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Chokes McGee posted:What bothers me even more is that the next stop on the Plato government cycle train is tyranny. I've got bad news for you... 
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Apr 19, 2014 06:21
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Cool Bear posted:Sounds like you need a new state for your north if you think the majority of your idiots want to ban the gays. I live next to Philadelphia I know your pain. Remember that prop 8 happened in 2008 and that has been an eternity for changing public perception of gay rights, especially in the black community. If the vote was held today then it would have no chance of passing. I lived in California during the prop 8 debacle and if I remember correctly the polling was breaking against the bill until shortly before the election, when prop 8 people ran a media blitz and phone targeting campaign like I've never seen. It was surreal. They shifted the debate away from civil rights and into 'think of the children' nonsense and it was sickening. Just look at the commercials that were running https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PgjcgqFYP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7352ZVMKBQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8j2y9WtTPw Those commercials were loving sickening and ran nonstop. e: here's the best graph I could find of support for gay marriage in CA. Not sure where they got the data, though  So the short answer to your question is they won by completely changing what was being debated Good Citizen fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Apr 19, 2014 |
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Apr 19, 2014 06:41
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As a striaght white man, "HOLY poo poo LOL are you loving kidding those are the worst advertisements I have ever seen" I am a lucky man that I live in a blue state even though it's Pennsylvania, the rurals are right next to us, loving us up all the time, but they don't have enough to vote against a black usually. I am absolutely blown away that people are listening to the advertisements that you linked. My least favorite part about advertisements is that they pay money because some people actually listen to them. The fact that some people listen to any advertisements ever, that is what makes me angry at advertisements. If a marketing person tells me that he has success because he knows how to manipulate people, I can not be angry at that man because he has a job which he has spent a lifetime cultivating. We have to be angry at a society which allows those advertisements to exist, and to make people believe that Massachusetts people are all hosed up now because they allowed the gays. I'm not even gay what do i care!! California voted to ban the gays lol what the gently caress is this planet (sigh education shouldn't be funded by local property taxes but by standardized federal spending or else it isn't equal) Thanks for listening to me being drunk. Here is this funny moment from our past: 
Cool Bear fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Apr 19, 2014 |
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Apr 19, 2014 06:51
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Cool Bear posted:As a striaght white man, "HOLY poo poo LOL are you loving kidding those are the worst advertisements I have ever seen" CA has also consistently failed in their ballot attempts to legalize pot. CA is hardly the liberal bastion people take it for.
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Apr 19, 2014 06:57
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Cool Bear posted:Destroying the national bank sounds extremely helpful to me. I work in finance irl It really wasn't. The early bank had some serious issues but by the time Jackson killed it, the bank was doing well. It had stabilized the currency and was giving a nice boost to the process of industrialization throughout the northern US, Jackson's veto of its charter sent the country into a economic panic/depression.
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Apr 19, 2014 06:58
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That's what I'm saying. Iraq needs three states, Pennsylvania needs at least two states, California probably something similar. Or we can standardize public education and it will be fine in a few decades.
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Apr 19, 2014 06:59
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Raskolnikov38 posted:It really wasn't. The early bank had some serious issues but by the time Jackson killed it, the bank was doing well. It had stabilized the currency and was giving a nice boost to the process of industrialization throughout the northern US, Jackson's veto of its charter sent the country into a economic panic/depression. When I say I work in finance, this means that millionaire business owners or engineers or executives will come to "money dudes" and say "dude what do i do with my money can you make it do a percent" uncertainty is good for "the finance industry"
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Apr 19, 2014 07:00
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Good Citizen posted:Those commercials were loving sickening and ran nonstop. Holy poo poo I never saw those commercials. "In ASSachusettes, the teachers told Billy that his classmates' families aren't abominations in the eyes of God. They're teaching him not to be a bigot, and he's only in second grade  "
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Apr 19, 2014 07:01
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Literally any state that's larger than Vermont (geographically) will have extreme differences in the urban and rural regions.
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Apr 19, 2014 07:02
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Cool Bear posted:That's what I'm saying. Iraq needs three states, Pennsylvania needs at least two states, California probably something similar. Or we can standardize public education and it will be fine in a few decades. California splitting into multiple states would be a disaster. Research the water situation in California if you want to know why. VitalSigns posted:Holy poo poo I never saw those commercials. The 2008 election season in California was absolutely insane. I really don't think I can understate how crazy everything got with the warring protestors.
