Progressives (Liberals)

@neptuneblue,

neptuneblue wrote:

Again, I disagree.

I won't vote for Bernie for President. He makes an awesome Senator though.

Really strange how you haven’t been able to be convinced that your viewpoint is wrong and evil.

Regarding Trump's pea-brained statement that "Democrats have become an anti-Israel party", Ed Kilgore (in a different piece from the on quoted above) notes:

Quote:

Let’s look at the record.

There are 27 Jews currently serving in the U.S. House. Twenty-five of them are Democrats; 2 are Republicans. There are nine Jews in the U.S. Senate. All of them are Democrats (if you consider Bernie Sanders a Democrat). Republicans: zippo.

...A look at Jewish voting patterns is equally revealing. According to the best available data, Democrats have carried the Jewish vote in 24 consecutive presidential elections, dating back to 1924. In six of the last seven presidential elections, the Jewish vote was more than 70 percent Democratic (the one exception was in 2012, when Barack Obama won 69 percent of the Jewish vote). Hillary Clinton trounced Trump among Jews by a 71/24 margin. 2018 exit polls showed 79 percent of Jews voting Democratic in the midterms.

HERE

The one thing we know here is that Fox is going to be honest about this.

1 Reply

@maporsche,

Well, having to deal with FAFSA for 2 kids doesn't make me an expert. It does however, allow me to have input into how my tax dollars are spent. And "free" college for all isn't going to be a selling point to me.

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Quote:

It's not just a recent problem: In all, since 1998, roughly 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers have faced allegations of sexual misconduct, the newspapers found. That includes those who were convicted, credibly accused and successfully sued, and those who confessed or resigned. More of them worked in Texas than in any other state.

They left behind more than 700 victims, many of them shunned by their churches, left to themselves to rebuild their lives. Some were urged to forgive their abusers or to get abortions.

Houston Chronicle

I don't have an answer to why so many religious leaders are sexual abusers of children. But it is an ugly pattern we need to honestly confront.

1 Reply

@blatham,

blatham wrote:

Trump's pea-brained statement that "Democrats have become an anti-Israel party"

Facts do so frustrate the left.

The Democratic Party is the home of neonazism in America.

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Quote:

Jane Mayer
‏Verified account
@JaneMayerNYer
New: Fox reporter Diana Falzone's lawyer Nancy Erica Smith has issued a statement demanding that Fox release her from her NDA so she can talk about getting the Stormy Daniels story before the 2016 election.
4:24 PM - 8 Mar 2019

I am certain that Fox has nothing to hide in this matter and will grant Falzone the right to provide the relevant details on this matter. Because they have nothing to hide. That's really the thing here, that Fox has nothing to hide. they'll let the truth come out. They WANT the truth to come out. Why? Because they have nothing to hide. Honesty and forthrightness is how Fox roles. It has nothing to hide, you see.

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Bernie Sanders-Style Politics Are Defining 2020 Race, Unnerving Moderates

Quote:

The sharp left turn in the Democratic Party and the rise of progressive presidential candidates are unnerving moderate Democrats who increasingly fear that the party could fritter away its chances of beating President Trump in 2020 by careening over a liberal cliff.

Two months into the presidential campaign, the leading Democratic contenders have largely broken with consensus-driven politics and embraced leftist ideas on health care, taxes, the environment and Middle East policy that would fundamentally alter the economy, elements of foreign policy and ultimately remake American life.

(...)

nyt

1 Reply

@hightor,

It is natural for political parties to resort to extremism when they are in the middle of an extended period out of power.

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@neptuneblue,

neptuneblue wrote:

Well, having to deal with FAFSA for 2 kids doesn't make me an expert. It does however, allow me to have input into how my tax dollars are spent. And "free" college for all isn't going to be a selling point to me.

Me either. I haven’t seen any compelling arguments why this is a good use of our tax dollars.

I’ve been waiting for the compelling argument but I haven’t seen it.

