Fox News poll finds Bernie Sanders and Planned Parenthood are the most popular things

[Bill the Cat]

I get that you enjoy trying to win the stupidest TWebber prize,

Sorry fruitloop, but that Oscar sits firmly on your mantle.

but GDP and median income are widely published numbers and you can easily find dozens of minor variants of the same chart published by different people, so your bizarre attacks on the makers of this chart are totally irrelevant.

Again, you missed the point, unsurprisingly. I said "but you elephant hurl so much crap that it takes a full time job to fact check your biased sources and their creative charts." Your source you used is heavily biased.

[Starlight]

Told ya so... That "EPI" chart...


The Economic Policy Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-profit American think tank based in Washington, D.C. that carries out economic research and analyzes the economic impact of policies and proposals. The EPI describes itself as a non-partisan think tank that "seeks to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions". It is affiliated with the labor movement, and is usually described as presenting a liberal viewpoint on public policy issues

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Policy_Institute

I get that you enjoy trying to win the stupidest TWebber prize, but GDP and median income are widely published numbers and you can easily find dozens of minor variants of the same chart published by different people, so your bizarre attacks on the makers of this chart are totally irrelevant.

[Bill the Cat]

And it is typically you who is wrong - but you elephant hurl so much crap that it takes a full time job to fact check your biased sources and their creative charts.

Told ya so... That "EPI" chart...


The Economic Policy Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-profit American think tank based in Washington, D.C. that carries out economic research and analyzes the economic impact of policies and proposals. The EPI describes itself as a non-partisan think tank that "seeks to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions". It is affiliated with the labor movement, and is usually described as presenting a liberal viewpoint on public policy issues

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Policy_Institute

[TheWall]

Of course it would be hard to stop tyranny once it has occurred. We had an entire war of independence about the subject.

[demi-conservative]

^Assuming that is true (a big assumption even if you were the most honest injun around, given how incompetent you are), it is a very unique situation.

Those kiwis just slightly faster. Like in Dutchland, immigration causing parties to move right. Even Merkel has to fake at times!!

So many idiots libs eventually will see light, oppose immigration. Then they will claim that 'but but but opposing immigration is not right-wing'

[Starlight]

Bernie is a socialist.

P.S. I would call myself a "socialist" or "democratic socialist". My motivation for doing so is that I am concerned about the way rich business owners can screw over their employees, the environment, and their community just to make a few dollars more for themselves. The term "socialist" to me means that I want to see the employees and the community have more say in how the businesses are run, so that the businesses are not simply mini-dictatorships where the rich person gets everything they want and then makes all the profits. Ways I would want to do this include:
- Having strong unions, so employees have power (as many Scandinavian countries do)
- Encouraging cooperatives
- Encouraging employee shareholding schemes and profit-sharing agreements.
- Replacing the legal fiduciary responsibility of a business to maximize its profits, with a wider set of legal responsibilities to act in the interests of all those with whom the company interacts (shareholders, employees, customers, the community, the environment). (As the UK does)
- Having a representative of the employees sit on the board of directors (as Germany does)
- Having a democratically elected representative from the local community sit on the board of directors
etc.

Socialist ideas originally developed during the industrial revolution in England, when new technologies allowed the rich people to build a factory and staff it with minimum-wage workers who worked in awful conditions and died young, and the already rich factory owners made truckloads of money in profits which they kept for themselves. The workers weren't getting their fair share of what their own labor was producing. Today we are seeing this same sort of repeat of extreme wealth inequality where workers are not getting paid proportionately for their productive activities and where the rich are running out the back door with all the money. And that is happening because businesses are run in a very top-down dictatorship fashion, and workers have woefully inadequate powers to stand up for their fair share of the profits. Here is a graph that lays the problem out for you:



From the 40s to the 70s in America, as productivity increased, what employees were being paid increased. That was great, that was what should happen - if your productivity doubles your earnings should double. But around the 70s, due to a number of different political policies (perhaps the most important being the decline of unions), employee wages stopped rising despite the fact that productivity kept increasing with new technology. The increasing difference between those two lines all went into the pockets of the business owners rather than into the pockets of the employees, thus making the already-rich much, much, much richer. The fall of the unions around the 70s thus effectively transitioned America from socialist to capitalist around that time, and you see the two lines diverge as a result.

Anyway that is an example of what "socialism" or "democratic socialism" is. Notably, Bernie during his campaign only ever mentioned a single one of the things in my list (unions). He campaigned mostly as a social democrat would, which is a different term that means a person is in favor of strongly re-distributive government policies (i.e. using taxes and welfare to take money from the rich through taxes and give it to the poor in the form of healthcare, education, welfare etc), and thereby achieve a more equal society. The difference between those terms basically is that a "social democrat" endorses capitalism (the idea that those rich business owners can create a business and milk it for all its worth) and tries to redress the inequalities the capitalism creates through some re-distributive government welfare programs, where as "democratic socialist / socialist" opposes capitalism and advocates socialism (the idea that employees or the community should have real power in how a business is being run) and thus tries to stop the inequalities created by capitalism at the source rather than mopping up after it as the social democrats try to do.

[Starlight]

Bernie is a socialist.

What does that term mean to you? Do you call the entire democratic party 'socialist'? Do you call the rest of the Western world 'socialist'? Is socialist a bad thing? I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say here. Bernie calls himself a "democratic socialist" which is a bit different to a "socialist", and he's been criticized by socialists in the past of not actually being a socialist.

Also our government was intentionally designed to change slowly to prevent tyranny.

So does that mean that once it changes into a tyranny it's very difficult to change it back?

