2020 Election

My sister homeschools her kids, but only because she doesn't feel safe with them at school. And I can't blame her. Some of these schools...the teachers are just totally inept. And some areas are just filled with people that want to take advantage of little kids. She lives in New Mexico. I'd feel safe sending my kids to school here in Iowa, but not New Mexico.

I'm hungry for an America that isn't thuggish and depraved. America is a fairly nice place to live, but I wish it were more European. You know, those countries that don't fret about being the biggest kid on the block. It would be nice if we could take a step back and be more harmonious with the rest of the world. Just another country instead of "the greatest country on Earth" and all that rubbish. I really hope Bernie wins, so that this country can have some semblance of being a healthy nation. I'd make do with Elizabeth Warren in that regard, too. But Joe Biden is a no go for me. Things would return to normal, yeah, but normal in this country isn't a positive thing.

I don't think most people have it too bad in this country, all things considered. Though too many do have it really bad. But it's like, with someone like Joe, we're all just supposed to be contented. He puts a nice veneer on everything. But I'm not contented nor satisfied. I want to live in a really great country, a really progressive one. I don't want to just have to deal with the government eking its way towards progress...progress just so long as the wealthy elite maintain control, that is. 'Cause that's all it boils down to. They'll just do the bare minimum to keep the people satisfied, so that the country runs smoothly for them, but it always has to jive with the wealthy maintaining their lifestyle and their grip on power. I'm tired of living in a nation like that.

It's all about being friendly, really. And the wealthy elite just aren't friendly. This isn't a country just for the 1%. This has to stop.

 

How lucky to be privileged enough not to need any big policy change, to have cheap and comprehensive employer sponsored insurance, to not have student loan debt from predatory student loans, to have never experienced bankruptcy from medical debt or been denied medical treatment because of an inability to fix it, or dealt with the effects of gentrification, or been food insecure or dealt with the reality of stagnant wages versus rising housing costs or...I could go on but I wont

Policy is exactly what they should be focused on, politics isnt just a fun reality show featuring the Democrats versus Donald Trump. For some people this sort of thing carries real life consequences

 

Many people are immature and do just want the show, though. Policy is an afterthought.

 

It's a shame isnt it

But if the Democrats focus on the reality show rather than real policy, the people who have become disillusioned with politics and who need real change will just stay home and not vote. They're right to focus on policy

 

Bernie Sanders is the only candidate that's real , he hasn't changed his core beliefs nor his message to suit the times , with him you get someone committed to his ideas every day of his life. With the rest you get focus groups, cooked messaging and polling data, professional advisors and advertising firms, whispering every word that must be spoken, a charade if you will.
That charade has been the norm for at least the last 60 years and our country slips further into the abyss each passing day. Selling laundry detergent on TV is really little different than selling a candidate.
Too few Americans ever take time to look beyond the packaging, advertising deals and the showbiz , yes I said showbiz, of what American politics has become to even attempt an understanding of policy.
With that being said they become a herd of sheep stampeding in the direction their masters point them without question whatsoever.

 

There are no real candidates when there is no real government and everybody keeps voting for whoever advertises the most. Bernie can pretend to be the voice of conscience and democracy all he wants, but ask yourself who is the bigger fool? The last Jew with such pretensions they nailed to a cross.

 

The left: Capitalism is evil because it creates monopolies

Also the left: We demand government monopolies on education, healthcare, transportation, water, utilities, etc.

 

For a lynch mob politics are about entertainment and entrenched wealth while, for the rest of us, politics are about cooperating to defeat the lynch mobs. Capitalism doesn't exist in a lynch mob. You can find books on the subject at Amazon.com

 

There is also a sliver of home schoolers in the United States who are apolitical or on the Left. The first few I knew personally included a scientist who said that the he and his wife and in-laws and the children themselves, given a choice at the age of 10-15 or so after experiencing both public and private schools, felt the schools were of poor quality and maybe they could make up around the margins and do it right if there were 100 hours in a day and 15 days in week but they wanted to take the bull by the horns. Then there were quite a few hippy and IWW types who were concerned about the corrupting influence of class struggle and monopoly capitalism and the warmongering of the Postmodern Techno-Industrial Megastate.

I think all the kids in those cases turned out fine, and didn't turn into inbred toothless redneck cousin-fucking banjo-playing people who waylay tourists and tell them to squeal like a pig. One of them managed to get two or three advanced degrees and ended up simultaneously as a monsignor, professor, and politician and could speak 12 languages or something.

