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On November 12 2020 11:23 thePunGun wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2020 10:42 overt wrote:
More members of the GOP need to start stepping up to move the transition forward. Your voters picked a conman, it sucks, but now you need to start worrying about long term damage to our institutions.
The sooner the GOP turns on Trump’s actual insanity the sooner we can start returning to some level of normalcy. The main problem here is Trump will eventually f... *uhum* ...go away, but the shit stain from the huge dump he took on the credibility and legitimacy of the election process will stick around much longer
Yeah I guess my fear is that this will likely happen again unless the GOP takes a firm stance. They’re running out of time to do so and it seems most probable that they’ll just give statements like, “we need to count all of the votes,” and keep silent as Biden is inaugurated.
Meanwhile I’ve got co-workers, clients, and family members regurgitating this shit and honestly believing there’s a chance for a second term. They get more extreme and more ‘concerned’ about the situation everyday and I worry they’re all going to believe widespread fraud occurred years from now.
Hell, Trump has convinced the rank-and-file that Fox News is part of the liberal agenda...
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Trump isn’t the only thing to worry about don’t forget we just elected a QAnon congresswoman. This won’t stop with Trump, we have to address underlying fundamental issues with American society to move through this far right psychosis.
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On November 12 2020 10:41 Wegandi wrote:@Nevuk Democrats also say wonderfully stupid things like: Show nested quote +To fight this recession the Fed needs…soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Before anyone says he didn't mean what he said (He being the esteemable Krugman) he said this a year prior: Show nested quote +Meanwhile, economic policy should encourage other spending to offset the temporary slump in business investment. Low interest rates, which promote spending on housing and other durable goods, are the main answer. [emphasis added] As for economics Democrats believe in debunked crap like rent control, dismiss behavioral and Buchanan public choice economics, and have adherents in their midst of MMT (or have said wonderfully great things about the USSR (on video even!), Honduras, Castro regime, etc.). After Kucinich retired they're also all sycophants for the Fed Reserve. Literally not one other (and Sanders famously torpedoed our best shot at a Fed audit).
Of course there are smart republicans and stupid democrats.
You're missing the underlying point about groupthink. We're not talking about politicians or thought leaders here- just the voters.
Here's the most striking example of what I'm talking about. Under Obama, 22% of republicans supported retaliating against Syria for gassing their own citizens. Under Trump, it skyrocketed to 88%. This was only four years apart, and democratic voters views stayed relatively the same (somewhat against it).
Here's the real kicker. When asked, BEFORE it happened in 2013, republicans said they were 67% in favor of action. They only dropped to 22% after Obama came out for it.
(I can quote the charts if you want me to, to get around the paywall. I'm only interested in those).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/04/11/republicans-transparently-obama-tinged-evolution-on-syria/
On the points about Krugman and the fed, I'm referring to opinions on the economy, not on opinions on economics.
We can trace it somewhat back to Bush. The economy crashed in 2000-2001, GOP became convinced it recovered faster than democrats did. (We can argue about who was correct - there are valid arguments both ways). Now, what is undeniable is that democrat's views of the economy did NOT significantly change purely from an election result. Republican's views did in a particularly dramatic way under Trump. There is 0 evidence that the economy was suddenly better in 2017 than it was in 2016 - these drastic shifts of opinion happened before the stock market started hitting highs.
![[image loading]](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/03/032218_1.png?w=420)
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Netherlands6273 Posts
On November 12 2020 09:47 TheYango wrote:
The difference is that Democrats are constantly criticizing other Democrats for their bullshit. Democrats don't need Republicans to point out how crazy their crazies are because they're already doing it. Republicans are far more into "tacit compliance" than Democrats are.
You can honestly even see it in the USPMT, where the left-leaning posters are constantly arguing amongst themselves, while when a random right-wing loon pops into the thread, the conservative posters all silently let it slide rather than calling them out. You're responding to a post where GH criticizes Republicans while forgetting the fact that GH criticizes Democrats equally often.
Both sides are accountable for some crazy shit, but they don't hold themselves accountable to an equal degree.
This thread is incredibly circle jerky really. It's not as bad as something like /r politics but it's still pretty bad. I've seen people here argue for MMT and the labour theory of value and nobody bats an eye. Wegandi posts some Austrian economics and half the thread piles on him. It's true that right posters in the thread don't call eachother out much but that's both because we're few in number and when they post they get piled on already.
