All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[Steel Inquisitor]

We need to build an economic system that adequately compensates people based on what they contribute to society, not how good they are at taking from others. Solve this core issue, and everything else more or less falls into line right behind that.

You're dodging. What is the ideology called that you are marketing to us?

[PwrdOn]

You're dodging. What is the ideology called that you are marketing to us?

If you think I'm afraid to say communism, then you might be a tad mistaken. Now go and check to see if your landlord didn't just magically drop dead from a heart attack, wouldn't want that to happen...yet.

[TheDarman]

Darman... seriously...
When did Centrist become a Slur?
Are you serious right now?
Centrist is now a slur?

To the other highlighted section. Where did I attack you on " I don't actually want anyone to have a better life."
That was nowhere even aimed at you. Right before that I talked about the Establishment, You seem to have taken it personal.

It is because it is used to remove any and all other characteristics of a person down to a single word. It isn’t real engagement and is really dismissive of people who are widely different from one another on how they think.

As for the following part, it was pretty clear, at least to me, that the implication was that people who support “establishment” candidates like Obama, Clinton, or Biden don’t actually want to make life better for anyone. Either that or we are too ignorant to not see through it. I apologize if I got the wrong impression from that and I invite clarification for what it means for the voters who support these candidates.

I get what you're saying here, but even Aja comes across as passive-aggressive when it comes to replying to people. YOU may think you're being kind and gracious but it comes across as not actually listening to people you claim to want to listen to. I won't ask you to go back and read how you respond to people. But it comes across as "yes dear, now run and play." Aja does the same thing when you post links about the information he/she asks for.

So I'm glad you feel that way, but in reality it comes across as patronizing. I at least know I can be an ass and actually aggressive at times lol.

I’m truly sorry that it comes across that way. I’ll attempt to avoid engaging further. I sincerely don’t mean it to come across that way, but that doesn’t change the fact that that was what you got from it. For that, I apologize and wish you the best.

[Steel Inquisitor]

If you think I'm afraid to say communism, then you might be a tad mistaken. Now go and check to see if your landlord didn't just magically drop dead from a heart attack, wouldn't want that to happen...yet.

You didn't say Communism in the previous posts, and wouldn't have said the dreaded C word had I not said anything.

Edit: The context for the landlord thing gets chilling with what happened to them during Mao's tenure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Land_Reform

The Chinese Land Reform Movement , also known by the Chinese abbreviation Tǔgǎi (土改), was a campaign by the Communist Party leader Mao Zedong during the late phase of the Chinese Civil War and the early People's Republic of China.[1] The campaign involved mass killings of landlords and land redistribution to the peasantry.[2] The estimated death count of the movement ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions.[3][4][5]

[Tendrin]

Meanwhile, Ron Johnson is showing how empty of humanity the GOP is.

https://twitter.com/tripgabriel/stat...68940951506949

"Getting coronavirus is not a death sentence except for maybe no more than 3.4 percent of our population...probably far less."
"We don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways"

[PwrdOn]

You didn't say Communism in the previous posts, and wouldn't have said the dreaded C word had I not said anything.

Edit: The context for the landlord thing gets chilling with what happened to them during Mao's tenure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Land_Reform

Doesn't seem so chilling to me, those were landlords in the literal sense of the word, not just the guy who owns your apartment building, but practically a feudal aristocracy that held the peasantry as virtual slaves bound to the land. You sound like the kind of guy who would have denounced John Brown as a dangerous radical too.

[Tendrin]

Doesn't seem so chilling to me, those were landlords in the literal sense of the word, not just the guy who owns your apartment building, but practically a feudal aristocracy that held the peasantry as virtual slaves bound to the land. A mass killing of plantation owners doesn't honestly sound so bad to me, I must say.

Be careful you don't cut yourself on all that edge.

[PwrdOn]

Be careful you don't cut yourself on all that edge.

Worth pointing out as well that, because of the coronavirus, there are going to be lots of people who aren't going to be able to make rent payments, and I'm sure their landlords will be perfectly understanding and cooperative through that process, and I certainly wouldn't expect any of them to plead poverty on the basis of needing to collect rent to survive or anything like that.

[Tendrin]

Worth pointing out as well that, because of the coronavirus, there are going to be lots of people who aren't going to be able to make rent payments, and I'm sure their landlords will be perfectly understanding and cooperative through that process, and I certainly wouldn't expect any of them to plead poverty on the basis of needing to collect rent to survive or anything like that.

Hating them and stopping them isn't the same as endorsing mass killings, tanky.

[PwrdOn]

Hating them and stopping them isn't the same as endorsing mass killings, tanky.

Who said anything about stopping them? For most people, a huge chunk $2000 stimulus being proposed will go directly toward to their landlords, enterprising ones might even use it as an excuse to increase rent. Indeed, as long as the rentier class exists, they will continue to suck up a significant share of the benefits of various social programs meant to improve the lot of the poor, simply by jacking up prices of whatever basic goods we try to subsidize, and use their political power and influence to paint any type of asset seizure or redistribution as akin to genocide. And here in America, if the tanks do get sent in they will almost certainly be there to protect the landlords rather than to kill them. After all we do have lots of surplus military vehicles belonging to various police departments that only ever seem to get sent in when a violent mob threatens to destroy valuable property, but stay oddly idle when the lives of the poor are in danger.

[Celgress]

I think it is a hard sell to have two 75+ year old white men on a ticket together.

