Yeah, I can certainly agree with that.

All those bases around the world, the places America is poking around in - that's not going away. Ever. It's always been America's intent to interfere, ever since good ol' Teddy R. made it policy.

We certainly have tendencies toward animal behavior, as that is indeed in our blood, but we are also better than that and fully capable of rising above it. When people give in to those urges on a level where it hurts others, they should be punished or further controls should be used to prevent it. We're better than animals because we have a society, which is a reason I find that society to be essential.

I said why I took it as an insult in the post you quoted, I am someone you would consider "weak" in the survival of the fittest model. I have needed extensive assistance in my life due to a certain aspect of myself I don't want to talk about. If it were not for having family which could help I would be on government assistance or the street. Not everyone has those family ties.

Saying "man up" is callous and ignorant, also it plays into ancient gender archetypes. Also I am pretty sure your estrogen theory is insane, but I have never researched such a thing so feel free to leave a link.

If things are really that bad then send in the National Guard, increase police numbers and education drastically, invest in better schools and businesses to educate. Invest in social workers to explain the societal implications and to look for cases of abuse or drug dependency.

What you don't do is write people off as animals and ignore that the violence and payments which effect you are the evidence of interdependency that means we as a society need to stop it.

I lived in Philadelphia, I walked through West Philadelphia, I know the kind of shit you are talking about. The difference between us is I think it is disgusting we are abandoning these people with just a welfare check and EBT card as a token sign of interest. We need to do MORE, not LESS.

Yeah, and that's just going to be a point we'll have to disagree on. I certainly feel like there are good people out there that actually need help, but like you said in your personal example, you had help from family. That's what family and friends are for. And, for people without family and friends, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a small system in place to help people get a little boost, but there are already options for these people, such as the military. But I definitely disagree that we need more social programs, if that's what you're suggesting by saying we need to do more.

And in East St. Louis, they are actually struggling to have any police force at all. They did bring in a team of federal agents or they are going to at some point, because the crime is so bad and nobody wants to be a cop in one of the most dangerous cities in America for only 11 dollars an hour (or something like that). The city is very poor so they can't afford to pay the cops much -- and this is an area where the criminals are not at all afraid to shoot cops.

But as far as 'giving up' on them goes, I pretty much have on certain groups of people and I'm not sorry about it. Not everyone is a good person or will do good things with the help you provide. That's just life. There's no helping the extreme fundamentalist Muslims for example, anymore than the blacks in ESTL who would shoot someone for a 20 dollar bill. There is no getting through to these people and changing their way of life.

I would actually say that I've had the opposite experience as you've had regarding your political stance. I believe in one of your previous posts you mentioned that you weren't always a liberal or something along those lines? I don't feel like backreading to find the exact comment. For me, I used to be extremely liberal when I was younger. As I've gotten older however, I've gotten more conservative on many issues, and probably overall just more moderate or slightly right leaning. There are still some issues that I'm heavily liberal about, such as abortion rights. But for most government issues, I'm pretty moderate or right-leaning, and far less liberal about social welfare programs than I was 10 years ago.

I don't consider my outlook a negative one -- I just consider it realistic.

And for the record, I did a lot of volunteer work when I was in the service. I worked at soup kitchens, helped build houses for the needy, worked with the special olympics, etc. But, in all honestly, if I had a lot of money that I could use to help the world, I would go to a place like an impoverished part of South America and build schools for kids. I'm telling you that where I live, my money would go to waste here. I wouldn't spend a dime of it in this area, unless it was to remove all the bad people from ESTL, which would be most of them.

I disagree. It's all socialization. Most of these predominantly Black urban areas you're speaking of have suffered from racism leading up the the 80's or so, then ambivalence after that. "Hey we're not racist anymore so you're fine," ignoring the fact that they live in areas with horrible schools, lack of effective police presence and have been socialized for 200 years to be downtrodden. The continued "well your community pays few taxes so you get less services" bullshit makes sure they stay that way.

The assistance I am speaking of, called modern day reparations by some, is basically to invest heavily in these areas (schools, expanded police presence, subsidized wages, crackdown on substances, guns, etc.) to bring them into some form of modern equality. The way we have it set up now, it's "escape if you can by being really smart, motivated and lucky, or be doomed to an endless cycle we pretend does not exist so we can feel okay about living in the burbs and buying a new SUV every two years." As Obama would say and be attacked for, that suburban lifestyle isn't all your doing, thousands of factors contributed to that being possible and most of those were missing for people born into Black ghetto areas.

Look at the Rudy Giuliani model in New York and what he did for Times Square to see what social manufacturing can do. And he was a Republican. I'm not saying he did exactly what I would do, but the point is you can change an area by giving a shit and using government effectively.

