04-20-2018, 06:03 AM
(04-19-2018, 10:54 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(04-19-2018, 08:17 PM)Another Xer Wrote:(04-19-2018, 08:02 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:(04-19-2018, 03:15 PM)Another Xer Wrote:(04-19-2018, 11:34 AM)David Horn Wrote: The concept of Left and Right has so thoroughly changed over the last several decades that it's hard to use those terms to compare historical and current politicians with one another. Worse, neither party is even vaguely united. The GOP has a Trumpian-Populist wing and a Pro-business-small government wing. The Dems have a wing consisting of a disconnected coalition of mostly disadvantaged social groups, a Neo-Liberal wing and one that can be called liberal-populist. Neither party has a coherent message, with the Dems the least coherent of the two.
If the Dems win big in November, it may be a Pyrrhic victory. With politicians representing all three wings (and a few standing outside the mainstream entirely), show me how they will accomplish anything more productive than fighting amongst themselves.
Disunity among Democrats is typically one of the most overhyped narratives of the last many decades. Policy-wise, there was not much difference between Hillary and Bernie. Much of the supposed division between the two, I think, was unique to the individuals. Bernie, an Independent running as an old fashioned liberal and Hillary Clinton, who is a lightning rod for differing opinions. Replace those names with Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren and you get the same minimal policy differences without all the rancor.
Democrats all pretty much stand for the same things - the difference is the degree to which they want to go and the emphasis on certain things (i.e. is campaign finance reform the OMG #1 issue or is it lower down on the list of priorities).
Hillery and Bernie have lots of differences. Hillery is the usual establishment Democrat. She's a member of the axis of evil, Neocon-Neoliberal sort. Bernie is a populist , although he has some trace of taking establishment positions.
NeoCon: is a label I affix to someone who supports stupid shit like the US is the "exceptional nation", likes to suck'Israel's cock,
huge military budgets, bases strewn the globe over, supports regime change, and the new evil empire basically.
NeoLiberal: is a label I affix to someone who supports global capital flows, knocking down trade barriers, knocking down nation state laws against cartels, labor exploitation, pollution, strip mining a nation's economy in general. These people are truly evil, since this ideology is trashing the earth. The results of this ideology are that there are just inputs and outputs to transnationals in their quest for profit. In fact, the earth is just a huge sewer for their products when folks are done with them. The earth of course is a sewer for strip mining natural resources , pollution, and landfills.
SJW's/snowflakes: Whiny ass people who (((obsess))) over minutia, imho.
I'd love a combo of Republican and Democrat populists because I'd like all of the Democrat populist positions along with the fact I think we need a nation state to protect against multinationals and unrestrained capital flows. The Republican populists have the right idea on border control, but they need to drop tossing folks in detention for months on end. I can go for any sort of compromise on securing the border in exchange for a path to citizenship for those are here. Restricting future immigration needs to be permanent though. A worker's bill of rights which extends the minimum wage to all persons along with REAL-ID along with some punitive fines for employers who hire illegals. The pull part of illegal immigration needs fixing just as much as pull. On the push side, I'd love to see the US empire crash and burn so Latin America can chart its own destiny. Transnationals are ruining small farms and others and that's another reason for illegal immigration. Finally, I'd get rid of the war on drugs which should also help Latin America.
I find the obsession with disadvantaged groups to be symbolism over substance as well. Like when the fuck are all of these snowflakes gonna start talking about real stuff like the prison industrial complex, defacto debtor's prisons where folks rot , just because they can't make bail, lead poisoning in places like Flint, folks with no proper waste disposal like poor folk in the South, etc. ?
The status quo can't last forever since is isn't sustainable or resilient.
I stopped at "(Hillary's) a member of the axis of evil."
I'm sure you can do better.
He can. Actually, when our esteemed moderator and bird award supervisor took a political questionnaire, he came out scoring close to Hillary. Of course she was just fine on most issues, and was close to Bernie. The neo-con and neo-lib labels are right as you define them, Rags, but they don't apply to Hillary. I would just say she was more hawkish than Bernie, and more liable to compromise with keeping the corporate neo-liberals in line, but she did strongly advocate keeping them in line, and her record was as good as any progressive. Her problem is that she has a low horoscope score. She could not communicate effectively and dispell the mistrust people had in her and the lies told about her.
That's the moderator?
Lol, this site has issues.