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The Old Hack

Political Discussion Thread (READ FIRST POST)

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Indiscriminating hate for all politicians in my experience often comes from a position of lazy cynicism, in which they pour scorn on every attempt to change the world, while they themselves do nothing and feel self-righteous about it. As you might tell, I have little respect for this "position".

Personally, I have personally met some politicians during my life and they have all been positive experiences. I'm even friends with one of them. Granted, she is a part-timer and works on the municipal level, but still, she is a politican. And I can't imagine a more intelligent, honest and kind person than she.

 

11 hours ago, ijuin said:

Pretty much "you must bow to the Party platform if you want the Party to vote for any of your proposals". Otherwise, good luck trying to get any bills passed.

Well, there has to be some party discipline, some order, for otherwise the party will dissolve.  What is the point of having a party platform if the party's politicians don't follow it? Why organize at all if there are no ideals or ideology which tie the party together? No, a party must stand for something, otherwise they just become an arbitrary grouping of politicians. The members of a party have a right to expect that their politicians follow the ideals around which the party is organized, which are supposed to be expressed in the platform.

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On July 8, 2016 at 4:02 PM, The Old Hack said:

Then there is nothing more to say. I am saddened that this is how you see things but I will not further intrude on you with a viewpoint you find unacceptable.

I am curious which part of this is saddening.

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On 7/10/2016 at 5:05 AM, Sweveham said:

Indiscriminating hate for all politicians in my experience often comes from a position of lazy cynicism, in which they pour scorn on every attempt to change the world, while they themselves do nothing and feel self-righteous about it. As you might tell, I have little respect for this "position".

Well, there has to be some party discipline, some order, for otherwise the party will dissolve.  What is the point of having a party platform if the party's politicians don't follow it? Why organize at all if there are no ideals or ideology which tie the party together? No, a party must stand for something, otherwise they just become an arbitrary grouping of politicians. The members of a party have a right to expect that their politicians follow the ideals around which the party is organized, which are supposed to be expressed in the platform.

Politicians are easy and visible targets.  Even the best have to surf on the wave of public opinion and sometimes wipe out.

The current problem, especially in the US, is political beliefs are very polarized and divisive and that bleeds over onto the party platform which sometimes seems more a collection of advertising slogans than a coherent policy document.

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11 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

The current problem, especially in the US, is political beliefs are very polarized and divisive and that bleeds over onto the party platform which sometimes seems more a collection of advertising slogans than a coherent policy document.

I doubt politics in the US are that polarized. Sure, there are some "social" issues which divide them, but the Republicans and Democrats are rather unified around free market "neoliberal" economics. There's not much foreign policy differences either.

Granted, both of their platforms are indeed rather confused and vague, though I doubt this is due to polarization.

Either way, polarization is not a bad thing. It means the voters have choice, which is vital for a democracy to function. A common problem in modern Europe is that the parties abandon their ideals and ideologies to instead move to the centre. This eventually means that most parties have pretty much the same policies, leaving the voters with no meaningful choices. You can vote and change governments, but there is no actual change in policy.

Elections and debates then cease to be about how we will run the country, but about who will run it, about persons. This is why modern politics is so filled with personal attacks, for there are no longer any policy differences to debate. It is one of the reasons why people hate politicians: because they spend so much time hating each other.

Political scientist Colin Crouch have writted an excellent short book about this, called Post-democracy. As he puts in an interview: " A post-democratic society therefore is one that continues to have and to use all the institutions of democracy, but in which they increasingly become a formal shell. The energy and innovative drive pass away from the democratic arena and into small circles of a politico-economic elite. " We in Europe are not there yet, but we're slowly moving towards, partly because of a lack of polarization.

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I feel Sweveham has the right of it. We have two parties, with similar policies and practices across both the economic and foreign spheres. They differ primarily on polarized social and operational issues which many European countries don't even debate, such as the right to bodily autonomy for women, or the necessity of taxation to fund the activity of government. Our elections are primarily run around the personalities and social stances of our politicians, rather than the expectation of differing political practice.

Of course, to your earlier post, Sweveham, our parties are nearly arbitrary groupings of politicians, primarily differentiated from one another by branding, fundraising, target demographics, and stance on the aforementioned social and operational issues. They persist because they are so large and pervasive that they've established a dominant binary, it is infeasible to practice politics here without participating in one or the other. If Europe is only just moving toward a post-democratic society, we are honestly further down that road.
 

