2020 Election Thoughts

[Jack Parkman]

6 minutes ago, Danny Dravot said:

Looking through there (my work computer won't open several of those articles), but particularly #4, it mentions appeasing a fiscally conservative base or fear of defying the president as reasons for not approving of a larger bill. You can disagree with fiscal conservatism, and the second concern is stupid since the president is a fucking imbecile, but at the same time for, say, Thom Tillis, doing so would probably constitute career suicide.

I don't agree with what McConnell is doing. They need to move heaven and earth to get something passed so Americans can handle the COVID pandemic without starting some sort of financial suicide pandemic. But you are ascribing his motives as economic terrorism and racism, and that's where you jump the shark.

I don't know how you can characterize the GOP economic platform as anything but economic terrorism. 

Tearing apart the social safety net is quite literally economic terrorism. 

Also..........I will say this until I'm blue in the face......if social safety net programs pay more money to a person than holding a low-end job, then the onus is on corporate America to raise wages to encourage people to get off. 

[Danny Dravot]

4 minutes ago, Jack Parkman said:

I don't know how you can characterize the GOP economic platform as anything but economic terrorism. 

Because I'm not massively hyperbolic. Next question.

[Danny Dravot]

8 minutes ago, Jack Parkman said:

I don't know how you can characterize the GOP economic platform as anything but economic terrorism. 

Tearing apart the social safety net is quite literally economic terrorism. 

Also..........I will say this until I'm blue in the face......if social safety net programs pay more money to a person than holding a low-end job, then the onus is on corporate America to raise wages to encourage people to get off. 

Seriously, I know what terrorism looks like. Every American who's over 30 or so should, because we watched it on TV. Additionally, I fought in a war zone where, more than once, children in our area of operations were killed and maimed by terrorist explosives. Often, we noticed that these explosives were placed on paths and infields that American soldiers didn't even visit. There was no reason to expect that they would harm anyone other than Afghans, and probably children. So why do it? Because it's helpful in making the population live in fear every second of their lives. I don't take the word terrorism lightly.

Thinking that the social safety net should be diminished and that people's financial outcomes are primarily their responsibility is an idea. It's not really my idea (I've expounded plenty on my ideas) but a person who supports this idea can absolutely do so for reasons that they find beneficial to society as a whole. Feel free to argue against them. But if all you can do is to conflate that idea with actions that base themselves on the intentional murder of innocent people, then have fun not ever being taken seriously.

[Jack Parkman]

19 minutes ago, Danny Dravot said:

Seriously, I know what terrorism looks like. Every American who's over 30 or so should, because we watched it on TV. Additionally, I fought in a war zone where, more than once, children in our area of operations were killed and maimed by terrorist explosives. Often, we noticed that these explosives were placed on paths and infields that American soldiers didn't even visit. There was no reason to expect that they would harm anyone other than Afghans, and probably children. So why do it? Because it's helpful in making the population live in fear every second of their lives. I don't take the word terrorism lightly.

Thinking that the social safety net should be diminished and that people's financial outcomes are primarily their responsibility is an idea. It's not really my idea (I've expounded plenty on my ideas) but a person who supports this idea can absolutely do so for reasons that they find beneficial to society as a whole. Feel free to argue against them. But if all you can do is to conflate that idea with actions that base themselves on the intentional murder of innocent people, then have fun not ever being taken seriously.

That's exactly what it is. Policies that result in poverty and homelessness  ARE the intentional murder of innocent people.  Denial of healthcare IS the murder of innocent people. In fact, it's a slow torture that results in death. The less money one has, the lower their life expectancy. It's absolutely a form of terrorism, but an indirect one rather than a direct one. 

Terrorism doesn't have to be a mass shooting or a direct act of violence. 

We've tried the personal responsibility direction for 40 years and it has proven to be toxic to social cohesion in a heterogeneous society. It's fair to say that experiment has failed miserably for the country as a whole. It's bad for the economy, social cohesion, and political rhetoric. The only "good" thing that happened is that 100 people got really rich. 

