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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On July 26 2017 05:53 mozoku wrote:
Don't something like 80% of Americans have employer-sponsored healthcare anyway?
As immeasurable as the effect can be on the other 20% (i.e. the individual market), I'm always a little amazed at how much people care about healthcare bills considering most people talking about the issue aren't even significantly affected by them.
That doesn't excuse the utter mess our healthcare system is, but Obamacare didn't do much to fix that except make the individual market less terrible.
I'm awaiting a real healthcare bill that actually tries to deal with the cost of healthcare in the US, instead of just bickering about who pays for it or about how much of it we pay for publicly.
It's the same reason I care about keeping poor kids in school. It is for the good of society. For the good of the whole. When the whole does well, so too does the individual. Poor people who use the ER hurt everyone. Just because I have insurance doesn't mean I don't suffer indirectly from other people not having insurance.
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On July 26 2017 05:54 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 26 2017 05:53 mozoku wrote:
Don't something like 80% of Americans have employer-sponsored healthcare anyway?
As immeasurable as the effect can be on the other 20% (i.e. the individual market), I'm always a little amazed at how much people care about healthcare bills considering most people talking about the issue aren't even significantly affected by them.
That doesn't excuse the utter mess our healthcare system is, but Obamacare didn't do much to fix that except make the individual market less terrible.
I'm awaiting a real healthcare bill that actually tries to deal with the cost of healthcare in the US, instead of just bickering about who pays for it or about how much of it we pay for publicly. It's the same reason I care about keeping poor kids in school. It is for the good of society. For the good of the whole. When the whole does well, so too does the individual. Poor people who use the ER hurt everyone. Just because I have insurance doesn't mean I don't suffer indirectly from other people not having insurance.
Completely agree. The educational system analogy is the lens I use too, as a teacher who comes from a family of teachers.
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On July 26 2017 05:53 mozoku wrote:
Don't something like 80% of Americans have employer-sponsored healthcare anyway?
As immeasurable as the effect can be on the other 20% (i.e. the individual market), I'm always a little amazed at how much people care about healthcare bills considering most people talking about the issue aren't even significantly affected by them.
That doesn't excuse the utter mess our healthcare system is, but Obamacare didn't do much to fix that except make the individual market less terrible.
I'm awaiting a real healthcare bill that actually tries to deal with the cost of healthcare in the US, instead of just bickering about who pays for it or about how much of it we pay for publicly. I'm not expecting it from either of the clown troupe factions in Congress though.
Those 80% getting insurance through their employers are going to be drastically effected by tons of chunks of a straight repeal, as well as the market changes (BCBS sells individual plans and provides tons of employer plans, for example). People don't seem to really know what the ACA does in terms of regulations for the general insurance market, but it does a LOT.
Because it's a market, it's an ecosystem. And because it's an ecosystem, hitting part of it is going to have significant ripple effects.
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On July 26 2017 05:53 mozoku wrote:
Don't something like 80% of Americans have employer-sponsored healthcare anyway?
As immeasurable as the effect can be on the other 20% (i.e. the individual market), I'm always a little amazed at how much people care about healthcare bills considering most people talking about the issue aren't even significantly affected by them.
That doesn't excuse the utter mess our healthcare system is, but Obamacare didn't do much to fix that except make the individual market less terrible.
I'm awaiting a real healthcare bill that actually tries to deal with the cost of healthcare in the US, instead of just bickering about who pays for it or about how much of it we pay for publicly. I'm not expecting it from either of the clown troupe factions in Congress though.
Yes, but that makes us all slaves to our jobs. That 20% is private contractors, authors, freelance writers, photographers, plumbers, carpenters and so on. Most indie game development studios used the ACA to allow them to obtain healthcare. All of that will be gone now. We will be locked into employer provided insurance or no insurance. Very early and mid 2000s.
And then there are pre-existing conditions. We will be returning to the good old day of companies being able to deny coverage due to existing illnesses. Or start fraud investigations because they think you lied to them and you knew about having cancer when you signed up.
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And in GH-related news, the top IT staffer for Debbie Wasserman Schultz just got picked up trying to flee the country. Developing story right now.
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On July 26 2017 05:45 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2017 14:00 xDaunt wrote:On July 20 2017 13:55 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 20 2017 13:33 xDaunt wrote:On July 20 2017 12:36 IgnE wrote:On July 20 2017 05:20 xDaunt wrote:On July 20 2017 02:06 IgnE wrote:On July 20 2017 01:40 xDaunt wrote:On July 19 2017 14:33 IgnE wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 18 2017 09:36 xDaunt wrote:I meant to post this editorial a few days ago, but have been badly tied up with work: Show nested quote +It’s anyone’s guess whether the latest round of Russia revelations will flame out or bring the administration toppling to the ground. But either way, the drama is only one act in an ongoing cycle of outrages involving Trump and Russia that will, one way or another, come to an end. That is not true of the controversy over the President’s remarks in Warsaw last week, which exposed a crucial contest over ideas that will continue to influence our politics until long after this administration has left office. And the responses from Trump’s liberal critics were revealing — and dangerous.
The speech — a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without — was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. “Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto,” read a Vox headline. According the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, Trump’s “alt-right speech” “redefined the West in nativist terms.”
Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term “alt-right” that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.
There is no shortage of fair criticism of Trump’s speech: For example, that he shouldn’t have delivered it in Poland because of Warsaw’s recent authoritarian tilt; that his criticism of Russia should have been more pointed; or that he would have better served America’s interests by sounding a more Wilsonian tone when it came to promoting democracy around the world. And, yes, Trump has proven himself a clever manipulator of white identity politics during his short political career, so it is understandable that critics would scrutinize his remarks for any hint of bigotry. But by identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values.
How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of “liberalism” and “the West.” Liberalism is an ideology — defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.
So to appeal to “the West” in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the West’s wars, religions and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.
What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of “the West” to liberalism’s enemies on the alt-right — that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right — not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of “immigration skeptic,” or “social conservative,” but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism — is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the West’s greatest achievements.
As any alt-rightist will be quick to point out, many Enlightenment philosophers were racist by current standards. (Have you even read what Voltaire said about the Jews?) But this is a non-sequitur: The Enlightenment is today remembered and celebrated not for the flaws of its principals but for laying the intellectual foundations that have allowed today’s conception of liberalism to develop and prosper.
As Dimitri Halikias pointed out on Twitter, there is a strange convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to understanding the Western political tradition. The campus left (hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go) rejects Western Civilization because it is racist. The alt-right, meanwhile, accepts Western civilization only insofar as it is racist — they fashion themselves defenders of “the West,” but reject the ideas of equality and human dignity that are the West’s principal achievements. But both, crucially, deny the connection between the West and the liberal tradition.
To critics, one of the most offending lines in Trump’s speech was his remark that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Trump clearly intended this to refer to the threat from Islamic extremism — and, presumably, the politically correct liberals who he believes are enabling it. But there is another threat to the West’s survival in the form of a far-right politics that would replace liberalism and the rule of law with tribalism and white ethnic patronage.
The best defense we have against this threat is the Western liberal tradition. But by trying to turn the “West” into a slur, Trump’s critics are disarming. Perhaps the president’s dire warning wasn’t so exaggerated, after all. Source. The author's main point is interesting and functionally indistinguishable from the arguments that I have previously made regarding the radical Left's overbearing use of identity and racial politics. What say y'all on the left? This article is interesting because it at least draws distinctions between the "extreme" left and right despite its tepid equivocation ("there is a strange convergence …") and despite rehashing Horseshoe Theory pablum. The problem is that its vision is far too limited (and I am not just talking about the unalloyed celebration of "liberalism"). The "racism" or, perhaps more properly, "Eurocentrism" of the Enlightenment is far too narrow a hook on which to hang the divide between left and right. If anything, this kind of analysis seems to have missed the epochal shift from the modern to the postmodern that Negri and Hardt point out in their book, Empire. Negri and Hardt identify a struggle between two modes within the emergence of modernity that the Enlightenment ushered in. On the one hand is the revolutionary transition from "a dualistic consciousness, a hierarchical vision of society, and a metaphysical idea of science" inherited from medieval Europe to "an experimental idea of science, a constituent conception of history and cities, and [the posing] of being as an immanent terrain of knowledge and action." The Enlightenment brought about "an affirmation of the power of this world, the discovery of the plane of the immanence." This new found creativity ushers in a revolutionary subjectivity within modern people, that fundamentally changed the modes of life of the population. On the other hand, uprooting and destroying traditional forms of life and connections to the past provokes conflict and war, or counter-revolution. The second "mode" of modernity "poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire." You get modern capitalism emerging in Genoa and the Italian city states, as well as the Reformation, civil wars, and the reestablishment of ideologies of command and authority: absolutism, parliament, and the rise of the modern nation state which sought to control, mediate, and harness the productive energies unleashed by Enlightenment thought. Insofar as the contemporary left and right appeal to "modern" Enlightenment ideals, or in the context of this article, we could talk about "the West," I think they are talking about two separates modes of Enlightenment. On the one hand you have the opening up of the potentiality of the multitude in the plane of immanence, and on the other hand you have a modern appeal to a "people." The "people" being the reduction of the heterogeneities and singularities of the multitude to a single subjectivity: "the national people," which is capable of univocal communication and knowable, controllable, desires. The "people" legitimates sovereign authority in the presence of the prince, the parliament, the dictator, etc. The crisis of modernity is the "contradictory co-presence of the multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule of one" or at least the imagined community of the nation-state. It's hard to know how seriously to take the idiots who talk about "neo-Marxism," "feminism," and "post-modernism" as the premiere monolithic evils ailing us in the present. Mostly because even when they can convince the totally ignorant that they have a working knowledge of those concepts, they actually have no clue what they are talking about. But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You don't have to look any further for evidence of the waning legitimacy of the imperial world order than the ineffectiveness of police action by the United States within the last two decades. It is effectiveness, itself, that legitimates those actions by restoring peace and upholding humanitarian principles, and every failure greatly undermines that legitimacy. And so there's a conflation here, in this article you have linked, xDaunt, between "Western Enlightenment modernity" as the bevy of imperialist, war-prone, nation states that carved up territories and maintained strict lines between the capitalist market inside, and the colonial outside, and the " imperial global market led by the United States" which is based on a truly global sovereign imperative, breaks down borders, opens flows of capital, culture, and people, and incorporates the entire world into a single united market. The fundamentalist Islamists of ISIS are no more pre-modern than they are post-modern. Jihadist mentality of "being-against" is an active response to globalizing post-modern imperial sovereignty. They resist in the only way open to them. To put up strict borders and cut yourself off from that policing, organizing influence today is to turn your territory into a ghetto. On the question of Enlightenment I am partial to Kant's answer in Was ist Aufklärung: "Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason by in lack of resolution and courage to use it without distinction from another." Insofar as "identity politics" attempts to overturn hierarchies by circumscribing individuals and groups within eidetic boundary lines, saying " I am essentially this [or these] kind(s) of entity," I think it is silly and short-sighted. One might say childish. Insofar as the wiser members displace hierarchies, recognize fractured subjectivities, and refrain from putting me or themselves in the very boxes that [we] want to dismantle/deconstruct, I don't even see what the big deal is. ![[image loading]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Klee%2C_paul%2C_angelus_novus%2C_1920.jpg) I want you to know that I needed two cups of coffee before I tackled this. And at times, I felt like scotch may have been more effective. In short, I think that you're missing the forest for the trees. At issue here isn't really a particular definition of the Enlightenment or how Western thought evolved following the Enlightenment. What's at issue is whether we should embrace the culture that gave birth to the Enlightenment: "Western culture." For decades, the intellectual left has been making arguments that undermine the status and prestige of Western culture. And these arguments have only grown more radical in recent years (hence the author sounding the alarm at the attacks on Trump's speech that necessarily incorporate various levels of demonizing Western culture). Thus while I agree with you that the average proponent on the right really doesn't understand what they're talking about when they loosely throw around terms like "Marxist" or "Neo-Marxist," there is more than just some truth to the fact that the Marxist schools of thought have been the primary launching pads for the current outbreak of Western self-hatred. Lastly, I need to address the following: But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You identified the problem (cultural clashes => conflict/war/bad things). You even tacitly admit that this problem is well-grounded in historical fact. But then you dismiss this problem with a wave of a hand by declaring that we're in a new epoch where none of this cultural difference shit matters anymore, and by implication, it won't matter in the future, either. I simply find that to be an incredible declaration. I have no idea where your confidence in this newfound state of world order permanence comes from. In fact, your repeated use of the term "imperial" or "imperialist" when referring to this order shows that you understand that this order is maintained through Western (re: American) unipolar force and power. What happens when we inevitably revert to a multipolar world? What happens when another unipolar power emerges that may have a very different idea of culture (not to mention cultural tolerance) than the West presently does? The answers to these questions are precisely why Western culture should be defended and why it is foolish for the Left to antagonize Trump for doing so. As we know from the examples of Rome and every other great empire that rise and fell, cultural integrity matters. And when it's lost, it's usually not regained, to the peril of the people. i'm not going to respond at length now but in short my point might be distilled to something like the following: western nostaglia for 50s leave it to beaver pastiche from the likes of Publius has failed to adequately reckon with and accept modernity's passing. there is no way to return to the (fantasy of) the past. this problem is exacerbated by conservatives' general belief in markets and the creative potential of capital without properly understanding that the need for expansion, and the concomitant incorporation and articulation of the outside (i.e. those scary elements that threaten order itself) is what has propelled us into our contemporary imperial order. corruption, in the sense of "degeneration" and/or recrudescence (or if you prefer "creative destruction") is the necessary condition and modality of this imperial order. you cannot maintain empire, with its legitimacy bolstered by effective police action and a universalizing set of human rights, without that corruption. the