US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9474

On December 10 2017 02:32 Jockmcplop wrote:
Its so fucking easy to get sucked into the conservative area of Youtube (Rubin, Peterson, Crowder etc.).
Why isn't there a leftist version? I've seen some contrapoints videos that are really good, but can anyone recommend any other channels doing good leftist stuff?
Is it a matter of funding why there is such a difference in quality and interesting content, or am I just missing it all?

On December 10 2017 02:32 Jockmcplop wrote:
Its so fucking easy to get sucked into the conservative area of Youtube (Rubin, Peterson, Crowder etc.).
Why isn't there a leftist version? I've seen some contrapoints videos that are really good, but can anyone recommend any other channels doing good leftist stuff?
Is it a matter of funding why there is such a difference in quality and interesting content, or am I just missing it all?

Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals. People close to him estimate that Mr. Trump spends at least four hours a day, and sometimes as much as twice that, in front of a television, sometimes with the volume muted, marinating in the no-holds-barred wars of cable news and eager to fire back.

On December 10 2017 02:32 Jockmcplop wrote:
Its so fucking easy to get sucked into the conservative area of Youtube (Rubin, Peterson, Crowder etc.).
Why isn't there a leftist version? I've seen some contrapoints videos that are really good, but can anyone recommend any other channels doing good leftist stuff?
Is it a matter of funding why there is such a difference in quality and interesting content, or am I just missing it all?

On December 10 2017 02:34 kollin wrote:

I think the left has a much more credible and established intellectual base that doesn't need to use YouTube.

Apparently emboldened by the likelihood that they’ll pass an enormous tax cut for the rich before the year is out, congressional Republicans such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wisc., have been speaking more openly about how they’re planning to eviscerate government programs for the middle and working class.

Ryan laid out these plans the other day in a remarkable interview with Denver radio host Ross Kaminsky, a conservative and apparently a long-term Ryan supporter. During the companionable 10-minute chat, Ryan identified Medicare and Medicaid as the drivers of “the debt and the deficit.”

Never mind the tax cuts making their way through the Republican-controlled Congress, which nonpartisan analysts predict will explode the deficit by $1.4 trillion over 10 years — Ryan endorsed the GOP talking point that these will pay for themselves through economic growth. That’s an assertion for which neither Congress nor the Trump White House has produced any analytical support.
So we’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit. — House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., forgetting that his tax cuts will drive up the deficit by $1.4 trillion

Ryan couched his policy prescriptions in the context of “entitlement reform,” employing an overused term for social insurance policies that include Social Security and Medicare, the costs of which Americans cover through payroll taxes during their working careers. He acknowledged that cutting Social Security benefits would be a tough lift, since that would probably require 60 votes in the Senate, where the GOP currently has only 52 members.

That leaves the government healthcare programs. Ryan reminded Kaminsky that “the House passed our entitlement reform bill in May… the biggest entitlement reform bill ever passed by Congress.” He’s referring to the House GOP’s Obamacare repeal bill, which would have killed Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and slashed $800 billion from traditional Medicaid over 10 years by converting it to a block-grant program. Block granting, as we’ve reported in the past, is merely a tool for cutting benefits, with the carnage increasing over time.
As Ryan observed, the House Republicans’ best-laid plans were wrecked by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who in a celebrated moment turned thumbs-down on the Senate’s version of the ACA repeal bill, killing the Senate bill and ending the fun for both chambers.

“So we’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” Ryan said. He told Kaminsky that Medicare reform “has been my big thing for many, many years, because it’s the biggest entitlement. It’s gotta be reformed.”
“Patient-centered” care is more often used as a guideline to a sort of bedside manner — giving the patient more of a voice in his or her treatment, more information, more opportunity to ask questions. But as two family medicine experts observed in a 2011 paper, the changes are often cosmetic — hotel-like amenities such as “greeters, greenery, and gadgetry.”

