overtone

You can call it anything you want, Overtone, but if the methods they use to control the populace are identical, that makes them equivalent in all but name.

That's just silly.

 

All oppressive authoritarians draw from the same handbook of techniques of oppression, the same arsenal of means. Are you trying to claim that the strike-breaking Robber Barons and strike-breaking Soviet Central Committee were equivalent in all but name?

 

 

Some people in the former USSR did extremely well for themselves after the so-called fall of Communism.

Much better than 'militarized and myth-justified corporate capitalist authoritarians'.

In fact V. Putin is alleged to be the richest man in the world, with a ( possible ) net worth of some $200 bill.

So?

How is Putin not a militarized and myth-justified corporate capitalist authoritarian?

 

( of course this is 'bastardized' Communism, not the ideal

It's not communism at all. Russia's economy is corporate capitalist, and has been since before Putin seized power. They have a joint stock corporations, a stock market, private banking sector, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazprom

There's a reason Putin is so much admired among the predatory capitalist class in the US - which would in my view be strong evidence of incompetence due to immaturity of character, lack of necessary understanding of life, in a Presidential candidate.

Robert Reich makes some interesting points here: -

Twenty or thirty years late. The Republican Party did not die in 2016. It was dead as a legitimate political Party when it impeached Clinton, if not before. It was a corpse - as a legit Party - when it nominated W for the Presidency, rigged key voting districts and the Supreme Court to hand him the office.

 

This isn't a surprise, a shock, a new thing in the public arena. Donald Trump is saying nothing that Rush Limbaugh wasn't saying in 1994, he's not a whit nuttier in his positions than Ronald Reagan was in 1980. Trump is unusually vulgar, like the hate radio and Fox punditry and PAC tactics that threw him up, but he's otherwise an ordinary Republican politician.

(Trump's economics make more sense than Reagan's voodoo, actually, and when Ronnie stood up on his hind legs and defended US support of death squads in Central America

- yes, they tortured, and under US guidance and supervision as well as support

- his invocation of the terrorist risk from the fanatic agents of Communism so close to the US border in Nicaragua was as fantastically delusional as anything Trump is putting out there. )

 

From the Reich link: "I, for one, regret its passing. Our nation needs political parties to connect up different groups of Americans, sift through prospective candidates, deliberate over priorities, identify common principles, and forge a platform

- - - -

But there was always enough of a Republican Party to do these important tasks – to span the divides, give force and expression to a set of core beliefs, and come up with a candidate around whom Party regulars could enthusiastically rally."

 

Robert, Robert - bless your warm and kindly heart replacing the spotlight of history with the glow of nostalgia, but the Republican Party has not been operating like that since the last time you raided the change jar for laundry quarters. That's not how Nixon won the Presidency, that's not how Reagan or W came to power in that Party, that's not where Spiro Agnew and Dan Quayle and Dick Cheney and Sara Palin came from, that's not the Party taking its marching orders from Karl Rove and Frank Lunz and Newt Gingrich and the Kochs/Adelmans of this world.

Banning "hate speech" on college campuses sounds eerily similar to the things that are bolded in the quote above.

No, it doesn't. Starting with the observation that it isn't the government doing it, continuing by noting that "hate speech" is not ideologically defined, and so forth. Details, details.

 

 

The USSR wasn't just communism, but fascist communism

This is bad - this wingnut propaganda meme launched from the Koch brothers's think tanks is spreading like foot fungus, and infecting the innocent.

 

-> There is no such thing as leftwing fascism. There is no such thing as fascist communism, or fascist socialism, or fascist anarchy, or fascist feudalism, or fascist theocracy, or fascist anything that does not involve the central and necessary feature: capitalist corporate organization of the economy and control of the government. Militarized and myth-justified corporate capitalist authoritarians cannot take over the government and run it for the economic benefit of their band of brothers unless they exist in the first place.

 

Fascism is an English word that has a meaning. It is not a synonym for "bad", or "authoritarian", or "totalitarian", or "violent", or "warmongering", or "Nazi", or "police State", or "jackboot wearing", or "anti-Semitic", or "thuggish".

 

Leftwing authoritarian - even totalitarian - ideologies do exist, despite the fixation on them by the pundit-minnows of the US media (that makes them look like hobgoblins of the deluded). Rightwing authoritarianisms that are not fascistic exist as well (capitalism is fully compatible with feudalism, even theocracy). One does not need to be fascistic to be an ugly and oppressive governing officialdom.

This is a great video that goes over the problem. Blue collar workers are caught in a double-bind. Democrats do not respect their culture or values. Republicans do not respect their economic needs.

