The Glade 4.0

I don't think that's true, AK. There's an anti-establishment populism on the Right these days that largely withered away on the Left after the 60s wound down. Lefty opposition to the Iraq war was the closest thing to a resurgence I've seen, but it was aimed at a particular administration and a particular issue (notably, one that involved body bags rather than budget debates). The contemporary Right, on the other hand, doesn't just discount the arguments of the Obama administration, it disdains climate scientists, mainstream economists, the media, universities, the CBO, the Fed, etc., etc. It's a much wider-ranging rejection of the establishment and perceived elites. And it's not a mystery how/why it happened - it's the result of a very intentional cultivation of that sentiment on the part of activists and organizations on the Right over the last 30 years at least.

Also, from an electoral perspective, the Right just has more room to run than the Left. Poll after poll shows strong majorities of self-identified conservatives preferring ideological purity over compromise from their elected representatives, and precisely the opposite preference dominates among self-identified liberals. Further, since self-identified conservatives significantly outnumber self-identified liberals, even if politicians on the Left might want to push a hard left agenda and ignore more middle-of-the-road ideas, they can't do so and still hope to get elected - they need the self-identified moderates to get a majority - whereas politicians on the Right can get elected just fine by relying mostly on the self-identified conservatives and conservative-leaners in their base.

If France can be AAA with a debt equal to 82% of GDP, I think the US can be AA+ at 100%. Japan is AA with a debt load over 200% of GDP.

Uh, you don't. I saw it the first time. I quoted it, as a matter of fact. Simply repeating it doesn't sell it.



I totally agree with this. That still doesn't explain why the debate couldn't have been taken into consideration.

Basically, you're calling a bunch of people that work for S&P liars, with no evidence. That's fine, but like I said, I don't buy it. I don't doubt it was a consideration.



This is laughable to me. A) Your post was a barely coherent pile of insults that didn't really make much sense. B) There is no "right" for me. My position is merely "I believe..." and "Where are you getting this from?". There's no being right there, bud. You're directly contradicting official statements, and I'm just asking you WHY.

My God, man! This is a forum where folks discuss political positions. You might have more fun if you don't get so defensive every time you're questioned. Just chill - nobody's trying to assault your opinions. If they are opinions, just say so - if it's some kind of fact, you should be able to say why it's fact. If you can't, that's ok too, just say so.

Come on, this is so ridiculous. You're thinking about educated, political-minded liberals and comparing them to the masses on the right. Have you spent any time in the left's masses? Swing by DailyKOS or something. Seriously, look into it - it's even.

That said, I'll grant you that it is somewhat less out in the open nowadays. Why? Their guy's in office. When Bush was in office, oh man.

Oh, it's not a mystery, but you're incorrect about what it is. It has nothing to do with cultivation at all. It has to do with 30 years or so of the left loudly insisting that its ideas simply can't be questioned without moral bankruptcy on the part of the questioner There was no need whatsoever to cultivate it. The idea that the right is organized enough to cultivate an idea over 30 years is pretty amusing though.

The real fact is, however, that back in the 1960s and 70s, the left hit on a number of social issues such as women's rights, civil rights, etc. that really did involve significant inequality and unfairness. The problem was, however, that by the time the late 1980s rolled around these problems were for all intents and purposes, remedied.

As I alluded to in my post on sexual assault (this is only one of a myriad of such issues where this happened) the left fell into a pattern of simply not letting the problems go, and people were slow to realize that. Not only that, but people thought they were going to get a "peace dividend" at the end of the cold war, and so they elected a really popular guy that was going to bring social progress now that he had all that military money to spend.

The problem was, however, that the middle got tired of being told they had to go along with the left, or be some sort of nazi. People in the middle got tired of being told if they owned a gun they were some sort of menace. They got tired of being told tht if they opposed special privileges for blacks, they were racist. They got tired of being told every man accused of rape was guilty, and they got tired of being told the planet was going to collapse tomorrow if measures weren't taken right now to remedy things, and they got tired of a press and a higher education establishment that always catered to the left, lest they find a crowd of outraged screaming protestors on their doorstep. That's one thing the left has always done better - outrage.

That persists to this day. The left has not changed its political paradigm since Bill Clinton was elected. It is still loudly insisting that that its every assertion must be aceded to, and anyone who doesn't hates children, old people, poor people, the elderly, nature, animals, plants, blacks, hispanics, jews, muslims, hindus, buhdists, asians, gays .. and so forth.

