Lake Street Dive - Bad Self Portraits

@theartofmadeline
occasionally subtle
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Sweet Seals For You, Always
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titsay
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
will byers stan first human second
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JVL

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
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Janaina Medeiros
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@peasantprideworldwide
Lake Street Dive - Bad Self Portraits
I’ve been listening to this great band Lake Street Dive for the past couple of weeks. I’m really drawn to some straight up great music, and that’s what you get with this band. Some very talented musicians and great vocals! Anyway, I did this personal piece in the vain of a Rolling Stone record review. Enjoy! @lakestreetdive
Lake Street Dive - Better Than
Oh gee, I wonder why I called you a Trump supporter, who could have seen this one coming....
Yes when he was talking about censoring twitter I was for it.
I have no allegiances to politicians. Trump for a brief moment cut prescription drug prices and was open to public infrastructure investment and I think he would be more open to it than joe Biden.
This was also before he pulled this bitch move of hiding in a bunker and tweeting then emerging to threaten violence against his own citizens then took some absurd photo op with a Bible for the viewers on Fox News.
It’s all spectacle though.
>publicly controlled, municipally run, staffed by civil servants, dependent on tax revenue and state subsidization
Amazing how taxpayer funded police services are held up as an example of successful socialism- until cops start killing people, then it’s because they’re a private military serving the capitalist class.
That’s because Bernie bro’s are idiots and not any smarter than lolbertarians
The irony of this superimposed over a military helicopter is next level lmao
This is not a thing that is happening and small business owners are not struggling to feed their kids.
If they are then by free market logic they should be able to withstand a 3 month decline in demand.
“Small business owners are not struggling to feed their kids”
Prove it
“By free market logic”
By free market logic the government doesn’t forcibly shut down businesses because it doesn’t want people going there.
The thing is under neoliberalism the free market isn’t a thing.
Doesn’t want people going there? Is the government separate from society? Is it located in a vacuum free from the influence and conditions of human life and humans living and socializing with one another?
This is a completely incoherent notion that the government shut businesses down simply because they don’t want people going there. Governments don’t suspend market forces or attempt to mitigate their impacts just because they want to. They were forced to by a pandemic and businesses were forced to close by the pandemics disruption to the market.
Nope. The government closed all “non-essential businesses” for the explicit purpose of preventing people from going to them. That’s not up for debate, that is the stated reason why it happened. You cannot possibly be so dense as to not realize that the stay-at-home orders did that.
That isn’t the stated reason.
Stated reason is to prevent the spread of a pandemic. That isn’t up for debate. You cannot be so dense as to realize the reason for the stay at home orders which followed after many businesses did so voluntarily and the federal government restricted travel.
China did not shut down its manufacturing sector simply because they woke up one day and decided to.
They did so to prevent catastrophic damage to the economy and market failure as a result of a deadly pandemic.
“Some businesses shut down voluntarily. This means that there are no businesses being adversely affected by mandatory government shutdowns”
A+ logic there comrade
That looks like a straw man.
Don’t believe I ever implied or said businesses weren’t adversely affected by the pandemic or the consequent shutdowns.
In fact my entire premise is that they were…
“small businesses owners are nit struggling to feed their kids”
Literally the first thing you said.
I mean they’re really not. It’s mainly landlords bugging them for rent but they’re not going hungry. The people running Instagram businesses were struggling before the pandemic.
Read the second part, which is the fundamental problem.
How can progressives get their act together for 2024?
This is a great question and the main reason why I haven’t answered it is that I keep thinking over it, so sorry for the very late response. Basically it boils down to this, I think the Progressive should follow the example of how the Religious Right took over the Republican party, a process that started in the mid 60s but really came into fruition in 1980 with the election of Reagan.
1) VOTE. Absolutely most important plan is for progressive to vote, not just in the presidential elections but in every single election. Vote for the Senate Races, Vote for the House Races, vote for the Govonor, the state legislature, the City council and your local town mayors. Vote in presidential years but also in off years, local snap elections and above all vote in primaries. Vote for the most left wing candidate you can as frequently as you can, even better try to get other people to vote as much as possible. If we can become a voting bloc, rather than a mass of individual progressives, we can wield power in the democratic party much like how other groups do
2) Figure out what intersectionality is. We have lost two elections now because our policies aren’t being embraced by African Americans, and we keep alienating women. A major factor in this is that a lot of progressives aren’t bothering to actually campaign or attempt to change minds but are instead doing what the left usually does and get into Party Vanguard or auto cannibalism. Actually make an effort to reach out to people and properly communicate and don’t talk to people like “you are obligated to join us”.
A critical part of this is to not go with the “A rising tide raises all ships” attitude. We can’t put class first and expect everybody else to just follow suit. We need to address class, administration, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, immigration the environment, and anti intellectualism in tandem, not expecting everybody else to just get in line
3) Completely disavow and purge the fucking Dirtbag left, Red Brown Alliance, Chapo House Brocialist nonsense. The fact that the popular image of the progressive left is abusive sexist 4chan socialist assholes online is killing us, we have more popular ideas
4) Actually get involved in campaigns. Politicians might not care much about progressive but they do care about the people who volunteer for them.
5) Get more progressives in office and support those who are there. Currently the Senate has like 2 progressives and both of them are in the Senate We just don’t have enough people, which is a major reason why centrist keep beating us. We need to take over the party and that involves getting more people into the movement
Finally, don’t make alliances with bigoted Trump voters, they will always betray us
I think the biggest thing any progressive should do in then next 4 years if Biden wins is to try to prep the discourse before the 2024 primaries, and try to get the message across that being toxic and abusive isn’t actually helpful to the progressive cause.
Centrists keep beating you because you don’t have support from the vast majority of people.
But that aside, the “right” you’re talking about no longer exists. The religious right do not have very significant influence over politics. They influence the “discourse” which is market generated or algorithmically generated but it’s not real.
Who are the 2 progressives in the senate and why should working people support them?
Its kinda hilarious how much Trump makes it obvious that he is a bad person even if you only consume his own media and do not know anything about children in cages. I mean, responding with insults and not-so-subtle threats at anyone questioning his authority, saying that Obama/Hillary/Biden is bad for doing X and then openly doing X himself, throwing under the bus even his GOP allies when they unconvinience him. I can't imagine why anyone(even right-wing) would still support him.
Here is the problem...the reason why Trump doesn’t bother to hide the fact that he is a bad person is because...his base likes that about him. I really recommend two essays, one is Cruelty is the Point and the other is “Trump the First White President” because in practice...it turns out that his base is made up of bad people who actively like him being a bad person.
Like this is the problem with the “Economic anxiety argument”, its mostly just a way for people to not reconcile themselves to the fact that about 63 million Americans are terrible people who happily support terrible policy (Also known as the HItler’s Willing Executioners problem). its like how a lot of people are like “Did so many White Southerners really fight a war to protect slavery?” and the answer is “yes...yes they did”.
They like Trump because he is a monster, not in spite of it/
Ahhh yes, his base are all bad people. Everybody is a bad person and a fascist except the eunuchs filling out imperial examination cards in the empire’s academies
you know since the cdc is now recommending we wear non-medical grade face masks, we might as well all bite the bullet and make plague masks to stuff with dried herbs that will keep out the miasma that carries the disease
Time Traveler: Wait so miasma is real? Us: No, but actually yes
it’s interesting to me that miasma theory was wrong but led to a lot of technically effective practices
wearing a plague doctor outfit that basically acts as a rudimentary hazmat suit? yeah, that might help somewhat
avoiding areas where an outbreak is rampant? probably a good idea, if unnecessarily broad sometimes
clean up waste to avoid a buildup of bad air? wrong reason; right thing to do
they were wrong, objectively wrong, about what caused disease, and even then the power of human observation was such that they still figured out some of the right behaviors to adopt
Uh, the stink is often a byproduct of bacterial activity in the decomposition process. I don’t know that they were “objectively wrong”. The smell is naturally offensive because it indicates a lack of hygiene and a heightened risk of exposure to pathogens. Stink is a natural alarm. It’s also why they were correct about “airborn particles” and covering their bodies to reduce exposure.
Few prefer stank to not stank.
Tumblr scientists
THIS.
no joke, my dyslexic ass thought this said “i can’t eat applesauce!” the first three times it came across my dash…
Is the president supposed to feed the nurses or something? Do they only sell nurse feed to the White House, and he’s hoarding it all to himself, even though he’s not a nurse? I’m so confused.
