Presidential election, 2016

[Bob Butler 54]

Kinser79 Wrote:

I Wrote:

Kinser79 Wrote:The wage gap is a myth.

Well, no.  This is one of the places where we live in different realities.  Your politics does blind you, can render you unable to perceive the real world.  I'm not interested in trying to remove your blinders at this point, though.

Yes, it is a myth.  Since we agree that we live in a mostly-capitalist society now, and since we agree that it is the class interests of those capitalists to maximize profits, it therefore holds that if said capitalist could get away with paying women 75 or 80 or however many cents on the dollar a man earns then the obvious solution would be fire all then men and hire only women.

Any other explanation simply doesn't stand up to Occam's Razor.

On the other hand, if we hold that men and women are different, and because of those differences they make different choices, then it should be self-evident that any differentials in income between men and women are the result of them making different choices.

Here, you are reminding me of your father.  Saying something doesn't make it so.  The Times has not apologized, he did advocate more countries acquire nuclear weapons, but he seems to think by repeating lies over and over reality will shift to fit the lies.  Women don't get equal pay for equal work.  No amount of sophistry, closing your eyes to facts which clash with your world view or repeating lies with persistence and ever increasing volume will change this.

(11-13-2016, 04:58 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: You're making the assumption here that the Democratic Party is the progressive party this time around--the evidence for which is non-existent.

By this line of argument I would contend that the so-called new elites are not a new elite at all but simply a New Money version of the old elite.

You were the one that said the old elites didn't exist anymore, and called out one particular industry as the new elites.  

My own notion of an arrow of progress works far better on issues than political parties.  If one favors giving more wealth to the existing elite ruling class at the expense of the working people, one is conservative on that issue.  In any given S&H crisis, those advocating for continued dominance by the existing ruling elites would be conservative.  This doesn't mean that someone conservative on economic issues can't be progressive on on women's health care or marriage equality.  Not every Republican is conservative on every issue.  Thus, I don't care all that much to assign labels in this case, though on most of the issues we are talking about here, the Republicans do come up as conservative under my definition.

Again, I am not Noah Webster or Humpty Dumpty.  I can't mandate how you use the word.  The side that gets to write the history books is progressive?  There is some sort of truth in that, but I can't judge which party is which by that definition, and won't be able to until after the fact.  I'm more interested in resolving issues that assigning labels.  My definition is focused towards examining problems and suggesting the sort of answers that traditionally have fixed them.  Retroactive labeling after the fact is useless for what I'm trying to do.

I am happier with saying the capitalist class -- the owners of the means of production -- still exist and that the computer folk are a subgroup of the robber barons as a whole.  They will be pushing somewhat different agendas than those invested in oil, armaments, automobiles, or any other industries, but computer industry robber barons are not basically different from other robber barons.