Omnibus Politics Thread: Campaign 2016 EditionFollow

And Hitler did the same thing. And so did Stalin. Neither of those people subscribed to any iteration of liberalism. Perhaps it's true that the Japenese camps in America had nothing to do with liberal ideology and everything to do with the prevailing attitudes as to how total war should be waged? The British did the same thing (Churchill was a conservative), though in fairness most of the interred were released fairly quickly. Hm. Let's sit and contemplate the evidence.

Edited, Feb 5th 2016 10:54pm by Kavekkk

Yeah. Socialist.



Also a socialist.

The problem is that people on the left pretend that when socialism results in terrible things happening, it just wasn't socialism. Um... Yes, it was. The underlying ideology of socialism is that the government can and should take control of the society and make it "better". The only difference is that sometimes, one socialist's idea of what is "better" differs from yours. Hitler thought German society was made better by exterminating anyone who didn't fit the model of Aryan supremacy. Stalin thought that Russian society was made better by doing that as well. Oh yeah, and Mao did the same thing in his country. Only to be fair to him, he didn't so much actively kill of undesirable folks and accidentally kill them when attempting to implement his economic policies, which he'd been assured would result in much greater prosperity for everyone.

And hey. Let's toss Pol Pot in the ring too, while we're at it. All were following the ideology of socialism. All sold what they were doing to an adoring public on the grounds that if that public just gave them enough power, they would make all their problems go away, their lives more meaningful, their pockets full, their belly's full, etc. Sound familiar? It's the same message Sanders is selling. Because that's what socialism is about.

Have you ever listened to a speech given by FDR? It's actually kinda scary the language he used. It's quite possible that had Hitler not done what he did in Germany, and Stalin what he did, and the Japanese not attacked us, we might have had a government that killed a similarly large number of people over time. We were certainly headed in that direction. His policies viewed people as numbers on a ledger to be moved around based on what was best for the whole, and not really caring much about individual rights along the way. If we hadn't gotten embroiled in a major war that required our focus elsewhere, and made additional massive social and economic programs impossible to implement, it's hard to know what might have happened.



Um... Because socialism isn't "liberalism". It's more broadly called "social liberalism", but that's just a label. Liberalism is about the rights of individuals within a society being of paramount importance. Socialism is specifically about the idea that individual rights are less important than group outcomes. That's why socialists are perfectly willing to infringe rights if the result is "better for the whole". The ends justify the means is well accepted on the left.




Again, I take issue with the term liberal. Liberal in the modern US sense really aligns with "social liberalism", which is a broad term for socialism (as a philosophy, not as a form of government, which is where the distinction lies). It's not the same as "classical liberalism" which is best expressed in the philosophies of guys like Locke, and which bears very little resemblance to modern liberal ideology but quite a bit to modern conservative ideology.

Social liberalism basically looks at classical liberalism, and say's "That's nice, but giving people that much freedom allows them to make bad decisions. If we empower the government to make those decisions for the people, the people will collectively be better off". It is precisely about sacrificing liberty for what is presumed to be a better overall result.

The problem is that, once you've accepted the fact that government can infringe individual liberties to make society as a whole "better", you are at the whim of those planners and have to basically hope you get folks who aren't going to send you to the camps. It's more or less luck as to what you get. Hitler looked like a great guy with great ideas that would fix the German economy, create jobs, and make them a great nation again. And along the way, he demonized the rich who were taking from the poor and working classes and preventing their success. Sound familiar? Replace "rich" with "jews" and go read a Sanders speech sometime. And no, I'm not kidding here.

No one thought he'd actually round people up into camps and exterminate them. Just as I'm assuming no one's thinking that Sanders would round up wealthy conservatives and put them into camps either. No. He'll just maybe confiscate their wealth? Or maybe something else? What do you think he'll actually do? How do you "fix the jewishwealthy problem"? It's the same darn rhetoric. The problem is that people fail to see it. And they fall for it. Again and again.