Edited November 14, 2020 by Jack Parkman

[Danny Dravot]

1 minute ago, Jack Parkman said:

That's exactly what it is. Policies that result in poverty and homelessness  ARE the intentional murder of innocent people.  Denial of healthcare IS the murder of innocent people. In fact, it's a slow torture that results in death. The less money one has, the lower their life expectancy. It's absolutely a form of terrorism, but an indirect one rather than a direct one. 

 

 

No.

If someone says, "you can buy a house and health insurance and whatever else you want, but YOU have to figure out how to find the money for it", it's calloused and ignores that some people can't work or can't afford education/licensing processes to get a better job, but it's not the intentional murder of anyone. It's not a slow torture.

Grow up. Stop the hyperbole.

[Jack Parkman]

10 minutes ago, Danny Dravot said:

No.

If someone says, "you can buy a house and health insurance and whatever else you want, but YOU have to figure out how to find the money for it", it's calloused and ignores that some people can't work or can't afford education/licensing processes to get a better job, but it's not the intentional murder of anyone. It's not a slow torture.

Grow up. Stop the hyperbole.

Yes it is. If you can't afford to eat healthy, to get the education to better yourself, to have access to housing, etc. The result is death due to homelessness or development of diseases of poverty, such as obesity, addiction and diabetes. Then, they can't afford their drugs or surgeries to keep themselves alive. This is an indirect, deliberate murder of their own citizens by lawmakers. 

It absloutely is torture and terrorism. 

 

Also, Trump's covid "response" is also terrorism. 

In order to understand this, one would have an understanding of the difference between violent and economic terrorism. It seems you don't. 

Edited November 14, 2020 by Jack Parkman

[Danny Dravot]

10 minutes ago, Jack Parkman said:

Yes it is. If you can't afford to eat healthy, to get the education to better yourself, to have access to housing, etc. The result is death due to homelessness or development of diseases of poverty, such as obesity and diabetes. Then, they can't afford their drugs or surgeries to keep themselves alive. This is an indirect, deliberate murder of their own citizens by lawmakers. 

It absloutely is torture and terrorism. 

 

Also, Trump's covid "response" is also terrorism. 

I'm an advocate of a limited welfare state that prevents suffering and unnecessary death while encouraging eventual independence from it. Yet your ideas here are so fanatical that I need to argue entirely against them.

Serious question- are individual citizens responsible for ANYTHING in your view? Right in this post alone, it's apparently the government's responsibility to provide education, healthy food, housing, drugs, surgery, disease prevention. Anything else you want the government to take care of?

Edited November 14, 2020 by Danny Dravot

[Dick Allen]

2 people died from Ebola, the right said Obama should resign.

4 died in Benghazi, Hillary had to testify for 11 hours, they had 33 hearings in a multi year probe.

250k died because Trump decided Coronavirus was over, so they cheer him on and play along with him about maybe he didn’t lose an election.

[Jack Parkman]

9 minutes ago, Danny Dravot said:

I'm an advocate of a limited welfare state that prevents suffering and unnecessary death while encouraging eventual independence from it. Yet your ideas here are so fanatical that I need to argue entirely against them.

Serious question- are individual citizens responsible for ANYTHING in your view? Right in this post, it's the government's responsibility to provide education, healthy food, housing, drugs, surgery, disease prevention. Anything else you want the government to take care of?

It's the government's responsibility to ensure that people actually have access to those things and that they're reasonably priced such that even the poorest people can afford them. 

This can be done one of two ways:

1. Higher wages, higher taxes on the rich/Corporations

2. Higher taxes on everyone. 

 

The huge issue right now(even before covid) is that there aren't enough jobs that pay a living wage. 

Those of us under 40 are getting hit especially hard. There are two Americas right now. One for the people who have secured a living wage and one for those that haven't. 

Edited November 14, 2020 by Jack Parkman

[Danny Dravot]

1 minute ago, Dick Allen said:

2 people died from Ebola, the right said Obama should resign.

4 died in Benghazi, Hillary had to testify for 11 hours, they had 33 hearings in a multi year probe.

