Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Barack Obama
It's perplexing that Americans regard him as a socialist when he's as far away from being one as possible. It's a sad state of politics when legislation designed to strengthen private insurers' hold on healthcare is railed against (for the wrong reasons) as unconstitutional even though it's hardly universal health care.
Comments
The thing about Obama is that he seems to be the only one who really knows what he's doing. Whatever one thinks of his policies, they're very cleverly machinated in many cases.
He's certainly not on the left, but I do think he errs towards centrism -- given the current state of the USA, that's probably a good compromise to live with. If nothing else, Obama might help pave a way for a USA that can one day hold to its initial ideals. A long way off, granted, and we can say goodbye by 2016, but US citizens should take what they can get. Given a choice between a capitalist hellhole and pretty much anything else, the decision should be easy enough.
Easily.
That depends. If by some bizarre happenings 2016 saw the most socialist leader than ever socialed in the USA, it would still be a long strip towards centrism or leftism, depending on your preference. Democracy theoretically protects the interests of the masses, but it can also cause an indoctrinated population to dig its own grave. No matter the leader, it's up to US citizens to change and support proper equality and justice.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what they want for lunch.
He calls them "Lie-berals" for fucks sake!
My dad would probably be unhappy. I dunno about my mom, but she tends to lean more left than he does, I think.
And I wish America was more left wing too, but when it comes to how the majority votes, they aren't really worth shit.
Do "Americans" really regard him as a socialist, or is it just Republican propagandists/Fox News? I mean, if most people accepted this, he would presumably never have been elected in the first place.
I personally believe that socialism (actual socialism, not the stuff uneducated folk call socialism) in the United States should be implemented on a State Government level. Our country is just so massive that trying to centralize everything would be impossible; many states are themselves the size of European nations.
I do find it troubling some of your parents are far right-wing. If they were moderately right-wing, I wouldn't mind that but it does go to show the generation gap.
My parents are leftists, I'm centrist, myself. /totally relevant.
I don't actually know how right-wing my dad is. My parents very rarely ever talks politics with my sisters and I.
We used to talk about it more back during my right-wing days. Oh boy, those were some funny days.
My parents' political opinions are too weird and unconventional to put them on a simple left-right axis, but they are opposed on pretty much everything.
Oh, damn, I remember the time when I was a far-right hardcore nationalist and my father would threaten to beat the crap out of me if I didn't repent my evil ways.
My dad's pretty much a pure Libertarian. So whether I agree with him more or less depends on the issue.
My parents' political views line up reasonably well with mine. Well, my dad's anyway, I rarely talk to my mom about politics, but she supports the same party as me.
For the most part my mom was socially liberal and fiscally conservative with big exceptions for medical reform, because even with insurance, dealing with a terminal illness is just ridiculous at times. I think she might have been more fiscally liberal if she wasn't one of those people who managed to work herself out of poverty and consequentially, didn't have much empathy for people stuck behind because she managed to get out herself.
That's quite the thing to put into signature. And now I can't not think of it in meme terms. "Dad, I am fascistist", "son, I am disappoint". Oh wait...
Pretty much sums up my dad. Grew up on a farm in a house my grandfather built himself, is now an extremely successful lawyer.
^^ Pfthahaha. God bless Google Translate.
Don't look at me like that, I was fourteen! And all my friends did it, too.
My bro's little wannabe fascist, he writes brony fics where the Republic of Luna is made of Romanesque militarists and they're the good guys.
Now my dad is one of the top salesmen in Canada and making (can't recall if it's before or after commisions) over $100,000 a year
I can't really bring myself to call Obama a proper socialist. I can understand that he got cockblocked on the economic policies that would line up with that -- alright, whatever, not his fault.
But backing shit like NDAA, organizing the ISP spying cabal, pushing for airborne drones, and generally going back on every single promise of transparency and respect for civil liberties doesn't seem remotely aligned with the good of society on the whole -- it's using vanishingly small threats as a smokescreen to crystallize power.
Yes, this. I would hate to see somebody like Romney as president because he would be even worse (unless he changes all of his positions, that is), but the United States and the world as a whole deserves somebody better than Obama.
The NDAA is what clinched it for me, btw. Also, he extended the Patriot Act several months before he signed the NDAA into law, saying that the Patriot Act was needed to combat terrorism.
That's exactly what George W. Bush was telling people. If Obama takes the same position as Bush (and this isn't the only example of him doing so), then in my opinion he's not worth defending or supporting. The fact that there are so many self-avowed liberals who are sticking up for him baffles me and infuriates me.
At this point, I'm not sure America has any presidential candidates left who're still viewed as people rather than symbols. Obama's one of the most "real" and least symbolic of them all--certainly he's less symbolic than Kerry ever was--but he's still supported/hated as much for being the current face of the Democratic Party as for his actual policies.
...what? Obama's entire campaign was like half and half "I'm not Bush" and "I'm a viral symbol". Like, more so than any other candidate in my lifetime.
Eh. I vary between disdaining Obama as a politician and defending him as "not good, but better than we give him credit for given what he has to work with."
Mm. NDAA was meaningless (the Patriot Act already authorized everything in the NDAA to begin with; nothing changed), I have no idea what the ISP spying cabal is, the airborne drones are actually kind of cool and useful and I support them with the caveat that the military is far too indiscriminate and imprecise with them, no promise of transparency survives past the White House front door and rightly so, and what the hell is Obama going to do with civil liberties with the Republican Party in the state it's in?
Also, this is an excellent defense of Obama as the best we have right now and better than we'd like to admit, though still far from perfect. Love him or disdain him, he's the most progressive President we've had since LBJ, and that's not just "in comparison to Ronald Reagan," either.