People on the right, and in the middle, are fed up with it. They are simply tired of the whine fest combined with the endless demands for money to remedy these problems, especially when not only do you hate <insert group here> if you don't agree, but even if you don't want even more money spent on them. The middle may get fed up with the right from time to time, because the right has its own faults, but the bottom line is that the endless moralistic lecturing as a front for social funding from the left is not something people want to hear.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Sorry, but RD has turned into Monty minus the being a constant *******.

You are seriously deluded RD. Kool-aid drinking, blind, lemming, white guilt. bleeding heart...you name it, you're it.

You are either seriously naive, willfully ignorant, or a liar if you think this is all the right's fault and that the left is being the "grown up in the room". If anything, the left has cranked up the hate and violent rhetoric.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

Klaven gets it right.

http://pajamasmedia.com/andrewklavan/20 ... s/?print=1

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

Let's not get carried away. Saying someone has "turned into Monty minus the being a constant *******" is basically saying they haven't turned into Monty. Monty's problem was never his views, absurd though they might have been (and in any case RD's views still show a lot more signs of thought than Monty's ever did). It was his complete inability to discuss any issue without it turning into a tirade on how horrible anyone who disagreed with him was.

Monty represented an everyday, if fairly hardcore, but uneducated leftist, whereas RD represents a far more educated perspective.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm sorry, but the general extreme anti-redistributionist attitude shared by so many conservatives, that it's better to let millions of people die rather than take one cent from someone who "earned" it and give it to someone who didn't, is far more horrible than any leftist agenda. And when I say this, I'm not talking about when conservatives argue that the "millions of people will die" theory is wrong, and that millions of people wouldn't actually die. I'm referring to when they agree that millions would die, and are perfectly OK with pushing that same agenda anyway.

Now, while we're crusading against political philosophies, I would suggest that something needs to be done about the rather disgusting general conservative belief that there is basically only one problem in the world - laziness. To conservatives, all other problems are simply manifestations of laziness. If you are unemployed, it's because you're too lazy to find a job or to do the job that's available. If you lost all your money in the stock market crash, it's because you were too lazy to research the risks. Did you buy AAA-rated mortgage securities? Nope, still a lazy ****, you should have figured it out in advance. Did your new startup business fail? If you had worked harder and planned better, it wouldn't have failed. Did someone shoot you in the face? Well, if you weren't uselessly lazy, you'd have checked out the area you were traveling through beforehand. You'd have traveled in a group. You would have bought a gun and learned how to use it. It's really your own fault that this happened.

To conservatives, things like random chance, bad luck, disadvantaged upbringing, racial prejudice, natural variations in intellect/ability, and homophobia are all irrelevant - these are excuses for lazy people. If you weren't so **** lazy, you'd succeed despite these things. In addition to dismissing every unemployed person as worthless, this leads conservatives to do things like crap all over professions like psychology, because they believe these people aren't actually sick, they're just lazy, and come up with ridiculous platitudes to justify this. If you're an alcoholic, you don't need a psychologist, you just need to stop drinking. Stop being a useless lazy ****, man up, and just stop drinking, and you won't be an alcoholic. If you have OCD, man up and stop counting ****, and you won't have OCD anymore. See how easily I can solve all the world's problems?

The only exception to the "all problems are laziness" mantra would of course be the government, it's the government's fault if you fail because the government interfered. But of course, under conservative philosophy, the government as a concept is also just another form of laziness - it's created by people who don't want to work and want to force other people to give them the stuff they worked for. This is the only thing government does, so we have to smash it down as much and as often as possible.

Now that we've dismissed every problem in the world as really being due to the laziness of the person suffering it, it's now much easier to withdraw all aid and handouts. After all, if these people die as a result, whatever they died of was their own fault. If they hadn't been lazy, they wouldn't have died! So we're all better off that all these worthless lazy people are now all gone.

Quite frankly, the suggestion that whenever someone fails to function in a society, it's ALWAYS totally and completely the fault of the person who has failed, without exception, is far more unrealistic and damaging than any liberal position.

LMAO

Tell that to Japan and England between 1946 and 1965.

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Except that this isn't the attitude of most conservatives. Mainly because A) these people will not just die and B) most conservatives aren't against ALL social safety nets; they're against the extreme ones we have now and the even more extreme ones leftists want. You love to use some of the exteme ideas on this board as a strawman, and you forget that a lot of these discussions represent general principles, not actual workable ideas.