In what way, specifically, have "Democrats" disrespected the culture or values of "blue collar workers"?

 

Like these guys: http://therealdeal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/construction-workers.jpg

 

https://cbsnewyork.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/120250092.jpg?w=620&h=349&crop=1

 

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.2211130.1430849930!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_635/article-shaft-0506.jpg

 

Or were you thinking more of these cultural and family values: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/51/66/3e/51663e0c3fd069609bbac7cddb4d1a1c.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Vivian_Malone_registering.jpg

https://qph.is.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-10adc7257e051cb3fbc8cc5066ff2d02?convert_to_webp=true

 

 

 

When I see progressives rail against Catholicism because the Pope does not support abortion rights, - -

That's a bit strange. Where did you see that?

 

Was it the same place you saw dominionist Protestant evangelicals, Republican voters, rail against Catholicism because the Pope is the Antichrist? Because of their values, their culture, etc, you know.

 

 

From the beginning what I have been saying is that a man who a Harvard law professor has said was "off the charts brilliant" may be smarter than what you are making him out to be.

Nobody here is making Ted Cruz out to be dumb.

 

The only reason he doesn't scare me as much as Rubio or Jeb would is that he has no real friends. The lesser of two evils is the one with the less evil friends.

 

 

An increasing number of liberal students want to enforce rules on college campuses that limit free speech in order to promote a singular ideology. If that is not fascist, I don't know what is.

Ok: You don't know what fascism is.

"We already have a legal immigration system that every other country in the world has to follow. We shouldn't be giving special privileges to people from Mexico or Central America just because they can jump a fence.

 

Everyone needs to be held to the same standard."

 

 

 

By the standards we apply to other countries, most of the illegals in the US have a plausible claim to amnesty - fleeing death squads and political terrorism.

Why does anyone listen to the lies that come out of his head?

Conditioning. After decades of Fox and Limbaugh, the Republican voting base is in its comfort zone with Trump.

 

He's just saying the same stuff Limbaugh and Hannity and Beck and Kelly and O'Reilly and Coulter and a thousand other lesser lights of the rightwing media operations have been saying for years - decades. Why would that audience reject it now?

 

Yeah, they're angry. It hurts to shoot yourself in the foot over and over again, and a lot of the pain is humiliation. But the lefties had the rise of Trump called as soon as he threw his hat in the ring, and the reasoning was as follows: the Republican voting base is what it is and will behave as it has been behaving.

 

 

My frustration with these illegal immigrants is that the "moderate" position is to essentially give 11 million people a free pass for breaking our country's laws.

If we cannot even enforce the rule of law, why have laws?

They already got the free pass. That happened years ago, and it happened because rich people influenced the enforcement of the relevant laws in order to provide themselves with a large supply of compliant, cheap labor embedded within the lucrative US market.

The question is not whether to give them a free pass. That question was answered years ago, when Reagan (yep - him again) broke the labor unions, defunded the immigration and labor law enforcement against employers, and launched the revamping of the relevant treaties and the cutbacks in welfare and other public service requirements completed by Clinton (that prevented the influx from wrecking local communities and State budgets, which would have made trouble politically).

Here's a deal: the lefties agree to support a large increase in deportations, but after - and only after - the righties agree to hardcore, NSA capability, subpoena enabled, fully funded investigation and criminal prosecution - not just fines: jail sentences and business licenses revoked and criminal gains seized by the government and damages assessed at their real life values - of a substantial fraction (at least a third, by money involved) of the corporate malfeasance involved in the past forty years of importing illegal labor.

You know - enforce the law. The racketeering law. The anti-bribery and anti-corruption law. The labor laws that still exist. Because why have laws if you aren't going to enforce them.

Free pass my ass. The illegals earned their keep, and that's more than you can say for anyone else involved.

The actual qualifications for Supreme Court Justice are not obvious. It's not at all the same job as regular judge, even less is lawyer a solid recommendation, and political involvement might even be negative similar to criminal involvement.

 

What you want is wisdom. Including the wisdom to hire a hotshot clerk who can write your decisions up with impressive scholarship and airtight legal logic.

 

Or as Scalia put it, in one of those odd turns of phrase he would write that were deeper than he was capable of following up: Why would you want nine lawyers interpreting the Constitution?

There is an average gender pay gap favoring men for all the age/occupation groups except one, and that one is explained by the same proposed mechanisms of gender discrimination against women that account for the larger and inclusive and dominant pattern.

This is flat out wrong. I have shown you stats where between 22 and 39 they earn more when you exclude overtime.

Yes - that was the one. Your point?

