OK but what makes the policy "left"? Is it redistributive?Nope, a policy left of what the average left citizen is OK with is far left.
OK but what makes the policy "left"? Is it redistributive?Nope, a policy left of what the average left citizen is OK with is far left.
Well, funny that.How do you think you get to socialism or communism? It rhymes with horse.
I don't think law agencies and governments are making investigations and reports about their concerns that the far right are infiltrating their organisations because it's just the "occasional" individual, e.g. https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31...-supremacist-infiltration-of-law-enforcement/Again, I'm not overly concerned about the occasional far right person being in the police because it's basically unavoidable.
Just looking up one of those, Mohammad Mosaddegh (Iran's "socialist"), he wasn't a socialist...Well, funny that.
The Spanish freely voted in a socialist in the 1930s, and the military launched a coup and won the resultant civil war. The Iranians freely voted in a socialist in the 1950s, and when he tried to bargain Iran getting a decent price for its oil, the British had the CIA remove him in a coup. The Chileans freely voted in a socialist in the 1970s, and the CIA set up a coup by the Chilean military to get rid of him, too.
There's a pattern there... ...it's almost like capitalist powers and reactionary nationalists have violently suppressed democratically-elected socialists.
Plus much of that socialist force you imply was not overturning peaceful, stable, democratic, popular governance. Nicholas II of Russia was a hated and incompetent tyrant. Fulgencia Batista of Cuba was a deeply corrupt and unpopular dictator lining his own pockets with the backing of the USA. Likewise many non-socialist states emerged through force in similar ways: the French had to depose various kings and emperors on their way to democracy, and even your own country, the USA, had to rebel against its distant monarch.
If you want to say socialists have gained power by force, the same is substantially true of capitalists (or proto-capitalists). It's not clear to me why socialists should uniquely be damned for the occasions that they happened to be successful.
I don't think law agencies and governments are making investigations and reports about their concerns that the far right are infiltrating their organisations because it's just the "occasional" individual, e.g. https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31...-supremacist-infiltration-of-law-enforcement/
Complacency is unwise - as the saying goes, "the price of democracy is eternal vigilance".
Which policies are these?And who is responsible for all the new crime policies that don't actually punish criminals that are increasing crime?
Everywhere.You said countless people live in fear of violence from the far-right, where (in America)?
Again, there are overt and covert forms of far-right infiltration. Far right organizations such as the Oath Keepers often have specific, organizational goals of getting their people into the military and police, because they want members with military and/or paramilitary training. More generally, the kind of person who is psychologically drawn to far right ideology is often drawn to careers which legitimate or allow for violence and the abuse of authority, so they tend to be disproportionately represented there.How has the far right infiltrated the military and police?
Because you are complicit within a world that, from the far right ideological perspective, is disordered and deserves to be destroyed.Why would someone murder me for political reasons?
Define "much further". Who is the "average person." Are you the average person?"Far left" is just people who want to steer the country much farther left than the average person wants
You do realise that all you're doing here is moving the goalposts? You disagreed Terminal Blue's statement that there was infiltration, then when that was unsupportable just made up an argument that there wasn't systematic infiltration, and are essentially now arguing that the systematic infiltration is not serious enough to personally concern you.No mention of infiltrating the actual police department or leadership or anything that would cause the police to be more right-leaning.
Why the hell would anyone take movies so seriously?View attachment 10428
They just keep going lower and lower.
If anything, this proves that they know on some level that their hatred of Kennedy, Iger and Feige is pathetic. Why else would they wish these people were guilty of sex trafficking, rather than the infinitely lesser sin of making movies they don't like?
I saw this same thing happen when Smallville's Alison Mack was revealed to be part of a sex trafficking cult and fans who hated Lana Lang and her actress Kristin Kreuk wanted her to have also been involved so they had a more valid reason to hate her.
An utterly pathetic lack of personal achievements or strengths to base their self-worth on? I dunno, just spitballin' here.Why the hell would anyone take movies so seriously?
