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I do not typically like the editorializing of The Young Turks as they tend to remind me of Olbermann NBC, but by contrast this is just asking a lot of questions and just letting 'em speak. (Granted, it's still cut back and forth.)
How representative this is/ what did TYT do to find them, I don't know. But interesting perspective for sure.
On February 29 2016 17:25 JW_DTLA wrote: Oh man, it is happening. Conservatives are coming around the Trump. The spin is gonna be good.
All that talk of Trump not being conservative enough falls through when someone like Sessions gives him an endorsement. If the GOP had used half the amount of venom and pettiness they are throwing at Trump against Obama 4 years ago Romney would be running for re-election.
well former ron paul aide (eric rittberg) said it best when obama was reelected:
November 7, 2012 at 10:19 AM Eric Dondero wrote:
Seccession of leave. I say we've got two to three years left before they start rounding up dissenters and sending us off to Nazi-style concentration camps. I've got a little more time, cause I live in Texas.
Arizona is a good place to be for now. But New York, Iowa, Michigan, Massachusetts, PA beware. You're vastly on the road to complete authoritarianism and statism. Grab your guns, protect what few things you have left. You're living in Nazi Germany circa 1933-34.
On February 29 2016 18:19 Velr wrote: Clearly the not born in the US Muslim that wants to destroy america was reeleceted because he wasn't attacked hard enough...
Actually they didn't attack him hard enough and to be fair robot Romney buried the rest. It's unbelievable how anyone could lose that election against Obama but Romeny pulled it off.
To all the people saying Hillary would stand a chance against Trump in debates.. maybe she would do better than Sanders who has anger issues when challenged, but Trump will deconstruct her on live television. There is just too much dirt on her out there, and as Trump always says 'I haven't even started on her yet'. At least high ratings will ensure everyone will see her collapse.
On February 29 2016 17:59 Falling wrote: I do not typically like the editorializing of The Young Turks as they tend to remind me of Olbermann NBC, but by contrast this is just asking a lot of questions and just letting 'em speak. (Granted, it's still cut back and forth.)
How representative this is/ what did TYT do to find them, I don't know. But interesting perspective for sure.
I think it's easy to criticize the people in the video, believing we would never be like them. It's harder to realize two things:
1. We are all easily manipulated. Our worldview is heavily shaped by our surroundings and the information we choose to inform us. 2. We all have some deep-seated beliefs about the world that would be hard for us to change even with overwhelming evidence against them.
We've been steadily moving away from the notion of "I know that I do not know". Admitting this is perceived as weakness. I think a healthy dose of Socratic wisdom is needed to counter the rampant exceptionalism that abounds on all sides.
On February 29 2016 16:10 xDaunt wrote: Sanders was always going to be a longshot. He's not within the democrat mainstream, much less the American mainstream. Thought it may be too much to say that it was a foregone conclusion, the expectation always was that Bernie was going to struggle in the South and in conservative states during the primary. Though the DNC certainly worked to stack the deck in her favor, I haven't seen anything to suggest that Hillary's seemingly impending victory is largely a function of underhanded tactics. As exciting as Bernie may be to very liberal democrats, he simply isn't getting enough of them out to vote for him.
And this is what should be concerning to democrats overall: their low turnouts in the primaries so far. The hearts and minds of democrat and liberal voters aren't being moved like they were in 2008 and 2012. The Obama thrill is gone. Republicans, however, are very excited (for Donald Trump) and are turning out in record numbers. Presuming that Trump wins the nomination and is able to unite most of the Republican Party behind him (he's going to have very careful with his VP pick), Trump will be very well-positioned going into the general, without factoring in 1) his ability to appeal to many traditional democrat voters by moving to the left of Hillary on free trade and foreign policy, 2) any downturn in the US economy which will undoubtedly work to his advantage, and 3) any other catastrophe that may occur on Obama's watch, which will work against Democrats as a whole.
I'm not saying that any of this is going to happen, but the recipe for an electoral disaster for Hillary is right there for everyone to see. And simply dismissing Trump as a buffoon who will be exposed once he is beyond the relative safety of the Republican primary requires turning a blind eye to what has happened since Trump announced his candidacy. His demise has repeatedly been predicted -- and even announced -- by many over the past nine months.
