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On November 15 2024 21:42 oBlade wrote:In Liz Cheney's case, not only was it the former, because she is simply an idiot who's wrong about almost everything, but the nature of her reaching across the aisle was a consequence of the fact that not only is she simply an incompetent retard who is wrong about everything of substance, she managed herself into such a failure of a political corner after getting excommunicated from her own circles that she had no choice but to reach in an act of bipartisan desperation across the aisle towards a campaign that may be now second guessing the wisdom of having accepted that spoiled olive branch.
You know that we know that all the Trump appointments you are applauding right now will get the same treatment from you as Liz Cheney or John Kelly as soon as they have a falling out with him in t-minus 6 months, right?
Your algorithm for value judgement of politicians/bureaucrats is "If currently allied with Trump = genius, else = retard." As complex as a cockroach deciding what to do when the light turns on in the middle of the night.
You have no idea what I believe.
Politician's "variance" happens in low-constituency positions. Governors or senators of large states will generally be the most middle of the road, boring personalities, idealess expression, and middle of the road to their party's current platform. The mavericks or abject failures come from the geographic fringe.
Wyoming doesn't have a million people. That's why they can manage to elect such a retard. Neither does Vermont. That's how they can elect someone like Sanders.
Your whole thing is pro-right anti-left. We know what you believe.
Have you ever voted for a Democrat?
wdym, I'm not American. But if I vote for the equivalent of a Democrat here in Austria, it's certainly never gonna be the FPÖ. Trump's administration is the equivalent of the FPÖ.
Bi-partisan executives don't make much sense to me, since the term applies to a parlament when there are two major fractions passing legislation that would require votes from both sides.
Since executives ...execute.. and don't vote.. I don't understand how the list of executives could be bi-partisan... unless they are all hearing voices in their heads.
Also I am no longer able to tell if this is a joke:
On November 15 2024 22:53 KT_Elwood wrote: Bi-partisan executives don't make much sense to me, since the term applies to a parlament when there are two major fractions passing legislation that would require votes from both sides.
Since executives ...execute.. and don't vote.. I don't understand how the list of executives could be bi-partisan... unless they are all hearing voices in their heads.
Also I am no longer able to tell if this is a joke:
On November 15 2024 17:47 Velr wrote: When ideas are based in reality, I like to engage.
If it's moronic left/right wing extremist garbage. I don't see any value in it and that so many people do, is part of the problem.
My dad always used to tell me that if everyone else seems like the problem its probably worth looking at yourself.
Pretending like the cozy centrist political consensus is working for enough people for you to consider only centrism to be worth engaging with is what I would call delusional.
If you don't believe me, look at the results of recent elections.
I don't think it is fair to claim that Velr only views centrists as worth engaging with.
I personally consider myself to be pretty leftwing. Not GH-style leftwing, but rather leftwing nonetheless. I believe that our society requires a lot more redistribution of wealth from the rich to normal people, and that that is one of the top problems currently. I do not think i am a centrist.
And yet i have not had the impression that Velr had any problems engaging with me so far.
I don't think this is actually about political positions, but about sanity and being rooted in reality. And i would agree that in the last decade or so, groups of people that are just completely detached from reality have gained ever more prominence. And those groups of people with "alternate facts" are really, really hard to talk to.
I suppose it depends on how you define things. I didn't bother to ask Velr so you might be right tbh. Some people would define socialists as anything to the left of Elon Musk economically so when velr says socialists are awful i assume he just means leftists in general. I get that that's wrong but everyone seems to have their own definitions of these terms these days.
When it comes to alternative facts, I get just as frustrated as you guys do with the whole idea, but its worth examining where they have come from and why. If the story being told by the more 'sane' governments who tend to be centrists or medium left/right came across as true and worth listening to people probably wouldn't be driven to go find their own convenient facts. The problem is the people we are supposed to listen to are just as likely to come out with utter BS as anyone else is these days. I'll give an example from the UK, The minister in charge of our treasury, Rachel Reeves, said a couple of years ago that she was running for this position because she felt our economy needed completely redesigning from the bottom up to make it more fair and equal and to rebalance things to stop the growth in income inequality. Then she got near government and as soon as it became obvious she was going to get the job it was 'oh yeah sorry about all that we're just going to have more austerity instead.' Where are people supposed to go if you can't get a straight story our of the sensible. centrist-y parties? Take a big enough group of people and you'll find enough of them flocking to the extreme positions that it causes problems.
The center has let everybody down, their growing mutual resentment of the working class will ruin them, and instead of any serious self analysis we just get flaming at anyone who didn't go along with their bullshit.
I'm pretty far left, as long as you don't want to overcome/abolish capitalism or other delusional ideas. Cheap/Free education, redistribution of wealth, raising taxes to pay for concrete programs/plans, subsidising/furthering green energy/tech/infrastructure, strenghtening labour rights/laws and so on i'm all on board with.