1 Reply

@blatham,

blatham wrote:

I don't have an answer to why so many religious leaders are sexual abusers of children. But it is an ugly pattern we need to honestly confront.

I think the answer, at least in some cases, may lie in the restrictive nature of religion and the anti-restriction impulse to subvert restriction.

In short, it is a form of rebellion, a challenge for the sexual predator, to achieve positions of trust in order to abuse their position, and even discourage faith in religion in general if possible.

It's easy to assume that no one who hates religion and religious people would try to lie their way into a religious organization. We assume that everyone involved in religious organizations are sincerely. But that may simply not be the case with many of these abusers. They may just like religion as a mask to cover up their deeper interests and intentions.

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@maporsche,

Free college means that the government pays for it. What the government pays for, it controls. Academics and teachers will become civil servants (probably unionized) and the quality of scholarship and education for all will suffer.

Naïve liberals believe that organizing their "prefect society" is a design challenge somewhat like that of a designer building a bridge over a river. However human society is composed of human beings, each pursuing their self interest. In this case the analogy involves a river which, seeing the construction project, decides to change its course, bypassing the bridge.

The liberal academics & politicians who designed Obama Care larded up the required elements of medical insurance to suit their political and social goals and values. The result was expensive insurance the young and fit saw no need to buy. The, legislatively set, fines for doing so were much less than the cost of the insurance, so large numbers simply opted out, thus destroying the cost basis for the insurance program, etc. , etc.

The usually unforeseen side and indirect effects of authoritarian measures to control society invariable collapse due to the (often, but not always) passive resistance of individuals pursuing their own self interest. The former Soviet Empire was a notable example. The widespread samizdat (underground commentary) phrase was "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

Free college means that the government pays for it. What the government pays for, it controls. Academics and teachers will become civil servants (probably unionized) and the 1quality of scholarship and education for all will suffer.

(Higher) education is already structured in a way that caters to a superficial approach to knowledge. Students want easy hoops to jump through that give them the credentials they need to go get jobs and make money. Those who get hired cater to this student desire, and people who are critical of the dogmatism either get promoted into positions where they can express critique or they fall through the cracks of the system as others who are more friendly to the BS are embraced and given roles catering to the students.

The unions are already a problem to the extent they drive up salaries so that self-marketing experts compete for the jobs instead of those who truly love education so much they are willing to work for peanuts. Public funding used to be such that practically anyone could get a job in academia and get by, but then the trend grew of seeking external funding to supplement public funding, which led to the widespread cultural belief that public funding is insufficient.

That public belief is key to understanding where we are now. Try to grasp this very clearly: it is not public funding that's insufficient; it is those working for the system that are deeming it insufficient in order to press for more money that is the problem. If everyone involved would simply work harder at lowering salaries than raising them, those who are in it for the money would go find other jobs or learn to make do with less if they truly believe in education.

Still, nothing can ever stop people with money from trying to invest their money in getting better education for their kids and themselves. So there will always be private schools and private funding sources pulling strings to attempt to weight the system to their advantage in various ways.

The thing about education is that knowledge and skills can be reproduced limitlessly by willing people, and that is the biggest threat to people who want to maintain a social hierarchy with themselves higher up on the soci0-economic pyramid. So, for whatever reason, there will always be bad students and bad information doing the senseless job of ruining some educational situations so others will only be available at a premium, either by paying higher tuition (& finding grants) or by moving to more expensive parts of town (and thus paying more taxes and more to home sellers, realtors, contractors, etc. etc.)

It would be great if everyone would just get on board with giving and getting great education at a minimum of cost, but that conflicts with what so many business people are trying to achieve with economic society in so many subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

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https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2019/03/IMG_1447.jpg?resize=397%2C600&ssl=1

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https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2019/03/Screen-Shot-2019-03-03-at-10.57.48-AM.png?resize=600%2C497&ssl=1

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@livinglava,

I generally agree.

