Delusibeta
Banned
Disclaimer: I don't follow US politics too closely (what with being in the UK and all) but as far as I know there isn't an official reason.
Why does GAF lean so much to the left in politics?
- Thread starter Schattenjäger
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Disclaimer: I don't follow US politics too closely (what with being in the UK and all) but as far as I know there isn't an official reason.
I'll admit, I'm not a very political person. I have my opinions but sort of keep them to myself. I just find that the right, more and more, does not base itself in reality. It focuses on bigotry, helping the rich while neglecting the poor and middle class, and giving more power to corporations and more and more stuff that just does not make sense in today's world.
It just doesn't seem very logical. Not to mention that the GOP just keeps saying more and more insane things.
I like to think that the logical posters on the internet are louder than the illogical. The illogical get flamed and eventually go away, and the logical gather together and team up to make it happen.
It just doesn't seem very logical. Not to mention that the GOP just keeps saying more and more insane things.
I like to think that the logical posters on the internet are louder than the illogical. The illogical get flamed and eventually go away, and the logical gather together and team up to make it happen.
Your first reaction to those posts was resort to the "bububu both sides do it!" defense. It's sort of a tacit admission that you're not really bothered by it because, hey, the other guys do bad things too!
one thing i don't understand about american politics (this also applies to other countries of course but not as drastically) - why does most of the poor, uneducated people in the south vote republican? the republicans lower the taxes, making it worse for the poor, they have no interest in them, but still get most of the souths votes...
Because the democrats are baby killing, gay loving socialists.
soundahfekz
Member
Manmademan
Member
There are lots of reasons, but the big one has to do with Southern Democrats splitting from the rest of the party and joining the Republicans en masse after LBJ passed the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act a few years later.
prior to that the south was a solid democratic voting bloc (Because Lincoln was a republican....do the math).
So the short answer is racism. Longer term the republican party has put a lot of work into convincing these voters (southern evangelicals, "working class" whites) that immigrants, gays, minorities, and non christians are taking their rights away, so "vote republican." The republican party consistently demonizing minorities to keep this voting bloc is one of the biggest reasons why blacks, latinos, etc vote solidly democratic.
by thors hammer, i get so preplexed at the word socialist being thrown around as an insult. people must have a tigher grip on reality than this, its hard for my head to wrap around this issue, im sorry
thank you for giving me some insight. i had no idea about this
CHEEZMO
Obsidian fan
"One of these days I'll start up that small business I spend my time dreaming about, which will then grow and grow. One day I'll be a millionaire and when I am I dont want the government stealing all of my hard-earned money and giving it to "poor" people who are too lazy to make money."
tl;dr - temporarily embarassed millionaires.
That's the tax side, anyway. There's lots of people who dont give a shit about that and instead just hate them coons and fags. *rabble rabble*
*drives off on a creaking Rascal shoving my face with CFA sammiches*
Exactly. At the end of the day whether it is or not doesnt really even matter.
And the US is steadily growing more and more multi-racial, i heard there are actually more non-whites than whites in the US at the moment.
Long-term thinking is someting the Republican party clearly lacks. Or at least long-term thinking based on common sense.
Manmademan
Member
Not yet, but this is expected to change within the next 10 to 20 years with the expanding latino population.
It's sort of difficult to calculate exactly when this will occur though, since hispanics are an ethnicity, not a race and tend to intermarry with whites at a fairly high rate. In addition there's been actually a negative immigration rate for hispanics due to the terrible economy and most projections were based on immigration continuing to expand at the rates it was 5 or 10 years ago.
But yeah- all it will take to completely crush the republican party into irrelevancy is texas going democratic, or into swing state territory, and that's going to happen within the next couple of presidential elections.
Schattenjäger
Gabriel Knight
I'm not that bothered about it - politics is always about choosing the lesser of two evils..
Ah, maybe it was about births then, what i heard, more non-white born than whites born, maybe?
There is, it's called the Democratic Party. Unless of course you think that giving control of national healthcare to private companies, drone strikes outside the confines of warfare, payroll tax cuts, and indefinite detention of Guantanamo prisoners are far left policies.
Manmademan
Member
that's accurate, yeah.
SouthernDragon
Member
That was the official reason.
Some fundamentalists like to have their bigoted cake and eat it too by classifying "homosexual tendencies" as just another character flaw that God can capriciously assign to a person as he knits them together in their mother's womb.
Others say to hell with justice and define any horrible thing God could do as just, because God did it and God is justice or something like that.
José Mourinho
cocknose
Which is why letting them bog you down in this ridiculous crap is essentially letting them win. It means you're fighting on their turf, where they always win because God says so.
Such circular logic! They have absolutely no outer point of reference on which to ground any of their claims in reason!
It's almost as if they're taking a leap of....faith!
/mindblown
In all seriousness, based solely on rules of logic...the debate between "science" and "faith" is sort of at an impasse. Even if one seems logically grounded, the other side doesn't necessarily need to either affirm itself or negate the other side. Rationally grounded "faith" borders on an oxymoron.
In a way, isn't that sort of like the debate between progressiveness and tradition? Conservatives don't actively seek out to affirm and reinvent tradition; tradition is justified simply by being rooted in society. Progressives are the argumentative re-inventors...maybe that's why so much of GAF leans "left". After all, we all make a habit of arguing about stuff on the internet.
Yeah. He was a DINO.
(Ha. Yeah, the Democratic Party is the real Big Tent today, with people who can barely stand each other's worldviews working together, vs. the Republican Party where you have no chance of even entering the House unless you're pretty close to the line. Scott Brown was an aberration.)