only way to get rid of discomfort with the disintegration of the boundary line between us and them, between first and third world (if that is what you feel and what you mean by "integrity," or identical self-sameness) is to end the project of empire. that's all fine and good, as long as you understand that empire is the only substrate upon which capital accumulation can continue unabated. at least until other avenues of expansion open up. mars colonization anyone? Maybe some conservatives are preoccupied with the past and a return to the "glory days," but that's certainly not the point that I am making, which is strictly forward looking. And again, you're missing the forest for the trees with the point that you're making. Let's just presume for a moment that you're correct in asserting that the dynamics of capitalism make cultural contact, mixing, and conflict inevitable, thereby creating the forces that threaten cultural integrity. All that you have done is define the need for some type of cultural defense. You're not saying that the Romans should have bent over sooner for the barbarians, are you? Such defeatism is absurd. And this absurdity becomes very apparent once you step outside of Western culture and see what other peoples think. The Chinese created the perfect slur for the people who adhere to this kind of defeatism: "baizuo" -- the white left. I want to take this question very seriously, but it would help if you would elaborate on what you mean by "Western culture." I take it you don't mean anything so narrow as "that which is opposed to Islam" but I am not sure how much of what might be perceived as "Western" you think is worth defending. In other words, I would prefer to skip over the inevitable apophatic objections and move to a more positive characterization of "Western culture," including that which you think needs defending from the forces of cultural contact, mixing, and conflict. Let's start with a broad definition of Western culture, which would include traditions of individual liberty, inalienable rights, political plurality, and the rule of law (I'd throw Christianity in there as well, but I'm not sure that we need to go down that rabbit hole yet). I'm not sure we can say the US was founded on those concepts. I suppose if you just erase the humanity anyone but* white males (a common practice for some) then those would be traditions of western culture though . Don't worry, I'm sure that I'll be addressing this when I respond to Igne's next post. Alright, Igne hasn't responded, so I'll give GH my response now. First, the question was about the definition of western culture, not necessarily American culture. Though America is a Western nation and has been a driver of Western culture -- particularly over the past 100 years, the two concepts shouldn't be conflated. Second, pointing to the sometimes unequal application of the liberties and traditions that I listed above as a reason not to defend Western culture is myopic. The very arguments that one would make for the more equal application of rights and liberties are all grounded in the traditions of Western culture. Following GH's lead, let's take slavery as an example. All of the arguments for abolition were derived directly from one aspect of Western culture or another. In fact, one could argue that Christianity was the primary driver of the abolition movement, both through direct religious influence on the arguments of abolitionists and through the liberal philosophies that were spawned from Christianity (natural law being a big one). The Civil Rights movement, likewise, is also grounded conceptually in Western traditions. From these examples, we can see that Western culture has provided its own framework for self-improvement. What matters most is that Western culture has created the very ideas that form the foundation for its own self-criticism. The revolution isn't the equal application of the concepts of individual liberties and inalienable rights. The revolution was the development and broad-based acceptance of those ideas in the first place. Those on the Left who demonize Western culture have lost sight of this fact. Stated another way, my argument is that it is unwise to throw the baby out with the bath water.
I think you attribute some novelty to concepts previously enjoyed in different ways. I think you're brushing aside too easily the systemic deprivation of those rights and liberties as an indispensable part of the establishing those ideas, and how they undermine rather than form a foundation on which better ideas were born.
It all sounds very self-important but it seems the concept so sweeping and selectively exclusive to not be of much value. I'll let Igne elaborate if he's interested.
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On July 26 2017 05:54 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 26 2017 05:53 mozoku wrote:
Don't something like 80% of Americans have employer-sponsored healthcare anyway?
As immeasurable as the effect can be on the other 20% (i.e. the individual market), I'm always a little amazed at how much people care about healthcare bills considering most people talking about the issue aren't even significantly affected by them.
That doesn't excuse the utter mess our healthcare system is, but Obamacare didn't do much to fix that except make the individual market less terrible.
I'm awaiting a real healthcare bill that actually tries to deal with the cost of healthcare in the US, instead of just bickering about who pays for it or about how much of it we pay for publicly. It's the same reason I care about keeping poor kids in school. It is for the good of society. For the good of the whole. When the whole does well, so too does the individual. Poor people who use the ER hurt everyone. Just because I have insurance doesn't mean I don't suffer indirectly from other people not having insurance.
Well, people care for that reason, or if not that, tax reasons obviously.
I was more scratching my head over the people cheering "Thank God I live in State X!" It was admittedly terribly phrased.
And then there are pre-existing conditions. We will be returning to the good old day of companies being able to deny coverage due to existing illnesses.
Wasn't that only for the individual market though? And an insurance company can't exist financially with a mandate to treat pre-existing conditions really. The problem is that consumers abuse the system and then the nation feels (understandably) guilty for their bad judgment. That's why I could understand the continuous coverage mandate in the GOP bill.
At this point, I'm mostly convinced that we're better off single-payer, even though I know it's going to be shitty and inefficient. It's not like there's any market forces in the current system to incentivize efficiency anyway, so it's either get robbed by the hospital/insurance company tag-team or waste a bunch of money in government bureaucracy.
I'm leaning towards the latter as less of a waste of money atm, though it's hard to believe that there isn't a better system out there.
I'm also of the belief that most on the Left who support single-payer have either never had to work with a government bureau to get something done, or are directly profiting from government (funding) in some way in their jobs. Between working partially in financial regulation firsthand and talking to some friends employed in the public sector, I can attest that the amount of waste, inefficiency, and incompetence in government bureaus/entities can be staggering. I don't think that most Progressives have a good understanding of that.
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On July 26 2017 05:53 mozoku wrote:
Don't something like 80% of Americans have employer-sponsored healthcare anyway?
As immeasurable as the effect can be on the other 20% (i.e. the individual market), I'm always a little amazed at how much people care about healthcare bills considering most people talking about the issue aren't even significantly affected by them.
That doesn't excuse the utter mess our healthcare system is, but Obamacare didn't do much to fix that except make the individual market less terrible.
I'm awaiting a real healthcare bill that actually tries to deal with the cost of healthcare in the US, instead of just bickering about who pays for it or about how much of it we pay for publicly. I'm not expecting it from either of the clown troupe factions in Congress though.
aca also had several provisions to deal with the cost of healthcare in general, far from a solid fix; but a few things that did help a bit.
it's not likely to get an actula fix, because the voters don't want an actual fix (i.e. they claim they do, but they will in fact vote against someone who does the unpopular but necessary things to implement an actual fix)
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On July 26 2017 06:01 mozoku wrote:Show nested quote +On July 26 2017 05:54 Mohdoo wrote:On July 26 2017 05:53 mozoku wrote:
Don't something like 80% of Americans have employer-sponsored healthcare anyway?
As immeasurable as the effect can be on the other 20% (i.e. the individual market), I'm always a little amazed at how much people care about healthcare bills considering most people talking about the issue aren't even significantly affected by them.
