That's kinda what I'm writing. I don't think Biden sleaze will impact the vote much as he will stand by policies certain people like (and may call equality). So, supporting him may make sense for that reason.
Biden clenches the nomination.
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Your moving goalposts again. Stop it. You do not seem to like arguing in good faith. I am not going to even pretend to take you seriously if you insist on doing things this way. Like I said, you remind me of The Lunatic, a user who did exactly this kind of stuff. He got banned for being a Nazi, like a literal Nazi.
-I- am not. I am talking about what left and right ACTUALLY mean. Republicans call themselves Republican, but they do not support 'Republican' views. And most people who call themselves 'moderate' or 'centrist' are actually far right.
Human rights policies are more important than tax systems. I would prefer having someone who supports good versions of both, but I will take a President who installs good human rights laws and protections than someone who is good at the economy, because usually those rights last longer than that economy does. Economic depressions come and go, but slavery is still illegal, and women can still legally vote.
And better for us all to be poor as equals, than for some of us to be poor and unequal, cause then we tend to stay poor, even in a 'good economy'.
I am someone versed in history. I am someone who knows about the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and WWII. I am someone who is glad that England was defeated, even if it was by a slave owner who hypocritically whined about the virtues of 'freedom'. I am someone who realizes that the Reign of Terror while wrong, was better than continued abuses under the nobility. I am someone who thinks slavery is still worse than Jim Crow laws. And that Hitler and his Nazi Germany had to be defeated, even if it was by teaming up with Stalin.
If you want to wait to act only when the perfect person comes along, then you will be waiting forever. Life is not perfect, and we cannot wait. You cannot walk 1000 miles without first taking a single step.
That's not how the terms are defined, nor how they're commonly used & understood. It's also not true to the origin of the terms.
The relative perceived importance of one area of policy over another doesn't come into it.
Gorfias, you seriously need to stop getting your political context from Youtubers like Sargon of Akkad. He has no credentials whatsoever and a track record of outright making shit up. There's not really any good reason anyone here should give him the time it takes to watch.
If you have a specific point to make, make that point-- don't post an insulting provocateur to make a whole video argument on your behalf. We'll address the argument on its own merits. There's nothing to be gained by sitting through a derisive, one-sided broadcast to get to the point you'd like to make.
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No, this is fundamentally wrong. Greed is not exercised by giving up one's ability to generate wealth - if we're talking traditional sins, that is if anything sloth. Creating wealth is fine. The issue with greed is in the distribution of wealth.
From here we may as well go straight to possibly Marx's most incisive comment, which is that capitalists profit at the expense of workers. If labour produces X much value, workers must receive less than X so that the capitalists who own businesses can take the difference in profit. Therefore, there is always drive to decrease the salaries of workers. That is the basic framework that underpins our current economic system, and probably the single largest political divide in society: those who want to give the workers more, and those that don't. That conflict extends to public services, as taxes of course are largely paid by the rich (and the richest mostly earn through capitalistic ownership, not any labour they may also do) to pay for services that often heavily benefit the poor. Welfare and public services inherently reflect the degree to which people on low-middle incomess cannot afford from their salaries huge amounts of things we deem they should. And we might note that whilst salaries at the bottom end are subjected to savage downward pressure from the market, the people running the companies are under no pressure at all, and corporate boards inflate their own salaries to their heart's content. This introduces to us the basic concept of power in the mix. Those with power protect or benefit themselves at the expense of others. This is why businesses try to squash labour unions, because labour unions offer workers more power to fight their case. This is why businesses and workers tend to fight over who runs the government, because the government offers power to oversee the rules of wealth distribution.
Bezos is greedy because he packs his workers into things like distribution centres to work like dogs for minimal salaries; distribution centres whose location is chosen because his vastly wealthy and profitable company encourages governments to compete with each other by offering more subisidies or tax relief to have them. And then dreams up all sorts of whizzo tax cheats to avoid paying anything back to government. It is in fact amazing just how much of corporate success is not based in inventiveness and superiority of product / service, but in creative accountancy and exploitation of workers.
I'm furious that Amazon - because of TV streaming and deliveries - will end up making a lot of money from coronavirus. The government has borrowing eye-watering sums to keep the economy from collapse, and a fair chunk of that has effectively gone to Amazon. We've got to pay it back: do you think Bezos and Amazon are going to decide fair's fair, do their bit and help out by actually paying their taxes without all the usual scams? Of course they bloody aren't, unless we force them. We save the economy, lots of companies and the investments of their shareholders, and then they turn round and do everything they can to make other people pay off the debt.