What drives me mad are things like "doomersim", "utopianism" and "accelerationism". All this stuff helps absolutely no one. I would love to have discussions about possible(!!!) policies. Biden wasn't perfect but he actually got a pretty good track record in his 4 years... Yet Democrats are too pussy to even take credit for it and the right is just flinging blatant lies and feacies around... At the same time progressives are sitting there shouting genocide Joe and act like voting for Harris/Joe over Trump is somehow not the easiest choice ever, actively trying to hold the decmoratic party hostage. Seriously, progressives can go fuck themselves.
If anything I blame the Democrats for listening to progressives way too much. I hope the democratic party takes a giant dump on all of them and ignores whatever these worthless, harmfull, self important assholes want for the forseeable future. Listening to them is as usefull as arguing with the russian trolls in the Ukraine/Russia tread. There is no harm in saying "trans woman shouldn't compete in womens sports" or "we got issues at the border and we plan to do XYZ to improve the situation, illegal immigration is in fact not the sort of immigration we want". Yeah, a few morons will call them transphobic and/or racist - No one outside of these circles cares anyway, if anything it would win them votes.
I can understand and even support being "radical" if your a teenager... If your over 30 and find yourself still advocating for "overcoming capitalism" and other daydreams, whiteout serious political/democratic action behind it beyond Twitter/online Spaces, it's imho just sad and actively harmfull to furthering feasible "leftist" policies.
On November 15 2024 08:23 NewSunshine wrote: Yeah, I went back and edited in that it's an AP article. It's legit. And might I add, the journalistic integrity of InfoWars is liable to increase exponentially as a result. Couldn't have happened to a worse guy.
Trump was Hitler a little bit over week ago, and now about Alex Jones : " Couldn't have happened to a worse guy." You either dont know who Hitler was, or Alex Jones dude is some hybrid of Genghis Khan, Stalin, and maybe Xenomorph.
Alex Jones is a predatory piece of shit that sold lies for profit at the expense of families that were already grieving the loss of their children to gun violence, and harassed them for his own benefit using lies and conspiracy theories. I don't care to quibble with you about whether he was literally the single worst person alive. It was a figure of speech, asshole.
You being unable to express yourself properly makes me an "asshole", cute.
You being unable to distinguish between literal and figurative speech and needing to litigate my post because you can't help yourself is acting like an asshole, yes.
Nobody likes a Grammar Nazi.
To be fair, 76 million people like one who's bad at grammar.
I think that makes my point rather than disagreeing with it. The Orange One is "relatable" because he uses easy words and feels out how the English language works on the fly.
Yeah that's probably pretty accurate.
In my opinion this is an awful trait to have as a politician. People creating legislation, crafting laws, and leading a country should be able to use explicit language to convey a message. It should not be worked out "on the fly". Misinterpretation can cost lives when you consider the amount of power the president has.
I understand and appreciate the dislike of the democratic party. I'm not a fan of them myself. But this is the guy that the republican party and voters wanted instead? Out of all of the people that could have risen to the top of the party to earn the nomination, this is the guy?
On November 15 2024 06:15 oBlade wrote: RFK Jr. in at HHS according to Don Jr. 10 minutes ago.
Already the most bipartisan administration in decades.
What's your working definition of "bipartisan"? Or was this meant as a joke? I can't tell with your posts sometimes.
My definition is I see 3+ Democrats already and that's more people from the other party than any other administration has poached for a while.
I don't think calling RFK Jr a Democrat is very fair. It's about as useful a point as saying Trump is a democrat. At some point, they were members of the Democratic party, but that doesn't make them Democrats. Even Tulsi Gabbard is a stretch and for her I'm not sure her views changed or she's an opportunistic lickspittle who'll hitch her wagon to whoever she thinks will give her the easiest route to more power. I'm not sure who the 3rd is.
While not quite as unhinged and vitriolic, your response is interesting. The Republicans already have someone named Kennedy from Louisiana. Most Americans understand that the Kennedy family are Democrats.
Being a member of the Democrat Party is basically the only thing that makes anyone a Democrat. Whether you need to split hairs and vigilantly add "former" or "ex" or changed the word to "turncoat" in order to feel smarter than what should be a basic observation - whatever that class of people is, whatever word you want to put on them - tell me if there's a recent administration who had more of them. Besides his first term which also had them but of lesser profile.
Did you not claim that Liz Cheney outreach from the Harris campaign wasn’t really a bipartisan gesture because she wasn’t popular nor aligned with mainstream republican sentiment anymore?
Genuine question, I may be incorrectly recalling, or misread at the time. Don’t want to missrepresent.
I do not view "bipartisan(ship)" as an inherent good. You possibly do, in which case you're exploring if I might believe things contradictory to that because it might look like that's why I brought this up. It was a simple observation.
Often times in politics, and in life, one person or side is completely correct and the other is completely wrong. In politics, I am not a fan of bipartisan warmongering state-corporatist globalism. However, I appreciate bipartisan populism. In Liz Cheney's case, not only was it the former, because she is simply an idiot who's wrong about almost everything, but the nature of her reaching across the aisle was a consequence of the fact that not only is she simply an incompetent retard who is wrong about everything of substance, she managed herself into such a failure of a political corner after getting excommunicated from her own circles that she had no choice but to reach in an act of bipartisan desperation across the aisle towards a campaign that may be now second guessing the wisdom of having accepted that spoiled olive branch.
