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Best line of the thread!

I was going to say Hitler probably loved his dogs, but I didn't want to Godwin myself and someone beat me to it.

Instead, let's take a look at the Hare Psychopathology Checklist:

-Glibness/superficial charm
-Grandiose sense of self-worth
-Pathological lying
-Cunning/manipulative
-Lack of remorse or guilt
-Shallow affect (genuine emotion is short-lived and egocentric)
-Callousness; lack of empathy
-Failure to accept responsibility for his or her own actions

Some people I know are quite nice and very caring to those around them, but harbor surprisingly intense racist views / superior entitled feelings / misogyny which is usually directed towards those not so near. Every time I encounter this I'm flummoxed anew by how people can not only entertain, but integrate seemingly diametrically opposite principles into their world view. We are physically incapable of evaluating ourselves in a truly independent manner, and I can only suppose that this is what leads to blind spots and other malfunctioning defense mechanisms. Throw some power into the mix and things can get scary.

Over a long distance, you learn about the strength of your horse; over a long time, you learn about the character of your friend. - Chinese Proverb

Those on the right here seem to be talking a lot about liberty. I like liberty. Living in the US, how do I get more of it?

For instance, who do I vote for to keep the government off the backs of my female & LGBT friends and family? Not the Rs. Social conservatives here seem intent on controlling women's reproductive systems, and pretty much hate the gay. They aren't exactly pro-minority either.

Maybe I think the Fed is taking too much of my tax money and giving it to the military and "defense" contractors to kill people abroad. Who do I vote for to minimize this? Not the R's, they always want to expand the military (and in so doing ironically expand the wasteful Fed they claim to hate so much).

If I feel that the state should be completely secular and that the government should keep it's nose out of my religious affairs, who do I vote for? Not the R's, the tenets of fundamentalist Christianity are part of their platform.

Taking my life is the ultimate in lost liberty. Which party should I vote for so that my chances of being murdered by the state (for whatever reason) are diminished? Not the Rs, they fully embrace the death penalty. If it turns out I was innocent my rotting corpse can't exactly appeal from the grave.

So I don't get it. Is the word "liberty" just code for gun rights and sticking it to the poors? Why all the bitterness?

I despise the fact that, in the decades before her, the economic foundations of the country were permitted to decline to such a low point that drastic measures were required. Had the economy she faced coming in not been made to deteriorate so badly before her, the cures would have been much less painful.

It's quite problematic that there isn't a coherent set of beliefs that divide conservative and liberal philosophies. Certainly economic and social conservatism are basically orthogonal. Your feelings about one have little power to predict your feelings about the other. And it's problematic that the political parties don't line up very cleanly on those either. Political parties are kind of like politicians. They have some kind of beliefs but for the most part they are just looking for votes, so the split up the electorate in some way that makes sense to them.

For most of this discussion we have been restricting ourselves to economic conservatism vs liberalism, and with good reason. Those ideas generalize a little better than social issues and they are also more fundamental/important in my opinion. I would argue that decisions like gay marriage and other social issues should be decided at the local or at least state level, where the group of people affected can be more-or-less in agreement and where people who feel strongly enough can move to a different locality. This again supports the generally conservative position that those issues shouldn't decided by the federal government and imposed on everyone. The nation was founded on the principle that different states have different needs and want different laws, but it's a principle that is contradicted all the time today. The feds bully states around (both for liberal and conservative causes) and it causes a lot of ire.

As for the military stuff, in principle conservatives should be arguing to limit spending on that to just what's needed (as they should in everything). In practice, when the parties split up the electorate, republicans took military personnel and those who support expanding military power. For the most part that's a hangover from the debate about how to handle the cold war--at the time the democrats took the other side in order to scoop up the pot-smoking hippies. But in the absence of the threat of communism, there's nothing particularly conservative (or liberal, in the usual sense of the word) about wanting to be the world police.

Certainly the bold point should provide common ground where most of us can find agreement.

However, how drastic the measures needed were of "Milk Snatcher Thatcher", how they were taken and the deep implications of what their legacy has been have left the UK to enter into a much more sinister kind of decay of moral values and cultural decline -- precisely the same kind of decline of that the US is experiencing after having the country be taken over by plutocratic profiteers who have weakened & destroyed the democratic institutions, made a mockery of fairness and well-functioning markets (including labour markets) without respect for the rule of law and a level playing field of equal opportunity, leaving behind deep polarization and divisions among citizens with even bigger, more intractable permanent underclasses than before.

It should come as no surprise that the US and the UK are very much in the same sorry boat anno 2013. After all, "The government(=We the people) is the enemy"-Reaganism was an earnest copy of "Let's sell everything we've got for a song"-Thatcherism packaged and marketed by the boys at the Heritage Foundation using a B-actor as the front man to sell the idea of freely giving up ones' right to self-determination to Americans like so much toothpaste. Americans let America be taken over by a cruel British meme without so much as a fight, despite having more guns than people.