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On November 12 2020 15:19 RvB wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2020 09:47 TheYango wrote:
The difference is that Democrats are constantly criticizing other Democrats for their bullshit. Democrats don't need Republicans to point out how crazy their crazies are because they're already doing it. Republicans are far more into "tacit compliance" than Democrats are.
You can honestly even see it in the USPMT, where the left-leaning posters are constantly arguing amongst themselves, while when a random right-wing loon pops into the thread, the conservative posters all silently let it slide rather than calling them out. You're responding to a post where GH criticizes Republicans while forgetting the fact that GH criticizes Democrats equally often.
Both sides are accountable for some crazy shit, but they don't hold themselves accountable to an equal degree. This thread is incredibly circle jerky really. It's not as bad as something like /r politics but it's still pretty bad. I've seen people here argue for MMT and the labour theory of value and nobody bats an eye. Wegandi posts some Austrian economics and half the thread piles on him. It's true that right posters in the thread don't call eachother out much but that's both because we're few in number and when they post they get piled on already.
? People were making fun of MMT just a few pages ago lol What are you talking about?
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On November 12 2020 09:30 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2020 07:16 ChristianS wrote:So maybe my biggest hope for the new admin is ending shit like this: https://twitter.com/crampell/status/1320471320468008961?s=21One of Trump’s biggest expansions of executive power was in completely subjugating non-partisan administrative entities to partisan goals. It basically amounted to selective enforcement of laws passed by Congress in order to change policy without getting a new law passed, but the mechanism was essentially bureaucratic corruption masquerading as bureaucratic incompetence. Example: a series of fields for listing relatives, whether they are alive or deceased, and a blank for their current location. Location was left blank for deceased relatives; visa rejected. For a category of visa that is filled out 90% of the time by legal representation they still found grounds to reject a full 50% of applications for stuff like this. This type of “policy-setting” should be illegal, but I don’t know how you structure that law. For the moment, at least, I hope the Biden administration fixes all of this bullshit. It's not really a big political issue, but certainly a big issue in practice, that standard government functionality had large degrees of fuckery going on during the Trump admin. Just about every federal organization other than the military seemed like it had incompetent fools in charge during the administration, because that's who Trump appointed to lead up those orgs. Education, housing, infrastructure, immigration, the list goes on.
I'm sure that Biden's appointees will be incrementally better. Even if he picks canines.
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On November 12 2020 09:47 TheYango wrote:
The difference is that Democrats are constantly criticizing other Democrats for their bullshit. Democrats don't need Republicans to point out how crazy their crazies are because they're already doing it. Republicans are far more into "tacit compliance" than Democrats are.
You can honestly even see it in the USPMT, where the left-leaning posters are constantly arguing amongst themselves, while when a random right-wing loon pops into the thread, the conservative posters all silently let it slide rather than calling them out. You're responding to a post where GH criticizes Republicans while forgetting the fact that GH criticizes Democrats equally often.
Both sides are accountable for some crazy shit, but they don't hold themselves accountable to an equal degree.
The fact that you consider GH vs. the average user in that thread to be lefties criticizing each other and Democrats holding themselves accountable says a lot more about your understanding of politics in America than it does about the GOP's unwillingness to criticize themselves.
For one, GH is almost certainly not registered as a Democrat nor identifies with the party. In fact, the fights he often gets in there are because he is trying to tell people the DNC is just as corrupt, evil, and racist as the Republicans just in more subtle ways or that the neoliberal policies the DNC (people Obama, Clinton, Biden, Pelosi, Schumer etc.) support are generally ineffective at best or have the opposite effect intended at worst. And for it he gets talked down to by people who don't want to hold their own people accountable or reconsider their own beliefs.
If you turn on the news you see this all the time. Neoliberal pundits and politicians constantly downtalk progressives/leftists as crazy, divisive radicals. You can find dozens of examples of this in wake of the election, where the disastrous downballot results are somehow the fault of the evil socialists and people who want a Green New Deal. But most people here don't care about that, because they're unwilling to criticize their own party.
