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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Everything people call on the government to provide aid for. For example, if someone drops out of school, a liberal will be inclined to see that as the system having failed that person and thus now owing him recompense, while a conservative will tend to see it as that person having failed themselves and not deserving anything from those who chose to stick with their education.
The reality is somewhere in the middle, but each side tends to lean towards one end of the spectrum.
edited 19th Nov '12 8:37:26 AM by EdwardsGrizzly
<><There are always risks associated with innovation and it is a constant throughout human history that we stagnate in a particular area until someone pushes us forward. Societies can be defined by the degree to which they encourage and embrace innovation.
In that regard, I would like to advance the notion that individual security is a baseline necessity for innovation. The notion of the plucky guy inventing the Next Great Thing in his garage is only possible because he is not forced to root around in dumpsters for his next meal, or worry that if he gets sick his entire business could get liquidated to pay his medical bills. Or, for that matter, because he doesn't have to worry about meth addicts breaking into his garage and stealing all his shit.
I was talking about this with my neighbor after the election. The notion of equal opportunity is one that liberals very much support, but what we want to set up is that everyone has the chance to start from the same baseline level of opportunity. Institutional disadvantages are crippling to an innovative society. It is brutally disingenuous to look at a kid from a drug-ridden neighborhood with a 75% dropout rate and say that if he just "tries hard enough" he can be as successful as a kid from an affluent suburb with a million dollar college fund.
We see it as our duty to ensure that everyone has the basic necessities of a modern society guaranteed so they can reach out from there to become whatever they dream of being.
Amazingly relevant article from Krugman
. Simply put, the era of the 1950's saw a 91% top marginal tax rate and an effective marginal tax rate of 70%, and had the greatest degree of economic freedom and innovation in our history.
Agreed. But really, it's a problem that Donald Trump can go through bankruptcies the way he goes through women, and yet his wealth is never in any danger.
Meanwhile, a single-mom who tries to buy and run a diner is at very real risk of having everything down to her life-savings wiped out.
I....have nothing to say other than bravo.
edited 19th Nov '12 8:41:44 AM by TheStarshipMaxima
It was an honorWell the difference between you and I then is that I think that risk should be less for the individual. It should not be a death sentence to have to switch jobs, etc. If we do have some freeloaders, then fine. I still think that it is worth it and that in such a system we will still have about the same number of productive individuals, and that these productive individuals would be more productive if they were not living in fear all the time.
All right Fighteer is much more eloquent than I am. That's it. Yes.
edited 19th Nov '12 8:43:10 AM by ohsointocats
Fighteer is known for that sort of thing.
Although, I just have to nitpick your post a bit; there are kids from drug-ridden neighborhoods with 75% drop-out rates that do precisely that. Like Tony Stark they build something out their lives ''In THE PROJECTS! With a box of food stamps!"
So..when another kid from the same neighborhood is talking about how the white man is keeping him down, some of us are like "Really?"
It was an honorThe right loves to cherry-pick individual success stories and use them to justify the thousands of failure stories. It's just not a fair comparison.
The Israel thing is something we're discouraging conversation over, as it never ends well.
edited 19th Nov '12 9:01:18 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"While there are those that do do that, that's not what's being said here.
I said that there are people who come from the very circumstances you describe, and do succeed. And there are people who throw up their hands in surrender and their circustances aren't as dire.
These are facts Fighteer, not acknowledging them doesn't make them go away.
It was an honorIn fairness, it's not all about the "white man keeping them down". That's an overly simplistic viewpoint. What's really going on is a combination of factors:
- Institutionalized racism, which is basically white people hiring and promoting white people. It continues to this day.
- Crime and poverty, absent intervention, breed more crime and poverty.
- Businesses have no self-interest in dealing with this because there's no short term profit involved and high risk. Ergo, government has to be the one doing it.
To address your specific point, there will always be a spectrum of attitudes among people. Some are content with their lot, some push forward, some seek to abdicate responsibility and live off the dole. But when you compare an affluent white neighborhood with an urban ghetto, you see that "living off the dole" has very different implications.
I have a friend who is the son of a lawyer. His father is, while not wealthy, certainly not hurting for money. He's probably in the one percent. My friend is, quite frankly, a bit spoiled. He studied law but has never passed the bar and is basically drifting on as low-responsibility a job as he can manage. He's a moocher by a certain definition but he had the "luck" to have a rich father who ensured that he never had to live on government support.
Compare that with a "welfare mom" with five kids and a drug habit. People accuse her of being a moocher but she never had a chance to be otherwise.
edited 19th Nov '12 9:09:50 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"![]()
I had a relative who worked in the British Diplomatic Corps (admitted not very high up) who said that the private reaction of nearly every Western foreign ministry when the balloon goes up in Israel is basically somewhere along the lines of: "Oh, FFS, not again! Release a token statement, then wait for it all to blow over."