 

Your response to me saying that you provide no evidence is to waffle and provide no links or evidence...... good one

Uh, I did point to evidence - and you keep providing more.

 

YOU are proposing the theory that part of the gender pay gap is because of the organising of the patriarchy. YOU have to provide the evidence.

I don't think I have to provide evidence that men organize themselves for their mutual benefit in a patriarchy. Beyond that, it is the contention of standard feminist theory that such organization accounts for all manner of burdens on women, including wage gaps - not my theory, standard feminist theory. I agree with it, but that's here nor there.

 

Also how does the stat that women 22-39 earn more than men prove that women get rewarded for their youth???

It doesn't prove anything - it just agrees with standard feminist theory in the matter. Your contention was that it conflicted. It does not.

 

If that was the case then women under 22 would be earning more. Also your vague statement (I'll be generous and call a model) doesn't acount for women earning more for 17 years. If they were getting punished for aging you would see a decline as the age increases. Instead you see a dramatic change from 39 onwards.

You are confused about your stats. They do not show a dramatic change at age 39.

 

I have given you stats that show that when age is concerned women earn more than men per hour from the ages of 22-39 when overtime is excluded in the UK.

You then proceeded to assert, without evidence or argument and contrary to standard feminist theory, that this contradicted or conflicted with the contention that women were in general handicapped and discriminated against by men in the workplace as feminist theory proposes.

 

 

How about some constructive criticism along the lines of steps to rebuild the Republican party so that we again have a multiparty system and some choice in who to vote for.

The way to get a second legitimate Party would probably be to have reasonable Republicans join their ideological fellow travelers in the Democratic Party, and either form a new Party themselves or motivate the Democratic Party voting base to split off and form one of their own.

 

Or one could simply devote oneself to Democratic Party politics, which encompass the range of choices that once involved the Republican Party (Clinton as Eisenhower/Nixon, Sanders as Humphrey/McGovern).

 

The Republican Party should not be rebuilt. It's rotten at the foundation, not the superstructure. It represents a faction of American politics that should be prevented from organizing itself and rising again as an anaerobic entity - its value is as a ubiquitous streak of ornery, best employed as a leavening in all Parties rather than restricted to one.

This post was inspired by the death of Antonin Scalia and the apparent overt political leanings of his profession in the US which can ultimately decide policy.

This is to a significant degree a new factor in the US Supreme Court. The appointment of Supreme Court Justices has always been pressured, politically, but the former necessity of maintaining at least the appearance of impartiality has until the last couple of decades restricted such appointments.

 

Sounds like a broken record, but the legacy of Reagan is the dead elephant in the room that keeps getting in the way. After the already dubious nomination of Antonin Scalia - a political ideologue and dubious "intellectual" , but not an overt Party and political operative - the nomination of Robert Bork was so obviously a political move that when it worked - that is, when it did not disgrace the President or Party involved, and did create elbow room for similarly motivated nominations in the future - it politicized the Court from then on.

 

On one "side", of course. It's not a "both sides" problem.

 

 

No one is disputing the fact that there is a gender pay gap for SOME AGE GROUPS

There is an average gender pay gap favoring men for all the age/occupation groups except one, and that one is explained by the same proposed mechanisms of gender discrimination against women that account for the larger and inclusive and dominant pattern.

 

 

 

With no evidence this screams consipracy theory.

I don't know of any mainstream feminist theories that require the men be consciously conspiring against women. Most of the feminists expounding on the topic seem to think the men are fairly clueless, oblivious to what they are doing. For that I believe you have plenty of evidence in front of you. There are posters here who think that very young women getting paid more by the hour on average for part time and short week entry level jobs than very young men get paid for their regular hours at equivalently unskilled entry level full time jobs is a "slap in the face" to that feminist theory - you can't get much more oblivious than that.

 

If you are trying to argue that men in patriarchies do not organize themselves for their mutual benefit, that any such observation "screams conspiracy theory", allow me to refer you to the dictionary definition of "patriarchy". Unless you are contending that patriarchy does not exist?

 

 

Also doens't even bother to explain how my points, links and claims support this.

See post 105 and 115 of mine, and several others of others, on this thread - you have yet to deal with these responses to your posting here.

Wow took a break and people took the chance to ignore the fact that women earn more than men per hour ages of 22 and 39 (excluding overtime)

 

That was settled in 105 and 115 from me, and several posts from several others.

It was not ignored. If you are going to repost it, you need to pay some attention to its various rebuttals.

 

 

If you take time out of a highly skilled trade you deskill quicker. Physics/tech and engineering jobs move a lot faster than caring professions and people who work in history departments or libraries etc.

Civil engineering jobs "move faster" than library management has been moving these past few decades? That seems unlikely. I doubt the job of professor of physics has "moved faster" than nursing, either.

 

And the executive jobs that supply the largest pay gaps of all don't move any faster for women than they do for men, nor do they seem to "deskill" rapidly.

 

 

Why is it that in richer countries were the households are more stable and have more expendable income women are less likely to be in a senior management role???

One reason is because senior management roles pay better in richer countries, and men in patriarchies self-organize in various ways to restrict high paying jobs to men. That's the standard feminist explanation, well supported by your links and claims.

 

 

what is political campaigning other than propaganda with makeup on?

Establishment of voter familiarity with one's opinions, agenda, record, and general personality.

 

 

We're about to hear a whole lot about how the democratic senate spent 7 months blocking the nomination of Robert Bork. Problem is, even if that's a baseline, it still means any Obama nominee should be voted up or down well before the election.

 

Bork was a straight ahead political nomination, without either intellectual qualification or respectable career credentials - he was being rewarded for his services to the Republican Party in abetting Nixon's various extra-legal maneuverings during Watergate, and his political stances regarding Reagan's social and economic agenda.

 

From Wiki: " When Cox issued a subpoena to President Nixon, asking for copies of taped conversations recorded in the Oval Office and authorized by Nixon, the President initially refused to comply. On Friday, October 19, 1973, Nixon offered what was later known as the Stennis Compromise—asking Senator John C. Stennis to review and summarize the tapes for the special prosecutor's office. Since Stennis was famously hard-of-hearing, Cox refused the compromise that same evening and it was believed that there would be a short rest in the legal maneuvering while government offices were closed for the weekend.

However, on the following day (a Saturday) Nixon ordered Attorney General Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused, and resigned in protest. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. He also refused and resigned.^[4][5]

Nixon then ordered the Solicitor General, Robert Bork (as acting head of the Justice Department), to fire Cox. "

All Obama has to do to beat that equivalency is nominate someone either apolitical, or recognized as intellectually capable, or both.

This is possibly the President best qualified in history to nominate someone to the Supreme Court. Also, it's his job.

 

So mere considerations of good government, without politics intervening, press for a nomination made as soon as at all possible.

 

Some examples of the quality of reasoning of the Justice whose unexpected demise opened up the chair:

 

The dissent in the creation science school case, entire: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/482/578#writing-USSC_CR_0482_0578_ZD

Overview: the law did not violate the establishment clause because the legislators who passed it sincerely believed in the scientific validity of creationism. That sincerity, regardless of the law's actual history or even intended effects, expunged any Constitutional conflicts.

 

And a few misc:

This is an execution, not surgery. Where does that come from, that you must find the method of execution that causes the least pain?

I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over nonreligion.

Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

My State will hold Party caucuses March first, which are non-binding platform-establishing Party bureaucratic shindigs, and Primary votes for Party ballot designation in August.

 

The caucuses I view as a get- together, see some people I haven't seen in a while, meet local candidates I don't know anything about, try to sneak a favorite initiative into the Party platform (One year a coordinated group of caucuses had the Democratic Party advocating for nude beaches in their official platform). I go if they don't conflict with my job.

 

I always vote in the Primary - nowhere does one's vote count for more. In my State the only restriction on one's Primary vote is that you have to choose one Party on the ballot, and vote within it. I tend to pick the Party with something at stake for me in one of the races - where there's no clear consensus candidate for a significant office, and I have a preference. Where I live the local pols are all Republican, so local offices with Party designation are essentially chosen in the Republican primary - that sways my ballot choice, sometimes. You don't want a nutcase for DA or Sheriff or tax assessor because his whole church made it to the primary.

 

 

I have admired a few Republicans from previous years...

I don't care what Overtone says, I always liked R. Reagan.

Liking him is one thing. Forgetting or ignoring what he actually did, as President, is a much different thing.

The fictional account of the Reagan tenure, especially the obscuring of the still accumulating and severe economic damage his ridiculous economic policies have imposed on the US ever since his pivotal terms in office, should be discarded forthwith. Whatever you like about the guy, launching the rollback of the New Deal, deregulating the banks and handing big tax breaks to hedge fund founders and the like, handing the economy back to the people Roosevelt had rescued it from, was a very bad - incompetently bad, significantly bad - course of action. It did harm, and does harm to this day. It's how we got into the mess we're in now.

I am not asking you to accept my view of the world. That is unlikely. I have had different insights and thoughts that remove me from completely agreeing with just about everybody. March to the beat of my own drummer, so to speak.