The reality is the DNC is a center-right wing party that exists to quash actual leftwing movements by co-opting their language and converting it into meaningless platitudes and feelgood speeches so that the wealthy people voting for them can feel like they're the resistance, fighting for something against the cartoonishly evil GOP without having to worry about all the injustices that continue to exist in the world that they perpetuate
The reason the GOP is such a problem is that the media and politicians that isn't owned by the GOP constantly talks down to these people, calling them deplorable or stupid, and people like the average poster in this thread eats it up and just spits out hate. Our entire political discourse is designed on purpose to divide and pull people into camps so that nothing ever changes.
That's not to say that in every right wing lunatic online there's secretly a good, decent person who just needs some love or whatever. Some people are just shitty, and someone with the time to constantly argue on the internet is more likely to have the resources to know better compared to some dude in rural Nebraska who is just bombarded with propaganda. But even then it's hard. I mean, when companies do shitty things to squeeze money out of you while turning around and talking about how they support LGBT and feminism and all that, and then some man with a 3 hour video essay comes along to tell you about how women and minorities are causing this it makes sense: after all, it's right there on the sticker of what these shitty companies are doing. So when a leftist comes along, who you've been conditioned to think of as bad your entire life because you live in America and socialism/communism are the spawn of Satan so you already distrust them, and starts trying to explain well actually, this corporation doesn't really care about these people, they are just using their imagery to make money and actually feminism or what have you is good and will help you (a person who isn't even part of the directly oppressed group), that starts to sound like a load of bullshit. It's really difficult to get people out of that cycle because people are stubborn.
Speaking of that rural dude in Nebraska, Nevuk's post about groupthink is fairly spot on here. Socialist policies have huge support among the American populace (including Republicans) as long as they are not linked with the word socialism. This is why things like a $15 minimum wage can be passed in a state that goes for Trump, as well as legalizing medical marijuana in other states that went to him. On the flipside, Dems love the ACA even though it's at least inspired by the work of Conservative thinktanks. When given actual policies and an explanation of how it will improve their lives, people aren't as crablike as some people like to think. The problem is people in threads like these are often pretty far removed from things that actually matter and instead like to navelgaze or jerk off about how the other side is bad.
On November 12 2020 16:01 Artisreal wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2020 09:30 LegalLord wrote:On November 12 2020 07:16 ChristianS wrote:So maybe my biggest hope for the new admin is ending shit like this: https://twitter.com/crampell/status/1320471320468008961?s=21One of Trump’s biggest expansions of executive power was in completely subjugating non-partisan administrative entities to partisan goals. It basically amounted to selective enforcement of laws passed by Congress in order to change policy without getting a new law passed, but the mechanism was essentially bureaucratic corruption masquerading as bureaucratic incompetence. Example: a series of fields for listing relatives, whether they are alive or deceased, and a blank for their current location. Location was left blank for deceased relatives; visa rejected. For a category of visa that is filled out 90% of the time by legal representation they still found grounds to reject a full 50% of applications for stuff like this. This type of “policy-setting” should be illegal, but I don’t know how you structure that law. For the moment, at least, I hope the Biden administration fixes all of this bullshit. It's not really a big political issue, but certainly a big issue in practice, that standard government functionality had large degrees of fuckery going on during the Trump admin. Just about every federal organization other than the military seemed like it had incompetent fools in charge during the administration, because that's who Trump appointed to lead up those orgs. Education, housing, infrastructure, immigration, the list goes on. I'm sure that Biden's appointees will be incrementally better. Even if he picks canines.
ah, yes, incrementalism, my favorite political ideology
maybe by 2050 when our planet is destroyed we'll have incrementally moved away from having fossil fuel lobbyists as secretary of energy
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On November 12 2020 16:01 Artisreal wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2020 09:30 LegalLord wrote:On November 12 2020 07:16 ChristianS wrote:So maybe my biggest hope for the new admin is ending shit like this: https://twitter.com/crampell/status/1320471320468008961?s=21One of Trump’s biggest expansions of executive power was in completely subjugating non-partisan administrative entities to partisan goals. It basically amounted to selective enforcement of laws passed by Congress in order to change policy without getting a new law passed, but the mechanism was essentially bureaucratic corruption masquerading as bureaucratic incompetence. Example: a series of fields for listing relatives, whether they are alive or deceased, and a blank for their current location. Location was left blank for deceased relatives; visa rejected. For a category of visa that is filled out 90% of the time by legal representation they still found grounds to reject a full 50% of applications for stuff like this. This type of “policy-setting” should be illegal, but I don’t know how you structure that law. For the moment, at least, I hope the Biden administration fixes all of this bullshit. It's not really a big political issue, but certainly a big issue in practice, that standard government functionality had large degrees of fuckery going on during the Trump admin. Just about every federal organization other than the military seemed like it had incompetent fools in charge during the administration, because that's who Trump appointed to lead up those orgs. Education, housing, infrastructure, immigration, the list goes on. I'm sure that Biden's appointees will be incrementally better. Even if he picks canines.
