All Purpose News and Politics Thread Part IV: The Center Cannot Hold

[Tami]

.... oh boy. ooooh boy.

Whats' up?

[Rosa Luxemburg]

Calling Warren a 'fauxgressive' sounds pretty delusional to me.

It means they have higher standards. That's not a bad thing.

Always expect more from politicians.

Not realistic to know that trump is worse than any Democratic candidate. And any policy they are passionate about will NEVER move forward with him or any GOP candidate.

They aren't going to vote for Trump. The few that do are will be no more common than those that had a Democrat choice during the primary but went Republican during the general in previous elections.

Did I miss the declaration that you cant br a capitilist and a progressive?

Progressives usually refers to liberals that are to the left of other liberals. So you can believe in capitalism and be a progressive, but that's not a good thing in the broader context.

Capitalism is an oppressive exploitative system that has wrecked the planet. Anyone who champions it should be viewed with skepticism.

What I see is someone who would rather see the country descend into the turmoil that is Trump than accept any comprimise on their perfect candidate. But you aren't a real Democrat anyway. Just someone who would rather see the world burn than see progress.

Either that or you want to do a perfect imitaion of a Russian bot doing what they can to get Trump re-elected.

To many of these people, Sanders is the compromise that they can build and maintain a movement around.

He's still going to bomb the middle east.
He's not going to abolish the border and immigration laws.
He's not going to abolish capitalism.
He's not going to get rid of evil organizations like the CIA or DHS.
He's not going to support Palestine (occasional criticism of Israel doesn't count)
He's against reparations.
He's still an imperialist.

He sucks.

Sanders is their choice because he's the closest to the left out of everyone running. Even if he wins, he's probably going to get little done, but in the long run shifting the overton window to the left and building a leftist populist movement is more important than continuing to rely on electoralism.

Anyone with a lick of sense here knows how bad the Republican party is, so what does it tell you that they are still such a powerful force in US politics? What does it tell you that Clinton gave way to Bush and then Obama gave way to Trump? Do people really think continuing the same pattern isn't going to give way to another Republican victory in 2028?

People can wag their finger at those voting third party of casting protest votes, but that isn't the problem. Those people don't even make up 5% of the voting population. The problem is you have a system where a party so brazenly evil as the Republican Party is, still succeeding.

[InformationGeek]

.... oh boy. ooooh boy.

Is that Rudy is being investigated for illegal campaign finances now?

Or is it that the Acting DHS Secretary just abruptly?

[Tendrin]

Whats' up?

Just some of the posts I've read today.

[Tendrin]

Is that Rudy is being investigated for illegal campaign finances now?

Or is it that the Acting DHS Secretary just abruptly?

These also qualify.

[Tendrin]

Matt Shea is back in the news which, as usual, is nothing good.

https://www.courthousenews.com/washi...lims-in-video/

Washington state Representative Matt Shea said in a video posted Thursday that the media’s exposure of his extremist ideas such as Christian dominion — which calls for Christians to control society by taking over political and cultural institutions — is a “Soviet tactic” to persecute him.
The video was published Thursday on The New American, the media arm of the John Birch Society.
“Look, Christ was crucified, died and was buried and resurrected,” Shea says on it. “He paid the price for the dominion of this earth. That’s what we believe as Christians. We’re not going to shy away from that. But they’re trying to turn that into something nefarious.”
Shea, 45, a six-term Republican, wants the state of Washington split in two. “Liberty,” a new state on the eastern side, would be ruled by biblical law.

[Theleviathan]

If you are a pro-capitalist who is taking donations from a folks who work for the big tech companies, you aren't just a "Capitalist".

Is there some really narrow path to doing it? Sure.

Is that what's happening? Come on.

She is "Actual Center..." That's only "Progressive..." to some Americans who don't want to look at reality.

Is she acceptable? Sure. Just gimme a break on "Progressive..."

I find definitions like this obnoxious. Invariably everyone who doesn't agree with your particular definition gets lumped in as a centrist or a conservative. Conservatives do it in reverse. Typically I find if someone resorts to this sort of thing they don't have the slightest clue about how to use the terms or the broader context in which people fall in the spectrum.

You end up weaponizing it against people in your own coalition with largely similar goals. That's political stupidity in it's truest form. It happens to be the left's calling card for defeat as well.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

Warren isn't a capitalist. She's an advocate for capitalism.

A capitalist is someone who actually owns Capital.

