Serious Political and economic discussion thread

I dunno guns are banned from where I am. Nor do I have interest in buying guns even if they are legal. Maybe practice shooting? Dunno.
 

Surgo

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I dunno guns are banned from where I am. Nor do I have interest in buying guns even if they are legal. Maybe practice shooting? Dunno.
You're the one who said that women are responsible to carry guns to avoid being raped. So how many should this woman have been carrying?
 
Oh damn! That’s the worst doctor you can get! Well for that specific case I guess you got a point, nothing the patient could have done to avoid the assault (sorry I just opened the link)
 

Pilo

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I mean it doesn’t make sense. I rarely see a conservative women if not at all virtue about a rape culture. It’s overwhelmingly overshadowed by left wing women. Seems to me having a weapon makes a significant difference.

Lastly is if they don’t carry a weapon I don’t know how can we prevent rape.
look i like rape doujins as much as the next guy but real women dont want to be raped .its not virtue signalling to not want to fall victim to a violent crime
 

So i was wasting my lifetime instead of studying and i came across this video on social media. If you don't want to watch it is a quite well produced essay on how the left should stop being so sensitive about so called minor issues and change strategy and look in order to tackle the alt right and populist movements in general.
You might think yeah that sounds reasonable, we hear it all the time, but i've come to think that this is pretty much blackmailing minorities into subduing their power to the so called white progressive elites, as a lesser than two evils.
Doing so would eventually aggregate all major political issues in order to fight or contain the rise of right wing movement, the left would just build its consensus on representing the minorities and it would all work right?
Well i just think the problem is that it wouldn't. Despite what the video says this compromise for minorities is getting less and less advantageous by the day. Promises of redistribution of wealth stopped making sense after the last great war and identity politics pretty much fails in the current social environment as we see. The conflict between elites and minorities within the left is more and more apparent and in all this contradictions the right just found its place to boom and grow.

Believing that the main problem for the left is the form and not the content is fucking delusional. The left's blanket is way too short and all the unkept promises over the years just made everything worse.
 

Surgo

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You might think yeah that sounds reasonable, we hear it all the time, but i've come to think that this is pretty much blackmailing minorities into subduing their power to the so called white progressive elites, as a lesser than two evils.
Very insightful and you're exactly right. This is the sort of bullshit that minorities have had to put up with for ages and they are finally sick of it. Their issues are important too and they deserve more than table scraps.

Generally the only people who make videos like that are white (and male). Gee, I wonder why.
 

GatoDelFuego

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Calling card of the video's white privilege police: admit that you have white privilege and then never bring it up again?
 
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tcr

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calling card of those who dont understand what white privilege is: bring up homeless white people or the holocaust as examples of how white privilege doesnt exist so you can continue to live your life without being socially challenged and any problems other people face in society can simply be written off as mistakes on that person, rather than actually work to address inherent advantages and disadvantages in the social hierarchy of the modern world.
 
watch out, you're probably gonna get told that you're being rude and mean to those poor right-wingers or something

anyway, yeah, if you just try and not do anything about any of the "minor" issues that minorities face with the idea that solving this minor one will magically end up solving them, or that then you can focus on them then, then you'e frankly either foolish or dangerously disingenuous. Telling minorities that they need to keep dealing with all of the bullshit they have thrown at them and to not expect any of it to be lessened at all witht eh nebulous promise of it getting better later is also gross as fuck and is a pretty big sign you likely don't give a shit about them and what they are going through at all. It also makes the silly assumption that people can't focus on pursuing more than one goal at a time, which is an infuriatingly common arguing point that a lot of people try and use.
 

Chou Toshio

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So i was wasting my lifetime instead of studying and i came across this video on social media. If you don't want to watch it is a quite well produced essay on how the left should stop being so sensitive about so called minor issues and change strategy and look in order to tackle the alt right and populist movements in general.
You might think yeah that sounds reasonable, we hear it all the time, but i've come to think that this is pretty much blackmailing minorities into subduing their power to the so called white progressive elites, as a lesser than two evils.
Doing so would eventually aggregate all major political issues in order to fight or contain the rise of right wing movement, the left would just build its consensus on representing the minorities and it would all work right?
Well i just think the problem is that it wouldn't. Despite what the video says this compromise for minorities is getting less and less advantageous by the day. Promises of redistribution of wealth stopped making sense after the last great war and identity politics pretty much fails in the current social environment as we see. The conflict between elites and minorities within the left is more and more apparent and in all this contradictions the right just found its place to boom and grow.

