kvduff
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Democratic socialism is the gateway to communism. And that’s the new rage here. I view it as a precancerous cell, needs to be eradicated before it metastasizes.
Does anyone here think there will be any traction to this Italy gate?
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RBB
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Yep, pretty much the definition.
Woody
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The 'gateway' is our schools/education IMHO
RBB
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I tend to agree with that sir.
kvduff
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I don’t disagree, however, as an educator, I try to do my part. I teach civics, and US History. Not the revisionist versions.
Searageous
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No terms of use were violated, you can find countless left wing propaganda on line, including threats, that go unchecked by these corporations. It's clearly a one way street, so much so that conservatives started sites such as Parler which Apple and others are now trying to shut down. No violation of user agreement there, they just don't like what is being said on that platform so they are trying to silence it. Right out of the marxist playbook! Anyway, were not convincing each other of anything and next time I'm in Miami I'll tell my Cuban friends how good they had it before that took the boat ride to the U.S. There is nothing exciting about this political talk so I'm going to stick to Sea Ray topics, which are!
Searageous
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Aye Aye, Captain!
hottoddie
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You must be in conservative state. In the average middle/liberal area your job would be in jeopardy to say the least. And forget college that's far worse.
kvduff
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Blue state , not worried
Carpediem44DB
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@Boat Guy, I'd love to buy you a beer! I'm quite surprised that the thread has not been move to the tank, I was hoping for a spirited polite conversation about the veracity of certain 'news' sources. I think every one of your points are right in line with the way I see things as well. I live in Cali and have no plans of leaving, I just roll with the system and figure out ways to deal with the wackadoo liberals. Mostly I ignore them and just go about my life. My wife often wonders if we should leave but I figure by the time we decided where to go and went there the libs will have invaded and ruined it there.
Yeah, I went to buy some ammo last week. I have not purchased any for a couple of years. Had to show my passport and pass a real time back ground check and then sign documents for each type of ammo purchased. Time to just pack as much ammo as you can possibly store and hide it well. When they come for it we will just have to give it them hot!
Carpe Diem
OMG! You don't even understand what democratic socialism is. It means that all citizens have basic needs such as healthcare and education provided by government. It really means you have a decent society that provides the essentials for everyone. But it's determined democratically not imposed by an authoritarian government. Wealthy folks still have private clinics and elite schools available to them. They can still buy big yachts and belong to exclusive clubs. Some hotbeds of democratic socialism that have seen success in improving their societies are Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, Canada, Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand. Hardly the gateways to communism that you are suggesting.
Wrong! Twitter has a well-defined policy:
Violent threats policy
Overview
March 2019
You may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people. We also prohibit the glorification of violence.
Healthy conversation is only possible when people feel safe from abuse and don’t resort to using violent language. For this reason, we have a policy against threatening violence on Twitter. We define violent threats as statements of an intent to kill or inflict serious physical harm on a specific person or group of people.
Trump violated that policy by repeatedly inciting his Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to terrorize the Capital.
...and so he lost his imagined entitlement to further undermine democracy and threaten to destroy democratic institutions on Twitter.
You are correct. I am a proud Canadian that has spent a fair bit of enjoyable time in the U.S. I follow U.S. politics closely. You are also correct that many millions did die under communist regimes. The remaining communist countries are Vietnam, Cuba, Laos and nominally China, although by using capitalistic strategies it will soon be the largest economy in the world. Communism, as a governing philosophy, clearly has failed. Why are you still so afraid of an old idea?
hottoddie
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To convert our system to something similar to those countries you mention the US would have to reduce our military to a fraction of what it is and leave us vulnerable. Those countries rely heavily on the US to protect them and their tax rates are astronomical as well. Most people live in small clusters in small apartments. Families own one small car and gas cost $6-8 a gallon. Life in the US as we know it would cease to exist.
Ok now do Ayatollah Khamenei.
"Those that fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it." Winston Churchill.
Searageous
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Socialism is the economic branch of communism. Anytime a govt is forcing you to pay for others it’s communism. The U.S. has been the most successful country in history because of capitalism, which inspires hard work and creativity. No one in America wants or needs the govt to tell them what to do with their hard earned money.
Equality of opportunity is not the same as equality of outcome, the latter is the goal of socialism.
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"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." - Yoda
Fear of communism lead the U.S. into the Vietnam war, where 58,200 young Americans died, along with over 1 million N.Vietnamese soldiers, 250 ,000 S. Vietnamese soldiers and over 2 million civilians on both sides. The war had ended by 1975 with American forces going home and Vietnamese forces winning the country. 20 years later, the U.S. resumed diplomatic and economic relations with Vietnam. 45 years later, there are now fewer communist countries in the world than in 1975. The fear of communism spreading, the "domino effect" was wrong. What should this history teach us?
"Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose."
Dwight D. Eisenhower - a very smart man.
Searageous
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Please quote what POTUS said that violated this policy, and remember is cannot be subjective. No summary please, quote.
The U.S. may have once been among the richest societies in history but it still lags behind other developed nations in many important indicators of human development – key factors like how children are educated, treatment of prisoners, how Americans take care of the sick and disabled and more. In some instances, the U.S.’s performance is downright abysmal, far below foreign countries that are snidely looked-down-upon as “third world.” The countries Trump referred to as "shit holes". Here are six of the most egregious examples that show how far the U.S. still has to go to be truly great:
1. Criminal Justice
We all know the U.S. criminal justice system is flawed, but few are likely aware of just how bad it is compared to the rest of the world. The International Center for Prison Studies estimates that America imprisons 716 people per 100,000 citizens (of any age). That’s significantly worse than Russia (484 prisoners per 100,000 citizens), China (121) and Iran (284). The only country that incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than we do is North Korea. The U.S. is also the only developed country that executes prisoners – and our death penalty has a serious race problem: 42 percent of those on death row are black, compared to less than 15 percent of the overall population.
