What's the issue with cash for clunkers? It was a superb program. Reduced fuel consumption and helped poorer people get better cars.

I don't have an issue with it, considering I supported it (see my location). My only criticism of it was that it took until 2010 for the dealers to be reimbursed in full. The whole point of my post can be summed up in this picture:

 

 

I completely agree with magekillr. [sarcasm]The letter next to a name on a ballot makes all the difference in the world. A man who has no ability to write bills or create laws is clearly responsible for ones not passed in congress and, as a result, clearly has full control over the economy. We should entirely blame this one man for everything bad that happened while he's in charge, but hold a double standard for someone with a different letter next to his name on the ballot. Even though there are no distinct differences between the two parties, one is clearly superior to the other. Inner city poor people and country poor people are clearly in different socio-economic classes, where one is more intelligent than the other, even though both lack any higher education; even though big businesses and the news media both lie out the ass for profits, one is clearly more evil than the other; those who vote for someone because of race are clearly less racist than those who don't vote for someone because of race; churches of the same faith who take different sides of the political scale are only good members of that faith if they agree with me and my interpretation of that religion; it's clearly worse when one side ignores science, but the other has no basic understanding of history from which to see "new" ideas they present are old ones that failed miserably before. Clearly the ®/(D) makes a ginormous difference. If you disagree with me, you're probably just an idiot so I don't care what you say, seeing as I'm probably smarter than you anyway and even though tea partiers and hippies are the same damn thing, but with opposite beliefs, one of them has been right about every social issue ever.[/condescending rollseyes face] No wait, overly political people who spout none-sense is just as bad and annoying on both sides.

 

You really nailed your own coffin with the ironically over-zealous tone. Now you made yourself look like a crazy political person.

And sorry for any insults that people might take from this, but if after this debt ceiling hysteria you still haven't realized that Republicans are bat-[cabbage] insane, then you're an idiot. These people have no business being in power, ever. If you joined the Tea Party because you want to see lower taxes on millionaires and less regulation of business, then good; you're on solid ground. But if you joined because you want smaller government and a balanced budget, you made a grave mistake.

I think the government is too big when you have Police officers shutting down children's lemonade stands when they don't have the proper paperwork. I also think the government is too big when they Tell you what you can and can't have at a restaurant, and they tell you which lightbulbs you can and cannot buy.

I also think it's a shame when the banks are so tied to the government that they can't function without it.

 

Anyhow, if the Republicans decide that the federal government must start using a balanced budget, all they have to do is nothing.

You really nailed your own coffin with the ironically over-zealous tone. Now you made yourself look like a crazy political person.

I agree. My near apathy is unmatched by the tea party and hippies alike - I'm like the Glenn Beck or Keith Olberman of centrist views. Because of that, I apologize if you were offended that I pointed out the lack of a significant difference between political parties. I'm also sorry that I implied the party you like is pretty much the same as the one you hate. Because I disagree with you, I'm obviously a crazy political person. Thank you for this epiphany; I think I'll start agreeing with everything your party does, so I won't be considered crazy by you anymore.

Actually I agree with Hamtaro.

 

In my opinion most political parties are really just much of the same. They may have different policies to some extent but they both spew the same garbage, have the same scandals, make the same stupid mistakes, etc, etc.

"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution." - John Adams; Letter to Jonathan Jackson (2 October 1789)

You really nailed your own coffin with the ironically over-zealous tone. Now you made yourself look like a crazy political person.

I agree. My near apathy is unmatched by the tea party and hippies alike - I'm like the Glenn Beck or Keith Olberman of centrist views. Because of that, I apologize if you were offended that I pointed out the lack of a significant difference between political parties. I'm also sorry that I implied the party you like is pretty much the same as the one you hate. Because I disagree with you, I'm obviously a crazy political person. Thank you for this epiphany; I think I'll start agreeing with everything your party does, so I won't be considered crazy by you anymore.

 

I don't affiliate myself with any party. I'm just like you, except I don't use massive strawman attacks to paint the picture, which is ironically a very political thing to do.

My personal involvement in politics is minimal - I'm not of the age of maturity, so I can't vote (yet).

 

Voting purely on the basis of self interest would seem irrational for the greater good of society - in order to benefit oneself, it may require others to suffer.