Schild und Schwert der ParteiIt's hard for me to connect with liberals on this issue, because I seem to have a dramatically different idea of what a "basic standard of living" is than most of them do. Both my cultural and religious backgrounds are rather anti-materialistic, and when I was growing up lots of things that other people seem to consider baseline were unusual luxuries for me. When I hear any American from any socioeconomic status complain about their life being unfair, 95% of the time my reaction is not "you poor thing" but "that is mind-bogglingly pathetic: you have it great!"
edited 19th Nov '12 9:05:11 AM by EdwardsGrizzly
<><Most people are not sitting on their hands going "poor me". That's what we're saying. This stereotyping of ghetto Americans as being a bunch of lazy bums is what's behind so many conservative attitudes, but it's just not true.
These people work hard. They struggle for everything they have. By classical concepts of morality, they are more morally grounded than some rich kid who got handed his education and his private equity job just through the luck of being born to the right family.
Look, this idea of a "bootstrap America" where "I built that" is another one of those smokescreens that conceals a very specific ideological agenda: that of preserving the wealth of the existing system against the greedy grasping hands of the "less deserving". Wealth that in many (most?) cases was no more earned than the aforementioned kid of rich parents "earned" his place in high society. By reference I give you the Koch Brothers and one Mitt Romney. Neither of them bootstrapped their way to wealth.
edited 19th Nov '12 9:20:16 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"@Grizzly: by the same token as your view of liberals, we could say conservatives believe in survival of the fittest, and also kicking people while theyre down or blatantly ignoring when luck or the help of others and not "I worked hard" is what actually happened.
No liberal (other than the downright crazy) is going to say everything should be handed to you. But shit like "I built that" tends to be code for "I will blatantly ignore that if I hadnt launched into the market at the right moment, knew the right people, made the right contacts, or had the right workers, that all my hard work might have amounted to nothing and not everyone who tries has a success story"
edited 19th Nov '12 9:26:34 AM by Midgetsnowman
I don't have the statistics so I can neither agree nor disagree with your assertion that the ghetto welfare moocher is an insignificant minority.
I can state with relative certainty that the attitude, the mindset, that begets this sort of thing is a problem. And it seems to be increasing. It's a problem whether you're a rich entitled brat sipping mimosas in the Hamptons, or if you some unemployed hood brat content with your food stamps.
My problem Fighteer is that the kid who says "the white man is keeping my down" refuses to even consider that, while that might be true somewhat, perhaps his playing Call Of Duty instead of going to class is contributing to his problem.
And I'm sorry if we're assholes because we look at such a kid and are less sanguine about helping him.
It was an honor
@Maxima: and by the same token, we on tyhe other side hear people go "well, you should just start a business, thats what I did" or "Go get a job" as though the second you put in a modicum of effort that you will be richly rewarded, and think thats hilariously naive.
Most of the time, your effort will fail and you will get nothing for it. And even the average guy playing call of duty and railing against the man probably got that way because they did try, and got nothing from it often enough that they stopped trying.
edited 19th Nov '12 9:29:35 AM by Midgetsnowman
![]()
But the problem is that you don't know, and can't know for sure, if someone's shirking their duties to play video games, or spending their day looking for work.
It's also not reasonable to say that poor people shouldn't ever play video games (or insert leisure activity here), because it's "contributing to the problem".
edited 19th Nov '12 9:31:24 AM by DrunkGirlfriend
"I don't know how I do it. I'm like the Mr. Bean of sex." -DrunkscriblerianYou know, as much as people love to cast strawmanning as the pastime of the right, there's an awful lot of it here.
Nobody said poor people shouldn't play Call Of Duty, shit, I'm a Mass Effect guy myself. I didn't commit some crime because I wiled away my unemployed days occassionally watching Star Trek Voyager.
Nobody said "just start a business. It's what I did". And nobody is even suggesting cutting social programs in the middle of a recession.
I'm saying people have the right to get annoyed when someone in the projects claims they can't afford school, but their car has the latest rims. I have the right to get angry when a company begs for a bailout, but shuts down three American factories so they can open one in a country where they'll pay the workers a third of what their original workers were getting, less health benefits.
I don't see what crime has been committed in expecting people to take some responsibility for themselves.
It was an honor

Oh So, I dont' think you realize how much we actually think very much alike. What you're talking about is what the fake capitalists have done. Companies and fat rich slobs that rig the game so that it's basically a lottery for the common man, but win, lose, or draw they come out with a dividend.
Why do they play this fucked-up bizarro game of Monopoly? Because they believe there should be NO risk. They're trying to eliminate risk from the capitalist construct and they're willing to destroy the economy to make it happen.
I'm not against the poor, or those who need help. I'm against who think they're above pulling their weight. I hate when some Latin American immigrant sneaks into the US for the express purpose of being on welfare and not working and I hate it when some stupid rich white bitch who wouldn't recognize an honest job if walked up and punched her in her nose job thinks herself better than her housekeeper who's working four jobs just to eat.
It's fucked up all around.
It was an honor