“Only My Guy will do all the good things. All the good things you can possibly imagine is what My Guy would do”
“I can’t eat applause!”
I hate these people
It’s not the nurses fault they participate in the same garbage culture everyone else does.
I suppose it is good for workers to enjoy some beauty in the middle of a lot of death.
I haven’t listened to this podcast, but the trailers are devastating
one way in which Iraq perfectly recapitulated Vietnam is that in decades to come it still won’t be possible for any American politicians to openly admit it was wrong.
“A left that does not have class at its core can only be a liberal pressure group…It must be remembered that the aim of our struggle is not recognition by the bourgeoisie, nor even the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. It is the class structure – a structure that wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it – that must be destroyed.”
— Mark Fisher, Exiting the Vampire Castle
So are our checks and balances completely destroyed? Can we fix the system?
Only partly, it certainly isn’t as bad as Hungary. The President has too much power and the Congress has screwed itself, but it isn’t too hard to fix it, we just need to destroy the Republicans first. Basically here is what you need
1) A semi independent or fully independent oversight agency, like inspector Generals but the president can’t fire them. Give them wide reaching powers to request documents
2) Make an official requirement for president that you must turn over your tax returns as well as completely open all of your financial history to congress. make this also be a requirement for every major executive office.
3) Expand SCOTUS to 15, appoint a bunch of democrats with who value Congressional oversight. Make all future SCOTUS appointments have to go through a board of Legal Scholars, Human Rights Organizations, and Civil Liberties groups before they can be appointed. Also add at least 6 new circuits and fill them with democrats
4) Ban money from politics
5) Take away most forms of Presidential immunity
6) Abolish the Filibuster
7) Destroy the Electoral College.
Its not that hard, we just need an autocrat out of office. Ideally replace the Senate but I don’t think that is possible yet
What?
This is legitimately insane.
1. None of these things will meaningfully make the country better in any objective sense.
You want to replace an elected office with semi independent IGs? To do what?
2. How do you ban money from politics in a capitalist society? Like this makes no sense.
3. You can just hold the president accountable to the rule of law. That doesn’t really change much. Even if the president had immunity it would still be a highly politically charged endeavor to try and remove one.
3. Abolish the filibuster? How does that restore a system of checks and balances?
4. Abolish the electoral college? Why? How will that make the country better? It will just further concentrate power among the most populous and well developed states. Regardless of its origins in the US we have a federated system that requires an electoral institution to balance power between strong states and weak states unless you want to promote antagonism and conflict between states, regions, etc.
So you want to get rid of Donald trump, an elected official, and replace him and his party and our government with essentially a naked one party state run by democrats? And this will make our country better? How?
A reactionary pretending to be a Anarhcist/Marxist. I wish I could say that was new but its sadly predictable this time. Like I normally don’t expect supposed Communists to be in agreement with white nationalists but welcome to 2020 I suppose.
Ok lets break this down
First off the Electoral College: the most classically liberal institution ever
1) Yeah, giving more power to the more popular and better devolved States is a good thing, most of the country lives there. That is how democracy works
2) Even beyond the “an undemocratic system shouldn’t exist in a democracy” argument, the current electoral college system means that voters in conservative areas (as marks would call them the lumpenproletariat) get more
3) Yeah the Electoral College was a bad idea when it was founded and was based on shitty principles. There is a reason why no other democratic country uses this system, because its a bad system, and keeping around an institution designed to protect slavery is dumb coming from anybody, its really dumb if you are a supposed Communist.
I mean there was a reason why Marx himself didn’t like liberal democracies that had a wealth requirement for voting. The EC is basically that but for how depopulated, white, and fundamentalist your state is
4) Finally it doesn’t even work as intended. It actually robs the vote from anybody living in a Blue or Red state who disagrees with the majority. Republicans in New York and Democrats in Texas effectively have their vote erased
The Filibuster
Its an undemocratic systems that is basically designed to prevent reform….duh? I mean ideally i would like to replace the Senate, but if you want things to get actually passed, then removing the things that prevent things from getting removed is a good idea.
Impeachment
Yeah if the president does something illegal, he should be removed from power. Considering that the US has a problem with the Executive Branch having far too much power anyways, removing a President would do the nation good.
Checking the President
Again, it kinda seems like you are an Alt Righter pretending to be a leftist, because the notion that the executive shouldn’t have any checks on it is basically being pro Authoritarianism. Trump has thus far
refused to turn over documents
Attempted to interfere with elections
Actively removed Inspector’s general
Is engaging in corruption
Is using the power of the office for personal ends
And thanks to the fact that SCOTUS and Congress are broken, they aren’t actually providing any check on the President. Which is why you need Inspector Generals to be independent so that they can actually be a counter weight, if the president can just fire people whose job it is to oversee him, then oversight means nothing.
Money in Politics
Turns out there are a whole series of reforms based on preventing paid lobbying funnily enough, but it seems like you were too busy repeating Alt-Right talking points.
One Party State
As long as the GOP exists in any meaningful level, you aren’t going to get any reform. Once the Dems get power, they were almost certainly split between the Centrist/Leftist wings, which is what everybody wants anyways (though a multi party system would be better)
I want Biden to be the face of conservatism in America rather than Trump.
Tax Returns
Any major elected official should have all of their public fiances made public, because you need to know if they have conflicts of interest. The fact that the US doesn’t have that is actually pretty embarrassing.
Your blog is hilarious btw, cause its like a Sophomore Philosophy Student who just discovered Marx but still spends way too much time on chan boards bitching about Idpol
Frankly I don’t even know why you are here, you are clear an Acceleration, so I don’t see why you would care, beyond spouting amateur philosophy
I don’t believe I ever pretended to be anything. I’ve made several criticisms of anarchism and reject it as idealist and not useful to my politics. You already harmed your credibility by likening me to white nationalists.
“Yeah, giving more power to the more popular and better devolved States is a good thing, most of the country lives there. That is how democracy works”
How is this a good thing? Why would it be a good thing to encourage underdevelopment in some areas and development in the capital city centers? This produces conflict and antagonism and will only produce more reactionaries. That is not how democracy works because the political parties with power in those developed areas don’t represent any kind of majority.
1. The US is not a unitary state.
2. This ahistorical type of framing of the EC that accuses anybody who might defend it of being racist or stupid has a distinct political purpose: it is ruling class politics meant to reinforce domination.
3. Our Federal system was constructed to give authority to a central state but Americans were skeptical of the British Westminster system with power concentrated in London. Many people thought it would result in rich powerful states dominating weaker smaller states and turning it into a core-periphery situation.
To reassure the Anti-federalists the Federalists included many compromises into the Federal structure which include:
- the constitutional separation of power between federal government and states
- checks & balances, bicameral legislature (house is population based but the senate is 2 per state regardless of population) - and it includes a bill of rights to protect individuals and state governments from intervention by federal state Large population states would’ve liked popular sovereignty in which both the house and senate were run on a population basis but small states would not move on that. So they created the Senate to persuade the smaller states and the only other way they would’ve been brought into the Federal system was through war. And that would’ve been a very costly war.
This is the compromise that was reached.
You want to do away with this compromise because of some misguided and ahistorical moralizing. This is the fundamental compromise that led to the United States being united and if you want to fundamentally alter that you should truly reckon with its origins and the implications of doing away with it. Or at least pursuing that kind of politics.
You don’t need any normative or political orientation towards the EC in the present to understand how it came about or the compromises it involves. How do we make the United States more substantively democratic, then ok we can do that.
4. The EC forces presidential candidates to win more votes from a more diverse compilation of regions. More than half of the states have their voting power increased by the EC. So it forces candidates to increase their vote share in less populated areas. The effect of this prevents any particular region that is very dominant in terms of population and size of the economy from dictating the direction of the country.
And without an EC a presidential candidate or can say all rural people are horrible and only cities matter and you could run a more forthright version of Hillary’s 2016 campaign or conversely when the country was more agrarian you could run a campaign on depriving cities of resources and representation. It is obvious at this point that everything you support is part of a broader particularly Liberal class project dressed up as some moral crusade about slavery. Very very creepy. I think you should reconsider your position because you have no actual power you’re just parroting Liberal nonsense. I mean the rest is just like lol, bro I’m not an alt-righter, you’re just insane. I guess you could get reform with Joe Biden, I don’t know what that means but that’s not my politics and Joe Biden is most definitely engaged in a ruling class project to subjugate workers, wittingly or unwittingly. It’s literally his life’s work.
