US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3078

On March 01 2016 09:03 Acrofales wrote:
I hope we can all agree that scheduling the first three (I think) debates on a Saturday was retarded, though.

In 1906 German sociologist Werner Sombart wrote an essay entitled Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? that sought to explain why the US, alone among industrialized democracies, had not developed a major socialist movement.

Today, however, we need to pose a different question: why are there socialists in the United States? In this nation that has long been resistant to socialism’s call, who are all these people who now suddenly deem themselves socialists? Where did they come from? What do they mean by socialism?

Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign has made clear that many Democrats are inclined to vote for a candidate who proclaims himself a democratic socialist, but even more dramatic and consequential are the many Democrats who say they’re socialists themselves. In a poll on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, more than 40% of likely Democratic caucus attendees said they were socialists. In a Boston Globe poll on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, 31% of New Hampshire Democratic voters called themselves socialists; among voters under 35, just over half did. And in late February, a Bloomberg poll of likely voters in the Democratic primary in South Carolina – South Carolina! – showed that 39% described themselves as socialists.

Favorable views of socialism aren’t limited to Sanders supporters. The 39% of South Carolina Democrats who call themselves socialists exceeded by 13 percentage points the number who actually voted for Sanders. In a New York Times poll last November 56% of Democrats – including 52% of Hillary Clinton supporters – said they held a favorable view of socialism. Nor was this sway toward socialism triggered by Sanders’s candidacy: as far back as 2011, a Pew poll revealed, fully 49% of Americans (not just Democrats) under 30 had a positive view of socialism, while just 47% had a favorable opinion of capitalism. In 2011, the percentage of Americans under 30 who could have picked Sanders out of a police line-up was probably in the low single digits.

Bernie Sanders didn’t push the young toward socialism. They were already there.

Indeed, the current socialist emergence was foretold by the polls that showed most American looked positively upon the message of Occupy Wall Street – that the 1% has flourished at the expense of the 99%. It was foreshadowed by the rise to bestseller status of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and by the success of the Fight for $15 movement in prompting cities and states to raise the minimum wage.

What’s the substance of the new American socialism? I know of no surveys asking this newly hatched brood to define what they mean when they call themselves socialists, but we can make some educated guesses. First, they don’t counterpose socialism to a militant liberalism. The rise in the number of people who identify as socialists coincides with a rise in the number who call themselves liberals. Whereas in 2000 only 27% of Democrats told Pew they were liberal, by 2015 that figure had risen to 42%, and among millennials, it had increased from 37% in 2004 to 49% today. In Bloomberg’s poll of South Carolina Democrats, while 39% described themselves as socialist, 74% also called themselves progressive, and 68% liberal: they weren’t asked to pick just one.

On March 01 2016 09:01 farvacola wrote:
Honestly, the Democratic Party is so anemic when it comes to leadership that, as a proud lifelong Democrat, I'm ashamed of the fact that DWS is still in charge. The party could be celebrating this dual between Clinton and Sanders through promotion in the form of more debates, more press events, and a media campaign that compares the primaries of the two parties. Some kind of dynamic response to the Trump snowball that at least attempts to generate similar amounts of hype. Instead, DWS plays Clinton fangirl while setting a party agenda that is as sheepish as ever.

Though I'm still quite confident in a Democratic win come November, it'll be in spite of the party, not because of it, and that's a goddamn shame.

On March 01 2016 09:01 farvacola wrote:
Honestly, the Democratic Party is so anemic when it comes to leadership that, as a proud lifelong Democrat, I'm ashamed of the fact that DWS is still in charge. The party could be celebrating this dual between Clinton and Sanders through promotion in the form of more debates, more press events, and a media campaign that compares the primaries of the two parties. Some kind of dynamic response to the Trump snowball that at least attempts to generate similar amounts of hype. Instead, DWS plays Clinton fangirl while setting a party agenda that is as sheepish as ever.

Though I'm still quite confident in a Democratic win come November, it'll be in spite of the party, not because of it, and that's a goddamn shame.

The Supreme Court has only been in session without Justice Antonin Scalia for a week. But already, his death is affecting cases, and particularly decisions not to take certain cases to the Supreme Court without the guarantee of his vote.

Last week, Dow Chemical made headlines by opting for a $835 million settlement in a class action lawsuit rather than risk having the case heard by a Scalia-less Supreme Court. A lower court had already ruled against the company for allegedly conspiring to fix prices for industrial chemicals, and prior to the settlement, Dow had appealed to the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling.

In the absence of Scalia's vote, taking the case to the eight other justices risked the company not just a loss in the specific case, but the potential for a broader ruling that would have put companies in a tougher position in future class action lawsuits.

The current court line-up "increased the likelihood for unfavorable outcomes for business involved in class action suits," Dow said in a statement Friday, according to the AP.

But it's not just corporate interests that are quickly recalibrating their legal strategy with the loss of Scalia. A guns right groups decided to forgo a Supreme Court petition last week because the court had lost its conservative tilt.

The New York State Rifle and Pistol Association announced Thursday it would not petition the court to overturn an appeals court decision upholding a New York gun control law.

On March 01 2016 09:06 killa_robot wrote:


Issue with the whole "birth defects" angle is that we don't prevent any other forms of relations that would have similar results. You don't see people pushing for those with certain diseases or severe autism or other mental disabilities to no be able to procreate, even though they would likely breed children with defects.

On March 01 2016 09:12 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


Except this is between two consenting adults, not a child and parent. If you mean an adult son/ daughter and his/ her older parent, then that's still two consenting adults, so who cares? It's icky but we shouldn't be telling people who they can and can't hook up with.

On March 01 2016 10:17 Nyxisto wrote:


The German ethics committee actually debated this I think two years ago and they also recommended to remove the incest laws because social taboos aren't sufficient reason for criminalization. The genetic abnormalities issue is inconsistent they argued as the risk for birth defects among, say two people in their late thirties, turns out to be way higher than between two young siblings. And we also don't exclude people with way higher risk for several diseases from having children either.

On March 01 2016 09:40 zulu_nation8 wrote:
recs? Drudge seems okay seems cuz it's funny. Looking mainly for aggregator sites. The millennial focused startups like ozy are pretty bad

On March 01 2016 09:29 zulu_nation8 wrote:
thoughts on drudge report? looking to beef up my election media diet