mikema63 wrote:I'm honestly curious where you think our lines of thought diverge in a fundamental way.
I think you are still young enough to see politics and ideology primarily through your own point of view and personal experience, which is commonplace for society as a whole. I also think being gay makes gay people see themselves as fundamentally different from society as a whole, and that means you too. One of the weirder debates for me was the Omar Mateen shooting in Florida, where you purported to be more fearful of Christians than Islamists. Since Islamists openly say they want to kill gays and they actually do it, whereas Christians are sort of annoyingly vocal but usually not particularly violent, it struck me that you have a sort of blind spot there where some sort of primal anger takes over. That sort of "anger at rejection" sort of thing will usually color ideological outlook. As a typical American, I think you are also more inclined to see a two-party political system when it is largely an illusion.
mikema63 wrote:I'm not a socialist because I'm not a revolutionary and I'm not particularly convinced it would work at all like socialists say it would.. I'm not a fascist because I think authoritarian power is doomed to fall into human nature and serve to enrich the people in power without regard to everyone else. So I end up being a capitalist because it works well enough if in a democratic system enough people fight hard enough to rub off it's worst edges with welfare, fixes for negative and positive externalities, and other stuff like that.
Well, we end up debating quite a bit; yet, with that sort of ideological description, we are not that far apart. However, I'm substantially more libertarian than egalitarian, so I'm not inclined to believe that welfare is anything more than a short term answer or buffer for capable and responsible people, and a fairly dismal way of life for incapable and irresponsible people. I'm also openly hostile to political correctness.
quetzlcoatl wrote:Socialism (in a formal sense) has never resolved its central dichotomy, which is whether it will be a true democracy of the workers or a dictatorship of the proletariat. ... Socialism as an ideal is still valid, if we focus on the idea of worker control of the means of production as an initial goal, not an eventual one.
Another central dichotomy is that workers are also consumers. Consumers are notoriously more fickle. Everyone needs food, but some like it spicy and some like it sweet. Consumers don't want to live strictly according to their needs, so they demand of workers that they be catered to--the very same people who whilst in control of production are supposed to take a different view. From each according to his ability to each according to his needs is sounds nice, but ultimately requires some sort of dictatorship to work as an econmic system.
Rich wrote:Most people don't want to control the means of production. Hell most people don't even want to control their own address book. The issue is not how the mass of people can increase their control over their lives but how we can give it up. They've taken away our guns, they've started on knives, they'll be coming for our cars soon enough.
The problem is people are having evil thoughts, like "I'm not sure if Islam is a religion of peace." Currently people can not just think an evil thought like that, but can even write it down, without suffering any consequences. However if a responsible Liberal corporation owned your car, then such bad thoughts could be punished by giving you a driving ban. Of course ideally even the doors and windows would be controlled by a responsible Liberal corporation like Facebook or Google.
Notice of course the big row over face-book is not that Zuckerberg shouldn't control our data, but that he let bad people non Liberals have access to it. It was only right that Hillary and Obama should have access to our data, so they could craft their messages of truth. The problem was when they gave data to bad (Nazi) people.
That's a lot of information, but I think it can be reduced to nationalism versus globalism. The globalists think they can spread their ideology everywhere, which I think is a kind of a stupid idea. The Clintons, Muellers, etc. of the world believe in one government, one currency, one religion, and truly think that is an enlightened position. I think it is a position for people who can't count to two or more.
B0ycey wrote:At best the ideology you should support needs to be in your interest and something you believe in.
Yes, but that would lead to too constrained an ideology, because it doesn't consider the common needs of others. Remember mikema63 is gay. Homosexuals will naturally have "needs" and things they "believe in" where society at large will more likely express apathy or antipathy rather than sympathy. An ideology has to be able to survive contact with the larger society to have any relevance.
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden