Mueller investigation conludes that Trump is guilty!

[oxmixmudd]

And if you can show the least bit of objectively vs going off the rails and flat ignoring the moral failings of past presidents I might bother to give you one. As long as you keep showing that you’re incapable of being objective on all matters dealing with Trump, mockery of the rather weird theories you dig up is a good course of action.

And what weird theories are those? Can you be specific?

Jim

[Starlight]

Well to Star the WP would be a right wing source...

It usually favors Dems over Republicans. But it tends to be viciously anti-progressive - e.g. it ran 16 anti-Bernie stories in 16 hours when he seemed in danger of passing Hillary in the primaries. So it seems to prefer Republicans to progressives, and centrist Dems to Republicans. I guess that makes it fairly centrist within a US context.

From an international perspective it's pretty right-wing, because the US in general is far to the right of 'socialist' Europe/the rest of the Western world, and the centrist Dems are loosely equivalent on policies to the right-wing parties in most other Western countries.

[Starlight]

Need I once again have to note that to him Joseph Stalin was a right winger?

As you well know, political positions can be complex and multi-faceted, and most political scientists today tend to favor the usage of 2-dimensional charts for plotting political positions on. The "left-wing vs right-wing" continuum is a 1-dimensional measure, so the question of how one draws that 1-dimensional line across the 2-dimensional chart and how one projects 2-dimensional positions onto a 1-dimensional line can be very arbitrary. As a result, where communism and libertarianism - the two political positions most dissimilar to 'common' political positions - end up projected onto the 1-dimensional line can vary wildly.

Some political scientists have suggested a "horseshoe" model where the right-left spectrum "loops around" so the far right and the far left ends of the spectrum are all but identical. Some others like to use the right-left divide as a measure that only applies to economic policies and not other political policies.

Stalin's location on any political spectrum has to be defined in the context of whatever the definition of the political spectrum is. It is fairly meaningless to say "Stalin was a left-winger" unless it is defined what being a "left-winger" actually means.

For various reasons, I have personally found that the most useful one-dimensional political spectrum definition is centralization/hierarchicalization of power into the hands of a few people ("right-wing") vs distribution of power/freedom among the people ("left-wing"). For many and various reasons in the course of my studies of different types of political systems and countries I have found this to be the most useful and robust model with the greatest explanatory power and in general it corresponds pretty well with the labels that most political scientists in history have tended to use.

The slightly unusual result of this definition is that it labels communist dictatorships as "right-wing" due to their centralization of power and general reduction of the power/freedom of the average person in those societies. That is certainly a minority position to label them that way, though it is hardly unprecedented - George Orwell and Noam Chomsky would agree with me in that labeling.

[seer]

For various reasons, I have personally found that the most useful one-dimensional political spectrum definition is centralization/hierarchicalization of power into the hands of a few people ("right-wing") vs distribution of power/freedom among the people ("left-wing"). For many and various reasons in the course of my studies of different types of political systems and countries I have found this to be the most useful and robust model with the greatest explanatory power and in general it corresponds pretty well with the labels that most political scientists in history have tended to use..

So you have defined the terms to agree with what you believe. And I'm not sure which political scientists agree with you - leftists like Chomsky? Rather self-serving don't you think?

[Starlight]

So you have defined the terms to agree with what you believe.

I have found from experience & learning that paying attention to the degree to which power is distributed vs consolidated is the most interesting/useful thing to focus on in political analysis. Most everything else ends up being secondary to the question of who is making the decisions that matter in people's lives: Are the people themselves making their own decisions for themselves, or is someone somewhere else making their decisions for them?

This way of thinking about political issues sheds a great deal of light on everything from political freedoms (e.g. democracy where the entire populace gets a say, vs oligarchy/dictatorship where only a small number control everything) to social freedoms (e.g. to what extent does a person make personal choices for themselves vs the state/the church/the dictator telling them what to do) to the workplace (e.g. the boss ordering them around vs workers having rights and having a say) to slavery (e.g. the master making all the decisions for the slave) to feminism (e.g. men making decisions for women, vs women having the power/freedom to make their own decisions for themselves) etc.

[Starlight]

P.S. Incidentally, I have been reading a few books about Karl Marx lately, and if there's one thing Marx could be really said to have been for it was for distributing power among the workers and not having it consolidated in the hands of the business owners. Marx was pro-democracy at every opportunity, and always for the distribution of power and always for improving the rights and powers of the working people.

This is why scholars of socialism usually draw quite a sharp distinction between Marx and the Democratic Socialist tradition of distributed power that follows him over and against the Communist/Bolshevik/Lenist/Stalinist/Maoist tradition which tends to have little or no focus on or interest in empowering the average worker and is often quite happy about reducing workers rights and reducing the quality of working conditions for the average person as it pursues its ideology of state-centralization of power and consolidation of power in the hands of the Party (not a term Marx used) in its system of "State Capitalism" as it is now commonly called. While Lenin read some of Marx's works (though a lot of Marx's works weren't actually discovered/known/published until after Lenin) and was influenced in some respects by Marx, Lenin developed his own almost completely new system that was radically new and didn't hold any of the same values as Marx.

