Starker on 21/8/2018 at 18:32
Unfortunately, things like advocating a living wage get you penned as far left in America.
For example, why is Ocasio-Cortez depicted as taking the Democrats to a radical, extreme direction (and not only in conservative media, btw)? What is she really saying that is so far left and out there?
nickie on 21/8/2018 at 19:12
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
It seems strange to be complaining about the far left when the world is being increasingly taken over by the far right and the alt-right.
Where are all these far-left people hiding? I don't see them. Am I one of them . . .
Maybe I just don't travel in enough circles to see them?
You and me both. As far as I'm concerned, until Brexit and Trump, most people in my left and right circles have been muddling along in a middling kind of way. They may have believed various untruths but the Trump effect has allowed them to express their nasty thoughts. And expressing them seems to have resulted in an increase in thinking and saying - hopelessly muddled but I expect you understand what I'm trying to say.
Quote:
But what I don't agree with is that hatred should be protected by the right of free speech. If your speech is designed solely to attack and hurt others, then that is not okay and you should not have the right to that speech. You have the right to have an option. You do not have a right to spread hatred and vitriol, to attack others. Those aren't valid political beliefs, they're behaviours which are unacceptable in any society.
I'd guess this might come from the '(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incitement_to_ethnic_or_racial_hatred) incitement to racial hatred' law (Wikipedia entry) that we have or whatever similar you have:
Quote:
This offence refers to:
deliberately provoking hatred of a racial group
distributing racist material to the public
making inflammatory public speeches
creating racist websites on the Internet
inciting inflammatory rumours about an individual or an ethnic group, for the purpose of spreading racial discontent.
I think that covers most of what we have to deal with in those terms. There's a helluva lot of debating you can do without falling foul of that law.
heywood on 23/8/2018 at 20:48
Quote Posted by Starker
Hmm... if Lord Dampnut can have his rallies, why can't the Tea Party people? What's so different about them?
The only ones I've seen suppressed so far are the alt right, like what happened at Unite the Right 2. But these are a bunch of white supremacists and literal Nazis, who quite unironically talk about ethnic cleansing and the day of the rope. Hardly legitimate political discourse.
In my area it's happening to the "alt-lite" and some libertarians as well. I think the antifa and other militant left groups just lump everybody on the right together. It doesn't matter if you actually espouse white supremacist views or not, if you have any association or connection with the alt-right you are assumed to be a closet white supremacist.
Last year, there was a "free speech" rally planned in Boston by a local alt-lite group. They had lined up two local libertarian Congressional candidates and some alt-right speakers. The most controversial name I can recall is Augustus Invictus, who they later disinvited due to the negative publicity. The rally never really got going because a huge crowd of ~40k counter-protestors showed up and overwhelmed the police who couldn't keep the entry way to the rally open. The crowd chased off anybody who was trying to get into the rally, so attendance was limited to a handful of people who showed up early, and some of the planned speakers never made it in. The police got spooked by the swelling crowd and basically had to smuggle the rally-goers out through a tunnel and police vans. Some of the crowd tried to block the police vans from leaving. Police vehicles were vandalized, some cops got assaulted as they tried to clear a path through the crowd, some had urine thrown on them.
At a more recent alt-lite rally in Providence, the cops had horse manure thrown on them, and one of the rally-goers was confronted on his way back to his car and hit in the head with a bike lock. And a Free State Project (libertarian) protest was overrun by rioting college students.
And there's been a bunch of minor things recently. A Trump bumper sticker prompted a case of road rage and a hit & run. A group of people went nuts in a restaurant because some guy eating there wouldn't take off his MAGA hat and they had to be arrested. I live in one of the swingiest of swing districts, and at this stage of the election cycle there's normally a lot of campaigning. The usual practice of holding signs up at a local roundabout has stopped after an incident of cars going by throwing eggs at them. And lawn signs are being stolen at night.
