3 ms·

Even Biden admitted the moratorium is unconstitutional. Nobody seems to care.

rootusrootus 5y ago
Half the population had no problem trying to actually overthrow a constitutional election earlier this year and the previous President still claims it was all rigged. I'm not at all surprised that Biden's actions are not inspiring much outrage.
handrous 5y ago
Ok, so the eviction moratorium? Maybe we just have very different historical perspectives, and that's why I don't get it. "Abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms" seems like wild hyperbole, given how the country usually operates, and has basically forever. We're still way on the "more free" side of things, as far as the spectrum in which the US has historically operated, by a long shot, and I don't see a strong trend the other way.
version_five 5y ago
As an aside, you can see the way the parent (comment you replied to) wanted to shift the conversation to some kind of definition of terms argument instead of actually discussing any salient points. And how they jumped on your example and used it as a kind of strawman to dismiss and explain why your point is baseless.
- handrous 5y ago
  Actually, I wouldn't have guessed at the eviction moratorium, so it was interesting that that was the chosen example. If that's the kind of thing in question then clearly this is a fundamental difference in perspective on where things started and have been, so differences in opinion on where they're going will probably be impossible to bridge without addressing that, in much the same way that if someone's sailing South from the US and tells me they're going to keep on going that way in order to visit the Arctic, we're going to need to sort some things out before understand what's going on—did they mean Antarctic? Do they know something I don't? Are they just very confused? Hard to say. And yes, of course I suspected that was the case. But now I know. And this wasn't some kind of ploy—given my understanding of American history I genuinely do not know what someone (you) might have meant by "abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms". The pandemic response measures seems basically normal to me, in the context of how the US usually operates, in practice. Mild and tame, even. Progress we gain in fits and starts, regressions here and there, often pretty terrible for long stretches of time. Liberty-limiting measures during emergencies, including other pandemics, are typical. We evidently didn't abandon the project of liberal democracy any of those dozens of other, often worse, times when liberty's been more restricted and even heading toward, in the moment, being further restricted, if that project remains as something that can yet be abandoned, so what should I think is meant by that claim? It's either that the writer has a different understanding of the lay of the land, so believes all the above context is incorrect (why? Perhaps we've read entirely different history books? Who knows), or knows something about what's going on, that I don't. It looks like it's the former—unless the eviction moratorium was a bad example of the kind of thing you meant.

Half the population had no problem trying to actually overthrow a constitutional election earlier this year and the previous President still claims it was all rigged. I'm not at all surprised that Biden's actions are not inspiring much outrage.

handrous 5y ago

Ok, so the eviction moratorium? Maybe we just have very different historical perspectives, and that's why I don't get it. "Abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms" seems like wild hyperbole, given how the country usually operates, and has basically forever. We're still way on the "more free" side of things, as far as the spectrum in which the US has historically operated, by a long shot, and I don't see a strong trend the other way.

version_five 5y ago

As an aside, you can see the way the parent (comment you replied to) wanted to shift the conversation to some kind of definition of terms argument instead of actually discussing any salient points. And how they jumped on your example and used it as a kind of strawman to dismiss and explain why your point is baseless.

handrous 5y ago
Actually, I wouldn't have guessed at the eviction moratorium, so it was interesting that that was the chosen example. If that's the kind of thing in question then clearly this is a fundamental difference in perspective on where things started and have been, so differences in opinion on where they're going will probably be impossible to bridge without addressing that, in much the same way that if someone's sailing South from the US and tells me they're going to keep on going that way in order to visit the Arctic, we're going to need to sort some things out before understand what's going on—did they mean Antarctic? Do they know something I don't? Are they just very confused? Hard to say. And yes, of course I suspected that was the case. But now I know. And this wasn't some kind of ploy—given my understanding of American history I genuinely do not know what someone (you) might have meant by "abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms". The pandemic response measures seems basically normal to me, in the context of how the US usually operates, in practice. Mild and tame, even. Progress we gain in fits and starts, regressions here and there, often pretty terrible for long stretches of time. Liberty-limiting measures during emergencies, including other pandemics, are typical. We evidently didn't abandon the project of liberal democracy any of those dozens of other, often worse, times when liberty's been more restricted and even heading toward, in the moment, being further restricted, if that project remains as something that can yet be abandoned, so what should I think is meant by that claim? It's either that the writer has a different understanding of the lay of the land, so believes all the above context is incorrect (why? Perhaps we've read entirely different history books? Who knows), or knows something about what's going on, that I don't. It looks like it's the former—unless the eviction moratorium was a bad example of the kind of thing you meant.