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Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

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Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#401

Post by webmaven »

javagram wrote: post #393
pavel_lishin wrote: post #235

> At 85, the libertarian tycoon who spent decades funding conservative causes says he wants a final act building bridges across political divides Isn't that what all the republicans are saying now that their presidential candidate has lost? Now that they've lost a modicum of power, now is the time for partisanship and teamwork? Where was this spirit of cooperation before? This seems like a good way to spend money on…

> Isn't that what all the republicans are saying now that their presidential candidate has lost? FYI, the Koch network did not actively support Trump in either 2016 or 2020. So calling Trump as “their presidential candidate” could be misleading. Charles Koch talked about Trump vs Hillary in 2016 as cancer vs heart attack and said publicly hillary might be a better president.

> > Isn't that what all the republicans are saying now that their presidential candidate has lost?

> FYI, the Koch network did not actively support Trump in either 2016 or 2020. So calling Trump as “their presidential candidate” could be misleading.

Sure, they didn't support Trump directly. But they really only supported GOP candidates, and whether those candidates in turn supported Trump doesn't seem to have ever been a factor. They certainly never explicitly supported any opposition to Trump, not even conservative opposition such as the Lincoln Project.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#402

Post by aniro »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #383
aniro wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web of deceit surrounding the Republican Party at this point is undeniable unless you have chosen to abandon reality entirely at the point it chafes your opinion.

Oh yes, with Hillary deleting something like 40,000 emails when she became aware of an impeding investigation, and the Democratic Party aligned media, and Deep State, barely covering and investigating it, respectively, and the same thing happening with Hunter's scandalous laptop, it is only the Republican party that is surrounded by deceit.

QAnon, is it really you?

Do you have the assigned catch phrases in text-expander? I mean how many times can someone realistically type out "Hillary's emails" and "Deep State" in a day before developing carpal tunnel.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#403

Post by TT3351 »

iso1210 wrote: post #72
pmiller2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Marginal propensity to spend kills that out of the gate. Poor people save a much smaller proportion of their income than rich people, on average. Since rich people are rich (meaning that percentage is out of a bigger pie than the poor person's), and their savings rates are higher than poor people, you just multiply that out and see that rich people will get richer much faster than poor people. This doesn't take…

What really riles me about taxation is that generally people who work longer/harder/smarter to increase their net worth get taxed far more than those who increase it because they have a spare 50k they put into the stock market. For a just society we should tax working far less than taxing capital and dividend gains, not the opposite.

From "Wall Street" (1987) [a work of fiction which I have no reason to take at face value regarding precise statistics, but nevertheless]:

"The richest one percent of this country owns half the country's wealth: 5 trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds of it comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulation to widows and idiot sons and what I do -- stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. Ninety percent of the American people have little or no net worth. I create nothing; I own. We make the rules, Buddy, the news, war, peace, famine, upheaval; the cost of a paper clip. (picking one up) We pull the rabbit out of the hat while everybody else sits around their whole life wondering how we did it..."

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#404

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

harimau777 wrote: post #295
CryptoPunk wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The problem is that the Libertarianism/free-market policies simply don't work. They've failed to address the growing inability to normal people to have financial security and a reasonable quality of life. At some point, continuing to advocate those policies in the face of their outcomes becomes negligence at best.

What is your means for gauging what "works"? To where do you point as your evidence? I ask, mainly because the notion that "libertarian" policies (of both left and right varieties) have been tried in the modern era is a pretty big stretch, to me.

Not even the shallowest stuff people typically refer to, like marijuana decriminalization/legalization laws, qualify as "libertarian" policies. All the states that have legal weed also tax & regulate it heavily with specialized state controls, so we can't call it 'libertarian' in the least.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about what libertarianism is - not to worry, though, because that's pretty common and says nothing about you otherwise. Libertarianism is a radical political position to take; it does not fit neatly into today's political infrastructure. By suggesting it fails to address X, Y, or Z, you are simply projecting your own values onto a system which does not share them with you.

> They've failed to address the growing inability to normal people to have financial security

Libertarians have absolutely no interest in solving this problem. They are not trying to run peoples' lives, they are trying to relieve the people of the power that currently is wielded against them by the state and its cronies. The intent is to liberate people, so that they may be uninhibited in their pursuit of voluntary, peaceful interactions with others. What one chooses to do with this liberation is entirely up to them, and that's what being human is all about.

You are of course free to disagree all you want with these perspectives, but attacking libertarianism in the way you do isn't exactly fair.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#405

Post by forest_dweller »

aniro wrote: post #399
forest_dweller wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Maybe you shouldn't lead with an absolute that you can't possibly claim to know. > This line dismisses .. pretty much anyone advocating for change. "I proposed a solution that works for me. They don't like it. They must wish to protect the identity." Pure poppycock. I never claimed that applied for anyone that is advocating for change. In this case the nuclear power solution could be a viable solution (I…

Actually, what you wrote was "..activist groups will quite often ignore viable solutions. This is usually because they wish to keep on being activists and keep on continuing the fight." You surmise in the text that the rejection of nuclear is just out of hand because solving the problem would end the fight. This is what you stated. Nuclear may be a viable solution to the energy problem. Whether it is a viable solutio…

> Actually, what you wrote was "..activist groups will quite often ignore viable solutions. This is usually because they wish to keep on being activists and keep on continuing the fight." You surmise in the text that the rejection of nuclear is just out of hand because solving the problem would end the fight. This is what you stated.