Fortunately, we will have to wait a long time to see if Cheney would end up with a role in any Harris administration. Unfortunately, that long time is going to be unpunctuated tantrums directed to anyone associated with the Blumpf administration, including lifelong environmentalist and patriots, because they are the only people left now to project those emotions onto, because theoretically they can be "got" whereas the left has utterly failed to "get" Blumpf and they need a new target for their futility.
Edit: I don't want to be unfair to Liz Cheney by being results-oriented. She did make a brave all-in move. If it had worked out with Harris getting just about 200k more votes, we would be possibly talking about how Cheney's going to run some federal department right now instead.
To me, at least in the political realm it’s a relatively neutral concept. I wouldn’t say the Iraq War decision was a great advertisement for bipartisanship. But if parties can find commonality across the aisles to accomplish what most people want to see, can be good.
Either way I see bipartisanship more in the spirit and practice of actual cooperation, or at least attempts to do so. I’m not really seeing these appointments as an actual olive branch. We shall see.
Hey Liz Cheney is wrong on a lot, hence why I don’t think Harris campaign should have made much of that endorsement. Still right on Trump, but hey. She did take a hit for that stance, being charitable one can praise her for a principled stand. Being uncharitable, perhaps one could say a power grab that backfired.
Similarly being charitable, maybe Gabbard genuinely felt the Dems had shifted in directions she didn’t like and thus made her current pivots, maybe it’s a move from self-interest after she saw no possibility of upward progression.
Either case I can make my own educated guess, ultimately I do lack the power to look into the souls of folk
Nothing about Trump's cabinet picks surprise me. Because, unlike the average voter apparently, I remember what happened during Trump's first term. The only thing noticeably different to how it went the last time is how purposeful his picks are this time: nearly everyone so far has been chosen either for their proven cronyism or for their open conflict of interest with their duties as a fuck you to the office. The fact that we're gonna have an AG who's a human-trafficking pedophile, a director of national intelligence who's all but a Russian plant, and a health director who's against vaccines says it all.
On November 15 2024 08:23 NewSunshine wrote: Yeah, I went back and edited in that it's an AP article. It's legit. And might I add, the journalistic integrity of InfoWars is liable to increase exponentially as a result. Couldn't have happened to a worse guy.
Trump was Hitler a little bit over week ago, and now about Alex Jones : " Couldn't have happened to a worse guy." You either dont know who Hitler was, or Alex Jones dude is some hybrid of Genghis Khan, Stalin, and maybe Xenomorph.
Alex Jones is a predatory piece of shit that sold lies for profit at the expense of families that were already grieving the loss of their children to gun violence, and harassed them for his own benefit using lies and conspiracy theories. I don't care to quibble with you about whether he was literally the single worst person alive. It was a figure of speech, asshole.
You being unable to express yourself properly makes me an "asshole", cute.
You being unable to distinguish between literal and figurative speech and needing to litigate my post because you can't help yourself is acting like an asshole, yes.
Nobody likes a Grammar Nazi.
To be fair, 76 million people like one who's bad at grammar.
I think that makes my point rather than disagreeing with it. The Orange One is "relatable" because he uses easy words and feels out how the English language works on the fly.
Yeah that's probably pretty accurate.
In my opinion this is an awful trait to have as a politician. People creating legislation, crafting laws, and leading a country should be able to use explicit language to convey a message. It should not be worked out "on the fly". Misinterpretation can cost lives when you consider the amount of power the president has.
I understand and appreciate the dislike of the democratic party. I'm not a fan of them myself. But this is the guy that the republican party and voters wanted instead? Out of all of the people that could have risen to the top of the party to earn the nomination, this is the guy?
I think it's embarrassing, but apparently Trump is able to charm and galvanize enough gullible, low-information Americans to get elected in this country. (Democrats running a less-than-ideal campaign also contributed, of course.)
On November 15 2024 17:47 Velr wrote: When ideas are based in reality, I like to engage.
If it's moronic left/right wing extremist garbage. I don't see any value in it and that so many people do, is part of the problem.
My dad always used to tell me that if everyone else seems like the problem its probably worth looking at yourself.
Pretending like the cozy centrist political consensus is working for enough people for you to consider only centrism to be worth engaging with is what I would call delusional.
If you don't believe me, look at the results of recent elections.
I don't think it is fair to claim that Velr only views centrists as worth engaging with.
I personally consider myself to be pretty leftwing. Not GH-style leftwing, but rather leftwing nonetheless. I believe that our society requires a lot more redistribution of wealth from the rich to normal people, and that that is one of the top problems currently. I do not think i am a centrist.
And yet i have not had the impression that Velr had any problems engaging with me so far.
I don't think this is actually about political positions, but about sanity and being rooted in reality. And i would agree that in the last decade or so, groups of people that are just completely detached from reality have gained ever more prominence. And those groups of people with "alternate facts" are really, really hard to talk to.
I suppose it depends on how you define things. I didn't bother to ask Velr so you might be right tbh. Some people would define socialists as anything to the left of Elon Musk economically so when velr says socialists are awful i assume he just means leftists in general. I get that that's wrong but everyone seems to have their own definitions of these terms these days.
