Left , right. Why not move to the center?

a reply to: rom12345

Liberalism has the crazy ideas. Ideas are not bad or wrong, but just because they're new or different doesn't always make them good or right.

Conservatives want to see the proof and need to be convinced that the ideas are going to end up better than what was there before. Sometimes, there is a reason why things have always been done the way they have always been done, and it isn't always because of oppression. It's sometimes just because that's been the best way to do those things because people have tried in the past to change them and discovered messing with them didn't work out well.

a reply to: ketsuko

I don't think liberal ideas are necessarily crazy, they are more just naive and not fit for purpose.
Conservative ideas held too tightly, will stagnate.
Anyone who is cultishly devoted to extremes is possibly mentally ill, or of low intelligence.
Unfortunately many have an axe to grind, which is not what politics should be about.

a reply to: rom12345

When I said crazy, it was somewhat tongue in cheek. But when you brainstorm, most of your ideas are actually crazy ones. That's fine. It just means your creativity is at work, but the art of good brainstorming is recognizing the off the wall stuff as off the wall.

Modern liberals got so free that they feel prey to the left, and the left is nothing like liberal in any traditional sense at all. I think liberalism is at a crux where a lot of liberals are going to have to decide where they stand -- with the left or with the conservatives and the middle to re-assert the American experiment and the values in the COTUS that let us carry on with our grand and often fractious republic in freedom.

originally posted by: scraedtosleep
I wont be able to reply to this thread till tomorrow.

I was just sitting here in silence thinking about random issues.
I imagined myself sitting with a group of people.
Mixed politically. And I tell them.

The left.
That other side is filled with nothing but nazis, white supremacist, racists and racists deniers.
There all misogynist and bigots. How dare they have the right to speak their ideas.
Chase them from their jobs! Ostracize them!

The right.
That other side is filled with socialist and communists, baby eating satanist and weaklings.
There all mentally ill and stupid. How dare they live their lives the way they choose.
Round them up! Stick them in gitmo!


That, that up there is propaganda. Tiny kernels of truth meant to pop and control our feelings. Distorting reality.
We have let the two parties divide us. They have us by the balls. Because we feel that we have no choice but to vote for one or the other.
Why? Because we are trained to think that if we don't vote for the side we like that other side will win for sure. And this is true. This is the cage that they have put us in.

The only way to break that cage is to vote 3rd party. Imagine the blow to these established party ideals when nether of them wins.
It might just cause the party politicians to actually do a good job. For fear of being voted out. Let's take back the power that these two parties have stolen from us.

I for one promise that I will vote third party this nonmember. All the way down the ballet if I'm able.
Those of you that agree with this plan should get together and decide which third party for us all to vote for.
We need to do something . This divide is un-healthy.

I've been an Independent since 1990. Voted all parties.

That's done. The Democrats have gone so insane with their far left beliefs, I cannot, and will not vote for any party even close to theirs.

The middle is a fool's paradise. Which is sad, because it didn't used to be.

I really do not get what is far left about today's democrats. Is it the calls for universal healthcare? Wealth tax? What is radical. If those things are radical then what does that make former presidents like JFK and FDR? Cause they were way, way to the left of today's democrats. a reply to: poncho1982

a reply to: ras321

Nothing new under the sun. We're seeing upheaval similar to the 1930s, upheaval that ushered in Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. It's a turning away from classical liberalism toward authoritarianism, and it existed under FDR as well. He was just as prone to it.

On May 7, 1933, just two months after the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New York Times reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote that the atmosphere in Washington was “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five‐​Year Plan.… America today literally asks for orders.” The Roosevelt administration, she added, “envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy.”

When Rahm Emmanual said that they never want to let a crisis go to waste, he was right.

Schivelbusch concludes his essay with the liberal journalist John T. Flynn’s warning, in 1944, that state power feeds on crises and enemies. Since then we have been warned about many crises and many enemies, and we have come to accept a more powerful and more intrusive state than existed before the ‘30s.

