Unpragmatism of TYT

[DocWatts]

1 hour ago, Hardkill said:

Considering how progressives get very little to none of the things they want done do you think that all of these progressives in Congress have been useless?

Btw, I know you said before that conservativism is about keeping the status quo, but centrism is also all about the status quo. Isn't there supposed to be a difference between those two political ideologies?

I'd say that the difference is that Conservatism picks an arbitrary point in the past to romanticize, then works to roll back aspects of societal progress that it finds distasteful / threatening. It's a regressive ideology.

Centricism is more about preserving the status quo by making incremental tweaks to existing institutions.

Progressivism is about transformative change.

[Preety_India]

On 15/11/2021 at 3:12 AM, DocWatts said:

Centricism is more about preserving the status quo by making incremental tweaks to existing institutions.

Progressivism is about transformative change.

I think both are equally beneficial. Progressivism needs radical open mindedness though. 

 

[Hardkill]

On 11/14/2021 at 1:42 PM, DocWatts said:

I'd say that the difference is that Conservatism picks an arbitrary point in the past to romanticize, then works to roll back aspects of societal progress that it finds distasteful / threatening. It's a regressive ideology.

Centricism is more about preserving the status quo by making incremental tweaks to existing institutions.

Progressivism is about transformative change.

So, then is Leo wrong about conservatism wanting to maintain the status quo?

 

41 minutes ago, Preety_India said:

I think both are equally beneficial. Progressivism needs radical open mindedness though. 

 

A certain degree of centrism is needed to make practical/realistic changes. However, I am always concerned with possibility of conservative politics causing a society to regress.

[DocWatts]

2 hours ago, Hardkill said:

So, then is Leo wrong about conservatism wanting to maintain the status quo?

Conservatism is always going to be contextual to some degree. In some contexts that would entail maintaining the status quo.

In the context of contemporary America which has been undergoing a paradigm shift towards Green over the last half century, Conservatism necessarily entails trying to roll the clock back on societal progress. 

So it's fair to say that Conservatism in a contemporary context is quite regressive.

For example on abortion, maintaining the status quo would mean preserving Roe v. Wade, rather than trying to erase 60 years of progress on reproductive rights.

Ditto for the expansion of civil rights that happened as part of this paradigm shift, as much of contemporary Conservatism is motivated in part by a resentment of the gains that have been made by communities of color in the last half century. Trying to reimpliment elements of Jim Crow by restricting voting rights with surgical precision towards communities of color is reactionary, rather than a preservation of the status quo.

 

[soos_mite_ah]

26 minutes ago, DocWatts said:

Conservatism is always going to be contextual to some degree. In some contexts that would entail maintaining the status quo.

In the context of contemporary America which has been undergoing a paradigm shift towards Green over the last half century, Conservatism necessarily entails trying to roll the clock back on societal progress. 

So it's fair to say that Conservatism in a contemporary context is quite regressive.

For example on abortion, maintaining the status quo would mean preserving Roe v. Wade, rather than trying to erase 60 years of progress on reproductive rights.

Ditto for the expansion of civil rights that happened as part of this paradigm shift, as much of contemporary Conservatism is motivated in part by a resentment of the gains that have been made by communities of color in the last half century. Trying to reimpliment elements of Jim Crow by restricting voting rights with surgical precision towards communities of color is reactionary, rather than a preservation of the status quo.

 

I remember once listening to this take by one woman who was saying that the real conservative party in the U.S. was the Democrats because they wanted to *conserve* the status quo. The Republicans on the other hand aren't conservative rather they are regressive. Her whole thing was on how the U.S. political spectrum was stunted and how we technically have 2 right wing parties. 

[DocWatts]

48 minutes ago, soos_mite_ah said:

I remember once listening to this take by one woman who was saying that the real conservative party in the U.S. was the Democrats because they wanted to *conserve* the status quo. The Republicans on the other hand aren't conservative rather they are regressive. Her whole thing was on how the U.S. political spectrum was stunted and how we technically have 2 right wing parties. 

That's a rather good way of characterizing the current state of the two political parties; one being regressive, the other with some factional splits but on the whole conservative.

 

[captainamerica]

@Opo Hi, sorry for the late reply. Launched a new service recently and was busy in managing that. Do check it out here:

 

Before starting, I would say that I have followed AOC very closely now and was sincerely considering supporting her before. 

