New Testingstan

I knew people in school who seriously wanted to move to America, just because they thought it was cool. This was 17-18 year olds, during the Bush years.
My compelling 'but you'll probably get shot' argument didn't go over very well.

true fact :

when I was a little kid, I was wondering why we were using Francs instead of Dollars

everyone on TV was using dollars. Why were we using something else ?

Nietzslime wrote:

weemadando wrote:I wonder if they realise that the US is seen as the cute mentally disabled orphan in the corner who's trust fund has been robbed by his guardians by the rest of the world? Not as the square jawed world policeman bringing super-justice-democra-freedom to the brown people, one hellfire at a time.

if only that were truuueee

we're still only on par with south korea and india, and well behind any western european country when aggregated

granted, that's largely a factor of the shitty opinions turkish and egyptian citizens have of the us

and anyways, the second part of the statement would almost certainly be found to be true in a more nuanced poll- i doubt that a majority of kenyans like the USA because we bomb places sometimes

what's funny to me if that if you say 'the world dislikes and lols at america' you must be working under the assumption that africans aren't people

Quackustra wrote:

weemadando wrote:Your party has issues when if someone says "The rape guy lost" you have to ask "which one". But of course it's because women are uncontrollable lust monsters who dream about black cock that they voted against you, not because you're evil fucks who want to roll back the clock on every right they've won.

HPCA Hero nightwatch2 would take exception to that notion.

nightwatch2 wrote:<snip>Now, having said that, to some extent your prescription is correct to a point, that point being that we have to explain in much better terms and very clearly why conservative values are everyone's values. Much of the various block group values are much closer to the conservative values than to the leftist drivel articulated iin the Democrat Party Platform<snip>

Isn't there actually a grain of truth in this? Aren't a lot of these minority groups, and lower-income people in general, more socially conservative but minorities tend to go with democrats as the "lesser of two evils" from their pov on account of the dems being less into "fuck brown and poor people"?

It wouldn't surprise me if Repubs could get pretty far among minorities with a "Kansas strategy*" if they somehow managed to rebrand themselves as not the "fuck the brown people" party.

* Referencing What's The Matter With Kansas, which as memory serves was about how Repubs manage to get poor people to vote against their economic interests by appealing to "values" issues ("we'll protect society from the terrible commies and feminists and gays!").

The irony is that it was the people of the Republican party that freed the brown people in the 1860s and gave them civil rights in the 1960s, and it was the Damnocrat supporters that fought those, tried to filibuster the Civil Rights Act, and oh yeah formed the KKK. Yet the Dems are perceived as the champions of the people who aren't white. Go figure.

Don't be willfully dense.

I did a term of American history in HS.

Even that was enough to know why Choccy is wrong.

Teach a foreigner :

Wasn't that different parties with the same names ?

Pretty much. American parties are what would be coalitions of parties under our parliamentary system. So as groups enter and leave those coalitions over time, parties drift around a bit.

Oxymoron wrote:Teach a foreigner :

Wasn't that different parties with the same names ?

Somewhat. The Republican party was basically founded as the "Industry and Abolition Party", while the Democrats at the time were the party of agriculturalists, mainly plantation owners. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Republicans basically shifted to become the business party (shedding human rights along the way), while the Democrats incorporated pro-industry elements and small-farmer elements.

The 1930s saw the formation of the New Deal coalition, where the Democrats reformed into a broad party that incorporated industrial workers, small farmers, blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans, and Southern whites. The Republican party became split between the pro-New Deal wing, based in the Northeast (sometimes called "Rockefeller Republicans" after their last leader) and the isolationist anti-New Deal wing based in the Midwest.

This sort of fell apart after the 1940s, and the Civil Rights Movement and Nixon's Southern Strategy meant that the Republicans became the party of racist whites and business, with the 1980s adding Protestant fundamentalism to their coalition.

So how is it that Republicans were the lynchpin that passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s while the Democrats attempted a filibuster? And why were the ghettos housing projects that herded urban blacks into block housing, thereby isolating them from the rest of the cities they lived in, funded mostly by Democrat administrations?

