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[Lord Dullard]

A lot of people back in the Great Depression concluded that capitalism was obsolete in the face of rapid technological change.  When the depression ended, inequality plummeted and we had a robust welfare state and social contract, suddenly it didn't seem so obsolete anymore.

Maybe, but our chances of gaining a 'robust welfare state' in this day and age and with this political climate are basically null. We have two center-conservatives running for president, one of whom has already proven he's either unwilling or unable to reduce inequality, and another who will necessarily cater to those who benefit from greater inequality (including himself, since he's in that group). We've also made welfare and social well-being such dirty concepts that it would be nigh-impossible to make any progress in that regard, barring some sort of serious social upheaval.

[Lagslayer]

Did you just refer to Obama as conservative? On what grounds do you base this claim?

Or are you from another country? In which case, please enlighten us/me.


Anyways, back on the rails. Unemployment is inherently bad. That we have people not contributing to society is inherently bad. The problem is redirecting/redistributing all the menial laborers to new tasks (not like they are property, but to make sure we have enough in the right places).

edit: menial labor does not equal physical labor. It refers to tasks that pretty much anyone can do.

[Lord Dullard]

Did you just refer to Obama as conservative? On what grounds do you base this claim?

Or are you from another country? In which case, please enlighten us/me.

Yes, I did. And I base this claim on the well-known traits of conservatism and liberalism, not as defined by our mainstream media and ridiculous 'Democrat/Liberal vs. Republican/Conservative' American mindset, because that is patently false - in fact our last two Democratic presidents have both been rather conservative by almost any definition. For that matter, American politics have shifted so far to the right that it isn't realistic to refer to any mainstream candidate as 'liberal' in any sense other than the one used by our MSM.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008

http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2012

The Democratic incumbent has surrounded himself with conservative advisors and key figures — many from previous administrations, and an unprecedented number from the Trilateral Commission. He also appointed a former Monsanto executive as Senior Advisor to the FDA. He has extended Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, presided over a spiralling rich-poor gap and sacrificed further American jobs with recent free trade deals.Trade union rights have also eroded under his watch. He has expanded Bush defence spending, droned civilians, failed to close Guantanamo, supported the NDAA which effectively legalises martial law, allowed drilling and adopted a soft-touch position towards the banks that is to the right of European Conservative leaders. We list these because many of Obama’s detractors absurdly portray him as either a radical liberal or a socialist, while his apologists, equally absurdly, continue to view him as a well-intentioned progressive, tragically thwarted by overwhelming pressures. 2008's yes-we-can chanters, dazzled by pigment rather than policy detail, forgot to ask can what? Between 1998 and the last election, Obama amassed $37.6million from the financial services industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. While 2008 presidential candidate Obama appeared to champion universal health care, his first choice for Secretary of Health was a man who had spent years lobbying on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry against that very concept. Hey! You don't promise a successful pub, and then appoint the Salvation Army to run it. This time around, the honey-tongued President makes populist references to economic justice, while simultaneously appointing as his new Chief of Staff a former Citigroup executive concerned with hedge funds that bet on the housing market to collapse. Obama poses something of a challenge to The Political Compass, because he's a man of so few fixed principles.

To actually believe Barack Obama is 'liberal', you'd have to either be willfully ignorant of what liberalism is beyond the borders of America, or you'd have to be willfully ignorant enough to buy into the MSM byline that we actually have liberalism in this country, or you'd have to be too young to know the difference. The latter is naturally the most forgivable.

[Lagslayer]

Ah, one of those graphs. Don't take them too seriously. The scoring systems are easily rigged to give the desired portrayal. You could make Ghandi look like Hitler with a little tweaking. Besides, beliefs and actions are much more complicated than such a simple graph can show.

[Dutchling]

According to the test on that site, I'm like that Ralph Nader guy, while I really am not leftist at all :P. Perhaps the fact that it is a US test changes the outcome though.

[Lord Dullard]

It doesn't really matter whether or not you think political compass graphs are meritorious. The simple fact of the matter is that Obama is not liberal. Pretty much all of his actions as a president could have been undertaken by a nominally conservative president just as easily as by him. Even his 'landmark' healthcare law fails to deliver any liberal single-payer option to the masses and favors the industry far more than it does the consumer, and is about as conservative a national health care law as you could possibly conceive of (obviously, since it was initially conceived of by a conservative governor).

TBH, if you seriously consider Obama to be a liberal, you're brainwashed, willfully ignorant, or youthfully ignorant. Harsh, but that's about the truth of it.

[ChairmanPoo]

He has a point though, I think. Not so much about the graph (or it's associated website) as about how much of Obama's liberalness is just posturing. Consider the subjects of extraordinary rendition, surveillance, et al, as well as how nothing came about the promised universal healthcare attempts. Or the continuous pandering to the banks.

I don't think this is exclusive to the US, for the record. Most supposed socialist/liberal/whatnot parties in the western world are pretty faux. TBH I don't think it's a matter of left vs right anymore. We need better politicians, overall, of both signs..

Edit: ninjaed.

[forsaken1111]

We need better politicians, overall, of both signs..

But the better politicians don't have the money necessary to gain the votes because the corporations throw money at the bad ones.

[Lord Dullard]

Spoiler: Beware, derail. (click to show/hide)

We need better politicians, overall, of both signs..