List of AOC's policies, propaganda, and understanding that hurts the poor: 

• Misrepresenting history for personal gain:  
  • Before the 1970s the tax rates were a cluster of garbage. In a confiscatory tax system, the tax revenue does not go down only because of people fleeing the country. A majority of Annual tax revenue is lost because all types of investments plummet. Employment and Product creation plummets as a result. If there are fewer people getting a paycheck and less number of products to be sold where will the govt. get its annual tax revenue? Apart from this nobody actually paid 70-90 percent tax rates. That's just propaganda. After his lowering of the tax rates the annual federal tax revenue doubled by the end of his second term. The far left is calling it "Tax cuts" and whatnot. 
  • After the 1920s again the lowering of the tax rates lead to 65 percent of all the tax revenue paid by people who made 100k or more per year. Before this lowering, the number was 30-35 percent. The economy gets choked when there is a confiscatory tax, in terms of job creation,  entrepreneurship, etc. This in turn leads to even less annual tax revenue. Lack of Capitalism painted as Capitalism going wrong.
  • The Govt. is at least 100x inefficient in performing these functions in a majority of industries, (with a handful of exemptions like healthcare) so they cannot replace Entreprenurship. For eg. NASA has launched projects worth millions of dollars, and startups in the space industry replicated the exact function of those projects in 10s of thousands of dollars. There are exemptions, but this is the rule in such public organizations. If hypothetically the govt. were to manage all this everyone will be much much poorer than now, apart from loss in creativity and new innovation which will take away future opportunities for us as a collective. 
  • This muddying of the water has huge costs for people, sooner or later it leads to misinformed economic policies. There is not even one exception for this basically, this is how it went if you actually want to understand history and not misrepresent it for propaganda.
• Propagation of a warped perception of reality regarding money:
  • In her language wealth is never created. It is always a zero-sum game. She always uses phrases like climbing up the leader, benefits of tax cuts, pandemic making people rich. In her dictionary wealth is never created it is always transferred. 
  • Conflating of pumping up the stock market and housing bubble by reckless money printing to "reward system that does not help the workers" economy.
  • Rich got richer in the pandemic, foolish narrative. Can I print myself a trillion dollars coin and call myself rich? About 15 trillion dollars in the last couple of years were printed in the last couple of years, at least 50 percent of the total money supply. What do you expect when 50 percent of the total money supply is printed? The stock price goes up and bubbles are created. 
  • Margerie Taylor Greene recently polled on Twitter if the country should be split. It was considered against the spirit of democracy by many. AOC tried to run on the platform for 70 precent income tax. AOCs followers automatically conflate wealth with evil. Evil landlords etc. Or they think CEOs don't do a majority of the work and their income is passive which is incorrect. (Like Jeff Bezos for eg. Made supply chain optimizations including packaging with is worth a few hundred billion dollars of market cap that Amazon has, by just one person. Other E-commerce companies failed because their founders were incapable of doing this). Her average voter's understanding of macroeconomics, as well as wealth creation, is completely shitty. She propagandized it as the voice of the people and hence democratic. If a majority of your base does not really understand a concept are they ready to vote on it? Then is it truly democratic?
  • Again, all this muddying of the water has great costs for the people. In the last couple of years, about 5 trillion worth of redistributive bills would have passed (including the latest social spending bill, covid relief, etc. ) 5 Trillion dollars worth of wealth redistribution. Progressives in America are somehow making THAT look like it is a loss with their foolish narrative. This conflation leads to misinformed economic policies sooner or later, in fact it is already happening now.  At what point of spending does the govt. think about fixing its approach? 
• Mislabelling Confiscatory Tax as Progressive Tax: 
  • You may read about the implications and history of Confiscatory tax. It is quite obvious.
• Promotion of Regressive policies in the name of being a "Progressive".
  • In Green New Deal the approach is either to go to the old ways of doing things or a short term simple understanding of things. In reality after some time of these policies there is great economic loss due to lost efficiency. It affects the poor the most. (as eg. No provision for Nuclear Power Plants in her Green New Deal, because her simplistic job creation plan would fail if this was included instead of Solar.)
  • In AOC's student loan forgiveness plan with Elizabeth Warren the benefits go to the top 40% households, the bottom 40 percent households get close to nothing. Again, regressive not progressive. Being actually progressive would require solving this from the root.
  • 70 percent taxation leaves nothing for investment and innovation. Billionaires and Millionaires don't live in a house worth their networths. Most of it is employed in innovation, invention, investments and Venture Capital for startups. 
  • Rent control instead of being against reckless money printing poor economic policies by the govt. You can't have it both ways.
  • Other countries talk about increasing regulations and tightening loopholes when wealth is misused. From the last 70 years, we have reduced the number of loopholes by a 100 times. Many groups of these progressives lack perspective and talk about taxing away the profits which would lead to collective growth by innovation and investment, instead of closing off the loopholes. Progressives in America are quite unique. They would kill the economy to kill corruption instead of dealing with corruption.
  • Foolish approach to public housing. It will just inflate the prices, even more, leading to more taxes leading to more inflation, and this cycle repeats. Her followers are the type of people who think that taxation, which is a part of this cycle, will actually break the cycle.
  • Support for Money Printing or Modern Monetary Theory creates artificial inflation and increases prices of housing by leaps and bounds. Another Regressive policy.
  • If you actually understand policies and do a side-by-side comparison then Andrew Yang, a centrist, is more progressive than the far-left progressives. Sadly, an avg. AOC follower does not understand even a few of these basic principles.
• Support for Modern Monetary Theory:
  • Reckless money printing, which MMT is based in, absolutely devastates the poor and the workers.
  • Stephanie Kelton recently said that AOC's support for MMT got an Oprah effect in terms of support/popularity for this type of economic policy. 
• Green New Deal
  • To implement her unrealistic plans of railway, climate corps, shift to solar, etc. would just lead to losses for at least 10s of millions of poor people. No explanation is needed. It is full of regressive policies that lead to long-term losses (about 10 years since implementation in this case). Imagine you were 12 years old, your father sold everything, your house, car, made you drop out of school, cashed out your family's savings, etc. For the first 12, maybe 24 months,  you will think that he is the best dad in the world. You will live so lavishly it may possibly put the lifestyles of multimillionaires to shame. After the initial period, there will be a crash that will take your family a decade or more of suffering and frustrations and failures to get out of that hole. An avg. AOC supporter is like that 12-year-old who does not really understand the world yet. As soon as the father did it is was possible for an outsider to see that he is one of the worst fathers for doing this.
  • She advocates for Modern Monetary Theory or Money printing to pay for 10s of trillions of dollars for the Green New Deal. 