This is why I really don’t like Liberals, more so than the fact you people don’t actually know anything, you’re all idealists. You’d rather a different face of conservatism? what does that even mean? How does that fundamentally change anything? It’s purely a rhetorical and aesthetic difference.
Honestly, the more you people talk and the more obvious it is you are carrying water for bourgeois the more I’m inclined to believe that all these shibboleths about nazis and white nationalists and Trump being orange Hitler might all be a bunch of bullshit.
It certainly looks and smells like bullshit. The rest is all nonsense but I don’t feel like addressing it all. Complaining about corruption is inherently conservative.
You’re ignoring the economy, stupid. Trump is ignoring economic needs of those states and you idiots aren’t talking about it. You’re talking about abolishing the EC which is one of the few institutions left protecting them from getting railroaded by the wealthy capital city centers and the Federal government and impeaching the president and establishing a unitary state controlled in all aspects by the Democratic Party? lmfao are you a cartoon villain? You’re calling me a reactionary? lmfao
The irony of it is that what you believe is probably more extreme than the average trump voter who just shows up to vote every 4 years. Lmfao they are not on the internet writing diabolical fictional scenarios where we live under a Fascist state run by Democratic Party technocrats
If almost any of the above changes were instituted it would mean changing or negating the constitution which in turn is all that holds the states of the United States together so legally any state could leave. Personally I’m rather certain that about 40 states would. The nonsense about “checking the President “ despite his popularity it could easily be proven that Obama did all that and more as in weaponizing the irs and fbi to attack political opponents. Now as to checks and balances what it states in the constitution is that each branch of government is EQUAL do you understand that concept? That means NONE HAVE MORE POWER. In order for congress to compel the president to testify they MUST go to the Supreme Court just as in order for the President to compel congress he would have to. It’s basic constitutional law. This congress is so incredibly ignorant or arrogant they completely ignore things they should have learned in 8th grade civics class.
Yeah most people who aren’t playing with footsie with the alt right actually move beyond 8th grade civics class. Some of them move unto 9th grade, or college or even Grad School Turns own knowledge doesn’t end with what you picked up in middle School
And secession is illegal, that was made clear in 1861. but just for the record, the Civil War was about slavery
Secession is only illegal as long as the constitution remains in effect (as per the Supreme Court) the changes you espouse would require significantly changing the constitution and altering how it can be changed (unless you are delusional enough to think states would really vote to give up power they have). In such a case succession would be both legal and fully legitimate.
Now as your complete ignorance of the term “balance of power “ all three branches have EQUAL POWER which means congress doesn’t have more power than the president it needs the backing of the Supreme Court. Read the constitution you will learn something.
Neo Confederate says what?
Secession (which is in fact different from Succession by the way) was pretty provable shown to be illegal and not constitutional in 1861, right before the Union ground the horrid Confederate state into dust. The Civil War was about slavery btw just to be clear
Also if you ever bothered to move beyond 8th grade Civics and tried out you know…an adult understanding of civics (you know what real people know) you will understand that the current way the goverment is laid out doesn’t actually cause Balance of Power.
Also @peasantprideworldwide, well down having literal Trump supporters backing your arguments, its almost like you are a Rightist rather than a marist
How about checks and balances? Instead of arguing history talk about the meat of your post. However educated you are trying to sound the bottom line is that you know next to nothing about the system of checks and balances. However you want to spin history in order to make such changes you would have to negate the primary law of the US which is the constitution. If such a thing were done there would be a (not very) civil war. Whether it would be legal (according to you) most of the US would revolt against such tyranny.
@evilelitest2 lol so what if he’s a Trump supporter?
He’s raising legitimate concerns with your extreme theory for improving “democracy”. Acknowledging that doesn’t make me a trump supporter or a white nationalist sympathizer or any of that nonsense.
I think the EC is flawed and we can do better but what you propose isn’t better. It’s a transparent attempt by the ruling class in wealthy coastal cities to dictate the direction of the country.
You’re calling people neoconfederates and racists although they’ve not indicated anything of the sort.
Regardless of what particular candidate @msternberg supports it is obvious he’s not a confederate or neoconfederare and his objections to what you and many Liberals are advocating doesn’t come from any sympathy with some lost confederate cause. Nor is it racist or extreme. You are the extremist lmao
You’re calling people that are appealing to the US constitution neoconfederstes and nazis. Lol it’s unhinged. Nobody here is advocating secession from the Union and the resurrection of the old confederacy with a racial hierarchy. So I’m not sure why you’re calling people neoconfederates.
I’m just amazed that you would even tag me like I’m supposed to come disagree with this person simply because they’re a Trump supporter. What you’re saying is silly, shallow and transparently repugnant to anybody with a brain.
The Dems don’t even represent poor black or brown people in our coastal cities. You sound like the Liberal democratic version of a neoconfederate except instead of resurrecting the confederacy you want to go to war with half the country to install a dictatorship run by Hillary Clinton and Robby Mook? Tom Perez? Joe Biden? Maybe the “good” republicans like George W. bush.
To think about it, it’s pretty hysterically funny you would even take the time to think that out and type it and think to yourself, “yes, I’m proud of these ideas and this is going to make my country better”. The more I think about it the more absurd it is actually lmfao
“So what if he is a Trump supporter”= Says man who mostly agrees with Donald Trump
Lol stop it, Lib.
So are our checks and balances completely destroyed? Can we fix the system?
Only partly, it certainly isn’t as bad as Hungary. The President has too much power and the Congress has screwed itself, but it isn’t too hard to fix it, we just need to destroy the Republicans first. Basically here is what you need
1) A semi independent or fully independent oversight agency, like inspector Generals but the president can’t fire them. Give them wide reaching powers to request documents
2) Make an official requirement for president that you must turn over your tax returns as well as completely open all of your financial history to congress. make this also be a requirement for every major executive office.
3) Expand SCOTUS to 15, appoint a bunch of democrats with who value Congressional oversight. Make all future SCOTUS appointments have to go through a board of Legal Scholars, Human Rights Organizations, and Civil Liberties groups before they can be appointed. Also add at least 6 new circuits and fill them with democrats
4) Ban money from politics
5) Take away most forms of Presidential immunity
6) Abolish the Filibuster
7) Destroy the Electoral College.
Its not that hard, we just need an autocrat out of office. Ideally replace the Senate but I don’t think that is possible yet
What?
This is legitimately insane.
1. None of these things will meaningfully make the country better in any objective sense.
You want to replace an elected office with semi independent IGs? To do what?
2. How do you ban money from politics in a capitalist society? Like this makes no sense.
3. You can just hold the president accountable to the rule of law. That doesn’t really change much. Even if the president had immunity it would still be a highly politically charged endeavor to try and remove one.
3. Abolish the filibuster? How does that restore a system of checks and balances?
4. Abolish the electoral college? Why? How will that make the country better? It will just further concentrate power among the most populous and well developed states. Regardless of its origins in the US we have a federated system that requires an electoral institution to balance power between strong states and weak states unless you want to promote antagonism and conflict between states, regions, etc.
So you want to get rid of Donald trump, an elected official, and replace him and his party and our government with essentially a naked one party state run by democrats? And this will make our country better? How?
A reactionary pretending to be a Anarhcist/Marxist. I wish I could say that was new but its sadly predictable this time. Like I normally don’t expect supposed Communists to be in agreement with white nationalists but welcome to 2020 I suppose.
Ok lets break this down
First off the Electoral College: the most classically liberal institution ever
1) Yeah, giving more power to the more popular and better devolved States is a good thing, most of the country lives there. That is how democracy works
2) Even beyond the “an undemocratic system shouldn’t exist in a democracy” argument, the current electoral college system means that voters in conservative areas (as marks would call them the lumpenproletariat) get more
3) Yeah the Electoral College was a bad idea when it was founded and was based on shitty principles. There is a reason why no other democratic country uses this system, because its a bad system, and keeping around an institution designed to protect slavery is dumb coming from anybody, its really dumb if you are a supposed Communist.
