Keating wrote: ↑Mon Oct 08, 2018 4:18 pm
There's no doubt that Sargon is a terrible debater, nor that he has a very inflated ego of himself.
However, I continue to find your description of everyone you disagree with as "far-right" annoying.
Sargon has endorsed the Front National and has joined the UKIP. Both parties belong to the spectrum of the far right. He hasn't joined the mainstream right wing Conservative Party or supported the gaullist Les Republicains. He's also expressed sympathies for AfD, not the CDU/CSU. That's yet another far right party.
The US aren't a good proxy for the rest of the world, especially not for Europe. Due to the history of the Cold War there have been no labourist/social democratic parties or influential movements in the US.
Compared to the average European parties, the Democrats span a range of policies from the center-right to the center-left. Barack Obama's fiscal and foreign policy were analogous to those of many centrist/center-right European parties. The Republicans, on the other hand, range from the center-right to the extremely conservative Religious Right and the far right. Trump has adopted a lot of far-right talking points and suggested policies.
The right have stayed more or less the same, and the left has become ever more "left". What would have been considered fairly centrist 20 years ago is now "far-right".
This is only true when it comes to social issues like gay marriage, abortion, divorce, or LGBT rights. In economic terms both the Democrats and the GOP have adopted different flavors of neoliberal policies: the GOP has supported trickle-down economics, the Dems have adopted moderate fiscal stimulus policies.
Keynesian economics, which were mainstream in the 1950s-1970s, are seen as far-left today. The Glass-Steagal act is seen as a social democrat talking point, even though it was passed under FDR. Bill Clinton liberalized banking economy following neoliberal policies that did away with some regulations that were approved under Lyndon Johnson.
With regards to immigration and intergration the shift has been towards stricter border policy across the board, at least until the Trump administration and the open border reaction to Trump's closed border policies. The GOP used to be much more supportive of legal and legalized immigration. Ronald Reagan, not exactly a left-wing politician, supported an illegal immigration amnesty similar to DACA back in 1986. Barack Obama supported border policies that would have been mainstream Republican talking points under the Bush sr. years.
In terms of foreign policy there have been few significant changes, mostly about Obama's disengagement from the Iraq quagmire.
The Kavanaugh circus was a pretty good example of the problem, I think. A real argument could have been built on his judicial record with regards to the right to privacy. But no, the political calculation from the Democrats was that they would be more likely to achieve their immediate ends by piggy-backing on divisive intersectionality politics that pits all white men as inherently guilty. That was their fundamental error, as that is completely antithetical to Western values. If they had built their case on his judicial record, they may still have lost, but they wouldn't have energised Republicans against them, and may even have won over many Republicans who do care about the right to privacy.
It isn't that I want the right to win, because I still disagree with them on a lot, but, rather, that the left deserves to lose.
The rise of the Social Justice intersectional movements has muddled the waters. The SocJus is tribal, simplistic, and aims for emotional and visceral reactions instead of discussion of policies. It's a movement that has no clear political aims beyond protesting "the Patriarchy". The SocJus is largely disinterested in economics, gives little attention to foreign policy, and has unworkable, pie-in-the-sky approaches to the issues of immigration ("Completely Open Borders") that aren't traditionally left or right, and are actually closer to extreme libertarian positions about abolishing all sorts of governmental control. It's a movement that is often only superficially left wing.
It's not a coincidence that Bernie Sanders, a politician classified as far left in the US but who would fit within a center-left party in Europe, has been skeptical of the Completely Open Borders and has called it a Koch brothers policy.
The SocJus is a mix that is all over the map. They can profess to be socialists or social democrats but then they can ally with multinational corporations like Google against employees like James Damore, just because Damore has criticized some assumptions of social constructionism.
They claim to be against privilege, but then praise market giants like Starbucks or Nike when those companies perform some cheap "woke" virtue-signalling. They claim to support LGBT rights, but then are unwilling to strongly criticize the homophobic parts of islam because that's "islamophobia". They claim to be the True Supporters of Women's Rights, but gush over hijabs and other conservative misogynistic parts of islam.
They claim to be in favor of police reform and more rights to the accused when it comes to police shootings, but then want to do away with presumption of innocence when it comes to accusations of rape and sexual assault. They're for prison reform and amnesties for minor crimes, but think that hate speech and not using someone's preferred pronouns should be illegal and carry legal punishment.
They have no coherent principles except the idea that "the Patriarchy" is bad and there's a pecking order of oppression.
The SocJus is actually very often a tool of corporate interests. They can be easy duped into supporting Starbucks cutting the wages of their employees if Starbucks promises to hire refugees who are willing to work for less. They stand with Disney and accuse anyone who doesn't like their "woke" Star Wars movies which include Asian characters of being bigoted, when Disney is using "wokeness" mostly as a tool to appeal to foreign markets and sell more merchandise. They clamor about mandatory diversity in the workplace and wage gaps, but don't care about wage freeze or market monopolies or less workers' rights. They laugh at the idea that blue-collar white workers might have legitimate economic and social issues, because they see every white person as privileged just because they're white. If companies decided to pay men less to reduce the wage gap they'd probably be more focused on the reduction of the gap then on the fact that women aren't actually earning more.
A Pharyngula poster once replied to a post of mine discussing some attempts at police reform, like reducing the number of people arrested or coming in contact with the police through the decriminalization of drug use, by saying that he didn't really care about reforming the police or laws, only that the police stopped killing black people. That's the SocJus in a nutshell: lots of outrage, no real ideas on what to do.