She dropped the ball the first time, did better the second time, and was good this time around.I still haven't quite forgiven AOC for her awful responses to the Omar/antisemitism controversies in February and especially March, but she's been good this time, at least. Hopefully she's learned from her mistakes.
Lmao this thread went to shit because some people REALLY can't deal with democrats ever being criticized by people who are going to vote all democrat all the time anyway.
I mean she fucked up the first time round but unlike a lot of her colleagues she actually improved herself in this regard and has step up to defend Omar.I still haven't quite forgiven AOC for her awful responses to the Omar/antisemitism controversies in February and especially March, but she's been good this time, at least. Hopefully she's learned from her mistakes.
I didn't know there were right wing posters on that site and I had been there for over a decade. I guess I just focused more on the gaming and GoT stuff. Disgusting.Basically once everyone jumped ship to ERA. All the right wing types stayed and it's basically just another alt right site now. The few left leaning posters get attacked and piled on.
We really don't have a choice anyways...Either democrats....and who else? The Green Party?Lmao this thread went to shit because some people REALLY can't deal with democrats ever being criticized by people who are going to vote all democrat all the time anyway.
With like 98% of black women in alabama voting for jones too lolIt happens EVERY TIME. Just the thought of black and brown folks not doing their duty brings out this rabid defense of these jerks. It makes me sick.
Lmao this thread went to shit because some people REALLY can't deal with democrats ever being criticized by people who are going to vote all democrat all the time anyway.
I'm not romanticizing it, read it again. The point is that extreme poverty is a relativistic term, it ONLY accounts for capital and the concept of monetary gain as the sole abject piece of studying and measuring human growth and the subsidy of surviving. It doesn't measure the quality of that life or the real costs associated with actually living. The point is that we're not making marked improvements just based on this strata no longer being the case. That you can't use monetary license to measure the kind of life people lead just through a bunch of numbers about how much money they have.I'm just going to reply to the bolded, because you're literally romanticizing the type of extreme poverty and poor living conditions that people have been trying to escape from for decades.
Oh yes, the joys of needing to cultivate your own food to live, where a drought or a flood can literally kill you. The joys of needing to walk miles to get access to clean water. The privilege of not having any type of transportation other than your feet. Boy, what great times eh? I guess all those people who grew out of those life styles just didn't know how good they had it. You should go to India and start convincing all the people they have it way worse than they did 30 years ago.
Of course I wrote that with a straight face, I'm sorry that people living with a semblance of dignity and not being beaten down by the constant onslaught of capital is a demure feeling that you find laughable. I'm sorry that you think that there's some abject net good that the constant hoarding of capital, where people aren't entitled to even a fraction of what they produce through their own labor, is somehow a functional and satisfactory system. Yes, Capitalism is better than Feudalism, so what, that doesn't say anything, that's not a substantive retort to anything.It's actually fucking hysterical that you just wrote the bolded with a straight face, you sound like a high schooler reciting Tyler Durden thinking "yea Project Mayhem is a good idea"
As for the second bolded part, I challenge you to find any post on ERA where I was arguing, or have ever argued, for "unregulated capitalism".
The fact you actually just argued that people who had no access to healthcare, travel, constant reliable food/water had it better before joining some type of specialized workforce shows how fucking insane some of you people are in terms of arguing for socialism. You are literally out of touch and out of your mind and frankly sound like a disgruntled high schooler who watched Fight Club a dozen too many times.
Poverty is based on money flow because you have to use some type of unit to establish baselines of what poverty is. Shockingly, economic people who are studying poverty, which is the measurement of a persons wealth, decided to use income to measure poverty, as income is very much an indicator of ones ability to have access to the resources to live a comfortable life. And when you move into an economic model that depends on specialization, a model where people don't need to grow their own food to live, and can go to school to learn things to trade good and services for said food, you get an increase in wealth because people no longer have to spend all day trying to not die from starvation on their farm
You don't even understand what Socialism is. Nebulous concepts like "innovation" are totally abstract and functionally meaningless. What is that even supposed to mean? You're going to need more than empty buzzwords that could literally mean anything to have any meaningful distinction in this ideological discussion. Artists, the bright, the driven, people like that have existed before we created "the market" and the systems that our current late capitalist society functions with. You're trying to paint it as if people just don't do anything if there isn't monetary benefit for them, and while I will even grant you that under the condition that this is true, it doesn't tell us anything about the depth to which the system "encourages it". Because the system is the one these people live within, of course it's how they produce their craft or ply their trade, it's the only avenue available to them. That's not an argument, that's sophist libertarianism.My argument is pretty simple, socialism is a bad economic model that stifles innovation, competition and literally is not functional in any type of world with scarcity. Until we have access to nearly free energy and the amount of effort to produce electricity, water and food become negligible in cost, socialism will forever be the pipe dream of people who's entire world view depends on global revolution that dismantles capitalism. If your economic model and argument for it depends on a world that is post-scarcity... then your issue is already solved.
The amount of effort to enact tangible changes to improve lives and fix issues are magnitudes easier to function within the current system than it is to overthrow the entire global economic network.
I would agree generally but this instance has to deal with a black muslim woman so pretending it isn't about race and religion would be missing the mark.The majority of black voters chose Clinton over Sanders. Sanders had his own very ugly race problems (and still does). Framing this as a poc vs white issue where poc somehow represent the progressive wing of the party is ridiculous, when more poc identify as moderate.
Icemonk191 That poster falsely accused me of, "You minorities better shut up".
Lmao this thread went to shit because some people REALLY can't deal with democrats ever being criticized by people who are going to vote all democrat all the time anyway.
I would agree generally but this instance has to deal with a black muslim woman so pretending it isn't about race and religion would be missing the mark.
White men have said and done MUCH worse things about 9/11 (like the entire GOP platform towards first responders) with 0 backlash.
Most of them just stayed in the gaming section and avoid political threads. Now that everybody jumped ship they came out of woods and are more comfortable. Evil Lore too.. It's sad what that site turned into.I didn't know there were right wing posters on that site and I had been there for over a decade. I guess I just focused more on the gaming and GoT stuff. Disgusting.
That's the thing. POC have been reliable Democratic voters for decades; we have no choice but to be. Even after all this with Ilhan Omar, POC will still vote for Democratic candidates in 2020 at >95% rates like every election. All we ask in return is some fucking backup in the face of resurgent rightwing racism, and all we get is finger wagging and push back. And then when we dare to express disappointment in that, we are labelled as not "unifying" and falling for GOP tricks.
It is damn infuriating, and I won't blame black and brown people at all if they decide to sit out in 2020.
The majority of black voters chose Clinton over Sanders. Sanders had his own very ugly race problems (and still does). Framing this as a poc vs white issue where poc somehow represent the progressive wing of the party is ridiculous, when more poc identify as moderate.
People aren't as left leaning as you think...Whoa this thread blew up...We're all pretty left leaning here yea? Why did this suddenly ballon to almost 30 pages ( I'm on mobile ) ?
Whoa this thread blew up...We're all pretty left leaning here yea? Why did this suddenly ballon to almost 30 pages ( I'm on mobile ) ?
Whoa this thread blew up...We're all pretty left leaning here yea? Why did this suddenly ballon to almost 30 pages ( I'm on mobile ) ?
But it is not just fourmdwellers. It's damn near the entire Democratic leadership acting that way.I can only repeat my speech to the brickwall:
If your voting hinges entirely on a fellow forumdweller saying "well atleast its not Hitler", you really should consider to get into politics instead.
Here's my cue: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2014/08/29/exposing-the-great-poverty-reduction-lie/The point is that globally the extreme poverty numbers go down in the aggregate because they are not qualitative, they're based on an arbitrarily selected number that doesn't reflect the actual needs of people to live a full life.
The world's governments first pledged to end extreme poverty during the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996. They committed to reducing the number of undernourished people by half before 2015, which, given the population at the time, meant slashing the poverty headcount by 836 million. Many critics claimed that this goal was inadequate given that, with the right redistributive policies, extreme poverty could be ended much more quickly.
But instead of making the goals more robust, global leaders surreptitiously diluted it. Yale professor and development watchdog Thomas Pogge points out that when the Millennium Declaration was signed, the goal was rewritten as "Millennium Developmental Goal 1" (MDG-1) and was altered to halve the proportion (as opposed to the absolute number) of the world's people living on less than a dollar a day. By shifting the focus to income levels and switching from absolute numbers to proportional ones, the target became much easier to achieve. Given the rate of population growth, the new goal was effectively reduced by 167 million. And that was just the beginning.
This statistical sleight-of-hand narrowed the target by a further 324 million. So what started as a goal to reduce the poverty headcount by 836 million has magically become only 345 million – less than half the original number. Having dramatically redefined the goal, the Millennium Campaign can claim that poverty has been halved when in fact it has not. The triumphalist narrative hailing the death of poverty rests on an illusion of deceitful accounting.