I mean there was a reason why Marx himself didn’t like liberal democracies that had a wealth requirement for voting. The EC is basically that but for how depopulated, white, and fundamentalist your state is
4) Finally it doesn’t even work as intended. It actually robs the vote from anybody living in a Blue or Red state who disagrees with the majority. Republicans in New York and Democrats in Texas effectively have their vote erased
The Filibuster
Its an undemocratic systems that is basically designed to prevent reform….duh? I mean ideally i would like to replace the Senate, but if you want things to get actually passed, then removing the things that prevent things from getting removed is a good idea.
Impeachment
Yeah if the president does something illegal, he should be removed from power. Considering that the US has a problem with the Executive Branch having far too much power anyways, removing a President would do the nation good.
Checking the President
Again, it kinda seems like you are an Alt Righter pretending to be a leftist, because the notion that the executive shouldn’t have any checks on it is basically being pro Authoritarianism. Trump has thus far
refused to turn over documents
Attempted to interfere with elections
Actively removed Inspector’s general
Is engaging in corruption
Is using the power of the office for personal ends
And thanks to the fact that SCOTUS and Congress are broken, they aren’t actually providing any check on the President. Which is why you need Inspector Generals to be independent so that they can actually be a counter weight, if the president can just fire people whose job it is to oversee him, then oversight means nothing.
Money in Politics
Turns out there are a whole series of reforms based on preventing paid lobbying funnily enough, but it seems like you were too busy repeating Alt-Right talking points.
One Party State
As long as the GOP exists in any meaningful level, you aren’t going to get any reform. Once the Dems get power, they were almost certainly split between the Centrist/Leftist wings, which is what everybody wants anyways (though a multi party system would be better)
I want Biden to be the face of conservatism in America rather than Trump.
Tax Returns
Any major elected official should have all of their public fiances made public, because you need to know if they have conflicts of interest. The fact that the US doesn’t have that is actually pretty embarrassing.
Your blog is hilarious btw, cause its like a Sophomore Philosophy Student who just discovered Marx but still spends way too much time on chan boards bitching about Idpol
Frankly I don’t even know why you are here, you are clear an Acceleration, so I don’t see why you would care, beyond spouting amateur philosophy
I don’t believe I ever pretended to be anything. I’ve made several criticisms of anarchism and reject it as idealist and not useful to my politics. You already harmed your credibility by likening me to white nationalists.
“Yeah, giving more power to the more popular and better devolved States is a good thing, most of the country lives there. That is how democracy works”
How is this a good thing? Why would it be a good thing to encourage underdevelopment in some areas and development in the capital city centers? This produces conflict and antagonism and will only produce more reactionaries. That is not how democracy works because the political parties with power in those developed areas don’t represent any kind of majority.
1. The US is not a unitary state.
2. This ahistorical type of framing of the EC that accuses anybody who might defend it of being racist or stupid has a distinct political purpose: it is ruling class politics meant to reinforce domination.
3. Our Federal system was constructed to give authority to a central state but Americans were skeptical of the British Westminster system with power concentrated in London. Many people thought it would result in rich powerful states dominating weaker smaller states and turning it into a core-periphery situation.
To reassure the Anti-federalists the Federalists included many compromises into the Federal structure which include:
- the constitutional separation of power between federal government and states
- checks & balances, bicameral legislature (house is population based but the senate is 2 per state regardless of population) - and it includes a bill of rights to protect individuals and state governments from intervention by federal state Large population states would’ve liked popular sovereignty in which both the house and senate were run on a population basis but small states would not move on that. So they created the Senate to persuade the smaller states and the only other way they would’ve been brought into the Federal system was through war. And that would’ve been a very costly war.
This is the compromise that was reached.
You want to do away with this compromise because of some misguided and ahistorical moralizing. This is the fundamental compromise that led to the United States being united and if you want to fundamentally alter that you should truly reckon with its origins and the implications of doing away with it. Or at least pursuing that kind of politics.
You don’t need any normative or political orientation towards the EC in the present to understand how it came about or the compromises it involves. How do we make the United States more substantively democratic, then ok we can do that.
4. The EC forces presidential candidates to win more votes from a more diverse compilation of regions. More than half of the states have their voting power increased by the EC. So it forces candidates to increase their vote share in less populated areas. The effect of this prevents any particular region that is very dominant in terms of population and size of the economy from dictating the direction of the country.
And without an EC a presidential candidate or can say all rural people are horrible and only cities matter and you could run a more forthright version of Hillary’s 2016 campaign or conversely when the country was more agrarian you could run a campaign on depriving cities of resources and representation. It is obvious at this point that everything you support is part of a broader particularly Liberal class project dressed up as some moral crusade about slavery. Very very creepy. I think you should reconsider your position because you have no actual power you’re just parroting Liberal nonsense. I mean the rest is just like lol, bro I’m not an alt-righter, you’re just insane. I guess you could get reform with Joe Biden, I don’t know what that means but that’s not my politics and Joe Biden is most definitely engaged in a ruling class project to subjugate workers, wittingly or unwittingly. It’s literally his life’s work.
This is why I really don’t like Liberals, more so than the fact you people don’t actually know anything, you’re all idealists. You’d rather a different face of conservatism? what does that even mean? How does that fundamentally change anything? It’s purely a rhetorical and aesthetic difference.
Honestly, the more you people talk and the more obvious it is you are carrying water for bourgeois the more I’m inclined to believe that all these shibboleths about nazis and white nationalists and Trump being orange Hitler might all be a bunch of bullshit.
It certainly looks and smells like bullshit. The rest is all nonsense but I don’t feel like addressing it all. Complaining about corruption is inherently conservative.
You’re ignoring the economy, stupid. Trump is ignoring economic needs of those states and you idiots aren’t talking about it. You’re talking about abolishing the EC which is one of the few institutions left protecting them from getting railroaded by the wealthy capital city centers and the Federal government and impeaching the president and establishing a unitary state controlled in all aspects by the Democratic Party? lmfao are you a cartoon villain? You’re calling me a reactionary? lmfao
The irony of it is that what you believe is probably more extreme than the average trump voter who just shows up to vote every 4 years. Lmfao they are not on the internet writing diabolical fictional scenarios where we live under a Fascist state run by Democratic Party technocrats
If almost any of the above changes were instituted it would mean changing or negating the constitution which in turn is all that holds the states of the United States together so legally any state could leave. Personally I’m rather certain that about 40 states would. The nonsense about “checking the President “ despite his popularity it could easily be proven that Obama did all that and more as in weaponizing the irs and fbi to attack political opponents. Now as to checks and balances what it states in the constitution is that each branch of government is EQUAL do you understand that concept? That means NONE HAVE MORE POWER. In order for congress to compel the president to testify they MUST go to the Supreme Court just as in order for the President to compel congress he would have to. It’s basic constitutional law. This congress is so incredibly ignorant or arrogant they completely ignore things they should have learned in 8th grade civics class.
Yeah most people who aren’t playing with footsie with the alt right actually move beyond 8th grade civics class. Some of them move unto 9th grade, or college or even Grad School Turns own knowledge doesn’t end with what you picked up in middle School
And secession is illegal, that was made clear in 1861. but just for the record, the Civil War was about slavery
Secession is only illegal as long as the constitution remains in effect (as per the Supreme Court) the changes you espouse would require significantly changing the constitution and altering how it can be changed (unless you are delusional enough to think states would really vote to give up power they have). In such a case succession would be both legal and fully legitimate.
Now as your complete ignorance of the term “balance of power “ all three branches have EQUAL POWER which means congress doesn’t have more power than the president it needs the backing of the Supreme Court. Read the constitution you will learn something.
Neo Confederate says what?
Secession (which is in fact different from Succession by the way) was pretty provable shown to be illegal and not constitutional in 1861, right before the Union ground the horrid Confederate state into dust. The Civil War was about slavery btw just to be clear
Also if you ever bothered to move beyond 8th grade Civics and tried out you know…an adult understanding of civics (you know what real people know) you will understand that the current way the goverment is laid out doesn’t actually cause Balance of Power.
Also @peasantprideworldwide, well down having literal Trump supporters backing your arguments, its almost like you are a Rightist rather than a marist
How about checks and balances? Instead of arguing history talk about the meat of your post. However educated you are trying to sound the bottom line is that you know next to nothing about the system of checks and balances. However you want to spin history in order to make such changes you would have to negate the primary law of the US which is the constitution. If such a thing were done there would be a (not very) civil war. Whether it would be legal (according to you) most of the US would revolt against such tyranny.
