466 replies to this topic

[SakuranoSenshi]

Simple solution: if it's not to your taste, don't read the thread. You're an adult, right? You can exercize your own free will and just ignore something you don't want to take part in?

Everyone here has been civil, so there is no call for moderation and it's unlikely to be applied, given this is JetCom, where stuff like this is okay. Don't browse here if you're easily offended by people with opinions that don't match your own.

[Murph]

Agreed. We're in the off topic of the off topic section. We're in the land of bronies and memes and pink urbies. Nothing here is to be taken seriously.

[SakuranoSenshi]

I drawn the line at pink Urbies driven by Bronies, though. That **** has no right to exist anywhere.

[TLBFestus]

Greyrook, on 13 August 2012 - 03:33 PM, said:

Good thing that was all over a thousand years ago.

But, in real life, I'm not sure which way I'm going in this election, I'm just glad it's not Sarah Palin again *shudder*.

Paul Ryan
Sarah Palin

Seems like you could beat yourself to death over either one, but for different reasons.

[soulfire]

I agree can we lock this and toss it . It should have never gotten past a page. Its not related to the game and all it allows are trolls to feed. If you want to chat about politics go to an appropriate board.

[SakuranoSenshi]

Luckily for the sane people, you're not a moderator and this is perfectly appropriate for it. Just move on to another thread; the only trolls here are the whingers complaining about people talking politics on a part of the board where basically anything goes, so long as it's kept civil.

[Dimestore]

Lightdragon, on 14 August 2012 - 04:06 PM, said:

bush senior was the best thing to happen to the country... he had nearly abolished the welfare system, had most people in the country relying on themselves, job market was strong coming out of a recession then clinton came along (who wouldnt have been elected if the media didnt blow things all out of proportion)

Selective memory much? Bush oversaw the Savings & Loan Crisis but insisted nothing was wrong with the system and expanded upon the weaknesses that lead to the most recent crash. He was second in command (arguably first given Reagan's mental status) for when Reagan ran cocaine from Central America into US cities to illegally fund his pet projects. Have you even heard of Oliver North? The only reason that guy didn't rot in jail was due to a presidential pardon. That doesn't even cover the fact he illegally sold anti-aircraft missiles to Iran for political manoeuvring. I do find it hilarious how many laws the supposed law & order candidates always seem to break.

Add in the fact that Bush & Reagan started the laughable and utterly discredited from the beginning "trickle down economics".

Note: Clinton continued those policies including repealing long-standing legislation that preserved a realistic free market (no such thing as too big to fail). Obama hasn't been significantly different, re-appointing the same incompetents who steered the US into the crash. If you were reading the first paragraph and immediately thought I must be a supporter of the dems then you drank the Kool-aid too.

The US has been suckered into thinking that a two party political system works. Ultimately a two party system fails because they don't have to work on good ideas to get you to vote for them, they just have to scare you that the other side will <fill in the blank>. Once you get 3 or more parties then you can actually vote for a party you agree with and politicians have to figure out how to work together to keep large portions of the population happy rather than afraid.

The thing I find scary is that my country has started to drift that way. The same tone of "who cares what we offer you, be afraid of the horror they will wreak upon you" has begun to infiltrate our politics (Canada).

[GaussDragon]

Hax DB Header, on 14 August 2012 - 06:34 PM, said:

Add in the fact that Bush & Reagan started the laughable and utterly discredited from the beginning "trickle down economics".

Note: Clinton continued those policies including repealing long-standing legislation that preserved a realistic free market (no such thing as too big to fail). Obama hasn't been significantly different, re-appointing the same incompetents who steered the US into the crash. If you were reading the first paragraph and immediately thought I must be a supporter of the dems then you drank the Kool-aid too.

You're referring to the Glass-Steagall act. Clinton didn't necessarily 'continue' those policies. Glass-Steagall basically put up the wall between traditional banking and the major investment houses. The repeal (which happened at the very end of Clinton's administration) was because these investment houses were eating up a greater portion of the retail market and the chartered banks felt hamstrung by significantly tighter leverage rules. The repeal of Glass-Steagall helped the crisis, but it was by no means the only factor. It took a confluence of several things to make it happen. You can read the entire congressional report for free right here.

http://fcic-static.l...report_full.pdf

Hax DB Header, on 14 August 2012 - 06:34 PM, said:

Once you get 3 or more parties then you can actually vote for a party you agree with and politicians have to figure out how to work together to keep large portions of the population happy rather than afraid.