Believing that the main problem for the left is the form and not the content is fucking delusional. The left's blanket is way too short and all the unkept promises over the years just made everything worse.
Wait... white progressive elite? I'd like to see evidence that the liberal/progressive elite identifies itself on the basis of whiteness.

I do think there is a progressive/liberal elite, and I do think that it's the biggest problem of the left, and ultimately of the entirety of our politics (at least in the US, because we genuinely need more liberal policies to fix many of the biggest problems we have).

But in my view, based on what I know, the idea that the liberal elite identifies itself around race seems silly. Liberal elites identify their tribe based on how much they care about education and academic pedigree, on having a global view of the world and a cosmopolitan outlook on the world's cultures, how well spoken and empethatically spoken one is. They are "anywheres", not "somewheres,". The neoliberal's Democratic party is the party of the global, white-collar professional class, and serves its interests. The fact that many people in this category end up being racially white coastal elites from privileged academic backgrounds is a result, but it's not the parameters that define the group. If you think of President Obama, who graduated from Hawaii's most elite highschool before going to Harvard, in this way-- as the President of the party of the academic elite and professional elite class, everything he did makes perfect sense. There may be decisions that seem terrible to labor, the poor, immigrants, or minorities, but the balance of policies and politics makes perfect sense to the sensibilities of the academic/professional class.

Many people of that class may THINK it's representing the interests of the people or the world, but that's not the reality-- and that inability on the left to represent the people is what's causing politics to fail in a way that gives us people like Donald Trump.

It also means that no one is representing the 80, 90, or 99% of the population. The right will not do it, and the left isn't doing it.

Whether you prioritize the minority issues, or you prioritize the leftist universal issues (that do disproportionately benefit minorites and poor folks)-- you have to hope that the left in the US becomes better, and better able to govern... because representative government is only better than authoritarian regime because more people's interests are represented, taken into account; and right now, that's not happening. Populism is happening because the population isn't being given a voice. The left needs to be that voice, because no number of tea parties or Donald Trump style presidents will turn the right into that voice.
 
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Chou Toshio

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So i was wasting my lifetime instead of studying and i came across this video on social media. If you don't want to watch it is a quite well produced essay on how the left should stop being so sensitive about so called minor issues and change strategy and look in order to tackle the alt right and populist movements in general.
You might think yeah that sounds reasonable, we hear it all the time, but i've come to think that this is pretty much blackmailing minorities into subduing their power to the so called white progressive elites, as a lesser than two evils.
Doing so would eventually aggregate all major political issues in order to fight or contain the rise of right wing movement, the left would just build its consensus on representing the minorities and it would all work right?
Well i just think the problem is that it wouldn't. Despite what the video says this compromise for minorities is getting less and less advantageous by the day. Promises of redistribution of wealth stopped making sense after the last great war and identity politics pretty much fails in the current social environment as we see. The conflict between elites and minorities within the left is more and more apparent and in all this contradictions the right just found its place to boom and grow.

Believing that the main problem for the left is the form and not the content is fucking delusional. The left's blanket is way too short and all the unkept promises over the years just made everything worse.
Also, a narrative of the progressive elite trying to sideline minority issue talking points seems absurd. I think there is a real argument to be made that they are sidelining taking real substantive action to better the lives of minority voters, but the idea of them trying to sideline minority issue rhetoric seems unfounded. The liberal establishment doesn't sideline those talking points-- it abuses them. There are cynical forces within the left, and especially within the elite of the left, that have figured out that social justice requires self-defense to deal with past injustices, and that self-defense offers up awesome powers. I mean, you are morally allowed to kill a man in self-defense. So if you can always frame your political opponent as a bigot, than you can put yourself on the higher moral standing by default as a result. You don't have to address the argument or the issues. You can label the Jewish man fighting for economic justice as the leader of "Bernie-Bros" and then you don't have to contend with his ideas. Trump voters aren't constituents to be listened to, they're a "basket of deplorables" and therefore we're completely entitled to victory.