 

As I live in the UK, the most relevant parties would be the Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party, and the Conservative Party. I choose not to affiliate with any as many of their proposed policies are rather irrational (underfunding the fundamental backbone of the economy, namely education, as opposed to over-bloating into great amounts of debt).

 

I do feel that the Conservative party has rather negative qualities about them - arrogance, ignorance and a lack of care towards those less fortunate. I will admit I don't know all that much about the Liberal Democrats, but on the basis of their MP's actions are so far - they appear to be traitors.

 

Someone please enlighten me, I feel I lack sufficient knowledge to make an informed judgement.

As a former Tory party member, I feel I am not in much of a position to give you a balanced run down of the three main parties.

The majority of Tip.It is leftist. Shocker.

The majority of Tip.It is leftist. Shocker.

More like the majority of the internet.

What is considered by "leftist" anymore, though? Would libertarianism be considered "leftist"? I consider libertarians to be on the leftist side of the political spectrum, but they almost overwhelmingly support Republicans. Of course a lot of Republicans these days are going through a re-branding stage because their party is less popular than sexually transmitted diseases, so that could be part of the problem.

 

I say this because from my experiences on the intertubes, I'd say the majority of the internet seems to be libertarian. That usually involves supporting Ron Paul, but imo Ron Paul isn't a libertarian, he's just a paleoconservative along the stripes of Pat Buchanan.

 

Will Wilkinson explores that a little bit in this column (link). His ending is thought-provoking, and it's why Will is one of my favorite writers (even though I disagree with almost everything he writes):

 

It seems to me that most of our high-level political concepts like "freedom" or "equality" are tailored and tweaked to justify the kind of political regime we already tend to favor. If you are offended by taxation, you'll settle on a conception of liberty according to which taxation is a violation. If you think a relatively high level of taxation is necessary to give people what you think they ought to get, you'll settle on a conception of liberty according to which taxation is not a violation, but not giving people what you think they ought to get is. That's why abstract political philosophy is so often futile. It's probably more useful to start out arguing over regime types in the first place, since mostly what we do is choose our favorite regime type and then reason backwards to conceptions of liberty, equality, and so forth that justify our pick.

 

Myself, ideologically I've stated before that I'm an anarchist and would prefer a stateless society. This is my ethos. This is mocked a lot of times as being unthinkable or unworkable. The funny thing is, we always think that what we have is what will always be...until that stops being the case.

 

 

Many people are very dedicated to the idea that this globalizing liberal capitalism is, while not a perfect system, the best possible system, and one that is here to stay.

 

The existence of this trope is, in its own way, self-troubling: why do so many people who claim to be so confident in the state of the liberal democratic capitalist system spend so much time announcing that confidence? The repetition of these ideas itself suggests a profound unspoken dissonance. Those who are genuinely confident generally have little cause to say so. You can accuse me of a psychoanalytic reading here, and it's a fair criticism, but I tend to find these arguments pregnant with anxiety.

 

I'm not going to articulate an argument for the mechanism by which capitalism will be replaced. I won't articulate what I think the next order will be. I'm only going to offer a weak inductive claim: human systems of political and economic organization are temporary.

If you don't mind me asking, who did you vote for in the last presidential election magekillr? I only ask out of curiosity.

I voted for President Obama, and I plan to vote for him in 2012. If I lived in a safe-Democratic or safe-Republican state, I would vote third party. But I live in Virginia, a key-state to the president's victory. The Republicans continue to get so right-wing that it's beyond the pale anymore. Jon Huntsman -- a far-right conservative with a clear conservative record while he was governor -- is considered a "moderate" now. Of course, he's only seen as a moderate because he believes in science, and he believes in GOVERNING. The fact is, on the issues, he's really not that much different than Rick Perry.

 

For national elections, I will always vote Democratic. Many anarchists believe voting to be a charade, but they're just a bunch of privileged [wagon] whose lives don't differ. And I'll admit, my life wouldn't change much no matter who wins. I'm more concerned with the poor and the lower middle class, and with the planet in general (ie, we need someone who will at least TRY to do something about climate change).