I believe that we are not, and can not be, a healthy democratic society under the two party system. The enforced binary does not empower politicians to seek change, for it is inherently reductive and repressive. Unanimity in economic and foreign policy has driven decades of interventionism and increasingly unwise deregulation. Even the progress we have made in recent years on social issues is vulnerable in the face of this uneven polarization that prevents functional compromise in these areas. We can, we must reform both ourselves, and our political reality.

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The trouble is not that opinions are polarized so much as it is that, in the past 10-15 years, there has been a general refusal to compromise on anything. The major power blocks within the two parties have decided that they would rather risk losing elections by standing immutable on their positions than give an inch in the name of getting something done--instead of the old "half a loaf is better than none", they have decided to try for all-or-nothing. This refusal-to-compromise can most visibly be seen in such actions as the open claim by several Republican senators that blocking Obama's policies is a higher priority than trying to pass any legislation at all. In essence, both parties have been moving towards "my way or the highway" stances.

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A complicating matter in this is that many members of the House of Representatives are from "safe" districts.  That is, their party's nominee will almost certainly win the general election.  Therefore, they only risk losing their seat by losing in the primary.  And as bad as voter turn out can be for the general elections in the USA, primaries are even worse.  So only highly motivated voters show up.

So if, for example, a Republican in a "safe" district was seen crossing the party line and voting for an Obama proposal, the political machine would be quick to support a true believer against the incumbent in the primary.

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8 hours ago, Sweveham said:

I doubt politics in the US are that polarized. Sure, there are some "social" issues which divide them, but the Republicans and Democrats are rather unified around free market "neoliberal" economics. There's not much foreign policy differences either.

I, at least, don't see it this way.  US leftists seem to regard all politics as driven by social consciousness.  When they're not driven by re-election realities, which is why the differences might appear muted from the outside.  US social conscience can collide with reality rather hard sometimes.

Example:
It was a 2008 campaign promise of Barack Obama's to close the terrorist prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.  It was a huge human-rights issue when his predecessor GW Bush was president.  The fact that it's still open and criticism is muted might make it look like there's actually little difference between the US Left and Right about the place.  Not so.  Obama's ideology tripped over reality on the way to the one serious attempt at closure he attempted. 

President Bush released everybody from Guantanamo one could seriously imagine releasing.  The 100 or so left were/are all really bad men bent on doing really bad things to the US and its citizens given the chance.  Some inmates released by Bush returned to the battlefield as it was.  It's easy to expect that the hardcore inmates that Bush didn't release were kept back because of the very high confidence that they'd return to the fight against us.  It would be madness to release them anyway.  No matter how much Obama would love to close Guantanamo, he has a stronger desire to not see a trail of blood leading from his decision to his door.

Several US states offered up their prison systems for housing the Guantanamo inmates but they all fell down on one really nasty question.  Once on proper US soil they would be subject to Constitutional due process, especially when treated according to the criminal-justice model the US Left wanted to use.  That due process could result in guantanamo inmates being released, begging the question:  Do we really want to see what happens if these guys get loose on US soil?  So the whole thing ground to a halt with the status quo as the result.  But not because the US Left and Rigth agreed to the status quo but because no solution to Guantanamo Bay could be found that didn't impose a high political risk to the US Left.

The hoo-hah over Guantanamo actually quieted down rather quickly after Obama was elected in 2008.  Not because the US Left and the US Right suddenly agreed about the place but because most of the US news media, which leads or amplifies such concerns, decided not to put any more emphasis on it.  90% or more of people working in US news media identify themselves as liberal, democrat, or both.  There was no point in shedding human-right tears over Guantanamo when there was no Conservative or Republican president to use them against.  To an outsider, this manner of choosing issues to be concerned about can also seem to mute the actual degree of contention between the two major US political parties.

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There's a fantastic xkcd graphic visualizing the history of polarization in Congress. You can see the center-right dwindle and vanish over the past 20 years or so, replaced by the hard-line far-right, especially in the House. In fact, the right wing of American politics looks more polarized now than it has ever been. Meanwhile, the left actually isn't all that polarized, with a mix of centrists, hard-left progressives, and a decent spectrum in between. Similarly, it's pretty much just the Republicans that are refusing to compromise, not the Democrats.

So it's really not that surprising that where the Democrats are presenting a fairly conventional candidate in Hillary Clinton, the Republicans are giving us "The Donald." It's been building to that for a long time now.