Since the Bill Clinton days, the liberal establishment have loved figuring out ways to tell their constituents "Yeah, we're bought by all the big elite interests-- but fuck you guys, you have no where else to go." Figuring out how to re-tool the rightful powers of social justice into weapons for political gains without actually having to de-prioritize working for the economic elite is just another variation. And unlike the white working class getting screwed by our Orange con-man, minority voters really don't have anywhere else to turn to.

To me the issue with social justice is not primarily that its outrage culture is making it impossible for the left to govern. Okay I mean, yes, it is doing that in my opinion, but that's a symptom and not a cause. The problem is that cynical parts of the left, including the elite establishment in media, academics, government, have figured out that the moral high ground social justice issues offer immense power, and have figured out how to shape the ideas and dogma of social justice to make it easily controllable got political gains.
 
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The principles of liberalism aren't entirely flawed, like protecting the environment and rights for LGBT citizens, but political correctness and social justice is just nonsense most of the time! Ex: using "improper" gender pronouns, being racist for disagreeing, stating facts over feelings. Because of this and other liberal policies I dislike, Unchecked immigration, limiting free speech, welfare, etc. I am more of a Republican.
 
calling card of those who dont understand what white privilege is: bring up homeless white people or the holocaust as examples of how white privilege doesnt exist so you can continue to live your life without being socially challenged and any problems other people face in society can simply be written off as mistakes on that person, rather than actually work to address inherent advantages and disadvantages in the social hierarchy of the modern world.
But white privilege doesn't exist, at least not even close to the extent it once did, and if it does, it is an extremely minuscule difference. Here's an example, but do not try it of course. If a black person were to call a white person a cracker, No big deal. People would shrug it off rather quickly. But if a white person were to call a black person the forbidden word, again, just an example, there would be outrage and anger among the bystanders, and the offender would likely be shunned or hated. Yet no one is talking about black privilege are they? It sounds like nonsense to democrats but white privilege sounds like nonsense to me. We live in a timeline of racial equality , which is a good thing.
 
But white privilege doesn't exist, at least not even close to the extent it once did, and if it does, it is an extremely minuscule difference. Here's an example, but do not try it of course. If a black person were to call a white person a cracker, No big deal. People would shrug it off rather quickly. But if a white person were to call a black person the forbidden word, again, just an example, there would be outrage and anger among the bystanders, and the offender would likely be shunned or hated. Yet no one is talking about black privilege are they? It sounds like nonsense to democrats but white privilege sounds like nonsense to me. We live in a timeline of racial equality , which is a good thing.
What you're talking about is a market of ideas aggregate of what people find offensive, which isn't really the same kind of process as the societal infrastructure that gives people opportunity.

It's true that essentially everyone, given the right chances, can make it, and this infrastructure is arguably better than it's ever been. But the people on the receiving end of being treated differently have noticed and collectively characterized the difference, and I choose to listen to them. Just like I choose to listen to the coal miners who feel like they have a harder time of things after Obama's term. They're the ones who live their lives, it would take an astounding amount of arrogance or evidence for me to presume to know better.

We can always do better. There will always be debate about whether cultural change, education, policy solutions, or enforcement of current policy will be the answer, but plugging our ears and pretending there isn't a problem doesn't solve anything.
 

fanyfan

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What you're talking about is a market of ideas aggregate of what people find offensive, which isn't really the same kind of process as the societal infrastructure that gives people opportunity.

It's true that essentially everyone, given the right chances, can make it, and this infrastructure is arguably better than it's ever been. But the people on the receiving end of being treated differently have noticed and collectively characterized the difference, and I choose to listen to them. Just like I choose to listen to the coal miners who feel like they have a harder time of things after Obama's term. They're the ones who live their lives, it would take an astounding amount of arrogance or evidence for me to presume to know better.

We can always do better. There will always be debate about whether cultural change, education, policy solutions, or enforcement of current policy will be the answer, but plugging our ears and pretending there isn't a problem doesn't solve anything.
Now I’m not familiar with who these coal miners are and all I could find is speculation on what Trump vs Obama could be like for coal miners, so excuse my ignorance on the subject, but I’m going to use this to illustrate a larger problem I have with the left currently.

