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Who the gently caress reads books
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Jan 28, 2017 18:22
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Not the president of the united states of america, that's for sure! e: I mean I bet the band does read books but the guy holding the office doesn't read
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Jan 28, 2017 18:25
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BrandorKP posted:No one who bothered to read his book should have been surprised. Paraphrased cause I gave my copy away: "I am going to disappoint them" and "I would have been a Republican in the eighties" Are things that are in there. He told everybody what he was. Anybody upset about him being exactly what he said he was is a bit daft. "Hey now. If you ignore all the lies told by both Obama and his surrogates before the election and look at these two lines from his book you could have easily deduced that he was going to stab you in the back on every meaningful issue. It's really the voters own fault for being so easily conned if you think about it."
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Jan 28, 2017 18:36
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Even the 1980s Republicans were willing to throw a shitload of people in jail after the Savings and Loan debacle. It's absolutely true that people had unreasonable expectations of Obama (which his campaign team cultivated assiduously) but a lot of his behaviour in office had nothing to do with political philosophy and everything to do with the sheer corruption of contemporary US politics. Republican or Democrat, there was no excuse to put Rubinite economists in charge of fixing the crisis that was largely caused by Rubinite economists, especially when one of your prominent campaign statements was "we can't put the same people in charge and expect different results!" Also regardless of the vague homilies he wrote to centrism and bipartisanship in his biography, he made very specific criticisms of NAFTA (laughable as it sounds, he actually had a campaign plank about renogiating NAFTA, which I doubt anyone took seriously but which ought to illustrate his dishonesty on this front), and criticisms of the free trade deal with South Korea, which he then used as the model for the Trans Pacific Partnership. He also specifically campaigned against Hilary in the primary by opposing the individual mandate for health insurance. And let's not forget that he used his vote against the Iraq war to present himself as an anti-war candidate. Yes, people had unreasonable expectations. But that doesn't exonerate Obama or mean he wasn't extremely dishonest about how he would govern.
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Jan 28, 2017 19:27
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Helsing posted:He also specifically campaigned against Hilary in the primary by opposing the individual mandate for health insurance. I remember distinctly it was this and his nuanced stated position on Net Neutrality that swayed me to him in '08, as I remember similarly distinctly how pissed I was when he flipped on these positions as fast as logistically possible and we only kept net neutrality because of a wacky john oliver skit
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Jan 28, 2017 19:35
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readingatwork posted:"It's really the voters own fault for being so easily conned if you think about it." I got almost exactly what I wanted at the time voting for him. All in saying is that he wasn't trying to con anyone. The rhetoric and ideology were of the campaign were consistent with each other, just that most people thought it was something that it wasn't. Obama is what a liberal Christian realist looks like and is what he said he was.
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Jan 28, 2017 20:22
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BrandorKP posted:I got almost exactly what I wanted at the time voting for him. Except I just cited several really prominent examples of his very obviously lying?
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Jan 28, 2017 21:01
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Obama dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016. How Christian of him.
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Jan 28, 2017 21:05
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Helsing posted:Except I just cited several really prominent examples of his very obviously lying? Having a gap been ones ideals and ones possible real actions that can be taken or must be taken is very much what realism deals with. There are not innocent ideologies and we must act and we will inevitably have blood on our hands as a consequence of our actions. Some one who thinks that way will eventually make choices that contradict their ideals. With the understanding that we and history and God after the fact will judge those choices.
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Jan 28, 2017 21:20
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Helsing posted:Obama dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016. How Christian of him. If we count the Crusades as Christianity then yes, it is.
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Jan 28, 2017 21:21
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Horseshoe theory posted:If we count the Crusades as Christianity then yes, it is. No it's ideas out of wwi pacifists being confronted by WWII and then dealing with the cold war.
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Jan 28, 2017 21:24
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Saying you're opposed to a trade deal and then passing it, and further using it as the direct blue print for an even bigger trade deal that you aggressively try to ram through Congress, to the point that it actually contributes to your worst political nightmare happening in the form of Donald Trump getting elected, isn't some kind of noble pragmatic sacrifice. Campaigning on the need for new economic policies and then very actively protecting Wall Street -- to an even greater degree than previous Republican administrations -- wasn't pragmatic, it was ideological. It's just a real reach to pretend that the ideology at play has anything to do with Christ rather than Mammon. Obama was a very typical Chicago machine politician who talked out both sides of his mouth. And if he gave you exactly what you wanted well, congratulation, cause now you get Trump.
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Jan 28, 2017 21:25
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Trumps election is the failure of these ideas. There must be something new or we are all hosed.
