Election '08 (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Politics on the Internet)

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  • edited October 2008
    Please don't associate me with acorn.
  • edited October 2008
    "We believe that the best of America is in the small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very Pro-America areas of this great nation" -Palin

    FUCK YOU PALIN

    The Daily Show lifted this from one of her speeches, but I was so goddamned pissed off I had to write about here.

    Now it is commonly known in the political realm that pretending to be an average, modest, everyday American is a successful political strategy. We saw this in the primaries when Hillary stood on pickup trucks at Nascar rallies and when Obama tried to bowl. And let's be honest they both looked fucking stupid because they were both obviously out of place. But this happens.

    Then Palin comes along and she's got the balls to tell all these fucktards that they're the real America. Apparently the millions of people who've been born and raised in big cities aren't American. Apparently immigrants from Europe and Asia who came to America looking for a better life and legally became US citizens to live and work in major cities aren't fucking American either. This pandering to the stereotypical Joe Sixpack is making me sick to my stomach. I don't want Joe Sixpack running my country, because Joe Sixpack is an alcoholic, unemployed leech on society who beats his wife. I want somebody's who's educated, hardworking, and intelligent at the helm. We tried electing someone different once, and look where it got us.

    I spent my childhood in the Twin Cities and in Dallas, and although I went to high school in Iowa, both of those larger cities had impacts on my life. I was near Chicago in college, and I can see myself living and working in Chicago in the future. By Palin's asinine logic I am apparently not an American, and I don't appreciate this. I bust my ass to be a better American every day. I try to understand different worldviews, languages, and culture. I live in a country that has a very complicated relationship with America and the West, and I work hard to help show people here that Americans are good, honest, hardworking folk who simply want to have a good life, like everyone else.

    Oh, and I read the NEWS too, not just "whatever is put in front of me". Dumbass.

    Fortunately, it seems a good portion of the country is seeing right through all this, as everybody but the very conservative base is turned off by her (Colin Powell's Obama endorsement was largely because of this).

    Argh... she just makes me so angry...
  • edited October 2008
    Yeah but do you love Israel and hunting? Those are important American things too.
  • edited October 2008
    I am indifferent to Israel, but I love hunting. Babies, that is.
  • godgod
    edited October 2008
    From helicopters?
  • edited October 2008
    Behemoth wrote: »
    Did anybody catch the Diane Rehm Show on NPR today? I'm pissed off again, now. She had some lady from ACORN talking about how it was all a smear campaign to disenfranchise minority voters and a republican guy talking about all the various instances of voter registration fraud they'd uncovered. The whole thing can pretty much be summed up with one little exchange. The republican mentioned that a dozen NYers who all voted in the Democratic Primaries in NY were requesting absentee ballots for Ohio. All for the same address. The ACORN lady's response was, "requesting a ballot is not a crime, people move all the time." Every single attack was countered with "it's not technically illegal or fraud until they vote" a dozen fucking people all moving into the same fucking house, yet staying in NY and requesting absentee ballots isn't fraud? Once the people vote, it's too late to check for fraud. And still, if you try to have stricter voting registration requirements, it's a huge republican conspiracy to disenfranchise minority voters. I can't take this any more.

    ACORN's problem is that they pay people to go out and get registrations, and some of those just fill in whatever in order to get their checks. ACORN is legally obligated to turn in those registrations whether they have any merit or not. Nobody is going to vote with those registrations, the only reason the GOP is making a huge fuss out of this is to discredit ALL of ACORN's registrations to, yes, disenfranchise voters that were legitimately and legally registered to vote through ACORN as they tend to be poorer, urban, and minority voters. You can't tell me the Republican National Committee would be this outraged if this happened in Southeastern Tennessee.

    Should there be stricter voting registration requirements? Of course. I think the whole legal ID thing you talked about earlier is entirely reasonable. But this specific feigned-hysteria is not motivated by a genuine desire to see electoral reform, it's just yet another battle in the general GOP war of attrition to get 50%+1 of the votes at whatever cost since their candidate is doing poorly.
  • edited October 2008
    Once again.... I thought Tina Fey made that up.
  • edited October 2008
    ACORN's problem is that they pay people to go out and get registrations, and some of those just fill in whatever in order to get their checks. ACORN is legally obligated to turn in those registrations whether they have any merit or not. Nobody is going to vote with those registrations, the only reason the GOP is making a huge fuss out of this is to discredit ALL of ACORN's registrations to, yes, disenfranchise voters that were legitimately and legally registered to vote through ACORN as they tend to be poorer, urban, and minority voters. You can't tell me the Republican National Committee would be this outraged if this happened in Southeastern Tennessee.

    Should there be stricter voting registration requirements? Of course. I think the whole legal ID thing you talked about earlier is entirely reasonable. But this specific feigned-hysteria is not motivated by a genuine desire to see electoral reform, it's just yet another battle in the general GOP war of attrition to get 50%+1 of the votes at whatever cost since their candidate is doing poorly.

    Nevermind, associate me with acorn.
  • edited October 2008
    Alright, listen up. It's time to talk about socialism. There's been a lot of talk about socialist policies lately, so we're going to clear things up. Now pay attention everyone, I'm going to use my amazing superpowers of common sense and logic.

    Americans are retarded with money. We actually have a negative savings rate, meaning that the average American spends more money than they actually have. While other countries can boast 25% or more, we spend everything we have and then make up the difference with credit cards. The subprime mortgage mess is a perfect example of this. People without money were buying homes they shouldn't have been buying. Just because a bank approves your loan doesn't mean you should go out and do it. If a bank approved a loan for me to buy my own jet, that doesn't mean I should go out and buy it.

    Furthermore, we have a very serious problem with income distribution. Refer to this (sourced from the Economist):

    Income.jpg

    We have a big problem here. We have a very wide range of income distribution, much more than any other OECD country. Americans in the top 10%, or decile, have over $87,000 dollars of disposable income (disposable income is the money you have leftover after you've paid rent, utilities, food, and other necessary expenses). Those in the lowest decile have about $5,000 in disposable income, which is among the lowest of developed countries (these numbers were taken from the accompanying article, not the graph, in case you were confused).

    The axiom "the rich get richer" applies here. CEO pay have increased ten fucking fold over the last 30 years. The CEO of Lehman Brothers, before it went down, made approximately $200,000 dollars. Every fucking day. Those of you who are in or finished with college, how much could you turn your life around with ONE day's worth of pay as a CEO?

    Let's look at the minimum wage. It's only finally going up after what, 15 years? Longer? $5.15 an hour may have been survivable in the early 90s, but it sure isn't survivable now, nor has it been for the last several years. I don't think it has been since gas went more expensive than $1.09 a gallon.

    Finally, the icing on the cake, Washington DC has a nice National Debt counter posted somewhere, I forget where. It's gotten so bad they had to drop the dollar sign taking up the digit slot on the far left, because they needed that to extend the debt. We actually need a new tally machine to show how much money our country owes everyone else.

    We need some major reform. We already are getting reform in the financial sector, now that the government has billions of dollars of preferred shares in almost every major US bank and financial institution. Hey, that sounds kind of socialist to me. Good thing you stood up to that kind of thing, huh John McCain? Good thing you didn't do something fucking stupid like suspend your campaign to assist Congress in passing what many could argue is the biggest socialist move our government has ever made. Otherwise you'd look like a goddamn idiot when you criticize Obama's tax plan.

    I don't like McCain's tax plan because it seems too wishy washy. We have a serious monetary crisis, and we're not going to solve it by cutting everyone's taxes. Look at the graph. If they want to earn more money, they can pay more in taxes.

    It's tough, no one likes taxes, but someone's got to pay to help our country out. And the people at the bottom just can't do it.
  • edited October 2008
    I can't critisise you because you acknowledged it, but that was all common sense.

    That said, I do agree with you.
  • edited October 2008
    Common sense is surprisingly uncommon.
  • edited October 2008
    Yeah, it's sad how its the poor supporting the milionares. And they don't care, they aspire to be the milionares.

    I generalize, but still.
  • edited October 2008
    This is a bit long, so skip to the numbered items if you're lazy.

    Source here, I didn't write this.

    --

    Facism's principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for. The cliché that people and nations learn from history is not only overused, but also overestimated; often we fail to learn from history, or draw the wrong conclusions. Sadly, historical amnesia is the norm.

    We are two-and-a-half generations removed from the horrors of Nazi Germany, although constant reminders jog the consciousness. German and Italian fascism form the historical models that define this twisted political worldview. Although they no longer exist, this worldview and the characteristics of these models have been imitated by protofascist regimes at various times in the twentieth century. Both the original German and Italian models and the later protofascist regimes show remarkably similar characteristics. Although many scholars question any direct connection among these regimes, few can dispute their visual similarities.

    Beyond the visual, even a cursory study of these fascist and protofascist regimes reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi. This, of course, is not a revelation to the informed political observer, but it is sometimes useful in the interests of perspective to restate obvious facts and in so doing shed needed light on current circumstances.