When it comes to alternative facts, I get just as frustrated as you guys do with the whole idea, but its worth examining where they have come from and why. If the story being told by the more 'sane' governments who tend to be centrists or medium left/right came across as true and worth listening to people probably wouldn't be driven to go find their own convenient facts. The problem is the people we are supposed to listen to are just as likely to come out with utter BS as anyone else is these days. I'll give an example from the UK, The minister in charge of our treasury, Rachel Reeves, said a couple of years ago that she was running for this position because she felt our economy needed completely redesigning from the bottom up to make it more fair and equal and to rebalance things to stop the growth in income inequality. Then she got near government and as soon as it became obvious she was going to get the job it was 'oh yeah sorry about all that we're just going to have more austerity instead.' Where are people supposed to go if you can't get a straight story our of the sensible. centrist-y parties? Take a big enough group of people and you'll find enough of them flocking to the extreme positions that it causes problems.
The center has let everybody down, their growing mutual resentment of the working class will ruin them, and instead of any serious self analysis we just get flaming at anyone who didn't go along with their bullshit.
I'm pretty far left, as long as you don't want to overcome/abolish capitalism or other delusional ideas. Cheap/Free education, redistribution of wealth, raising taxes to pay for concrete programs/plans, subsidising/furthering green energy/tech/infrastructure, strenghtening labour rights/laws and so on i'm all on board with.
What drives me mad are things like "doomersim", "utopianism" and "accelerationism". All this stuff helps absolutely no one. I would love to have discussions about possible(!!!) policies. Biden wasn't perfect but he actually got a pretty good track record in his 4 years... Yet Democrats are too pussy to even take credit for it and the right is just flinging blatant lies and feacies around... At the same time progressives are sitting there shouting genocide Joe and act like voting for Harris/Joe over Trump is somehow not the easiest choice ever, actively trying to hold the decmoratic party hostage. Seriously, progressives can go fuck themselves.
If anything I blame the Democrats for listening to progressives way too much. I hope the democratic party takes a giant dump on all of them and ignores whatever these worthless, harmfull, self important assholes want for the forseeable future. Listening to them is as usefull as arguing with the russian trolls in the Ukraine/Russia tread. There is no harm in saying "trans woman shouldn't compete in womens sports" or "we got issues at the border and we plan to do XYZ to improve the situation, illegal immigration is in fact not the sort of immigration we want". Yeah, a few morons will call them transphobic and/or racist - No one outside of these circles cares anyway, if anything it would win them votes.
I can understand and even support being "radical" if your a teenager... If your over 30 and find yourself still advocating for "overcoming capitalism" and other daydreams, whiteout serious political/democratic action behind it beyond Twitter/online Spaces, it's imho just sad and actively harmfull to furthering feasible "leftist" policies.
I think it’s perfectly possible to have parallel frameworks of discussion, the more constrained and pragmatic can co-exist alongside the hypothetical and the lofty. Overcoming or extremely reforming capitalism is not an innately delusional position.
Actual bigotry also does throw people in quite a difficult position. Either be perceived as abandoning x group to face bigotry, or weigh in on defence. Often people overcompensate.
I’d prefer not, for example to constantly be talking about trans issues. Live and let live, let them live their lives. they’re a small section of the population that takes up an inordinate amount of discourse. There’s probably a similarish proportion of folks in the population who one could consider extremely, extremely wealthy, I’d rather have that discussion.
But then, I see all this bigoted nonsense, scaremongering and hyperbole, all the time. I’ve no issue with trans folks, I have trans friends so quelle surprise I’ll react. Not known for my impulse control me.
Now perhaps this doesn’t mean to taking an enthusiastic leap into every one of these traps, sure.
Less a problem in other locales, you’ve also got parties that are just too broad a coalition ideologically and socio-economically in the likes of the US and UK. I’d be towards Labour’s left, so I’ll naturally be a bit more critical of the centre, but it absolutely goes both ways.
Furthermore you can sell incremental progress from, some may complain it’s not fast enough sure. It’s very hard to sell going actively backwards in domains people really directly experience.
In the UK we went from free college, to fees that are ever-increasing in my lifetime. Indeed not long after taking charge Labour raised them again. Ostensibly the working person’s party of course.
Housing well, same as everywhere really. Perpetually rising prices above wage rises/inflation-adjusted wages.
Relatively stagnant wages and an ever-increasing wealth gap.
Progressives perpetually complain about these things not because they’re not getting better fast enough, they’re just not getting better full stop. Furthermore a fundamental failure to deal with these problems creates dissatisfaction that ultimately fuels right wing populism with all that entails as well.
Hell I’d probably vote for the ‘We are Centrist, Socially Moderate but We’ll Fix Housing’ Party.
On November 15 2024 23:29 Magic Powers wrote: Obviously Gaetz didn't post this. Such a post would be career ending, it's a fake.
You'd think trafficking a minor across state lines would be career ending but here we are.
You mean the party full of people calling other folks ‘Groomers’ and fantasising about Pizza Parlour based satanic child sex rituals doesn’t actually care about sex trafficking?