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Apr 19, 2014 07:06
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Good Citizen posted:CA has also consistently failed in their ballot attempts to legalize pot. CA is hardly the liberal bastion people take it for. With the last one, polling suggested it was poised to maybe win, and then Eric Holder said that the DOJ would fight it if it passed, and then public opinion turned against it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_19_(2010) http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/16/local/la-me-marijuana-holder-20101016
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Apr 19, 2014 07:06
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computer parts posted:Literally any state that's larger than Vermont (geographically) will have extreme differences in the urban and rural regions. edit: I deleted a large post here but also want to say, instead: I think california has big differences due to being very extra large Cool Bear fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Apr 19, 2014 |
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Apr 19, 2014 07:07
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Cool Bear fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Apr 19, 2014 |
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Apr 19, 2014 07:12
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When I think of California, I think of it as the conservative hellhole it truly is. What with its mere flirtations with a Democratic Supermajority in the State Senate, you'd think it was some sort of prude. A truely liberal state would be post coital and smoking a jay with their legalized weed by now.
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Apr 19, 2014 09:27
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Good Citizen posted:California splitting into multiple states would be a disaster. Research the water situation in California if you want to know why. Why I'd say California already has tons of experience getting water by signing treaties with states several states away!
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Apr 19, 2014 16:28
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Cheekio posted:When I think of California, I think of it as the conservative hellhole it truly is. What with its mere flirtations with a Democratic Supermajority in the State Senate, you'd think it was some sort of prude. A truely liberal state would be post coital and smoking a jay with their legalized weed by now.
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Apr 19, 2014 16:37
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Nessus posted:It is pretty hard to deny that Texas (W., to be fair, but also LBJ) has a better record on liberal presidents than California (Reagan, Nixon). Even if I guess Nixon is practically Lenin by modern standards. Nixon is Lenin in that he was an authoritarian shitbag.
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Apr 19, 2014 16:38
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The last pot-legalization measure to come up in California seemed like it was really cynically pitched to alleviate the state's budget problems in the middle of a cash crunch, and I didn't buy those claims. If it came up again though, I would definitely vote to legalize.
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Apr 19, 2014 16:41
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StandardVC10 posted:The last pot-legalization measure to come up in California seemed like it was really cynically pitched to alleviate the state's budget problems in the middle of a cash crunch, and I didn't buy those claims. If it came up again though, I would definitely vote to legalize. It was also pushed in the 2010 midterm republican wave election, ensuring its failure due to lovely youth turnout. I think they're trying again this midterm  .
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Apr 19, 2014 16:51
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Raskolnikov38 posted:It was also pushed in the 2010 midterm republican wave election, ensuring its failure due to lovely youth turnout. I think they're trying again this midterm They most recently said they're waiting until 2016, probably because someone actually had the foresight to point that out.
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Apr 19, 2014 17:09
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I've been reading Truman's speech that he gave saying he wasn't going to run for president again.Harry Truman, March 29, 1952 posted:The political situation in this country may look complicated, but you can find the key to it in a simple thing: The Republicans have been out of office for 20 long years-and they are desperate to get back in office so they can control the country again. Every salient point is still around today, in the same form, with the same old words. It's frankly amazing but not shocking the Republican party of 1952 and the Republican party of 2012 have so much in common. Party Plane Jones fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Apr 19, 2014 |
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Apr 19, 2014 17:33
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Well, except for the stuff about communism. Today it's not like we have a poorly defined ideological foe that justifies foreign intervention wait a minute.
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Apr 19, 2014 17:49
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Party Plane Jones posted:I've been reading Truman's speech that he gave saying he wasn't going to run for president again. People in general don't change as much as we think they do. That article, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (if you google you'll find it on Harpers. Read it because it's short) was written in 1964 and describes the Tea-Party and modern conspiracy theorists and militia groups down to the exact details, even though it starts off talking about the anti-Mason, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jesuit movements. Maybe politics in itself is such an innately human thing that it really won't ever change all that much.
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Apr 19, 2014 19:04
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Mineaiki posted:Maybe politics in itself is such an innately human thing that it really won't ever change all that much. Yea 
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Apr 19, 2014 19:09
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Mineaiki posted:People in general don't change as much as we think they do. That article, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (if you google you'll find it on Harpers. Read it because it's short) was written in 1964 and describes the Tea-Party and modern conspiracy theorists and militia groups down to the exact details, even though it starts off talking about the anti-Mason, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jesuit movements. One of my personal fears is that the millions of deaths under authoritarian regimes in the 20th century may have shifted the world's population towards more authoritarian thinking, as better "adapted" to live under such regimes.
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Apr 19, 2014 19:14
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Touching on the topic of money and access, sometimes just the potential of having money gets you access.
