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Norway spanky4ever
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by spanky4ever »

Biden has only one way, and that is down ;)
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by fightinfrenchman »

Link me to the actual polls please, not a YouTube vid
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by spanky4ever »

fightinfrenchman wrote:Link me to the actual polls please, not a YouTube vid

you figurit out, I am sure;(
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by spanky4ever »

Sanders is gonna win @fightinfrenchman and you should know it now
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by fightinfrenchman »

iwillspankyou wrote:Sanders is gonna win @fightinfrenchman and you should know it now


I bet $25 he doesn't
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by spanky4ever »

fightinfrenchman wrote:Link me to the actual polls please, not a YouTube vid

https://youtu.be/-WW2DQhzWCg :P
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by Dolan »

Let me break it up for you. Into small pieces, maybe your brain can handle smaller paragraphs.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by Dolan »

lejend wrote:"Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism." ― Karl Marx
Meh, Marx here is only emphasising one facet of "human nature". Humans are also fiercely competitive, which makes them want to be set apart from the crowd. There isn't only "one true human nature", the one described by Marx, there's a multiplicity of competing human natures. I get it, though, that what could have determined Marx to think and write like this in the 19th century was a perception of social malaise in industrialised Britain, in which workers were perceived as nothing but instruments of wealth production for big property and capital owners. So, to address this, Marx set out on a journey to heal society with a work that stressed the social dimension of human behaviour and built a revolutionary ideology around it.
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Nauru Dolan
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by Dolan »

lejend wrote:All anti-market ideologies are fundamentally romantic and therefore reactionary, whether it's socialism, fascism, or any other strain of anti-individualist tribalism. They all seek to take humanity back to pre-modern times, when everyone was in it together instead of every man being captain of himself. This is why tribalists are near-universally hostile to the free market; it just doesn't feel right to them. They can't conceive of their country as anything other than one big family, and in a family, market rules don't apply. In fact, they're highly frowned upon.
Actually, individualism is a very recent thing, it didn't exist 2000 years ago, for example. There was something similar in Ancient Greece, but this idea that property gave you your own social cell in which you could retreat behind the locked doors of legal rights was not present before modern times. So, no wonder that lots of people don't perceive individualism as something natural.

Fascists weren't really hostile to the free market, though. That's not historically accurate. Both fascists and nazis let private enterprise continue to operate and keep their facilities. What fascist and nazi regimes wanted was that the private sector worked to serve the official ideology. So if the party needed tanks, they should produce more tanks, but the government would pay for them, obviously. Companies were allowed to make any kind of economic decisions they wanted as long as they didn't contradict the party's ideology. The fascist or nazi parties were not interested at all in micromanaging or commanding the economy, like communists were, their main focus was on curing society of what they thought was degeneracy and a loss of national spirit.

It's correct to say that all kinds of socialisms (including fascism and nazism, which are both ideologically socialist) shared a common ethos of "bringing people together" in one giant social engineering project, though for different goals. Socialism/communism were more interested in doing that from an economic point of view (because that's what Marx taught them), while fascism and nazism were more focused on national rebirth, mythical racial purity, lifting the spirit of the nation, and all that jazz. That's why it's weird that somehow fascism and nazism were classified as far-right ideologies, when they're actually mostly leftwing. The only things they share with rightwing ideologies are their emphasis on socially conservative values and their lack of interest in micromanaging the economy.
Socialism was internationalist, globalist, while fascism and nazism were ultranationalist and parochialist (they did believe that they should ally themselves with other countries that shared their ideology, but they wouldn't really mix things up).
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by fightinfrenchman »

There's something I want to say here right now but I know if I do I'll get banned, so instead I'll just say "woow"
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by Dolan »

lejend wrote:“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.” ― Frederic Bastiat
So much sophistry in this quote, I don't even know what should I address first. Distinction between government and society? What does this even mean? Society votes for parties that eventually get to power and implement an electoral program. Does that program come from another planet and is it abusively forced upon a population? No, there's typically a link between how many votes a party has managed to get, their electoral program and how much from that program becomes policy, if they get to govern. Where does this idea that government is always necessarily evil and anti-people come from?
In fact, the problem here is interpreting a quote without a context. The context in which Bastiat was writing this was the middle of 19th century when he was expressing a serious concern that behind any initiative to expand the state's powers lies the danger of falling into another kind of tyranny (after France managed to rid itself of the tyranny of hereditary monarchy). So it's a bit pointless to address his points literally (such as the argument on state religion).
There's nothing wrong with wanting to have education provided by the state, though. Just as there's nothing wrong with having private, alternative systems of education, as long as they all follow a minimum, standardised curricula.
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Nauru Dolan
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by Dolan »

lejend wrote:The "far right" and the "far left" have largely identical worldviews; both reject universal principles and equal treatment under the law, and believe instead in the subjective will to power of one tribal coalition over the rest of society. Their only point of disagreement is over which tribal coalition should be in power and benefit at the expense of everyone else.
Well, socialists didn't really reject equal treatment under the law, officially they had very liberal laws (liberal in the classical sense, which give the individual lots of freedoms). It's just that in the name of their utopian objectives, they wouldn't hesitate to trample those rights under foot, if they deemed it was for a higher purpose. Until it became common practice and official laws were nothing but legally empty hulks.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by Dolan »

