2024 ELECTION THREAD

When Luciom is the undisputed voice of reason in a dialogue, you can pretty safely assume the other guy is a lost cause.

Just watched the last night of the dnc that we recorded.

Kinzinger brought it.

I'll admit that when kamala was picked to run with the ball I was a little skeptical. But she absolutely knocked it out of the park.

Is it just me or is the democratic party the republican party of years ago?

vaguely? the Dems put out a concrete Republican plan.

Certainly not just you, Victor is on side there.

people like him are why the right has a chance in many countries though so I can't really say I am sorry they exist.

if the left had all united with a compact from the equivalent of victor to the equivalent of rococo in Italy Meloni would have lost

I mean, how many times have the liberals celebrated Kinzinger? his is an actual Republican!

man this is like when they claimed Obamacare was a republican policy because the most left-leaning republican in a deep blue state passed something close to it.

an ex governor that lost "his" state (to the left) by 23 anyway when he run for president lol.

any plan for the border that doesn't have mayorkas in jail isn't a republican plan

Rococo's intelligence and understanding of, inter alia, politics, is probably like 3 standard deviations from the mean. You're never going to get a majority or compact of Rococos, just by how normal distribution works.

I used him to define the right-most border of what could still be in a center left coalition.

from victor to him meaning from the extremist left to the very moderate and centrist no nonsense which could team up on the left if the platform is reasonable (or the opposition disastrous).

thanks mostly to the victors of the world, those coalitions are extremely rare so the right has a shot more often than it could otherwise

I get what you mean. I am making the observation that I find how politically moderate someone is to be positively correlated with high intelligence and deep understanding of issues, which means that you will find the majority of people further away from the centre. This is my pet theory and I have no sources to back it up.

How strongly correlated tho

Might be the case today in the USA but in many places in europe it's just old well off people, somewhat educated (but not necessarily too much) and pretty satisfied with their own personal lives.

"status quo is the king" kind of people.

Even if they have no clue about actual policy and stuff. In Italy the saying went "moriremo tutti democristiani". "at the end of life we are all christian democrats" (the centrist party that ruled italy for many decades, always playing both sides).

that's because the italian communist party won an insane 30% of the popular vote (vs 33% of the centrists) in 1983 and the communist newspaper published "NON moriremo democristiani" (we will not die as christian democrats).

Given that even with 30% to the communists they didn't manage anything of substance, and further elections eroded that result, the saying became that we will all die as centrists.

So, this was just to say how centrism , political moderation, has a different feeling in different countries.

To confirm, since I didn't make it clear - I was speaking to the current political climate in the USA specifically.

Not sure if the Italian saying you mentioned might have a similar meaning to "there are no atheists in foxholes" in English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_...).

No i think the foxholes thing is about actual beliefs in a greater power.

The italian saying is just something about "the more you get old the more you move toward the center" (which btw isn't necessarily true in all countries, i know), and no matter how many iterations of coalitions we end up with, the centrist part of any coalition is going to rule (this, for now, has always been true except for like 3 years since ww2, 2018-2020).

4 degrees below top dead centre.

Seriously, how do you expect me to answer this? It's just a pet theory. I don't have anything I can measure with a protractor.

Right. Didn't know if it was similar because you mentioned "Christian democrats".

That's just what i think the name for "democrazia cristiana" is for foreigners , the mono-party who ruled 1946-1991 in italy (always in the ruling coalition, always as the major partner).

A more centrist version of their german equivalent

It’s because they’re not using the word socialism correctly. What they actually want is social democracy, what they call it is democratic socialism. Democratic socialism has as much basis in socialism as social liberalism has with classical liberalism. They share similar analysis but come to much different conclusions.

I will say that if anyone tries to legitimately push Marxist-style socialism I will absolutely condemn them for it.

If you’re going to keep bringing up failed marxist talking points, I’ll keep insulting socialism. I’m sure the quality of life went up for the people of Cambodia lol

For real though, any quality of life increases from rural peasantry to socialism are vastly smaller than quality of life increases from the same to liberalism. As well, with the increase in industrialization there was then massive increases in political oppression and controlling the narrative through the media. The numbers can’t be trusted because they are openly manipulated. That’s the genius of authoritarian regimes.

If you think you're going to get through to Victor with facts, logic, and reason, I am afraid you will soon discover that you are sorely misguided and your time is better spent pissing in the wind.

no its an objective fact that quality of life, life span, education, medicine, technology skyrocketed in China, Russia, and Cuba. and that was despite all 3 fighting off technologically advanced murderous Western capitalist powers.

you can argue that it would have went up anyway, but we will never know. and there are plenty of places that have continued to be oppressed and exploited by the West. like, is the USA offering up liberal democracy to the slaves in Congo? lol.

and as addendum, quality of life drastically declined and mortality drastically increased in Russia after the fall of the SU.

nobody ever posts facts. you want to cite some work and I would be happy to read it. I am one of the only people on this board capable of changing my opinions. remember, I used to be a John Kerry Democrat.

Have to compare with industrialization in the same time frame , not with the year the revolution started.

The baseline isn't to stay put when countries like the USA have a 7k or whatever per capita gdp per year and you are at 100. It's to catch up to them as fast as possible, they already have shown you it's possible, so you have just to copy which is 10000000x easier than being the first to reach that.

We will know that it goes up anyway, it's not like Cuba has no countries nearby that were dirty poor in 1959.

As for china, until they were actually marxists it was the worst disaster in world history by a large margin. They managed to kill more chinese people with communism than people worldwide died during ww2.

Then they , because they are smart (and/or Xiaoping is one of the best human beings who ever lived, you can pick your preferred option), enacted a sufficient amount of capitalist practices and, in the "copying" phase that can be enough, and it worked very well.

Chinese choices actually changed the mind of many pro capitalism observer (if they are honest), we are now forced to admit that you can copy most capitalistic successes WITHOUT DEMOCRACY (Friedman was wrong, but he couldn't know that) at least up to middle income country status. China proved that.

You still need property rights and markets for a big enough portion of the economy though.

As for Russia lolololol, there is no reason Russia is poorer than Sweden or the UK, they had the same elite, except they didn't all have Lenin, Stalin and friends.

Hahahah. Nobody ever posts facts. It's not at all that you dismiss any facts inconvenient to your propagandistic narrative as a product of Western disinformation campaigns. It's not at all that you think that the Soviet Archives are a golden source of truth. Not any of that at all.

Anyway, looks like checkraise might have taken the bait, I'm sure he'll post some facts for you until he too becomes convinced that you are a lost cause.

why would the West ever let you catch up? seems a lot better for the USA if they just continue to exploit the resources of poor countries and prop up comprador regimes to enrich a few locals while oppressing the rest of the population.

China and Russia over came this and beat the fascists. pretty amazing accomplishment tbh.

Do you think "the west" pays less for iron ore in africa, accounting for all costs, or in Australia?

China and Russia were the fascists (which is just a variant of communism, as all totalitarian, state centered models are)