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Apr 19, 2014 19:16
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Rexicon1 posted:Yea Also politics is money changing hands, whether you express it in dollars, seashells, pigs, children, something more subtle like a promise of future patronage, or whatever. It's all the same thing. Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Apr 19, 2014 |
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Apr 19, 2014 19:20
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Something that I haven't seen mentioned here about the donation limits is that they allowed donors to tell campaigns "sorry dude I'm capped out." We focus on the ability of donors to influence politicians but there is a very real situation where the politicians actually blackmail funds out of donors by saying "I have this legislation here that I'm cosponsoring that is not in your interest I might consider dropping my support if you were a supporter."
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Apr 19, 2014 19:25
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:One of my personal fears is that the millions of deaths under authoritarian regimes in the 20th century may have shifted the world's population towards more authoritarian thinking, as better "adapted" to live under such regimes. Authoritarianism is practically a given for large nations, at least at some level. You may as well worry about the effects of urbanization on the thinking of the world's population, as the same sort of effects are seen there. Also, in a related note a lot of the deaths related to authoritarian regimes were more directly connected to rapid industrialization (or failed attempts at it) rather than "people are killed to show the supremacy of the leadership" or whatever.
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Apr 19, 2014 19:26
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The Warszawa posted:Touching on the topic of money and access, sometimes just the potential of having money gets you access.
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Apr 19, 2014 19:28
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SedanChair posted:Well, except for the stuff about communism. Today it's not like we have a poorly defined ideological foe that justifies foreign intervention wait a minute.  Any idea if Truman's speech is stored in video format anywhere? Some of the best stuff is seeing old addresses like the ones by FDR in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElYNHeL51ZU
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Apr 19, 2014 19:30
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SavageBastard posted:Something that I haven't seen mentioned here about the donation limits is that they allowed donors to tell campaigns "sorry dude I'm capped out." We focus on the ability of donors to influence politicians but there is a very real situation where the politicians actually blackmail funds out of donors by saying "I have this legislation here that I'm cosponsoring that is not in your interest I might consider dropping my support if you were a supporter." Won't someone think of the rich donors?
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Apr 19, 2014 19:40
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The Warszawa posted:Touching on the topic of money and access, sometimes just the potential of having money gets you access. So, the rich are doing away with the convenient fiction of their wealth coming from hard work, as opposed to being inherited. It was only a matter of time before they fully embraced aristocracy, but it's finally happened. What happens next?
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Apr 19, 2014 20:01
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:One of my personal fears is that the millions of deaths under authoritarian regimes in the 20th century may have shifted the world's population towards more authoritarian thinking, as better "adapted" to live under such regimes. That kind of came with industrialization and people living in huge groups all keeping the same schedule, and having to work together to make things. The idea of a bureaucratic state absolutely exploded in the 20th century. One of my history professors mentioned, and I need to ask him for recommended reading on the subject so thanks for reminding me, that this love of bureaucracy allowed simultaneously for some of the best and worst things in the 20th century. This is not at all a "hurr durr, big gubmint bad" guy. He's a fairly left-leaning Englishman, and he's about as well-educated on the subject of communism as you can be, having studied 20th century Eastern Europe all his life. So he's not your average Teabagger who thinks government anything = impending Holocaust ruled by gay Nazi black communist Muslims. Anyway, he said we would not have had huge forceable removals like with the Germans in E. Europe in the interwar period, a tragedy like the Holocaust/other ethnic cleansings and massacres, or the Great Terror and famines (to be fair, these were likely caused more by mismanagement than malice) of the Soviet Union, had we not built up an affection for profound and convoluted bureaucracy. We got this idea in the 20th century that every man in government could be a cog in the machine. It was a sort of industrialist approach to governance. What worked for industry and capitalism on the rise could work for government, and it did. It just happens that it does tend to remove all humanity from the problem-solving process. We saw a huge backpedal from that way of thinking post-war, though. Maybe the USSR had something to do with it as a great example of a bureaucratic monster, though I don't know if that's a safe assumption when the Soviet Union itself was trying to back away from that kind of thinking. That's not to say we don't have huge bureaucracy everywhere now, but it's a much tamer entity than it used to be.
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Apr 19, 2014 20:12
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I'm kind of skeptical about the idea that a bureaucratic state is some kind of distinctive disease or original sin of industrial capitalism, because of the historical existence of imperial China.
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Apr 19, 2014 20:19
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Nessus posted:I'm kind of skeptical about the idea that a bureaucratic state is some kind of distinctive disease or original sin of industrial capitalism, because of the historical existence of imperial China. Also the Romans.