Blue-collar licenses, Zoning, Rent control(supply goes down and rents increase), Sin Tax, etc. have all been a part of the policies that "progressives" have promoted or tried to promote, yet they hurt the poor the most. Compassion is not some soft feel-good cake and vanilla cream icing with pink food coloring. It requires the best of intellect, emotional labor, and physical work from a person. A Soldier not picking up his weapons is an act of violence. Suddenly becoming a sentimental semisolid does not make one a compassionate person. Sure you can be compassionate in a personal situation much more directly. But to be compassionate at scale, or maybe create an entire meta-ideology around a subject, requires great nuance. Otherwise, you will just hurt people in the name of compassion and love.

Edited November 26, 2021 by captainamerica

[captainamerica]

@Opo

She has become a better politician, not a better policymaker:

• Before she used to focus on Green New Deal and had pie in the sky plans to fund it(like 20 trillion dollars adjusted from Pentagon's account), now she is focusing on Money Printing to fund it instead of taking feedback about n number of blunders in it and basically the whole concept as she sees it.
• Recently, she criticized Facebook for being a threat to democracy but forgot Reddit which does the same thing in terms of foreign influence, misinforming millions of Americans, millions of bot accounts, etc. The difference is Reddit mostly caters to her voter base.
• Before, she used to be upfront and tried to run for a 70 percent tax policy regardless of the economic loss such a policy would cause to the people. Now she uses the age-old tactic of using vague language with words like fair share. They are purposely not defined. This is a feature of such language, it gives survival advantages. In the original Green New Deal Document, she included "income for people who don't want to work" when this was disliked by the public and discussed in social media her team tried to blatantly lie and cover it by saying that it was the trolls who made like a fake image or something but in fact the original document had it.
• Her language has become more polarizing to her voter base over time, notice this, they have become more emotionally appealing. But her policies and approach to all this have remained the same.

You can see she has become a better politician, that's all. Not a wiser policymaker.

Edited November 26, 2021 by captainamerica

[captainamerica]

On 15/11/2021 at 2:58 AM, Johnny Galt said:

@captainamerica Now you're talking, and yet I'd expect no less from a Captain

With that said though, I think we need to think bigger then a party, we need a whole new paradigm, a whole new vision. 

@Johnny Galt Thanks, I agree. 

[captainamerica]

On 15/11/2021 at 2:58 AM, Johnny Galt said:

Instead of voting for a leader and their party, we should be voting for a leader AND the team.

