I too voted twice for Obama. The alternative was simply unthinkably bad. What we got was just merely bad. Quite a number of steps up from Hell. Still, my butt is scorched…
Insurance is wonderful in theory and absolutely evil in practice.
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I gather that you are not familiar with the TPP. Oh, wait. No one is familiar with the TPP. In fact, it is illegal to be familiar with the TPP. Excuse me, there’s a knock on my door…
I just can’t even be bothered dealing with this style of argument anymore. You’re right, everything sucks, corporations and greedy people own the world, let’s just give up.
[quote=“teapot, post:14, topic:19377”]
I’m not a fan of a lot of Obama’s decisions but you’re entirely deranged if you think he’s been worse than Geroge “Mission Accomplished” Bush.
[/quote]
I would reserve judgment Obama came into office as a war skeptic after the fucking war was essentially over. Would the world have shaped up any differently if the Obama of 2008 had been at the helm on 9/11? I wouldn’t be willing to say that it would have been. It is easy to stand up against a war when you have nothing to lose. As Obama proved when faced with the PATRIOT act renewals, it is far harder to standard you ground when you face actual criticism.
You have to remember that as far as Republicans go, Bush was dully moderate. That worthless asshole actually had a decent immigration reform bill he tried and failed to push through congress. Bush won (or at least statistically tied) the elections with a solid, if not majority, Latino vote. Romney was slaughtered when he took Bush’s right flank on immigration, which was (inanely enough) the left flank of the rest of the American Taliban Party. If Romney had had Bush’s Latino numbers, he would have stood a chance. Thankfully, Romney is a fucking piece of shit bigot who articulated clearly why anyone who isn’t a white bigot should vote for the slightly less awful guy.
Please don’t mistake me; Bush was a piece of shit. I’m just pointing out that Obama’s occasional not-so-horrible decisions came after Bush’s abject failures and without the emotional attachment to decisions that Bush would have felt. I honestly don’t believe that 2000 to 2008 would have been all that different if Obama had been in charge instead of Dubya. Maybe Obama would have cut taxes less but he would have just compensated by spending a little bit more. Obama would have helped to inflate housing prices, and he would have happily done the first round of bank bailouts (he did the second round without any coercion). He would not have stopped the hilariously named PATRIOT act, and horrifyingly enough might have accelerated the time table for totally fucking over the constitution. Maybe without a snake like Cheney he might have avoid Iraq, but I wouldn’t put money on it. The NSA casterfuck would have been unchanged, His drug policy might have actually been worse than Dubya’s.
Obama is a wretched disappointment, and Hillary is going to be just as bad as worse. I fantasize that an anti-police state democrat will appear out of nowhere to decry Hillary’s police state policies and win the primaries, but I realize that that is just a fantasy. We are going to half to pick between the American Taliban from the Republicans, or Bush’s fifth term from the democrats. I guess the Democrats slightly more begrudged civil liberty, which is why I would vote for them if my vote mattered, but that is basically it.
On the plus side, I live in Massachusetts, so my vote literally doesn’t count and I can vote for a third party with a clear conscience. The US will get a shit leader, but at least I won’t be a part of it. The best I can say about democrats is that when I travel abroad, it is slightly less embarrassing to admit I am an American when they are in power.
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You’re right. I’t much easier and therefore better to say that the other side is wrong and my side is right. That makes the world much easier to understand and lets us pretend our partisanship is making a real difference, doesn’t it?
Look, pretending things aren’t the way they are is really just choosing to live in a fantasy world simply because the issues are so complex it makes you want to ‘just give up’. Cheering mindlessly for one side or the other has been tried now for over 200 years and look what it’s gotten us.
I think it’s time to realize that change will never come from within a system which works only to perpetuate itself. As Upton Sinclair put it - It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Anyone who reads 1984 comes to understand the evil of big brother. The difference between a rational conservative and a rational liberal is where they fear the big brother will come from. The conservative may worry about bureaucrats and run away social spending bringing about a nanny state big brother while a rational liberal worries about the military industrial complex and corporate machinations bringing the big brother state about. Here’s the thing, they are both right to worry and their goals are actually very compatible.
The problem comes in the way we are presented the two sides by our media. We are shown the irrational-fear mongering-side taking-partisanship view only. We are literally being programmed to have an us versus them mentality. This programming is not some plot or evil scheme. It is simply a natural result of a 24 hour news cycle where no one ever reports that nothing is happening. It is their job to sensationalize and emotionalize the news. After decades of this, many of us can’t think in any other terms.
Yet the truth is that we all want the same thing. We want peace, equal opportunity, and justice. It’s not the world or the people who are in such a mess. It is our governments and media that have failed us. So, instead of picking sides in an entirely imaginary political construct, how about we hold all sides accountable and try to effect change directly instead of through legislation, taxes, and regulation?