@evilelitest2 lol so what if he’s a Trump supporter?
He’s raising legitimate concerns with your extreme theory for improving “democracy”. Acknowledging that doesn’t make me a trump supporter or a white nationalist sympathizer or any of that nonsense.
I think the EC is flawed and we can do better but what you propose isn’t better. It’s a transparent attempt by the ruling class in wealthy coastal cities to dictate the direction of the country.
You’re calling people neoconfederates and racists although they’ve not indicated anything of the sort.
Regardless of what particular candidate @msternberg supports it is obvious he’s not a confederate or neoconfederare and his objections to what you and many Liberals are advocating doesn’t come from any sympathy with some lost confederate cause. Nor is it racist or extreme. You are the extremist lmao
You’re calling people that are appealing to the US constitution neoconfederstes and nazis. Lol it’s unhinged. Nobody here is advocating secession from the Union and the resurrection of the old confederacy with a racial hierarchy. So I’m not sure why you’re calling people neoconfederates.
I’m just amazed that you would even tag me like I’m supposed to come disagree with this person simply because they’re a Trump supporter. What you’re saying is silly, shallow and transparently repugnant to anybody with a brain.
The Dems don’t even represent poor black or brown people in our coastal cities. You sound like the Liberal democratic version of a neoconfederate except instead of resurrecting the confederacy you want to go to war with half the country to install a dictatorship run by Hillary Clinton and Robby Mook? Tom Perez? Joe Biden? Maybe the “good” republicans like George W. bush.
To think about it, it’s pretty hysterically funny you would even take the time to think that out and type it and think to yourself, “yes, I’m proud of these ideas and this is going to make my country better”. The more I think about it the more absurd it is actually lmfao
So are our checks and balances completely destroyed? Can we fix the system?
Only partly, it certainly isn’t as bad as Hungary. The President has too much power and the Congress has screwed itself, but it isn’t too hard to fix it, we just need to destroy the Republicans first. Basically here is what you need
1) A semi independent or fully independent oversight agency, like inspector Generals but the president can’t fire them. Give them wide reaching powers to request documents
2) Make an official requirement for president that you must turn over your tax returns as well as completely open all of your financial history to congress. make this also be a requirement for every major executive office.
3) Expand SCOTUS to 15, appoint a bunch of democrats with who value Congressional oversight. Make all future SCOTUS appointments have to go through a board of Legal Scholars, Human Rights Organizations, and Civil Liberties groups before they can be appointed. Also add at least 6 new circuits and fill them with democrats
4) Ban money from politics
5) Take away most forms of Presidential immunity
6) Abolish the Filibuster
7) Destroy the Electoral College.
Its not that hard, we just need an autocrat out of office. Ideally replace the Senate but I don’t think that is possible yet
What?
This is legitimately insane.
1. None of these things will meaningfully make the country better in any objective sense.
You want to replace an elected office with semi independent IGs? To do what?
2. How do you ban money from politics in a capitalist society? Like this makes no sense.
3. You can just hold the president accountable to the rule of law. That doesn’t really change much. Even if the president had immunity it would still be a highly politically charged endeavor to try and remove one.
3. Abolish the filibuster? How does that restore a system of checks and balances?
4. Abolish the electoral college? Why? How will that make the country better? It will just further concentrate power among the most populous and well developed states. Regardless of its origins in the US we have a federated system that requires an electoral institution to balance power between strong states and weak states unless you want to promote antagonism and conflict between states, regions, etc.
So you want to get rid of Donald trump, an elected official, and replace him and his party and our government with essentially a naked one party state run by democrats? And this will make our country better? How?
A reactionary pretending to be a Anarhcist/Marxist. I wish I could say that was new but its sadly predictable this time. Like I normally don’t expect supposed Communists to be in agreement with white nationalists but welcome to 2020 I suppose.
Ok lets break this down
First off the Electoral College: the most classically liberal institution ever
1) Yeah, giving more power to the more popular and better devolved States is a good thing, most of the country lives there. That is how democracy works
2) Even beyond the “an undemocratic system shouldn’t exist in a democracy” argument, the current electoral college system means that voters in conservative areas (as marks would call them the lumpenproletariat) get more
3) Yeah the Electoral College was a bad idea when it was founded and was based on shitty principles. There is a reason why no other democratic country uses this system, because its a bad system, and keeping around an institution designed to protect slavery is dumb coming from anybody, its really dumb if you are a supposed Communist.
I mean there was a reason why Marx himself didn’t like liberal democracies that had a wealth requirement for voting. The EC is basically that but for how depopulated, white, and fundamentalist your state is
4) Finally it doesn’t even work as intended. It actually robs the vote from anybody living in a Blue or Red state who disagrees with the majority. Republicans in New York and Democrats in Texas effectively have their vote erased
The Filibuster
Its an undemocratic systems that is basically designed to prevent reform….duh? I mean ideally i would like to replace the Senate, but if you want things to get actually passed, then removing the things that prevent things from getting removed is a good idea.
Impeachment
Yeah if the president does something illegal, he should be removed from power. Considering that the US has a problem with the Executive Branch having far too much power anyways, removing a President would do the nation good.
Checking the President
Again, it kinda seems like you are an Alt Righter pretending to be a leftist, because the notion that the executive shouldn’t have any checks on it is basically being pro Authoritarianism. Trump has thus far
refused to turn over documents
Attempted to interfere with elections
Actively removed Inspector’s general
Is engaging in corruption
Is using the power of the office for personal ends
And thanks to the fact that SCOTUS and Congress are broken, they aren’t actually providing any check on the President. Which is why you need Inspector Generals to be independent so that they can actually be a counter weight, if the president can just fire people whose job it is to oversee him, then oversight means nothing.
Money in Politics
Turns out there are a whole series of reforms based on preventing paid lobbying funnily enough, but it seems like you were too busy repeating Alt-Right talking points.
One Party State
As long as the GOP exists in any meaningful level, you aren’t going to get any reform. Once the Dems get power, they were almost certainly split between the Centrist/Leftist wings, which is what everybody wants anyways (though a multi party system would be better)
I want Biden to be the face of conservatism in America rather than Trump.
Tax Returns
Any major elected official should have all of their public fiances made public, because you need to know if they have conflicts of interest. The fact that the US doesn’t have that is actually pretty embarrassing.
Your blog is hilarious btw, cause its like a Sophomore Philosophy Student who just discovered Marx but still spends way too much time on chan boards bitching about Idpol
Frankly I don’t even know why you are here, you are clear an Acceleration, so I don’t see why you would care, beyond spouting amateur philosophy
I don’t believe I ever pretended to be anything. I’ve made several criticisms of anarchism and reject it as idealist and not useful to my politics. You already harmed your credibility by likening me to white nationalists.
“Yeah, giving more power to the more popular and better devolved States is a good thing, most of the country lives there. That is how democracy works”
How is this a good thing? Why would it be a good thing to encourage underdevelopment in some areas and development in the capital city centers? This produces conflict and antagonism and will only produce more reactionaries. That is not how democracy works because the political parties with power in those developed areas don’t represent any kind of majority.
1. The US is not a unitary state.
2. This ahistorical type of framing of the EC that accuses anybody who might defend it of being racist or stupid has a distinct political purpose: it is ruling class politics meant to reinforce domination.
3. Our Federal system was constructed to give authority to a central state but Americans were skeptical of the British Westminster system with power concentrated in London. Many people thought it would result in rich powerful states dominating weaker smaller states and turning it into a core-periphery situation.
To reassure the Anti-federalists the Federalists included many compromises into the Federal structure which include:
- the constitutional separation of power between federal government and states
- checks & balances, bicameral legislature (house is population based but the senate is 2 per state regardless of population) - and it includes a bill of rights to protect individuals and state governments from intervention by federal state Large population states would’ve liked popular sovereignty in which both the house and senate were run on a population basis but small states would not move on that. So they created the Senate to persuade the smaller states and the only other way they would’ve been brought into the Federal system was through war. And that would’ve been a very costly war.
This is the compromise that was reached.
You want to do away with this compromise because of some misguided and ahistorical moralizing. This is the fundamental compromise that led to the United States being united and if you want to fundamentally alter that you should truly reckon with its origins and the implications of doing away with it. Or at least pursuing that kind of politics.
You don’t need any normative or political orientation towards the EC in the present to understand how it came about or the compromises it involves. How do we make the United States more substantively democratic, then ok we can do that.