On November 15 2024 17:47 Velr wrote: When ideas are based in reality, I like to engage.
If it's moronic left/right wing extremist garbage. I don't see any value in it and that so many people do, is part of the problem.
My dad always used to tell me that if everyone else seems like the problem its probably worth looking at yourself.
Pretending like the cozy centrist political consensus is working for enough people for you to consider only centrism to be worth engaging with is what I would call delusional.
If you don't believe me, look at the results of recent elections.
I don't think it is fair to claim that Velr only views centrists as worth engaging with.
I personally consider myself to be pretty leftwing. Not GH-style leftwing, but rather leftwing nonetheless. I believe that our society requires a lot more redistribution of wealth from the rich to normal people, and that that is one of the top problems currently. I do not think i am a centrist.
And yet i have not had the impression that Velr had any problems engaging with me so far.
I don't think this is actually about political positions, but about sanity and being rooted in reality. And i would agree that in the last decade or so, groups of people that are just completely detached from reality have gained ever more prominence. And those groups of people with "alternate facts" are really, really hard to talk to.
I suppose it depends on how you define things. I didn't bother to ask Velr so you might be right tbh. Some people would define socialists as anything to the left of Elon Musk economically so when velr says socialists are awful i assume he just means leftists in general. I get that that's wrong but everyone seems to have their own definitions of these terms these days.
When it comes to alternative facts, I get just as frustrated as you guys do with the whole idea, but its worth examining where they have come from and why. If the story being told by the more 'sane' governments who tend to be centrists or medium left/right came across as true and worth listening to people probably wouldn't be driven to go find their own convenient facts. The problem is the people we are supposed to listen to are just as likely to come out with utter BS as anyone else is these days. I'll give an example from the UK, The minister in charge of our treasury, Rachel Reeves, said a couple of years ago that she was running for this position because she felt our economy needed completely redesigning from the bottom up to make it more fair and equal and to rebalance things to stop the growth in income inequality. Then she got near government and as soon as it became obvious she was going to get the job it was 'oh yeah sorry about all that we're just going to have more austerity instead.' Where are people supposed to go if you can't get a straight story our of the sensible. centrist-y parties? Take a big enough group of people and you'll find enough of them flocking to the extreme positions that it causes problems.
The center has let everybody down, their growing mutual resentment of the working class will ruin them, and instead of any serious self analysis we just get flaming at anyone who didn't go along with their bullshit.
I'm pretty far left, as long as you don't want to overcome/abolish capitalism or other delusional ideas. Cheap/Free education, redistribution of wealth, raising taxes to pay for concrete programs/plans, subsidising/furthering green energy/tech/infrastructure, strenghtening labour rights/laws and so on i'm all on board with.
What drives me mad are things like "doomersim", "utopianism" and "accelerationism". All this stuff helps absolutely no one. I would love to have discussions about possible(!!!) policies. Biden wasn't perfect but he actually got a pretty good track record in his 4 years... Yet Democrats are too pussy to even take credit for it and the right is just flinging blatant lies and feacies around... At the same time progressives are sitting there shouting genocide Joe and act like voting for Harris/Joe over Trump is somehow not the easiest choice ever, actively trying to hold the decmoratic party hostage. Seriously, progressives can go fuck themselves.
If anything I blame the Democrats for listening to progressives way too much. I hope the democratic party takes a giant dump on all of them and ignores whatever these worthless, harmfull, self important assholes want for the forseeable future. Listening to them is as usefull as arguing with the russian trolls in the Ukraine/Russia tread. There is no harm in saying "trans woman shouldn't compete in womens sports" or "we got issues at the border and we plan to do XYZ to improve the situation, illegal immigration is in fact not the sort of immigration we want". Yeah, a few morons will call them transphobic and/or racist - No one outside of these circles cares anyway, if anything it would win them votes.
I can understand and even support being "radical" if your a teenager... If your over 30 and find yourself still advocating for "overcoming capitalism" and other daydreams, whiteout serious political/democratic action behind it beyond Twitter/online Spaces, it's imho just sad and actively harmfull to furthering feasible "leftist" policies.
I think it’s perfectly possible to have parallel frameworks of discussion, the more constrained and pragmatic can co-exist alongside the hypothetical and the lofty. Overcoming or extremely reforming capitalism is not an innately delusional position.
Actual bigotry also does throw people in quite a difficult position. Either be perceived as abandoning x group to face bigotry, or weigh in on defence. Often people overcompensate.
I’d prefer not, for example to constantly be talking about trans issues. Live and let live, let them live their lives. they’re a small section of the population that takes up an inordinate amount of discourse. There’s probably a similarish proportion of folks in the population who one could consider extremely, extremely wealthy, I’d rather have that discussion.
But then, I see all this bigoted nonsense, scaremongering and hyperbole, all the time. I’ve no issue with trans folks, I have trans friends so quelle surprise I’ll react. Not known for my impulse control me.
Now perhaps this doesn’t mean to taking an enthusiastic leap into every one of these traps, sure.
