Clay Bennett for October 28, 2013

Good counterpoint!

LOL ! Bloody funny.

Here’s what the server hosting that website will look like

“Tigger missed the joke again…”

rotfl! As predicted;-)

You do have a point. He should have been more careful than to make such an unrealistic blanket statement. He should have said something along the lines of “For those of you who buy your own insurance, if you like your insurance plan and it meets the ACA minimum requirements, you can keep your insurance plan.”

Y’know, as usual the conservatives miss the Big Picture.Why is it that our government can build a system that goes through hundreds of millions of phone calls & emails, looking for terrorist activity, but we can’t have a working Healthcare.gov?

Rednecks?? What happened to the whole left ideology about not judging or being derogatory to those who have differing cultures, views etc? The ugly hypocrisy coming from the far right and left seems to be becoming the norm rather than the exception these days.

How thoughtful of you to work in the word “spook”

Might it be money as a motivator. Let’s face it – there is no money in being a spook , just power . The money is in controlling the nations sheeple and their cashflow…I admit there is a lot of money being ‘redistributed’ to private insurance companies. If that is where the money is, why do we as a nation, give more money & power to the spooks? I don’t think anyone can claim Obama ‘transformed’ our priorities there…

Might it be money as a motivator. Let’s face it – there is no money in being a spook , just power . The money is in controlling the nations sheeple and their cashflow…I admit there is a lot of money being ‘redistributed’ to private insurance companies. If that is where the money is, why do we as a nation, give more money & power to the spooks? I don’t think anyone can claim Obama ‘transformed’ our priorities there…

And here’s a paragraph from your link:

“So yes, individuals can keep the plans they have if those plans remain largely the same. But individuals receiving cancellation notices will have a choice of enrolling in subsidized insurance in the exchanges and will probably end up paying less for more coverage. Those who don’t qualify for the tax credits will be paying more for comprehensive insurance that will be there for them when they become sick (and could actually end up spending less for health care since more services will now be covered). They will also no longer be part of a system in which the young and healthy are offered cheap insurance premiums because their sick neighbors are priced out or denied coverage. That, after all, is the whole point of reform.”

Well you certainly aren’t in the middle and most certainly don’t lean right.. doesn’t leave much alternative Doc..

And one further comment — leftists have to deal with the legacy of Marx — I’m a non-Marxist leftist, but I have to make that clear, because Marx is such a towering figure in the history of the left. Liberals don’t have to worry about dealing with Marx, because no liberal ever had any interest in Marx or Marxism.

That’s interesting. I see your point — certainly there are liberals who can recognize that Marx was pretty smart. But here was my point: If you say “I’m a liberal”, nobody (who is moderately sane and intelligent) says, “Well, you must be a Marxist.” But when I say, “I’m a leftist” or “I’m a socialist”, people do say “Well, you must be a Marxist”, and I have to go to a lot of trouble to explain that I’m not, and that there is a whole tradition of non-Marxist leftists.

A little further on the topic, since dinner isn’t ready yet. I was brought up as a liberal, though to the left of the liberal spectrum, and I still have a lot of regard for liberals and liberalism. Some liberals, sometimes. I became attracted to the left in the early sixties, first because of the civil rights movement, and then because of the War in Vietnam. It’s just a fact that liberals were mushy on civil rights. It was the left that led the movement, and liberals came along late. (i have a deeper critique, but I will leave it for now.) Then when the War in Vietnam started to escalate, that was a liberal adventure — and US liberals by and large have been in favor of US imperialism. Again it was the left that led the opposition to the War. So when I got involved a little bit in the civil rights movement (I’m just a few years too young to have been part of the Mississippi Summer) and then quite a lot in the anti-war movement, I saw that it was the left that had the theory and the practice.+Mostly my politics is based in my moral feelings, rather than in economic analysis, but just as one more point that may distinguish leftists from liberals, I suspect that a lot of liberals think that union are a good thing as a sort of addendum to the market, especially as a kind of safely value, while leftists would say that unions (and for some of us, worker control) should be at the center of the system.