Even so, the country will likely be dogged by the consequences of what happened during this presidency for years to come.
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The whole incrementalism shit has become a really, really, REALLY stupid strawman. Unless one has cheese in his head, saying that Biden is an incrementally better choice than Trump makes zero sense. It's a fucking million miles better, whether you agree with Biden or not.
Incrementalism doesn't mean you want something a little bit better than the worst, it means that you don't believe you can fix the country magically, and that progress is a slow process that requires patience and compromises.
I get it, it's fun to turn the whole thing into a sarcastic meme, but it insults our intelligence to even consider that this is what you understand when we talk of incremental improvement.
I am sure not doing stuff like that is too much to ask to LegalLord, but you don't all need to jump into the bandwagon. We can do better than that.
Thanks.
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On November 11 2020 23:01 Zambrah wrote:As long as Republicans have a viable hold on power adding SC justices is a risky prospect, we need the Democrats to gain and wield the power they're perfectly capable of acquiring in such a way that shows that Republicans arent going to be winning many elections in the future, first being get the Senate and get PR and DC in as states, which probably requires a fundamental shift in their leadership. EDIT: Kamala Harris' husband quit their law firm for a role in the Biden administration. I'm glad that we'll have echoes of Trump in our Democrats now. Thats the sound of the lowered bar clicking into place... https://thehill.com/homenews/525326-harriss-husband-leaving-law-firm-for-role-in-biden-administration
Isn't being the Second Gentleman a full time job in the administration normally?
AFAIK, Jill Biden will be the first First Lady with a job beyond being the First Lady in the history of the United States if she keeps up her teaching gig.
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The problem with those politcal candidates who embrace conspiracy mythologies like QAnon in any form (since 'theory' would really give credit where no credit is due) will get votes where there were none - voters that demand constant action from people they think are "pushable".
One, maybe the only quality Trump has in the end: He does not believe, and he does not care about the bullshit he tells others. He forgets most of it 10 minutes later, and just acts on instinct to keep up his image.
While other people, that try to use the alt-right spectrum of voters to get to office, and try to make everyone forget about that later wont be able to, trump will piss on the people that lift him up on their shoulders...while they are doing it.
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Incrementalism doesn't mean you want something a little bit better than the worst, That is indeed not incrementalism, that's lesser evilism. it means that you don't believe you can fix the country magically, and that progress is a slow process that requires patience and compromises.
No one argues the country can be fixed magically or that it won't take time and compromise.
EDIT: Should add that this: + Show Spoiler +On November 12 2020 16:10 TomatoBisque wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2020 09:47 TheYango wrote:
The difference is that Democrats are constantly criticizing other Democrats for their bullshit. Democrats don't need Republicans to point out how crazy their crazies are because they're already doing it. Republicans are far more into "tacit compliance" than Democrats are.
You can honestly even see it in the USPMT, where the left-leaning posters are constantly arguing amongst themselves, while when a random right-wing loon pops into the thread, the conservative posters all silently let it slide rather than calling them out. You're responding to a post where GH criticizes Republicans while forgetting the fact that GH criticizes Democrats equally often.