Hooray for the Westminster system!

Hax DB Header, on 14 August 2012 - 06:34 PM, said:

The thing I find scary is that my country has started to drift that way. The same tone of "who cares what we offer you, be afraid of the horror they will wreak upon you" has begun to infiltrate our politics (Canada).

Yes, we're seeing more of that stupid polarization. Our political discourse is being dummed-down and ever-more toxic. As someone who voted Conservative in 2 of the last 3 elections, I defiantly went Liberal because I can't stand what Harper is doing to our democracy. I'd vote Liberal all the time if we could get Paul Martin back, it's his type, the pragmatic 3rd-way-ers of the 90s that's truly my preferred style (Clinton, Blair, Chretien with Martin as his finance minister, Brian Mulroney). The statesman is going extinct and he's being replaced by the scaremonger.

I went on a Facebook rant against Harper thanks to this article (which neatly summed-up most of the things I dislike about his style of politics)
http://www.economist.com/node/21558303

Edited by GaussDragon, 14 August 2012 - 06:50 PM.

[SakuranoSenshi]

Blair was pure style over substance and a toadie. Anything but a pragmatist. Also another of the "God talks to me" idiots.

[Lawstar]

VOTE CTHULHU...DONT SETTLE FOR THE LESSOR EVIL!!!!!!!!

[Hot Rod]

SakuranoSenshi, on 14 August 2012 - 05:59 PM, said:

I drawn the line at pink Urbies driven by Bronies, though. That **** has no right to exist anywhere.

wait you don't like this?



nvm ^^

on topic:

yeah we all are kind of screwed up.

if you vote Romney you got a shark that comes from the rich, and will be working for the rich. you don't seriously think he will do something for the 99% do you? Obama? well can he screw up more than bush jr. did? he restarted his fathers war and finally got what he wanted. the oil, the ability to print money. paid in blood of your soldiers.

we Germans are in this boat too. politicians lie all day long, stretching laws, don't get charged for what they do wrong and the worst part is the are all the same. whom you vote for isn't important. they are all committed to the industry. when they retire they get a nice senior seat in a huge company and when you will look back and see "omg he passed a law which miraculous helped this company to get even richer in disposal of our kids future ".

its called lobbyism. we germans couldn't sign an anti corruption paper because of that. See here

all i hear every day for the last 2+ years is "save that bank!" "we need to rescue that bank!" "we need to push that industry.." i'm sick of this.

every time the parliament got a chance to REALLY DO THINGS the right way they screwed up and the big part of the people got the short stick.
look at the "nuclear power vs renewal energy" fight in Germany they CAN make the change but there are some people with huge wallets stopping that from happen. ( is there a logic in shutting down producer of clean (relative) energy -> without their permission <- if there is too much energy in the lines so that a Cole power plant can continue?? is there? )

to vote someone who got "presented" to us isn't important. we will never get the democracy we seriously need. not if our so called "elected representatives of the people" can continue to break or bend laws unharmed, from the laws they vowed to honor. the laws they pass and we follow. the laws that get people fired when they pick up 50cent from the floor in a store they work for, while our politicians trowing BILLIONS out of the window. how screwed up is that?

kudos

[SakuranoSenshi]

My eyes! My eyes!

[CaveMan]

I'm starting to wish that Washington had just accepted being crowned king.

Democracy doesn't seem to work any better than monarchy, and there are more idiots to behead blame when things go wrong.

_{Of course, nearly every president has been a distant relative of Washington's family, and they nearly all come from the upper class rich set with more connections than brains. So it's kind of like we have a monarchy anyway.}

[Catamount]

Murph, on 14 August 2012 - 03:59 PM, said:

The constitution is NOT a living document. What it has listed for the federal government's powers are all the federal government should have. What powers are not expressly given to the federal government in that document are expressly given to the states or the individual by the 10th amendment. A centralized government trying to rule 300+ million (and growing) people living over 3.8 million square miles just isn't practical in the least bit. Keeping the bulk of the ruling authority delegated to smaller areas where the state laws can be tailored more closely and react more quickly to the needs of its people, with a smaller federal government providing for common defense, organization/proliferation of trade between the states and the civil rights of all Americans is what we should have according to the constitution and its amendments.

