U.S Presidential Election 2016 Not Otherwise Specified

[Stavros]

[QUOTE=Ts RedVeX;1733867]
Have you even watched the movie or just read its title? You are accusing capitalists, who in contrast to communists actually get things done for others to use, of telling lies while your propaganda is nothing but lies.
--I posted a critique of a film on YouTube some time ago, but I don't recall its title and cannot find the post. The film explores the same issue with regard to 'Cultural Marxism' and is just as riddled with factual errors and other distortions of the truth to be of no value in any serious debate on politics. I have criticised, not defended Communism, and as for getting things done, well, over a period of 600 years capitalism has achieved extraordinary things, but not always. Sometimes the truth really is just that, not propaganda.

Frankly, I cannot see why a capitalist would have anything against same sex relations or internet freedom. Moreover, as a businesswoman, I would like to promote whatever suited my business, on-line! However, you lefties, wanna have the media all controlled because you want to be the "more equal" class in your world of "equality". You are against free trading. You are against competition.
-If you read the post I started last week you will note that it is the Conservative government that has introduced in the Investigative Powers Act a law to limit your internet freedom, and it is nonsense to say that 'the left' is opposed to free trade when the evidence suggests that people like Donald Trump, who claims to be a successful capitalist, is opposed to free trade and in favour of tariffs. The left is now so lacking in influence in politics in the UK and the USA you probably need to accept that the current division of most importance is between 'traditional conservatives' and 'authoritarian populists' though that is a bit of a (tasteless) mouthful.
http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/sho...44#post1732144

You want to induce fear in black, latino transgendered, homosexual people with your promotion of violent acts against them on the media you control. This causes some of us to do silly things like all sorts of parades, marches and other things that in turn make the "normal" part of the society feel uneasy. It increases racism, xenophobia and hate in general. All one needs to do is look around them to see all this and interpret it in the properly.
-The sad fact is that if any media outlet has encouraged violence against minorities it is Breitbart, and we all know where they stand in relation to Donald Trump. The minorities you refer to have never been attacked by The Guardian, or Channel 4 News, or even the BBC in the UK, all allegedly part of the 'left-wing media'.

Luckily, your bullshit seems to have lost a bit of its momentum... Fingers crossed that you guys will be pushed back to your universities and the general public is going to get a break from all that crap.
--When it comes to 'bullshit', a man who claims elections are rigged but offering no supporting evidence qualifies for the brown stuff. I don't work in a university, for what that's worth.

The critical remarks you have made about 'the left' could as easily be made about Conservatives. I understand why you support Donald Trump, but he is not a 'conventional conservative' and I suspect much of what he claimed he would do on the campaign trail will be discarded. From what you have said I would expect you to identify with libertarians, but Trump is not one of them, and I therefore think you may be both disappointed and disillusioned with the reality of contemporary politics next year.

[broncofan]

I strongly agree with Trish' post about political correctness. It is a phrase that has a legitimate domain so small it's difficult to think of an example of someone tangling themselves up in verbal gymnastics to avoid causing offense. The one example I can think of is a Jewish friend of mine who did not like the word "Jew" even when used in its ordinary manner as a noun, because he had heard people use it in a sinister way as a pejorative, or worse yet as an adjective. But the solution is not to make people acting in good faith say Jewish-American instead of Jew, which when used in good faith should offend no one. That's literally the only example I can think of.

Almost every other time I've heard people say they are tired of political correctness, they follow it up with epithets and stereotypes. Objecting to the attempt to disqualify a Judge because he's Hispanic is not political correctness. Objecting to the insinuation that Muslims are affiliated with terrorist organizations is not political correctness. Objecting to the use of racist caricatures of African-Americans and slurs against them is not political correctness. These are actual racist offenses and should be opposed by everyone.

The only way political correctness can get in the way of solving problems is if you are one of those people who believes there are actually innate differences between groups of humans, and such urgent issues as the Jewish question (as one example) need to be answered without self-censorship. Then you might actually deplore political correctness because it prevents us from having that candid conversation about how to deal with that group.

But political correctness for me is synonymous with decency and conscientiousness.

[broncofan]

I should say political correctness as it is used by Republicans is synonymous with common decency and conscientiousness. Political correctness used properly to mean gratuitous offense-taking, has a domain so narrow very few actual examples exist.

[hippifried]

For the most part, those who whine about political correctness just want rude to be considered politic because they're too stupid to converse any other way.

[Stavros]

Have you even watched the movie or just read its title? You are accusing capitalists, who in contrast to communists actually get things done for others to use, of telling lies while your propaganda is nothing but lies.

I have now watched this film and it is similar to the one I saw a year or two ago whose title and link I cannot find. The film has a simple message which is entirely American in orientation. This message is that America is the greatest country in the world, formed to give people liberty and freedom, provided through its Constitution which aims to give people a life free of taxes and government. The thrust of the film is provided by something called 'Cultural Marxism' which at times appears to be anything considered un-American that originated in Europe and which has infected the USA like a virus. The attack on America thus takes the form of an attack on the family, on private property, on the nation and on God. As Pat Buchanan argues at the beginning of the film and later (around 19.55) America is a Christian country but one where the Supreme Court has 'perverted the Constitution' by imposing secular views and values on States and communities, a comment he makes in spite of the fact that the Constitution is a secular document.
A core element of the argument is that everything changed in the 1960s and thus the film is an attack on youth culture which allegedly lapped up European Cultural Marxism to replace Dad as head of the family with Mom, indeed this entire section entitled 'Androgyny' beginning around 33.45 claims that tv, film, the media and academia have all conspired to destroy the American family as a union between a man and a woman who believe in a Christian God and love their Country. Crucially, throughout this film, Christianity is the core belief of the USA to the extent that no other religion is mentioned, presumably because such religions are either irrelevant or un-American.
The last half-hour of the film is a savage attack on Woodrow Wilson, FDR and John Maynard Keynes, with the various claims about the printing of money, debt and borrowing as being unconstitutional and of course, part of Cultural Marxism's attempt to smash capitalism and the USA with it. Keynes is described as an economist 'indoctrinated in the environment of our former enemy' (ie Britain), who with Roosevelt conspired in the New Deal to destroy a Republic founded on free trade.
Thus welfare creates poverty and above all, shifts responsibility from the Christian family (which is no longer Christian) to the State, and the State provides, creating a circle of dependency that boosts the power of the Federal government and its power to levy taxes and print money.
There are so many holes in these arguments one hardly knows where to start. There is no awareness of the role played by the Christian church in Europe (or Latin America) in crushing democracy, in acting against the interests of the people by forming alliances with corrupt and dictatorial monarchies of the very kind the American Constitution sought to prevent. Again, the Constitution is continuously lauded as the source of law and values, yet Buchanan, a writer called Giffin and others regularly impute to the Constitution Christian values that are not there.
At times the language is absurd, such as the claim that children sent to day care centres and public schools are 'handled like animals in captivity' (c35.44) and the conclusion by one Harvard economist that the 2nd Amendment in effect obliges every citizen to be armed. In the matter of capitalism, while it has in private property and free trade provided America with its greatness, the fascists known as multi-national corporations have Congress bought and sold for their benefit, and it was the Federal Reserve that caused the great depression.
As for Cultural Marxism, a loose collection of thoughts by philosophers from Marx through Gramsci to the Frankfurt School does not amount to the organized conspiracy the film tries to portray it as, in fact there is no evidence the film-maker even understands what it was that Marx argued for, given that he viewed Communism as a state-less society...rather like the United States of America the film-maker would like to live in.

[broncofan]

All I can say that maybe election of Trump is going to open up your eyes a bit, as he makes quite a lot of sense.

Before I give you my rebuttal I want to say I appreciate that you're willing to stand up and state your views. On this forum when I state my views, they tend to be fairly mainstream but I know what it's like to state views that you know 10 or 12 people will vehemently disagree with. So thanks for that. I've read transcripts of Trump speaking, and all I see are tangents, non-sequiturs, bluster, and falsehoods.