Both sides are accountable for some crazy shit, but they don't hold themselves accountable to an equal degree. The fact that you consider GH vs. the average user in that thread to be lefties criticizing each other and Democrats holding themselves accountable says a lot more about your understanding of politics in America than it does about the GOP's unwillingness to criticize themselves. For one, GH is almost certainly not registered as a Democrat nor identifies with the party. In fact, the fights he often gets in there are because he is trying to tell people the DNC is just as corrupt, evil, and racist as the Republicans just in more subtle ways or that the neoliberal policies the DNC (people Obama, Clinton, Biden, Pelosi, Schumer etc.) support are generally ineffective at best or have the opposite effect intended at worst. And for it he gets talked down to by people who don't want to hold their own people accountable or reconsider their own beliefs. If you turn on the news you see this all the time. Neoliberal pundits and politicians constantly downtalk progressives/leftists as crazy, divisive radicals. You can find dozens of examples of this in wake of the election, where the disastrous downballot results are somehow the fault of the evil socialists and people who want a Green New Deal. But most people here don't care about that, because they're unwilling to criticize their own party. The reality is the DNC is a center-right wing party that exists to quash actual leftwing movements by co-opting their language and converting it into meaningless platitudes and feelgood speeches so that the wealthy people voting for them can feel like they're the resistance, fighting for something against the cartoonishly evil GOP without having to worry about all the injustices that continue to exist in the world that they perpetuate The reason the GOP is such a problem is that the media and politicians that isn't owned by the GOP constantly talks down to these people, calling them deplorable or stupid, and people like the average poster in this thread eats it up and just spits out hate. Our entire political discourse is designed on purpose to divide and pull people into camps so that nothing ever changes. That's not to say that in every right wing lunatic online there's secretly a good, decent person who just needs some love or whatever. Some people are just shitty, and someone with the time to constantly argue on the internet is more likely to have the resources to know better compared to some dude in rural Nebraska who is just bombarded with propaganda. But even then it's hard. I mean, when companies do shitty things to squeeze money out of you while turning around and talking about how they support LGBT and feminism and all that, and then some man with a 3 hour video essay comes along to tell you about how women and minorities are causing this it makes sense: after all, it's right there on the sticker of what these shitty companies are doing. So when a leftist comes along, who you've been conditioned to think of as bad your entire life because you live in America and socialism/communism are the spawn of Satan so you already distrust them, and starts trying to explain well actually, this corporation doesn't really care about these people, they are just using their imagery to make money and actually feminism or what have you is good and will help you (a person who isn't even part of the directly oppressed group), that starts to sound like a load of bullshit. It's really difficult to get people out of that cycle because people are stubborn. Speaking of that rural dude in Nebraska, Nevuk's post about groupthink is fairly spot on here. Socialist policies have huge support among the American populace (including Republicans) as long as they are not linked with the word socialism. This is why things like a $15 minimum wage can be passed in a state that goes for Trump, as well as legalizing medical marijuana in other states that went to him. On the flipside, Dems love the ACA even though it's at least inspired by the work of Conservative thinktanks. When given actual policies and an explanation of how it will improve their lives, people aren't as crablike as some people like to think. The problem is people in threads like these are often pretty far removed from things that actually matter and instead like to navelgaze or jerk off about how the other side is bad. Show nested quote +On November 12 2020 16:01 Artisreal wrote:On November 12 2020 09:30 LegalLord wrote:On November 12 2020 07:16 ChristianS wrote:So maybe my biggest hope for the new admin is ending shit like this: https://twitter.com/crampell/status/1320471320468008961?s=21One of Trump’s biggest expansions of executive power was in completely subjugating non-partisan administrative entities to partisan goals. It basically amounted to selective enforcement of laws passed by Congress in order to change policy without getting a new law passed, but the mechanism was essentially bureaucratic corruption masquerading as bureaucratic incompetence. Example: a series of fields for listing relatives, whether they are alive or deceased, and a blank for their current location. Location was left blank for deceased relatives; visa rejected. For a category of visa that is filled out 90% of the time by legal representation they still found grounds to reject a full 50% of applications for stuff like this. This type of “policy-setting” should be illegal, but I don’t know how you structure that law. For the moment, at least, I hope the Biden administration fixes all of this bullshit. It's not really a big political issue, but certainly a big issue in practice, that standard government functionality had large degrees of fuckery going on during the Trump admin. Just about every federal organization other than the military seemed like it had incompetent fools in charge during the administration, because that's who Trump appointed to lead up those orgs. Education, housing, infrastructure, immigration, the list goes on. I'm sure that Biden's appointees will be incrementally better. Even if he picks canines. ah, yes, incrementalism, my favorite political ideology maybe by 2050 when our planet is destroyed we'll have incrementally moved away from having fossil fuel lobbyists as secretary of energy
Neoliberal pundits and politicians constantly downtalk progressives/leftists as crazy, divisive radicals. You can find dozens of examples of this in wake of the election, where the disastrous downballot results are somehow the fault of the evil socialists and people who want a Green New Deal. But most people here don't care about that, because they're unwilling to criticize their own party.