The only way to ensure against such things is to not empower the government to that degree in the first place. That's the position of conservatives. We are not egotistical enough to assume that we have all the right answers and know what's best for everyone. And so we support a form of government that minimize the power it has over us all. Liberals, on the other hand, and certainly full socialists like Sanders, just assume that if we just put the right smart people in a room, and we give them enough power to implement whatever ideas they come up with, they can make all our lives better. Problem is that sometimes those smart people, come up with "solutions" that are pretty darn horrific. And we get Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Russia, and Mao's China. And people die by the tens of millions. And we still fail to learn the lesson.

Edited, Feb 5th 2016 8:25pm by gbaji

You not understanding something doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. You don't care about the 300,000. Hell, you don't care about the 3,000. You just thought evoking 9/11 would legitimize your hypothetical. Staying in Iraq. Next question. They wouldn't. Because if you were consistant then someone with a complete lack of a plan should get the same reaction regardless of their affiliation. You've spent the last few days on Sanders "lack of a plan" but quiet on Cruz. That shows it isn't the lack of plan you are concerned with. No, it really isn't. In fact it's no different than just being quiet. It's a soundbite idiots would be drawn to. And lo and behold, here you are. "Peace is going to be Hell on me" is something I look for in a soldier, not a President. Sure, someone just stole your account and posted exactly like you. Tell us again how waitresses make as much as Brigadier Generals and how Romney is actually winning because the polls are all wrong.

Oh, and tell the New Yorker how New Yorkers think.

Edited, Feb 5th 2016 11:46pm by lolgaxe

Hah. I was being somewhat tongue in cheek with my comparison of "rich" and "jews", but it's interesting to note that jews in Germany in 1933 made up .75% of the population. So not quite a 99% versus 1% equivalent, but well... similar. Remember that the jews weren't scapegoated in Germany because of their religion (although as a religious minority, it surely made it easier), but because they were assumed to be the wealthy class who owned the banks and the businesses and were portrayed as siphoning the wealth away from the people (the 99.25% in this case) and to themselves.

It's the same basic argument today. The label is more broad is all. But, once again, the same siren's song of socialism plays out, convincing the poor and working classes that all their woes are the result of evil rich people taking from them. Ironically, at least here in the US, the correlation between the growth of relative wealth in the hands of fewer people is to greater prosperity for the poor and working class, not the other way around. As the rich have gotten richer, the standard of living for the poor has grown somewhat, the working class quite a bit, and the middle class enormously. The model of wealth distribution over time is less like a blob growing at one end of the spectrum, and more like a rubber band stretching. If you pin one end down and think of that as "zero wealth", and each point along the way as a percentile within the wealth spectrum, you'll find that while the farthest end (the 1%) gains the most relative distance, every point along the band gains as well.

Socialist economic ideology rests on lying to people as to the causes of their problems, and presenting them with simplistic solutions that look great at first glance and if not really examined closely, but that don't really work in any real economy. Sure, you can take money from one side and hand it to the other, but you break other parts of the economic equation when you do that. And to fix those problems, you have to do yet more meddling. And more. And more. And ultimately, you don't ever actually improve the lot of those at the bottom at all. They are still poor. Maybe slightly more comfortable for a time, but over the course of their lives, they become statistically more poor, not less. Because your economic prospects are not set based on where you start, but how you move upwards over your lifetime. And one of the first casualties of socialist economic policies is a decline in upward mobility. So while the 20 year old may get a better deal under socialism, he's economic condition wont change much over his lifetime. Thus, he'll be worse off at age 40 than he would have been otherwise. And much worse off at age 60.

And more importantly, over the entire course of his live, he'll be strongly dependent on the government for his lifestyle. Which is where the real rights problem comes in. He's traded his freedom for a lifetime of living slightly better than a subsistence existence. Which I think is a really really poor choice.