 

My political philosophy is similar to Howard Zinn's:

 

I do [vote]. Sometimes, not always. It depends. But I believe that it is preferable sometimes to have one candidate rather another candidate, while you understand that that is not the solution. Sometimes the lesser evil is not so lesser, so you want to ignore that, and you either do not vote or vote for third party as a protest against the party system. Sometimes the difference between two candidates is an important one in the immediate sense, and then I believe trying to get somebody into office, who is a little better, who is less dangerous, is understandable. But never forgetting that no matter who gets into office, the crucial question is not who is in office, but what kind of social movement do you have. Because we have seen historically that if you have a powerful social movement, it doesn't matter who is in office. Whoever is in office, they could be Republican or Democrat, if you have a powerful social movement, the person in office will have to yield, will have to in some ways respect the power of social movements.

 

We saw this in the 1960s. Richard Nixon was not the lesser evil, he was the greater evil, but in his administration the war was finally brought to an end, because he had to deal with the power of the anti-war movement as well as the power of the Vietnamese movement. I will vote, but always with a caution that voting is not crucial, and organizing is the important thing.

 

When some people ask me about voting, they would say will you support this candidate or that candidate? I say: "I will support this candidate for one minute that I am in the voting booth. At that moment I will support A versus B, but before I am going to the voting booth, and after I leave the voting booth, I am going to concentrate on organizing people and not organizing electoral campaign."

 

So if you'd read my Facebook or blog, you'd think I didn't vote for the president at all. But he's really a small intricate part of a larger system, and in the end what really brings about "change" in any system is the masses of the people. Organizing is the most important thing. But privileged [wagon] bloggers like to sit from their Ivory Towers rather than do the hard work that Zinn lays out above. It's kind of upsetting. Our problems are not one man's fault. One man cannot fix them. We need to remember that we have one man standing between where we are now and an immeasurably worse situation, and that man is Barack Obama (as much as he and I don't agree on anything politically, he's one of the most skilled politicians of all time).

 

edit: One of my favorite bloggers wrote about another aspect that's troubling about the GOP to me just today, and their media enablers like Kathleen Parker. It isn't so much that they're tacking far to the right -- although that is a problem. It's that they're "addicted to TEH STOOPID."

 

You want to know why Poppy Bush didn't ruin the country? Being head of the CIA and ambassador to China, and vice-president gave him a lot of experience to make informed decisions. He made some mistakes, but he navigated us through the fall of the Soviet Union without incident. Maybe he had to fake liking pork rinds to appeal to the conservative base. Maybe he had a hard time connecting with people. But he knew what he was doing, unlike his son, and unlike Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann.

 

Whether a president appeals to the average voter or not, it's incredibly important that they know what they're doing. Our current president knows what he's doing. So did Bill Clinton, when he wasn't letting his penis do his thinking. Being smart and well-educated does not guarantee success, but being of average intelligence and ignorant is a recipe for disaster. We need someone a little more sophisticated than 'Iran bad', 'Saudi Arabia good.' Do you know if Hizbollah is Sunni or Shi'a? No? Then you'd be a total disaster as president. You'd be completely at the mercy of your advisers. Why? Because you don't know anything about the world, that's why. You're liable to invade the wrong country without a reconstruction plan.

 

I know even Parker is disturbed by the "I'm stupid, vote for me" attitude of Bush and Perry, but it's lot worse than she acknowledges. Why are we even debating climate change, evolution, and the HPV vaccine? Because they GOP is addicted to The Stupid, that's why. And it's incredibly dangerous.

What is considered by "leftist" anymore, though? Would libertarianism be considered "leftist"? I consider libertarians to be on the leftist side of the political spectrum, but they almost overwhelmingly support Republicans. Of course a lot of Republicans these days are going through a re-branding stage because their party is less popular than sexually transmitted diseases, so that could be part of the problem.

 

I say this because from my experiences on the intertubes, I'd say the majority of the internet seems to be libertarian. That usually involves supporting Ron Paul, but imo Ron Paul isn't a libertarian, he's just a paleoconservative along the stripes of Pat Buchanan.