That doesn't excuse the utter mess our healthcare system is, but Obamacare didn't do much to fix that except make the individual market less terrible.
I'm awaiting a real healthcare bill that actually tries to deal with the cost of healthcare in the US, instead of just bickering about who pays for it or about how much of it we pay for publicly. It's the same reason I care about keeping poor kids in school. It is for the good of society. For the good of the whole. When the whole does well, so too does the individual. Poor people who use the ER hurt everyone. Just because I have insurance doesn't mean I don't suffer indirectly from other people not having insurance. Well, people care for that reason, or if not that, tax reasons obviously. I was more scratching my head over the people cheering "Thank God I live in State X!"
I am glad I live in Oregon because it means I won't go bankrupt from getting an expensive illness.
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On July 26 2017 05:53 mozoku wrote:
Don't something like 80% of Americans have employer-sponsored healthcare anyway?
As immeasurable as the effect can be on the other 20% (i.e. the individual market), I'm always a little amazed at how much people care about healthcare bills considering most people talking about the issue aren't even significantly affected by them.
That doesn't excuse the utter mess our healthcare system is, but Obamacare didn't do much to fix that except make the individual market less terrible.
I'm awaiting a real healthcare bill that actually tries to deal with the cost of healthcare in the US, instead of just bickering about who pays for it or about how much of it we pay for publicly. I'm not expecting it from either of the clown troupe factions in Congress though.
I fail to see how pricing the average family out of the market but mandating they buy it on the market is an improvement over how the individual market worked beforehand. I know dozens of families that found the policy they liked cancelled and the new available ones roughly double the premiums and double the deductibles, all because it had to include the gamut of pre-paid services and not insurance. I too am waiting for a health care bill that deals with costs, but I can't understand the more honest types not seeing how fucked up the ACA made the individual market.
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On July 26 2017 06:01 mozoku wrote:Show nested quote +On July 26 2017 05:54 Mohdoo wrote:On July 26 2017 05:53 mozoku wrote:
Don't something like 80% of Americans have employer-sponsored healthcare anyway?
As immeasurable as the effect can be on the other 20% (i.e. the individual market), I'm always a little amazed at how much people care about healthcare bills considering most people talking about the issue aren't even significantly affected by them.
That doesn't excuse the utter mess our healthcare system is, but Obamacare didn't do much to fix that except make the individual market less terrible.
I'm awaiting a real healthcare bill that actually tries to deal with the cost of healthcare in the US, instead of just bickering about who pays for it or about how much of it we pay for publicly. It's the same reason I care about keeping poor kids in school. It is for the good of society. For the good of the whole. When the whole does well, so too does the individual. Poor people who use the ER hurt everyone. Just because I have insurance doesn't mean I don't suffer indirectly from other people not having insurance. Well, people care for that reason, or if not that, tax reasons obviously. I was more scratching my head over the people cheering "Thank God I live in State X!"
as for people living in state X; that's a simple case of: some states have state law that already provides similar protections to the ACA; like the ACA's precursor in MA, romneycare (or whatever you want to call it). if you're in one of those states, you'll still have many of the protections, but you won't be able to move outside of it (at least not to a place that doesn't have them)
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On July 26 2017 05:59 Danglars wrote:
And in GH-related news, the top IT staffer for Debbie Wasserman Schultz just got picked up trying to flee the country. Developing story right now.
From what I read he has already fled the country and is a grade A dick
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United States42778 Posts
On July 26 2017 05:53 mozoku wrote:
Don't something like 80% of Americans have employer-sponsored healthcare anyway?
As immeasurable as the effect can be on the other 20% (i.e. the individual market), I'm always a little amazed at how much people care about healthcare bills considering most people talking about the issue aren't even significantly affected by them.
That doesn't excuse the utter mess our healthcare system is, but Obamacare didn't do much to fix that except make the individual market less terrible.
I'm awaiting a real healthcare bill that actually tries to deal with the cost of healthcare in the US, instead of just bickering about who pays for it or about how much of it we pay for publicly. I'm not expecting it from either of the clown troupe factions in Congress though.
Employer provided healthcare isn't a magical better kind of insurance contract. Your employer goes to the insurance company and they negotiate. The employer is using benefits as a substitute for salary and therefore if they can offer good benefits for less than it'd cost to pay people without benefits then they make a profit on the deal. And likewise if they can offer bad benefits without losing employees then they can effectively reduce payroll costs.
Imagine an ideal world.
Say good healthcare costs $10,000/year on average. An employer with 50 people might have some with healthcare costs of $50,000/year and others with costs of $1,000/year. But that's not important, they're buying a bulk rate. So they take $10,000 of the total compensation from each of their 50 employees and they buy a $500,000 insurance contract. Then all 50 employees get the healthcare they need for free for that year. The insurance company wins because they get $500,000 up front and the time value of money. The employer is fine, they're paying the same in total compensation. The employees are happy, they have great healthcare.
Now consider our world.
The employer says "okay, what can I get for $50,000". The insurance company replies that obviously they can no longer cover the condition that the guy with costs of $50,000/year by himself has. Everyone else will have to have a $5,000 deductible so nothing under $5,000 gets covered. Oh, and there is a lifetime benefit of $100,000, anyone who gets something that costs more than $100,000 gets cut off. The insurance only really exists if you're in a catastrophic situation which is found here $100,000> X >$5,000. All the employees get a cut in their total compensation of $9,000 but it's not immediately obvious, except to the one really sick guy who now just shows up at emergency rooms.
Employer health insurance isn't special, unique or good. It's an employer provided benefit that can be great and can be awful. Literally the only thing that makes employer provided health insurance remotely good is that it has mandatory risk pools built into it which is, wait for it, SOCIALISM!!! If you get employer paid for insurance and you're young and healthy then you're getting mandatory deductions from your paycheck to help subsidize the old and sick people getting the same health insurance through your employer.
Employers generally don't allow you to opt out of their health insurance and take the money instead, using that to either self insure or buy a health insurance contract customized to your needs. There's a reason for that. If they then all the people without preconditions would bail out of the risk pool, take the extra compensation as $ and then buy their own low risk individual health insurance contracts. That'd leave the employer unable to provide health insurance to the remaining uninsurables and the entire system would collapse.
Effectively if you have employer provided health insurance then you're already getting all the things that people absolutely hated about the ACA. Only you're already used to it so you don't really think about it. Remote bureaucrats deciding what is and is not covered? Check. Paying for conditions you don't have? Check. Mandatory risk pooling? Check. No control over your own coverage? Check. Penalties? Check.
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On July 26 2017 06:01 mozoku wrote:Show nested quote +On July 26 2017 05:54 Mohdoo wrote:On July 26 2017 05:53 mozoku wrote:
Don't something like 80% of Americans have employer-sponsored healthcare anyway?
As immeasurable as the effect can be on the other 20% (i.e. the individual market), I'm always a little amazed at how much people care about healthcare bills considering most people talking about the issue aren't even significantly affected by them.