Furthermore, what's really even more horrible is the fact that leftists think all they have to do is argue "but people will die if we don't!" and then their agenda must be aceded to regardless of how many people will actually die and whether any will at all, and what the alternative actually is. People die. Arguing "People will die if we don't do things my way!" is the worst of emotional blackmail, combined with total bullshit that modern politics has to offer.



Again, you're using some of the more extreme ideas presented on this board as a strawman of "conservative". More importantly, this idea that "laziness" is the entire problem is really not representative of an actual belief so much as a backlash against the willingness of leftists to blame every social problem on something or someone other than the person affected. Liberals simply cannot stand the idea that it actually may be the fault of the little guy.



The fact that you're comparing random chance and bad luck to disadvantaged upbringing or racial predjudice just points out how idiotic your position is. Sure, some people just get hit by an overwhelming combination of problems that they have no chance against, and they deserve help. That is not the same as these other problems:

Homophobia? Not a meaningful problem. Plenty of homosexual people succeed.

Racial predjudice? Essentially dead as a barrier to success, and has been for close to 30 years. This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Liberals are still trying to solve social problems that no longer exist. Racial predjudice by individuals will never go away, but institutionalized racism is not only dead, it has reversed. No race faces meaningful racial barriers to success; the major barrier there is using race as an excuse to fail

Poor upringing? Why is this a problem? You shouldn't get special help because you were brought up poor. If anything, that should be an advantage since you should be learning early to work hard for what you get.

The worst offender is natural ability. People with less natural ability should be more likely to fail. Period. Why would we ever expect our best, brightest people to try to achieve, otherwise?

As for alcoholism and the like, yes people with problems need help, but they also need to help themselves. Yet liberals are willing to make endless excuses, mainly involving how enough money wasn't spent, when they drink themselves to death or whatever. My dad drank himself to death. It was his **** fault. He didn't need counselling, or help, he got that ****. I used my most persuasive arguments and ultimately he did not stop drinking. Stop making **** excuses.

Have you ever tried to accomplish anything seriously hard in your life? I don't mean "I had to do a lot of work in school and write a thesis" hard, I mean "holy **** I don't know if I can keep going" hard. My father never did, until he had to stop drinking - and then he failed because no one ever made him do anything hard. He got an electrical engineering degree and a law degree but he never had it tough other than the intellectual demands and when it came time to stop drinking he was unequal to the task.

People like you kill alcoholics every day. You tell them they need help, counselling, what the **** ever. Yes, they need that, but they also NEED TO MAKE THEMSELVES STOP DRINKING! No one else can do it for them.



And largely, that IS what government does. There is an endless parade of people in and out of the Capitol Building asking the government to fund this, that, or the other "cure" social ill.



None of these people deserve, or are entitled to, government aid in the first place. You seem to think that this aid is some sort of default, and that eliminating it requires justification. That is not true. The continuance of assistance is where the burden of proof lies. Had the capacity for that aid never existed int he first place, where would these people have been?



Well, then stop stacking them most extreme example of conservative frusteration against everyday liberals. It's dishonest as hell, and in any case, it all is just based on nothing mroe than your personal revulsion. Ok, you don't like it that people might die. Well, **** you.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

So? If I am working 40+ hours a week at xxx salary, why in the crikey **** should someone who will not go get a job and demands that other people take care of them be entitled to a god damned thing?

If I decide that I am tired of busting my *** to be a productive human, should it be up to others to foot the bill for me? I should not be able to demand the government to take from Xequecal so I can have a place to sleep, or to take from RangerDave to allow me to have food, or to take from TheRiov to provide me with a Television or Entertainment. If I am not willing to go out and acquire those things for myself... then **** me, and my needs.

Speaking of needs... Here is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:
1. Physiological needs
2. Safety needs
3. Love and belonging
4. Esteem
5. Self-actualization
6. Self-transcendence

If I cannot be bothered to try and provide myself with any of these needs, then why should anyone else? Should the government provide me with a social group or spouse that cannot ditch me?

Furthermore, if you are unwilling to meet your own needs; it is not right that you procreate and further the burden on others.

And there are a lot of people who donate to homeless shelters and to food kitchens. They donate supplies, time, money, etc. If the people were not pushed into this "you have to do this thing for the good of others." there would be more donations to these causes.