Because when I use it, I'm referring to modern liberal political ideology. When you used it in return, you seemed to be using it as a synonym for "a philosophy based on the principles of liberalism". Which, as I explained in my earlier post, is not remotely what modern liberal political ideology is about. Modern liberal is more properly aligned with "social liberalism", which is itself a rejection of the core tenant of classical liberalism, that places individual rights at the forefront. Social liberalism is not classical liberalism. It's an ideology that places broad social outcomes ahead of individual rights. While it's technically in the same school of philosophy in the sense that it's an attempt to operate a government that rules for the betterment of the people rather than merely the betterment of those in power, it's very very different in terms of how it measures "better", and what methodology it allows in the pursuit of "better".



Not if you mean "liberal" as "putting the rights and liberties of individuals first". Clearly he was not.



I disagree. You're getting caught up in the label "liberal" and an assumed meaning based on the root. But if we mean liberal as in "those ascribing to a modern US political policy broadly labeled as liberal", then yes, they were liberal. Because modern US liberals most closely follow the same ideology of "social liberalism" that Hitler and Stalin followed. The underlying defining concept is the idea that it's ok, and even necessary for the government to infringe on the rights of individuals in order to make the social and/or economic outcomes of the whole society better.



Again though, you're retroactively applying the label based on whether the resulting outcome was "good" or "bad". But I'm looking at the methodology. In all of these cases, the underlying assumption is that government can put the good of the whole ahead of the rights of the individual in the pursuit of making that whole "better" than it would be otherwise. What do you think justifies Obamacare requiring that individuals must purchase health insurance even if they don't want to? Putting the whole ahead of the individual is the core concept behind it. That if we force people to buy something they don't want or need, it'll add to the total pool of money for health care, thus helping pay for that care for those who do need it but otherwise could not afford it.

That is social liberalism. I don't want to call it "socialism" because that has a specific meaning in terms of actual established governments (definitions get tricky here). But when someone says they are a "socialist", it means that they are an adherent to the basic concept of social liberalism I just outlined above. They believe that the government should take actions which infringe individual rights when it believes that a greater good will result.

How extreme the actions, or the infringement, or whether we agree with the greater good being pursued does not determine whether it is or isn't social liberalism. It's the fact of weighting that greater good higher than individual liberty when contemplating government action and power that does. It's the concept behind the action that defines it, not the action itself. And in all of these cases, the underlying assumption driving them was (and is) that the government should be the vehicle to force individuals to work for or contribute to a greater good, even at the expense of their own liberty. It's the same whether we're talking about social security, or medicare, or ACA, or welfare, or food stamps, or a host of domestic programs that take from one group to provide for another. The underlying assumption is that the government can do a better job with your property than you can.

And that is in complete opposition to the principles of classical liberalism.



No, we don't. For things like national defense and some basic interstate rules and regulations, sure. Those are necessary roles of our federal government. Most conservatives are very much opposed to the federal government taxing them to spend money on welfare, and even education. This is something that can and should be done at the state or even local level, where the people have more power and choice.

We don't spend money on the military to make our society a better place. We do it to protect us from foreign threats and to have the ability to press our issues around the world. You're still missing the key components that the objective is to make "society better". This means social programs. Taking money from private citizens and giving it to other private citizens because you think it's more fair that way, or will make a greater percentage of the people happier, is what makes it social liberalism, and what makes us conservatives oppose it. It's not that we hate the poor, or want people to starve, but that we don't think the government, especially the federal government, is the right vehicle for providing that help.



Except for our constant calls to eliminate spending on things like NPR, right? Social security and medicare is a bit trickier because even a socialist like FDR couldn't quite get them set up as true socialist programs and had to structure them like investment accounts. Um... But the opposition to those programs on the right is stronger today than it has been for decades, ever since the left more or less abandoned the idea that these were investments and are now treated as just additional tax revenue to use to fund retirement and medical care for the elderly. Add in Obamacare, which tosses out even the most basic idea of people having to pay into the program in order to get anything out, and you see even more opposition.

There's a pattern to what we oppose and how much we oppose it. And it does align with these principles I'm talking about.



