When discussion is slow on DU... Why

[LakeArenal]

do we fall back to the divisive subjects of "Democratic purity" or whose fault it is we have dump...

Is it trolls, who know we will take sides over these topics? I have given up arguing these circular stand offs. Trouble with circles they don't end.

People have to vote their conscience. I realize some folks don't have one.

[uppityperson]

1. Drama. If there's not drama to focus on, make some

[LakeArenal]

2. I see Joy Reid discussing it this morning

With Howard Dean and another.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

3. I don't get it. It's not like news is slow.

We have a Republican president who is both incompetent, mentally unstable and who colluded with a hostile foreign government for his own benefit.

And somehow we get sidetracked into talks of purity tests and litmus tests and No True Scotsmans, all as the foreign policy scandal of the century unfolds before us.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

5. "We have a Republican president who is both incompetent, mentally unstable, ..."

That's true today. It was true yesterday. It will be true tomorrow.

So, yeah, slow news daze.

[lpbk2713]

4. DU is a great place.

For this very reason it attracts its share of trolls, agitators and contrarians.
They will always be among us. They may be vocal and persistent but they
are in the minority. For me, I let them reply once to one of my threads and
engage them no longer after that. I don't want to give them what they want.

[frazzled]

6. People should rarely vote their conscience

They should vote their head. Voting is always strategic, and if voting your own conscience means the possibility of handing the seat to someone worse, then you really have no conscience anyway.

You don't vote your own conscience because you must vote for the general common good (and that includes considering a range of issues—social, economic, judicial, foreign policy—not just one pet issue). That is a basic view of American liberal thought. It's never about you, it's about the greatest good, overall, for the society in which you live.

And as an aside, I find these threads you object to far less annoying than the ones that begin "Senator so-and-so says Donald Trump is ignorant" or "unfit for office" or other platitudes of that order, as if it's "news." Like it's something we all haven't known definitively and in a thousand ways for the past two years. They're a waste of time, and just sad attempts at advertising their favorite senator.

[LakeArenal]

7. I disagree with you to the degree

that it's my conscience that tells me I must do what is for the common good. It's my conscience that tells me to give back the extra ten I found in my change.

[Hortensis]

8. Nope. This is AGITATORS AT WORK, busy all over social media

getting excitable people distracted from the mess on the right to the far more important business of creating a giant rift in the left, assuming that's possible.

But 2018 is coming up fast already. WE MUST LOSE. This is an existential election for both the Republican Party AND possibly for Putin. Putin and the kleptocrats keeping him in power have much to lose personally. Their dreams of invading and sacking a dozen former Soviet Union nations without serious opposition are also on the line.

Don't be seduced into running in their harness. That's what happened to the right, and they're now crazy.