I am pretty burned out on this thread, but it was fun to knock heads with you folks for a bit. :)

However, SV asked for a link:

Here is one to a Japanese study; I think it is what Qwertyman is talking about:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19496976

This is study was only of milk from pregnant cows, so the results are more dramatic. However, the issue of raised estrogen levels in commercial milk is a known problem. I don't know if estrogen levels is an issue in other commercial products, but I knew about this one off the top of my head.

Oh, I will reply to one other comment, because I think it should be reinforced:

This is actually not a bad place to start on a compromise. If there were a way to limit how much pandering a politician can do on the issue, I am all for it. My main concern is that the way it is now, politicians breed class-warfare through many of these programs. In the end, people just end up voting themselves money from other people, because they feel they deserve it more and/or it would be more 'fair'. These programs were started with good intent, but they have become a way for folks to legally, though indirectly, steal from others. If there were a way keep people from, in effect, voting themselves money, then one of my major objections to these programs would dissipate. I think your idea is on the right track, in that respect.

(I was reading this thread and felt I should reply to this post)


So multiple parties are better for democracies, you say it works for Europe, but are you sure its flawless, because like I said 10 parties is and only 1 wins an election that sounds like it is going to piss off even more people of certain parties.

Try to come up with 10 significantly different opinions about a single political topic. Usually there just aren't that many. If there's 10 parties to choose from, it's much more unlikely that you'll strongly disagree with all but one party (or every party).

Also, there is no flawless system, and he didn't suggest there was. That's somewhat of a strawman you did there.

I was just making a suggestion that how is having more multiple parties in democracies is better when I see it as displeasing people even more when their party of choice loses an election?

I am aware that I may not be right about this statement.

Socialism and Libertarianism are too off the scale to be acceptable in America and most other Western countries now-a-days. So, in America at least, you end up with center-left and center-right parties that offer more moderate versions of those two wildly different ideas.

In essence we have fallen in love with Clinton-esque centrism and just debate the particulars.

We have other parties in the US, the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Socialist Party... they just get no attention or air-time because no one really gives a shit about them. People like Orcish will tell you this is because the money men and current parties rig the game to keep those parties irrelevant, which is true to some extent, but honestly if people wanted real change they would look into alternatives. They don't, they're comfortable and largely centrist. Hence two centrist parties.

The more parties there are, the more likely it is that you'll find a party that corresponds exactly (or very closely) to what you are looking for.

If you have 2 parties like in the US, many voters will be stuck between a rock and a hard place where they will be stuck voting for the party that is the least incompatible with their views.

In a multi-party system that works, the vast majority of decisions are not made by a single party, because no single party has enough clout to pass anything by itself so it must agree with other parties to get the support that is needed to pass a decision.

This is the only scenario under which representative democracy can work as a democracy (that or no party at all, just a room with a hundred or two hundred 100% independent representatives representing their region).

Our system is flawed in many ways.

For example, Harper was able to force election after election with his minority government, because he couldn't pass a budget amongst other things.

In a real democracy, the other parties should have been able to say "ok, give us the budget, we'll fix it for you. Here, we all agree on the corrections we made and together, we form a majority. This is the budget. No need for an election".

Another thing: vote splitting is terrible for democracy.

As things are now, the voting process is one pass, so basically, if two parties are not the same, but very similar, they have vested interest in merging, because they are splitting the demographic they both loosely represent into more parts and reduce their respective chances of being elected in every riding.

This is very conductive to having several parties merging until you have 2, like in the US and then you are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

What you need is a multi-pass voting system with people writing their voting choices in order and with each pass, you eliminate the candidate with the lowest vote in the riding (redistributing his voters amongst their next preferred candidate) until you have 2 (or very few) left.

This is how many political parties vote to elect a leader inside the party and this is how we should be voting to elect candidates in ridings.

Democracy is not a one digit binary value (true or false). It's more of a shade between two colors (say black being a dictatorship and white being a perfect democracy where everyone has direct input into our decision making process).

At the present, we are a very dark grey in Canada.

Then, we have a very different definition of socialism.

Communism would be too extreme, but all of Socialism? Na. Well, maybe in the U.S, but not in Canada or many parts of Europe.

Socialism is a pretty varied term, but the government owning production, the traditional use of it, is pretty much dead as far as I know outside of communist countries. Even places like Sweden and Norway have moved pretty far away from that.

If you vary the term enough though anything outside Libertarian could be called Socialist.

There's a clear, cut defined definition of socialism and communism in the US: anything that doesn't sound conservative enough.

I've been called both for stating things that Nixon was in favor of.
They quit looking when they see what the price is, voting must change and gerrymandering will, likewise, have to be curbed before anyone can change anything, even if they wanted to.

More people voted against Romney than voted for Obama, and that problem isn't unique to Obama, it's the same for pretty much any national office.

Just because people aren't ready to literally fall on their swords and die doesn't mean they don't want change.

All it takes is a google search and a tiny bit of effort. They don't care.