There are other things, especially with the gig economy and casualised workers. Many of them are expected to provide their own equipment - uniforms, transportation, etc. In essence, they are expected to do the traditional work of capitalists by providing the means to produce goods and services. But the sick thing is, whilst they're being exposed to the capitalist risks of investment, they don't get the capitalist payout, because they don't get shares in the company. That's the world we've got to, where capitalists even outsource the risks that are supposed justify their profits. When companies lobby government to relax pollution controls, it means they belt out more shit that costs a load of other people money - respiratory disorders, toxic water that has to be cleaned up by taxpayers, damaged agriculture and losses to farmers, etc. This all boils down to distribution of wealth, leveraged by power. Hundreds of people get $1000 a year expenses for beta-agonist and corticosteroid inhalers, and a CEO has got a $1 million a year bonus/dividend. It can be phrased in terms of "efficiency" and "cost reductions" and "stronger, more competitive business" as euphemisms, but what really is is that the CEO has effectively redistributed money from random people to himself, even despite earning vastly more in the first place. Greed.
Yes, because we've had years of exactly this, just saying they are theoretically uninvolved with the DNC means nothing in the face of the political machine the DNC is able to bring to bear. The evidence here is that the only people to benefit from the decision is the DNC and without there being strong evidence of the DNC not being involved in the election board, it's safe to say they're involved in this decision.
And as always, like the DNC, platitudes. Sanders isn't the perfect person, he's just the only reasonable choice presented, and the DNC wants to fight to the death to stop a small step forward.
But there's the problem. The creation of wealth, and abundant resources, isn't unique to capitalism. It can be achieved under communism. The difference is that, under capitalism, the wealthy are able to hoard the resources as necessary. They are able to utilize money to influence elections, impact laws, hoard and control intellectual property and trademarks, snuff out innovation and invention, and exploit workers. You use Jeff Bezos as an example. It's true that he's not gaining wealth by taking the wealth of others. But he is exploiting the production of workers, both at home and abroad. Amazon is infamous for its poor treatment of workers, and for their unsafe working conditions. There are many types of exploitation and greed. Under communism, those same resources could be controlled communally, and distributed as necessary. Communism is fat more democratic then the system we have in place now, where those with wealth and power have more of a voice then others. I understand that it's difficult for people to wrap their head around, since its an alien concept to so many, but its so, so important that you understand what I'm trying to explain to you. You would benefit under this system as well. Heck, so would billionaires, spiritually.
My friend, you've bought into the propaganda. Greed isn't just a desire for wealth, its a desire for wealth, even if it hurts others. And there is a benefit to it. Look at a recent example, with Gamestop. They have been refusing to close their stores in the face of the recent epidemic. Their management has been told to quarantine, while their staff were told to continue on, business as usual. Now, this decision wasn't stupid, because their financials are so bad, that they may not survive shutting down for weeks or months without going out of business. Staying open is to their benefit, as it may allow them to survive, and it may allow them to benefit from the lack of competition. However, it is also greedy because, in order to gain this advantage, they have to expose their employees, their employees families, and their customers to disease. They were even having release events for Doom and Animal Crossing. Now, you can claim that this wasn't greed, because maybe they were thinking about their employees monetary needs. If they go out of business, those people lose their jobs. But we know that isn't the case for several reasons. One, they are notorious for mistreating their employees, and firing them if they fail to meet their card quotas more then once. Second, the leadership was not giving their employees cleaning material, and they were resisting demands to adopt a curb side pickup policy. Furthermore, they were resisting calls to pay employees who did not want to work, out of fear of getting sick. Eventually they did adopt some of these policies, after a major backlash. But their methods were to tell employees to wrap their hands in plastic bags.
The morally responsible thing for them to do would be to close down, even if it meant possible bankruptcy. Many comic shops have done this, even though their in dire financial straight after the closing of Diamond Distributors. They refused to do that, because they wanted to make money. This is greed, because it potentially comes at the cost of the health of their employees, and the community, since they were not taking adequate safety measures to keep them safe. Greed can be very beneficial to the greedy person, in terms of financials. Simply put, you are wrong.
Ain't moving any goalposts since you still seem to be under the illusion that I wanted concentration camps and claiming I'm right wing. I don't know what personal beefs you have with what people on this site, but you are literally unable to read the part where I said it was justifiable to the American public. It's obvious you want to think that Obama was left wing whilst there are people around the world and in Mexico who would gladly want to see him publically shamed and degraded for the things he has committed acting on behalf of the state you are a part of and you personally benefit from. If you can't see the logic behind those actions and those of japanese concentration camps as the same then that's on you, you're obviously fine with Obama pushing out what he deems are the undesireables at the behest of a politico-economic structure, whilst feigning humanism through shallow appeals like DACA which serve to only justify violence through performative 'humaneness'.