1) No measurement of "poverty" is quantitative because the "poverty line" itself is malleable and has been adjusted numerous times, always to make bad news into good news and to move the goalposts so they're easier to hitBut the IPL proved to be somewhat troublesome. Using this threshold, the World Bank announced in its 2000 annual report that "the absolute number of those living on $1 per day or less continues to increase. The worldwide total rose from 1.2 billion in 1987 to 1.5 billion today and, if recent trends persist, will reach 1.9 billion by 2015." This was alarming news, especially because it suggested that the free-market reforms imposed by the World Bank and the IMF on Global South countries during the 1980s and 1990s in the name of "development" were actually making things worse.
This amounted to a PR nightmare for the World Bank. Not long after the report was released, however, their story changed dramatically and they announced the exact opposite news: While poverty had been increasing steadily for some two centuries, they said, the introduction of free-market policies had actually reduced the number of impoverished people by 400 million between 1981 and 2001.
This new story was possible because the Bank shifted the IPL from the original $1.02 (at 1985 PPP) to $1.08 (at 1993 PPP), which, given inflation, was lower in real terms. With this tiny change – a flick of an economist's wrist – the world was magically getting better, and the Bank's PR problem was instantly averted. This new IPL is the one that the Millennium Campaign chose to adopt.
She dropped the ball the first time, did better the second time, and was good this time around.
I agree here.
The majority of muslim voters chose Bernie Sanders over Clinton. Guess American muslims don't count as a minority/POC in your books?
The issue with Omar is more Islamophobia and her criticism of Israel than anything else. How dare a lowly muslim dare to speak up. That's why no one is supporting her. That's why liberal Americans casually accept the attacks against her - in the US, Islamophobia is an accepted discrimination.
But it is not just fourmdwellers. It's damn near the entire Democratic leadership acting that way.
Y'all see AOC getting called an anti Semite for defending Omar? The right is absolutely disgusting.
Here's my cue: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2014/08/29/exposing-the-great-poverty-reduction-lie/
1) No measurement of "poverty" is quantitative because the "poverty line" itself is malleable and has been adjusted numerous times, always to make bad news into good news and to move the goalposts so they're easier to hit
2) The bulk of "poverty reduction" at the end of the 20th century to the start of the 21st century has been carried by China
Non-Chinese poverty reduction has been pitiful.
But Chinese growth is starting to plateau. As they move their poor above the poverty line, global "poverty" reduction also slows. I don't see any capitalist defenders saying we should adopt Dengism for poverty reduction though, pretty weird.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/why-china-is-central-to-global-growth
Here's my cue: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2014/08/29/exposing-the-great-poverty-reduction-lie/
1) No measurement of "poverty" is quantitative because the "poverty line" itself is malleable and has been adjusted numerous times, always to make bad news into good news and to move the goalposts so they're easier to hit
2) The bulk of "poverty reduction" at the end of the 20th century to the start of the 21st century has been carried by China
Non-Chinese poverty reduction has been pitiful.
But Chinese growth is starting to plateau. As they move their poor above the poverty line, global "poverty" reduction also slows. I don't see any capitalist defenders saying we should adopt Dengism for poverty reduction though, pretty weird.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/why-china-is-central-to-global-growth
I feel like this is just going to fly through people heads and this topic is going to go on forever.How are people going to argue that Dems being accessories to the hatred of a black Muslim congresswoman as though that's the position of "unity?" Or that people asking for dems to protect their own is actually divisive?
How does someone do that for an ungodly amount of page after page in this thread? Jesus Christ
I feel like on the list of things democrat leaders should do (and not just pelosi, schumer and perez but prominent figures like gillibrand as well), standing unified against an edited video to make one of their own members look like a terrorist sympathizer to racists to incite them to literally kill her is a pretty low bar. Especially in the wake of a mass shooting at a mosque and someone being arrested for planning to kill her.How are people going to argue that Dems being accessories to the hatred of a black Muslim congresswoman as though that's the position of "unity?" Or that people asking for dems to protect their own is actually divisive?
How does someone do that for an ungodly amount of page after page in this thread? Jesus Christ
You mentioned:
Seemingly blaming "you", whoever that may be, for electing Clinton as the candidate. That lead me to believe you weren't happy with that choice, and the choice was pretty clearly Sanders/Clinton. I find it strange you say black voters stayed home in 2016 because of that "center-left shitbag", when they were the ones that gifted Clinton the nomination. Black voters only stayed home compared to 2008 and 2012, when voting for the first black president. I do not believe the black vote was the issue in 2016.