What do we see right now? All over and all over the world in fact? We see the leaders of supposedly free nations using the flimsy excuse of COVID to crush the freedoms and rights of their own peoples. And which leaders make it worse here in the US where local control allows for it? You can answer that question for yourself, and they are from the same party that wants to take control of all things in your name.

Since 1776, liberalism had transformed the Western world. As The Nation editorialized in 1900, before it too abandoned the old liberalism, “Freed from the vexatious meddling of governments, men devoted themselves to their natural task, the bettering of their condition, with the wonderful results which surround us” — industry, transportation, telephones and telegraphs, sanitation, abundant food, electricity. But the editor worried that “its material comfort has blinded the eyes of the present generation to the cause which made it possible.” Old liberals died, and younger liberals began to wonder if government couldn’t be a positive force, something to be used rather than constrained.

Others, meanwhile, began to reject liberalism itself. In his 1930s novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil wrote, “Misfortune had decreed that… the mood of the times would shift away from the old guidelines of liberalism that had favored Leo Fischel — the great guiding ideals of tolerance, the dignity of man, and free trade — and reason and progress in the Western world would be displaced by racial theories and street slogans.”

You have too much, but what you have has been provided by the very liberties that classical liberalism allowed - the very same thing you want to do away with in favor of more and stronger government control. Look what strong government control has done this past year! It has severely damaged the economy in the name of "saving" us from a disease that we know is barely a threat to most of us. It has taken a sledgehammer to a problem that only required a delicate set of jewelers tools to mitigate. This is government control.

And I shouldn't need to point out the great similarities here between those days and modern times. Racial theories (Critical Race Theory) and street slogans - BLACK LIVES MATTER. You can't get more "street slogan" than one that's literally painted all over the very streets. In the name of this movement, people are being dehumanized, demonized, terrorized. Property is being destroyed.

Intellectuals worried about inequality, the poverty of the working class, and the commercial culture created by mass production. (They didn’t seem to notice the tension between the last complaint and the first two.) Liberalism seemed inadequate to deal with such problems. When economic crisis hit — in Italy and Germany after World War I, in the United States with the Great Depression — the anti‐​liberals seized the opportunity, arguing that the market had failed and that the time for bold experimentation had arrived.

In the North American Review in 1934, the progressive writer Roger Shaw described the New Deal as “Fascist means to gain liberal ends.” He wasn’t hallucinating. FDR’s adviser Rexford Tugwell wrote in his diary that Mussolini had done “many of the things which seem to me necessary.” Lorena Hickok, a close confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt who lived in the White House for a spell, wrote approvingly of a local official who had said, “If [President] Roosevelt were actually a dictator, we might get somewhere.” She added that if she were younger, she’d like to lead “the Fascist Movement in the United States.” At the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the cartel‐​creating agency at the heart of the early New Deal, one report declared forthrightly, “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.”

So the progressives in the country were all admiring fascism, compared what FDR was doing to it. That's not to say that they didn't admire communism as well, but Germany and Italy seemed to rise in economic prominence faster, so they were hotter ... sexier.

Frankly, when Obama was in office, his Congress passed Obamacare which was fascist in nature through its regulatory arm and there were pundits who openly wished he could be a dictator similar to the woman above opining about FDR. Nothing new under the sun at all!

The New Deal was also openly called Fascist back then.

And of course, the old thing that some have more than others and this was terribly unequal. It lead to the usual complaint that the market had failed which we still hear today after every market crash and downturn in the economic cycle. Of course, it's wearing thin this time because people know the government explicitly caused this one on purpose.

FDR, Mussolini and Hitler were openly admiring of each other on the national stage too for the various policies and regimes they enacted prior to WWII.

The only reason why fascism fell out of favor is because of WWII and its results. That's when progressives desirous of the planned/controlled society shifted their eyes to communism.

The left.
That other side is filled with nothing but nazis, white supremacist, racists and racists deniers.
There all misogynist and bigots. How dare they have the right to speak their ideas.
Chase them from their jobs! Ostracize them!