250k died because Trump decided Coronavirus was over, so they cheer him on and play along with him about maybe he didn’t lose an election.

Genuinely curious, can you cite anybody on the right demanding Obama's resignation over Ebola? I was much more firmly on the right at the time, and I didn't like Obama (Trump has caused him to grow on me), but I don't remember that much outrage about it.

[pettie4sox]

13 hours ago, Danny Dravot said:

Joe Biden, a moderate, won by six million votes (3%). 72 million people voted for Trump. How many of Joe’s 78 million were also moderates or Never Trump conservatives? The incumbent was historically unpopular and there was a world changing pandemic that was horribly handled by said incumbent. And yet, the Senate, whose map also favored Ds, is very likely to stay in R hands (at best, it’s a tie to be broken by a VP who’s in power because of aforementioned shitty incumbent). That’s all the evidence I need. Have fun waiting anxiously for policies that aren’t coming.

They won't come when republicans are running things because that's what dems are.  People will get fed up eventually, and I'll sit back and enjoy the show then.

[pettie4sox]

9 minutes ago, Danny Dravot said:

I'm an advocate of a limited welfare state that prevents suffering and unnecessary death while encouraging eventual independence from it. Yet your ideas here are so fanatical that I need to argue entirely against them.

Serious question- are individual citizens responsible for ANYTHING in your view? Right in this post alone, it's apparently the government's responsibility to provide education, healthy food, housing, drugs, surgery, disease prevention. Anything else you want the government to take care of?

I believe citizens are responsible for decisions they make but how many people are in the situation they are in because they got dealt a bad hand of cards (aka bad parents, bad environments, poverty, etc...)   I think it's the government's job to make sure the bad decisions of individuals are the culprit of their failings and not because the government had a shitty foundation to begin with for those people.

[Danny Dravot]

1 minute ago, Jack Parkman said:

It's the government's responsibility to ensure that people actually have access to those things and that they're reasonably priced such that even the poorest people can afford them. 

No, that's not the government's responsibility.

Insulin is a weird situation and the government should stop pharmaceuticals from jacking up the price and heavily profiting off a drug that's incredibly cheap to produce. They should subsidize healthcare for people who can't afford it. There should be welfare and unemployment payments for people who have fallen on hard times and need help while getting back on their feet. They shouldn't really help with education (although federal loans should come with extremely low interest if at all). The feds should help local governments establish homeless shelters so that people can generally be safe and not sleeping on the streets, but it shouldn't go beyond that. I'm fine with food stamps for the actually needy on a similarly limited time frame, but it's the individual's responsibility to use those wisely.

 

[Jack Parkman]

2 minutes ago, pettie4sox said:

I believe citizens are responsible for decisions they make but how many people are in the situation they are in because they got dealt a bad hand of cards (aka bad parents, bad environments, poverty, etc...)   I think it's the government's job to make sure the bad decisions of individuals are the culprit of their failings and not because the government had a shitty foundation to begin with for those people.

How many people's bad decisions are the result of their environment though? 

People become criminals because they feel like they have no other choice to survive.

[pettie4sox]

2 minutes ago, Jack Parkman said:

How many people's bad decisions are the result of their environment though? 

People become criminals because they feel like they have no other choice to survive.

Here's the thing you can argue these semantics until you're blue in the face.  The reality is, give everyone an even start.  Wages, healthcare, education.  The rest is up to them.  It's not that radical of an idea either because most developed countries on the planet already do it and guess what, they are absoluting kicking our asses.

[Jack Parkman]

6 minutes ago, Danny Dravot said:

No, that's not the government's responsibility.

Insulin is a weird situation and the government should stop pharmaceuticals from jacking up the price and heavily profiting off a drug that's incredibly cheap to produce. They should subsidize healthcare for people who can't afford it. There should be welfare and unemployment payments for people who have fallen on hard times and need help while getting back on their feet. They shouldn't really help with education (although federal loans should come with extremely low interest if at all). The feds should help local governments establish homeless shelters so that people can generally be safe and not sleeping on the streets, but it shouldn't go beyond that. I'm fine with food stamps for the actually needy on a similarly limited time frame, but it's the individual's responsibility to use those wisely.