The GOP would love to destroy the welfare state. I'm not sure why you think otherwise. The reason we haven't done so is because it's actually quite tricky, once you have so many millions of people dependent on government benefits, to get them off those benefits. But yeah, if there were way to wave a magic wand tomorrow and eliminate welfare entirely, without having some serious short term negatives on those currently addicted to it? We'd do it in a heartbeat. Because we believe that it serves more to trap people in poverty than to help them deal with it.



Um.... There's a massive and really critical difference between infrastructure that is neutral in terms of application versus programs that directly interact with individuals and their own outcomes. A road doesn't tell me where to go. Police protect my property just as much as the next guy's. The law, in theory, is blind, and we're all equal under it. These are all things that government can do, and arguably should to in order to create an environment in which a society can exist. But none of those affect the resulting society itself.

When government gets into the business of directly providing people with food, shelter, health care, and education, it's going too far. And yes, that's generally where conservatives tend to draw the line. And that's not arbitrary. If I pay taxes to maintain the roads, everyone benefits from those roads to the same degree. Same deal with police, courts, fire department, etc. When i pay taxes to pay for someone's food stamps, I'm being taken from and given nothing in return other than a person that has become less productive and more dependent on future government services as a result.

The socialist argument for such things is that society is "better" if we pay for these things for those less fortunate. I don't agree. Well, I don't agree that government should do it. Because when private charities do it, it's by their own free choice. When government does it, it's via coercion of the people. And that's the point at which the infringement of individual rights comes in.


It's funny because I got into an argument with a co-worker just this last week about Bernie Sanders. At some point, he veered off into an argument that having so much of the wealth in the economy focused in so few hands was bad. I asked him why it was bad. He just kind of looked at me and incredulously asked if I was serious. I said yes. And he proceeded to tap dance around the answer for several minutes. He was sure it was bad. Was so sure that he couldn't believe that I seriously didn't agree with him, but the funny thing is that he could not for the life of him actually say in words why it was a bad thing. It had just been presented to him as a fact for so long that he never questioned it. And I suspect he'd never once in his life (the guys in his 60s) actually stopped to ask if it was true, much less examine it intellectually.

I see this kind of blind assumption on the left all the time. And it's equally funny when I challenge those assumptions. I can give a clear logical answer for every single political position I hold, that starts with a basic ideological principle and ends with the position. Liberals generally cannot do this. They jump from one assumption to a conclusion, often failing to support the assumption, and missing steps to the conclusion, and also rarely with a propose solution, much less why said solution addresses the starting problem. Most of their positions are based on someone using emotional appeals to get them to adopt said position, but can't be supported with actual logic or fact. Some examples:

Do food stamp programs actually decrease hunger in the US?
Does income assistance actually decrease poverty in the US?

I think most liberals assume an answer to this. I think most of them are wrong.

Bernie Sanders' answer to all problems is more government. But some of us have known for a long time, that, as Reagan correctly stated, government isn't the solution. it's the problem.

Huh? It's not about me caring or not caring. I'm making the quite reasonable assumption that the 3000 people who lost their lives on 9/11 would very much have appreciated if it our government had taken some foreign policy action that would have prevented that attack. Because...wait for it... then they would not have died.




What about staying in Iraq? Did you miss where I stated that just because we're engaged in foreign policy doesn't mean we're "throwing money" (presumably in a wasteful way, since everything we do costs some money). Why mention Iraq? Why not mention any of the other military bases we maintain around the world? One could argue that maintaining bases in Germany and Italy is far more of a waste of money from a defense of the nation point of view than maintaining bases and military in Iraq. One of those is actually an actively dangerous area that we only just recently finished fighting a war in, and in which there are still active threats to deal with. The other we went through the same phase in, like 70 years ago.

I mean, I'd assume you'd agree that we should be sending our military into places where there are people who want to kill us, and not just to places with good beer and brats, right? Unless you view the military as having a very different purpose than I do, I guess.



Funny that you edited out the statement itself. Um... You're actually claiming that they would rather die than have their government act to prevent their deaths? That's... insane.