How Congress can legislate anything like patient-centered care is a mystery that Ryan didn’t bother to try solving — he just threw the term out like a smoke bomb to conceal that he’s really only talking about cutting benefits. Patient-centered care as it’s commonly understood won’t give patients more choice — in the vast majority of clinical encounters, patients don’t want “choice” — they want an urgent health problem to be addressed. And it has nothing to do with competition.

“Choice and competition,” Ryan said, “brings down prices, improves quality. Government healthcare is the opposite of that.”

Ryan’s description of Medicare, however, displayed all the sophistry he’s shown in his previous discussions of American healthcare. He plainly doesn’t understand Medicare — or if he does, he hides it well.

“We need to convert our healthcare system to a patient-centered system so that people have more choice [and] we have more competition,” he said. What does this vacuous statement even mean? “Patient-centered” healthcare is a conservative shibboleth. It often refers to a system in which patients pay a larger share of costs so they will make more discerning judgments about when to go to the doctor. There’s no evidence that higher deductibles or co-pays produce better care — that does produce less care, but the evidence is that people end up seeing the doctor less for genuine needs as well as frivolous reasons.
Actually, he’s dead wrong. Medicare, which specifies reimbursement rates for all the doctors who compete to serve its enrollees, is in fact the most efficient healthcare delivery system in the nation, with the lowest administrative costs. Far from suppressing innovation, Medicare has been a fount of innovation. The program has been a leader in testing new models for healthcare payment and new approaches to, yes, “patient-centered” care.

Ryan just wants to cut costs, but his prescriptions, such as they are, won’t do that. Medicare and Medicaid can’t actually be “reformed” from within; they’re both prisoners of overall healthcare costs. That’s what needs to be reformed — how we pay doctors and hospitals, how we judge the value of medical outcomes, and how much we allow drug companies to charge patients for their products.

None of those factors is on Paul Ryan’s agenda. He’s just talking about shifting the embedded costs of healthcare from government to individuals, and in a way that will drive costs up, not down. As long as he chooses his interviewers carefully, his lies and misrepresentations aren’t going to get the scrutiny they deserve. But since’s he’s threatening to turn them into policy, it’s time they did.

On December 10 2017 02:50 Nebuchad wrote:
Also wanted to add that the amount of comments under leftist youtube videos that are like "Holy shit six months ago I was a rightwinger buying all of Sargon's talking points, thanks [x] for making me see that it was all bullshit" is proof enough that the left should seek to be bigger on youtube than they are now. People don't get the views they get in a vacuum, they forge them. The time they forge those views is going to be their teens, and a ton of people nowadays spend their teen years on Youtube. You might want to be there and do stuff.

On December 10 2017 02:54 Jockmcplop wrote:


Exactly.
I've been taking the Peterson/Harris medicine for a long time now but only because there aren't really many intellectual alternatives creating interesting/in depth talking points from a left wing perspective. For me personally, that's where my heart is politically but there's logical holes on the leftist system that no-one is dedicating enough time to sorting out.
I'd like to see a channel where people really take on the most difficult points for the left in a sensible, rational way.

On December 10 2017 02:45 Jockmcplop wrote:


I don't agree. I mean if it was true that the left doesn't need to use Youtube there wouldn't be such a surge in right wing views. The right has found a way to disguise their opinions as liberalism ('classic' liberals), while the left is getting a reputation as shrieking children.

To me, the left's intellectual base has become eroded to the point where it needs some fresh thought. The epistemology of the left (ie all knowledge is socially constructed) is only taken as fact by those on the left and they often don't seem to realize that it doesn't really chime with how most people (let's say most white people) experience reality.
It seems to me that although the left likes to think that they have a more credible intellectual base, they are becoming easier and easier to ridicule, and its playing into the hands of the Rubin/Shapiro crowd.

PS thanks for the suggestions everyone I guess I've got alot of Youtube to watch now :D

edit: it could be that I am cartoonishly exaggerating the social constructionist views of the left but I don't think so. Its not something that often gets discussed across political lines so its hard to determine the exact philosophy behind the politics.