So, for the coal miners, shouldn’t they have the evidence to back it up? If they’re the ones making the claim, the burden of proof should fall on them to show that there’s a problem. What policies exactly made them better under Obama rather than Trump? If it’s not policies, what exactly did Trump do to cause change elsewhere? Is it a coincidence? Is it because of the decline of the coal industry getting worse over time and has nothing to do with the president? Are their experiences reflective of all coal miners? I don’t know. Now, I’m not saying there’s not a problem and I’m not saying that the coal miners are lying or that Trump is innocent. Rather, believing without any evidence is my problem. Now, apologies if I misinterpreted your post, but the wording “choose to believe” is making me think you take them on face value without any evidence. Either way, this is something I see some people on the left do and I quite disagree with it. Politics based on emotions is not how things should be done. There are many reasons why someone could lie about their experiences, their experiences could be an isolated case and not reflective of the whole, etc. I don’t see the need to solve a problem when there’s no evidence for it, and if that happens, it usually backfires (as an example, hiring women firefighters and the like that aren’t physically qualified in order to combat sexism, I believe, and just ends up with less qualified people being in charge of saving people’s lives).

Now, I’ve been left-leaning for a long time, and I still consider myself left in the political spectrum, despite getting closer and closer to the center as time passes, and I don’t mean this as an attack. I do think identity politics and politics based on emotional appeals rather than facts end up with bad policies and our terrible political climate currently. To be clear, I think these things are wrong on both sides, but the left has a bigger problem with these recently.
 
Now I’m not familiar with who these coal miners are and all I could find is speculation on what Trump vs Obama could be like for coal miners, so excuse my ignorance on the subject, but I’m going to use this to illustrate a larger problem I have with the left currently.

So, for the coal miners, shouldn’t they have the evidence to back it up? If they’re the ones making the claim, the burden of proof should fall on them to show that there’s a problem. What policies exactly made them better under Obama rather than Trump? If it’s not policies, what exactly did Trump do to cause change elsewhere? Is it a coincidence? Is it because of the decline of the coal industry getting worse over time and has nothing to do with the president? Are their experiences reflective of all coal miners? I don’t know. Now, I’m not saying there’s not a problem and I’m not saying that the coal miners are lying or that Trump is innocent. Rather, believing without any evidence is my problem. Now, apologies if I misinterpreted your post, but the wording “choose to believe” is making me think you take them on face value without any evidence. Either way, this is something I see some people on the left do and I quite disagree with it. Politics based on emotions is not how things should be done. There are many reasons why someone could lie about their experiences, their experiences could be an isolated case and not reflective of the whole, etc. I don’t see the need to solve a problem when there’s no evidence for it, and if that happens, it usually backfires (as an example, hiring women firefighters and the like that aren’t physically qualified in order to combat sexism, I believe, and just ends up with less qualified people being in charge of saving people’s lives).

Now, I’ve been left-leaning for a long time, and I still consider myself left in the political spectrum, despite getting closer and closer to the center as time passes, and I don’t mean this as an attack. I do think identity politics and politics based on emotional appeals rather than facts end up with bad policies and our terrible political climate currently. To be clear, I think these things are wrong on both sides, but the left has a bigger problem with these recently.
Of course, finding the source of the problem and applying a proper solution is important, and that can be tricky like i said. I'd argue the issue with coal is probably mostly independent from executive policy, for instance. I'm only saying that if there seems to be a collective understanding (a soft line, but it generally works okay), that it's important to pay attention to someone's lived experience and start the difficult work in finding clear evidence and solutions rather than just immediately tell them to explain themselves.

Policy making is hard, the world is a complicated place. But it seems we keep getting stuck on the assumptions and argue about the state of reality more often than we talk about what to do about it.

Edit: I guess to put it another way, giving a collective account of lived experience credence and weight isn't the same thing as blind faith, and we shouldn't treat it as such. But I'm gonna sleep now.
 
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Deck Knight

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The issue of privilege for me comes down to the fact you can't talk about "institutionalized X" without addressing the institution's rules itself.