On Twitter the other day, he said that MILLIONS of people voted illegally for Hillary. This false claim was rebutted by CNN and other networks, as it's noteworthy that the winning candidate in an election is making a baseless charge of voter fraud. He then took to twitter to insult CNN and say, "prove to me what I said isn't true." Anyone with an iota of common sense knows that the onus is on a person making an outrageous claim to provide evidence it's true, not on those saying it's unsupported to prove a negative.

The reason he finds allies in people like Alex Jones, who makes videos claiming secret agents are in the midst of following him, is that he needs to go to the paranoiac fringe to find people with as little respect for facts and reality. He won a big victory in the election, but it's not a victory for truth, it's a victory for nihilists and people who don't care very much about facts but are angry about the way things are.

I also imagine you were here to see Erika's little performance where she was posting racist images and memorializing Nazis to show her love for Trump. This movement, known as the alt-right, but little more than a collection of neo-nazis of varying degrees of commitment, has grown under Trump. People might ask what control does he have over those who follow him? He doesn't have ultimate control. But it is telling that he is more vitriolic in talking about Rosie O'Donnell than he is in talking about thousands of Neo-Nazis who feel empowered enough by his victory to yell things like "Heil Trump". Being too cowardly to chastise a group who calls other human beings subhuman with the vigor you do of someone who mocks your thin hair is not leadership quality.

[broncofan]

Woody Allen mocks a woman in his movie Manhattan who talks about how biting satire is the best way to combat fascism. The joke is that in the face of violent people who do not care about facts or irony or ridicule but who only want to bash your skull in, the rebuttals amount to nothing. That's how I feel in writing about Donald Trump's recent tweet where he said that people who burn the American flag should be imprisoned or lose their citizenship. First of all, under our constitution, nobody can have their citizenship revoked, even for murder. Once you are a citizen, you can be imprisoned, you can even be executed for crimes, but there is no process for forfeiting citizenship. The imprisonment (or any punishment at all) of people for burning the U.S. flag is also unconstitutional as it violates the first amendment. This has been ruled upon and if it were before the court again, I imagine such a law would fail first amendment scrutiny unanimously. We are truly living in a post-fact world, where we have a president who treats literal neo-nazis with kid gloves and then recommends the imprisonment or deportation of citizens engaging in protected speech.

[trish]

We are now in a time where people are derided for kneeling before the flag and not standing. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, "So it goes."

[flabbybody]

Im a little concerned about Tom Price for Health&Human Services secty. This doctor-legislator has been authoring bills to kill Obamacare and Medicaid for years. Now he's been made boss and can actually do it.

[broncofan]

Im a little concerned about Tom Price for Health&Human Services secty. This doctor-legislator has been authoring bills to kill Obamacare and Medicaid for years. Now he's been made boss and can actually do it.

I didn't know that, though it's not surprising. This is going to sound like a partisan claim, but I think that any problems or inefficiences that exist with obamacare are the result of not having a comprehensive enough system. The entire reason the federal government has commerce clause power is to impose a uniform system for economic activity whose costs and benefits transcend state boundaries.

Healthcare is something that affects people regardless of geography, and it never made sense for the health insurance industry to be split up into fifty different regimes. It was only further complicated by the fact that ERISA peeled off those employer sponsored plans and did subject them to federal regulation, but removed some of the deterrents that used to provide protection against insurance companies acting in bad faith (summarily denying meritorious complaints or drowning busy people in paperwork).

Were both parties to recognize that healthcare is not an ordinary good or service, that it is one best dealt with using insurance (which involves the sharing of risks) because its costs are so unpredictable and potentially catastrophic to families, then maybe we can agree upon a system that retains few characteristics of a purely private system. My recommendation is that if we get rid of Obamacare, we try to replace it with a system that protects working class families against rising healthcare costs rather than leaving those unfortunate enough to become gravely ill vulnerable to a hodgepodge of laws that make them susceptible to financial ruin.