American "Conservatives" of the present time want to completely tear up the existing politicosocial order and more than a century of tradition in order to return the USA to a time that, demonstrably (like, with actual facts, man), never existed. It is not conservative to be a revolutionary, which is what these people aspire to be.
Though I am not the Limbaugh-listening, National Review-reading reactionary dumbass I was as a teenager, I still consider myself conservative, though not rightist, on a number of topics. I would not be accepted in the Republican party of today except as a useful idiot like the libertarians and Log Cabin crew. They would like my money and my vote, but not my voice.
SquiddyCracker
Banned
... which is the side holding a war on women and minorities?
Another brilliant argument. Why can't we have conservative posters who don't troll or do drive-by postings?
I say pretty much this. The Gaffers who lean left are allowed to pile on and call those who are conservative posters names on this board. Why speak up at all if the moderators condone this type of behavior?
OttomanScribe
Member
I don't think it is neccesarily the case. I find it depends on what time you are on as much as anything else. Also 'left' seems like such a useless term as what it means varies so widely depending on the country we are talking about.
Maybe it was because I spent so much time on a revolutionary left forum, everyone comes off as facist to me?
Also what is left about being anti-religion? A lot of lefties I know are quite partial to a bit of religion.
Maybe it was because I spent so much time on a revolutionary left forum, everyone comes off as facist to me?
Also what is left about being anti-religion? A lot of lefties I know are quite partial to a bit of religion.
I find the GAF mods pretty impartial when it comes to bans. No favorites except for a few GAF celebs (drinky crow, etc.).
Did you report the posts that you feel breached the rules?
Examples?
The traditional movement of socialists opposed the Catholic church and their policies. Karl Marx, one of the 'founders' of communist theory said 'religion is the opium of the people'.
So 'the left is anti-religion' is a left-over of the opposition to the Catholic church in Europe.
Schattenjäger
Gabriel Knight
Every single political thread on this site
Derailing a bit here, that quote (from my understanding) is often misunderstood.
Religion in his definition isn't bad/evil, but it's also not real (as in it's man made, and not from some transcendent being), but it is an illusion, that people use (need) to be able to cope with the harsh reality.
Religion is not needed when the suffering of man ends, but as men do suffer, religion has it's uses to alleviate some of the pain.
Or something like that...
Schattenjäger
Gabriel Knight
Yes but that is one idiot just spewing his mouth to appease the religious idiots he is trying to get votes from
Roe vs wade will never be repealed
cubicle47b
Member
Yeah, too bad we get a new idiot like that every day now.
RustyNails
Member
Welcome back OS, you better post more!
Manmademan
Member
Really? Because we have several supreme court justices up for retirement, and wanting to repeal Roe v Wade is one of if not THE litmus tests for conservative justices, and Romney has committed to nominating justices to overturn it.
Should Romney win the election it's a certainty those justices would be in the majority and roe would be severely neutered if not overturned outright.
diffusionx
Gold Member
That party you long for exists and it is the Democrats. This is a running joke in left-leaning political blogs: you see an article from some blowhard talking about a third party that caters to the "center" and then rattles off a list of "centrist policies" and it basically lines up with Barack Obama's past four years in office.
But even then I find the notion of the "center" to be basically illusory. Studies have shown that most people who identify as "independents" or "centrists" are just as partisan as anyone; they just choose to deny it. In today's electoral politics, I would say 80%-90% of people can not be being swayed one way or the other. Sure, 1/3rd or more of the country may self-identify as independents but most of those people have their minds made up.
This makes sense logically: people have their beliefs and don't often change them. People also don't like blatant pandering. Remember how goofy Kerry looked in that hunting gear? The right destroyed him for that.
There is no justification that holds up to even the slightest scrutiny. They just don't want minorities to vote for Democrats. This isn't just Ohio - an old GOP man out of Florida came out and said that the party there used to talk about ways to keep black people from voting.
I'm not sure most Americans realize how reactionary and radical the Republican party has become.
This. There's no actual left in the US mainstream politics if you use the European or global scale.
Wolfgunblood Garopa
Member
You don't get it. Conservatives aren't silenced because others pile on. On the contrary, they speak up exactly because they know that others will pile on. That's conservative victimhood. They want to play the role of the victim- it's an important part of the identity of their movement.
It's also how they insulate their often whacked out and flat out wrong views from reality- they perceive opposing views through the filter of victimhood.
My view, too. Mind you, Aussie politics is slowly swinging more right day by day, especially with the compromises the Labor party has been throwing out in the last few weeks.
Because Aussies have largely bought into the whole rhetoric against taxation, and the trickle down bullshit.
We take our talking points from American media - their ideas and beliefs soak into the bones of our own culture.
Same goes for Canada... both countries are very similar to each other socio-economically and population wise, as well as global influence wise. Indeed, I've always thought about Australia as the sunny Canada, or Canada as the icy Australia...
But the point is, on the global level, there is likely an intersection of factors that cause both countries to be trending in the direction of the right.
Probably because of Rupert Murdoch. Fucking worse son of Australia ever.
calling out insanity should be bannable?
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
I was just scanning the thread to see if anyone else had made this post
OttomanScribe
Member
Where do you think socialism came from? It was Christian socialism first! Marxism is full to the brim with the progress narratives of Christian Europe. This history marching ever onward to an end point thing is all Christian all day.
Also socialists aren't the only lefties lol.
Thanks akh
can't promise anything, you know how it goes!Yes, you are correct.
Marx was obviously commenting on the corruption of religion in favor of those who are better off and/or in search of power instead of religion as a concept.
The core of all modern leftist politicians lies in the socialist principle of solidarity. Be it with nature or fellow workers etc.
I don't see how you could be a lefty without wanting solidarity ?
How about instead of dodging the question you give some specifics.
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