Because that was before Nixon and the southern strategy.

Who did you vote for Chocula?

What "third-parties" are there in the US on the Right/Conservative side ?

Count Chocula wrote:So how is it that Republicans were the lynchpin that passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s while the Democrats attempted a filibuster? And why were the ghettos housing projects that herded urban blacks into block housing, thereby isolating them from the rest of the cities they lived in, funded mostly by Democrat administrations?

Are you capable of understanding that the Dixiecrat faction basically had split from the New Deal faction in the Democratic party by that point? Are you capable of understanding that public apartment buildings were far more politically palatable and efficient than building subsidized townhouses or individual homes?

Oxymoron wrote:What "third-parties" are there in the US on the Right/Conservative side ?

The Constitution Party and the Libertarian Party are the two constant ones. The Constitution Party is the remnants of the isolationist wing of the Republican party combined with the Christian fascists (dominionist Protestants and a handful of ultra-right Catholics) who find manipulating the Republican party to be too compromising for their tastes.

The Libertarian Party is generally left-wing on certain issues (gay marriage, the war on drugs, civil liberties) nationally, hard right on economic issues, and also generally in favor of state's rights, which means that their left-wing social issues are largely irrelevant. They also have large contingents who are hard right on everything but despise the Republicans for occasionally accepting deficit spending.

Providing cheap state-owned housing is solid social democratic policy, the American housing projects thingy was probably just implemented badly.

As it was in France, or in pretty much every First-World state during the Thirty Glorious. And in Europe, it wasn't helped by the fact that :

1 - the continent had been kind of destroyed by being the principal theater of a Wold War
2 - to rebuild we (France at least) encouraged a politic of immigration, with millions of people coming from oversea and abroad to work and live here
3 - then a few hundred throusands of Colonist were exiled from the newly independent Algeria and went living in the Metropole
4 - also, it was the baby-boom

That's a shitload of people to house and a shitload of houses to build.

So they did the most economical thing and created these giant housing projects. Really, they were top-notch for the time.

Sadly, -that- was 50 years ago...

I lean more Libertarian but have had no party affiliation for 10 or more years. I voted for Romney, even though the man lost to McCain of all people, as the lesser of two evils. Social Democratic is a four-letter word to me, and I despise block housing, having grown up in the periphery of that environment and experiencing the sociopathic tendencies that other people who grow up in them have tended to exhibit. I don't know if there is a good way to implement dense housing projects, rife with people who do not work and depend on a govermnent stipend. Such experiments seem to end badly.

Most people who live in housing projects don't OWN the property in which they live. There is little incentive for them to maintain the property, or even their own living quarters, and they tend to turn rapidly from well-built structures to decrepit shitholes. Put 1,000 people into a place who have no pride or reason to improve, because hey they're getting Maslow's basic needs for free, and things decay rapidly. THAT is the lesson of the Great Society.

Count Chocula wrote:I lean more Libertarian but have had no party affiliation for 10 or more years. I voted for Romney, even though the man lost to McCain of all people, as the lesser of two evils. Social Democratic is a four-letter word to me, and I despise block housing, having grown up in the periphery of that environment and experiencing the sociopathic tendencies that other people who grow up in them have tended to exhibit. I don't know if there is a good way to implement dense housing projects, rife with people who do not work and depend on a govermnent stipend. Such experiments seem to end badly.

Most people who live in housing projects don't OWN the property in which they live. There is little incentive for them to maintain the property, or even their own living quarters, and they tend to turn rapidly from well-built structures to decrepit shitholes. Put 1,000 people into a place who have no pride or reason to improve, because hey they're getting Maslow's basic needs for free, and things decay rapidly. THAT is the lesson of the Great Society.

