smjjames

That’s the kind of question you’re going to get 7 billion answers for as it’s something that philosophers and religions have been trying to answer since religion became a thing.

*sigh* The Guardian has now joined the 'you must sign in/register to read' bandwagon. Or at least it's to a point where I'm now noticing it. Edit: of course though, I can just click 'not now', but still.........

How much of European history are you looking at? During the Age of Sail/colonialism era/era of empire, the fight over resources, and the control of, were a pretty big driver of conflict, if not a hot war, then piracy/privateering.

The Democrats are the ones saying that waiting would take too long, not me.

The thing though is that while waiting for the courts would certainly be ideal/optimal, the Democrats don't want to wait for the courts because it'd take too long and the WH is already running the clock as much as they can. If there was a way to make the proccess take days instead of months/years, they'd probably have used it already.

Government aka the police or government aka the military? You do realize that completely not having a military (well, unless you want to return to the days of fighting with bow and sword) is a pretty stupid idea, right? If aka police, I get where you're going with that.

Also stupid IMO. The only reason why they do that is because there are still consistuents for which the mere mention of 'socialist' and 'commie' triggers them, no matter how much the word is abused, which has essentially become a proxy for 'thing that I don't like and don't want to have a constructive conversation over', they've called things socialist that are obviously not socialist.

@Raithe Is it even possible to reimplant a pregnancy that's been deimplanted in the first place? Pretty sure that was tongue-in-cheek, yes, considering it was blue for the Union anyway and there were northern Democrats too, so.... Also, the Green party would be considered 'progressive', no? And there are other left wing parties. There isn't really a truly left main party, that much is true.

TBH, it would be more informative to see the past economic stuff from before Reagan simply because it'd be helpful to see the picture/trend from before Reagan.

At raithe's link: #7 and Laws in general, well, it's Congress that does the laws, not the President, and they haven't done laws that are any more authoritarian than the Republican party has been. #4 It doesn't appear that the chaos is planned, as this one implies. #6. What qualifies as a false 'superficial' scandal? Also, all of the 'scandal' has been coming from Trump, not Republicans (but he's in their party, so....) 12. Trump hasn't gone that far, yet... 13. About the only 'historical' figures he smears are Obama, and to a somewhat lesser extent Bush 43, everybody that he smears is in the 'present'. The only real historical revisionism has been his own, everything else has been 'I'm an idiot' type things.

Perhaps instead of turtling up and bunkering down, the Christian conservatives could find out why it's happening. It's called adapting This bit from the article is probably key " We moved to a city and talked a lot about how we came to see all of this negativity from people who were highly religious and increasingly didn’t want a part in it.” Of course, the caveat is that it's an ancedote from one person, so, can't solve the problem from just that. I've never been religiously involved, just didn't care for it, so, I can't speak to the experience of those who drifted away if that's the main part.

Might as well replace all of the Republican Senators (or at least the ones who don’t want to do it fairly) with actual kangaroos during the Senate trial, right? I know GD would say replace them with rats, but the term is kangaroo court, not rat court.

What happens when Republicans don't see a genuine violation of the Constitution though? And McConnell seems more than happy to relinquish oversight authority in exchange for various Republican desired stuff.

Do it too soon after the election and the Democrats will get doubly accused of trying to overthrow an election, how soon is too soon though, no idea, a year? two? Part of the reason why they are going so fast is to try and avoid quagmiring it among the election. Johnson was impeached similarily late in his term, but looking at wikipedia, running into election season didn't appear to be a concern. Meanwhile, the two most recent ones, Nixon (in a purely technical sense), and Clinton had theirs well into their second term, so, there isn't any modern precedent for how to do an impeachment late in a first term. Sure, Johnson was, but nearly everything about politics is so different from over 150 years ago that all you can really say is 'yes, it's been done in the first term.' I have seen some articles saying that they should pursue censure for that reason, but I haven't really seen anything in the way of Democrats looking to do that route instead of impeachment. Probably something they can do if impeachment fails to go through.

Perhaps, but even if history rhymes, 1860 has several things that don't exist today, aside from the issue of slavery about to go supernova at that point, the Republican party wasn't a third party in the conventional sense, it rose out of the collapse of the Whig party (some of them joined the democrats, some joined other parties, the rest formed the Republican party), the other major party was utterly split and had two candidates (the portion of the Whigs joining the Democrats certainly contributed to this). I don't see the Democrats utterly splitting, but I could definetly see the kind of behavior we saw in 2016 if say, Biden had poor debate performance or something, namely some of them staying home and others going for the Green and Libertarian parties. However, with partisanship as strong as it is, I wouldn't bank on something like that.