The reality is the DNC is a center-right wing party that exists to quash actual leftwing movements by co-opting their language and converting it into meaningless platitudes and feelgood speeches so that the wealthy people voting for them can feel like they're the resistance, fighting for something against the cartoonishly evil GOP without having to worry about all the injustices that continue to exist in the world that they perpetuate
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On November 12 2020 03:26 Nevuk wrote:
It's like they're TRYING to have so many of their supporters die that they lose the senate. CNN left the room shortly after this, as GA is in the red covid zone and they didn't feel safe.
Unless you dress them all up like astronauts, there is no way to gather that many people in a room like that safely, all while enormous concert halls and outdoor stadiums don't allow a single person in the public...
The covid-be-damed approach to campagning almost worked for Trump, so I guess they are sticking to it.
One of the things I did not like that Biden did was showing that graph of the US being in the "3rd wave" of cases. It was really just that the 1st wave hit different areas at different times. If you look of the individual states, it is obvious that it is really the 2nd wave which is starting now. This will be brutal, unfortunately. I will expect the current 10,7 million cases nationally to be at least doubled by the time Biden is president.
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Netherlands6273 Posts
On November 12 2020 15:38 StasisField wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2020 15:19 RvB wrote:On November 12 2020 09:47 TheYango wrote:
The difference is that Democrats are constantly criticizing other Democrats for their bullshit. Democrats don't need Republicans to point out how crazy their crazies are because they're already doing it. Republicans are far more into "tacit compliance" than Democrats are.
You can honestly even see it in the USPMT, where the left-leaning posters are constantly arguing amongst themselves, while when a random right-wing loon pops into the thread, the conservative posters all silently let it slide rather than calling them out. You're responding to a post where GH criticizes Republicans while forgetting the fact that GH criticizes Democrats equally often.
Both sides are accountable for some crazy shit, but they don't hold themselves accountable to an equal degree. This thread is incredibly circle jerky really. It's not as bad as something like /r politics but it's still pretty bad. I've seen people here argue for MMT and the labour theory of value and nobody bats an eye. Wegandi posts some Austrian economics and half the thread piles on him. It's true that right posters in the thread don't call eachother out much but that's both because we're few in number and when they post they get piled on already. ? People were making fun of MMT just a few pages ago lol What are you talking about?
Reading it back I don't think people made fun of it. Maybe my interpretation of Kwarks post is wrong though. That's possible since I'm good at missing sarcasm.
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On November 12 2020 18:29 Slydie wrote:Unless you dress them all up like astronauts, there is no way to gather that many people in a room like that safely, all while enormous concert halls and outdoor stadiums don't allow a single person in the public... The covid-be-damed approach to campagning almost worked for Trump, so I guess they are sticking to it. One of the things I did not like that Biden did was showing that graph of the US being in the "3rd wave" of cases. It was really just that the 1st wave hit different areas at different times. If you look of the individual states, it is obvious that it is really the 2nd wave which is starting now. This will be brutal, unfortunately. I will expect the current 10,7 million cases nationally to be at least doubled by the time Biden is president.
Do you really think the american population would be capable of following that argument? Because i don't. It involves comparing multiple different sets of data. And more than 5 words.
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We should be relying on our politicians to inform us appropriately, using words the common electorate can understand, sadly we have one party who focus tests meaningless platitudes and is terminally afraid of having actual values to communicate and we have another party who weaponizes their responsibility to inform their electorate in order to sow anger, mistrust, and lies.
This is also why it should be important to make college affordable and not cause crippling levels of debt.
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On November 12 2020 19:09 Zambrah wrote:
We should be relying on our politicians to inform us appropriately, using words the common electorate can understand, sadly we have one party who focus tests meaningless platitudes and is terminally afraid of having actual values to communicate and we have another party who weaponizes their responsibility to inform their electorate in order to sow anger, mistrust, and lies.