Over two and a half million American children have a parent behind bars. A whopping 60 percent of those incarcerated in U.S. prisons are non-violent offenders, many of them in prison for drug charges (overwhelmingly African-Americans). Even while our crime rate has fallen, our incarcerated population has climbed. As of 2011, an estimated 217,000 American prisoners were raped each year – that’s 600 new victims every day, a truly horrifying number. In 2010, the Department of Justice released a report about abuse in juvenile detention centers. The report found that 12.1 percent of all youth held in juvenile detention reported sexual violence; youth held for between seven and 12 months had a victimization rate of 14.2 percent.
2. Gun Violence
The U.S. leads the developed world in firearm-related murders, and the difference isn’t a slight gap – more like a chasm. According to United Nations data, the U.S. has 20 times more murders than the developed world average. Our murder rate also dwarfs many developing nations, like Iraq, which has a murder rate less than half ours. More than half of the most deadly mass shootings documented in the past 50 years around the world occurred in the United States, and 73 percent of the killers in the U.S. obtained their weapons legally. Another study finds that the U.S. has one of the highest proportion of suicides committed with a gun. Gun violence varies across the U.S., but some cities like New Orleans and Detroit rival the most violent Latin American countries, where gun violence is highest in the world.
3. Healthcare
A study last year found that in many American counties, especially in the deep South, life expectancy is lower than in Algeria, Nicaragua or Bangladesh. The U.S. is the only developed country that does not guarantee health care to its citizens; even after the Affordable Care Act, millions of poor Americans will remain uninsured because governors, mainly Republicans, have refused to expand Medicaid, which provides health insurance for low-income Americans. Although the federal government will pay for the expansion, many governors cited cost, even though the expansion would actually save money. America is unique among developed countries in that tens of thousands of poor Americans die because they lack health insurance, even while we spend more than twice as much of our GDP on healthcare than the average for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a collection of rich world countries. The U.S. has an infant mortality rate that dwarfs comparable nations, as well as the highest teenage-pregnancy rate in the developed world, largely because of the politically-motivated unavailability of contraception in many areas.
4. Education
The U.S. is among only three nations in the world that does not guarantee paid maternal leave (the other two are Papua New Guinea and Swaziland). This means many poor American mothers must choose between raising their children and keeping their jobs. The U.S. education system is plagued with structural racial biases, like the fact that schools are funded at the local, rather than national level. That means that schools attended by poor black people get far less funding than the schools attended by wealthier students. The Department of Education has confirmed that schools with high concentrations of poor students have lower levels of funding. It’s no wonder America has one of the highest achievement gaps between high income and low income students, as measured by the OECD. Schools today are actually more racially segregated than they were in the 1970s. Our higher education system is unique among developed nations in that is funded almost entirely privately, by debt. Students in the average OECD country can expect about 70 percent of their college tuition to be publicly funded; in the United States, only about 40 percent of the cost of education is publicly-funded. That’s one reason the U.S. has the highest tuition costs of any OECD country.
5. Inequality
By almost every measure, the U.S. tops out OECD countries in terms of income inequality, largely because America has the stingiest welfare state of any developed country. This inequality has deep and profound effects on American society. For instance, although the U.S. justifies its rampant inequality on the premise of upward mobility, many parts of the United States have abysmal levels of social mobility, where children born in the poorest quintile have a less than 3 percent chance of reaching the top quintile. Inequality harms our democracy, because the wealthy exert an outsized political influence. Sheldon Adelson, for instance, spent more to influence the 2012 election than the residents of 12 states combined. Inequality also tears at the social fabric, with a large body of research showing that inequality correlates with low levels of social trust. In their book The Spirit Level, Richard Pickett and Kate Wilkinson show that a wide variety of social indicators, including health and well-being are intimately tied to inequality.
6. Infrastructure
The United States infrastructure is slowly crumbling apart and is in desperate need for repair. One study estimates that our infrastructure system needs a $3.6 trillion investment over the next six years. In New York City, the development of Second Avenue subway line was first delayed by the outbreak of World War II; it’s still not finished. In South Dakota, Alaska and Pennsylvania, water is still transported via century-old wooden pipes. Some 45 percent of Americans lack access to public transit. Large portions of U.S. wastewater capacity are more than half a century old and in Detroit, some of the sewer lines date back to the mid-19th century. One in nine U.S. bridges (or 66,405 bridges) are considered “structurally deficient,” according to the National Bridge Inventory. All of this means that the U.S. has fallen rapidly in international rankings of infrastructure.
America is a great country, and it does many things well. But it has vast blind spots. The fact that nearly 6 million Americans, or 2.5 percent of the voting-age population, cannot vote because they have a felony on record means that politicians can lock up more and more citizens without fear of losing their seat. Our ideas of meritocracy and upward mobility blind us to the realities of class and inequality. Our healthcare system provides good care to some, but it comes at a cost – millions of people without health insurance. If Americans don’t critically examine these flaws, how can the U.S. ever hope to progress as a society?