There actually is plenty of incentive to maintain property even if you don't own it, idiot- you fucking live there. The underlying reasons most large-scale housing projects have gone to shit is because most of the people who live there, far from being able to live off of welfare, (which hasn't existed since 1996 in the United States and was iffy from well before then) work incredibly long hours to just barely fail to make a living, meaning that most of the area is in the hands of children and young adults who have no real economic prospects in the perpetual depression of inner-city slums, are regularly mistreated by the police and pissed on by the rest of society, and so end up vandalizing and refusing to take care of areas because of how shitty their lives are.

And hell, a lot of the original ones were poorly built. But there are underlying reasons beyond whatever latent hatred you have of poor people why slums end up looking like slums.

Also, workfare only works if we abandon economic efficiency or our belief in the value of human life, since finding sinecures for disabled people and the elderly is the very definition of a drag on the economy, and the only alternative is leaving them to die in the streets. My guess is that you're in favor of the latter, at least deep down.

You're assuming I grew up rich, am rich, and want people to die. Your complete misread of my circumstances and the reality of housing projects amuses me. Oh yeah, prove there hasn't been welfare since 1996 in the US or at least provide some perspective, even anecdotal, to support your assertion you disengenuous fuck. Hey, why don't you take a look on Google at how many people in the US are on food stamps, and their growth since 2008?

Food stamps are hilariously fucked up, why not just give money?

UK housing estates, while they have their problems, are nowhere near as bad as the depictions of US ones that I've seen. Certainly not decrepit or whatever (they're mostly not very *nice*, but perfectly liveable), and more modern ones are generally better than older ones. So there's not a fundamental problem with social housing --> completely decrepit, it's in the implementation.

And since America is such a big place, I wouldn't be surprised if some cities have managed to make it work.

My experience is only with Washington, DC, northern Virginia, and New York City, so I'll concede that.

A problem of implementation, yes.

The major problem with these big housing projects, in my opinion, wasn't so much the basic idea of providing "cheap" housing (as in, economically affordable) to a lot of people with modest incomes ; than the fact that they kind of outlived their lifespan by a large margin in most case, have proved to cost A LOT to maintain (they cost a lot to heat, for example), and that, at least in France, the public / semi-private companies tasked to maintain them and to renovate them / finance the construction of new buildings are mostly self-financed (which is a good thing), but don't have much "hitting power" financially speaking - the few subsidies they touch from the Governement and local authorities not being enough for them to really do a difference.


So we're left with that heavy legacy, trying to make do with it, as the Government don't want to invest the kind of money it'd take to really change things. And the least favored housing project just fall to piece as they aren't maintained as they should.



AND THEN add in all the societal problems linked to the demographic inhabiting them, plug all of that into one ugly mess of feedback loops, and you have a magnificent shit sandwich wrapped into a gordian knot of shoestring budgets.

Count Chocula wrote:You're assuming I grew up rich, am rich, and want people to die. Your complete misread of my circumstances and the reality of housing projects amuses me. Oh yeah, prove there hasn't been welfare since 1996 in the US or at least provide some perspective, even anecdotal, to support your assertion you disengenuous fuck. Hey, why don't you take a look on Google at how many people in the US are on food stamps, and their growth since 2008?

Nope, I'm assuming that you've bought into the American mythology that the problems of the poor are the fault of the poor. You may well be objectively poor yourself! Conservatives often have a self-perception at odds with reality. I'm also pointing out that your choices are to give people free money or leave them to die in the streets, because there are always people unable to work, and these must either be supported or left to die. If you oppose handing out free money, then you must support leaving them to die. The goal is to get you to think about what "people only value things they work for" means when you stop pretending that every adult is whole of body and mind.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, what you had to have been referring to because it's what people mean when they talk about "welfare checks", unless you're really absolutely an idiot, only lasts for a total of 60 months in a person's lifetime. Some states reduce it from there. It is literally impossible to get welfare for more than five years. Even if you're in one of the states that allow for kids to claim it for longer, you receive a much smaller check and it only lasts for so long as well. Sure, you can get food stamps for a lifetime, and you apparently believe that people shouldn't get them during a recession, so yeah you do want people to die or else are a fucking idiot, but food stamps cannot be spent on anything else but food, so you need some other sort of income. Sorry you're dumb.