4. The EC forces presidential candidates to win more votes from a more diverse compilation of regions. More than half of the states have their voting power increased by the EC. So it forces candidates to increase their vote share in less populated areas. The effect of this prevents any particular region that is very dominant in terms of population and size of the economy from dictating the direction of the country.
And without an EC a presidential candidate or can say all rural people are horrible and only cities matter and you could run a more forthright version of Hillary’s 2016 campaign or conversely when the country was more agrarian you could run a campaign on depriving cities of resources and representation. It is obvious at this point that everything you support is part of a broader particularly Liberal class project dressed up as some moral crusade about slavery. Very very creepy. I think you should reconsider your position because you have no actual power you’re just parroting Liberal nonsense. I mean the rest is just like lol, bro I’m not an alt-righter, you’re just insane. I guess you could get reform with Joe Biden, I don’t know what that means but that’s not my politics and Joe Biden is most definitely engaged in a ruling class project to subjugate workers, wittingly or unwittingly. It’s literally his life’s work.
This is why I really don’t like Liberals, more so than the fact you people don’t actually know anything, you’re all idealists. You’d rather a different face of conservatism? what does that even mean? How does that fundamentally change anything? It’s purely a rhetorical and aesthetic difference.
Honestly, the more you people talk and the more obvious it is you are carrying water for bourgeois the more I’m inclined to believe that all these shibboleths about nazis and white nationalists and Trump being orange Hitler might all be a bunch of bullshit.
It certainly looks and smells like bullshit. The rest is all nonsense but I don’t feel like addressing it all. Complaining about corruption is inherently conservative.
You’re ignoring the economy, stupid. Trump is ignoring economic needs of those states and you idiots aren’t talking about it. You’re talking about abolishing the EC which is one of the few institutions left protecting them from getting railroaded by the wealthy capital city centers and the Federal government and impeaching the president and establishing a unitary state controlled in all aspects by the Democratic Party? lmfao are you a cartoon villain? You’re calling me a reactionary? lmfao
The irony of it is that what you believe is probably more extreme than the average trump voter who just shows up to vote every 4 years. Lmfao they are not on the internet writing diabolical fictional scenarios where we live under a Fascist state run by Democratic Party technocrats
Complaining about corruption is inherently conservative? Marx complained about corruption….but you aren’t a marxist so I don’t know why I would bother mentioning that. Cause this is a Trump supporter pretending to be a Marxist
Definition of Fascism Fascism is a right wing ideology, hence why all the Neo Nazis in American are pro fascist.
The Electoral College
The EC was made to protect slavery and the rule of the elites (Hamilton didn’t even hide this) so for a supposed Marixist you seem pretty pro elites when it comes to race (not surprised). Just like the rotten bourough system that Marx was bitching about.
Its almost like your a conservative who pretends to be a marxist, because you are a conservative pretending to be a Marxist
Democracy
the way EC currently works is that it gives more power to the most conservative parts of the country over where most of the people live. Which is not democratic.
Also if you actually knew shit about the EC, it doesn’t actually give power to “Small state” unless Florida is a small state now? Is Upstate new York not rural now?
Federalism vs. Anti Federalism Yeah, the Anti Federalists were wrong then, and history has moved on since the 18th century. The Civil War made it clear why States Rights was a farce (marx approved of that btw)
I mean its pretty obvious you have more in common with Neo Confederates than Marxists at this point
No, you fundamentally don’t know what you’re talking about. Marx never spoke about corruption in the way you’re speaking of it, in the sense that the system is undermined by the corrupting influence of individuals or bad actors. The Capitalist system’s effect of a corrupting influence.
Marx spends little to no time outlining political corruption as you are using it. He is talking about systemic corruption rooted in the machinations of capitalism.
When you and other Liberals like Warren whine about corruption or Trump being corrupt what you are necessarily implying is that the system is otherwise good and just but for the influence of these individuals. Therefore it is necessary in the preservation and conservation of that institution that the bad actors be identified and removed. This is inherently conservative and forecloses the possibility of altering the underlying conditions which produce the ‘corrupting’ influence to begin with. Marx would have considered anybody reactionary that attempts to preserve the conditions established by Liberalism and the bourgeois revolution.
Not sure why you cited the definition of Fascism as if that was supposed to prove that what you were proposing wasn’t actually Fascist in nature. You’re proposing the suppression of the democratic voice of trump supporters and workers in general in order to establish a transparently 1 party state with the goal of unifying and preserving an ideal notion of the state and society. You are proposing class collaboration and the repression of dissenting political views in the service of a state where big business and political power are married in the state. I encourage you to look at all the developments of Fascism throughout the 20th century and how often fascists use the charge of “corruption” to advance conservative ideas and manipulate the real discontent and disillusionment among their people. For contemporary examples outside the US I would pay very close attention to the use of narratives of corruption by Bolsonaro and the far right in Brazil against Lula and PT, or in Hungary with Orban, or in Ukraine with far right nationalists.
The EC was not protected to protect slavery explicitly, but that was one of tis consequences. I’s goal was balancing the power of smaller states and larger states as I’ve already gone over. Slave states tended to have large populations of slaves. It was created to protect the rule of elite plantation owners in the south. But we no longer have rich plantation owners in the south. And the effects of the EC today are very different from maintaining the institution of slavery.
The problem with you people is you take moral claims to have trans-historical truths and properties. Slavery is abhorrent and nobody is defending it. Regardless of the moral questions surrounding its creation re: the slave system , the EC has a different function today. You don’t need to agree with or disagree with the moral crime of slavery or racism to see that. The EC enhances the voting power of smaller less developed states so they do not get railroaded by the large states and dominant economic regions of the country. I am all for moving the US towards a more democratic system. If you want to abolish the EC and replace with something more democratic that preserves the representation of smaller states within our Federated system then I am certainly on board with that and I encourage it. What I disagree with is the flippant dismissal of people, particularly workers in smaller red states that raise objections about just abolishing the EC because it’s “wrong”. You want coastal elites to dominate workers in red states, you’re a reactionary, you’re not talking about improving democracy you’re talking about domination by coastal political and economic elites who don’t even represent the majority of people in the regions they claim to. They represent bourgeois and petit-bourgeois interests aka PMCs.
Again, it’s the same thing with the civil war discourse. Either the civil war gets talked about in moral terms or it gets dismissed as being about states rights. Both Liberal idealist conceptions which I do not accept or agree with at face value.
The civil war was fought over what economic model the US would employ. One economic model which featured chattel slavery and one economic model that features the wage slavery of industrial capitalism.
The early 19th century in the US is a period of immense conflict and upheaval over tariffs. Northern industrialists wanted high tariffs on British manufactured goods and southern agriculturalists wanted low tariffs on British manufacturing imports.
The southern agriculturalists wanted low tariffs because every time the Northern Industrialists raised tariffs on British goods, the British would raise tariffs on US agricultural exports, specifically cotton. High British tariffs on American cotton = cotton industry in other regions of the world in British East India for example to develop and reduced the competitiveness of US agriculturalists in the future.
So anytime the Northern Industrialists attempted to protect US industry from competition with the more dominant British manufacturing industry, the British used the South to create political opposition to that tariff in the US. See 1828 tariff of abominations which dramatically raised tariffs and invited retaliatory tariffs from the British and resulted in South Carolina threatening to secede from the union if the tariff was not nullified. The compromise of 1832 lowered that tariff significantly and capitulated to the demands of the south.
Friedrich List, a German-American economist, saw British manufacturing reducing the development of industry in other parts of the world. List encouraged European states and the US to institute protective tariffs to protect their infant industrial sectors from being held back by British manufacturing dominance in the world market.
It is no more than fair that England, now that she has attained the culminating point of her industrial growth and progress, should restore again to the nations of Continental Europe a portion of those productive forces which she originally derived from them.
What benefit is it to the people of the United States for instance, that they sacrifice the welfare of their finest and most cultivated states. The states of free labor and perhaps their entire future natural greatness for the advantage of supplying England with raw cotton. On this system the trade with England only tended to promote the agricultural labor of the American slaves while on the other hand the freest most enlightened and most powerful states of the union found themselves entirely arrested in their economical progress and thus reduced to dispose of the annual surplus of their population and capital by emigration to the wastelands of the west.
