Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Clinton openly stated during the election she wants to take away your right to bare arms I'm pretty sure going sleeveless will still be legal in a Clinton presidency. Spelling aside, it's still incorrect. Nobody is proposing a repeal of the 2nd Amendment. Basic gun control-- for example, requiring a criminal background check with no gun show loophole-- is not the same thing as taking away your right to own a gun.
There's no such thing as the "gun show loophole". It's a myth. There already are background checks. I can tell you've never even tried to own a gun.
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361–370 of 766 posts
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#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "His supported policies include registration of minorities, Do you have a source for this? What is considered a "minority"? I thought it was directed at "illegal immigrants", which I agree is a dumb idea. But saying it applies to "minorities" is a stretch. > torture, curtailing of the free press, restriction of religious freedom, and reprisals against political enemies" How much worse is it to openly support these…
> Do you have a source for this? There are two different proposals I'm thinking of. One for making a national registry of all Muslims in the United States (a religious minority) and another for police being able to demand immigration papers at any time. The problem is that there isn't any way to look at someone and say they are an "illegal immigrant" so you end up with a totalitarian regime where police are stopping…
In France, afaik, it is mandatory to carry an id card and, missing that, the police can stop you for up to 4 hours to verify your identity (according to Wikipedia). If you're a foreigner you have to prove that you are legally resident.
The last time I checked, France is not an authoritarian regime out of a comic book.
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#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conversely, he could from a family like mine - my Omi is Austrian, along with a slew of cousins. Dinner table conversation still turns to how things would have been better had herr Hitler won. My uncle has to leave the room he so vociferously objects to his mother and his children. So, that collective memory swings both ways. Maybe Thiel lacks education in history and pines for a glorious fictitious past, which is a…
Thiel has bachelor and JD degrees in Philosophy and Law from Stanford. I think it is a little bit preposterous to assume he holds his current views about Trump simply because he is too uneducated to think otherwise. >Maybe Thiel lacks education in history and pines for a glorious fictitious past, which is a core tenet of the trump campaign. And fascism. Maybe you are the one confusing narratives built around each can…
Indeed. I believe he holds his views for a more self-serving reason. Trump will reduce his taxes. They also align on their disdain for a free and independent media.
> Trump is not an authoritarian
Please examine, critically, the way he has treated journalists, dissenting voices at his rallies, and the few minorities that happen to attend.
> current mainstream American culture.
What is that, exactly?
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#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Clinton openly stated during the election she wants to take away your right to bare arms I'm pretty sure going sleeveless will still be legal in a Clinton presidency. Spelling aside, it's still incorrect. Nobody is proposing a repeal of the 2nd Amendment. Basic gun control-- for example, requiring a criminal background check with no gun show loophole-- is not the same thing as taking away your right to own a gun.
There's no such thing as the "gun show loophole". It's a myth. There already are background checks. I can tell you've never even tried to own a gun.
Now, what you can also do legally in most states is purchase a firearm from another private individual through a private sale. An enormous number of second-hand gun sales occur in this fashion, through Craigslist or classified ads or personal acquaintances. Effectively, this is no different than if you were buying and selling lawnmowers or comic books, or any other mundane object. I am skeptical of any attempts to really regulate this activity, because it is effectively unenforceable given the number of firearms currently in circulation and the almost complete lack of any records of ownership history for most of them.
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#365It looks like a lot of people here don't understand how someone could possibly support Trump. If I were simply following the mainstream media's narrative, I'd be in a similar position. If you're really interested in trying to understand a viewpoint that differs from your own (which I believe is healthy for anyone, even if you don't plan on changing your views), I would suggest beginning by listening to Stefan Molyneu…
" According to Jessica Roy of Time Magazine Molyneux argued that violence in the world is the result of how women treat their children, and that "If we could just get people to be nice to their babies for five years straight, that would be it for war, drug abuse, addiction, promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, ... Almost all would be completely eliminated, because they all arise from dysfunctional early childh…
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#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is different. Just say you were going to vote for Trump. Someone stops you on the street, or call you up; would you admit it? I wouldn't. The guy is an absolute joke of a person on so many levels. He's stupid. He's just aweful. But there's a tiny bit of Trump in a lot of us buried deep in that ID. Personally, I do think we need to get much more vigilant on immigration, even though Obama has sent more illegials h…
>>even though Obama has sent more illegials home than any other president Where can I find the source for this? I may need it when arguing with people...
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-deportation-machine-ob...
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#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm assuming 1/10 probability of Trump winning. Most poll aggregators are going 1/6; I actually suspect we'll see a bigger Clinton blowout than expected, but that's just MHO.