I had my dinner hours ago. ;-)

I will have to again consult what a Liberal is supposed to represent since I suspect I’m liberal and not a Liberal (political science not being one of my fortés). Which is why I’d say lonecat is quite liberal but I think that might irk him since he might interpret that I think he is a Liberal. Are there differences transatlatically?@Martens. At uni, my faculty was quite Libertarian which initially aligned with what I thought as myself in those days. However, I quickly became disenchanted as I felt no afinity with the values they championed. I thought they were quite bloody awful in fact. It is no wonder my best mate in my freshman year was an ardent Marxist ;-). My knowledge of political sciences was quite poor then, and not much better now I suspect. I should stick to engineering.

People who lean left want distinguish their varied viewpoints by coining liberal vs. leftist but the definition of leftist pretty much destroys that distinction.. it’s rather simply really. left·istˈleftist/Submitnoun1.a person who supports the political views or policies of the left.

You may be a moderate liberal with a different viewpoint than lonecat, but a liberal is still a leftist.

I understand multiple dimensions very much and don’t doubt for a second you are just that. My point however is that leftist is not what you guys seem to think it is. You can’t be a liberal without being a leftist. Leftist is a very vague term that can’t simply be altered as one sees fit. There is nothing wrong with being leftist or liberal and a leftist can certainly be described as a conservative liberal. There are very very few that straddle that line directly in the middle of both sides and can truly be attributed to neither left or right leanings. I’m a very liberal conservative myself but still lean slightly to the right.

“Into pigeon-holing much?”

How exactly are leftist and rightist a small group of people? Classifying the majority of the population cannot be considered pigeon-holing. Left and Right are sub-classed into numerous groups of varying ideologies, but they still stem from the right or left by and large.

“You might call me an extreme moderate.”

How did I miss that one.. I knew you were an extremist! j/k of course… I love the term… extreme moderate. I personally just consider myself anti-democrat and anti-republican.. anything else is fair game.

And I’m just a guy who likes to read poems. It’s been about forty years since I read much political theory, and even then I read it more out of duty than for pleasure. (Though I must say that I met John Rawls once — Robert Nozick introduced me to him.) I agree with pretty much everything you say. I firmly believe in fuzzy categories. And I also believe in community. But here I have a footnote — I think it’s really important to protect individual eccentrics. Again there’s a personal basis — I grew up as a non-religious person in a fundamentalist society, and I took a lot of grief for it. I want to make sure that there is room for people who don’t fit in with the community. But I can go beyond my own experiences, and say that one of my goals is the maximization of the potential of individuals to express their own values and live their own lives (so long as they don’t hurt other people). That’s why I’m worried about any system that allows any person or group to have too much power over the lives of other people. But that doesn’t make me a libertarian; libertarianism has a poor social analysis, characterized by an obsession with government as if it were the only locus of power in society. Often government can function as a protection for the individual, and it can also assist the individual to get the kinds of resources (material and intellectual) which can then allow the individual to flourish. Oh, my I do go on.

How is referring to a term that has a general definition pigeon holing? Christians have a variety of different views depending on which branch of Christianity you follow, and even within those branches members have a variety of differing views and yet I never see a Christian get upset at being called a Christian. Just because I recognize you lean to the left does not mean I automatically attribute all views from all groups on the left to you. People in society today are much to sensitive about being be treated with political correctness.

“Ideally, your point has validity. However, I see often a tendency on the part of most of us to overdo the compartmentalization and draw lines that are much too sharp to be of real use, thus causing a detrimental over-classification. The “all”, “none” “always” “never” mind-set.”

I don’t disagree at all with that. When I use the term left or right I do it in the broadest sense of the term which is as it should be. The compartmentalization you speak of is one reason I quit categorizing myself into any group a long time ago.