Um... Because one funny quote isn't the extent of Cruz's statements on the matter. If the only thing he's ever said about how he'd deal with Islamic terrorists is to win by winning, you'd have a point. Um... But even for someone like me who does not spend a lot of time following Cruz and his statements, I've seen him given plenty of speeches about what he would do. He's given some fairly detailed responses to questions about what he would do in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, how to deal with ISIS, etc. I get that you want to ignore all of this, because he said a funny, but that's on you, not me.

I don't necessarily agree with all of Cruz's plans or statements, but I'm not going to pretend that he hasn't spoken at length about the subject of foreign policy and Islamic terrorism specifically. I'd actually argue he beats this subject over the head, and if I hear him say "Obama wont even say Radical Islamic Terrorism" one more time, I may have to resort to drinking heavily. Or is it too late for that?

Sanders, on the other hand, does everything he can to change the subject whenever foreign policy, and especially Islamic terrorism comes up. He'll talk about how he voted against the war in Iraq, gather an applause from his faithful followers, and then change the subject to something he'll say is more important. He's basically a one issue candidate. Sadly, a lot of people haven't figured this out yet.




It at least proposes a desired outcome (winning, which while vague, is at least something). Sanders gives us what? Nothing. In his mind, terrorism is just a boogieman made up by the right to distract us from the important business of transforming the US into a socialist utopia.

And I'll point out that I'm not the one who brought up the sound bite. You did. So if someone was draw to it, that would be you. I place no weight on that soundbite at all. Maybe that's because I know that it's not actually the extent of Cruz's policy positions, but even more it's so obviously just a cherry picked "gotcha" quote of the kind that liberals love to circulate within their own echo chamber.



I would hope we'd want a commander in chief who at least understands what it takes to be a soldier though. You think that's Sanders?

[quote] Tell us again how waitresses make as much as Brigadier Generals and how Romney is actually winning because the polls are all wrong.[/quote]

Tell me what either of those questions have to do with the statement I made. Was I arguing for government to mandate wages? Oh wait! I was arguing against that. Because... wait for it.. I think that the free market does a better job setting prices (which includes wages) than some liberals who think they know better. Did I advocate for a law requiring the guy I wanted to win to actually win? Oh wait. No. I did not. So what does this have to do with my statement that conservatives believe that government shouldn't be involved in forcing social outcomes, because we're not egotistical enough to think that we always know best?

I mean, I guess you're tossing a zinger or two at me, but you're getting really desperate if you feel you have to pull that old baggage out of the back drawer here.

The purpose of the US military is to ensure the US's strategic goals. Whether those goals are to keep our European allies aligned with us in order to facilitate trade and diplomacy or to root out threats in a foreign land. The former is actually significantly more valuable to the US, even if our military forces there aren't in harms way. I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding about the purpose of the military, war and peace.

Sorry, but that sounds ******* amazing, actually. You mean I can get a job based on my actual ability and merit rather than my social status? Sign me up.

(Also, yeah. The tinfoil hat is strong with that one. It wouldn't happen in a million years even if/when we want it to.)



I don't know if anyone has clued you in on this, but Harrison Bergeron and the **** Ayn Rand writes are fiction. They're also pretty absurdfucking stupid. You're going balls deep into some real strawman fantasy ******** right now, so I'll stop here.

Edited, Feb 6th 2016 8:47pm by Kuwoobie

What strawman?




Edited, Feb 6th 2016 9:41pm by Kuwoobie

Good lord, Rubio got crushed in the debate tonight. What a noob Cruz was humiliated and looked like a small, small man trying to blameshift and cover for his lies about the Carson campaign. No one was fooled.

This clip of the candidates coming onto the stage is the most hilariously awkward thing I've seen in a while.

Edited, Feb 7th 2016 12:10am by Jophiel

I... have no idea. It's like they were trying to one-up each other by being the last to appear?

That doesn't scan. Why would you come out from the green room and just stand there, when the candidate before you is already on stage? It's not like this is the first debate.

Yakety Sax makes everything better.