The Princeton Election Consortium currently has Clinton's win probability as: random drift 95%, Bayesian 98%. [1] [1] http://election.princeton.edu/
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#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hitler was a Fascist / Authoritarian, not a Socialist. This confusion about Socialist vs Fascism is common because - as you point out - they enact similar policies, e.g. high taxes. There are numerous differences between the two. The biggest has to do with the relationship between the state and the individual: In a Fascist / Authoritarian regime, the individual is subordinated to the state. E.g. "The state knows what…
Why is it then that Socialist governments which are supposedly subordinated to the individual all seem to end up in having re education camps, Gulags, forced labour or concentration camps to crack down on dissenters. Why can't they let individual dissenting opinions exist beside their own hive mind ideology. Why do Socialist governments always try to get control over education to indoctrinate the next generation inst…
So you can have authoritarian governments that are socialist, or libertarian ones (in fact, libertarianism on the left predates right wing libertarianism by a century).
Marx spent one of the four chapters of the Communist Manifesto criticising alternative socialist ideologies, including reactionary, feudalist socialist ideologies. Marx himself was later condemned by people like Bukharin for being too authoritarian, leading to a split in the First International, where the most liberal socialists and anarchists left. Despite that there was shortly afterwards a resurgence in libertarian Marxism.
This difference grew greater leading up towards the Russian revolution. Lenin e.g. wrote the book "Left Communism: An Infantile Disorder" criticising the left-wing of his own party for its anti-authoritiarian views.
Consider that the "Russian revolution" came in two parts: The February revolutions where the Czar was overthrown, and a liberal socialist government under SR was put into place, and the coup that became known as the October Revolution, where the Bolsheviks decided to not honour the elections to the Constituent Assembly - an election that gave them ~10%, with a solid majority going to the liberal socialist SR, Left SR and Mensheviks.
After the coup, parts of the liberal socialists and communists tried cooperating with the Bolsheviks, parts joined the White's in the civil war opposing the Bolsheviks, and over the coming years tens of thousands of socialists and communists on both sides were murdered while opposing the Bolshevik rule. The purges continued for well over a decade (culminating in the Moscow Processes, where Stalin put on show trials to justify executing tens of thousands of Bolsheviks that had until then still fought against the rising authoritarianism).
In other words: Lookin for the label "socialism" to determine whether someone is left or right or liberal or authoritarian doesn't work.
> No, I do not buy it that in Socialism the government is subordinated to the individual, my family actually lived in such a shit system and I've seen it as a child myself.
And you are making the flawed assumption that a name only describes a single system. By thinking North Korea is democratic, because it's name is Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. Clearly they are not democratic.
As mentioned above, socialism is not a single political system, but a set of characteristics that can apply to political systems across the spectrum.
> Edit: And last but not least: Hitler himself frequently said and wrote that he is a Socialist.
The NSDAP adopted the term because it was popular with the German working class. It was predominantly a populist move, the same way that the staunch monarchist and conservative Bismarck, when labelled a "state socialist" by his opponents for his welfare reforms adopted the name and turned it to an advantage.
Early on the party was a curious mix of left and right wing, that is true, mainly tied together by nationalism, and a variety of policies appealing to a mix of groups.
When Hitlers influence in the party rose, he quickly and brutally changed direction of the party, and pushed out the more left wing parts of the party in order to satisfy increasingly financially important right wing backers, and after he got power he went as far as having the leaders of the remnant of the "left" of the NSDAP murdered and arrested.
If you are going to be discussing the NSDAP, you need to be careful about which time period you consider, as the party that gained power in '33 had little in common with the party in its early days.
> Not an International Socialist
The Bolsheviks too gave up any pretense of being "international socialists" under Stalin, with the passing of the Socialism in One Country doctrine as official policy in '25. They tried to "export" their policies primarily as a matter of self preservation. In fact, the term "international socialism" from then on primarily became associated with Trotskyism (there are e.g. Trotskyist groups using that name).
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#369Thiel might have ulterior motives, but his support of Trump is not too surprising if you've listened to his other ideas. He feels that the political agenda has been overrun by distractions, like "who can use which bathroom", at the expense of real problems, like the stagnation of median wages over the last forty years. He prefers the days when the national conversation was about how to beat the Soviets, and sees the…
That's all well and good, but Trump is still a terrible option. He never held office, he doesn't know how the system works, and doesn't have the temperament to be commander-in-chief. His tax plan will add trillions in debt over the next decade, and will only benefit the rich in the long run. So excuse me if I think Thiel just wants to pay less tax and sue people that piss him off. It's the rich coming to power in a m…
It neglects the fact that he wants to close loopholes that let people not pay tax and give less reason to dodge tax, you could argue that taking all this into account Hillarys tax could force more people to not pay tax and result in trillions rather than the estimated billions she will add.
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#370Thiel might have ulterior motives, but his support of Trump is not too surprising if you've listened to his other ideas. He feels that the political agenda has been overrun by distractions, like "who can use which bathroom", at the expense of real problems, like the stagnation of median wages over the last forty years. He prefers the days when the national conversation was about how to beat the Soviets, and sees the…
None of what you wrote answers "why Trump?", though. If Thiel thinks he can somehow control Trump and get him to pursue a Libertarian agenda (which Trump's platform bares no resemblance to) then he's an idiot. If he wants Libertarianism he should donate to Gary Johnson. Anything else is just opportunism.
Getting him into the 3rd debate might moderately raise awareness of the party, but he isn't going to win the election. Full stop.