Posted by Willful on February 24, 2014, at 2:47:44 [reposted on February 24, 2014, at 16:51:46 | original URL]
In reply to Re: THE root cause of TRD is » baseball55, posted by LostBoyinNC45 on February 23, 2014, at 22:09:06
The reason the NRA is effective, other than that apparently they have members with enough disposable cash to make sizeable donations, so that the organization is able to make sizeable donations to many politicians, to have lobbyists in Washington who pressure legislators to vote against gun control, and to push for their agenda.
Gun control advocates are often single-issue voters, and for this reason, the organization has unusual sway over the election of candidates-- their members vote consistently for ONE thing-- and that is freedom from any sort of restriction on the availability and dissemination of guns.
Many other people, who belong to various organizations, are not single-issue voters-- there are many issue that divide their loyalties,a nd they do not come out for any candidate who simply embraces their sole issue-- they support various candidates for various reasons. Nor are their organizations as wealthy and therefore as able to funnel funds into activities or ads or donations that are focuses solely on this one thing.
The same can be said of anti abortion voters, who are more powerful than other voters who can lean toward one or another candidates for many conflicting reasons.
There is no reason to assume that the mentally ill constitute some sort of single-issue voting bloc. They come from all walks of life, and are not focused simply and exclusively on improving treatment of mental illness particularly through election of candidates. Science doesn't respond simply to political power-- even if funding is available science can only proceed in those areas that are fertile and sufficiently advanced.
Your accusations against the mentally ill stem I think from lack of understanding of how electoral politics and science work-- and how much more able single-issue lobbies are able to bring people to the polls for their issue-- while other groups depend much more on various and fluctuating types of relevance to people's lives and voting decisions. You seem to be blaming the mentally ill for having more important things to worry about like jobs, health care in general, education, etc than their illnesses- and whose votes do not therefore always follow only one beaten path.
Emsam.
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poster:Willful
thread:1061206
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20120327/msgs/1061232.html