How do you want to improve on that in 2020? There's a diverse field of primary candidates.
The only one exhibiting any dismissal is the person (HINT: you) positing that minorities should vote exclusively to appease his moral quandaries instead of questioning why Democrat leaders are blatantly ignoring calls for violence against a minority politician, and thus, other minorites.I never said anything like that. You are doing casual dismissal seconds after complaining about it.
I didn't say anything about minorities. All I said was that everyone shoud vote and not throw away those votes.The only one exhibiting any dismissal is the person (HINT: you) positing that minorities should vote exclusively to appease his moral quandaries instead of questioning why Democrat leaders are blatantly ignoring calls for violence against a minority politician, and thus, other minorites.
So your laughable attempts at trying to make US feel bad because us minorities dare not meet your narrowminded needs is rightfully going to fall on deaf ears lol.
@speakerpelosi:
As we visit our troops in Stuttgart to thank them and be briefed by them, we honor our first responsibility as leaders to protect and defend the American people. It is wrong for the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to fan the flames to make anyone less safe.
Yeah, you've been saying this to minorities in regards to a minority suggesting that minorities be more mindful of who we vote forI didn't say anything about minorities. All I said was that everyone shoud vote and not throw away those votes.
I didn't say anything about minorities. All I said was that everyone shoud vote and not throw away those votes.
I still haven't quite forgiven AOC for her awful responses to the Omar/antisemitism controversies in February and especially March, but she's been good this time, at least. Hopefully she's learned from her mistakes.
How are people going to argue that Dems being accessories to the hatred of a black Muslim congresswoman as though that's the position of "unity?" Or that people asking for dems to protect their own is actually divisive?
How does someone do that for an ungodly amount of page after page in this thread? Jesus Christ
You have no need to defend yourself against shit like this.I'm not romanticizing it, read it again. The point is that extreme poverty is a relativistic term, it ONLY accounts for capital and the concept of monetary gain as the sole abject piece of studying and measuring human growth and the subsidy of surviving. It doesn't measure the quality of that life or the real costs associated with actually living. The point is that we're not making marked improvements just based on this strata no longer being the case. That you can't use monetary license to measure the kind of life people lead just through a bunch of numbers about how much money they have.
The point is that the transition away might be a net good for some, but for other's it saps them of all functional mobility. I'm not fucking saying Feudalism is better, I'm not saying the world hasn't been getting better. But to qualify everything through only one stratum through which we measure any human happiness is absurd and reductive as to be laughable.
The point that you're keen to miss to just CONSTANTLY insult me like a fucking three year old, is that poverty is only one aspect of human living and that it doesn't codify every aspect of human living, we cannot remove the dignity of people just to have them shovel mountains of garbage for a quarter an hour and claim that they have a demonstrably better life.
Of course I wrote that with a straight face, I'm sorry that people living with a semblance of dignity and not being beaten down by the constant onslaught of capital is a demure feeling that you find laughable. I'm sorry that you think that there's some abject net good that the constant hoarding of capital, where people aren't entitled to even a fraction of what they produce through their own labor, is somehow a functional and satisfactory system. Yes, Capitalism is better than Feudalism, so what, that doesn't say anything, that's not a substantive retort to anything.
People don't have access to any of those inane first world things you listed off NOW. 80% of the global population will never travel farther than ten miles from the place they were born (http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/migration/tab-a-1.xls), one in five people encounter hunger or extreme hunger during at least one part of their lives in the United States, 15% of the population does not have health care and an additional 15% will live their entire lives being underinsured which is functionally the same as being uninsured (https://www.commonwealthfund.org/si...2017_oct_collins_underinsured_biennial_ib.pdf) and that rate is HIGHER than it was in 2003, long after the ACA was passed. I'm the one out of touch? At no point am I arguing that we put all of human development back into a bottle and go back to subsiding as serfs, the point that I and others make is that just because things are better and on the surface appear to be perfect they are not. "The end of history" was a myth, and the constant invective and insults towards something you don't actually have any form of conceptual understanding of belies the point. You're trying to quantitatively assess and judge something based on factors that the global institutions report VASTLY differently than the local and state level measurements dictate to be the actual poverty level.