Not much of a shocker. It's all he ever will do and continue to be. His greatest and only "worthy" achievement.You do realise that all you're doing here is moving the goalposts? You disagreed Terminal Blue's statement that there was infiltration, then when that was unsupportable just made up an argument that there wasn't systematic infiltration, and are essentially now arguing that the systematic infiltration is not serious enough to personally concern you.
In all meaningful ways, you've already conceded the points that matter, because once you've reduced an issue to a subjective feeling it doesn't have an external point of reference to make it arguable.
It's just seems incredibly graceless of you to act like you haven't conceded anything.
WASHINGTON (AP) — With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump, recruiting thousands of Americans to come to Washington on a mission to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a vision closer to his own.
Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president’s return — or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Joe Biden in 2024.
With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers.
“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking.
“This is a clarion call to come to Washington,” he said. “People need to lay down their tools, and step aside from their professional life and say, ‘This is my lifetime moment to serve.’”
The unprecedented effort is being orchestrated with dozens of right-flank organizations, many new to Washington, and represents a changed approach from conservatives, who traditionally have sought to limit the federal government by cutting federal taxes and slashing federal spending.
Instead, Trump-era conservatives want to gut the “administrative state” from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.
FILE - Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2023, March 4, 2023, at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
The goal is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump’s first years in office, when the Republican president’s team was ill-prepared, his Cabinet nominees had trouble winning Senate confirmation and policies were met with resistance — by lawmakers, government workers and even Trump’s own appointees who refused to bend or break protocol, or in some cases violate laws, to achieve his goals.
While many of the Project 2025 proposals are inspired by Trump, they are being echoed by GOP rivals Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy and are gaining prominence among other Republicans.
And if Trump wins a second term, the work from the Heritage coalition ensures the president will have the personnel to carry forward his unfinished White House business.
“The president Day One will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state,” said Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official involved in the effort who is now president at the conservative Center for Renewing America.
Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what’s called Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the 2 million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired.
Biden had rescinded the executive order upon taking office in 2021, but Trump — and other presidential hopefuls — now vow to reinstate it.
“It frightens me,” said Mary Guy, a professor of public administration at the University of Colorado Denver, who warns the idea would bring a return to a political spoils system.
Experts argue Schedule F would create chaos in the civil service, which was overhauled during President Jimmy Carter’s administration in an attempt to ensure a professional workforce and end political bias dating from 19th century patronage.
As it now stands, just 4,000 members of the federal workforce are considered political appointees who typically change with each administration. But Schedule F could put tens of thousands of career professional jobs at risk.
“We have a democracy that is at risk of suicide. Schedule F is just one more bullet in the gun,” Guy said.
The ideas contained in Heritage’s coffee table-ready book are both ambitious and parochial, a mix of longstanding conservative policies and stark, head-turning proposals that gained prominence in the Trump era.
There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.
There are proposals to have the Pentagon “abolish” its recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls the “woke” agenda, and reinstate service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
Chapter by chapter, the pages offer a how-to manual for the next president, similar to one Heritage produced 50 years ago, ahead of the Ronald Reagan administration. Authored by some of today’s most prominent thinkers in the conservative movement, it’s often sprinkled with apocalyptic language.
A chapter written by Trump’s former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security calls for bolstering the number of political appointees, and redeploying office personnel with law enforcement ability into the field “to maximize law enforcement capacity.”
At the White House, the book suggests the new administration should “reexamine” the tradition of providing work space for the press corps and ensure the White House counsel is “deeply committed” to the president’s agenda.
Conservatives have long held a grim view of federal government offices, complaining they are stacked with liberals intent on halting Republican agendas.
But Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said most federal workers live in the states and are your neighbors, family and friends. “Federal employees are not the enemy,” she said.
While presidents typically rely on Congress to put policies into place, the Heritage project leans into what legal scholars refer to as a unitary view of executive power that suggests the president has broad authority to act alone.
To push past senators who try to block presidential Cabinet nominees, Project 2025 proposes installing top allies in acting administrative roles, as was done during the Trump administration to bypass the Senate confirmation process.
John McEntee, another former Trump official advising the effort, said the next administration can “play hardball a little more than we did with Congress.”
In fact, Congress would see its role diminished — for example, with a proposal to eliminate congressional notification on certain foreign arms sales.
Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies the separation of powers and was not part of the Heritage project, said there’s a certain amount of “fantasizing” about the president’s capabilities.
“Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says — and that’s just not the system the government we live under,” he said.
At the Heritage office, Dans has a faded photo on his wall of an earlier era in Washington, with the White House situated almost alone in the city, dirt streets in all directions.
It’s an image of what conservatives have long desired, a smaller federal government.
The Heritage coalition is taking its recruitment efforts on the road, crisscrossing America to fill the federal jobs. They staffed the Iowa State Fair this month and signed up hundreds of people, and they’re building out a database of potential employees, inviting them to be trained in government operations.
“It’s counterintuitive,” Dans acknowledged — the idea of joining government to shrink it — but he said that’s the lesson learned from the Trump days about what’s needed to “regain control.”
Crime is massively going up in the NCVS, which has nothing to do with crime being detected or not detected. You're literally trying to argue crime going up is good somehow... And no detection percentage is not going up with police being understaffed, police assistance taking forever and people not even calling, and some of the biggest departments including the biggest police department not even reporting their numbers to the FBI. You have to have people at least somewhat worried about punishment because if a person knows there is no repercussions (or super super super unlikely), many more people will commit crime. Hell, there was a reporter doing just a random interview of a person going to the grocery store in San Francisco and asked the guy if he knew the store had shoplifting issues and he said on live TV basically that "yeah, I've stolen from here before myself". That demonstrates people know there's no repercussions. Also, literally religion for thousands of years is based of that simple aspect of human psychology.Which policies are these?
Let me let you in on a statistical secret here. Increasing crime is generally a good thing, because it's far more likely to indicate that more crime is being detected and recorded than that more crime is actually happening. Granted, there are bad ways to increase crime. We could make up more offences so that more people are guilty of crimes, that would probably increase crime.
Furthermore, this simplistic equation where "not punishing" people leads to recidivism leads to more crime is statistically nonsense. Think for a moment about what punishing people actually means and how it might influence someone's life.
Everywhere.
There is covert and overt far right violence. Covert violence would be things like hate crimes, which are typically motivated by covert far-right political views such as white supremacy or extreme homophobia. Overt violence would be someone shooting up a public building and posting a manifesto, which is still common enough to affect people on a regular basis.
For example, kids in the US go through dozens of active shooter drills by the time they graduate from school. Who is going to shoot up a school? What kind of person does something like that? The answer, overwhelmingly, is a young white man with overt fascist sympathies, usually in contact with and radicalized via internet far-right communities whom they believe will celebrate their act of violence.
Again, there are overt and covert forms of far-right infiltration. Far right organizations such as the Oath Keepers often have specific, organizational goals of getting their people into the military and police, because they want members with military and/or paramilitary training. More generally, the kind of person who is psychologically drawn to far right ideology is often drawn to careers which legitimate or allow for violence and the abuse of authority, so they tend to be disproportionately represented there.
Because you are complicit within a world that, from the far right ideological perspective, is disordered and deserves to be destroyed.
Define "much further". Who is the "average person." Are you the average person?
It's not really hard. All modern democracies are based on the political and philosophical tradition of liberalism. This includes certain fundamental principles that characterize a liberal state: equal citizenship, democratic participation, restraints on executive power, individual liberty, property rights. Being far left or far right is defined by an ideological opposition to liberalism, it describes people who want to make fundamental changes to the way the state works that make it less like a liberal democracy, not people who fail to conform to an imaginary point of what the "average person" wants.
How the fuck did I move the goalpost when I literally asked if Terminal meant the right-wing was infiltrating the police/military like Hydra? That was my opening fucking question because that's what I cared about. I don't care so much about some right-wing person getting into the police or military, it's gonna happen, there's not much you can do to stop it, and I'm not gonna question whether it happens or not.You do realise that all you're doing here is moving the goalposts? You disagreed Terminal Blue's statement that there was infiltration, then when that was unsupportable just made up an argument that there wasn't systematic infiltration, and are essentially now arguing that the systematic infiltration is not serious enough to personally concern you.