 

Thank you for making my point for me, because we're pretty much on the same page here. I do think that tuition is way too high though. People shouldn't have the equivalent of a mortgage at 7% interest in order to get a decent education. Borrowing $30k at 1% int interest order to get a 4 year education is ok. Borrowing 100+k at 7% interest just to get an education is neither reasonable nor sustainable. 

With regard to homelessness, there should be free or low-cost housing along with programs to help people get back on their feet. 

We also need to promote non-college avenues to a middle class lifestyle. 

 

Edited November 14, 2020 by Jack Parkman

[Jack Parkman]

2 minutes ago, pettie4sox said:

Here's the thing you can argue these semantics until you're blue in the face.  The reality is, give everyone an even start.  Wages, healthcare, education.  The rest is up to them.  It's not that radical of an idea either because most developed countries on the planet already do it and guess what, they are absoluting kicking our asses.

We have a winner.

[Danny Dravot]

5 minutes ago, pettie4sox said:

I believe citizens are responsible for decisions they make but how many people are in the situation they are in because they got dealt a bad hand of cards (aka bad parents, bad environments, poverty, etc...)   I think it's the government's job to make sure the bad decisions of individuals are the culprit of their failings and not because the government had a shitty foundation to begin with for those people.

Though I disagree, this is much more reasonable.

Now, how long should we help such people? Take a kid with poor, drug addled parents. Give the parents some food stamps so they can feed their child and hope they use the stamps wisely and honestly. Provide welfare so that the family can have a roof over its head, but combine that with enough social services (including substance abuse counseling) so that, hopefully, the parents get clean and can obtain steady work and no longer require these services. Boom, success!

But the sad fact is those parents are never going to become my parents. My parents worked their asses off their entire lives (they came from poor Appalachian families) and ultimately got grad degrees. I was raised in an admittedly privileged environment because of their work. How far are we supposed to work for the kid in the previous paragraph? Where does it end?

[Jack Parkman]

4 minutes ago, Danny Dravot said:

Though I disagree, this is much more reasonable.

Now, how long should we help such people? Take a kid with poor, drug addled parents. Give the parents some food stamps so they can feed their child and hope they use the stamps wisely and honestly. Provide welfare so that the family can have a roof over its head, but combine that with enough social services (including substance abuse counseling) so that, hopefully, the parents get clean and can obtain steady work and no longer require these services. Boom, success!

But the sad fact is those parents are never going to become my parents. My parents worked their asses off their entire lives (they came from poor Appalachian families) and ultimately got grad degrees. I was raised in an admittedly privileged environment because of their work. How far are we supposed to work for the kid in the previous paragraph? Where does it end?

A lot of the backlash against current policy is because there are people in their 30s and younger who were raised in a privileged environment, followed all of the rules as a young adult, and end up in the working poor or chronically unemployed as an adult through no fault of their own, having to move back home. Then, there's a media attack on these people such that they deserve to get left behind, and that it's their fault. 

Edited November 14, 2020 by Jack Parkman

[Danny Dravot]

4 minutes ago, Jack Parkman said:

Thank you for making my point for me, because we're pretty much on the same page here. I do think that tuition is way too high though. People shouldn't have the equivalent of a mortgage at 7% interest in order to get a decent education. Borrowing $30k at 1% int interest order to get a 4 year education is ok. 

Borrowing 100-200k is not reasonable or sustainable. 

We also need to promote non-college avenues to a middle class lifestyle. 

 

Reading your posts and seeing your still-existent belief about economic terrorism, if you think we're on the same page, I didn't stress the word "limited" enough.

The welfare state should be LIMITED. It should also work towards eliminating itself.

I'll admit that my wife and I had to spend time in marriage counseling at one point. We worked through our issues and are in a fantastic place now, but the marriage counselor always used to joke that success for him always equated to unemployment. The welfare state should be the same way. The idealistic goal should be that it disappears because nobody needs it any longer.

