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KVeezy3 posted:Not if your goal is to obfuscate, as much as possible, that your raison d'être is to preserve the status quo. I mean, we only have to look through history to see how incrementalism has been so good to humanity, right? Incrementalism was never about change, it's about control. The reason that people propose slow and pointless efforts is to frustrate them. It is a very clear attempt to prevent progress while simultaneously appearing to support it. To run a race so slowly that it is effectively identical to forfeiture. And it is shockingly effective, for a time. After a while, people can't ignore that they no longer can afford their insulin, or their rent, and all of a sudden incrementalism collapses just like every single human system ever invented. Everything begins, and everything ends.
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Dec 10, 2020 04:07
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icantfindaname posted:Yeah the basic problem is just that a huge number of liberals really truly deep down believe that the policy status quo of the George H W Bush administration was optimal. This is maybe changing a tiny bit but that lasted an incredibly long time. Obamacare was just Clintoncare which was literally just a personal mandate fig leaf on what was assumed to be a basically well functioning private insurance market in a mental image of 1991 The most shocking thing to me was the immediate adoption of the Bush doctrine by the Democrats. They spent like 4 years screaming about how Bush was a big idiot who ruined everything, and then just kept doing all the lovely things that he started. lovely wars, lovely immigration policy, lovely economics, exactly as though he was still president. People like to say that history might be different if Gore had won, but that sentiment is getting silly especially after the Democratic convention had Colin Powell. They worship Bush as America's sacred defender. To them, his is not a tale of incompetence and failure but misfortune.
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Dec 10, 2020 21:13
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How are u posted:What you're describing is the period of time in which the Boomers have had full and complete control of the levers of power in this country. That isn't going to last forever, and our generation and the one that follows see the world very differently. This is an interesting position, but at a certain point we have to ask "why"? Why do the younger generations reject centrist "progressivism" and start embracing leftist doctrine? How did a declared "socialist" come one heartbeat away from the presidency? It's because of the success of capitalism. Capitalism has so successfully impoverished such a wide swath of younger generation that they reject it out of necessity.
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Dec 10, 2020 21:45
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Eric Cantonese posted:I apologize for asking this in multiple threads, but who are the big progressive SuperPACs? Are there any? At a certain point, we are going to need to define what "progressive" means in such a way as it qualifies some things and disqualifies other. As it stands, "progressive" implies progress towards a goal, but that goal has never been identified.
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Dec 11, 2020 16:30
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Eric Cantonese posted:Good question. In many ways, Soros is "progressive," but not nearly to the left as most posters here would like. Again, that depends entirely on how you would define "progressive". What are we progressing towards? What are we moving away from? What does that word mean in a political context? It seems that "progressive" is generally used to refer to members of the Democratic party. So, what makes one Democratic politician progressive as opposed to another? Is there literally anything we can use to delineate between the two sides? Or, is that word a meaningless phrase applied to the politicians we prefer other those that we don't?
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Dec 11, 2020 16:44
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Eric Cantonese posted:Okay. I don't have a useful response. I was counting on posters to say, "well, [INSERT NAME] is a SuperPAC advocating for single payer healthcare" or "[INSERT NAME] was started to support insurgent candidates and chip away at the DCCC's dominance," or similar pieces of information. Oh, I wasn't being critical of your question. I just feel like there is a considerable amount of framing that is needed in conversations like this, However, I would say that the fact that money drives all of politics means those with money are much more unbelievably powerful than those that advocate against them. For example you brought up M4A, and if we're going to talk about money in that political equation we have to talk about the fact that private insurers have a whole lot more cash than those who who advocate for M4A. I think you are correct in that advocacy groups are completely outmatched versus those with a vested interest in maintaining the private system.
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Dec 11, 2020 16:57
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Eric Cantonese posted:I'm starting to dream about a left-leaning investment fund that engages in some kind of passive or socially responsible investing and then uses the funds to support candidates who want good things and not just capitalist donor pet projects. You seem to be describing an ideologically driven charity, and I agree 100% with it. The left has always gained popular support by providing necessities to those without. Mao was famous for preventing evictions by liberating property from landlords and giving it to tenants. Morality aside, if you are talking about investing in the stock market, the problem with that is it takes a tremendous amount of untouchable capital that just has to sit around garnering slivers of a % in profit. This is fine if you have billions sitting around, but the left necessarily has far fewer resources than it's opponents. Any leftist movement is going to have to work with the only resource that workers have to spend: labor. Both in the forms of unions and the ability to build their own resources.
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Dec 11, 2020 17:10
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The Oldest Man posted:It's not that if the purpose of the money is to get people elected. It's just another rube goldberg machine whose wheels and pistons whir and clank but the ultimate outcome is just the same "vote blue" advertising money as we already have. See, I was more imagining a charity-style political party that also ran political candidates under BOTH party primaries.