The point is that globally the extreme poverty numbers go down in the aggregate because they are not qualitative, they're based on an arbitrarily selected number that doesn't reflect the actual needs of people to live a full life. Which, btw, I grew up in a household that relied on government assistance so I know first hand how the measurement for poverty is bullshit. Again, half the world lives under the "new" poverty line dictate by the World Bank last year of $5.50 a day. If "economists" can't even decide a baseline to agree with what poverty is then why does monetary income even cover that? You're arguing that income is a net indicator of the access to necessary resources to live when that's A) not even true to begin with as we see in even purported "middle-income" countries that 70% of the worlds poor now live within these nations despite decades of growth and upward mobility, B) again you're not measuring the actual aggregate of people's relative wealth and well being, you're just slapping a number on it and calling it solved, and C) it doesn't measure any form of moral quality of life, which we again have the resources to completely and totally eliminate overnight. The top 1% of the US population could eradicate poverty in an hour if they elected to do so.
Global hunger is increasing (22% of children under 5 will be permanently stunted thanks to severe malnutrition), poverty has risen the last decade despite multiple attempts by the IMF and the World Bank to fudge the numbers, the amount of uninsured and underinsured people continues to rise, infant mortality and life expectancy in the US continues to trend downwards. The point that you oh so astutely missed isn't "people just need to go back to serfdom", it's that what we've replaced serfdom with is not any better in any substantive form for the quality of life for the majority of the human population.
You don't even understand what Socialism is. Nebulous concepts like "innovation" are totally abstract and functionally meaningless. What is that even supposed to mean? You're going to need more than empty buzzwords that could literally mean anything to have any meaningful distinction in this ideological discussion. Artists, the bright, the driven, people like that have existed before we created "the market" and the systems that our current late capitalist society functions with. You're trying to paint it as if people just don't do anything if there isn't monetary benefit for them, and while I will even grant you that under the condition that this is true, it doesn't tell us anything about the depth to which the system "encourages it". Because the system is the one these people live within, of course it's how they produce their craft or ply their trade, it's the only avenue available to them. That's not an argument, that's sophist libertarianism.
Nobody thinks the global revolution is happening overnight, few think it will even happen in our lifetimes. But we live in a world where we throw away enough food to end global hunger, we burn off enough waste energy to kill an ocean, and we piss away money and capital on absolute useless nonsense both in the "market" and through our rampant and disgusting consumerism.
Socialism is the ablution of capital as the end goal, but the intermediary goals are a democratic control of the workplace, total control of the benefits of labor, by labor, the needs of society being put forward despite not being "efficient" or "Market friendly" because they are what we need to do. You're not going to abolish the use of fossil fuels within capitalism, it's not happening, because it's "not efficient" despite that it's quite literally killing us. You have to sacrifice, you have to exchange that fact, you have to see that the systems to which we prop up capital are not of any net benefit to the average person past a specific point in history and the factors which govern them.
I also note how you completely and utterly ignored the actual, substantive questions I posed to you about the data you claim denotes Capitalism as the only functional system and any attempt to deal with the active dissolution of capital as childish. So I will ask you again.
Where are Roser's numbers showing slum growth? Where are Diamandis's numbers showing the self-reporting of quality of life? Depression rates? Mental illness? Where are Roser's numbers showing the increasing control of all wealth by the rich? Where are Fukuyama's numbers showing the steady collapse of wildlife populations, from insects to fisheries to large carnivores? Where are Roser's numbers showing the loss of arable land? Where are Pinker's numbers showing decreasing soil fertility? Where are Roser's numbers showing the growing pollution of our waterways?
Where are the numbers that showcase the profound DAMAGE to people and the human spirit that late capitalism is doing? You can't view the world and the human condition through numbers, you can't reduce human suffering down to a stat on a page, you can't dismiss the profound damage that capitalism has done to people just because "well we have microwaves now" and assume that the rising tide raises all ships. It doesn't, the very core concept of capitalism DEMANDS that people be unequal, abandoned, and left to die. Socialism does not preclude growth, it doesn't demand a managed economy (which every fortune 500 company is literally a managed ecosystem), it doesn't stop the rising tide. It simply provides people that the fruits of their own labor is their own, and that nobody is left to die simply because it isn't in the profit motive to save them. Which we have with Capitalism, even highly regulated capitalism, everywhere on earth.
Replying to a PoC in a discussion about civil liberties with a gif depicting the leader of xenophobic street thugs isn't a great look.
Replying to a PoC in a discussion about civil liberties with a gif depicting the leader of xenophobic street thugs isn't a great look.