 

Will Wilkinson explores that a little bit in this column (link). His ending is thought-provoking, and it's why Will is one of my favorite writers (even though I disagree with almost everything he writes):

 

It seems to me that most of our high-level political concepts like "freedom" or "equality" are tailored and tweaked to justify the kind of political regime we already tend to favor. If you are offended by taxation, you'll settle on a conception of liberty according to which taxation is a violation. If you think a relatively high level of taxation is necessary to give people what you think they ought to get, you'll settle on a conception of liberty according to which taxation is not a violation, but not giving people what you think they ought to get is. That's why abstract political philosophy is so often futile. It's probably more useful to start out arguing over regime types in the first place, since mostly what we do is choose our favorite regime type and then reason backwards to conceptions of liberty, equality, and so forth that justify our pick.

 

Myself, ideologically I've stated before that I'm an anarchist and would prefer a stateless society. This is my ethos. This is mocked a lot of times as being unthinkable or unworkable. The funny thing is, we always think that what we have is what will always be...until that stops being the case.

 

 

Many people are very dedicated to the idea that this globalizing liberal capitalism is, while not a perfect system, the best possible system, and one that is here to stay.

 

The existence of this trope is, in its own way, self-troubling: why do so many people who claim to be so confident in the state of the liberal democratic capitalist system spend so much time announcing that confidence? The repetition of these ideas itself suggests a profound unspoken dissonance. Those who are genuinely confident generally have little cause to say so. You can accuse me of a psychoanalytic reading here, and it's a fair criticism, but I tend to find these arguments pregnant with anxiety.

 

I'm not going to articulate an argument for the mechanism by which capitalism will be replaced. I won't articulate what I think the next order will be. I'm only going to offer a weak inductive claim: human systems of political and economic organization are temporary.

 

One of the human psyche's first underlying ideas is that the future will always resemble the past. Our brains are hard-wired to assume so. Critically, we know that not to be the case if we take the argument apart, but it's the best system we know of that approximates the flow of cause and effect that we can perceive and understand. We are not blessed with foresight or absolute understanding of anyone else we live with, so we have to make do.

 

If you don't buy into the idea of it being hard-wired, you could say that it's a similar thing to the scientific process that humans invented. There is no absolute truth in science, only the most supported hypothesis. A theory can be supported by evidence after evidence, and eventually we treat it exactly the same as we would an 'absolute truth', even if it isn't. Basically, our perceptions of how things work are always approximations of what is actually true, and sometimes they're really rough. But they're the best thing that we've come up with.

 

If you think what we have is temporary, that may be right, but you'll never come up with an answer while you're still a human being or live in a time before anything significant has changed. Dwelling on it is a waste of your time.

 

Another part of the human psyche's ideas is that we say what we think to other people. If you're going to start saying that I'm secretly dissonant of liberal democratic capitalism, I'm not going to be able to convince you otherwise because you aren't me. Equally, though, you could say that I'm not a person at all, that I'm an illusion or something. Solipsism takes hold, and we get nowhere. It's a waste of time.

Oh, in general I agree with you, Will. It is indeed a waste of time to dwell upon it, and I really don't spend time thinking about it. I do think it should be pointed out every once in a while, though, because people seem so dead-set on always improving economic growth, always doing this, always doing that. It should still be in the back of our minds that we cannot grow forever with finite resources, that there is never a "best way" or "certain way" of doing things, and it's best to keep our minds open. It's mostly a response to those who believe war will always be with us, that nation-states and governments MUST exist, etc.

 

But this is why when I vote, organize, and participate in activism, I propose ideas that have been used; ones that we know work; ones where I feel society will be more egalitarian as a result. I look to Scandinavia for solutions to many problems in America, even if they can't be extrapolated exactly to a tee (different culture, different histories, experiences, etc) because it's the "best that we know" (according to magekillr, as Will Wilkinson pointed out).

War has been with us since the dawn of mankind - what change do you see in the future that might make war nonexistent?

 

I'd love to see the end of war, but I think it's highly unlikely.

War has been with us since the dawn of mankind - what change do you see in the future that might make war nonexistent?

 

I'd love to see the end of war, but I think it's highly unlikely.

 

It's an ethos, bro. It will probably be here for a while, certainly beyond my lifetime (then again, who knows?) What I do know is this:

 

Steven Pinker: A History of Violence

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.