 

The political realities are such that many Americans may want some policy changes but are afraid of major, unpredictable changes in their lives. Trump won partly because the changes they wanted were protectionism and keeping immigrants out. I think that's still probably true. Changes do occur incrementally, but the status quo has an advantage over candidates promising radical restructuring (as Elizabeth Warren did last night). To me, the most serious problem facing the United States at the moment is Trump, who is a threat to all we hold near and dear. Getting him out should be the number one priority, and I'm concerned that the lurch to the left will have the opposite effect.

 

The right: Why should we break up monopolies? That's just the nature of the game, winner takes all!
Also the right: Democratic socialism is bad because it creates monopolies.

 

What one could say to that is that if that is the case, then capitalism and the socialism with which they are familiar are the same thing with different people in charge and at least you can elect politicians more easily and directly than you can captains of industry and CEOs. If one wants to fix things I would propose a third position.

 

The simple truth is its empire baby, and this train ain't stopping until she derails. The money that flooded into the US after WWII was invested in weapons and the US sells 40% of all the weapons sold today. Those weapons are funding the entire world economy, with the dollar underscoring almost every other currency and the US being the third largest country in the world, but only 5% of the total population. We pay half the bills for NATO and the UN because people pay through the nose for the best weapons. The Pentagon is currently planning on putting 40,000 drones in the ocean, which will be the first large field test of their newest robotics technology. In part, they want to do it in the ocean first because the robots can gather power straight from the water like captain Nemo and shouldn't have to be recharged for a year or more.

Americans support the status quo, because they have no clue what status quo means. That money has a life of its own, and even Donald Duck cannot sink the empire created by the international conglomerates that have been eating the US alive for a century and a half. These days, you have to pay most people to vote.

 

We really aren't facing a choice between capitalism and socialism. Our society has evolved into a mixture of the two, and if we'd embrace it, things would work out much better. Instead we have a bunch of right wingers complaining about socialism. So what's the alternative, just cut throat capitalism at its worst? Every man for himself?

Seriously, who are these people who are against social programs to help the poor, old, and needy? It's so fucking ridiculous.

 

Socialism without capitalism, and vice versa, have each proven self-defeating and self-destructive for the last century. Extremism has not solved anything, because throwing large sums of cash off buildings is enough to upset the apple cart in both cases. Demanding loyalty to either capitalism or socialism, creates a black market and the Mafia is all about corrupt government. What we require is a theory of everything, which might sound strange, but economics today are a total mess and the world is much to small to continue on the path we are on. Marx makes sense, but only because a steam engine makes sense, while we require more organic self-organizing systems logics based on first principles.

Self-organizing systems logics can out perform capitalism any day of the week, because capitalism is ultimately self-destructive and wasteful. We require Game Theory, which can describe such things using Intuitionistic mathematics. There are a few examples in biology and agrarian cultures, but its all new science and we need that fucking theory of everything yesterday if you ask me.

 

One, sadists. Two, people with a faulty understanding of economics who may be conservative by temperament and gravitate to a group of politicians who push rugged individualism and a bit of victim blaming, which isn't really conservative by historical and world standards. Three, people who victim-blame impulsively, which I want to see in the DSM-VI and ICD-11 to be perfectly frank.

 

Capitalism + socialism works fucking great, though. You have a free market, you, ideally, make loads of money, and you utilize some of it to make sure that others can participate in the free market. Myself, I don't even make a living wage, and I barely put any resources into the economy. I can't afford to.

For the life of me, I can't understand why you wouldn't want to utilize some of your resources to help out your fellow countrymen. What even is a nation if not that. It helps you, too, in the long run. Economically and just for the sake of your own happiness. In what way is free health care for all a death knell for capitalism? No one is suggesting free tooth paste for all or free swimming pools for all, and I seriously doubt anyone ever will be suggesting that. At least not in the foreseeable future.

 

The blending when done correctly is wonderful -- the Social Market Economy is what the German Christian Democrats and others call it, and it does work better than the mess trying to be fixed in this case. I think the folks on the Right and assorted other libertarian types who concur with them in moaning about "European Socialists" and all this know this in their bones and have a fear of maybe, career-wise and philosophically, being spaded under if such a change comes. Which, per that example, has to have a very strong local, state, and regional element -- the Federal government cannot impose it from the top.

 

Think of it as an ecology, where you need variety. Thus far we have a primitive economic system, but self-organizing systems logics will allow for an even greater variety. The age of empires is as old as agriculture itself, but it keeps destroying the entire world economy. But, this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Soon enough, the machines will have more to offer people then either capitalism or socialism. Knowledge is power, and a theory of everything describes exactly how it is power.

 

I agree 100%.
As I have stated a number of times. Who are the people who vote? Old white people. Who are the people who don't like change? Old white people. Get my drift?
Grandiose, pie in the sky ideas are great to dream about. . . . . then reality sets in.
One day the younger generations will get a government they want, but in the mean time, it pays to be pragmatic.