[Theleviathan]

The fundamental conflict between capitalism and progressivism is that while it is true that market forces can produce incredible innovations and dramatically raise the quality of life for many people, this is ultimately not the end goal of most capitalists. The kind of cutthroat competition that generates most of the gains in a free market system is also seen by most entrepreneurs as a painful burden that they would like to rid themselves of once their companies are big enough to do so. We see this time after time in industry after industry, formerly forward-thinking companies grow to a sufficient size where they can start taking down all their rivals, and settle into a comfortable monopolistic existence. But if you were to use government regulation to force companies to compete and innovate in perpetuity, few people would bother going into business at all, that rent extraction phase is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that all companies look forward to.

The challenge of progressives is to develop an economic model that can deliver steady, sustainable growth, rather than the brief sugar highs followed by calamitous crashes and long periods of stagnation that capitalism tends to produce. An economy that focuses on social welfare and preserving the environment is obviously not going to be able to match the kind of technological innovation that a purely market economy will be able to, but will undoubtedly be better off in the long run because it won't burn through its resources quite so fast and won't have nearly as much social upheaval.

This is a deeply problematic misunderstanding, one I think illustrated by the fact that your first and second paragraph don't seem to agree with each other.

"Progressive" is a term about one's politics, generally related to the operation of government and the laws, systems, and other features therein. "Capitalism" is how the economy is structured. While those two often overlap, there is a broad spectrum of how they would do so. One can imagine an economy free of government control of capital (capitalism) that nevertheless has significant structures and laws in place to keep money moving to all people in the economy. (progressive) One could also imagine a country wherein there is complete government control of industry and laws are passed by a government to create social castes in order to maintain order. (There are several forms of conservative socialism like this. Some religious, some military, etc) There are many possible combinations in between.

As you point out in your second paragraph (which doesn't agree at all with what you state at the beginning of the first), there ARE ways to have a capitalist economy with a great deal of government oversight and intervention. The very fact that many people don't believe that's possible has more to do with their lack of understanding about what capitalism is. The words socialism and capitalism have some very bastardized definitions out there that are deeply problematic.

I for one would not vote for a true socialist, I want a progressive capitalist. So far through human history it's demonstrated itself to be the highest standard of living with the most growth, and lowest income inequality. Everything else has either utterly failed or generated a host of problems.

[zinderel]

I’m beginning to think Bernie support is personality cult, not unlike Trump supporters.

“Beginning to think”? Man, in 2015-2016, I was a HUGE supporter of Bernie. I registered as a Democrat for the first time in my life after nearly twenty years as an Independent/Green/Workers Party supporter. I believed in him.

And then I started paying attention to his followers, and I lost any hope that Bernie would unite anyone. His cultists were no different to me that Trumpians. All they cared about was making sure Hillary lost, and it became so obvious by the end.

To paraphrase Gandhi’s famous quote, “I like your Bernie. I do not like your Bernie supporters. Your Bernie supporters are very unlike your Bernie.”

[Tendrin]

“Beginning to think”? Man, in 2015-2016, I was a HUGE supporter of Bernie. I registered as a Democrat for the first time in my life after nearly twenty years as an Independent/Green/Workers Party supporter. I believed in him.

And then I started paying attention to his followers, and I lost any hope that Bernie would unite anyone. His cultists were no different to me that Trumpians. All they cared about was making sure Hillary lost, and it became so obvious by the end.

To paraphrase Gandhi’s famous quote, “I like your Bernie. I do not like your Bernie supporters. Your Bernie supporters are very unlike your Bernie.”

I don't think there's a single one of us who believed that a number of Berners who were supposedly open to 'voting for a woman but not Hillary' wouldn't turn around and start the same process all over again with Warren and, lo, there are some people living directly down to that expectation already.

[zinderel]

Matt Shea is back in the news which, as usual, is nothing good.

https://www.courthousenews.com/washi...lims-in-video/

My favorite part of fundamentalist Christianity is how they have embraced Orwellian doublespeak without thinking.

“Unconditional love” has all kinds of conditions, ‘Liberty’ is oppresive biblical law, ‘freedom’ is worshipping only their version of God, ‘rights’ are something god gave everyone but needed slave owners from 200+ years ago to express before we got them...

It’s freaking madness...

[zinderel]

I don't think there's a single one of us who believed that a number of Berners who were supposedly open to 'voting for a woman but not Hillary' wouldn't turn around and start the same process all over again with Warren and, lo, there are some people living directly down to that expectation already.

Exactly. Bernie supporters are proving once again that misogyny isn’t just a republican value...

[Tendrin]

Exactly. Bernie supporters are proving once again that misogyny isn’t just a republican value...

A lot of time spent trying to find a way to justify sitting on their hands all over again, except when it's even more pointedly critical given everything we've seen in the last four years.

[Dalak]

A lot of time spent trying to find a way to justify sitting on their hands all over again, except when it's even more pointedly critical given everything we've seen in the last four years.

The usual suspects I assume?