One of the obvious problems I see at the moment in US politicians is that the Supreme Court has creatively decided that corruption is constitutionally required, because "money counts as speech" and hence the First Amendment that allows free speech thereby requires that special interests be allowed to corrupt politicians with money and thereby thwart the will of the American people by leading to a government that always does the will of the big donors regardless of what the people want. Obviously the solution to that is a constitutional amendment that makes it clear that the government is allowed to pass anti-corruption laws (thus preventing the Supreme Court repeatedly declaring anti-corruption laws to be unconstitutional as it has been doing). But getting a constitutional amendment in the US requires a few major miracles plus moving heaven and earth, so most people write it off as impossible. All such attempts at passing this constitutional amendment so far have simply died down party lines with Dems all voting for it and all elected Republicans voting against it. Obviously once you get an entire party that bathes in the special-interest money and is corrupt through-and-through like the Republican party is (check out this video of John Boehner talking about the time he handed out checks from the tobacco-lobby to congressmen on the house floor), they are going to be unwilling to vote for anti-corruption laws, never mind anti-corruption constitutional amendments that need super-majorities.

[TheWall]

Bernie is a socialist. Also our government was intentionally designed to change slowly to prevent tyranny.

[Darth Executor]

^Assuming that is true (a big assumption even if you were the most honest injun around, given how incompetent you are), it is a very unique situation. Just about everywhere else it is the left calling for more immigration. The Koch Brothers are not right wing, they are libertarians. Contra typical stereotypes, the average libertarian is more likely to side with the left than with the right. Libertarians are also largely irrelevant. Most corporations are run by progressive CEOs with largely progressive goals. They do tend to step on the toes of the far left, but not over immigration (even if they support it for different reasons).

It's also amazing that a so-called left wing country is complaining about rich, competent foreigners beating them out of their own market. Sounds like they think whites are more entitled to the riches of NZ than asians, or at least that natives are more entitled to them than foreigners. That's a solidly right wing stance.

[Starlight]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/16/europe...ism/index.html

Shift to the right
Though his PVV did not perform as well as expected, some say Wilders has already prompted other parties -- particularly the VVD -- to shift more to the right.

In my country the right supports higher immigration and the left wants lower immigration. I'm both very left-wing and very liberal, and I strongly support lowering immigration substantially. I don't agree with the person making the statement in the article that a party changing policies to support less immigration inherently constitutes a "shift more to the right".

The ones who want open-borders are the right-wing libertarian globalists like the Koch brothers. Neither the traditional right-wing nor the traditional left-wing tend to be inherently pro or anti immigration. There have been two different types of forces pulling parties towards immigration positions: One is xenophobia / islamophobia which has encouraged a few people on the right toward anti-immigration policies; The other is economic globalization and the economic effects of immigration which has encouraged a few people on the right towards pro-immigration policies. The first factor is dominant in the US, both factors are currently very active in Europe (which is why the traditional right-wing party in Germany is trying to take in a million immigrants to boost their economy, yet the taking of immigrants is itself fueling the alt-right), while the second factor is dominant here in NZ. Nobody here fears Muslims much and it's a very multicultural country here, so what matters to people is not the color or culture of the people immigrating, but rather the raw numbers of people immigrating and the economic effects of that.

Our current right-wing government here has very deliberately used a very high rate of immigration to cause house prices to sky-rocket (which makes their already-rich house-owning voters even richer), and has endlessly rubber-stamped permission for foreigners to purchase large tracts of farmland here which has caused farm prices to sky-rocket (which makes their already-rich farm-owning voters even richer), and they use the high rate of immigration to hide the economic failures of their policies because they can say that total GDP is increasing (even though GDP per person is dropping, they're importing enough people to make the total increase). So the left-wing parties have been calling for a swath of anti-immigration anti-foreign-buyers rules to try to clamp down on the negative economic effects of too much immigration and stop the housing bubble that the right-wing government is deliberately causing.

[Bill the Cat]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/16/europe...ism/index.html

Shift to the right
Though his PVV did not perform as well as expected, some say Wilders has already prompted other parties -- particularly the VVD -- to shift more to the right.


http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...&ct=clnk&gl=us

Andre Krouwel, political scientist at the Free University Amsterdam, and owner of election website Kieskompas, said the only conclusion from the election result was that the Dutch were "deeply divided."

"It's very difficult to interpret this election result other than this is a very polarized result, people have abandoned the centrist parties but they have also abandoned the left-wing project ... the left together has 37 seats in the 150-seat parliament," he said.

[Bill the Cat]

Eh?


The far-right party had one of their lowest results in a long time.

And the Greens did really well - Dutch Greens almost quadruple seats as pro-environment parties register big gains in Netherlands election:

Support for the progressive D66 and GreenLeft was way up on 2012

You know Bill, there's no rule that means you have to be wrong about everything you say.

I'm just reciting what was said in a CNN article on the subject. According to the article I read earlier today, many of the Dutch traditionally center-left parties have moved center-right, and the poly science professor from one of the Dutch college that was interviewed said "the left only holds 34 of the 150 seats and no one wants to caucus with them now".

And it is typically you who is wrong - but you elephant hurl so much crap that it takes a full time job to fact check your biased sources and their creative charts.

[Starlight]

The Dutch election today showed that the far leftists are losing influence.

Eh?


The far-right party had one of their lowest results in a long time.

And the Greens did really well - Dutch Greens almost quadruple seats as pro-environment parties register big gains in Netherlands election:

Support for the progressive D66 and GreenLeft was way up on 2012

You know Bill, there's no rule that means you have to be wrong about everything you say.

[Zymologist]

Or even worse, feminists!!!!

I can't help it:

feminist robot.jpg

[The Thinker]

until the machines self-identify as humans and sit it out.

Or even worse, feminists!!!!