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Apr 19, 2014 20:20
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Nessus posted:I'm kind of skeptical about the idea that a bureaucratic state is some kind of distinctive disease or original sin of industrial capitalism, because of the historical existence of imperial China. "Kind of skeptical"? That claim is totally ahistorical. Bureaucracies have existed about as long as organized civilization has existed, and I am suspicious of anyone that would claim otherwise.
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Apr 19, 2014 20:40
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Nessus posted:I'm kind of skeptical about the idea that a bureaucratic state is some kind of distinctive disease or original sin of industrial capitalism, because of the historical existence of imperial China. Oh no, I don't mean you can't have it with anything but capitalism, but I mean that it really grew strong with industrialization. China had excellent bureaucracy and could accomplish Great Works, same with the Romans. Neither of them had an industrial society, though. There is a difference between a state with a strong bureaucracy (Western countries today, China, WRE, ERE) and a bureaucratic state (USSR, Germany during both wars, Post-war E. Europe, Maoist China, probably other places in W. Europe that I don't know because I don't study W. Europe). The idea of bureaucracy being good is ancient. China is an excellent example. But the idea of every single member being a faceless cog in the machine is not. In China they still had their own sense of individualism with their scholars, because their family history and connections still mattered a great deal, and they were sent out into the provinces to direct things instead of all being huddled in the capitals. When there were great works being done, it was considerably less bureaucratic than it would be now, with a few great engineers in charge and an army of laborers. I don't know a whole lot about the Western Roman Empire so I can't comment on that. There wasn't an idea of "I'll just pass along these figures to this guy, who will pass them to the next guy, who will tell the next guy to get X number of train cars ready, and then another person will tell the police to bring the Jews to the station. I'm hardly at fault for sending numbers on a page." People were a lot more accountable, and accountability in China's various bureaucratic incarnations was highly desirable. But then you look at the USSR, which had a figure-driven economy, and you see the clear difference. Once an idea got going, it was nigh on impossible to stop it because it was a time of bureaucracies doing new, crazy, massive-scale projects and everyone was just one piece of the governance assembly line. Arguably this is what caused the Great Famine in the first place: once it was decided that food production would increase with the changes to how farming was organized, increased grain seizure was set in motion, and the great heavy machine had no way of stopping itself. Then of course you had the problem of everyone lying about everything and dodging responsibility in a figure-based economy, which slowed reaction time. You didn't see this sort of massive-scale bureaucratic movement prior to industrialization.
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Apr 19, 2014 20:43
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Mineaiki posted:Oh no, I don't mean you can't have it with anything but capitalism, but I mean that it really grew strong with industrialization. China had excellent bureaucracy and could accomplish Great Works, same with the Romans. Neither of them had an industrial society, though. There is a difference between a state with a strong bureaucracy (Western countries today, China, WRE, ERE) and a bureaucratic state (USSR, Germany during both wars, Post-war E. Europe, Maoist China, probably other places in W. Europe that I don't know because I don't study W. Europe). My impression is that a lot of the nastiness in the 20th century had more to do with 20th century technologies making it feasible (plus some unique nastiness in the case of fascist regimes).
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Apr 19, 2014 20:47
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Nessus posted:I'm going to actually ask here, was there anyone who specifically praised being a faceless cog in the machine? I don't mean like vague patriotic noises about how we're all on the same team, marching in the same ranks - I'm just curious if this was ever openly, explicitly celebrated. I suspect somehow that ancient feudal societies weren't very respectful of personhood either. Not that I ever read about. There are such movements that people don't openly describe at the time, though. "Feudal" societies are tricky because they had entirely different ideas about pretty much everything than we do now, including "personhood." Certainly technology allowed it, but also technology required a reorganizing of governance. That's sort of what I'm getting at. You can't run a "feudal" society in an industrial context. Reorganization of society was going to happen with technology, and that generally means a reorganization of how that society is governed. Kind of like how modern weaponry drastically reorganized warfare and even changed how we see violence today. It just has to make room for itself. Anyway, I'm going to stop mangling this whole idea because I'm going to just start saying things that aren't true, and I'm going to leave it to the guy who wrote one of the papers my teacher was referring to: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/lawrence_blum/courses/290h_09/readings/bauman_intro.pdf That's a chapter in the book, and my teacher sent me the paper as a standalone, but I can't find it for free anywhere, so I'll go ahead and copy the abstract here for people who inevitably won't read the article: quote:
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Apr 19, 2014 20:57
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