Less a problem in other locales, you’ve also got parties that are just too broad a coalition ideologically and socio-economically in the likes of the US and UK. I’d be towards Labour’s left, so I’ll naturally be a bit more critical of the centre, but it absolutely goes both ways.
Furthermore you can sell incremental progress from, some may complain it’s not fast enough sure. It’s very hard to sell going actively backwards in domains people really directly experience.
In the UK we went from free college, to fees that are ever-increasing in my lifetime. Indeed not long after taking charge Labour raised them again. Ostensibly the working person’s party of course.
Housing well, same as everywhere really. Perpetually rising prices above wage rises/inflation-adjusted wages.
Relatively stagnant wages and an ever-increasing wealth gap.
Progressives perpetually complain about these things not because they’re not getting better fast enough, they’re just not getting better full stop. Furthermore a fundamental failure to deal with these problems creates dissatisfaction that ultimately fuels right wing populism with all that entails as well.
Hell I’d probably vote for the ‘We are Centrist, Socially Moderate but We’ll Fix Housing’ Party.
I'd vote for them too, and I'd regret it 100% of the time. I voted Labour this election and I already hugely regret it, although admittedly they are very marginally better than the tories. Only for them to turn around and go "We're not just going to redo austerity, but we're going to brief against the disabled and long term sick just like the tories were" which personally affects me in quite a drastic way.
We have two centrist parties who are very good at sounding reasonable but both want to punish the poor for the mistakes of the rich. This is what bothers me about the proponents of that ridiculous horseshoe theory. If both major parties' main economic policy is directly punishing me for the mistakes of others then I refuse to be held responsible for the fact that I'm going further left than the left most major party. Its as if the centrists don't just want me to suffer, but they want me to publicly endorse my own suffering or i get called names and told I'm just the same as the far right. If both parties want to lie, cheat and steal, but one is worse, does that mean I have to endorse lying, cheating and stealing?
I can't imagine its much different in the US when it comes to economic policy.
On November 15 2024 17:47 Velr wrote: When ideas are based in reality, I like to engage.
If it's moronic left/right wing extremist garbage. I don't see any value in it and that so many people do, is part of the problem.
My dad always used to tell me that if everyone else seems like the problem its probably worth looking at yourself.
Pretending like the cozy centrist political consensus is working for enough people for you to consider only centrism to be worth engaging with is what I would call delusional.
If you don't believe me, look at the results of recent elections.
I don't think it is fair to claim that Velr only views centrists as worth engaging with.
I personally consider myself to be pretty leftwing. Not GH-style leftwing, but rather leftwing nonetheless. I believe that our society requires a lot more redistribution of wealth from the rich to normal people, and that that is one of the top problems currently. I do not think i am a centrist.
And yet i have not had the impression that Velr had any problems engaging with me so far.
I don't think this is actually about political positions, but about sanity and being rooted in reality. And i would agree that in the last decade or so, groups of people that are just completely detached from reality have gained ever more prominence. And those groups of people with "alternate facts" are really, really hard to talk to.
I suppose it depends on how you define things. I didn't bother to ask Velr so you might be right tbh. Some people would define socialists as anything to the left of Elon Musk economically so when velr says socialists are awful i assume he just means leftists in general. I get that that's wrong but everyone seems to have their own definitions of these terms these days.
When it comes to alternative facts, I get just as frustrated as you guys do with the whole idea, but its worth examining where they have come from and why. If the story being told by the more 'sane' governments who tend to be centrists or medium left/right came across as true and worth listening to people probably wouldn't be driven to go find their own convenient facts. The problem is the people we are supposed to listen to are just as likely to come out with utter BS as anyone else is these days. I'll give an example from the UK, The minister in charge of our treasury, Rachel Reeves, said a couple of years ago that she was running for this position because she felt our economy needed completely redesigning from the bottom up to make it more fair and equal and to rebalance things to stop the growth in income inequality. Then she got near government and as soon as it became obvious she was going to get the job it was 'oh yeah sorry about all that we're just going to have more austerity instead.' Where are people supposed to go if you can't get a straight story our of the sensible. centrist-y parties? Take a big enough group of people and you'll find enough of them flocking to the extreme positions that it causes problems.
The center has let everybody down, their growing mutual resentment of the working class will ruin them, and instead of any serious self analysis we just get flaming at anyone who didn't go along with their bullshit.
I'm pretty far left, as long as you don't want to overcome/abolish capitalism or other delusional ideas. Cheap/Free education, redistribution of wealth, raising taxes to pay for concrete programs/plans, subsidising/furthering green energy/tech/infrastructure, strenghtening labour rights/laws and so on i'm all on board with.
What drives me mad are things like "doomersim", "utopianism" and "accelerationism". All this stuff helps absolutely no one. I would love to have discussions about possible(!!!) policies. Biden wasn't perfect but he actually got a pretty good track record in his 4 years... Yet Democrats are too pussy to even take credit for it and the right is just flinging blatant lies and feacies around... At the same time progressives are sitting there shouting genocide Joe and act like voting for Harris/Joe over Trump is somehow not the easiest choice ever, actively trying to hold the decmoratic party hostage. Seriously, progressives can go fuck themselves.