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could you please specify what you mean by this? it seems overstated, but i am still curious why you think them so similar. how so?
Nobody here is doing that, though. We’re pointing out that the differences between the parties are not all imaginary or insignificant. Some examples have been given on this thread, and @Cowicide and I have noted some other evidence here, here, and here. Those differences have serious effects on real people, and it is callous to ignore them.
While imagining that one party is genuinely good is a myth, so is that neither is any better than the other, as this shows. And it’s a pernicious myth, because it encourages people to treat the parties interchangeably, which is what allows all the extra harm you see in those charts.
I hear this a lot, and yet there are lots of people who vote for candidates who promise more military action, and ideas about giving success that mean no equal opportunity, and being harsh on crime in ways that means injustice. That’s what keeps those candidates around; not everyone would be electable, but they still are, and so they’re what we get.
If you actually care about these things, you should care that they are even more pronounced in one party than the other, and that people still support them. I agree real change has to come from outside the system, but it’s not voting for the lesser evil that has gotten us where we are, it’s that the greater evil still gets so many votes. I see no reason why we shouldn’t hope to change that as well.
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Your point of view is rooted in the idea that one must participate in the process of party choosing to effect positive change. You are so entrenched in that mindset that you seem to genuinely believe that it will get better if only we could elect the right people in to office.
The problem is that after 200 years of doing just that, look at where we are today. You can’t keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results.
The partisanship you support is just fantasy. Both sides of the 2 parties for which we are allowed to vote do much more harm than good. You may want to consider the possibility of working outside that system to effect change.
Look at the ACLU. That’s not a political or partisan organization but they effect positive change every day. Or maybe Amnesty International is more your style. The point is that the ones making change for good are not the ones involved in the theater of politics.
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I keep getting told I think that, but I don’t and don’t see where I say as much. I think that most things will get better only with a lot of work outside the electoral system, as you say.
But in the mean time there are still some things voting demonstrably affects, as those links show - social programs, women’s and workers’ rights, wars with Iran and so on. And saying the parties are identical means neglecting those things, which I can’t agree with.
It’s not the only one, but a problem is we haven’t been doing that at all. Anyone could have told you, and did tell you, that a Bush presidency would favor war and social inequality even more than Clinton did. He got half the votes anyway, because those things are actually popular.
America has a poor electoral system, but I don’t think any democracy can bring about positive change if people are going to vote against it half the time. So that’s the biggest need I see; more people need to care how much candidates support peace, equality, and justice, and stop supporting the worst ones.
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They aren’t identical. Like I said, they are two differing management styles to the same agenda. That agenda is, and has always been, keeping the rich and powerful rich and powerful. Only when the populace reaches a critical mass do the politicians take action for the common good. What this tells me is that changing the hearts and minds of the people is a more effective method for change than voting will ever be.
All you are seeing is the result of a partisan us versus them propaganda machine. The underlying cause and effect is not shown on the charts and figures you post. We only see the interpretation of the data as presented by those with a partisan viewpoint.
Take the war in Iraq for example. We now call this Bush’s war. Yet, some of us remember the decades long runup to that war. The UN wanted Hussein removed because he was gassing his own people and shooting down US peackeeper flights protecting those people he was killing. Over and over the UN warned him and told him that the UN would move in militarily and remove him. Finally, when the UN had had enough, the US and NATO forces invaded. Yet, the partisans call it Bush’s war when he was only involved at the very end and was approved of by a Democrat lead congress.
Partisanship rewrote history and we seem to just accept that.
As I’ve said, rational conservatives and rational liberals are not so different. They only differ in where they fear evil will originate. The problem is the national perception of us versus them creates a lens of insanity where reality can only be viewed along partisan lines. I submit to you that this partisanship is the greater evil.
That’s probably because you have decided what positive change looks like and label anything else as wrong. The problem is that you don’t get to decide what everyone else thinks positive change looks like.
We don’t have a democracy and we never did. Ostensibly we have a republic but in truth we have a system that is bought and paid for. Participation in such a corrupt enterprise is immoral and should be discouraged.
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! -Mario Savio
Same to you, pal. You talked about how everyone wants peace, equal opportunity, and justice; those are exactly the things I called positive change. Why is it arrogantly placing my view above everyone else when I say we need to convince more people to support those, but not when you say we need to change hearts and minds and work toward them?
Sure, but nobody here is endorsing partisanship. Supporting a party regardless of what it stands for means you’re indifferent to how is policies change, and saying you never prefer one party over the other despite differences between them means the same indifference.
I think that indifference is the real problem. America needs to fix its system, but the idea that in the mean time nobody should be bothered about trifles like how fast inequality builds up, how many have jobs, how many die from lack of health care or superfluous wars, and so on is horribly callous to the people those affect.