Just over decade ago, when two quasi independent, but Federally funded "corporations" i.e. Fannie May & Freddy MAC (as they were called) were energetically pumping cheap government subsidized capitol into housing markets ( in the form of subsidized mortgage loans) the public was "surprised" to discover that pumping more money into the housing loan process had, as its chief effect, raising the price of homes - exactly the opposite of that intended - and creating a bubble that collapsed in 2007. In a tiresomely similar way, people are "surprised" to observe the rapid inflation of college tuition, even despite these subsidized college loans. The simple fact is a government program designed to facilitate access to education is having exactly the opposite effect the mindless liberal reformers had in mind in creating it.

The continuing efforts of such "reformers" who suppose that government intervention in such complex human transactions, can achieve their desired and intended effects without, usually unanticipated, but entirely predictable, side effects that entirely negate their designed purpose, is a constant reminder 0f the folly of most liberal programs.

If you want to lower the cost of some public good the real remedies are increased production of that good and increased competition in delivering it. These are precisely the things that liberal "reformers" never undertake.

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I live near a fairly large university, 2880 acres. It costs about 22,000 dollars a year to go there. It has a baseball stadium, football field, numerous socker fields, and 4 lane roads maintained by the collage. So the kids pay about 8,000 dollars for their education and 14,000 dollars for stuff that is mainly unnecessary for education. Like most government programs their administration is financially bloated because they are encouraged to spend as much money as they can so they can demand large increases next year. Inefficiency of the collage board and the state boards is why collage costs keep raising.

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There is an elephant in the room, and EB is the only one who ever addresses it. That is the so-called defense budget. Eisenhower rightly described it in his last state of the union address as the military-industrial complex. It has battened on the American economy, and it is non-political. Both parties have military contracts in their states and districts, and it is a holy cow. Social welfare, education at all levels and all other programs (except for federal prisons, an enormous annual expenditure) are all diminished as a result of the military budget.

Universities administrative budgets have become bloated over the last 40 or 50 years. I know this, too, because I worded at two large universities in the 70s and 80s. Vice Presidents of various flavors get huge budgets for staff and facilities, while graduate teaching assistants get pittances and new professors live in genteel poverty. Big universities and even small colleges have become de facto minor league recruiting grounds for major league baseball, the NBA, the NFL and to a lesser extent the NHL. College administrations allege that this is a source of donations, but even when those donations are not specific to the athletic departments, the amounts of donations are dwarfed by the multi-million dollar budgets of the athletic departments.

With so little government money to go around and the unrealistic increases in university educations over the last decades, Sanders' pie-in-the-sky free education promises are rather obviously phony. Sanders need to go, and he needs to be sure the door doesn't hit him in the ass.

2 Replies

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

There is an elephant in the room, and EB is the only one who ever addresses it. That is the so-called defense budget.

It's important that we have a strong military to protect us from the bad guys.

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@Setanta,

Interesting points. Despite their lofty pretentions, my experience with academics has been that they are humans just like the rest of us, with their own prejudices and illusions, and having the same interest in profits and their own comforts in mind.

I suspect the problems you described have grown much greater in the last two decades as universities have chased and exploited the surge in government subsidized tuition money floating around. The problem here is that there are victims, namely the students, who graduate burdened with debt, and those others who learn, as one of their early life lessons, they can just default on it without much harm to themselves. Neither is good for the country.

I've often been bemused at the government sponsored efforts to suppress (or destroy) for profit educational enterprises. Many are (or were),to be sure,lacking in substance and effectiveness. However, the markets tend to quickly eliminate underperformers, and the determination of the Academic lobby, both within the government and outside it to destroy this source of potentially healthy external competition for themselves is itself not in the public interest.

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Ilhan Omar’s bro opened for Bern and endorsed him.
It’s thrilling to have a presidential candidate who’s unequivocally on the right side of this AIPAC/ speech issue.

1 Reply

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