If anything I blame the Democrats for listening to progressives way too much. I hope the democratic party takes a giant dump on all of them and ignores whatever these worthless, harmfull, self important assholes want for the forseeable future. Listening to them is as usefull as arguing with the russian trolls in the Ukraine/Russia tread. There is no harm in saying "trans woman shouldn't compete in womens sports" or "we got issues at the border and we plan to do XYZ to improve the situation, illegal immigration is in fact not the sort of immigration we want". Yeah, a few morons will call them transphobic and/or racist - No one outside of these circles cares anyway, if anything it would win them votes.
I can understand and even support being "radical" if your a teenager... If your over 30 and find yourself still advocating for "overcoming capitalism" and other daydreams, whiteout serious political/democratic action behind it beyond Twitter/online Spaces, it's imho just sad and actively harmfull to furthering feasible "leftist" policies.
This is all very understandable. The problem is there isn't a clear dividing line between what is reasonable and what isn't. Everyone has their own range of opinions on many, many subjects. Economically, I'm pretty far left, but socially less so, so am I an extremist or am I not?
To me accusing Biden/Harris of genocide is a russian psyop via tiktok/Social media.
but the vote didn't matter so much, because the real driving force of the overwhelming victory for trump were -again- fed up people seeking somebody that shakes up the situation, not caring if it gets worse for others.. because they are in what they think the worst situation ever, with nothing to gain from "more Biden".
Question: How much should we be blaming American voters for making the stupid, gullible, uninformed decision to vote against their own interests by electing Trump again? Obviously, we've talked quite a bit about all of Biden's mistakes and Harris's mistakes and Democrats' mistakes and Trump's successes and Republican social media's successes, which all absolutely contributed to Trump's victory and Harris's defeat. What about the average person though - how much of a responsibility do they have to do even a simple Google search to find Harris's website, or to watch 20 minutes of one of her speeches, or to learn what a tariff is, or to fact-check anything Trump says? The fact that a large number of American voters - even on Election Day - still didn't even know that Joe Biden dropped out several months ago, is deeply concerning ( https://www.10news.com/news/fact-or-fiction/fact-or-fiction-did-biden-drop-out-search-spiked-tuesday ).
Google Trends charts do not tell you raw numbers of searches. The only context is it was searched about one seventh as much around election day as it was around him dropping out.
On November 15 2024 17:47 Velr wrote: When ideas are based in reality, I like to engage.
If it's moronic left/right wing extremist garbage. I don't see any value in it and that so many people do, is part of the problem.
My dad always used to tell me that if everyone else seems like the problem its probably worth looking at yourself.
Pretending like the cozy centrist political consensus is working for enough people for you to consider only centrism to be worth engaging with is what I would call delusional.
If you don't believe me, look at the results of recent elections.
I don't think it is fair to claim that Velr only views centrists as worth engaging with.
I personally consider myself to be pretty leftwing. Not GH-style leftwing, but rather leftwing nonetheless. I believe that our society requires a lot more redistribution of wealth from the rich to normal people, and that that is one of the top problems currently. I do not think i am a centrist.
And yet i have not had the impression that Velr had any problems engaging with me so far.
I don't think this is actually about political positions, but about sanity and being rooted in reality. And i would agree that in the last decade or so, groups of people that are just completely detached from reality have gained ever more prominence. And those groups of people with "alternate facts" are really, really hard to talk to.
I suppose it depends on how you define things. I didn't bother to ask Velr so you might be right tbh. Some people would define socialists as anything to the left of Elon Musk economically so when velr says socialists are awful i assume he just means leftists in general. I get that that's wrong but everyone seems to have their own definitions of these terms these days.
When it comes to alternative facts, I get just as frustrated as you guys do with the whole idea, but its worth examining where they have come from and why. If the story being told by the more 'sane' governments who tend to be centrists or medium left/right came across as true and worth listening to people probably wouldn't be driven to go find their own convenient facts. The problem is the people we are supposed to listen to are just as likely to come out with utter BS as anyone else is these days. I'll give an example from the UK, The minister in charge of our treasury, Rachel Reeves, said a couple of years ago that she was running for this position because she felt our economy needed completely redesigning from the bottom up to make it more fair and equal and to rebalance things to stop the growth in income inequality. Then she got near government and as soon as it became obvious she was going to get the job it was 'oh yeah sorry about all that we're just going to have more austerity instead.' Where are people supposed to go if you can't get a straight story our of the sensible. centrist-y parties? Take a big enough group of people and you'll find enough of them flocking to the extreme positions that it causes problems.
The center has let everybody down, their growing mutual resentment of the working class will ruin them, and instead of any serious self analysis we just get flaming at anyone who didn't go along with their bullshit.
I'm pretty far left, as long as you don't want to overcome/abolish capitalism or other delusional ideas. Cheap/Free education, redistribution of wealth, raising taxes to pay for concrete programs/plans, subsidising/furthering green energy/tech/infrastructure, strenghtening labour rights/laws and so on i'm all on board with.