The evidence shows voting, however corrupt, still has power to change those. You can’t wave away those graphs as partisan just because they bother to show who presided over what; if it really didn’t matter, you wouldn’t see consistent swings in things like unemployment and deficit.
Does voting actually enable the corrupt system? All I can tell says the contrary; as the linked discussions say, America has unusually low voter turnout, and the people most in favor of social inequality have been working to lower it still. So in not participating, you keep your hands clean, and in exchange remove one more constraint on who gets selected as candidates. You can see who thinks that’s a good deal.
You want to stop the machine, I am with you. All I’m saying that it’s broken because money is steering it and people have been applying their only restraint with indifference, and more of that indifference is not helping.
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Because you are dealing in changing viewpoints while I’m dealing in removing imaginary divisions.
except
What evidence is that? We ended slavery and replaced it with below poverty minimum wage.
We created child labor laws and exported that child labor to other countries without those laws. We ended segregation only to classify people by race on very government form. We ask for healthcare and instead are literally forced by power of law to buy insurance from a private company. Those changes you see are marketing illusions.
Graphs show data. But they also come with an explanation as to the meaning of that data. It is that which I question.
You see swings in employment and deficit based on the work of Americans and the economy as a whole. Only party members think it has anything to do with them. If we learned anything from this recent banking mess it should be that politicians have zero marketplace power.
This is not endorsing partisanship, this is endorsing people to pay attention to what parties are doing. I don’t want anyone to stand behind the Democrats, which are awful. I want people to stand behind peace, social equality, and justice, and part of that means caring when someone is more or less opposed to them.
If they don’t have anything to do with the policies politicans enact, then how on earth do you see consistent differences between parties like this?
I think this shows a difference clearly enough that if you don’t, the burden is on you to offer some other sort of explanation. That goes for the rest of the links I gave above too; I’m not going to take it on faith that all those things are entirely illusory, as you seem to be asking.
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First, let’s be clear that you are showing job creation and not the total number of jobs. There could have easily been more private sector jobs total while the creation of public sector jobs saw the most growth.
Also, what change do you see there? You see a change is where the jobs are created. That’s not the change we are looking for chenille. One management style prefers creating private sector jobs and another thinks the public sector is better. That’s not change, that’s lateral movement at best. Also, you label them by president when it is congress who enacts law.
The interpretation of the data is not a black and white as you would lead us to believe either.
From Truman to Ike we had the end of a war and millions of soldiers coming home to no jobs. Post war America didn’t have the private sector jobs to absorb those workers. So, we decided to create a highway system and employ those soldiers.
Kennedy got us in to a war and Nixon and Ford dealt with the returning soldiers.
Carter reduced the size of government to where unemployment went rampant and Reagan/Bush opened those jobs back up.
Clinton presided over the tech boom and Bush the tech bust.
It’s simply cyclic with the leaders being co-incidental to the actual events at hand.
As I see it, things are getting worse here in America and the major change I’ve noted is the rise in rabid partisanship and divisiveness. This creates and environment where extremist policies are able to be enacted which harm everyone but those at the top. Going back to the rational conservative and liberal, the difference in the direction they face evil is a good thing. One side can watch out for their fears and the other their own. They could work together complementarily to protect against what they fear. But, that’s not possible in a divisive state.
A nation divided cannot stand.
That’s true and yet doesn’t change what the chart shows: the growth in private sector jobs has been higher when there is a Democratic president than a Republican one. If it’s a real correlation, obviously he is the one linked to it, for whatever reason.
It’s pretty obvious the claim those jobs are all being transferred to the public sector under the Republican presidents is specious, so that leaves your claim that all these things are cyclical and who’s in office is all a perfect coincidence.
That seems like too large a coincidence for me, but there are ways you could try and establish for it, for instance comparing other countries. All I have looked at here in detail is debt for the UK, Canada, and Australia; I won’t try to reconstruct that, the rises and falls don’t all match each other, and yet in the first two cases still mostly lines up with what party is in office. So to me it suggests that the influence that has is not illusory.
At any rate, you haven’t provided any real evidence it doesn’t have an influence, just argued that it must be. I assume you’d give the same for all the other charts and figures provided? Well, sorry, but I don’t see any real support for your claim it’s nothing but inherent cycles but faith the parties are interchangeable. I don’t share that faith; to me the data looks like the different policies of different candidates genuinely do make some real differences.
I do share the idea that the nation shouldn’t be divided. As I said, I want people to stand behind peace, social equality, and justice, and part of that means caring when someone is more or less opposed to them. It’s no coincidence extremist policies go with rabid partisanship, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence they go with America’s unusually low voter turnouts either.
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We see the same thing in differing light.
I see rabid partisanship and extremist policy as the cause to lower voter turnouts. The apathy towards public good and desire to enact insane laws demonstrated by our politicians result in low numbers of voters because most people see the system as broken and don’t want to participate in it any longer.