However thanks to two centuries of court decisions having the rule of law (Because congress has x power from one part of the constitution and an unrelated power from y part of the constitution means that it has z power even though not explicitly stated in the constitution) our congress has legislated itself into a bloated cluster **** from which we have very little hope of recovering claiming that same 'living document' theory.

And just because the constitution has ONLY been changed 27 times in two hundred and thirty six years does not mean it hasn't kept up. There's a reason why we made it difficult to change. So that we can't have idiots single-handedly add stuff (Anti-gay marriage amendment?) to the constitution we're just going to ditch 20 years down the road because it turned out to be ridiculous (It happened ONCE. Prohibition, and that took greater than 100 years of lobbying on the part of abolitionists.)

In theory, I mostly agree with this, in practice, I'm not convinced that something as rigid and unresponsive as a Constitution interpreted this way would work. You mentioned Prohibition as an example of government overstepping it's boundaries, but Prohibition wasn't repealed because society suddenly had a constitutional change of heart; it was overturned because the people learned hard lessons.

You could argue that we never would have made the mistake under a strict constitutional interpretation, but then, we might never have fielded an air force in World War II, either, since the USAF would be patently unconstitutional, and the USAAF (it's WWII predecessor) would be sketchy, at best, based on the nature of the enumerated powers under Article 1, Section 8.


Now, I'm sure we could pass an amendment for that, not quickly, but eventually, it would be done, but therein lies the problem. You know, we had a system like this before the Constitution. This idea of little federal control, and everything being handled by more local government was a core component of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, almost as core a component as an inflexible federal government. The lack of implied powers left government entirely unable to come up against any challenge any time it represented anything that remotely deviated from the problems that had already been considered, with things like Shay's Rebellion being the result.



The problem is simply that problems have a way of cropping up, frequently and numerously, and often not int he way we expect, and they have ways of crossing the boundaries of these more localized governments. Moving past things like the USAF, what options would we have in dealing with an issue like, say, climate change, where one localized government might either ignore or consider the problem inferior in importance to local and short-term energy concerns, and in doing so, would enable themselves to harm the members of other states?

I'd see us trying to either pass an awfully large, never-ending stream of amendments to hold the federal government together (and in our political climate, it'd simply never get done, so we'd just end up with total gridlock and NO ability to deal with ANYTHING; might as well just send Congress home for good, forever at that point), or end up taking a couple enumerated powers of Congress, and interpretating them SO broadly, that we'd just end up with what we have now anyways. That is how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 works, after all. Because of the political climate of the time, it was passed under justification of regulation of interstate commerce, and the justifications, especially when business challenged it, were sketchy, at best, but the point is that it was practical. It was the pragmatic thing our nation needed to do at the time, as decided by our society at the time, and that seems to be the way all industrialized societies today function (not a single strict constitutionalist government on such an extreme level exists, as far as I know), and it's how western society has functioned through 200 years of unprecedented societal progress.



I think as a society, we're a little more grown up than you and others here have given us credit for, certainly moreso than the US society of 1787, by a longshot. If you think government shouldn't do a particular thing, then the case should be made on logic, outlining the evidence for pragmatic gains (or further losses from continuing to do it some other way), because that's been the way societies have best seemed to operate. It's certainly how I argue for, say, gun rights. I may agree with most libertarians there, but it's not because my reasoning begins and ends at "Well, Second Amendment! DC v Heller!"; I have actual evidence and reasoning to bring to the table there, because that's how I feel issues should be weighed. To your credit, you've made a reasoning argument on the pragmatism of doing things a certain way, not one I wholly agree with, but an argument just the same. For the most part, however, I think citing the Constitution mostly just invites intellectual laziness. It puts the burden of running our society on a 230 year old document on the grounds that our society supposedly isn't smart enough to do it themselves, rather than trying to achieve a society that can run itself, which frankly, I think we'd already be ready for if more of us would exercise more reasoning than "But the Constitution!". If Congress should be restricted to a certain power, then people should say why, using modern arguments, and evidence, not citing a line on a piece of paper. If we did that more often, all of government would run a lot better.

Edited by Catamount, 14 August 2012 - 09:28 PM.