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Jan 28, 2017 21:28
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That's what is so frustrating about Obama. The Bush administration fully revealed just how empty the ideals of "pragmatic" centrism had become. The Iraq War and the financial crisis were the symptoms of an extremely damaged and unstable political system that was in desperate need of repair. We desperately needed some kind of new vision from the left or at least the liberal side of the spectrum eight years ago when it could have done some good. But Obama doubled down on a failed ideology at exactly the moment that it's failures had been plainly revealed and we're all going to pay the price for that now.
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Jan 28, 2017 21:37
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Not sure how anyone would have gotten the impression Obama was on the side of labor... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA9KC8SMu3o This sort of "if you REALLY paid attention you'd know Obama was actually conservative" stuff is what will continue sinking the Democrats. It comes off as incredibly elitist that regular people should have known better, especially when Obama was running against a party that had just wrecked the economy as their wars were starting to look unjustified so it's not like there was really a choice here. People shouldn't have expected Obama to be a super leftist but were right to be disappointed in a lot of how he ran the country. If the Democrat answer is just going to be bullshit centrism that leads the way for insane fanatics, like we are living through now, they need to be shaken up at the top. "Hope and change" is not the slogan of someone that wants to keep moving at the pace of the status quo and maybe fix a few things here and there.
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Jan 28, 2017 23:38
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If only I had known better, we could have had McCain instead? Or Hillary. poo poo with those choices I have no right to be disappointed.
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Jan 28, 2017 23:44
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BrandorKP posted:I got almost exactly what I wanted at the time voting for him. Wait. You wanted seven wars, an unaccountable financial sector and a surveillance state that knows every time you've picked your nose in the last decade?
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Jan 29, 2017 00:25
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Helsing posted:That's what is so frustrating about Obama. The Bush administration fully revealed just how empty the ideals of "pragmatic" centrism had become. The Iraq War and the financial crisis were the symptoms of an extremely damaged and unstable political system that was in desperate need of repair. We desperately needed some kind of new vision from the left or at least the liberal side of the spectrum eight years ago when it could have done some good. But Obama doubled down on a failed ideology at exactly the moment that it's failures had been plainly revealed and we're all going to pay the price for that now. I don’t think he or anyone else realized the GOP was radicalized right under their noses. Both Clinton and Jeb! campaigned on courting Bush and HW Bush Republicans. Too bad that wasn’t the makeup of the party. They saw their repeated failures on the national level (with McCain and Romney) as an excuse to slide further right. The Koch brothers came in and astroturfed the poo poo out of the movement, Fox News was there with completely unhinged hosts who had no idea what kind of damage they were doing (Glenn Beck running around calling for some kind of national unity), and the senators/congressmen in Washington were selling their voters a kind of fiction where shutting down the government and repealing Obamacare were feasible without burning bridges. In truth part of this was how our government was designed. The President and congress fighting over authority is as old as time itself. But that said, of course all of this was extremely divisive in the long run, which is why Trump voters now get the idea that they’re going to be able to bring about healing going forward instead of the country being effectively split into two. The level of escapism is dangerous here. Trump and his supporters cannot say the truth because that reality is a dangerous one for them and pretty much everyone else. A civil war is upon us if the economy crashes. Dead Cosmonaut fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Jan 29, 2017 |
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Jan 29, 2017 00:42
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Any day now! Sorry, reflex
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Jan 29, 2017 00:56
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:I don’t think he or anyone else realized the GOP was radicalized right under their noses. Both Clinton and Jeb! campaigned on courting Bush and HW Bush Republicans. Too bad that wasn’t the makeup of the party. They saw their repeated failures on the national level (with McCain and Romney) as an excuse to slide further right. The Koch brothers came in and astroturfed the poo poo out of the movement, Fox News was there with completely unhinged hosts who had no idea what kind of damage they were doing (Glenn Beck running around calling for some kind of national unity), and the senators/congressmen in Washington were selling their voters a kind of fiction where shutting down the government and repealing Obamacare were feasible without burning bridges. "Radicalized right under their noses"? The GOP in the 1990s wasn't much better than today and George W. Bush is easily one of the worst president's in the country's history. But truth is I wasn't even thinking of Obama's completely unrealistic expectations about the Republicans. Though since you bring it up let's not forget how Obama was stil completely delusional about the GOP at the end of his first term. Obama's big mistake wasn't that he failed to anticipate Republican obstructionism, it's that he genuinely believed in the whole third way Democrat ideology in a way I think very few other politicians in either party did. And even worse, he didn't just believe in it in an ethical sense, as in he liked compromise and he thought the senate was a worthwhile institution. No, he believed that these policies were actually efficacious in the real world. He actually thought his economic policies and foreign policies were going to improve things. And his dumbshit liberal fans believed this as well, long after reality had stopped providing even the thinnest evidence to support that belief. Neoliberalism and Neoconservative, the two guiding ideological tendencies of the last 30 to 40 years, had clearly failed by 2008. They didn't fail because of Republican obstructionism, they failed because they had very little connection to reality. Having an economy dominated by finance and trying to establish liberal regimes in places that have no desire for them went just as poorly as the Soviet Union's attempts to reconstruct human nature and build paradise on earth. The only reason America's crash hasn't been as dramatic as the USSR's is because America is a much wealthier and stronger country to begin with, but as time goes by both countries seem to resemble each other more and more. Corrupt leaders, listless and demoralized populations, and a dangerous tendency to believe too much of your own propaganda.