Maggie Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan were two demented sides of the same carnie huckster's two-headed coin used to flim flam their respective populations into participating in the biggest class warfare heist in their histories transferring wealth from the public into the hands of a tiny elite while transforming their economies into casino capitalism dependent on bubble after bubble of selling fraudulent insurance and financial instruments to each other.

theJourney, thanks for such a well balanced, reasoned and fair assessment.

TheJourney

Very well said I agree 100%

When Thatcher came to power many Unions were out of control, no ones saying things didn't need to change but there's change and there's annihilation.

Arthur Scargill was ridiculed in the press and many people still write him off as a joke today, but almost without exception, every single thing he warned about became 100% true.

When I started work in the early 80s everyone I knew got a 1 hr lunch break, everyone worked the hours they were paid, and most companies treated their staff with a bit of respect.

Roll on to today, unions have almost dissapeared, the amount of people who I know that don't have a lunch break is unbelievable, many are paid until 5 or 5:30 pm but are often there until gone 7pm, and are scared of loosing their jobs if they stand up for their rights.

A factory near me got their staff to vote away their lunch break for an extra hours pay, I spoke to a few workers, they said they needed the money. They had 12 hr shifts with just two 10 min tea breaks. New staff thought they were breaking the law, it turned out they weren't.

Unions were there for a reason. Some needed their wings clipped as they got too big for their boots, but the overall need was real.

We now have very few and people are working longer and longer hours, scared to stick up for their rights and most are completely stressed out which is doing no good for their long term health.

There is political partisanship and rhetoric, and there are the rants of the paranoid schizophrenic. To me it feels like you blur the line, TheJourney. Maybe I have just never met anyone as extreme as you are (or at least as you talk) so I'm caught off guard.

You very much get the direction of change wrong, though. Government size, influence, and power in our lives and our economy has been continuously increasing, with short pauses (Reagan) but without any setbacks for all of recent history. You would have to go back before the great depression to find a case of the opposite, if there are any. I know this is true of the US. I'm assuming the situation is similar in other parts of the world (perhaps former communist countries are the exception but they are under new governments, so I don't count them).

It is not the nature of government to shrink or to relinquish any power or influence it takes from the people. That's an unfortunate and inescapable reality.

Also note that the corporations you speak of as if they were bad guys are amoral entities that seek only profit by definition. There is no way of changing that and never will be--that's not their function. They are tools (legal fictions around which people form contracts), not bad guys or good guys. It's the government's job to create a situation which these fictions have incentives to do the right thing. If they don't, the blame is the government's ineptitude.

Perhaps we agree on that point, though. I just get tired of people anthropomorphizing firms and assigning moral blame to them. Firms have never, and will never, have a heart. That is to be expected. If you are set on finding one in them, you can expect to be frustrated forever and you will never find a solution to the ills you perceive to be caused by them.

Correct me if the situation is different in the UK, but unions are in a major secular decline in the US and it has nothing whatsoever to do with government action--quite the contrary, the unions that are still around have incredible leverage over the government. Workers have simply stopped supporting unions of their own free will. In most cases it's because the unions do more harm then good (there are very few controls to keep them from becoming corrupt...far fewer than there are in government or business).

You can argue that there ought to be more unions, but at least in the US you can't blame anyone in politics for it. Workers just don't want to be in unions the way they used to. Unions are kind of an old-economy thing.

Some people talk from absolute, extreme positions. Nothing is as simple as theJourney or Ojustaboo suggest. In trying to present a more balanced view of Thatcher for instance I would come across as defending her, which is inconsistent with my view of her and her policies. So I'm not going to do that. But the Thatcher thing is very much more complex and nuanced than is being portrayed here.

Just my own trouble. I feel myself in a left-wing company often as the right devil, and in right-wing circles as the liberal enemy.
And I can understand a lot - so perhaps 80% in both argumentations - and that is the problem, it is the question of perspective, which one should be able to freely move. Like in real life.

The action in this thread is very heavy.

....and the tone varies a lot.

Deleted

Reagan busted the air traffic controllers union personally. Which set a tone of intimidation, yadda, yadda.


The individual worker is almost powerless, so unless you want to end up virtual slave labor there is absolutely no substitute for collective bargaining. Countries do it when they enter into treaties with each other against other countries, companies do it when they form alliances, why is is it such a quaint thing in your eyes when workers do it?

Unions are the only reason we have basic human rights in the workplace anywhere, and the the demise of unions in the US probably has more to do with companies moving their manufacturing overseas where labor is non-unionized, and therefore cheaper and more easily exploitable. When I worked at a major telecom equipment manufacturer they got rid of all of the union jobs by getting rid of all US manufacturing. I suppose those workers were happy to see those decent paying union jobs go, relieved to no longer be yoked by the crushing oppression of the cruel, evil union.