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Dec 11, 2020 17:51
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How are u posted:I'd never say that Biden is a Progressive. He's a Democratic Party institutionalist through and through, as far as I can tell. I hope that the fact that the Democratic Party has moved left over the last 20 years will influence his policy making decisions. And activists in the streets. Ok, and what politically disqualifies him from being a "progressive" as opposed to, say, Bernie which I assume we can all agree would be included in your loose definition? is it M4A? Is it the GND? Those are coherent political goal towards which we can "progress". And let's not forget, they are very anti-capitalist stances. M4A is adversarial to the private insurance apparatus, just like GND is adversarial to the fossil fuel industry. Both of these privately owned industries dangerously exploit profit from the public and cause a massive amount of damage to the economy and our environment. Ytlaya posted:Who are you to gate-keep who is progressive? Weren't you just saying that no one has the right to decide what progressive means? This is an excellent point. Without proper definitions, Biden cannot be excluded from the label "progressive", nor can Diane Feinstein and her ilk. Hell, if you really want to push the envelope we could include Donald Trump!
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Dec 11, 2020 20:00
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The Oldest Man posted:This is actually a timely take for this stupid m4a floor vote drama and all the progressives putting Jimmy Dore on blast because he won't shut up about holding progressive pols accountable via hardline refusal to support the Dems' regular order of business if they don't advance progressive policy positions. If you just want to feel like good things are happening and a warm empty optimism, the exercise of power (that is, holding Nancy Pelosi's speakership hostage to achieve an objective like forcing the Dems on record with an m4a vote) is the opposite of what you want. It's incredibly easy to just sit back, relax, and watch nothing happen for literal decades as society rots out if you don't actually believe in anything other than the nebulous idea that things should be better somehow (but not if that means inconveniencing or annoying the people who are actively working to make them worse). There is a certain brilliance to the angry old youtuber's idea: Say it works, you force Nancy to make a vote, and the house doesn't pass it. Now you have forced everyone who opposes M4A into the open and they can get primaried. Say it doesn't, Nancy refuses to make the vote and she doesn't get to be speaker. Congrats! You've just removed a major obstacle to passing M4A! There is literally no downside to this move.
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Dec 20, 2020 02:00
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Sucrose posted:You are the epitome of what’s wrong with the far-left. One out of our two parties is currently infested with Nazis, but yes, it’s liberals who are the real threat to humanity. Both of our parties are infested with Nazis, you just prefer the one labelled "liberal". It becomes very silly to point at the other team and scream "THOSE ARE THE NAZIS!" when Democrats were responsible for building the concentration camps and the forced surgeries started on their watch. And, frankly, I am exhausted from having to drag out this conversation again and again. But I am more exhausted of the selective exclusion that forms the center of liberal narratives.
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Dec 21, 2020 18:12
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twerking on the railroad posted:And if we're talking stocks, most of the stock market was soaring during that time. The Dow jones tripled from beginning of year 2010 to end of year 2020. So, in other words, the ACA had 0 effects on the price of healthcare and the profits of insurance companies. Because if it had, healthcare provider profits and therefore stocks would have lagged behind the rest of the market. 
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Dec 27, 2020 00:13
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twerking on the railroad posted:I don't doubt that health insurance companies are doing well. But for whatever reason they don't seem to like the ACA, and they have signaled so with their campaign contributions. Please back up the claim that insurance companies "don't seem to like" a law that forces people to give them money. Edit: especially considering that they helped write that law in the first place. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Dec 27, 2020 |
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Dec 27, 2020 02:00
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twerking on the railroad posted:It's in the link. Look where the campaign contributions are going and how that shifted in 2012. Umm...what was Biden's position on the ACA again?  Edit: HootTheOwl posted:Didn't the ACA provide blunting of rising insurance prices for the first time in ten years? Nope.
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Dec 27, 2020 03:38
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HootTheOwl posted:Your chart shows two red bars of roughly equal height between 10 and 11, suggesting "yup" (for employer insurance). The next year's gains more than make up for it. So, in the short-term view of "this year ONLY", then yeah. Otherwise, the pattern continued largely unabated. twerking on the railroad posted:Yes it did shift in 2020. Something health related did happen this year. Also that supreme court thing. But look at the shift in 2012. The reason they were paying R's more in 2012 is because of their huge gains in the house and senate in 2010 from which the Democrats have never truly recovered.. You don't pay losers, after all, you pay the guys who have actual power. That's not some sort of tacit endorsement of their politics, it's just that legalized corruption necessarily flows to the people in power. I find it rather strange that you keep ignoring the fact that they had a very large part in writing that law, especially given it's a discussion as to whether or not they like it. Can you explain why insurance companies do not like the government to force people to give them money? That seems to be the missing piece.
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Dec 27, 2020 04:47
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