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Jan 29, 2017 01:04
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Helsing posted:Neoliberalism and Neoconservative, the two guiding ideological tendencies of the last 30 to 40 years These two terms mean completely different things contextually and don't work in the way you're using them at all. Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Thatcher, Jinping and Nieto are all neoliberal politicians of some form or other. Neoconservativism is entirely compatible with, and arguably a product of neoliberalism.
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Jan 29, 2017 03:24
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Well Iraq was deffo neo con. And it is a failed idea. So he's not too off base.
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Jan 29, 2017 03:34
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readingatwork posted:Wait. You wanted seven wars, an unaccountable financial sector and a surveillance state that knows every time you've picked your nose in the last decade? We had a surveillance state well before he was president.  I remember being a cadet on a prepo that was tied up in the Netherlands. We got told that Dutch anarchists would be listening to any cell phone calls we made to try to get the vessel itinerary for a protest. We also got told that the government would be listening to any phone calls we made and would know if we ignored the warning not to tell family and friends. That was 2002. NSA started really ramping up in the Bush years.
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Jan 29, 2017 03:49
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BrandorKP posted:We had a surveillance state well before he was president. Lol and you believed them like a gullible child with lazy parents.
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Jan 29, 2017 04:18
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ohgodwhat posted:Lol and you believed them like a gullible child with lazy parents. No I eventually looked at the size of the building and power requirements that faculty the NSA was building did some math and went welp, commit nothing to writing electronically that you don't want public or read by the goverment. This is my only real online presence outside of a Gmail account.
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Jan 29, 2017 05:39
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SHY NUDIST GRRL posted:Well Iraq was deffo neo con. And it is a failed idea. So he's not too off base. I don't disagree with his point, I'm just saying that "neoliberalism" is an older, separate kind of idea than "neoconservative", and is also the opposite of what Americans would call "liberalism". The term "liberal" came to mean opposite things between Europe and America around the time of the new deal, and neoliberalism refers to the european version, i.e. laissez faire economics and colonial empiricism. It's understandably confusing, but important to get right.
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Jan 29, 2017 05:49
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BrandorKP posted:No I eventually looked at the size of the building and power requirements that faculty the NSA was building did some math and went welp, commit nothing to writing electronically that you don't want public or read by the goverment. This is my only real online presence outside of a Gmail account. Oh, yeah, sorry I was a little aggro... Didn't mean to rip your head off, it just seemed very funny to believe them. I actually was under the impression that their Utah data center actually wasn't that impressive in terms of power requirements?
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Jan 29, 2017 05:54
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:These two terms mean completely different things contextually and don't work in the way you're using them at all. Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Thatcher, Jinping and Nieto are all neoliberal politicians of some form or other. Neoconservativism is entirely compatible with, and arguably a product of neoliberalism. You've misunderstood what I was saying. When I say neoliberalism and neoconservatism have been the guiding ideological tendencies of the last 40 years I don't in any sense mean to imply that they are in competition with each other. There's effectively one ideology governing Washington, and it manifests economically as neoliberalism and in foreign policy as neoconservatism. A more apt criticism of what I said might be that I'm using a very loose definition of "neoconservatism" to describe the foreign policy establishment in Washington, approximately the same thing that Ben Rhodes derisively referred to as "the blob". Technically neoconservatism is a very specific ideology that only a handful of people in Washington openly espouse, it's just that de facto the country seems to behave as if everyone who matters is a neocon most of the time.