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26 minutes ago, Troacctid said:

There's a fantastic xkcd graphic visualizing the history of polarization in Congress. You can see the center-right dwindle and vanish over the past 20 years or so, replaced by the hard-line far-right, especially in the House. In fact, the right wing of American politics looks more polarized now than it has ever been. Meanwhile, the left actually isn't all that polarized, with a mix of centrists, hard-left progressives, and a decent spectrum in between. Similarly, it's pretty much just the Republicans that are refusing to compromise, not the Democrats.

So it's really not that surprising that where the Democrats are presenting a fairly conventional candidate in Hillary Clinton, the Republicans are giving us "The Donald." It's been building to that for a long time now.

The funny thing is, about the only ones the Republicans refuse to compromise with are those from the hard-line far-right to the center-right. They're willing to compromise with the left pretty much any time, and repeatedly, giving away more of what they claim to stand for on each occasion.

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12 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

The funny thing is, about the only ones the Republicans refuse to compromise with are those from the hard-line far-right to the center-right. They're willing to compromise with the left pretty much any time, and repeatedly, giving away more of what they claim to stand for on each occasion.

Are they really, though? Congressional Republicans have shown no interest in compromising with the Obama administration. Their strategy has been persistent obstructionism: standing in the way of everything he tries to do, no matter what, so that he can never look good by scoring any victories. Then they can tell voters that the government is broken and useless under the Democrats and it's time to throw out the incumbent. Remember when they shut down the government a couple years back because they refused to pass funding for Obamacare? Or all the presidential appointments they've filibustered, up to and including an actual Supreme Court vacancy that they are filibustering right now at this very moment?

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1 hour ago, Troacctid said:

Or all the presidential appointments they've filibustered, up to and including an actual Supreme Court vacancy that they are filibustering right now at this very moment?

I find that one especially frustrating when they said "Let the people vote and decide who will nominate the next Justice," when Obama still had over a year left of the four year term the people did elect him to.  Makes me want to see a reporter insist that they say out loud how many years a President is elected for.  (While the joke that they seem to think a black President only gets three-fifths of a term is clever, I think they'd be about as bad with any other progressive President at this point.)

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15 hours ago, Troacctid said:

Are they really, though? Congressional Republicans have shown no interest in compromising with the Obama administration. Their strategy has been persistent obstructionism: standing in the way of everything he tries to do, no matter what, so that he can never look good by scoring any victories. Then they can tell voters that the government is broken and useless under the Democrats and it's time to throw out the incumbent. Remember when they shut down the government a couple years back because they refused to pass funding for Obamacare? Or all the presidential appointments they've filibustered, up to and including an actual Supreme Court vacancy that they are filibustering right now at this very moment?

Blocking in the sense of "Here's 99% of what you asked for." "No, not good enough, I'll veto it and blame you for being obstructionist if you don't give me 110% of what I asked for." "Oh, okay, here's 110%."

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On 2016-07-12 at 1:17 PM, banneret said:

I believe that we are not, and can not be, a healthy democratic society under the two party system.

I agree fully that a two-party is not healthy. Proportional representation for the win!

21 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

I, at least, don't see it this way.  US leftists seem to regard all politics as driven by social consciousness.  When they're not driven by re-election realities, which is why the differences might appear muted from the outside.  US social conscience can collide with reality rather hard sometimes.... To an outsider, this manner of choosing issues to be concerned about can also seem to mute the actual degree of contention between the two major US political parties.

Indeed, the Democrats do claim to be very different from the Republicans. But words count for little, it's actions that matter and in action, the democrats are not very different from the Republicans, as you yourself admit.

Also, I'm a Swedish leftist and I don't believe "politics [are] driven by social consciousness", which is idealism both in the colloquial and sociological sense of the term. Like most socialists, I believe that history and politics are mainly driven by material conditions, so-called materialism. The US "leftists" you're talking about are liberals which are centre-left at most. They tend to be idealist. Whatever you do, don't lump me in with them.

21 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

 There was no point in shedding human-right tears over Guantanamo when there was no Conservative or Republican president to use them against. 

Sadly many people seem to treat politics as a football game. All that matters is that their team win, that the politicians in their party get elected and gain power, even if the ideals and politics gets abandoned in the process.