In all meaningful ways, you've already conceded the points that matter, because once you've reduced an issue to a subjective feeling it doesn't have an external point of reference to make it arguable.
It's just seems incredibly graceless of you to act like you haven't conceded anything.
Cause it's dumb, and we're all dumber for even having to entertain the thought of reading such baseless bollocks yet again.Funny how you constantly edit out the stuff I'm right about like you can't take people's property without force (what the far-left wants) and I'm pretty sure none of your examples of capitalists forcing out socialists was actually accurate because none of them were socialists.
I didn't make those dumb arguments... Agema did.Cause it's dumb, and we're all dumber for even having to entertain the thought of reading such baseless bollocks yet again.
Is this because you still don't know what socialism means, though?I'm pretty sure none of your examples of capitalists forcing out socialists was actually accurate because none of them were socialists.
Oh almost forgot to add heritage foundation is planning some real fckin ghoulish bullshit ppl in democratic party should probably be doing something about maybe? Even if it's just acknowledging it's a problem worth planning ahead for?
Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision
With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump.apnews.com
And that's the whole point- regaining control of this country, taking it away from the rest of us, making sure that it serves only them....but he said that’s the lesson learned from the Trump days about what’s needed to “regain control.”
You didn't ask him though, did you?How the fuck did I move the goalpost when I literally asked if Terminal meant the right-wing was infiltrating the police/military like Hydra?
Salvador Allende was definitely a socialist, as was Manuel Azana and the Spanish Popular Front was an alliance of mostly socialist parties (with some left-leaning liberals).I didn't make those dumb arguments... Agema did.
It requires no bending: the mentions of Trump in this document are saying things like they didn't massage Donald Trump, they weren't flirted with by Donald Trump, they never saw Donald Trump at Epstein's properties, when Epstein called Trump to take girls to a casino they were kept off the casino floor. I haven't gone through all the documents, but in what I have read, not only are there no suggestions of wrongdoing by Donald Trump, the witnesses seem to actively exonerate him.Trump being friends with Epstein isn't the funny event of anti woke world. The funny part is how his cult is forced to bend itself in all sort of weird corners to try and ignore it.
Pretty much the whole thing is a gossipy nothingburger, and it was always going to be.It requires no bending: the mentions of Trump in this document are saying things like they didn't massage Donald Trump, they weren't flirted with by Donald Trump, they never saw Donald Trump at Epstein's properties, when Epstein called Trump to take girls to a casino they were kept off the casino floor. I haven't gone through all the documents, but in what I have read, not only are there no suggestions of wrongdoing by Donald Trump, the witnesses seem to actively exonerate him.
Social democracy isn't socialism...Is this because you still don't know what socialism means, though?
I literally did ask and Terminal didn't reply until after you replied to me. I asked because I wanted to know exactly what Terminal meant by infiltrate. I said "like Hydra" as that was my question... If it's just the occasional far-right person getting into the police or recruiting police/military, it's not that big of a deal like I said nor would I argue the point of it being a thing, but someone Hydra-style infiltration, then I would say it's a big deal. From Terminal's reply to me, it's either gross overestimation of the violence (and police infiltration) caused by the far-right or conspiracy level stuff. Literally more people get murdered in Chicago in a week than the amount of homicides caused by the far-right in a year. And people everywhere are living in fear of violence from the far-right? Give me a break.You didn't ask him though, did you?
What you did was derisively dismiss his point about the far right infiltrating the police - you said (#13054): "How has the far right infiltrated the military and police? This is like conspiracy theory tin-hat shit you're going on about... you guys act like Nazis are like Hydra or some shit".
You ask a question, but it's a rhetorical question because you answer that question yourself immediately after by calling it a conspiracy theory. The "Hydra" argument is just one part straw man because he never made that point, and one part attempting to rhetorically belittle what he said. So no, you were not asking anything at all, you were disputing his statement.
Salvador Allende was definitely a socialist, as was Manuel Azana and the Spanish Popular Front was an alliance of mostly socialist parties (with some left-leaning liberals).
Mossadegh was more on the border of social democracy (i.e. moderate socialism) and social liberalism, but half socialist is socialist enough as far as I'm concerned.