What drives me mad are things like "doomersim", "utopianism" and "accelerationism". All this stuff helps absolutely no one. I would love to have discussions about possible(!!!) policies. Biden wasn't perfect but he actually got a pretty good track record in his 4 years... Yet Democrats are too pussy to even take credit for it and the right is just flinging blatant lies and feacies around... At the same time progressives are sitting there shouting genocide Joe and act like voting for Harris/Joe over Trump is somehow not the easiest choice ever, actively trying to hold the decmoratic party hostage. Seriously, progressives can go fuck themselves.
If anything I blame the Democrats for listening to progressives way too much. I hope the democratic party takes a giant dump on all of them and ignores whatever these worthless, harmfull, self important assholes want for the forseeable future. Listening to them is as usefull as arguing with the russian trolls in the Ukraine/Russia tread. There is no harm in saying "trans woman shouldn't compete in womens sports" or "we got issues at the border and we plan to do XYZ to improve the situation, illegal immigration is in fact not the sort of immigration we want". Yeah, a few morons will call them transphobic and/or racist - No one outside of these circles cares anyway, if anything it would win them votes.
I can understand and even support being "radical" if your a teenager... If your over 30 and find yourself still advocating for "overcoming capitalism" and other daydreams, whiteout serious political/democratic action behind it beyond Twitter/online Spaces, it's imho just sad and actively harmfull to furthering feasible "leftist" policies.
I think it’s perfectly possible to have parallel frameworks of discussion, the more constrained and pragmatic can co-exist alongside the hypothetical and the lofty. Overcoming or extremely reforming capitalism is not an innately delusional position.
Actual bigotry also does throw people in quite a difficult position. Either be perceived as abandoning x group to face bigotry, or weigh in on defence. Often people overcompensate.
I’d prefer not, for example to constantly be talking about trans issues. Live and let live, let them live their lives. they’re a small section of the population that takes up an inordinate amount of discourse. There’s probably a similarish proportion of folks in the population who one could consider extremely, extremely wealthy, I’d rather have that discussion.
But then, I see all this bigoted nonsense, scaremongering and hyperbole, all the time. I’ve no issue with trans folks, I have trans friends so quelle surprise I’ll react. Not known for my impulse control me.
Now perhaps this doesn’t mean to taking an enthusiastic leap into every one of these traps, sure.
Less a problem in other locales, you’ve also got parties that are just too broad a coalition ideologically and socio-economically in the likes of the US and UK. I’d be towards Labour’s left, so I’ll naturally be a bit more critical of the centre, but it absolutely goes both ways.
Furthermore you can sell incremental progress from, some may complain it’s not fast enough sure. It’s very hard to sell going actively backwards in domains people really directly experience.
In the UK we went from free college, to fees that are ever-increasing in my lifetime. Indeed not long after taking charge Labour raised them again. Ostensibly the working person’s party of course.
Housing well, same as everywhere really. Perpetually rising prices above wage rises/inflation-adjusted wages.
Relatively stagnant wages and an ever-increasing wealth gap.
Progressives perpetually complain about these things not because they’re not getting better fast enough, they’re just not getting better full stop. Furthermore a fundamental failure to deal with these problems creates dissatisfaction that ultimately fuels right wing populism with all that entails as well.
Hell I’d probably vote for the ‘We are Centrist, Socially Moderate but We’ll Fix Housing’ Party.
I'd vote for them too, and I'd regret it 100% of the time. I voted Labour this election and I already hugely regret it, although admittedly they are very marginally better than the tories. Only for them to turn around and go "We're not just going to redo austerity, but we're going to brief against the disabled and long term sick just like the tories were" which personally affects me in quite a drastic way.
We have two centrist parties who are very good at sounding reasonable but both want to punish the poor for the mistakes of the rich. This is what bothers me about the proponents of that ridiculous horseshoe theory. If both major parties' main economic policy is directly punishing me for the mistakes of others then I refuse to be held responsible for the fact that I'm going further left than the left most major party. Its as if the centrists don't just want me to suffer, but they want me to publicly endorse my own suffering or i get called names and told I'm just the same as the far right. If both parties want to lie, cheat and steal, but one is worse, does that mean I have to endorse lying, cheating and stealing?
I can't imagine its much different in the US when it comes to economic policy.
Hey you’re preaching to the choir here man.
As the rather bleak joke goes, ‘Atos would assess (insert famous dead person) fit to work’.
It’s not just at times inhuman, demeaning, it’s often completely counter-productive and wasteful of resources. Could my community mental health nurse who I saw weekly write a letter? No of course not, somebody who’s never met me and isn’t qualified in the field is better placed! So I have to appeal, get letters that should have bloody sufficed in the first place, drag nurses away from other patients and do the whole bloody thing again.
At least things are slightly better now but not by bloody much.
Thing is. I expect this from the Tories, Labour? Fuck off.
As shit as austerity is, I think there’d be at least some tolerance if the problems that precipitated its (apparent) necessity were actually dealt with.
People may be a bit thick with details sometimes, but their instinctive moral intuition can often be on point. Rich folks and the corporate sector fuck up, the poor in society pick up the tab.
EPT![[image loading]](https://i.redd.it/s09f02nudx0e1.jpeg)