It may be that a majority of American voters ultimately reject Trump and that his loss is already baked into the cake due to the undesirability of his person and platform. But presuming that this is not the case, I do promise you this: Hillary will not be the instrument of Trump's destruction, and any faith in her to be as such is greatly misplaced. She simply is not a skilled enough politician, and she certainly is not qualitatively better than those whom Trump has dispatched thus far.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but I do think you're missing a few key points.
1) Trump is going to bring out the votes For and Against. He is so bombastic that he will energize his opposition and I would suspect the voter turnout in a Trump vs Anyone general election will be enormous. The primaries are just the first example.
2) Clinton has only lost one race in her entire life, right? That was to Obama in 08, who was a juggernaut that made McCain and Romney look pathetic. She may not be a great leader, but she's been a very good campaigner. She knows exactly what she needs to do to win an election and she's done it before. Recently, Sanders popped up as a challenger, so she consolidated the black vote in the south and smacked him back down. If she can smack him down once more on Tuesday, it's over. She knows how to campaign and has a real strategy that goes beyond the first two states. For the general, she'll know exactly which states she needs to target and she'll hit them exactly as hard as necessary to win. She could definitely lose the popular vote, but win the electoral college this election.
3) She can also handle herself quite well in a hostile debate. She has played nice with Sanders in the debates because he has been nice to her... but that's not really her element. She's already been able to smack down the witch-hunt that was Benghazi. She's quite good at venom when needed and her base and independents won't mind if she uses a little venom on Trump. She will get under his skin and make him look like an out of control maniac while she remains sociopathically cool. Then the mainstream media will consistently play select clips to reinforce the narrative that Trump is a maniac while Clinton is presidential.
I'm not predicting Trump's demise in the general quite yet. He has done significantly better than almost anyone predicted in the primary and his opponents have already taken the gloves off. However, I think you completely underestimate Clinton and the anti-Trump movement that is happening inside and outside the Republican party. Clinton may not be energizing, but picking her over Trump will be.
On February 29 2016 16:23 ErectedZenith wrote: Yeah most people wants to work and be productive member of society instead of having a welfare state.
what happens to people who fail under your system?
Social Darwinism.
That reasoning is imo very wrong - in addition to being very badly named - if you take as a core principle the fact that meritocracy should be the driving force of a country ; that a given individual's rank in society should be determined solely by their success and efforts (which can be grossly summarized as their "work") and not by their wealth, name, race, religion, etc.
Pretty obviously, having a functional meritocracy means that you have to have equal opportunities for everyone. With that system, it looks like the lack of welfare state makes perfect sense : if everyone has the same opportunities to climb the social ladder, then those who work and are productive members of society get what they deserve, and those who are lazy fuckers get what they deserve too.
But here's the catch : what should be is not what is. Even in the most egalitarian society you can think of, equal opportunities would not be a reality. That's why not having a welfare state is detrimental to meritocracy : I think it's not hard to understand that becoming a doctor, when your parents are doctors making $15K/month and you grow up with no material problems nor violent neighbourhood, is way easier than becoming a doctor, when your parents have low-pay, insecure jobs and you grow up in poverty and violence (and why not add an alcoholic father who beats his wife to the mix).
That's the idea : people who fail do not necessarily fail because they deserved to fail. Most of the time, they fail because they didn't have an equal footing with people who didn't fail.
Thus you have to penalize richer people and help poorer people - that's what Welfare State is. It can be done by reducing the richer people's advantages, or by reducing the poorer people's disadvantage, or both. But either way, the idea of a Welfare State is not that you give money to people who don't deserve it, as many in America seem to think ; it's that you give money to people who didn't even get the chance to climb the social ladder, even though they put effort into it. Yes, in the process you'll also give money to lazy fuckers, that's a reality. But these are a minority among the people who benefit from a Welfare State - and even more so if you consider that everyone, as a member a society, benefits from a healthier society, and that a Welfare State makes a healthier society.
the problem with aid is that it does disrupt the situation and make people and even enire communities dependent. this is a clear lesson from international aid and development.
there are some adverse effects to simply giving people aid, the remedy is not no aid, but aid that does not distort incentives to work (as a high effective marginal tax at hte lower range for example).