That doesn't excuse the utter mess our healthcare system is, but Obamacare didn't do much to fix that except make the individual market less terrible.
I'm awaiting a real healthcare bill that actually tries to deal with the cost of healthcare in the US, instead of just bickering about who pays for it or about how much of it we pay for publicly. It's the same reason I care about keeping poor kids in school. It is for the good of society. For the good of the whole. When the whole does well, so too does the individual. Poor people who use the ER hurt everyone. Just because I have insurance doesn't mean I don't suffer indirectly from other people not having insurance. Well, people care for that reason, or if not that, tax reasons obviously. I was more scratching my head over the people cheering "Thank God I live in State X!"
You'd have to do more research than I'm willing to do at the moment, but I think he was referring to a state sponsored healthcare system of sorts?
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United States42778 Posts
On July 26 2017 05:49 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On July 26 2017 05:40 KwarK wrote:On July 26 2017 05:25 Danglars wrote:On July 26 2017 05:03 KwarK wrote:On July 26 2017 05:01 Danglars wrote:On July 26 2017 04:47 KwarK wrote:On July 26 2017 03:24 Danglars wrote:
It should come as a welcome development for people that thought the Trump Tower meeting was absolutely unethical. Danglars appears to be stuck in some kind of loop. While "Trump" = president Print "but Hillary" Does anyone know how to restore functionality to Danglars.exe? Kwark seems to have gotten stuck on Trump-Russia hysteria. Do we have some way to restore his critical thinking on the breadth of topics, including current events from the chair of the Judiciary committee? I'm sorry, perhaps I misunderstood the content of your post. It seemed to me that you were attempting to defend Trump's Russian meetings by pointing to the DNC and claiming that what other people who aren't President do somehow impacts whether what Trump did was ethical. Was that not what you were doing? Apologies, I just rather assumed that you'd consider further investigations into malfeasance in office/campaigns to be welcome in the fight against unethical (or others would say criminal) behavior. Not that everything not TrumpRussia = distraction from Trump Russia, that it seems to me you insinuate regularly. I'm a big fan of blind justice that doesn't matter if you're named Clinton or Trump, you'll be investigated. Here you see new allegations from the chairman of the judiciary committee and his recommendations, and if you've had a chance to read them, maybe you'll comment on the literal content of my post. I'm certainly not arguing that Trump, and only Trump, should be investigated or prosecuted for wrongdoing for the next four years. If you thought that that was my stance then I'm happy to correct you. I think justice should be blind and that people who commit crimes should be prosecuted, even if they're not currently the president. I see now that you were confused and genuinely believed that the left thinks that for the next four years all the rapists and murderers etc are off the hook because only Trump matters. Obviously if that were the case it's important to remind us that other people who aren't Trump still do things wrong. However, now that you understand that nobody is saying that only Trump should be investigated, do you see the issue with your post? If not, I'll spell it out to you. 1) Claiming that Trump is being treated unfairly because other people commit crimes does not, in fact, absolve him of anything. There is no way of getting from "other people did things that were wrong" to "Trump did nothing wrong". 2) The crimes of others aren't actually being ignored. 3) There is no way of getting from "the people objecting to this are hypocrites" to "Trump did nothing wrong". 4) Even if Trump was being treated differently, that still doesn't get you to "Trump did nothing wrong". Unfair treatment by the law does not absolve sins, if it did then we'd never lock up an African American. 5) The crimes of people who are not President, while still criminal, are not as important as the crimes of people who are President. Investigating the possible compromise of the President is a more pressing matter than investigating the possible compromise of someone without that kind of influence. Hopefully you'll read this and understand that "but Hillary" will never, ever get you to "Trump did nothing wrong". Complaining that the world is unfair is the act of a child or an idiot. The argument "I shouldn't get punished because she wasn't" is not valid. The argument that "I shouldn't get punished because you're hypocrites" is not valid. To get to "Trump did nothing wrong" you have to talk about Trump and what he did. Not Hillary. Not the DNC. Now that you understand I'm more than just "but Hillary," would you mind commenting on the matter at hand. I see a lot of talk about issues I see resolved in the Mueller, House, and Senate investigations of Russian interference. My post was on new allegations from the chair of the senate judiciary committee. I saw some reason to hope people that want Trump held accountable for anything revealed from the investigations to cheer Grassley on in these new revelations. Show that the powerful are still subject to the rule of law. If you show by word that you're only interested in Trump, and I mean look at your post without a word of the two-page letter, we're at an impasse now for discussing a current event.
Am I misunderstanding what you were trying to express byIt should come as a welcome development for people that thought the Trump Tower meeting was absolutely unethical. because it seems an awful lot like you were trying to talk about the Trump Tower meeting?
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On July 26 2017 06:01 mozoku wrote:Show nested quote +On July 26 2017 05:54 Mohdoo wrote:On July 26 2017 05:53 mozoku wrote:
Don't something like 80% of Americans have employer-sponsored healthcare anyway?
As immeasurable as the effect can be on the other 20% (i.e. the individual market), I'm always a little amazed at how much people care about healthcare bills considering most people talking about the issue aren't even significantly affected by them.
That doesn't excuse the utter mess our healthcare system is, but Obamacare didn't do much to fix that except make the individual market less terrible.
I'm awaiting a real healthcare bill that actually tries to deal with the cost of healthcare in the US, instead of just bickering about who pays for it or about how much of it we pay for publicly. It's the same reason I care about keeping poor kids in school. It is for the good of society. For the good of the whole. When the whole does well, so too does the individual. Poor people who use the ER hurt everyone. Just because I have insurance doesn't mean I don't suffer indirectly from other people not having insurance. Well, people care for that reason, or if not that, tax reasons obviously. I was more scratching my head over the people cheering "Thank God I live in State X!"
Because we don’t have to worry about being denied healthcare based on pre-existing conditions. It is nice, but also limiting. It was really nice not having to worry about that nation wide, but I guess that was to much.
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On July 26 2017 05:59 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 26 2017 05:45 xDaunt wrote:On July 20 2017 14:00 xDaunt wrote:On July 20 2017 13:55 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 20 2017 13:33 xDaunt wrote:On July 20 2017 12:36 IgnE wrote:On July 20 2017 05:20 xDaunt wrote:On July 20 2017 02:06 IgnE wrote:On July 20 2017 01:40 xDaunt wrote:On July 19 2017 14:33 IgnE wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 18 2017 09:36 xDaunt wrote:I meant to post this editorial a few days ago, but have been badly tied up with work: Show nested quote +It’s anyone’s guess whether the latest round of Russia revelations will flame out or bring the administration toppling to the ground. But either way, the drama is only one act in an ongoing cycle of outrages involving Trump and Russia that will, one way or another, come to an end. That is not true of the controversy over the President’s remarks in Warsaw last week, which exposed a crucial contest over ideas that will continue to influence our politics until long after this administration has left office. And the responses from Trump’s liberal critics were revealing — and dangerous.