    For the purpose of this perspective, I will consider the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia. To be sure, they constitute a mixed bag of national identities, cultures, developmental levels, and history. But they all followed the fascist or protofascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power. Further, all these regimes have been overthrown, so a more or less complete picture of their basic characteristics and abuses is possible.

    Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.

    1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.

    2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.

    3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda and disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.

    4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.

    5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.

    6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.

    7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting “national security,” and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

    8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite’s behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the “godless.” A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.

    9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.

    10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.

    11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.

    12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. “Normal” and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or “traitors” was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.

    13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.

    14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.

    Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. Maybe, maybe not.
  • edited October 2008
    Want a sign of how bad our governments are borrowing?

    The public debt in Britain at the moment is £1,866 billion (before we bail out all these banks, I might add), which is 125.5% of our GDP. That is £76,475 of debt per person in the country.

    What does this mean? Once the economy picks up again, we'll be forced to sit through higher taxes as a means simply of paying back this debt. Not more money on the NHS, not an improved benefits system, but paying off debt.

    And the kicker? In this country, the government is leaving Northern Rock, a bank nationalised earlier this year, off the books, so that they appear to have less debt. Why? So they can borrow more!

    And is it helping? Through it all, is the Keynesian induced borrowing helping our markets pick up? Is it fuck. Markets are still going down, and I don't think that's going to change for a while yet.

    Don't get me wrong, I think the government are right to bail out our banks, but now what was an extraordinary measure, pumping money that could be ill-afforded into the banking system, is now becoming the norm in many other sectors. This is on top of 11 years of dodgy dealings with debt and borrowing by the current government.

    It doesn't help that they have fostered this culture of throwing money around in lieu of real solutions, which is why the NHS is doing so badly despite spending going up on it, why our social support bill is so high, etc. Even if things do get better, it seems to me that they haven't learnt a thing and will simply continue on this path.

    Sigh.
  • edited October 2008
    The moon doesn't have any debt. Let's move to the moon.
  • edited October 2008
    Bow chicka wow wow.
  • edited October 2008
    What? Is this the smash on your government thread now?

    Well here's my contribution:
    "Of course the people don't want war... that is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country that determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a facist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
    Remember, I don't have a copy/paste, so that was pretty big contribution.
  • edited October 2008
    Mish42 wrote: »
    In Atlas Shrugged (by Ayn Rand, tis one of those annoying obscure literature book references Adam referred to earlier in the other thread), the looters aren't the victims, because, by not helping themselves in any way, and just taking whatever OTHER people gain for them, they deserve to go down.

    I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question: Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?

    No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor.
    No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God.
    No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone.

    I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose
    Rapture.

    A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small. And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well. - Andrew Ryan
  • edited October 2008
    Despite how batshit retarded our government can be, I am infinitely grateful that we can still call out our government and bitch about them.
  • edited October 2008
    I don't care wyhat anyone says... Bioshock was the fucking shit, man. The storyline was awweome, are ypou are amazing for quoting it in this context. Seriously, relevant, dude.

    Is not a man entitled to the sweat of his brow?

    Sure thing, bitch, espediallywhen the sweat of his brow fucking keep0es every other person in slavery.

    Fuck this shit, we need to reduce our numbers to a few hundred thousand and breed people like they ddid in Brave New World. Workers and thinkers, ahppy within their positions.

    Yeah bitches. I'm drunk.
  • edited October 2008
    Indeed, three cheers for Bioshock! A game deep in philosophical thought as well as enjoyable game play.

    "Who is John Galt?" “Who is Atlas?”

    Rapture was to create a society free of God and government, where any citizen could achieve for his or herself, rather than for others' benefits. Charity and generosity only benefit “parasites.”

    “Altruism is the root of all wickedness.”

    "No Gods or Kings. Only Man." :―Andrew Ryan
  • edited October 2008
    It's a shame that all falls apart the moment Andrew Ryan takes credit for it.
  • edited October 2008
  • edited October 2008
    Hmm. I hate people again. Thank you, Ryan.
  • edited October 2008
    Ooh! Hate, I love hate! What was in the video? Can I get a link? Was it awesome? Am I missing out? Where am I?
  • edited October 2008
    I hate those mindless, fucking sheep. Is it wrong to hate someone for being cheerful, too?
  • edited October 2008
    No. It's completely fine, and I'm not being sarcastic. I hate people for being cheerful in many political situations.

    Also, could some kind sir give me a link to said video? Please?
  • edited October 2008
    Here you go. Is the embedded version not loading for you or something?

    EDIT: Damn you Illithid!