My point being that parties not aligning with those terms is systematic practice, and if terms like these are imperfect then we are in dire need of a general platform of social emancipation so that we need to stop capitulating to the parliamentary machinery if we identify concepts that would be useful for the good of human beings overall. If left and right aren't totalities and are relativisitic, then I don't find them to be quantifiably useful terms in anything outside of the sphere in which they are used in tandem with political actions. Actions, which I think are horribly alienated and consequently empower a structure I fundamentally disagree with, though that's the anti-revisionism cropping up.
This stigma regarding people not voting because they're lazy is also precisely what I'm talking about. If the action has the same consequence, that of voting a spoiled ballot and not voting, then what gives you the right to persecute people for not wanting to vote in the first place, when they don't want to pay lip service to a structure that does not serve any of their interests and has shown nothing but contempt for their political agency? It is absurdly elitist, especially considering how many non-voters are among the most disenfranchised in the US overall.
Yes, people do lie and misuse terms and say one thing but mean another. That is my point. I am saying the definitions they are and how they are used are not accurate to what they actually are.
We live in the time where the person calling themselves an American Republican are also supportive of the Confederate flag. Anyone who knows history should understand the absurdity of that.
Who gets to decide what counts as a legal right to be in a certain place? The earth you stand on does not come inscribed with ownership details, and indeed, both are racist, and both may have different justifications on the surface, but the internment of Japanese civvies was nothing but racist action stirred by a public sentiment of revanchism, paired with the pre-packaged notion of the 'other' as a fifth column. The same logic is used by border patrol vigilantes, that illegal immigrants seek to undermine the US from within, and the economic justification rolled out once again by those invested in state interests reduces people whose crime is to seek a better life into an economically malevolent entity. Both are structurally identical, both are justified by the same racist sentiment. The targets of prejudice are irrelevant, and it is the system that perpetuates brutality that needs to be dismantled and called out whenever it manifests itself, under whatever seemingly benign premises like 'legal right to residence'.
As for nations, there is nothing natural about their development. Your argument is ahistorical and a synthetic a-priori at that. Both the mode of organising society, economy and politics have developed massively over the years, but never linearally like you point out. They were messy processes of a variety of competing developments, cascading together into political singularities that resulted in new, unpredictable outcomes. Social relations are not prescribed with the end of result of nationhood. Every nation is built on the false premise of cultural totalitarianism and exclusion. Humans being inherently social creatures makes this insanely deterministic as a conceptualisation overall.
You: 'We should support Bernie!'
Bernie: 'We should vote blue no matter what!'
You: 'Anyone who votes blue no matter what is anti-Bernie'
I said he was the best, I didn't say he was right all the time. He's bound by his politics, but even a casual reading of the situation tells anyone that 'vote blue no matter who (they rape)' isn't a smart strategy.
The thing I find most interesting about the Reade allegations is how many people that downplay them also argued that the allegations against Kavanaugh were absolutely true with question. The hypocrisy there I find deeply amusing, especially when they don't see it themselves.
Have you ever considered, even for a moment, the possibility that if what you consider "far right" starts well to the left of what most would consider the center within this country that perhaps you might be much more extremist than you believe and that might possibly skew your view of others?
Define those. In detail. I'll wait.
For example, is the Equal Rights Amendment a good example of such a policy? Better with or without the Hayden rider? What else?
Is it OK to place special legal burdens on someone on the basis of gender, or special requirements to receive a job or entitlement? Does it matter what gender those additional burdens are placed on?
Is it OK to set different requirements for employment or promotion on the basis of gender? Does it matter what those requirements are or who is negatively effected?
The problem, ultimately is that it's a whole series of smaller questions that it's very difficult to get people to agree on when you get down to the details.
You realize the direct consequence of having sold "Vote blue no matter who" as hard as they have is that means blue no longer has to do anything more than pay slightly more lip service to your views than red. Running Biden is only slightly better than running Clinton again and assuming that enough people are pissed enough at Trump that they'll definitely win this time and thus don't need to bother to really sell themselves. Who knows, maybe he'll pick exactly the right VP and suggest the right cabinet picks to excite some folks but Biden doesn't exactly get out the vote like his former boss could.
But he's not someone that in your analogy would take even that single step - he's someone who will nap at the starting line instead of angrily shouting at clouds like the other guy.
