Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
Nowadays, but there was a time when you tried to link every second thread to Putin.
My pet issue is right below the sentence you quoted.



Well, as much as I pass as a leftist for all the rightists, I have no doubt that the left can be just as bad. I also already said that people are idiots.
There are two kinds of people in the world, those that simplify the world into easy categories like left and right, good and bad, and those who can see the nuance in everything (theory of relativity).



Somehow reminds me of the democratic primary as well. In that case you can also point out the obvious flaw in their thought process. The whole "Hillary is more electable than Sanders" even though some polls (read closely, Gilrandir!) said Sanders would fare much better against Trump than Clinton. Then again noone believed Trump could actually become the Republican nominee at that time either.
Of course I like Sanders because he always repeats what I've been saying for a long time, that a "system" where the "billionaire class" drains money from the 99% and tries to sell them "trickle down" economics in politics cannot have a very long future...
Even with Sanders a lot of people laugh about it or say it's just communist drivel that is not to be taken seriously, but now we have president-elect Trump...

And to try and connect the two things, I've long thought that one mistake a part of the left does is to focus too much on the socio-issues instead of the socio-economic ones. What good is equal pay for women if their jobs are rationalized away or it's just minimum wage either way? The issue is not just that blacks are kept in poverty, it's that escaping poverty is made almost impossible for everyone. I'd wager to say that quite a few of the societal issues would almost resolve themselves if the rich-poor divide were mitigated FOR EVERYONE.
While capitalism does have its virtues, it needs to be heavily restrained, mixed with heavy socialist cushions or replaced with the next economic system sooner or later.

The worst offenders in my book are still the Republicans and Libertarians who want to unshackle it even more. That will just screw over poor people even more. The whole support for small business is the worst idea when a lot of the successful business categories have such high entry barriers that you need to be a billionaire to be able to hire the required people (manufacturing chipsets in your garage? dream on...) or will nerver be able to compete with big businesses because they got more experts and economies of scale + resources on their side.
The plus that the Trump and Brexit campaigns have going for them is that they've gone through the test of winning an argument that involves the whole electorate. Put aside left and right, and that's the fundamental difference between them and Corbyn's Labour. They had to engage an electorate that includes a substantial proportion of people who disagree with them, and however divisive their arguments, they've won. Compare with Corbyn, who competes only within a self-selecting sub-electorate, and who is interested only in strengthening his position within said self-selecting sub-electorate. For the forseeable future, and barring conditions that we've not seen in the UK for a century, Labour will be the main opposition to the Tories. Ergo the leader of the Labour party will be the Leader of the Opposition. That's all Corbyn aspires to. Thus he doesn't need to engage with Tory, UKIP, and other voters. All he has to do is engage with Labour voters, who by their nature will already be speaking his language. And by flooding the Labour members with his supporters, he will control the party without having to talk with anyone who may disagree with him.

See the parallel with social media and post-truth politics?

IIRC it was Witney, David Cameron's old constituency, where the new Corbynite Labour party doubled its number of members by a thousand, but lost thousands of votes to the Lib Dems in the actual election. That's the result of giving the far left free rein in the UK. Corbyn has total control of the party which now speaks the language of the far left fantasists, but there is no realistic alternative to the Tory government, whose only effective opposition is to their right flank. But that doesn't bother Corbyn or his supporters, one of whom stated that, were Labour to be reduced to 30-40 MPs, it would still be deemed a success, as long as they're all ideologically sound. Ie. it doesn't matter if the right has control of the country, as long as the far left has control of the Labour party.