On the 1832 compromise:
By means of the influence of the cotton planters and importers and by the aid of the Democratic Party, especially by means of the so-called compromise bill in1832, a modification of the former tariff had taken place. Which although it certainly amended the excesses and faults of the former tariff and also still secured to the American manufacturers a tolerable degree of protection in respect of the courser fabrics of cotton and woolen, nevertheless gave the English all concession which they would’ve desired without England being compelled to make any counter concessions. Since the passage of that bill, the exports of England to America have enormously increased.
Who is depicted as the primary victims of Trump’s tariffs? Farmers. Agriculturalists are always depicted as the victim of tariffs on foreign manufactured goods because reciprocal tariffs are invariably always on agricultural exports.
Opposition to the southern economic model and moral opposition to slavery went hand in hand. One way to encourage opposition to the Southern economic model is the fact that slavery is a repugnant institution that has no place in a civilized society. It bolsters the economic argument to engage in a moral campaign against the Southern economic model which featured slavery as its dominant form of labor.
I have nothing in common with neoconfederates, you don’t even know what that means. I don’t know what point you Libs are trying to make by likening anybody that might question the moral justification of abolishing the EC today based on an institution a war was fought to end by your own account. It’s shitty politics regardless of the moral question of slavery if you claim to care about working class people of any race. All it doest is alienate people in red states who have no interest in challenging the fact slavery is morally abhorrent but are rightly concerned about being dominated by elites in coastal cities.
You can call me a Fascist, a neoconfederate, a racist, a Trump supporter, you throw these terms at people reflexively, they don’t mean anything and they have no power outside your little Liberal echo-chamber.
The European states that were able to abolish serfdom and break the power of the landed aristocrats or get them out of slavery and into industry and away from farming are the states that industrialized most rapidly and were most competitive going into the 20th century. The states which retained slavery for longer and didn’t push the landed aristocracy into heavy industry as the INDUSTRIAL BOURGEOISIE, AS THE MATURATION OF A HISTORIC CLASS, entered the 20th century on weaker footing.
Austria-Hungary which abolished slavery late and under duress entered the 20th century in much worse shape than Germany and Britain who abolished it much earlier. Agriculture in most cases is dominated by a competing interest with industrial capitalists. The agricultural sector, regardless of the nature of the exploitation whether it is wage labor or slave labor is going to want its interests met at the expense of the overall development of other competing industry. It is a matter of opportunity cost as well.
Prior to the civil war tariffs are around 20%, after the civil war tariff rates hover between 40-50% and they stay there until at least 1910. 50 year of dramatically higher tariffs because agricultural interests were systematically broken by state violence. Good. Slavery is an abhorrent institution. But the contents of peoples minds and hearts are irrelevant.
Whether you are a landed aristocrat who owns slaves, like the first president of the United States or an industrial capitalist the situation is basically the same. You are exploiting people in a more vulnerable position than you in the name of your own private interest. The difference is the form and economic potential of that exploitation. The North won because their system of exploitation was more effective. This does not trivialize the wrong of chattel slavery. The point is that Capitalism is much worse than people think and employee-employer relationship are worse than people think. The entire premise is that slavery is unquestionably wrong, it relies on the shared consensus that slavery is wrong. Marxism objects to exploitation in ALL its forms.
Again, i’m talking to a supposed Marxist who is apparently favors Trump, so when it comes to talking nonsense you are apparently the master.
Pro Confederate Propaganda
Hey well done, you are summing up a pro Confederate historical theory about the Civil War from the mid 20th century that isn’t accepted by historians today, well done. If you ever bothered to read actual historians, or anybody other than Marx, or hell if you read Marx’s writing on the Civil War, you might be able to figure out that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. John Brown didn’t go to Harper’s Ferry over Tarrifs, Kansas didn’t become Bloody over tariffs, and Harriet Beecher Stowe didn’t write a novel about tariffs it was about slavery, the Civil War was about slavery and the only people who pretend otherwise are Neo Confederates trying to justify the institution of slavery, well done
Also there is a vast difference between horrific working conditions and literal race slavery. But since you don’t care about black people, you don’t care about that difference.
Elites in Coastal Cities Or you know…most of the population, including the vast majority of the non white population. Like if you are going to echo White Nationalist rhetoric at least pretend you aren’t a reactionary. Which is funny, because Marx was pretty anti rural himself, there is a reason why he focused on the revolution of the city.
Also nice antisemetic dog whistle, Marx would be proud
Primary Victims of Trump
Latino children in cages, African Americans who are being victimized, people being denied medicine because of Trumps incompetence during the virus, the greatest victims of his administration aren’t rural white Trump voting farmers.
Which is why you are obviously a reactionary pretending to be a Marxist, because you are actively supporting the most conservative portion of the country getting the largest share of the vote
The Electoral College
The Electoral College doesn’t actually protect small states, it protects conservative states. Florida isn’t a small state
Also its hilarious to me that you are like “Marx Marx Marx” but then are all defensive about protecting the US federalist system, aka the most classically liberal political system ever designed. The Electoral College was designed by Hamilton, you can’t get more classically liberal than that.
Fascism
Making the US an actual democracy where the person who becomes president is the one who got the majority of the votes isn’t fascism, that democracy. Fascism wants less democracy, not more.
Which again, you are pretending to be a Marxist, Marx wasn’t defending the Electoral College, at least pretend to be a leftist
Marxist Theory
Your entire understanding of Marxist theory seems to be “Marx said this, so it must be true” which is basically just religious fundamentalist logic, ignoring the fact that Marx was…wrong about a lot of shit…its also not an argument. But again, you regularly call people who disagree with you mentally ill and are in favor of pro slavery institutions so you know..
Marx and Corruption
Marx didn’t care about political corruption much, and he was wrong, its one of hte failing of Communist ideology. Which is part of the reason why communist countries were historically so prone to corruption.
Strawman.
Ad hom.
Logical fallacy.
Logical fallacy.
Logical fallacy.
Christ, is this how you have discussions with people that disagree with your feckless moralizing? Just flippantly call them a racist trump supporter?
This wouldn’t pass in a freshman history class unless you’re at some joke liberal arts college that is just supposed to spit out useless academics and historians to provide “intellectual” grift to the class project of the bourgeoisie.
Funny i’m teaching Freshmen history evidently not. But again, your a reactionary pretending to be a Marxist so your views on fallacies is pretty comical. Actual Marxists shouldn’t be echoing Trumpian talking points.
You might want to check out a freshmen history class btw, cause the tariff theory of the Civil War has been debunked for decades. The Civil War was caused by slavery, that is why everybody at the time said it was about slavery. Cornerstone speech anybody?
Also marx is primarily taught at “joke liberal arts” colleges, gee…its almost like you are actually a reactionary. You’ve been bitching about “Elites in the cities’, defending the electoral college, pretending the Civil War was about slavery, comparing the Dems to fascism, and defending the institution of corruption. Do you want to complain about political correctness? dismissing the #metoo movement? Whining about immigration?
It’s like you people don’t read or can’t.
The tariff theory has never been debunked and you don’t understand it because you think the argument is either the civil war was over slavery or economic tariffs, theyre not mutually exclusive.
I am not surprised you’re teaching freshman history, I don’t know how that is supposed to qualify you as an authority on anything. You teach to the study guide. It doesn’t take an in depth understanding of history to do that.
List of books which debunk the Tarrif Theory (and aren’t just Lincoln biographies)
Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson
Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War By Bruce Levine
Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War by Charles B Dew
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid the Sparked the War by Tony Horwitz
The American Heritage New History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton
Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era by Nicole Etcheson
The Missouri Compromise and its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of American by Robert Pierces Forbes
Disunion! The coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 by Elizabeth R Varon
The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865 by Emory M Thomas
You could try reading that or anything on the Civil War that wasn’t written by Marx. You might even take some black people’s opinions into account
No, you fundamentally don’t know what you’re talking about. Marx never spoke about corruption in the way that you’re speaking of it. The way you tell it, the system is undermined by the corrupting influence of individuals or individual bad actors, or bad apples. Not unlike the idea that only some cops are bad and some are good, or most and good and it’s just a few who are bad. This misses the point and the fundamental nature of policing. Police play a particular role in society. And we can measure their function empirically and we have found that their functions are correlated with the evaluation of property and market dynamics.
Marx spends little to no time outlining political corruption as you are using it. He is talking about systemic corruption rooted in the machinations of capitalism.