The speech — a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without — was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. “Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto,” read a Vox headline. According the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, Trump’s “alt-right speech” “redefined the West in nativist terms.”
Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term “alt-right” that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.
There is no shortage of fair criticism of Trump’s speech: For example, that he shouldn’t have delivered it in Poland because of Warsaw’s recent authoritarian tilt; that his criticism of Russia should have been more pointed; or that he would have better served America’s interests by sounding a more Wilsonian tone when it came to promoting democracy around the world. And, yes, Trump has proven himself a clever manipulator of white identity politics during his short political career, so it is understandable that critics would scrutinize his remarks for any hint of bigotry. But by identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values.
How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of “liberalism” and “the West.” Liberalism is an ideology — defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.
So to appeal to “the West” in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the West’s wars, religions and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.
What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of “the West” to liberalism’s enemies on the alt-right — that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right — not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of “immigration skeptic,” or “social conservative,” but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism — is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the West’s greatest achievements.
As any alt-rightist will be quick to point out, many Enlightenment philosophers were racist by current standards. (Have you even read what Voltaire said about the Jews?) But this is a non-sequitur: The Enlightenment is today remembered and celebrated not for the flaws of its principals but for laying the intellectual foundations that have allowed today’s conception of liberalism to develop and prosper.
As Dimitri Halikias pointed out on Twitter, there is a strange convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to understanding the Western political tradition. The campus left (hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go) rejects Western Civilization because it is racist. The alt-right, meanwhile, accepts Western civilization only insofar as it is racist — they fashion themselves defenders of “the West,” but reject the ideas of equality and human dignity that are the West’s principal achievements. But both, crucially, deny the connection between the West and the liberal tradition.
To critics, one of the most offending lines in Trump’s speech was his remark that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Trump clearly intended this to refer to the threat from Islamic extremism — and, presumably, the politically correct liberals who he believes are enabling it. But there is another threat to the West’s survival in the form of a far-right politics that would replace liberalism and the rule of law with tribalism and white ethnic patronage.
The best defense we have against this threat is the Western liberal tradition. But by trying to turn the “West” into a slur, Trump’s critics are disarming. Perhaps the president’s dire warning wasn’t so exaggerated, after all. Source. The author's main point is interesting and functionally indistinguishable from the arguments that I have previously made regarding the radical Left's overbearing use of identity and racial politics. What say y'all on the left? This article is interesting because it at least draws distinctions between the "extreme" left and right despite its tepid equivocation ("there is a strange convergence …") and despite rehashing Horseshoe Theory pablum. The problem is that its vision is far too limited (and I am not just talking about the unalloyed celebration of "liberalism"). The "racism" or, perhaps more properly, "Eurocentrism" of the Enlightenment is far too narrow a hook on which to hang the divide between left and right. If anything, this kind of analysis seems to have missed the epochal shift from the modern to the postmodern that Negri and Hardt point out in their book, Empire. Negri and Hardt identify a struggle between two modes within the emergence of modernity that the Enlightenment ushered in. On the one hand is the revolutionary transition from "a dualistic consciousness, a hierarchical vision of society, and a metaphysical idea of science" inherited from medieval Europe to "an experimental idea of science, a constituent conception of history and cities, and [the posing] of being as an immanent terrain of knowledge and action." The Enlightenment brought about "an affirmation of the power of this world, the discovery of the plane of the immanence." This new found creativity ushers in a revolutionary subjectivity within modern people, that fundamentally changed the modes of life of the population. On the other hand, uprooting and destroying traditional forms of life and connections to the past provokes conflict and war, or counter-revolution. The second "mode" of modernity "poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire." You get modern capitalism emerging in Genoa and the Italian city states, as well as the Reformation, civil wars, and the reestablishment of ideologies of command and authority: absolutism, parliament, and the rise of the modern nation state which sought to control, mediate, and harness the productive energies unleashed by Enlightenment thought. Insofar as the contemporary left and right appeal to "modern" Enlightenment ideals, or in the context of this article, we could talk about "the West," I think they are talking about two separates modes of Enlightenment. On the one hand you have the opening up of the potentiality of the multitude in the plane of immanence, and on the other hand you have a modern appeal to a "people." The "people" being the reduction of the heterogeneities and singularities of the multitude to a single subjectivity: "the national people," which is capable of univocal communication and knowable, controllable, desires. The "people" legitimates sovereign authority in the presence of the prince, the parliament, the dictator, etc. The crisis of modernity is the "contradictory co-presence of the multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule of one" or at least the imagined community of the nation-state. It's hard to know how seriously to take the idiots who talk about "neo-Marxism," "feminism," and "post-modernism" as the premiere monolithic evils ailing us in the present. Mostly because even when they can convince the totally ignorant that they have a working knowledge of those concepts, they actually have no clue what they are talking about. But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You don't have to look any further for evidence of the waning legitimacy of the imperial world order than the ineffectiveness of police action by the United States within the last two decades. It is effectiveness, itself, that legitimates those actions by restoring peace and upholding humanitarian principles, and every failure greatly undermines that legitimacy. And so there's a conflation here, in this article you have linked, xDaunt, between "Western Enlightenment modernity" as the bevy of imperialist, war-prone, nation states that carved up territories and maintained strict lines between the capitalist market inside, and the colonial outside, and the " imperial global market led by the United States" which is based on a truly global sovereign imperative, breaks down borders, opens flows of capital, culture, and people, and incorporates the entire world into a single united market. The fundamentalist Islamists of ISIS are no more pre-modern than they are post-modern. Jihadist mentality of "being-against" is an active response to globalizing post-modern imperial sovereignty. They resist in the only way open to them. To put up strict borders and cut yourself off from that policing, organizing influence today is to turn your territory into a ghetto. On the question of Enlightenment I am partial to Kant's answer in Was ist Aufklärung: "Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason by in lack of resolution and courage to use it without distinction from another." Insofar as "identity politics" attempts to overturn hierarchies by circumscribing individuals and groups within eidetic boundary lines, saying " I am essentially this [or these] kind(s) of entity," I think it