[Maire Devylin]

Romney, Obama - it doesn't really matter who wins. The other side will go into block mode in Congress just as the Republicans have the past two years. The craptastic news we have will keep telling us what they want us to hear and see through red or blue covered glasses. The radio talk show hosts will still outrage over whatever they think of and in the end, banks, oil, and money will still be the rulers of this country.

One voice one vote is such crap, especially when a president can win an election with less than 50% of the popular vote.

Either way, we're screwed.

Edited by Maire Devylin, 14 August 2012 - 09:48 PM.

[Catamount]

CaveMan, on 14 August 2012 - 08:38 PM, said:

I'm starting to wish that Washington had just accepted being crowned king.

Democracy doesn't seem to work any better than monarchy, and there are more idiots to behead blame when things go wrong.

I didn't even notice this...

I'm not sure I'd agree with that assessment. Granted, the modern democratic world has only existed for about 200 years, as compared to the prior 15,000 years of human civilization under oligarchical societies of one type or another, but in those 200 years, we've accomplished an order of magnitude more than in those 15,000 years prior.

The oligarchical societies of the 18th century that little by little gave way for their successors were not fundamentally much different from what we had during the 15,000 years prior. Reason and understand existed, but were not broadly accepted, as by far, the vast majority of society was oppressed and uneducated, and superstition not only held de facto rule over the thinking of the vast majority of people, but was even largely enforced by governments that ranged from being downright theocracies, to being "divine right" monarchies, at best. And most of what we now consider basic rights within a society were something held exclusively by a tiny minority, with absolutely no opportunity for the rest to gain them. Science and technology moved at a snails pace, and on the whole, people were dumb, oppressed and unhealthy, and generally had no opportunity to strive for anything better.


We've just now entered the 21st century, and the average person has far more knowledge than much of the tiny intellectual elite of the 18th century (if not the brightest of them), with opportunity to take that as far as one wishes, because we have universal education. Rights, while not perfect in depth or scope, are stronger and more egalitarian than they have ever been, going from a small set of privileges held by a smaller-still group of people, to a vast assortment held by everyone, on mostly equal terms, and the remaining disparities disappearing rapidly in most remaining areas. We've gone from theocracies ruled by superstition to secular governments, ruled (at least in theory, usually in practice) by reason and evidence, complete with national science academies and research agencies who are recruited in most levels of decision-making. Wealth disparities in the western world are smaller than anyone even would have dreamed two or three centuries ago...

and the result is that people are smarter, more empowered, and healthier, again, by an order of magnitude.

This is an example of 200 years of that so-called ineptitude of democratic society:





I'd invite you to show me an oligarchical society, EVER, that has achieved anything remotely close to what we have in the same amount of time, but obviously, it can't be done, because we've done more in less than 300 years, than the in the 15,000 year prior to advance society, largely thanks to egalitarian application of rights and public systems designed to maximize opportunity.

Edited by Catamount, 14 August 2012 - 09:59 PM.

[IRaigothI]

Murph, on 14 August 2012 - 06:13 AM, said:

Where did I say this? Every time I point out what a foul up the election of Obama was, everyone expects me to praise Bush. Bush was bad. But he owned up to his mistakes. Obama passes the buck onto Bush all the time. Notice how whenever the economy takes a downturn, Obama inherited it from Dubya? Bush has been out of office for three years, six months and twenty five days and it's still all his fault.

Bush isn't running, so I have no intention of propping the man up any more than that. Bush sucked, Obama sucks, and Romney will probably suck, but not as bad as Obama does now.

I would rather have Obama than Romney, for the sole fact that he wants to bring back the same "Top down" economic system that Bush Jr. had going that put us into the economic downfall in the first place.

At the same time though, we need to get rid of all of the "Republican" and "democrat" crap, and find someone who doesnt give two ***** about either, and just wants to fix the country instead of line his pockets.

[MarshmallowRampage]

I find it amusing that Mitt Romny's buisness practices have resulted in Italy declaring him Persona non grata.

Look here

[oneyou]

The only thing I hope for this election, is for whoever wins to be in control of both the house and senate. That's all that really matters...

[SakuranoSenshi]

Aye, that's not trolling, it's just inane nonsense, "USA Forever" (rolling my eyes at the name)

As Mitt "Too shady for Italy" Romney, yeah...