But the better politicians don't have the money necessary to gain the votes because the corporations throw money at the bad ones.

Basically, yes. I've been saying this for years, but here's my theory on how to fix this country:

1. Create a party of moderates. Bear in mind I am talking about actual political centrism, not midway between Democrats and Republicans. So according to American mainstream media this translates to 'create a party of OMG THE COMMUNISTS ARE COMING'. In reality what you're going for is probably something slightly to the left of Bill Clinton circa his first term.
2. Make this party focus on corruption and political integrity. Everything else - and I mean everything - is secondary. Make the byline of this party be that you will root out political corruption like a group of crazed witch hunters turned loose on Hogwarts.
3. Go for state and local offices. You need to control the swing vote, so probably the middle 10-15%. Presidency is out of the question for a long time.
4. Reverse Citizens United. This is pretty much essential, since it is currently the biggest impediment to fair elections.

Won't ever happen because people are too stupid and petty and beholden to their political 'division' (which is illusory, really, it's just that people love their Us vs. Them mentality), so it's basically just a pipe dream. It's also even more impossible now than it would have been back when I first started saying we should do it, because politics have shifted waaaaay to the right, so 'moderates' are no longer moderates. Oh well.

(Tossed that into a derail spoiler, since this topic has already veered pretty far off its course. Sorry about that, but it seemed appropriate to respond to the question posed after my second post).

[Leafsnail]

There is no fixed definition of a "moderate".  I really don't like the political compass site for that reason - all he's saying is that politicians aren't liberatarian enough for him.

[mainiac]

A moderate is anybody who's political views are similar to one's own.

[DJ]

Shorter workday is the obvious answer, but it doesn't work because then the workers wouldn't have enough money to survive. Even though they'd still be producing more actual wealth than they consume. So yeah, the real problem is that your employer takes like 90% of your productivity for himself. And it's only going to get worse, as I see it the rich are purposefully tweaking the rules of the game to get as many people in as much debt as possible, in what I can only assume is an attempt to recreate feudalism.

Anyway, in my ideal world the capitalists who syphon off the wealth produced by the workers would be replaced by workers' self management.

[Lagslayer]

There is no fixed definition of a "moderate".  I really don't like the political compass site for that reason - all he's saying is that politicians aren't liberatarian enough for him.

This. Who exactly gets to determine what qualifies as "moderate"?

Spoiler: Beware, derail. (click to show/hide)

We need better politicians, overall, of both signs..

But the better politicians don't have the money necessary to gain the votes because the corporations throw money at the bad ones.

Basically, yes. I've been saying this for years, but here's my theory on how to fix this country:

1. Create a party of moderates. Bear in mind I am talking about actual political centrism, not midway between Democrats and Republicans. So according to American mainstream media this translates to 'create a party of OMG THE COMMUNISTS ARE COMING'. In reality what you're going for is probably something slightly to the left of Bill Clinton circa his first term.
2. Make this party focus on corruption and political integrity. Everything else - and I mean everything - is secondary. Make the byline of this party be that you will root out political corruption like a group of crazed witch hunters turned loose on Hogwarts.
3. Go for state and local offices. You need to control the swing vote, so probably the middle 10-15%. Presidency is out of the question for a long time.
4. Reverse Citizens United. This is pretty much essential, since it is currently the biggest impediment to fair elections.

Won't ever happen because people are too stupid and petty and beholden to their political 'division' (which is illusory, really, it's just that people love their Us vs. Them mentality), so it's basically just a pipe dream. It's also even more impossible now than it would have been back when I first started saying we should do it, because politics have shifted waaaaay to the right, so 'moderates' are no longer moderates. Oh well.

(Tossed that into a derail spoiler, since this topic has already veered pretty far off its course. Sorry about that, but it seemed appropriate to respond to the question posed after my second post).

The bias in your post makes my blood boil because you don't seem to realize it's even there.

We need better politicians, overall, of both signs..

But the better politicians don't have the money necessary to gain the votes because the corporations throw money at the bad ones.

Normal people respond to massive amounts of money being thrown at them. No other rules or regulations are going to work if the people allow themselves to be herded like this. The ignorance of the people is what allows those in charge to keep fucking them.

The government must be afraid of the consequences of doing a shitty job. However, the people also need to show self control, intelligence, and wisdom enough to understand the decisions of their leaders, as well as the full ramifications of any new rules they would put into place. And all of this must be done without the aid of those in power, for they would still be in control. I don't see this ever happening, and it saddens me deeply.

[ChairmanPoo]

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

[Lord Dullard]

The bias in your post makes my blood boil because you don't seem to realize it's even there.

Right-o. Look, you can call me 'biased' all day long. I favor neither party and consider them all too authoritarian to really be called 'conservative' or 'liberal' outside of an American context, since both parties completely lack any of the libertarian backbone this country was founded on, and both have a decided tendency to curb civil rights, expand useless or oppressive government agencies, and cut back on spending that actually does something useful. At any rate, until you provide some rationale or proof behind saying that I'm wrong or biased, I'm just going to assume you're talking out of your arse. If you can show there's any reason I should believe the Obama administration has made any significant liberal policy decisions that aren't outweighed by conservative or authoritarian ones, I'll listen.