is silly and short-sighted. One might say childish. Insofar as the wiser members displace hierarchies, recognize fractured subjectivities, and refrain from putting me or themselves in the very boxes that [we] want to dismantle/deconstruct, I don't even see what the big deal is. I want you to know that I needed two cups of coffee before I tackled this. And at times, I felt like scotch may have been more effective. In short, I think that you're missing the forest for the trees. At issue here isn't really a particular definition of the Enlightenment or how Western thought evolved following the Enlightenment. What's at issue is whether we should embrace the culture that gave birth to the Enlightenment: "Western culture." For decades, the intellectual left has been making arguments that undermine the status and prestige of Western culture. And these arguments have only grown more radical in recent years (hence the author sounding the alarm at the attacks on Trump's speech that necessarily incorporate various levels of demonizing Western culture). Thus while I agree with you that the average proponent on the right really doesn't understand what they're talking about when they loosely throw around terms like "Marxist" or "Neo-Marxist," there is more than just some truth to the fact that the Marxist schools of thought have been the primary launching pads for the current outbreak of Western self-hatred. Lastly, I need to address the following: But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You identified the problem (cultural clashes => conflict/war/bad things). You even tacitly admit that this problem is well-grounded in historical fact. But then you dismiss this problem with a wave of a hand by declaring that we're in a new epoch where none of this cultural difference shit matters anymore, and by implication, it won't matter in the future, either. I simply find that to be an incredible declaration. I have no idea where your confidence in this newfound state of world order permanence comes from. In fact, your repeated use of the term "imperial" or "imperialist" when referring to this order shows that you understand that this order is maintained through Western (re: American) unipolar force and power. What happens when we inevitably revert to a multipolar world? What happens when another unipolar power emerges that may have a very different idea of culture (not to mention cultural tolerance) than the West presently does? The answers to these questions are precisely why Western culture should be defended and why it is foolish for the Left to antagonize Trump for doing so. As we know from the examples of Rome and every other great empire that rise and fell, cultural integrity matters. And when it's lost, it's usually not regained, to the peril of the people. i'm not going to respond at length now but in short my point might be distilled to something like the following: western nostaglia for 50s leave it to beaver pastiche from the likes of Publius has failed to adequately reckon with and accept modernity's passing. there is no way to return to the (fantasy of) the past. this problem is exacerbated by conservatives' general belief in markets and the creative potential of capital without properly understanding that the need for expansion, and the concomitant incorporation and articulation of the outside (i.e. those scary elements that threaten order itself) is what has propelled us into our contemporary imperial order. corruption, in the sense of "degeneration" and/or recrudescence (or if you prefer "creative destruction") is the necessary condition and modality of this imperial order. you cannot maintain empire, with its legitimacy bolstered by effective police action and a universalizing set of human rights, without that corruption. the only way to get rid of discomfort with the disintegration of the boundary line between us and them, between first and third world (if that is what you feel and what you mean by "integrity," or identical self-sameness) is to end the project of empire. that's all fine and good, as long as you understand that empire is the only substrate upon which capital accumulation can continue unabated. at least until other avenues of expansion open up. mars colonization anyone? Maybe some conservatives are preoccupied with the past and a return to the "glory days," but that's certainly not the point that I am making, which is strictly forward looking. And again, you're missing the forest for the trees with the point that you're making. Let's just presume for a moment that you're correct in asserting that the dynamics of capitalism make cultural contact, mixing, and conflict inevitable, thereby creating the forces that threaten cultural integrity. All that you have done is define the need for some type of cultural defense. You're not saying that the Romans should have bent over sooner for the barbarians, are you? Such defeatism is absurd. And this absurdity becomes very apparent once you step outside of Western culture and see what other peoples think. The Chinese created the perfect slur for the people who adhere to this kind of defeatism: "baizuo" -- the white left. I want to take this question very seriously, but it would help if you would elaborate on what you mean by "Western culture." I take it you don't mean anything so narrow as "that which is opposed to Islam" but I am not sure how much of what might be perceived as "Western" you think is worth defending. In other words, I would prefer to skip over the inevitable apophatic objections and move to a more positive characterization of "Western culture," including that which you think needs defending from the forces of cultural contact, mixing, and conflict. Let's start with a broad definition of Western culture, which would include traditions of individual liberty, inalienable rights, political plurality, and the rule of law (I'd throw Christianity in there as well, but I'm not sure that we need to go down that rabbit hole yet). I'm not sure we can say the US was founded on those concepts. I suppose if you just erase the humanity anyone but* white males (a common practice for some) then those would be traditions of western culture though . Don't worry, I'm sure that I'll be addressing this when I respond to Igne's next post. Alright, Igne hasn't responded, so I'll give GH my response now. First, the question was about the definition of western culture, not necessarily American culture. Though America is a Western nation and has been a driver of Western culture -- particularly over the past 100 years, the two concepts shouldn't be conflated. Second, pointing to the sometimes unequal application of the liberties and traditions that I listed above as a reason not to defend Western culture is myopic. The very arguments that one would make for the more equal application of rights and liberties are all grounded in the traditions of Western culture. Following GH's lead, let's take slavery as an example. All of the arguments for abolition were derived directly from one aspect of Western culture or another. In fact, one could argue that Christianity was the primary driver of the abolition movement, both through direct religious influence on the arguments of abolitionists and through the liberal philosophies that were spawned from Christianity (natural law being a big one). The Civil Rights movement, likewise, is also grounded conceptually in Western traditions. From these examples, we can see that Western culture has provided its own framework for self-improvement. What matters most is that Western culture has created the very ideas that form the foundation for its own self-criticism. The revolution isn't the equal application of the concepts of individual liberties and inalienable rights. The revolution was the development and broad-based acceptance of those ideas in the first place. Those on the Left who demonize Western culture have lost sight of this fact. Stated another way, my argument is that it is unwise to throw the baby out with the bath water. I think you attribute some novelty to concepts previously enjoyed in different ways. I think you're brushing aside too easily the systemic deprivation of those rights and liberties as an indispensable part of the establishing those ideas, and how they undermine rather than form a foundation on which better ideas were born. It all sounds very self-important but it seems the concept so sweeping and selectively exclusive to not be of much value. I'll let Igne elaborate if he's interested.
Well let me ask you this question (and Igne can answer it if he wants), what's the alternative to Western culture. The concepts that I laid out are distinctly Western. Some other cultures may share in them to one degree or another, but no other culture values them to the extent that the West does.