When you and other Liberals like Warren whine about corruption or Trump being corrupt what you are necessarily implying is that the system is otherwise good but for the influence of a few particular bad actors. Therefore it is necessary in the preservation and conservation of markets and market transparency that those bad market actors be removed or held accountable. This is inherently conservative, it presupposes the market as as the solution to human needs. It forecloses the possibility of altering the underlying conditions which may produce a ‘corrupting’ influence to begin with. Marx would have considered anybody reactionary that attempts to preserve the conditions established by Liberalism and the bourgeois revolution and the conditions established by the bourgeois revolution are the state of need.
Not sure why you cited the definition of Fascism as if that was supposed to prove that what you were proposing wasn’t actually Fascist in nature. You’re proposing suppression of the democratic voice of trump supporters and workers in general in order to establish a transparently 1 party state with the goal of unifying and preserving an ideal notion of state and society. You are proposing class collaboration and the repression of dissenting political views in the service of a state where big business and political power are inseparable. I encourage you to look at all the developments of Fascism throughout the 20th century and how often fascists use the charge of “corruption” to advance conservative ideas and manipulate real discontent and disillusionment among their people. For contemporary examples outside the US I would pay very close attention to the use of narratives of corruption by Bolsonaro and the far right in Brazil against Lula and PT, or in Hungary with Orban, or in Ukraine with far right nationalists.
The EC was not created to protect slavery explicitly, but that was one of tis consequences. The goal was balancing the power of smaller states and larger states as I’ve already gone over. Slave states tended to have large populations of slaves. It was created to protect the rule of elite plantation owners in the south. But we no longer have rich plantation owners in the south. And the effects of the EC today are very different from maintaining the institution of slavery.
The problem with you people is you mistake moral claims for having trans-historical truths and properties. Slavery is abhorrent and nobody is defending it. Regardless of the moral questions surrounding its creation re: the slave system , the EC has a different function today. You don’t need to agree with or disagree with the moral crime of slavery or racism to see that. The EC enhances the voting power of smaller less developed states so they do not get railroaded by the large states and dominant economic regions of the country. I am all for moving the US towards a more democratic system. If you want to abolish the EC and replace it with something more democratic that preserves the representation of smaller states within our Federated system then I am certainly on board with that and I encourage it. What I disagree with is the flippant dismissal of people, particularly workers in smaller red states that raise objections about just abolishing the EC, simply because it’s “wrong”. You want coastal elites to dominate workers in red states, you’re a reactionary, you’re not talking about improving democracy you’re talking about domination by coastal political and economic elites who don’t even represent the majority of people in the regions they claim to. They represent bourgeois and petit-bourgeois interests aka PMCs.
Again, it’s the same thing with the civil war discourse. Either the civil war gets talked about in moral terms or it gets dismissed as being about states rights. Both are Liberal idealist conceptions which I do not accept or agree with at face value.
The civil war was fought over what economic model the US would employ. One economic model which featured chattel slavery and one economic model that featured the wage slavery of industrial capitalism.
The early 19th century in the US is a period of immense conflict and upheaval over tariffs. Northern industrialists wanted high tariffs on British manufactured goods and southern agriculturalists wanted low tariffs on British manufacturing imports.
The southern agriculturalists wanted low tariffs because every time the Northern Industrialists raised tariffs on British goods, the British would raise tariffs on US agricultural exports, specifically cotton. High British tariffs on American cotton = cotton industry in other regions of the world in British East India for example to develop and reduced the competitiveness of US agriculturalists in the future.
So anytime the Northern Industrialists attempted to protect US industry from competition with the more dominant British manufacturing industry, the British used the South to create political opposition to that tariff in the US. See 1828 tariff of abominations which dramatically raised tariffs and invited retaliatory tariffs from the British and resulted in South Carolina threatening to secede from the union if the tariff was not nullified. The compromise of 1832 lowered that tariff significantly and capitulated to the demands of the south.
Friedrich List, a German-American economist, saw British manufacturing reducing the development of industry in other parts of the world. List encouraged European states and the US to institute protective tariffs to protect their infant industrial sectors from being held back by British manufacturing dominance in the world market.
It is no more than fair that England, now that she has attained the culminating point of her industrial growth and progress, should restore again to the nations of Continental Europe a portion of those productive forces which she originally derived from them.
What benefit is it to the people of the United States for instance, that they sacrifice the welfare of their finest and most cultivated states. The states of free labor and perhaps their entire future natural greatness for the advantage of supplying England with raw cotton. On this system the trade with England only tended to promote the agricultural labor of the American slaves while on the other hand the freest most enlightened and most powerful states of the union found themselves entirely arrested in their economical progress and thus reduced to dispose of the annual surplus of their population and capital by emigration to the wastelands of the west.
On the 1832 compromise:
By means of the influence of the cotton planters and importers and by the aid of the Democratic Party, especially by means of the so-called compromise bill in1832, a modification of the former tariff had taken place. Which although it certainly amended the excesses and faults of the former tariff and also still secured to the American manufacturers a tolerable degree of protection in respect of the courser fabrics of cotton and woolen, nevertheless gave the English all concession which they would’ve desired without England being compelled to make any counter concessions. Since the passage of that bill, the exports of England to America have enormously increased.
Who is depicted as the primary victims of Trump’s tariffs? Farmers. Agriculturalists are always depicted as the victim of tariffs on foreign manufactured goods because reciprocal tariffs are invariably always on agricultural exports.
Opposition to the southern economic model and moral opposition to slavery went hand in hand. One way to encourage opposition to the Southern economic model is the fact that slavery is a repugnant institution that has no place in a civilized society. It bolsters the economic argument to engage in a moral campaign against the Southern economic model which featured slavery as its dominant form of labor.
I have nothing in common with neoconfederates, you don’t even know what that means. I don’t know what point you Libs are trying to make by likening anybody that might question the moral justification of abolishing the EC today based on an institution a war was fought to end by your own account. It’s shitty politics regardless of the moral question of slavery if you claim to care about working class people of any race. All it doest is alienate people in red states who have no interest in challenging the fact slavery is morally abhorrent but are rightly concerned about being dominated by elites in coastal cities.
You can call me a Fascist, a neoconfederate, a racist, a Trump supporter, you throw these terms at people reflexively, they don’t mean anything and they have no power outside your little Liberal echo-chamber.
The European states that were able to abolish serfdom and break the power of the landed aristocrats or get them out of slavery and into industry and away from farming are the states that industrialized most rapidly and were most competitive going into the 20th century. The states which retained slavery for longer and didn’t push the landed aristocracy into heavy industry as the INDUSTRIAL BOURGEOISIE, AS THE MATURATION OF A HISTORIC CLASS, entered the 20th century on weaker footing.
Austria-Hungary which abolished slavery late and under duress entered the 20th century in much worse shape than Germany and Britain who abolished it much earlier. Agriculture in most cases is dominated by a competing interest with industrial capitalists. The agricultural sector, regardless of the nature of the exploitation whether it is wage labor or slave labor is going to want its interests met at the expense of the overall development of other competing industry. It is a matter of opportunity cost as well.
Prior to the civil war tariffs are around 20%, after the civil war tariff rates hover between 40-50% and they stay there until at least 1910. 50 year of dramatically higher tariffs because agricultural interests were systematically broken by state violence. Good. Slavery is an abhorrent institution. But the contents of peoples minds and hearts are irrelevant.
Whether you are a landed aristocrat who owns slaves, like the first president of the United States or an industrial capitalist the situation is basically the same. You are exploiting people in a more vulnerable position than you in the name of your own private interest. The difference is the form and economic potential of that exploitation. The North won because their system of exploitation was more effective. This does not trivialize the wrong of chattel slavery. The point is that Capitalism is much worse than people think and employee-employer relationship are worse than people think. The entire premise is that slavery is unquestionably wrong, it relies on the shared consensus that slavery is wrong. Marxism objects to exploitation in ALL its forms.
Again its pretty obvious you haven’t read any of the books which debunk the tariff theory, so I don’t see why you expect me to not notice you just cut and paste your first neo confederate defense.
You cannot articulate anything about the tariff theory you disagree with or that is wrong.
Your only argument is that the tariff argument and slavery argument are mutually exclusive therefore it cannot be about tariff because it was about slavery.
You refuse to acknowledge or reckon with the material conditions of the time and thus don’t need to be listened to.