[pettie4sox]

Just now, Danny Dravot said:

Though I disagree, this is much more reasonable.

Now, how long should we help such people? Take a kid with poor, drug addled parents. Give the parents some food stamps so they can feed their child and hope they use the stamps wisely and honestly. Provide welfare so that the family can have a roof over its head, but combine that with enough social services (including substance abuse counseling) so that, hopefully, the parents get clean and can obtain steady work and no longer require these services. Boom, success!

But the sad fact is those parents are never going to become my parents. My parents worked their asses off their entire lives (they came from poor Appalachian families) and ultimately got grad degrees. I was raised in an admittedly privileged environment because of their work. How far are we supposed to work for the kid in the previous paragraph? Where does it end?

Of course there needs to a point where it's cut off, but the government should do everything in their power to curb what caused the drug addled parents to begin with.  There is always going to be fuck ups, but how many fuck ups were created because people lost hope early on, have kids, and pass that hopelessness to them.  We need to attack the problem at its root and not just assume people are just lazy fuckers who want free stuff.  IMO those types of people can be easily weeded out.  I genuinely believe we can have a country that works for everyone and not just people who got lucky with decent/good parental lottery.  I've shared here many times but I'm a black man that had parents that came from those poor disenfranchised areas.  They fought like hell but I'm unfortunately in rare air.  If my parents didn't do what they did, I would have been absolutely fucked.  I recognize my fortune and want the cycle to end.  America is allegedly the best country on earth yet we can't take care of our most vulnerable?  If we're the best we should be best at everything period.

[Jack Parkman]

5 minutes ago, Danny Dravot said:

Reading your posts and seeing your still-existent belief about economic terrorism, if you think we're on the same page, I didn't stress the word "limited" enough.

The welfare state should be LIMITED. It should also work towards eliminating itself.

I'll admit that my wife and I had to spend time in marriage counseling at one point. We worked through our issues and are in a fantastic place now, but the marriage counselor always used to joke that success for him always equated to unemployment. The welfare state should be the same way. The idealistic goal should be that it disappears because nobody needs it any longer.

That will never happen, get real. 

Like I said, there aren't enough decent jobs for everyone, so we have to either create them through a jobs guarantee or expand the welfare programs. 

We have to have a system where upward mobility is not only possible, but probable. 

Edited November 14, 2020 by Jack Parkman

[Danny Dravot]

3 minutes ago, Jack Parkman said:

A lot of the backlash against current policy is because there are people in their 30s and younger who were raised in a privileged environment, followed all of the rules as a young adult, and end up in the working poor or chronically unemployed as an adult through no fault of their own, having to move back home. Then, there's a media attack on these people such that they deserve to get left behind, and that it's their fault. 

I sympathize with the kids with crappy parents who grew up in crappy environments and never had the chance that I had, and I want to help them (again, to a reasonable extent).

But if someone grew up in a privileged environment and still ended up chronically unemployed and working poor, then I'm really not that sympathetic. Life takes a little bit of toughness. Sorry.

[pettie4sox]

2 minutes ago, Danny Dravot said:

I sympathize with the kids with crappy parents who grew up in crappy environments and never had the chance that I had, and I want to help them (again, to a reasonable extent).

But if someone grew up in a privileged environment and still ended up chronically unemployed and working poor, then I'm really not that sympathetic. Life takes a little bit of toughness. Sorry.

I don't even want to help these people man.  Are you kidding me lmaoooo.  I could be wrong in this belief but it seems like you assume all of these people fall into this category and if that was the case, we would agree 1000%.

[Danny Dravot]

2 minutes ago, Jack Parkman said:

That will never happen, get real. 

Like I said, there aren't enough decent jobs for everyone, so we have to either create them through a jobs guarantee or expand the welfare programs. 

The emphasis there is on "idealistic". I understand that we're never going to get to a point where that system can vanish. However, welfare systems and social services should combine to help people who are down on their luck and work them through whatever issues they have while also pushing them off of it eventually. The idea that we should sustain people until we have decent jobs for everyone is nutty.