So while Marx certainly 100% qualifies himself as wanting to distribute power (and hence as 'left-wing' in my definition), Lenin did not - he wanted to consolidate power among the few and make the decisions for everyone else and reduce the power and freedoms of the average worker/person (hence 'right-wing' in my definition).

[Tassman]

Yet that did not stop Russian money from flowing in to their foundation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=.d331fc1d369a

And yet it is the Trump Foundation that is under investigation by the New York Tax Department, not Hillary's.

[seer]

I have found from experience & learning that paying attention to the degree to which power is distributed vs consolidated is the most interesting/useful thing to focus on in political analysis. Most everything else ends up being secondary to the question of who is making the decisions that matter in people's lives: Are the people themselves making their own decisions for themselves, or is someone somewhere else making their decisions for them?

So by this definition Conservatives who want less government control (government being the few) over our daily lives are more left wing than the leftists who want more government control - they would be right wing. The fact is Star the Stalinists and Maoists were left wing.

This way of thinking about political issues sheds a great deal of light on everything from political freedoms (e.g. democracy where the entire populace gets a say, vs oligarchy/dictatorship where only a small number control everything) to social freedoms (e.g. to what extent does a person make personal choices for themselves vs the state/the church/the dictator telling them what to do) to the workplace (e.g. the boss ordering them around vs workers having rights and having a say) to slavery (e.g. the master making all the decisions for the slave) to feminism (e.g. men making decisions for women, vs women having the power/freedom to make their own decisions for themselves) etc.

That only works if you get to define the terms, it is self serving. In your world the left could never be dictatorial.

[seer]

So while Marx certainly 100% qualifies himself as wanting to distribute power (and hence as 'left-wing' in my definition), Lenin did not - he wanted to consolidate power among the few and make the decisions for everyone else and reduce the power and freedoms of the average worker/person (hence 'right-wing' in my definition).

Except that is the way it will always go, that is human nature. The powerful will always rise to the top and control the masses. We find that in the history of mankind and in our closest primate cousins. It seems to be genetic.

[lilpixieofterror]

And what weird theories are those? Can you be specific?

Jim

You mean like acting like Trump is the worst thing ever while ignoring the actions of past presidents?

[Mountain Man]

You mean like acting like Trump is the worst thing ever while ignoring the actions of past presidents?

scale-of-maganomics-2.jpg

[Sparko]

It usually favors Dems over Republicans. But it tends to be viciously anti-progressive - e.g. it ran 16 anti-Bernie stories in 16 hours when he seemed in danger of passing Hillary in the primaries. So it seems to prefer Republicans to progressives, and centrist Dems to Republicans. I guess that makes it fairly centrist within a US context.

From an international perspective it's pretty right-wing, because the US in general is far to the right of 'socialist' Europe/the rest of the Western world, and the centrist Dems are loosely equivalent on policies to the right-wing parties in most other Western countries.

I think it is cute that you believe the rest of the world, except the USA is as far left as you are.

[oxmixmudd]

You mean like acting like Trump is the worst thing ever while ignoring the actions of past presidents?

I haven't done that. Each time a problem associated with a past president has been brought up, I've been quite happy to say 'that was bad'. You seem to be working some false impressions:

A) the fact that some president in the past did something bad and got away with it to some extent big or small means that Trump is excused for doing something similarly bad.
B) it is my responsibility to reference all the times some other president has done something bad before I point out something Trump is doing that is bad.


Both of those are false assumptions pix.

Further, Trump is not 'the worst thing ever' because no other president ever did something similar. The issue with Trump is that he regularly exceeds previous excesses in two ways.

(1) He seems intent on trying to do ALL of them at once.
(2) he adds to it the degradation of the presidency itself, the degradation of relations with our allies, daily new lows in terms of how he lies about his actions and the actions of others. He allies himself with despots. And instead of trying to hide less that honorable actions or intentions, he flaunts them. And that is the short list.

No other president combines so many issues into one person, one presidency. He's like all the bad things in Nixon, Bush, Obama, and Clinton all rolled into one man, with some extra on top for frosting.


Jim

[Sparko]

No other president combines so many issues into one person, one presidency. He's like all the bad things in Nixon, Bush, Obama, and Clinton all rolled into one man, with some extra on top for frosting.


Jim

That is "over-the-top" Jim. What MM was saying and why I have called this "drama queenery" in the past.

But you can do better, you forgot to add in Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot. Unless that is what you meant by "frosting"

[JimL]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]33755[/ATTACH]

Trump has signed into law 1 major piece of legislation in 2 years, and that was a tax cut for his very wealthy friends. He has increased the debt though, by over a trillion dollars so far. And here I thought republicans/conservatives were actually principled concerning the debt. NOT!

Besides that, Trump is a criminal, a crook, a con man, and treasonous to western democracy.