Two 75+-year-old people on one ticket is bad optics period. It reminds me of the Soviet Union as it declined its leaders became ever older and more decrepitate.

[Tendrin]

Who said anything about stopping them? For most people, a huge chunk $2000 stimulus being proposed will go directly toward to their landlords, enterprising ones might even use it as an excuse to increase rent. Indeed, as long as the rentier class exists, they will continue to suck up a significant share of the benefits of various social programs meant to improve the lot of the poor, simply by jacking up prices of whatever basic goods we try to subsidize, and use their political power and influence to paint any type of asset seizure or redistribution as akin to genocide. And here in America, if the tanks do get sent in they will almost certainly be there to protect the landlords rather than to kill them. After all we do have lots of surplus military vehicles belonging to various police departments that only ever seem to get sent in when a violent mob threatens to destroy valuable property, but stay oddly idle when the lives of the poor are in danger.

I mean, I'm doing what I can to demand 'no rent', while backing groups involved in land reform here in the USA. You just endorsed mass killing.

[Mister Mets]

Bill Clinton was around 66%. How'd that work out for Al Gore? Or Hillary for that matter?

That's a different goalpost than the one I was responding to "who's going to support Joe in the general beyond people who already like Barrack?"

If Biden can keep the people who like Obama, he's President. Hillary and Gore were unable to keep enough of the people who liked the incumbent.

Who said anything about stopping them? For most people, a huge chunk $2000 stimulus being proposed will go directly toward to their landlords, enterprising ones might even use it as an excuse to increase rent. Indeed, as long as the rentier class exists, they will continue to suck up a significant share of the benefits of various social programs meant to improve the lot of the poor, simply by jacking up prices of whatever basic goods we try to subsidize, and use their political power and influence to paint any type of asset seizure or redistribution as akin to genocide. And here in America, if the tanks do get sent in they will almost certainly be there to protect the landlords rather than to kill them. After all we do have lots of surplus military vehicles belonging to various police departments that only ever seem to get sent in when a violent mob threatens to destroy valuable property, but stay oddly idle when the lives of the poor are in danger.

Under what circumstances should surplus military vehicles be used to protect the lives of the poor?

[Mister Mets]

Its claiming you won when the refs give the other team an extra touchdown. The game is fixed. Gore actually won Florida as well as the popular vote. But the refs decided to give it to Bush. And the last election stunk so bad they could smell it in Moscow. Making the Dems overcome GOP cheating is not the sign of a true Democracy.

By most standards, Gore lost Florida.

I posted this before, but Bush won Florida by most metrics. If the Gore campaign had gotten what they wanted (a recount limited to heavily democratic counties) it wouldn't have found enough votes to alter the results.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/polit...sults-studies/

The first major review
The players: A group of newspapers including the USA Today, Miami Herald, and Knight Ridder newspapers conducted the first major review of the Florida ballots.

How it worked: The group hired the accounting firm BDO Seidman to examine more than 60,000 "undervotes" -- ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race -- from all 67 Florida counties. These were ballots the Florida Supreme Court ordered to be hand counted with its December 8, 2000, decision.

The newspapers applied BDO Seidman's findings to four vote-counting standards. This was published in April 2001.

The results: The study shows that Bush likely would have won the statewide recount of undervotes even if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened to stop the counting. It also reveals that, ironically, the most lenient standard of vote counting —advocated by Gore — gives Bush his biggest lead. However, USA Today cautioned that, "The study has limitations. There is variability in what different observers see on ballots. Election officials, who sorted the undervotes for examination and then handled them for the accountants' inspection, often did not provide exactly the same number of undervotes recorded on election night."

https://www.factcheck.org/2008/01/th...count-of-2000/

According to a massive months-long study commissioned by eight news organizations in 2001, George W. Bush probably still would have won even if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a limited statewide recount to go forward as ordered by Florida’s highest court.

Bush also probably would have won had the state conducted the limited recount of only four heavily Democratic counties that Al Gore asked for, the study found.
Gore might have been able to win with a legal strategy his campaign never pursued (to count every undervote and overvote in the state) although he could have also won with a slightly better campaign, so that the result in Florida wasn't a coin toss (alternatively, with a better campaign he might have won New Hampshire, Nevada, West Virginia, or his home state of Tennessee, any of which would have been enough to win 270+ electoral votes.)

The Supreme Court did not alter the outcome of the election.

You did note years ago that there was a problem with the design of the butterfly ballot, but that's not something that should be determined by a court. The designer of the infamous Butterfly ballot was a Democrat who wanted to make something more legible for elderly voters.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=122175&page=1

[PwrdOn]

I mean, I'm doing what I can to demand 'no rent', while backing groups involved in land reform here in the USA. You just endorsed mass killing.

Well you know after the Civil War we tried to peacefully redistribute land from slaveholders to freemen, except that it turned out the plantation owners weren't willing to go quietly into the night and used their still considerable socioeconomic clout to start a campaign of racial terror that eventually led to the collapse of Reconstruction, imposition of Jim Crow, and the return of most former slaves to virtual bondage under peonage or convict leasing schemes. And the consequences of that failure are still with us to this day. You really think that if we had just lined up all those bastards and shot them, that things wouldn't have turned out much better?

Under what circumstances should surplus military vehicles be used to protect the lives of the poor?

Federal troops were used during Reconstruction to protect freemen, as long as that lasted anyway, and also were instrumental in integrating schools to protect students from racist local police and militia.