Everything you have posted here so far has been standard issue bs from the media influence operations of the wingnut right.

 

I can get it from Rush Limbaugh, or the American Enterprise Institute, or any of several Fox media "pundits", or Donald Trump's latest rant, or your posting here. Same words, same viewpoint, same fictional rewriting of history, same abuse of vocabulary and resort to personal attack. You didn't think any of that up for yourself, because if you had you would not have matched the specific errors and fictions one sees from the wingnut propaganda operations - you would have made your own errors. The only question is where, specifically, you found it.

 

 

In this cycle, I want a republican candidate that can beat the democrat candidate, because I think we are losing our respect for authority and law and order, and workable principles, - -

The Democratic candidates encourage far more respect for law and order than the Republican ones, by proposing justice be adhered to as a workable principle. When you discard justice as if it were an unworkable principle, you undermine people's respect for law and order - as we have seen, in the American pattern of abuse of black people by their local police forces.

 

You said you wanted a nomination for a competent, or capable, Republican - but what you really seem to want is the name of a Republican in public political life whom other people would be willing to see govern the country. In other words, not just capable and competent at what they do, but interested in doing good things that reasonable people want to see done in the way of governance. That is unlikely to be available, because the Republican Party has cleansed itself of those politicians at the national level. Gingrich did that, beginning in 1992.

 

 

 

It's the "get away with" process I'd name as one of our biggest problems. It's not a purely Republican Party-caused situation.

Regardless of what its various causes are, the rise of fascism and its co-option of the Republican Party is not a bipartisan feature of the political landscape. The Democratic Party has indeed been moved farther into the right/authoritarian quadrant, and corporate influence is a likely cause, but it has not been co-opted by fascism as the Republican Party has been.

 

The Republican Party is a problem in significant ways the Democratic Party , which is still functioning as a normal political Party in many respects, is not.

Capable and trustworthy is a requirement for a CEO. Corporate boards vet the leaders of their firms, very carefully. Ethics and social responsibility is a must for a corporate leader in this country. Many of these individuals, vetted by the boards, are excellent material for leadership of this country.

A lot of upper echelon executives are amoral, even sociopathic.

 

The tobacco, agribusiness, financial, and petrochemical industry CEO behavior proves that.

 

CEO compensation, relative to employee compensation, has risen by an order of magnitude and more in a couple of decades. CEO performance has not risen during that time. That is proof that the boards involved are not vetting those guys, and that no ethical principles are constraining CEO behavior in general.

 

In the US CEOs in general pay lower tax rates than their midlevel employees, or the average citizens, pay.

 

 

Looking at the chart, I would say that single income families became two income families and then a combination of factors slowed the economy, took many of our jobs overseas and our workforce aged.

A combination of what factors? Do you remember? It wasn't that long ago.

"Knowing" when politicians have made false statements would change nothing, among the voting base of the Republican Party in the US. One must care, and also comprehend the nature of "false" vs "true" as the distinction applies to statements made by public officials who represent oneself.

 

There's something going on in the psychology of the American public that reminds one of what Bertrand Russell called the "Sunday Truth". It's specific to politics - call it the "campaign truth".

 

Look at this, for example:

 

And I nominate either of the Koch brothers. They are capable and trustworthy, socially responsible, build great stuff that improves our quality of life, and employ 60,000 tax payers.

That poster will freely toggle between 1) complaining about politicians being corrupt and failing to represent the interests of the citizens they represent, and 2) celebrating the Koch brothers - who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars corrupting American politics - as "socially responsible".

 

And it's not because they lack exposure to facts, or the distinction between "false" and "true" in the statements of American politicians.

On the democratic side, I'm curious to see what happens in Nevada and South Carolina, specifically among black and latino voters. This population is clearly becoming more open to and aware of Sanders than at any time before, but I'm not yet convinced it is happening in large enough numbers

A couple of well known media figures and intellectuals - Killer Mike, Ta-Nehisi Coates, some others - have come down on Sanders's side.

 

The Clinton history of welfare "reform" and drug law enforcement and so forth, while not specifically originating with Hillary, is going to swing some black votes to Sanders as soon as he becomes familiar in his own right. Her close association with Israel won't help either (Sanders is Jewish, but not Zionist).

 

Hillary is at her peak of popularity now. The only question is how far she slides over the next month or so, and where, and among whom. She is not going to pick up any more black votes until after the primaries, when running against Trump or whomever - the question is how many she will lose. The longer it stretches out, the more she will lose. It's good for her that SC is coming up as soon as it is.