Republican nominations - Page 160

not like those jobs are way below the poverty line or anything, though. who cares if they're 'stable' or 'last longer' if they're not sufficient to sustain a decent lifestyle?

i'm honestly appalled that people in America think that the republican party should ever be elected. as someone who lives in Canada, i can tell you for a fact that the vast majority of the world (esp. Europe) looks at you with a sort of dumbfounded disbelief every time you guys have a serious bout of civil unrest over some hot button issue that, to the rest of the world, is something that we might have thought relevant forty or fifty years ago. i mean, we're talking about a country that had huge protests because someone wanted to build a mosque a few blocks away from ground zero. like seriously? that's what makes news in your country? that's what people are passionate about? really?

i'm not really going to check this thread very often, but i'm going to say a few things that the rest of the world (and basically everyone with a PhD in a relevant field) has accepted:

1) socialism is good, and you know it.
2) ayn rand was a horrible author and conservatism is actually weaker because of her
3) conservatism essentially boils down to preserving the status quo (or reaching back to a previous status quo) for its own sake, and this is totally unfounded
4) if you want to be in a country, then you need to stfu about extreme individual rights. it might be 'your right' to decide in a meticulous sense where each cent of your taxes go, but being that you are a citizen of a nation, you've got to understand that for logistical and practical reasons, you're going to be funding a road you might never drive on, or a school you might never attend, because these things are just good for the common good of your town/state/country. teaching evolution in schools is just a good thing to do. if you're teaching creationism to kids when it could be avoided, you're doing kids a disservice. the fact that you have to have a public education system (which, if properly optimized, is just better for everyone anyway) is a small price to pay for a guarantee (supposing you actually bother to make a good curriculum, which is something that the more 'socialist' states have done a much better job at) that every kid gets taught the correct stuff. and for those of you saying that it doesn't work: try looking outside America. you guys are doing it wrong. public school systems can work find and they do work fine in the vast majority of the developed world. simply because you have flaws in particular areas doesn't mean you need to abolish the entire system.
5) gay marriage is a non-issue. you are not going to overturn this, and trying to give the states the right to do so under the guise of "constitutionality" is underhanded and bigoted and everyone knows it. stop trying to subtly undermine the rights of citizens, or, if you're going to, come right out and preach it. don't hide behind legalistic nonsense.
6) just because something is constitutional doesn't make it good or correct. the founding fathers, while intelligent, were men of their own era, and they weren't infallible. if someone discovered that your constitution included a provision to only teach creationism, it would have to be amended, because that's simply a stupid provision. a good rule of thumb for these sorts of debates is to ask yourself, when you're considering objecting to something on the grounds that it's unconstitutional, "do i know a good reason as to why this should be unconstitutional? if the constitution were rewritten today, should we include the provision that makes this unconstitutional? why or why not?"
7) you guys aren't broke because of medicare, public education, pensions, or anything. you guys are broke because of essentially two things, only one of which is your fault:first, you're part of a capitalist system, which means you're necessarily going to have periods of recession and periods of prosperity. this is just the way capitalism works, and while someone might be to blame for it happening at this particular moment, pretending that you could fashion a system which NEVER recedes and yet is still capitalist is simply wrong on every level and contradicts basically every economic theory there is. second: you have a lack of national unity. you waste money on pointless things in order to appease (generally right wing, since they're the most vocal) interest groups. your military is a gigantic waste of money. the bush taxcuts were a gigantic waste of money. but understand simply because something costs a lot doesn't make it inherently bad. some indispensable stuff costs a lot of money, e.g. health care, education, the maintenance of a police force, etc. the problem with republicans is that they want unilateral cuts to spending across the board. ya, no. it's better to be in a state of debt with some sort of social security than to balance the books on the back of everyone's standard of living. it's not at ALL presumptive to suppose that i, or anyone else, should be entitled to enough to live off of, supposing i make the effort to work everyday.
8) hard work != wealth or success. this one is self-explanatory. poor people aren't poor cause they're lazy. they're poor because capitalism implies the existence of a lower class who are extorted by necessity into selling their labour for less than it takes to sustain them comfortably, only because the alternative is starving to death. the best argument against this is to suppose by thought experiment that every person worked extremely hard. would we have a world of billionaires? no, because that would completely annihilate the market.

basically, if you're a republican supporter, i strongly suggest you take some university level courses in economics or political science. it's not due to a conspiracy that professors are overwhelmingly left-wing. it's because the intelligentsia is always more left-wing than the commonfolk because the world is basically progressing more and more to the left with each decade. look back a hundred years. we're lightyears to the left. the republican party would have been left wing at that time. and you can bet that it'll be the same 50 years from now, because the status quo always has a net change when the left wing is in power and relative stagnation when the right is in power. over time, that results in a slow but steady shift to the left.

Of course its a trading scheme man, haven't you ready any of my posts? Al Gore and his buddies invested 1 billion dollars and more into this scam and are going to use carbon trading to take all those money you give to the government as tax in their own private pockets laughing all the way on the common idiots paying for a scam, while they enjoy their 200 meters yachts, private jets and drink whiskey in their lavish oil corporations offices.

At first its "big" companies yeah right and then will come the smaller ones and so on, until everyone pays taxes. Just 1 month ago I saw an article where a man is charged with a 500 fee for not putting paper garbage into the designated place there in Australia. O yeah I would love police to inspect my garbage and put huge fines on me.

So as I've said let a bunch of billionaires get even more money at the expense of your country economy! In fact I might even invest in Al Gore's trading scheme and use you and get insanely rich of a fake thing.

Its like if I were to come up with there is too much oxygen we need to tax everyone from breathing to save the earth and pay off tons of scientists to provide fake data and now I can have oxygen trading schemes and taxes and literally suck out the wealth of the country.