Master! The barbarian union hoards are at the gate and they want you to pay me a living wage! Lordy, can't a good slave be free to be happily enslaved anymore?

[Edited]

Well, let's try. The things I leave behind, my writings, my love, the little of music I could say to have given to others, my possessions, the memories others keep of me, even the parts of my dead body - who knows where they will be going. Many places, I am sure. It's for others to decide. But I myself? Certainly: Nowhere. At least that is my conviction, and my hope.

Now that might inspire some music. Even on an Avant Grand...

I get the feeling the leftists you've been exposed to are of the milquetoast / straw man variety. Not your fault I suppose, flaming centrists in any almost other country are labeled hard left in the US. Anyone might be confused.

If you are open to new ideas you might try A People's history of the United States by Howard Zinn. Though I have to say that it's an eye popping, harrowing read, not exactly light bedtime fare, and I personally couldn't make it past the first 1/4 or so for health reasons.


But companies, like Soylent Green, is people! No anthropomorphizing necessary. When groups of people do evil things they aren't evil? Particularly when they're doing it for profit (evil^2)? I don't see how economic theory relieves anyone of the responsibility of their actions.

Which leads me to another notion: the most dangerous social construct mankind ever invented is the diffusion of responsibility. If one person does wrong we all pretty much agree that he should get the full blame. If ten people are equally guilty of a single wrong we start scratching our heads and do our best to single out an instigator. And when I put part of my savings in a bank that invests part of it in a company that exploits child labor in some far off land, I have so little blood on my hands that maybe I don't even notice it.

When some borderline paranoid schizophrenic points out the blood, people with all the comforts in the world, who live like pampered kings of old, get defensive and start rationalizing, saying things like "it's dog eat dog" "I earned that money fair and square" "the world as we know it would disappear without an investor class" "emerging economies have to start somewhere" "you gotta break a few eggs to make an omlette" "hard work builds character" "maybe those 5 year olds enjoy working 18 hours a day" "my great Uncle worked in the mines when he was 8 (before the unions)" etc.

Our psyches are chock full of defense mechanisms that tend to make us look better to ourselves than we really are. It's no wonder that many first worlders don't understand how complicit they are in most of the world's woes, they naturally avoid self educational opportunities that might make them feel the pain of guilt. Which we lefties seem to be shouldering the brunt of lately, there is no equivalent to "liberal guilt" on the right - indeed it is used as something of an epithet, a sign of weakness.

Point taken. Individually, some of those people are culpable, if they are breaking laws. But the organization doesn't have a mandate to be kind or provide for the needy or whatever. If the individuals in the company break no law and they maximize the company profit, they have done nothing wrong. If the outcome is not what we want, then the laws and property rights were not set up right. Employees work for companies of their own free will. People buy from companies of their own free will. There's not a lot of room for guilt.

Speaking of guilt and compulsion, I disagree with the idea that it's unions that keep us paid well, and so do the people dropping out of unions like so many autumn leaves. Companies pay employees according to their marginal productivity. If the company doesn't pay enough or doesn't provide enough benefits, the correct option is to leave. If there are no comparable outside options, it means you were overpaid. If we were as critical of companies for paying people whose productivity is far below their pay grade as we are for what we perceive to be the opposite, we would have far more negative feelings toward these companies. But it's not actually possible for a company to pay someone below their productivity unless they can effectively compel them to stay.

Back in the 1980's there were a few actual government actions against unions (and also many in favor). But they didn't make a difference. The big exodus from unions came later. Let me be clear, I don't think unions are useless. I can imagine circumstances when they can be useful (for example, if the employer is getting monopoly power or maybe in an industry at the bottom where people's marginal productivity is not enough to sustain life). I don't agree that unions require government support to stay alive where they are needed, and I don't believe a law that compels employees in an industry to join the union whether they want to or not is moral. Those are the laws many industries have now.

Unions and other government-sponsored productivity killers drive companies out of business or make them scale back. This decreases demand for employees and puts workers in a worse situation to negotiate a good salary. In that way unions can and often do harm workers in an industry more than they help.

Parenthetically, one reason people don't like unions is that they are horribly rife with corruption. Many union bosses make obscene money, skimmed from employees and the employer by compulsory means, and are neck deep in various types of crime. Sometimes that crime is a means to enforce their union agenda but other times it's just a way to enrich themselves. They put both executives and politicians to shame in terms of corruption. In the case of politicians, the corruption sometimes goes goes hand in hand, though. The politicians write laws that force people to pay the unions, the union bosses use employee money to donate to the politicians' campaigns, whether the employees want to or not.