The Good Post Gallery

[Oakvale]

Marokai's post in that driving thread reminded me to find this and post it here.

The tangent Vosem is taking this thread on is the perfect example of what is wrong with the Republican Party right now. 

I have no problem with people taking conservative stances on issues, but recently it appears conservatism is supposed to be some sort of lifestyle where you take conservative stances on everything.  They invent a "conservative side" to every fact whose author might have voted Democrat at one point in his life.

There is no reason to debate Vosem on the "issue" of the morality of caps on campaign fundraising because it is not an issue.  There is no right or wrong side.  There is the fact that the campaign fundraising system is broken due to corporate spending and SuperPAC influence.  There is no opposite side. 

On campaign financing, like on all the subjects, the Republican vs. Democratic debate should be on how best to fix these loopholes. 

But there are no "hows" to compare.  The problem with the Republican Party is that they've turned politics into a series of Yes or No questions.  There's no option A or option B.   That's where things went south for me in my ability to support the party.   

On Obamacare, the debate was never "which plan is best suited to give our populous universal health care coverage?"  The debate was "do you believe the populous has a right to universal health care coverage?" That's a ridiculous question; a question where I'm forced to say yes because no is such a stupid response and therefore support the Democrats not because I believe in their plan but because it's the only plan.

Yeah, that's my moderate rant.

[Oakvale]

I refuse to see human life sacrificed on an altar to appease the pantheon of the knife gods that rule China.

and before the you-know-whos get in here, screw you, I'll politicize something that is inherently tied to politics. Why shouldn't 8 people dying needlessly lead to change? Because too many Chinese have a knife fetish to actually pass laws that might prevent these frickin massacres every few months!?

I get that you agree with the sentiment, but I don't understand how that qualifies as a "good post" per se.

[Oakvale]

Someone should cc: that to the Sulfur Mine, too.

[Oakvale]

Democracy empowers all people. Capitalism empowers the wealthy.

This, however, is not true.

Well, perhaps I oversimplified the concept, but capitalism certainly doesn't empower the less fortunate among us.

But it can. The premise of Capitalism is for all to work and succeed without the assistance of Government. Socialism inherently implies that one need not strive for success when Government can just hand them everything. Capitalism teaches a philosophy that humans should be responsible for their own economic success and should only rely on the Government when they cannot rely on themselves. In today's society, the welfare state has expanded so much that people can now receive welfare based on how many children they have, if they're married or not and plenty of other things that can just funnel more money into the pockets of people who do not seek work, at the expense of taxpayers. Why is it legal in some states for people to use food stamps to purchase cigarettes and alcohol? Why has the philosophy of 'people should not be required to look for work whilst receiving welfare' become a legitimate and basically widely accepted political position? Because humans have now come to the conclusion that working is too hard and American exceptionalism is too difficult to achieve, when it's really not. Sure, it requires a lot of hard work and blood and sweat and tears, but it does not mean that it is unreachable. Every multi-million dollar corporation started out as a small business at some point. The reason those small businesses where able to expand and become corporation was because there were always people looking for jobs, looking for money, looking for the pride that comes with having both of those things. There was no such thing as over-regulation and labour strikes where employees could halt two weeks' worth of product because they want more money. Are the leaders of most corporations greedy with their money to a certain extent? Absolutely. We'll disagree to what extent they're greedy, but that's not the point. The point is that nowadays, the lifestyle choice of some Americans has become either stay at home, don't work at all and expect the Government to pay for your house, your TV, your car and everything else you own or join a union and expect the leaders of said union to negotiate more money so you can buy your house that you can't afford, your TV that you can't afford and your car that you can't afford. It boggles my mind that someone making $50,000 a year would attempt to buy a $200,000 house and then be surprised when they're foreclosed, yet no one knows why the housing market crashed? It all comes back to the root of all evil (which I say that playfully): money. People will always want money so they can buy things. Socialism teaches that if someone else has too much money and I don't have enough money, I can just take their money so I have more money. So, in a nutshell, Socialism is a contradiction of itself in a way that it's supposed to be the least greedy of all economic philosophies, yet in practice it is the most greedy of all economic philosophies. The big point that I'm trying to make here is that Capitalism may not be perfect, but it offers everyone the opportunity to succeed and enjoy the benefits of success, whereas Socialism teaches laziness and bastardizes individual success and exceptionalism.

It's slightly tragic that you consider that amalgamation of right-wing platitudes and cheap politician's rhetoric masquerading as profundity  a "good post".

Also, paragraphs.

[Oakvale]

Wrong - feminism in part sprang up because women were being objectified as sexual objects.  Up until the movement, it's been a common belief throughout most of history that women were cheaters and desperately wanted sex and that's why they needed to be controlled.  The moment they saw another man, they would throw themselves at them...etc.  Have you ever heard the phrase "She wanted it" in defense of a sexual harrassment claim.  The feminism movement was about breaking that stereotype by being successful, career driven, individuals who take strength in their innate abilities, not their gender role.  Lena Dunham is an idiot being an idiot, not a modern female pioneer of the 21st century.