As one does with their own company and organization, we would hire/vote for the most qualified people. This would create a situation where those who are corrupted and with too much conflict of interest, they could be filtered out. 

 

@Johnny Galt I think that a four-party system in the US will incentivize the politicians to do that. The 2 party system incentivizes politicians to act in a manner against what you highlighted. 

What do you think?

Edited November 30, 2021 by captainamerica

[Johnny Galt]

@captainamerica Can you point me to any four-party systems that works well at doing this? 

 

[captainamerica]

On 30/11/2021 at 10:37 PM, Johnny Galt said:

@captainamerica Can you point me to any four-party systems that works well at doing this? 

 

@Johnny Galt Not four-party per se. Multi-party systems are very successful in many countries. 

In my view, it would not work out with 3 parties as polarization will again be like today. So there should be a minimum of 4 parties. It could be 5 or 7 parties as well. 

In the current system, politicians are incentivized and rewarded for extreme behavior.

Like recently Sen. Elizabeth Warren lied on her Twitter that "prices rising because of greedy corporations wanting to increase their stock prices" in reality it is because of inflation due to printing trillions of dollars and there is no one sane who can deny the effects of such a level of economic policy so either she is insane or she is lying. This is not the first time I have noticed her lie or manipulate, I have noticed it like a dozen different times with her alone. AOC supports Money Printing apart from a ton of other Regressive policies. Pramila Jayapal as well blamed the stock bubble created by the Fed to rich people getting richer due to greed whereas in reality, they became poorer while the on-paper number of ther stock value increased. That too by Fed, Entrepreneurs and business owners do not control the Fed. Robert Reich has a 4th graders understanding of economics. This is dangerous because over time it leads to misinformed economic policies, always happened this way in history. 

I have followed these big-name "progressives" and have observed that a majority of them use lies, manipulation, fear-based appeal, misinterpretation of history, statistical manipulation, etc. a majority of the time. Substance is usually lacking in most of their claims/propaganda. As an eg. of the statistical manipulation that "progressives" use:

Founders can earn more money as compared to workers because, after the computer, mobile, and internet revolution, one person who can code and express creativity that way can positively impact 100x more customers than before. (similarly with other tech and data analysis-related skills) How does this benefit the workers? As an example, if before 5 million workers were employed in a sector, now due to this increase in customer reach, Entrepreneurship, etc. now 10 million workers are employed. But "progressives" tell another story, instead of saying millions more can now work they say the average income of workers has been increasing slower than the founders and CEOs. An increase of millions of more people being employed and millions of new opportunities created for the workers and the middle class is lost in carefully crafted narratives revolving around averages. This makes for a great story and emotional appeal but has little truth and substance. The majority of problems in wages not keeping up with inflation and housing unaffordability etc. is due to the govt./fed, not capitalism, and is decades in making by them. Milton Friedman, who won the Nobel prize in Economics, already predicted many decades ago that this will happen due to the govt./fed's mismanagement. Most Businesses can not keep up with this mismanagement, it is not as simple as increasing wages because there are system-wide losses, obstacles, and friction created due to this mismanagement. 

The contrast between the Truth and the story they tell their voters is huge. But this polarizes the people unnecessarily and benefits the politicians while leading to poor policies. It creates survival advantages for the politicians at the cost of what is actually good for the people.

Imagine if the democratic party was split into two. There was a proper Left and the "Progressives" split into two parties. In such a scenario Politicians on the Left with all their power of influence, press, etc. will be incentivized to explain the importance of sane Left policies and understanding thus checking the insanity of the far-left automatically. 

In such a case the country will be less divided, misinformation will reduce and Politicians will be incentivized to be team players. It will reduce this polarization that is tearing apart the country. Independents today don't stand much of a chance due to the two-party monopoly but in such a system more qualified people can have a platform and have at least a decent chance to win.

Edited December 6, 2021 by captainamerica

[captainamerica]

On 15/11/2021 at 2:58 AM, Johnny Galt said:

@captainamerica Now you're talking, and yet I'd expect no less from a Captain

With that said though, I think we need to think bigger then a party, we need a whole new paradigm, a whole new vision. 

Instead of voting for a leader and their party, we should be voting for a leader AND the team.

As one does with their own company and organization, we would hire/vote for the most qualified people. This would create a situation where those who are corrupted and with too much conflict of interest, they could be filtered out. 

 

@Johnny Galt Would love to hear your suggestions and recommendations as well.