This is also why it should be important to make college affordable and not cause crippling levels of debt.
When it comes to education, I'm constantly surprised at how people can divorce their own opinions from the reality of lack of movement from politicians.
The most popular TED talk of all time was one from I dunno like 15 years ago by Ken Robinson called 'Do Schools kill creativity?'.
In it, he talks about the organizational structure of schools and how they are designed to create a victorian style workforce and are completely outdated and irrelevant in this day and age.
And yet, despite tens of millions of views and professionals within the industry wholeheartedly agreeing with Robinson on some of the ways it could be improved, nothing has changed, either in the US or the UK.
There is no political will to properly reform education, because the benefits don't appear until long after the politicians have spent their political capital on making change.
So 'pay off student debts' to me sounds like 'just throw money at the problem so we don't actually have to fix anything'.
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Theres no political will to do ANYTHING in the US aside from providing corporate welfare and making sure the rich can reap as much as humanly possible without causing a peasant uprising.
Americans need to CREATE the political will, holding our people accountable, holding ourselves accountable to holding politicians accountable. Americans are god awful at it though. Organizing is the only way forward, there is no trusting our politicians to carry forward on our behalf alone, we have to be doing the work and holding their feet to the fire. Its why we cant tolerate people like Joe Manchin imo, sure hes theoretically better than a Republican, but hes also going to fuck over any necessary legislation to get money out of politics, to reform finance, to improve education, to cut down on the military. We need to start primarying these people are letting them know if they want to keep their positions of influence and power they need to start making an effort for the constituents. It certainly won't work all of the time, it'll be a back and forth fight since the Republicans are the worse party and are also the party that is more intelligent and devious with power, its an uphill fight with the Democrats doing their best to make it harder, but I really think we need to primary any and all Democrats who can't commit to some basic pieces of fundamentally necessary policy.
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On November 12 2020 18:17 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +Incrementalism doesn't mean you want something a little bit better than the worst, That is indeed not incrementalism, that's lesser evilism. Show nested quote +it means that you don't believe you can fix the country magically, and that progress is a slow process that requires patience and compromises.
No one argues the country can be fixed magically or that it won't take time and compromise. EDIT: Should add that this: + Show Spoiler +On November 12 2020 16:10 TomatoBisque wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2020 09:47 TheYango wrote:
The difference is that Democrats are constantly criticizing other Democrats for their bullshit. Democrats don't need Republicans to point out how crazy their crazies are because they're already doing it. Republicans are far more into "tacit compliance" than Democrats are.
You can honestly even see it in the USPMT, where the left-leaning posters are constantly arguing amongst themselves, while when a random right-wing loon pops into the thread, the conservative posters all silently let it slide rather than calling them out. You're responding to a post where GH criticizes Republicans while forgetting the fact that GH criticizes Democrats equally often.
Both sides are accountable for some crazy shit, but they don't hold themselves accountable to an equal degree. The fact that you consider GH vs. the average user in that thread to be lefties criticizing each other and Democrats holding themselves accountable says a lot more about your understanding of politics in America than it does about the GOP's unwillingness to criticize themselves. For one, GH is almost certainly not registered as a Democrat nor identifies with the party. In fact, the fights he often gets in there are because he is trying to tell people the DNC is just as corrupt, evil, and racist as the Republicans just in more subtle ways or that the neoliberal policies the DNC (people Obama, Clinton, Biden, Pelosi, Schumer etc.) support are generally ineffective at best or have the opposite effect intended at worst. And for it he gets talked down to by people who don't want to hold their own people accountable or reconsider their own beliefs. If you turn on the news you see this all the time. Neoliberal pundits and politicians constantly downtalk progressives/leftists as crazy, divisive radicals. You can find dozens of examples of this in wake of the election, where the disastrous downballot results are somehow the fault of the evil socialists and people who want a Green New Deal. But most people here don't care about that, because they're unwilling to criticize their own party. The reality is the DNC is a center-right wing party that exists to quash actual leftwing movements by co-opting their language and converting it into meaningless platitudes and feelgood speeches so that the wealthy people voting for them can feel like they're the resistance, fighting for something against the cartoonishly evil GOP without having to worry about all the injustices that continue to exist in