The career driven aspects of feminism had nothing to do with sexuality.  You're basically just projecting your beliefs on sex onto feminism. 

The goal of feminism on sexuality is not and never has been to go from being repressed and controlled by men to being repressed and controlled by themselves.  That's a complete nonstarter.  It doesn't matter who is holding the whip if you're still being whipped.

Feminist attacks on porn have always been that the direction was catered to men.  That's what objectification is and that's what a lot of pornography is.  The woman has to be attractive and has to do a multitude of acts, while the man is some fat faceless schlub who gets to sit there and enjoy it.  When feminism went really hard against porn in the late 70s, it was also true that the men took most of the money from porn operations. 

Repressive anti-sexual virginity mongering towards women (and men) is another form of objectification, BTW.  The same kind of materialism that goes into this puritan parade can be seen (likely in the same people) who are unholy resistant to paying money for a recycled or used product and throw road rage fits if a shopping cart scratches the paint on their new car.

[Oakvale]

Man, making fun of folks who are old enough to play with computers but who also actually enjoy My Little Pony is a bit like making fun of people in wheelchairs, or of retards. Sure, we all do it, but only among close friends and certainly not in public.

Seriously, dude, you seem to be an awful person. Making fun of people in wheelchairs is not even close to acceptable, and we sure don't "all do it". Retards is an insult. As to making fun of people who enjoy a girly cartoon, this is perfectly acceptable, you can do it all day, go on.

Taking angus seriously makes this a bad post.

[Oakvale]

This is all a gross oversimplification for space.

Liberalism has its earliest philosophic roots with thinkers like John Locke and his Enlightenment heirs who believed that mankind had an unlimited set of rights from birth in the state of nature and surrendered certain rights to live in society (the social contact) and that governments only had the legitimate ability to restrict rights that infringed upon others (my "right" to murder you infringes on your right to live).  Philosophers like Rousseau elaborated on Locke's social contract and propounded a doctrine that government should be based on consent of the governed rather than divine right.  This dovetailed nicely with the lessons of England's 1688 "Glorious Revolution," a rejection of Stuart Absolutism, which culminated in the English Bill of Rights.  (This is a very positive view of these events, which were actually far more complicated and ambiguous, but I'm skimming).  Enlightenment projects like Cesare Beccaria's campaign to ban torture dovetailed nicely with this viewpoint.  Radical attempts by thinkers like Mary Woolstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges to lay claim to the liberal intellectual tradition in favor of equality for women met sharp ends (literally in Olympe de Gouges' case).  Against this doctrine, Edmund Burke would lay down his theory that rather than illusory fundamental rights, people should look towards their privileges granted in a murky medieval past and attempt to revive ancient privileges rather than destroy the order of society around them: Burke's reaction to the French Revolution was the founding of intellectual conservatism.

In the late 18th century, the followers of Adam Smith rejected the Mercantilist economic dogma that had dominated the 18th century.  Smith rejected the idea that there was a finite amount of wealth in the world and that economics was a zero-sum game of trying to amass the most gold bullion into your own treasury in favor of the idea that trade and mutual competitive advantage could leave both parties richer.  Smith's free-trade economic dogma, refined by David Ricardo in the early 19th century, merged with the political ideas of the Social Contract Theory to form the Classical Liberalism package: free markets and free men.  Jeremy Bentham and James and John Stuart Mill furthered the intellectual side of Liberalism into a new doctrine called "Philosophic Radicalism" which merged Liberalism's tenets with Bentham's moral philosophy of Utilitarianism, seeking the greatest good for the greatest number.  Philosophic Radicalism, at its worst, embraced a Malthusian disregard and contempt for the poor (Social Darwinism) and the notion that any recreational activity for the poor should be balanced with pain to encourage hard work in that group.  All the same, Mill advocated for religious tolerance and extension of political rights and female emancipation.

In most of Europe, Liberalism aped its British form, arguing for free trade and lassiez faire capitalism and against the privileges of the traditional aristocracy.  It had great appeal among the rising bourgeois orders and its promise of extended political rights appealed somewhat to the masses, but the rise of Social Democratic parties in the late 19th century came mostly at the expense of Liberalism's support among the working classes, and Conservatives also rapidly adapted to mass politics and did not suffer nearly as much from the increasing democratization of politics as Liberalism's (and Socialism's) partisans had assumed.