I am not sure i can accept your defense of a welfare state when you seem to think that "lazy fucks" aren't really fellow humans who deserve a dignified life, they are just lucky they get one by accident in a welfare state....
not every welfare state is based upon the principle of meritocracy others are based on human dignity... i just wanted to remind him of that, as i find meritocratic ideas flawed in the sense that they can never adjust for human variabilitiy... no amount of "adjustment" will create opportunities for people, that are considered disabled in some way or an other (accident, genetic, birth defect, illness, a lot of stuff happens to humans) in a truly meritocratic system... they would be just useless trash.. even if they would want to work, their apptitude would not match up to people in luckier parts of the distribution a dignity based approach captures all those cases and more easily and justifies helping them...
In a more practical argument, it is more efficient to provide someone with assistance so they are not desperate than to police them when because they cannot survive or make ends meet. I would rather pay for subsidized housing than have people be homeless and risk breaking into my house because they are desperate.
that is an argument to sell a wellfare system to people against one.... but it is at its core fundamentally selfish "lets make society better because if we don't their suffering might impact me"
John Oliver on Trump. The section about Trump not knowing what the truth is or just not caring is the most terrifying part IMO. I don't want a guy who true believes whatever headcannon he creates being president.
On February 29 2016 21:07 puerk wrote: I am not sure i can accept your defense of a welfare state when you seem to think that "lazy fucks" aren't really fellow humans who deserve a dignified life, they are just lucky they get one by accident in a welfare state....
On February 29 2016 21:19 puerk wrote: not every welfare state is based upon the principle of meritocracy others are based on human dignity... i just wanted to remind him of that, as i find meritocratic ideas flawed in the sense that they can never adjust for human variabilitiy... no amount of "adjustment" will create opportunities for people, that are considered disabled in some way or an other (accident, genetic, birth defect, illness, a lot of stuff happens to humans) in a truly meritocratic system... they would be just useless trash.. even if they would want to work, their apptitude would not match up to people in luckier parts of the distribution a dignity based approach captures all those cases and more easily and justifies helping them...
Let me clarify here : what I mean by "lazy fucks" are not people who cannot (be it because of social, medical, or whatever, factors) make enough efforts to atteign decent wealth, it is people who can do it, but do not want to work and be, as ErectedZenith originally put it, "productive members of society". Thus yes, I'd argue that people who do not have sufficient wealth not to work yet who chose to do nothing with their lives and who have the luck of benefiting from (almost-)free healthcare, financial aids, etc etc, are lucky to live in a welfare state during our era, because that wouldn't be possible if they lived anywhere else in the world or during any other era. I'm not saying that this is particularly good or bad, however I am saying that they are genuinely lucky, and I think that's a fact. I'll repeat, too, that contrarily to what some populist parties in Europe try to make people believe, these "lazy fuckers" are not a horde of people exploiting the system, they're a very small minority among all the people getting aid not because they wanted to, but because they couldn't do better.
As for meritocracy, raw/fake meritocracy, the idea that your success is only proportional with the efforts you put in, is indeed very flawed. Real meritocracy, the meritocracy that accounts for human variability, does not consider disabled people as trash, because real meritocracy takes the amount of efforts made as its main criteria, not your success (which most often doesn't come from the efforts you put in). And I do not see how promoting meritocracy is selfish at its core ; the selfish thing to do is NOT to promote meritocracy, as increased meritocracy means an increased chance of you getting lower on the social ladder because people with more merit, who previously were put down by the system, can now express their potential...
And human dignity... yeah, human dignity is indeed a principle that justifies the fact that no human should be treated like a beast, exploited, used an experimental material, forced to do things against their own will, etc - which makes human dignity one of the most disrespected principle on earth. However it does not justify the fact that someone refuses to partake in what is the fundamental core of even the smallest human society, work.
The issue is: who is the one deciding who can and who cannot, who wants and who wants not, who shows effort and who does not...
Meritocracies are measuring with monetary and/or societal (praise) success, they are entirely outcome based and not as you claim effort based.
And success is not in any objective way normalizable with some sort of apptitude level to extract their "effort". I am not sure why you think otherwise but there is no "meritocracy" in what you call a "real meritocracy".
I am not saying dignity justifies refusal to work, i say dignity informs us how to interact with people you consider lazy fucks.