As per the Current Events subforum rules, please do not engage in any kind of personal attack against other users. Attack the argument, not the person.
Given her low content post, I don't think she's actually being serious. I think she's trying to bait people. She's probably from 4chan. No one who supports left wing policies in good faith talks this way. It's like a caricature of a leftist.
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Ultimately, whoever controls the territory
It is very natural for humans to group together and for nations to develop out of that, since as you mentioned, we are social creatures.
Grouping together does not entail nationhood. The vast majority of human existence was not on the level of nations, social relations have transformed and changed with every mode of organisation, and they have done so unpredictably. Tribalism and manorism are not the same as feudalism - both the linguistic and kinship unity of each respective mode of social organisation are completely different and correspond to totally different divisions of society. Tribes can be run based on allocating work by efficiency, or on communal effort. Feudalism mandates strict social stations, with every member of society occupying a specific station to encourage the harmony of the political organ as a whole, with its fixed referrent and host of political action being the King. Communal ownership is afforded relative to the hierarchic status of the subject and station. A commune of landworkers will ultimately be subservient to lords, who may ultimately freely share land as they fit, and the King does so with their vassals and family, but total freedom across stations, in terms of material access, is not tolerated. A tribe and a kingdom are two separate entitites, and so consequently is a nation-state, which as a concept was only developed in the late 19th century by German Unionists to create a cultural bond and a sprachbund in order to intiate federalisation under military and economic principles. A nation is organised along the level of a parliament, those within it who enact decisions and the majority, whose alienated political agency in the form of a vote (or sometimes not even in that) are afforded certain economic liberties and whose participation in the political and economic process, independent of their relative contribution to the economy, is used to legitimise the function of the state. Those are all material motivations, but the concept of a 'nation' is not natural, it is a pure construction, historically and culturally contingent (ask Roma and Tuaregs about what they think constitutes a nation from their cultural perspective) and we have no more need of it. At the most fundamental level, the only natural state of human existence is cooperation. That in itself has a variety of shapes, more more natural than the other, but they can be more beneficial or efficient depending on material circumstances. A nation is fundamentally a more economically and politically efficient entity than a Kingdom, due to the state apparatus facilitating a monopoly of political action that can in theory be taken control of by any one particular group to enact its whims. Feudalism meanwhile, ceases functioning the minute the King's authority is called into question and leads to strife.
Furthermore, If nations are predicated by the right of residence by whoever controls the nation, then it is a totalitarian concept that treats human beings with utter contempt and seeks the domination of the weak at the behest of the powerful. The creation of legal and illegal entities is also something new and not natural, but is tied to the concept of a nation to begin with within the very morality you posted. Consequently, if that is the reasoning, then internment camps and detention centers are the natural outcome of such a mentality. The ruling classes get to decide what it means to be a legal entity, they predicate this on a fear of the 'other' exploiting them, so consequently they create laws and rules to identify the 'other' so that they may be persecuted in order to preserve what wealth is afforded the population, if that is needed (the US already came prepackaged with this due to slavery and religious persecution). This is constructed on the basis of national unity, a shared set of cultural, national values mandated on an arbitrary, ahistorical basis (who is an American? What constitues American and non-American being other than a piece of paper?) to mitigate the actual cultural instability and plurality of the modern social sphere (admittedly this is something that european nationalism is more famous for since America never had an outright fascist platform on totalitarian unity, unless you count Huey Long), differences are drawn using a variety of constructed lines like race, nation, creed, etc. and consequently antagonisms are ready-made and persecution on economic and jingoistic terms is always ready to be used. War is a convenient excuse. The constant state of economic terrorism under capitalism is another excuse.
When evil is normal, good is extreme. Centrists operate between Trump and Biden, favoring Trump. Do you consider Biden left-wing? I do not doubt how extreme my position is compared to the status quo. But that is the status quo's failing, not mine. When slavery was legal, being anti-slavery was an extremist view to have.
Its not a series of smaller questions. If you believe that, you have fallen for the propaganda of the bigots. Equal means equal. But then the bigots claim 'Well, certainly black people dont count?' and then we have to specify they count too, then they go 'Well, no way you also mean women?' and we have to specify yes women too, then the bigots go 'Well, ok, but there is no way you expect us to treat the gays as equals to us!?' And we have to palm our faces and go 'Of fucking course we mean them too! Equal means equal!'
Perhaps you know this quote?
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!"
Lip service my ass. Honestly, I dont give a fuck if Hillary likes supporting LGBT rights as long as she does. Lip service from democrats is why I can marry. Thanks Democrats!
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