 

21 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

Several US states offered up their prison systems for housing the Guantanamo inmates but they all fell down on one really nasty question.  Once on proper US soil they would be subject to Constitutional due process, especially when treated according to the criminal-justice model the US Left wanted to use.  That due process could result in guantanamo inmates being released, begging the question:  Do we really want to see what happens if these guys get loose on US soil? 

 I find it frightening that you seem to regard human rights and due process as just frivolous idealism we can not afford, as left-wing nonsense.  I understand you believe that it is necessary to disregard due process and human rights in order to defend us from the evil terrorists. But what is the US supposedly defending from the terrorists? Democracy, of course. And two of the cornerstones of that democracy is due process and human rights. What happened to Blackstone's formulation that it's better to let 100 guilty men go free than let one innocent man suffer?

Of course there is little point in arguing this. What you are arguing for is ultimately a form of Kissingeresque realpolitik. "The ends justify the means" and so on. And realpolitik is philosophically ultimately an form of utilitarianism. And since I studied library science at university instead of philosophy, I fell wholly unequipped to argue utilitarianism contra deontology contra virtue ethics and so on.

Instead, I suggest you read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula. K Le Guin, which you can read in the collection, The Wind's Twelve Quarters. It's what convinced me to abandon utilitarianism.

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35 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

Blocking in the sense of "Here's 99% of what you asked for." "No, not good enough, I'll veto it and blame you for being obstructionist if you don't give me 110% of what I asked for." "Oh, okay, here's 110%."

When did that happen ever?

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6 hours ago, Sweveham said:

I agree fully that a two-party is not healthy. Proportional representation for the win!

The US is not set up to handle a multiparty system well.  It's just different than the parliamentary system you guys use.  Not better or worse.
 

6 hours ago, Sweveham said:

Indeed, the Democrats do claim to be very different from the Republicans. But words count for little, it's actions that matter and in action, the democrats are not very different from the Republicans, as you yourself admit.

Also, I'm a Swedish leftist and I don't believe "politics [are] driven by social consciousness", which is idealism both in the colloquial and sociological sense of the term. Like most socialists, I believe that history and politics are mainly driven by material conditions, so-called materialism. The US "leftists" you're talking about are liberals which are centre-left at most. They tend to be idealist. Whatever you do, don't lump me in with them.

Sadly many people seem to treat politics as a football game. All that matters is that their team win, that the politicians in their party get elected and gain power, even if the ideals and politics gets abandoned in the process.

You have to differentiate desired action from limits on action.  My point with Guantanamo is it'd be long closed if there were no harsh consequences to closing it.   And of course that only a Democrat would consider closing Guantanamo.

I never intended to lump you in with US Leftists.  I apologize if that impression came across.  I tried to be very clear about who I was ...and by implication who I wasn't...talking about.  I primarily know the US and did not wish to make claims beyond it.

Politics as a football game...completely agreed.  Regardless of your definition for "football."  :)

6 hours ago, Sweveham said:

 I find it frightening that you seem to regard human rights and due process as just frivolous idealism we can not afford, as left-wing nonsense.  I understand you believe that it is necessary to disregard due process and human rights in order to defend us from the evil terrorists. But what is the US supposedly defending from the terrorists? Democracy, of course. And two of the cornerstones of that democracy is due process and human rights. What happened to Blackstone's formulation that it's better to let 100 guilty men go free than let one innocent man suffer?


Blackstone's Formulation should be satisfied.  First understand that the inmates at Guantanamo are Prisoners of War, not criminals.  No enemy combatant from any war ever got civilian due process from an enemy nation.  Nor should the inmates at Guantanamo.

Edit: Terrorists who have performed acts in the US or EU (for example) could be considered as criminals or enemy combatants.  The inmates at Guantanamo were all captured in time of war.  They are most definitely POWs.

Due process for a Terrorist captured in a theater of war is the same due process that an enemy soldier gets:  Hearings to be held (per the Geneva Accords) to separate enemy soldiers from people in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Hearings have been held for all inmates at Guantanamo. All the good guys or mildly bad guys were released by GW Bush long before Obama took office..   What's left are by definition all genuine bad guys.  The worst of the worst, in fact. 

When to release the last Guantanamo inmates is a tricky question.  When do they stop being a threat to US civilians and military personnel?  When is the war really over?