The right.
That other side is filled with socialist and communists, baby eating satanist and weaklings.
There all mentally ill and stupid. How dare they live their lives the way they choose.
Round them up! Stick them in gitmo!

No stereotypes there...
most people are already in the middle, watching 2 extremes going for first prize in the bat 5#!t crazy contest

Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you.

The issue is the far left,( and there’s way more of those than far right people When’s the last time you saw a conservative riot?) they’ve left our American liberals behind. We have Marxists that have corrupted what was our Democratic Party. It shouldn’t even be called the Democratic Party, but the American socialist party.
There was a deal where Tip Oniel the Democratic Speaker of the house would go have Drinks with President Reagan.
Pelosi is from another planet

It is the nature of liberal/progressive to always more further left. To be liberal/progressive means seeking change. That change is always to the left. Each successive generation of liberals must outdo the previous or they lose the title liberal. Any move toward the right, no matter how slight, would be considered traitorous. So they must continually more further and further left. That is why the extremists of yesteryear are the middle left today. Tomorrow it will be even worse and worse again the year after that. This is precisely the reason why there is no such thing as liberal compromise. Progressive requires motion and the motion will always be to the left. Its a political game of "can you top that". Notice when they fight among themselves. It is always over the degree of extremism. One liberal attacking another for not being far enough left.

a reply to: Vroomfondel

The idea of being more and more regimented and controlled and organized is what moves them left because it's government that can do that. The problem is that such ideas automatically lead to authoritarianism of one type or another at their natural conclusion.

Think about the Old Soviet Union telling President Kennedy that the U.S. should adopt Soviet Ideas, in order to "meet in the middle".

JFK's response?

originally posted by: scraedtosleep
I wont be able to reply to this thread till tomorrow.
...
The left.
That other side is filled with nothing but nazis, white supremacist, racists and racists deniers.
There all misogynist and bigots. How dare they have the right to speak their ideas.
Chase them from their jobs! Ostracize them!

That's actually what the left are doing. Are you claiming the left are not putinig BLM, a MARXIST group in a pedestal, meanwhile they claim the right are all nazis?... Every democrat/socialist leader, alongside your left-wing media, have done this...

originally posted by: scraedtosleep
The right.
That other side is filled with socialist and communists, baby eating satanist and weaklings.
There all mentally ill and stupid. How dare they live their lives the way they choose.
Round them up! Stick them in gitmo!

The left are not protesting in favor of BLM and their goals?... Are you seriously attempting to claim the left, and the left-wing media, are not protesting in favor of BLM and their MARXIST goals?

BTW, we have no issue with democrats/the left wanting to live THEIR lives as they want... The problem we have is the left is FORCING, or attempting to force their views on everyone which is different to what you are attempting to claim...

As for "the middle"?... The middle won't make the BLM types disappear. BLM, Antifa, and other far left-wing groups don't want compromise...

Compromises, or the middle road, has led countries into the worse dictatorships...

Germany attempted to satisfy the left "with some socialism" and it let to Hitler taking power and control...

The same thing happened with Lenin, Stalin, the castro brothers, Chavez/Maduro, etc, etc...

There is no middle road. Unless you leave all society become a Buddhist monk and live a solitary life... That's "the middle road" ignoring what happens in the rest of the world and just think about yourself.

a reply to: scraedtosleep

This decisiveness didn't come along until the internet. Having a president that is gaslighting people isn't helping the situation either. Trump is a toxic person he wears it on his sleeve.

I was born in the 70's grew up in the 80's and 90's. Republicans and Democrats didn't like each other back then but we never had a president that used it for his own personal gain.

Back then we had more of a middle ground between the parties. There were conservative liberals and liberal conservatives. Both sides shared some of the same beliefs.

Things have only gotten worse because Trump doesn't care about unifying the country. Add in the fact that we now have social media where every dumb ass has a voice only creates more division.

And yes we do have foreign governments using our freedom of speech online to sow even more division.