In the USA, Liberalism originally mostly shared that definition.  The word was associated with abolitionists and free traders alike (movements like the Free Soil Party, with its claims of Free Trade, Free Land, and Free Soil being as Liberal as a platform could get).  In the post-Civil War era, as the GOP embraced Protectionism, the Democratic Party, despite being opposed to many other tenets of Liberalism, fully embraced Free Trade and became associated with Liberalism as a result.  When Woodrow Wilson was elected president, he was a self-proclaimed liberal who was a firm believer in free trade, but was also a believer in massive government reform projects including the foundation of a central banking system.  Franklin Roosevelt took the word liberal with him when he assumed the Presidency, and it's under his administration, that greatly increased the size of the Federal government, that made it what it is today in the USA.  Liberalism became a light form of social democracy in the USA as a result of the "liberal" Roosevelt being a light social democrat and leaving such a huge imprint on American politics.

In Europe, the aftermath of World War I and the subsequent Depression had left lassiez faire economics and the liberal political order both borderline discredited, as solutions relying more on planned economies and dictatorial fiat became more and more attractive.  Even in Britain, the Liberal Party nearly died in the 1920s as its nature of being "Conservatives but anti-tariff" simply wasn't enough to maintain broad popular support outside of a few minor demographics.  Until the 1980s (when it was reborn as neo-liberalism), the lassiez-faire liberal idea in Europe made way in the democratic ideological scene for social democracy on the left and a heavily government-oriented Christian Democratic/Gaullist ideal on the right.

In the USA, the turmoil of the 1960s on race and the war in Vietnam left the traditional liberal political class, with their faith in the government's ability to solve any economic or social problem, seriously discredited.  Many in the liberal government class like Daniel Patrick Moynihan embraced the social ideals of conservatism without losing their faith in government as a major transformative actor and agent for their ideals: they would be the pioneers of "neoconservatism" (a word that's since been majorly trashed...Moynihan wouldn't embrace that label today if he were still alive).

Neoliberalism, arising in both Europe and the USA, was a reaction to the Keynesian consensus and argued that the most deregulated and unfettered global economy would be the most productive one.  Following the collapse of the USSR, neoliberal economists had disastrous spells as advisers in several Eastern Bloc countries, overseeing the firesale divestment of those states' huge public sectors and the creation of bandit billionaires all over the former Communist Bloc.

i didn't read all that but for everyone else i think he's saying that the different kind of liberals are BLUE DOGS AND PROGRESIVES

[Oakvale]

Also, to you and other 16-year old kids on the forum/the internet who like politics: please stop acting as if you're 60-year old boring congressmen.

I think Hash simply missed Jerrys irony.

I would bet real money (not really since I don't have any money but if I did) that Jerry was being entirely sincere in that thread.

[Oakvale]

On the Hawaii Senate primary -

But again, no one even seems to have made a case for Hanabusa, except for the usual "that's what Inouye wanted!" crap. Since Schatz is the one who has the seat now, the onus of the proof is on the Hanabusa side to establish that she is better than him. And there seems to be no single valid reason to think she is.

No real Governor lets a corpse force his hand.

On John F. Kennedy -

I think the bigger question is why it's now so trendy among the left to trash him?

[Oakvale]

>Please stop posting like this

Yes. This not 4chan.

[Oakvale]

Torie absolutely nails it -

Since when is going to school not wanting to change someone's life?  I have nothing to be ashamed of.  I am NOT going to hell because of the crap and lies you mention. I am going to heaven because I accepted Jesus Christ's sacrifice on the cross.  That's it.  Left to my own, yeah, I'd be going to he'll, but I'm not on my own. God walks with me hand in hand, day by day.  I'm fine.

Yes, I broke down, and read this page of the thread. First Bushie, speculation is not libel. You should not toss that word around recklessly. Second, the one thing that is clear is that you are doing close to everything possible short of suicide to join your Jesus in heaven at the earliest practicable time - at which time all of your problems will go away, to be replaced by joy and contentment.

[Oakvale]

Context somewhat necessary.

This sort of macho posturing from privileged suburban brats is pretty disgusting. You - and the pathetic middle management cocks you will all doubtless turn into - are enemies of decency, morality and all worthwhile forms of civilisation.

[Oakvale]

Scott should be banned for submitting that post here.

[Oakvale]

Gays have one huge advantage: their target group also wants sex.

Haha, what. Have you met women? They enjoy good sex. More than men do, I think.

Like many places on the internet I think men here confuse "women don't want to have sex with me" with "women don't want to have sex".

You are aware of the definition of "slut", I presume?

It's "woman who has sex but won't have sex with me".

No, that's a whore. A slut is a woman who won't have sex with you in exchange for basic social interaction and awkward attempts at chivalry.

[Oakvale]

So lemme get this straight here. Being "reasonable" on domestic policy excuses him from running what basically constituted massive scams on both the domestic and foreign policy front? Good to know that the political matrix is all that matters in judging presidencies.