Nobody has yet really delved into the question of how to treat a NGO (Non Government Organization) that wages warfare.  Neither ISIS or its precursor al Queda are proper "governments" or "nations", though ISIS aspires to the status.  We've all tried to act as if treating them like a governments works just fine but questions like "when do you release POWs?  "When is the war truly over?" show how awkward the fit can be at times.

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20 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

The funny thing is, about the only ones the Republicans refuse to compromise with are those from the hard-line far-right to the center-right. They're willing to compromise with the left pretty much any time, and repeatedly, giving away more of what they claim to stand for on each occasion.

That was certainly true of John Boehner's term as Speaker of the House...  Boehner seemed more interested in sitting at the "cool kids" table with Obama than the interests of his own Party.  Donald Trump owes his nomination to Boehner's shallow self-interested handling of his Speakership.

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On July 12, 2016 at 3:57 PM, Vorlonagent said:

It would be madness to release them anyway.  No matter how much Obama would love to close Guantanamo, he has a stronger desire to not see a trail of blood leading from his decision to his door.

This phrasing makes it seem like you were proposing that he wanted to just release them (even if you rule this out in later paragraphs). Why would ... eh, never mind. That was an odd implication to let loose.

 

 

Quote

It's just different than the parliamentary system you guys use.  Not better or worse.

Our First-Past-The-Post single-representative-districts-redrawn-along-partisan lines system isn't worse????

 

Quote

 First understand that the inmates at Guantanamo are Prisoners of War, not criminals.

PoWs who were not treated according to Geneva Convention protections for PoWs, hence their classification as 'unlawful combatants'. :|

2 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

That was certainly true of John Boehner's term as Speaker of the House...  Boehner seemed more interested in sitting at the "cool kids" table with Obama than the interests of his own Party.  Donald Trump owes his nomination to Boehner's shallow self-interested handling of his Speakership.

Can you provide a few concrete examples?

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2 minutes ago, Drachefly said:

He wanted to bring many of them to prisons in the USA. THAT was unacceptable, not 'let them all go'. Fer cryin' out loud, did you seriously think he wanted to release them all?

Yes I do think Obama wanted (and probably still wants) to release them all. 

It's common for the US Left to sympathize with third-world people and organizations with loud resentments against the US.  Foreign policy from such people tends to boil down to "be nice to them."  If that fails, "be nicer to them."  Honest signalling that the US has put its abusive ways behind itself, combined with material generosity to make good for past misdeeds, will lead to positive relations.  It just takes time and lots of niceness. 

A grand show of generosity would be to release all the Guantanamo inmates.

The real world doesn't work this way, however.  The terrorists don't see the niceness or generosity, they see weakness to be exploited.

I admit that I only have one data point of real proof for the above.  Obama released 5 Guantanamo inmates in exchange for 1 US Army deserter.

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Well, it's not about what the terrorists see. It's about what their potential recruits see. ISIS wants to paint the U.S. as evil, so when we do actual evil things, we're giving them propaganda fuel. This is why the anti-Muslim rhetoric of Trump and the Republican party actually plays directly into ISIS's hands—it alienates the non-terrorist Muslims (AKA most of them) and undermines our local support networks in those regions.

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8 hours ago, Troacctid said:

When did that happen ever?

Well, the most obvious example is that the party that took control of Congress on a pledge to do something serious about Obamacare has not even managed to slightly impair its funding.

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3 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

Well, the most obvious example is that the party that took control of Congress on a pledge to do something serious about Obamacare has not even managed to slightly impair its funding.

They've voted dozens of times to repeal, defund, or otherwise undermine the Affordable Care Act. Obama vetoed those bills every time they made it to his desk, so they obviously weren't collaborating with him—in fact I would consider it an excellent example of them relentlessly opposing him. Luckily for us Americans, they don't have the votes to override a veto.

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16 hours ago, Troacctid said:

Well, it's not about what the terrorists see. It's about what their potential recruits see. ISIS wants to paint the U.S. as evil, so when we do actual evil things, we're giving them propaganda fuel. This is why the anti-Muslim rhetoric of Trump and the Republican party actually plays directly into ISIS's hands—it alienates the non-terrorist Muslims (AKA most of them) and undermines our local support networks in those regions.

There's no shortage of terrorist recruits no matter what is said or not said in the US.  The people get a steady diet of anti-US propaganda from government and the clerics regardless of what gets said over here.  Obama makes "Muslim outreach" a major goal of NASA's and it means nothing.  Trump calls for blocking all Muslim refugees and it means nothing.

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