On December 10 2017 02:36 Nevuk wrote:

The left has crooked media's podcasts instead (pod save america, etc. hosted by former obama speechwriters), or the young turks. Also democracy now if you are fine with going full on leftist and not just liberal.

On December 10 2017 02:59 Slydie wrote:


Just as the right is so eager to discuss problems wit their own ideology? There is an opposite side for that. Also, I am curious to which holes you are talking about, Europe is doing fine, and even the right over here is leftist by US standards regarding many issues.

On December 10 2017 03:03 Nebuchad wrote:
Been a while since I shared my views of Harris I guess, but let's just say, not a fan. Used to call him "a stupid person's idea of an intellectual", which is the offensive way of saying kind of what you said (jock), he will appear like an intellectual if you have nobody similar or better to compare him to on the other side so that you can keep things in perspective.

On December 10 2017 03:01 kollin wrote:

The left might need to use YouTube, but you didn't ask if the left needs to do that. Right-wing YouTube pseudo-intellectuals such as Peterson are just that - pseudo-intellectuals, and so they're forced to use YouTube because no other media platform wants them. YouTube suits this because you get to control the content that you put out entirely, and so shape your image exactly as you want it.

I don't think the left has a reputation as 'shrieking children' amongst anyone except people who consume a lot of right-wing YouTube, and while I think your criticism of the left as focusing too much on social construction is valid, the reason I think it's valid is because eminent, respected, intellectual writers on the left - such as Richard Rorty - have made the same point. I can't think of one figure on the right who has the same kind of intellectual reputation, and this reflects in the fact that most of the intellectual icons of the modern right are found on YouTube.

I think in some ways you may as well ask why there's no such thing as a leftist Fox, or a leftist Daily Mail - they're kind of a contradiction in terms.

On December 10 2017 03:07 Jockmcplop wrote:


TBH Islam is probably the most confounding issue for the left. Much of the Middle East conforms to an extremely right wing version of Islam, and yet those on the left wing in Europe act as though they have a duty to protect that right wing system.

On December 10 2017 03:17 Nebuchad wrote:


If you go a little behind the talking point that the left is protecting the rightwing system, you will see that it makes no sense. First because you're not going to be able to show evidence of the left protecting Middle Eastern radical regimes, and second because you will see the opposite: attempts to cut ties with Saudi Arabia, for example, because they're not quite the good guys, will always come from the left and be denied by the right.

What happens is that those commentators will use the defense of refugees and of individuals that exists on the left and use how close those two ideas are in the minds of most people to give you the impression that the left defends the saudi regime. It doesn't.

On December 10 2017 02:54 Jockmcplop wrote:


Exactly.
I've been taking the Peterson/Harris medicine for a long time now but only because there aren't really many intellectual alternatives creating interesting/in depth talking points from a left wing perspective. For me personally, that's where my heart is politically but there's logical holes on the leftist system that no-one is dedicating enough time to sorting out.
I'd like to see a channel where people really take on the most difficult points for the left in a sensible, rational way.

On December 10 2017 03:22 Jockmcplop wrote:


I was talking in a more general sense, not inferring that the left is literally propping up right wing regimes in the middle east.
The biggest question I have is this:
Why does it make more sense to campaign for women's rights at home than it does to campaign for them in the middle east, where women are often so badly treated that they are victims of human rights violations every single day?
The other question would be as to why people who point this out end up ostracized by the left and often end up put in the category of 'just another islamophobe'.

On December 10 2017 03:22 Jockmcplop wrote:


I was talking in a more general sense, not inferring that the left is literally propping up right wing regimes in the middle east.
The biggest question I have is this:
Why does it make more sense to campaign for women's rights at home than it does to campaign for them in the middle east, where women are often so badly treated that they are victims of human rights violations every single day?
The other question would be as to why people who point this out end up ostracized by the left and often end up put in the category of 'just another islamophobe'.