Did I claim that? No. I only pointed out that the graph shows data which can be interpreted in many ways. The problem with that sort of data presentation is that it is quite narrowly defined and it does nothing to take in to account the reality of the situation which is a result of the net effect of hundreds if not thousands or millions of other factors leading to the resulting data set.
For example, simply the way the data is presented is misleading. The data points span multiple years and do not show the actual trend lines only the totals post presidential term. Jobs in one sector could slowly fall during one presidency and slowly rise in another without regard to policy. Since it only shows the number of jobs created and not the number eliminated, we may simply be seeing the closure of one department and the opening of another. We could also be seeing a data point where it appears the number of public sector jobs created seems high but during that same time the number of eliminated public sector jobs may be higher leading to a net loss of public sector jobs but since the graph only shows creation, there would be no way to see that.
To say that the graph present represents reality outside a narrowly defined set of criteria… now that’s specious. Which is to say it all looks very reasonable but in reality it’s incomplete and wrong.
But you see, that graph wonderfully illustrates my point. Instead of looking at the system as a whole and trying to determine the real root cause of the data, partisanship and decisiveness lead to these meaningless cherry picked charts that only serve to reinforce someones already existing beliefs and do nothing to add to the rational discourse. They are designed to prove a point. A point that was determined before the chart was even created.
I think that’s true too. It works as a cycle; playing to insensible people turns the sensible ones away, and with them gone the candidates are free to pay still more attention to the insensible ones. And it will keep working so long as how insane a politician is doesn’t affect their electability.
Well, it seemed to me like you were saying the changes in private sector jobs were just complementary to changes in public sector jobs here:
Since Republicans are presumably not the ones who prefer the public sector, that wouldn’t explain why private sector jobs would grow more under Democrats, but I’m not sure what else you might have meant by it. If it was supposed to purely subjunctive, it sure wasn’t obvious to me.
Charts like that aren’t meant to find all the root causes of the data, but to consider whether something might have an impact on it. By simplifying they strongly suggest some things are correlated with who is in office, for which an easy explanation is that the policies affect them.
That’s not a rigorous proof or anything, but I haven’t seen anything better. So far you’ve told me there is no such impact, but so far the only justification has been that reality is complex and that data is simplified. Well, that’s true, but it doesn’t provide any real evidence the correlations we do see are fake.
I say assuming there are no differences to be found here is just one more way of looking at party flags and ignoring what they actually do. So let me ask you this: if it turned out it did matter who was voted into office, if one party was actually associated with more job creation or lower deficits or so on than the other, how would you determine that?
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Thanks! This is the lengthy argument I wish I could have been bothered to have. Sadly there’s no convincing people sometimes. I appreciate that dacree is keeping it civil as well.
@dacree if the system is as corrupted and entrenched to protect the powerful as you believe then surely it would be impossible to take it down from the outside? Or at the very least, much easier to deconstruct from within.
Just read this on the Ellsberg AMA… pretty relevant.
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But I’m not the one making the claim of correlation or causation. I have no burden of proof here. I’m saying charts like that are misleading, incomplete, and generally a tool of decisiveness in response to your presenting a chart as evidence of correlation or causation.
Now you are leading me down the road of pure speculation. The only way to actually determine that would be to have a flat economy for 16 years during which time each party traded power for 8 of those years and then agreed not to obstruct the others efforts. Then we would repeat the experiment over a longer timeline to see if there are trends. if you could do that then we could see if one side or the other really does what they claim. Of course, that’s all an impossible situation since the question itself is meaningless.
How is post facto prognostication in any way relevant? This is just speculative Monday morning armchair quarterbacking.
All that quote does is repeat the same old tired Rebs would do this and Dems would do that partisan crud.
Instead of charts and sales pitches, why not look at the actual facts of the situation by asking this question. If Republicans and Democrats really are what we popularly paint them to be, why did California voters ban same sex marriage only to have the Supreme Court step in to rule that such restriction violated the states constitution. Why did California voters then pass Prop 8 amending that states constitution to make same sex marriages illegal? This lead to the United States Supreme Court (primarily Republican appointees) deciding Hollingsworth v. Perry which struck down prop 8.
California has a Democratic controlled house and senate. The people of California are primarily Democrats. So, if Democrats are gay friendly, and California the pro LGBT state why are the facts so different from the sales pitch? If voting worked, how did that state do all of this to the LGBT community?
What about marijuana? Again, California has a very liberal sales pitch yet time and time again, the decriminalization of the drug has failed in that state. Then there is Colorado where Republicans have generally held control of state-wide offices and the state legislature since the 1960s* They passed laws making the plant legal. Yet aren’t Republicans anti-pot?
That sales pitches don’t match the reality. Perhaps partisanship is a type of mental illness.