lejend wrote:Ultimately, it makes no difference whether your tribe is based on race, citizenship, income level or what have you. The reality is that if you're anti-market, then you're a tribalist reactionary, not a liberal or progressive.
The market is not some magical device that will solve anything by itself. I believe that a market-based system is the only viable one, from an economic point of view, but market idolatry is one side of the coin, opposite to authoritarian statism. As we've seen during various financial crises, markets do not care about systemic risks, there's no common sense that makes economic agents restrain themselves if their actions bring more systemic risks than society can handle. And if you believe that markets magically make things right, just look at how Google's, Facebook's monopolies led to a situation in which it's impossible to compete with them. You are owned, your data are owned by these companies and that's the case because governments are too slow to react to companies overextending their influence on consumers until it becomes too late and they already control a market completely. Then they have to come out with all sorts of anti-trust rulings that come too late and don't really fix a broken market that lacks competition.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by Dolan »

There you go, ear. Smaller paragraphs, no walls of text. Hopefully you can process that. :biggrin:
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by evilcheadar »

for the record I think trump will win
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by spanky4ever »

@lejend You seem to be the antichrist, not caring for anything or anyone if they are not Americans.
Sorry, I cannot read any love in your texts, they are all about hate.
Make rich ppl richer, and let the poor suffer, and if they want medical help because they are sick; you will leave that to the free market. what a dork you are.
*Do you know that 70 000 ppl are living on the street in LA alone? most of them are working, but cannot afford to rent a flat with those low paychecks. I have to say, we used to look up to USA, but now you are an example of what to not be :hmm:
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by evilcheadar »

also why would the antichrist care about americans
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by spanky4ever »

And I am no sorry for spelling that out, shame on you for calling yourself a Christian, and not caring for your fellow human beings.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by evilcheadar »

there is abundant shame
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by spanky4ever »

evilcheadar wrote:there is abundant shame

true :love:
but I am not the one calling myself a Christian, and fighting for Trump policies. Now, that is shameful :blush:
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by fightinfrenchman »

I wish Maximillion Pegasus was running for President
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by spanky4ever »

fightinfrenchman wrote:I wish Maximillion Pegasus was running for President

wish Noam Chomsky was your next potus :roll:
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by spanky4ever »

tbh I am tired or making the same arguments, again, and again. I know we win those arguments, @Goodspeed and @deleted_user, every time. But the same stupid arguments keep on popping up, like nothing ever happened, and if like Trump was not a dump for every stupid, lying argument. I am getting tired, I have to admit.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

  • Quote

Post by Goodspeed »

Riotcoke wrote:
iwillspankyou wrote:I know about Milton Freedman @Riotcoke and keep in mind that he has been wrong about neoliberalism if you take a look down the line. Nothing has trickled down, it has all gone to the top. Milton predicted that it would trickle down. You should know by now, that your knowledge is outdated.
how about a reality check ;)

There has never been true capitalism, governments still have far too much power, this is what friedman and hayek both argue.We have crony capitalism. Also if you look historically, nations that had better living standards for the many were countries with a strong capitalist sentiment, look at the UK and the Netherlands for example, the first two countries to become free market also had some of quickest levels of social mobility.
You're completely delusional if you think true capitalism would work for the many. It would work (even better) for the few, yes, but money trickles down only to an extent. The rest accumulates at the top. Here are some examples of things you wouldn't have:

- Minimum wage. In other words, before long you'll have people working for next to nothing and it'll become hard to distinguish from slavery.
- Public education. You utter the word meritocracy, but that's exactly what this wouldn't be. Many smart children from lower income families wouldn't have access to education at all, or if they do it would have to be very cheap and therefore couldn't possibly employ qualified teachers. Most people would end up home schooled by parents who have to work 2 jobs to make a living and were also home schooled. Good luck reaching your full potential in that environment.
- A way to fight global issues that no company would ever sacrifice their bottom line for, like climate change.
- Oversight against exploitative practices like ponzi schemes, insider trading, stock price manipulation, CDO's (see 2008 crisis), etc.
- A social safety net for people who have had some bad luck. For example they lose their job and can't find a new one within a week. How quickly do you think people like this would turn to crime so they can put food on their tables?
- A way to control prices in the pharma industry. There are many inelastic products there that people need to survive.
- A way to pump money into the economy during a recession.

You should watch (some of) the documentary "Dirty money" and/or learn some more about what caused the 2008 crisis (can recommend "The big short", informative but also quite entertaining). It should be obvious to anyone paying attention that people are way too incompetent and selfish for "true capitalism" to ever work for the many.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by spanky4ever »

I will not mention you little boy, @Mr_Bramboy after all you are just a little boy, who have not experienced what it means to pay for yourself. get a life dude, and we can talk 10 years ahead :smile:
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