the world that they perpetuate The reason the GOP is such a problem is that the media and politicians that isn't owned by the GOP constantly talks down to these people, calling them deplorable or stupid, and people like the average poster in this thread eats it up and just spits out hate. Our entire political discourse is designed on purpose to divide and pull people into camps so that nothing ever changes. That's not to say that in every right wing lunatic online there's secretly a good, decent person who just needs some love or whatever. Some people are just shitty, and someone with the time to constantly argue on the internet is more likely to have the resources to know better compared to some dude in rural Nebraska who is just bombarded with propaganda. But even then it's hard. I mean, when companies do shitty things to squeeze money out of you while turning around and talking about how they support LGBT and feminism and all that, and then some man with a 3 hour video essay comes along to tell you about how women and minorities are causing this it makes sense: after all, it's right there on the sticker of what these shitty companies are doing. So when a leftist comes along, who you've been conditioned to think of as bad your entire life because you live in America and socialism/communism are the spawn of Satan so you already distrust them, and starts trying to explain well actually, this corporation doesn't really care about these people, they are just using their imagery to make money and actually feminism or what have you is good and will help you (a person who isn't even part of the directly oppressed group), that starts to sound like a load of bullshit. It's really difficult to get people out of that cycle because people are stubborn. Speaking of that rural dude in Nebraska, Nevuk's post about groupthink is fairly spot on here. Socialist policies have huge support among the American populace (including Republicans) as long as they are not linked with the word socialism. This is why things like a $15 minimum wage can be passed in a state that goes for Trump, as well as legalizing medical marijuana in other states that went to him. On the flipside, Dems love the ACA even though it's at least inspired by the work of Conservative thinktanks. When given actual policies and an explanation of how it will improve their lives, people aren't as crablike as some people like to think. The problem is people in threads like these are often pretty far removed from things that actually matter and instead like to navelgaze or jerk off about how the other side is bad. Show nested quote +On November 12 2020 16:01 Artisreal wrote:On November 12 2020 09:30 LegalLord wrote:On November 12 2020 07:16 ChristianS wrote:So maybe my biggest hope for the new admin is ending shit like this: https://twitter.com/crampell/status/1320471320468008961?s=21One of Trump’s biggest expansions of executive power was in completely subjugating non-partisan administrative entities to partisan goals. It basically amounted to selective enforcement of laws passed by Congress in order to change policy without getting a new law passed, but the mechanism was essentially bureaucratic corruption masquerading as bureaucratic incompetence. Example: a series of fields for listing relatives, whether they are alive or deceased, and a blank for their current location. Location was left blank for deceased relatives; visa rejected. For a category of visa that is filled out 90% of the time by legal representation they still found grounds to reject a full 50% of applications for stuff like this. This type of “policy-setting” should be illegal, but I don’t know how you structure that law. For the moment, at least, I hope the Biden administration fixes all of this bullshit. It's not really a big political issue, but certainly a big issue in practice, that standard government functionality had large degrees of fuckery going on during the Trump admin. Just about every federal organization other than the military seemed like it had incompetent fools in charge during the administration, because that's who Trump appointed to lead up those orgs. Education, housing, infrastructure, immigration, the list goes on. I'm sure that Biden's appointees will be incrementally better. Even if he picks canines. ah, yes, incrementalism, my favorite political ideology maybe by 2050 when our planet is destroyed we'll have incrementally moved away from having fossil fuel lobbyists as secretary of energy was an excellent post. I especially liked this part Show nested quote +Neoliberal pundits and politicians constantly downtalk progressives/leftists as crazy, divisive radicals. You can find dozens of examples of this in wake of the election, where the disastrous downballot results are somehow the fault of the evil socialists and people who want a Green New Deal. But most people here don't care about that, because they're unwilling to criticize their own party.
The reality is the DNC is a center-right wing party that exists to quash actual leftwing movements by co-opting their language and converting it into meaningless platitudes and feelgood speeches so that the wealthy people voting for them can feel like they're the resistance, fighting for something against the cartoonishly evil GOP without having to worry about all the injustices that continue to exist in the world that they perpetuate
I mean, you say that but on the other hand your standard line is that anything less than total revolution isn't enough. I can't remember the last time you suggested anything like incremental improvement or supported it in any way.
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