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On July 26 2017 06:09 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On July 26 2017 05:49 Danglars wrote:On July 26 2017 05:40 KwarK wrote:On July 26 2017 05:25 Danglars wrote:On July 26 2017 05:03 KwarK wrote:On July 26 2017 05:01 Danglars wrote:On July 26 2017 04:47 KwarK wrote:Danglars appears to be stuck in some kind of loop. While "Trump" = president Print "but Hillary" Does anyone know how to restore functionality to Danglars.exe? Kwark seems to have gotten stuck on Trump-Russia hysteria. Do we have some way to restore his critical thinking on the breadth of topics, including current events from the chair of the Judiciary committee? I'm sorry, perhaps I misunderstood the content of your post. It seemed to me that you were attempting to defend Trump's Russian meetings by pointing to the DNC and claiming that what other people who aren't President do somehow impacts whether what Trump did was ethical. Was that not what you were doing? Apologies, I just rather assumed that you'd consider further investigations into malfeasance in office/campaigns to be welcome in the fight against unethical (or others would say criminal) behavior. Not that everything not TrumpRussia = distraction from Trump Russia, that it seems to me you insinuate regularly. I'm a big fan of blind justice that doesn't matter if you're named Clinton or Trump, you'll be investigated. Here you see new allegations from the chairman of the judiciary committee and his recommendations, and if you've had a chance to read them, maybe you'll comment on the literal content of my post. I'm certainly not arguing that Trump, and only Trump, should be investigated or prosecuted for wrongdoing for the next four years. If you thought that that was my stance then I'm happy to correct you. I think justice should be blind and that people who commit crimes should be prosecuted, even if they're not currently the president. I see now that you were confused and genuinely believed that the left thinks that for the next four years all the rapists and murderers etc are off the hook because only Trump matters. Obviously if that were the case it's important to remind us that other people who aren't Trump still do things wrong. However, now that you understand that nobody is saying that only Trump should be investigated, do you see the issue with your post? If not, I'll spell it out to you. 1) Claiming that Trump is being treated unfairly because other people commit crimes does not, in fact, absolve him of anything. There is no way of getting from "other people did things that were wrong" to "Trump did nothing wrong". 2) The crimes of others aren't actually being ignored. 3) There is no way of getting from "the people objecting to this are hypocrites" to "Trump did nothing wrong". 4) Even if Trump was being treated differently, that still doesn't get you to "Trump did nothing wrong". Unfair treatment by the law does not absolve sins, if it did then we'd never lock up an African American. 5) The crimes of people who are not President, while still criminal, are not as important as the crimes of people who are President. Investigating the possible compromise of the President is a more pressing matter than investigating the possible compromise of someone without that kind of influence. Hopefully you'll read this and understand that "but Hillary" will never, ever get you to "Trump did nothing wrong". Complaining that the world is unfair is the act of a child or an idiot. The argument "I shouldn't get punished because she wasn't" is not valid. The argument that "I shouldn't get punished because you're hypocrites" is not valid. To get to "Trump did nothing wrong" you have to talk about Trump and what he did. Not Hillary. Not the DNC. Now that you understand I'm more than just "but Hillary," would you mind commenting on the matter at hand. I see a lot of talk about issues I see resolved in the Mueller, House, and Senate investigations of Russian interference. My post was on new allegations from the chair of the senate judiciary committee. I saw some reason to hope people that want Trump held accountable for anything revealed from the investigations to cheer Grassley on in these new revelations. Show that the powerful are still subject to the rule of law. If you show by word that you're only interested in Trump, and I mean look at your post without a word of the two-page letter, we're at an impasse now for discussing a current event. Am I misunderstanding what you were trying to express by Show nested quote +It should come as a welcome development for people that thought the Trump Tower meeting was absolutely unethical. because it seems an awful lot like you were trying to talk about the Trump Tower meeting?
See, you thought discussions with Danglars was a loop, and got caught in his flow chart instead. You're currently at the "Discussion isn't going in the direction I want" step, which leads to the "Read better, it's your fault I'm not understood clearly" retort.
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On July 26 2017 06:23 WolfintheSheep wrote:Show nested quote +On July 26 2017 06:09 KwarK wrote:On July 26 2017 05:49 Danglars wrote:On July 26 2017 05:40 KwarK wrote:On July 26 2017 05:25 Danglars wrote:On July 26 2017 05:03 KwarK wrote:On July 26 2017 05:01 Danglars wrote:On July 26 2017 04:47 KwarK wrote:Danglars appears to be stuck in some kind of loop. While "Trump" = president Print "but Hillary" Does anyone know how to restore functionality to Danglars.exe? Kwark seems to have gotten stuck on Trump-Russia hysteria. Do we have some way to restore his critical thinking on the breadth of topics, including current events from the chair of the Judiciary committee? I'm sorry, perhaps I misunderstood the content of your post. It seemed to me that you were attempting to defend Trump's Russian meetings by pointing to the DNC and claiming that what other people who aren't President do somehow impacts whether what Trump did was ethical. Was that not what you were doing? Apologies, I just rather assumed that you'd consider further investigations into malfeasance in office/campaigns to be welcome in the fight against unethical (or others would say criminal) behavior. Not that everything not TrumpRussia = distraction from Trump Russia, that it seems to me you insinuate regularly. I'm a big fan of blind justice that doesn't matter if you're named Clinton or Trump, you'll be investigated. Here you see new allegations from the chairman of the judiciary committee and his recommendations, and if you've had a chance to read them, maybe you'll comment on the literal content of my post. I'm certainly not arguing that Trump, and only Trump, should be investigated or prosecuted for wrongdoing for the next four years. If you thought that that was my stance then I'm happy to correct you. I think justice should be blind and that people who commit crimes should be prosecuted, even if they're not currently the president. I see now that you were confused and genuinely believed that the left thinks that for the next four years all the rapists and murderers etc are off the hook because only Trump matters. Obviously if that were the case it's important to remind us that other people who aren't Trump still do things wrong. However, now that you understand that nobody is saying that only Trump should be investigated, do you see the issue with your post? If not, I'll spell it out to you. 1) Claiming that Trump is being treated unfairly because other people commit crimes does not, in fact, absolve him of anything. There is no way of getting from "other people did things that were wrong" to "Trump did nothing wrong". 2) The crimes of others aren't actually being ignored. 3) There is no way of getting from "the people objecting to this are hypocrites" to "Trump did nothing wrong". 4) Even if Trump was being treated differently, that still doesn't get you to "Trump did nothing wrong". Unfair treatment by the law does not absolve sins, if it did then we'd never lock up an African American. 5) The crimes of people who are not President, while still criminal, are not as important as the crimes of people who are President. Investigating the possible compromise of the President is a more pressing matter than investigating the possible compromise of someone without that kind of influence. Hopefully you'll read this and understand that "but Hillary" will never, ever get you to "Trump did nothing wrong". Complaining that the world is unfair is the act of a child or an idiot. The argument "I shouldn't get punished because she wasn't" is not valid. The argument that "I shouldn't get punished because you're hypocrites" is not valid. To get to "Trump did nothing wrong" you have to talk about Trump and what he did. Not Hillary. Not the DNC. Now that you understand I'm more than just "but Hillary," would you mind commenting on the matter at hand. I see a lot of talk about issues I see resolved in the Mueller, House, and Senate investigations of Russian interference. My post was on new allegations from the chair of the senate judiciary committee. I saw some reason to hope people that want Trump held accountable for anything revealed from the investigations to cheer Grassley on in these new revelations. Show that the powerful are still subject to the rule of law. If you show by word that you're only interested in Trump, and I mean look at your post without a word of the two-page letter, we're at an impasse now for discussing a current event. Am I misunderstanding what you were trying to express by It should come as a welcome development for people that thought the Trump Tower meeting was absolutely unethical. because it seems an awful lot like you were trying to talk about the Trump Tower meeting? See, you thought discussions with Danglars was a loop, and got caught in his flow chart instead. You're currently at the "Discussion isn't going in the direction I want" step, which leads to the "Read better, it's your fault I'm not understood clearly" retort.
How very meta of you. You're quite familiar with "ignore all that, what about this!!" But every time I think you're going to debate, I read another contrafactual "That's a...pretty dumb view of history you have there." But your claim to fame is hacking out summaries, like saying GH is "I know nothing about politics but I'm still better than all of you." Maybe one day you'll return to debating instead of wondering how you can butcher everybody's opinions and then attack the altered form of them.
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EPT