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Jan 29, 2017 10:07
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Helsing posted:No, he believed that these policies were actually efficacious in the real world. He actually thought his economic policies and foreign policies were going to improve things. And his dumbshit liberal fans believed this as well, long after reality had stopped providing even the thinnest evidence to support that belief. The model was flawed. The rising tide of comparative advantage did not lift all boats. It exacerbated inequality instead eg. As described in The China Shock. Those of us in the center failed to recognize what was going on. The idea failed to provide fruit for the people it made hungry. If there is a future for the model it must bear fruit. To me that means a new, new deal. Universal health-care, universal education, and universal welfare/ unemployment/ retirement.
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Jan 30, 2017 05:00
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BrandorKP posted:The model was flawed. The rising tide of comparative advantage did not lift all boats. It exacerbated inequality instead eg. As described in The China Shock. Those of us in the center failed to recognize what was going on. The idea failed to provide fruit for the people it made hungry. It did work. Globally it was responsible for a billion Chinese people being significantly better off. For first world workers the consensus is that trade is probably a wash at worst. Liberal fans like me like it because overall it's part of a post WWII system which has given humanity its most peaceful and prosperous 75 years (and globally, particularly the last 3 decades or so). The biggest problem is that in the first word it's played terribly politically and hasn't been dealt with by the establishment and isn't understood by voters.
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Jan 30, 2017 20:35
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asdf32 posted:For first world workers the consensus is that trade is probably a wash at worst. Got any sources on this? Because most people's actual experiences are the opposite.
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Jan 30, 2017 20:47
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I agree about the chinese lifted out of poverty. But, they (current adminstration) are gunning to kill it. They've already floated an across the board 20% tariff. How bad is every country in the world moving towards autarky going to be.? They are demonstrating that they don't give a gently caress and are actively hostile to free trade as it is now. If they win the: we can EO any drat thing we want and gently caress the judiciary fight, how long is it going to take before they get to this. The failure of the past WWII order to raise up everyone in the developed nations, its failure to address inequality at home is going to gently caress every one if the world moves protectionist. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Jan 30, 2017 |
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Jan 30, 2017 20:55
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asdf32 posted:It did work. Globally it was responsible for a billion Chinese people being significantly better off. For first world workers the consensus is that trade is probably a wash at worst. That's absolutely not the consensus, there's a growing recognition that the damage done by trade was been hugely underestimated (or more accurately ignored). You're being incredibly reductive here, squeezing about ten thousand different global trends and developments into one big process and acting like it's all a package deal when in fact there's a wide range of approaches for how a country handles increasing economic integration. As always your argument relies on moving things to an extreme level of abstraction and then making unsupported claims that whatever you believe is backed up by some unspecified expert consensus.
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Jan 30, 2017 21:20
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readingatwork posted:Got any sources on this? Because most people's actual experiences are the opposite. Just read "people" as "the college educated people that matter" and it's just fine
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Jan 30, 2017 22:25
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Helsing posted:That's absolutely not the consensus, there's a growing recognition that the damage done by trade was been hugely underestimated (or more accurately ignored). You're being incredibly reductive here, squeezing about ten thousand different global trends and developments into one big process and acting like it's all a package deal when in fact there's a wide range of approaches for how a country handles increasing economic integration. No, the big picture view is meaningful and the numbers are very clear. Your nitpicking is myopic. Damage from trade is real and underestimated, and vast wealth has been stolen by corporations and the wealthy that should have assisted with that. That does not mean that billions have not benefited, because they have.
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Jan 30, 2017 22:28
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And the benefits did not outweigh the cost.
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Jan 30, 2017 22:32
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Take a person off their subsistence farm, sell it off and pollute it to gently caress, make them work in a factory for slave wages. Boom, someone lifted out of poverty.
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Jan 30, 2017 22:34
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Proud Christian Mom posted:And the benefits did not outweigh the cost. I'm saying that they did, though - unless you count a poor person from China or India to be worth less than an American.
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Jan 30, 2017 22:40
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Mozi posted:I'm saying that they did, though - unless you count a poor person from China or India to be worth less than an American. Yes, I do value people from my community and nation more than I view others, and I want us to be successful even if it means everyone else won't be. To say nothing of the fact that China and India still have ridiculous amounts of poverty - of course, that's because the delta between American wages and Chinese/Indian wages were simply pocketed. Keep thinking that "you're a racist if you aren't happy about your city becoming an opiate riddled ghost town" convinces anyone, though.
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Jan 30, 2017 22:52
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I know we have to do this song and dance every couple months but yes, the average Chinese/Indian is better off today than (s)he was as a peasant historically. Saying otherwise smacks of first world privilege.
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Jan 30, 2017 23:13
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