No. Note the words "often" and "usually" appear. Therefore not always.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#406

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #370
tclancy wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, lies and bullshit would require self reflection. Both of those things have always been things the well fed and well off let their children play pretend with while making sure they never have to figure out how to feed themselves. I am 44. My entire life, speaking as someone who grew up conservative, libertarianism has either been about weed or drugs. And then about what degree of freedom one should have when arres…

libertarianism has either been about weed or drugs I'm not sure what libertarianism you've been looking at. Certainly stopping the war on drugs is one plank of the libertarian platform, but it's only one small piece. Other issues include stopping America's eternal military actions, reining in public debt, stopping abuse of police power (some overlap with BLM here!), ensuring that civil liberties such as speech, votin…

I'm not so sure how helpful this all is, to be honest. While I am sure almost all libertarian-leaning folks would agree with your policy positions, libertarianism is really a system of political thought - not a political party, nor a collection of specific policies.

Libertarians are really united more by their shared political axioms [0], rather than their specific policy views.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#407

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

bondolo wrote: post #323
qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the Democrats not condemning mob violence until it started to hurt them in the polls.

How much of that was spin and framing against the Democrats or did anyone seriously believe that they were in favour of mob violence? New rule: if you don't condemn child rape every Monday morning then until you do it is assumed that you are in favour. Tiny furors like the "who's wearing an American flag lapel pin" are is too often motivated by political opportunity rather than any real question of where the parties…

> Republicans seem to love their mostly meaningless and unsurprising performative doxologies.

You need to update your views for today's political scene. These conditions were true up til around 2008. Since then, the Democrats are now the party that engages in the performative doxologies.

Need I remind you of all that tone-deaf BLM kneeling crap in DC? Or how about the mask mandates? The face masks are the Democrats' "American flag lapel pin."

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#408

Post by brandmeyer »

8note wrote: post #377
bilbo0s wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liberals and conservatives will rarely condemn the violence of their pet terrorists. As far as violence is concerned, that's the problem with conservatives and liberals. They generally lend tacit support to violence against people they dislike. All with a wink, wink and a nudge, nudge. That's why we end up with dead police who walk into ambushes, dead black guys who make the mistake of relaxing in their own apartment…

Why do people in BLM protests keep getting arrested then? And why did the FBI stop the kidnapping of a governor? If this theory held true the republican federal government would be fine with right wing terrorists abducting democratic governors

Serious answer: The deep state. Really.

There are enough career civil servants out there that believe in the fundamentals of their roles that they keep the machinery of civilization turning along. I don't disagree with the parent's remarks at all - failure to condemn violent acts really is a both sides problem right now.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#409

Post by mindslight »

rootusrootus wrote: post #200
blfr wrote: post #27

The US seems to be in the middle of another realignment, like in the 60s. The Democratic party is consolidating its support from the big corporations, while the Republican party is making inroads with the working class.

Not just that, but the Republican party is openly populist right now. I think the Democrats are about to experience a significant amount of turmoil as the progressives try to take full control of the party. Maybe the conservatives in the Democratic party will join with the conservatives from the Republican party. Not sure how it will play out, but both parties seem to be evolving rapidly and both have big internal di…

> Maybe the conservatives in the Democratic party will join with the conservatives from the Republican party

And go where? As you've said, the Republican party is openly populist. If anything the Republican conservatives will look to the Democratic party, which seems to have become the conservative option. I consider myself a Libertarian and I'm considering voting straight national ticket Democrat for the next decade due to what the Republican party has become. Putting party above country is simply unforgivable.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#410

Post by aniro »

Xixi wrote: post #346
aniro wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen how big the Chernobyl exclusion zone is? are to move your family there? Have you paid any attention to the after effects at Fukushima? Do you care to realize that we are pushing radiation with unknown effects into the largest body of water (and one of the greatest repositories of life) on Earth? That the effects will likely reverberate for a 1000 years or more? What is your solution to the problem of ac…

The current trajectory of temperature increase is at least 4~5°C (rather optimistic) in 2100, which would mean that a pretty wide area surrounding the equator will, year-round or for significant parts of the year, have a wet-bulb temperature at or above 35°C. It is the limit at which human life (and mammal life in general) is entirely impossible, due to over-heating. That unlivable area will include most of India, In…

I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that "lack of rice" (and lack of clean water) is going to be a major issue whether we build out nuclear or not. I think humanity is in for a dark couple hundred years. The window hasn't closed, but we are hard pressed dealing with all the wrong fights and time is losing.

The less "1000 year tail of disaster" opportunities we can have available when things start to unravel the better. I am less afraid of us killing each other over rice and water than I am of us forcing those that come in the aftermath to deal with our effluence for 50+ generations.

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