For example, there is institutionalized racism in academic admissions: Against Asians, For Blacks/Hispanics. Whites are so constituent (i.e. too large an overall percentage) it would be difficult to make a case for overt or covert discrimination for or against them. Part of this goes back to culture where Asian culture parents inculcate high academic standards for their children at such a rate they all skew into the upper percentile. Whereas other cultures the alarming trend of fatherless households knocks down not only academic achievement but every other indicator of health, wellness, and success.

If there was a single most important issue I think society could tackle, it is fatherless households. This means a number of policies that will receive pushback on welfare reform, criminal justice reform, divorce law, etc. Culturally it would aggravate the "toxic masculinity" crowd and gender activists. It also might require us to lionize single motherhood less. Using statistical indicators for child success, single mothers just aren't doing the work of two parents. The outcomes are too disparate. It doesn't mean they intend harm, but if death or partner abuse is not the reason for single motherhood the children are suffering for their mother's choice to divorce (and in an overwhelming majority of cases, the woman files for the divorce.)

Reason being that strong families obviate the need for a lot of government social policy. When you have a mother and father who are married looking out for their own biological children, every single indicator of success and independence correlates positively. Obviously there are still examples of bad/abusive/neglectful parents, the law has remedies for such behavior.

The family itself is an institution worth protecting, defending, and strengthening. It has the fundamental advantage of being a human institution accessible to all people, barring catastrophic misfortune.

A more difficult discussion would be a market society that assumes one-parent income vs two-parent incomes. Before WWII the market was primarily centered around the first assumption, in the Postwar period women went from being in the workforce by necessity to being in the workforce primarily by personal desire, to now being fully integrated into pricing mechanisms. Now that's a thorny one to unravel.
 

Deck Knight

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Good God it's an epidemic. Trump has won so much the left can't even troll properly anymore.

Maybe I am tired of all the winning...

Let's go on to something substantive, shall we:

ChouToshio said:
To me the issue with social justice is not primarily that its outrage culture is making it impossible for the left to govern. Okay I mean, yes, it is doing that in my opinion, but that's a symptom and not a cause. The problem is that cynical parts of the left, including the elite establishment in media, academics, government, have figured out that the moral high ground social justice issues offer immense power, and have figured out how to shape the ideas and dogma of social justice to make it easily controllable got political gain
The outrage culture is making it impossible for the left to govern literally (as in can't win elections) as well as figuratively. I ran into this article today and offers an example of what I'm about to go over: http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/05...ing-republican-democrats-treatment-kavanaugh/

Basically the problem with social justice is it tries to steep itself in maximum empathy for marginalized communities, but it's political mechanism requires maximum antipathy for majority / high-status communities (MHSC for short). This would be fine if MHSCs still felt the impulse to feel like they were bad people just for being MHSC. That stopped happening roughly around the early morning of November 9th, 2016 when the biggest "fuck you" to majority guilt impulse ever publicly declared won a national election. Most people in MHSC are fundamentally good people whose decency can be effectively appealed to. Given their high numbers, most people know an MHSC of some description and don't think they are unfeeling entitled scum. Guilt had a great strategic advantage when it felt like a requirement to acquiesce. The guilt impulse was heavily, heavily overused, and the response was to toss it aside and not look back.

The Kavanaugh overplay illustrates this. You cannot have an empathy movement that relies on antipathy for success. You cannot declare to fight for the rights of the marginalized while your political strategy mandates you marginalize MHSC to the point of throwing out Due Process (a fundamental and necessary right to preserve to protect marginalized/minorities). It is my fervent hope Democrats lose as many seats as possible in the Senate and Republicans not only retain, but pick up seats in the House. The social justice left have misread the moment. Democrats should never have doubled down on radicalism. They may not only have cost themselves a wave election, but set off an earthquake fueling the other side.
 

vonFiedler

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It is my fervent hope Democrats lose as many seats as possible in the Senate and Republicans not only retain, but pick up seats in the House. The social justice left have misread the moment. Democrats should never have doubled down on radicalism. They may not only have cost themselves a wave election, but set off an earthquake fueling the other side.
Many have speculated that it's this exact same sort of arrogance that kept Democrats home in 2016 instead of voting for a "sure-fire" victory.
 

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