Charity should never be mandated. I give what I can at any time I can, I have even given when it put me at a personal burden. I did it not because I had to but because it felt right for me to do so.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

So, if redistribution does occur, millions won't die?

I'm thinking they will. In fact, I'm sure of it. What happens between now and then, for you, for me, and for those millions, is, well, pretty much what we make of it. Unless, of course, you take away from someone to give to another.

I'm not in favor of you stepping on my toes out of some altruistic urge to make room for someone who's not interested in making room for himself.

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In time, this too shall pass.

No one is suggesting that the people who REFUSE to work or mooch off the system deserve anyone's pity or anyone's money. It all comes down to a simple value statement though:

How many people would who are making an honest, wholehearted effort to be productive citizens who simply cannot for whatever reason-- are you willing to sacrifice to ensure that moochers/leaches/etc get nothing?

This is the same type of scale that is at work in a justice system: How many innocents are you willing to convict to ensure that we don't let the guilty go free?

The problem of entitlements is simply a question of degree---how many pay for those who abuse the system?

You're right it is a matter of degree. If we just cut the fraud out of Medicare it would outdo everything in this whole stupid debate. Most people aren't saying we want to kill all of medicare and SS. I think most people are even for "current benefits for current Seniors" and just weaning from there. The current plan doesn't work for the long term. We don't have the money to keep doing it. Eventually if we dont fix this we wont be able to pay anyone. So we need to look into other solutions.

People are tired of being told that wanting to address this means they want old people to eat dog food.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

+++

I don't agree. The US is teetering on socialized medicine. That's a huge financial variable that is obviously going to cost more than has been put forth by this administration. We cant meet our obligations now- before that variable. France does not have that uncertainty. These countries have the ratings without our issues. While the S&P did what I feel is a political downgrade- its justified. I don't feel, based on the criteria of credit worthiness, that many of the AA or AAA ratings are earned.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

There is not enough /facepalm to address this.

1) That is the worst possible lesson you could have walked away with from reading those numbers. Seriously? Not "wow...those credit rating agencies really *are* full of ****, aren't they?" but rather "welp, let's go borrow more money! It's A-OK!" It boggles the mind to behold.

2) I guess you'll pleased to know that the U.S. currently has about an 878% debt to GDP ratio, then. What kind of credit rating does that deserve? Hmm....

Serious and important question:

You know someone who makes, say, $60k a year and has over half a million dollars in debt. They have gone progressively further into debt every single year for the last 30 years, and they come to you asking if you think it's a good idea for them to borrow more money.

How hard do you slap them in the face?

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

This TV rant echoes the a lot of the sentiment I have that I have not seen expressed publicly.

I have never heard of this guy (probably because I don't have a TV), so I make no claims to his validity.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/09/dylan-ratigan-rant-debt-negotiations_n_922855.html

How do you arrive at that number, Stathol? Are you adding the present value of unfunded future entitlement payments to the debt side of the ratio? If so, are you also adding the present value of future GDP increases to the GDP side of the ratio? If not, then it's a skewed calculation.


It depends. Do they have the ability to substantially increase their own income at will? Can they just print money and pay the bills that way if they choose? Do they have a right to opt out of many of the future expenses that would prompt them to draw on their line of credit? If the answer to all those questions is yes, then I'm not quite so worried about it. (In short, sovereign nation != individual borrower.)

The market already treats and trades France like a worse rated security. Germany is the only sovereign in Europe.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Is it? That's not how my debt to income ration is calculated. Debt is debt. My mortgage isn't "due" now either. It's also due over the next 30 years.

If they make a wholehearted effort, then assistance should be available. It should involve rigorous interviews, regular drug screenings (you are caught with an illegal narcotic in your system you are out, you have drug money; you have money to help yourself), etc.

Too many people abuse the system and make it difficult for the people who need help and are not just lazy bastards. It needs to be changed to eliminate the fraud and lazy.

Sell your food card, out of the program.
Agree to not increase the size of your family while on assistance.
Do illegal drugs, out of the program.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

The problem with any system so large as ours is that there will be gray areas and things the fall through the cracks either by corruption or fraud or simple negligence.

I personally thing people who game the system are slime too.... You and I don't disagree on that fact. But all the things you're suggesting, while good ideas that I can get behind, require money to administrate. I've not seen a cost to administrate/enforce vs cost of just letting it slide, but I expect its comparable.

Though from a personal point of view its far more satisfying to do the former than the latter, I just don't know how well it works in reality.