Quote Posted by Renzatic
No, the extreme left are anachro communists and other fringe weirdos. The people you're talking about are just regular left.
The extreme left are relatively few in number and have been fairly quiet for the last 10 years or so.
Quote Posted by Starker
Unfortunately, things like advocating a living wage get you penned as far left in America.
For example, why is Ocasio-Cortez depicted as taking the Democrats to a radical, extreme direction (and not only in conservative media, btw)? What is she really saying that is so far left and out there?
Here's a quick list of proposals. The first two are becoming pretty mainstream among Democratic party voters. Not so much for the last three.
1. Medicare for all
2. Legalizing pot
3. Eliminating immigration and customs enforcement
4. Tuition-free public colleges, universities, and trade schools. She wants the federal government to write off all student loans they currently hold AND she wants the federal government to pay off all privately held student loans.
5. A guaranteed government job for anybody who wants one, with a living wage and benefits
Starker on 23/8/2018 at 22:52
Hmm... maybe it's because I'm not American, but I have a seriously hard time seeing how most of these proposals are so radical that they'd be extreme far left ideas.
1. Universal healthcare is incredibly common all around the world. Nothing radical about it.
2. This might seem a bit radical, but is it really more radical than legalising alcohol and tobacco? Also, while so far there are only a few places where cannabis is legal, there are quite a few countries where personal use is not criminalised and it looks like the US too is moving in that direction.
3. I can see how this might seem radical, even though ICE is a fairly new agency created in the aftermath of 9/11. But is it really much more radical than the very mainstream Republican ideas of getting rid of the Environmental Protection Agency or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Honestly, to me the creation of ICE seems far more radical than abolishing it.
4. A lot of European countries like Germany, France, and Greece are doing free or nearly free tuition. And forgiving student debt does not really seem all that much more radical to me than bailing out corporations.
5. With the looming threat of automation, this might be one solution to combat that. Either that or basic income. Just creating garbage jobs that pay next to nothing would help nobody, but there could be, say, infrastructure projects that make good use of the workforce and pay reasonably well, for example.
Renzatic on 23/8/2018 at 23:27
Quote Posted by Starker
4. A lot of European countries like Germany, France, and Greece are doing free or nearly free tuition. And forgiving student debt does not really seem all that much more radical to me than bailing out corporations.
The bailouts weren't a gift to our corporations. They were loans, expected to be paid back with interest.
I could understand offering some form of student debt relief, but to nix them entirely would help one group at the expense of multiple others.
Starker on 23/8/2018 at 23:48
Fair enough.
SD on 23/8/2018 at 23:50
University tuition isn't free here, but despite the hysteria about students graduating with mammoth debts, it doesn't need to be paid off until a person is earning a decent wage, and even then it's only a small percentage over a certain threshold. So it functions rather like a graduate income tax, which seems like a decent compromise between the two extremes (of poor people not being able to afford university versus poor people paying taxes so the middle classes can attend university).
Renzatic on 24/8/2018 at 00:07
That's the best way to approach the issue. Though it still doesn't address why college tuitions have skyrocketed over the last few decades, which is the major reason why we have a student debt problem to begin with.
Renzatic on 24/8/2018 at 05:47
Quote Posted by icemann
Well yeah. In the end we're going to run out of space world wide.
We might end up having a few big fights over resources once the population gets so large, but I'm not worried about us running out of room anytime soon.
The US is a good example here, because no one realizes just how staggeringly empty the middle of the country is. The entire state of Montana only has 1/8th the population of New York City, and it's a big fucking state.
nickie on 24/8/2018 at 07:07
Quote Posted by SD
University tuition isn't free here, but . . . it doesn't need to be paid off until a person is earning a decent wage, and even then it's only a small percentage over a certain threshold.
I've never managed to reach the threshold and it's too late now. Interestingly, I thought, it used to be the only debt that wasn't wiped out by bankruptcy although I don't know if that's still the case.
