DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: Plane on August 11, 2014, 02:42:00 AM
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=54fPcCYvLh0
Yes , it was shallow , for the most part.
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All foreign policy debate in every election that I recall, has been shallow and simplistic.
Invading Iraq a second time was also shallow and simplistic.
The US is too big a nation, with too many factions involved, to have a coherent foreign policy no matter which party is in charge.
Th the Mideast there has always been a conflicted foreign policy, as every government seeks to suck up to Israel (for the Jewish lobby) and to the Saudi leaders (who are allies of Big Oil).
The US will never have a foreign policy that is truly coherent, no matter which party is in charge.
The best policy is to oppose eternal war which is what the military industrial complex wants, so they can sell and export weapons, because fewer Americans are killed, maimed and driven insane that way.
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The US is too big a nation, with too many factions involved, to have a coherent foreign policy no matter which party is in charge.
That is true, but is a poor excuse for any particular President or Senate.The Mideast there has always been a conflicted foreign policy, as every government seeks to suck up to Israel (for the Jewish lobby) and to the Saudi leaders (who are allies of Big Oil).
Don't forget the Christians , who have a very pro Israeli faction.
The US will never have a foreign policy that is truly coherent, no matter which party is in charge.
Not Madison ,T. Roosevelt or F. Roosevelt?
The best policy is to oppose eternal war which is what the military industrial complex wants, so they can sell and export weapons, because fewer Americans are killed, maimed and driven insane that way.
I resemble that remark, most of my career has been devoted to the strength of the USA, and I am not apologizing. The stronger we are , the fewer times we will have wars and the shorter they will be. Unless loosing them sooner is considered an option? The number and kind of wars we have is dependent on political decisions in our leadership and in the leadership of potential enemies, not at the level of generals or their industrial suppliers.
I vote not to make ourselves so weak that the entire decision of whether or not to fight shall be in the hands of our attackers, rather to make ourselves so strong that most potential attackers smart enough to fight us are also smart enough to see the bad bet that fighting us represents. That would be half the problem.
The other half of the problem would be ourselves , and electing leadership that has enough wisdom to know the difference between restraint and weakness, so that weakness is not considered a good substitute for restraint.
Wise leaders fight when there is a real need , and not more and not less.
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The enemy now is not a country or an army, it is small groups of terrorists that cannot be defeated with armies.
I do not think that FDR has a coherent foreign policy until Dec 7, 1941.
Madison was president of a small puny nation. T Roosevelt was nuts about mongering wars.
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T Roosevelt was nuts about mongering wars.
http://www.shmoop.com/theodore-teddy-roosevelt/timeline.html
Really?
Too bad then that he made no war while he was president , do you suppose he was disappointed?
You know he won the Nobel Peace Prize , for which no Korean would have voted.
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If you read what TR wrote, he thought that wars were good for a people. He was gung ho about WWII. And you are right, he invited Japan to take over Korea. He was a racist and thought that Japanese were genetically and culturally superior to Koreans (and Russians as well). It is true that the country fought no wars while he was in office, but there was a major rebellion in the Philippines. Arthur MacArthur, Douglas's father was a disaster as military governor, and for Filipinos were very happy to see him replaced by William Howard Taft.
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Yes , and he was very progressive too.
But as a Warmonger he was a flop, if he didn't actually make a war.
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I just finished reading a book about TR and Taft called the Bully Pulpit. It was detailed and entertaining, and got into all the good and bad points of both Taft and TR. I think that both men served the country well, certainly better than a hack like Mark Hanna or an ill-informed religious nutcase like Bryan, who was a great speaker but pretty much useless as an actual leader.
Taft was the LAST Republican, other than Eisenhower, who was better than his opponent.
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I don't know why you wouldn't like Calvin Coolidge, I don't even know why you don't count Eisenhower as a real Republican.
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Coolidge did nothing. There was nothing to like.
Eisenhower did not vote for anyone until he voted for himself at age 61. There were 39 of 40 years of elections he could have voted in, and he disregarded them all. He chose to be a Republican in 1952. He was offered the Democratic nomination as well. I have heard that he turned down the democrats because he did not want to run against MacArthur, who also wanted to be president. Eisenhower was clearly an excellent mediator and politician, and MacArthur more of a vainglorious posturing fool.
Mac Arthur did manage to help make some good decisions with regard to rebuilding and restructuring Japan. But he was too ruthless to be a decent president.
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I like Eisenhower, and I agree that he didn't owe too much to party which would be a nice thing to happen again if it were possible.
I agree about MacArthur, his governance of Japan was terrific and was the best thing he ever did, the rest of his career included a lot of mistakes that got papered over at the time.
Calvin Coolidge was a deep thinker and spoke little , not the type we could elect nowadays , but he was a nearly ideal president and gets put into the top five by a lot of serious Republicans. I would like to vote for him myself , but he is too disqualified and there isn't likely an equivalent to be offered.
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Coolidge did nothing at all to encourage legislation to end wild speculation and trading on the margins in the stock market. He was nothing but a Harding without the scandal and the mistress. Another Republican hack.
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As much as Coolidge was terrific Harding was terrible, he appointed one of the most corrupt cabinets ever and corruption ran like a river.
Who says that a president has to be busy and involved to be a good president?
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I would say that. A stagnant government makes for a stagnant country. My parents were born in 1902 and 1910 and certainly did not think much of Coolidge. My father thought that Herbert Hoover was a very admirable sort of man in 1928 who would get things moving. My father was an usher at the GOP National Convention in Kansas City that nominated Hoover.
By 1932, their opinion of Hoover had changed. Hoover did nothing to help the people that was useful He did not even try. He did not believe it was the function of the government to try.
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I don't think that the great Depression can be directly blamed on the president , but I am willing to blame the government in general.
Of course If you would like to blame the recent very slow economy on the President I won't stop you.
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Coolidge could have raised the limits on the percentage of borrowed money that was used to purchase sticks. I think it was as low as 5%.
You pay $50 and you can "own" $1000 of stock.
I am sure it was the last thing on his mind. He did not think the government had any right to impose rules on business. Even TR and Taft would have disagreed with that.
In American history, there was a panic, a crisis or a bust every 7 to 10 years. It is the nature of unrestricted capitalism for this to happen. The price of the stock is bid so high that it becomes obvious to everyone that no amount of future earnings in the lifetime of the shareholders will ever warrant the price. And people starts selling.
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Coolidge couldn't do anything like this without congress or a regulatory agency empowered by congress, making law is not a power given the President.
Persuading the Congress and leading the people is part of the presidents job, if CC had been so insightful that he had known the Smoot-Hawley tariff would be such a problem and had known that too much capital had been taken in debt, he might could have done with leadership ......something.
But he would have to have known, and I don't think he did.
Business cycles affect very restrictive economies no less ,( let me emphasize...NO LESS! )than less regulated economies. For the very simple reason that whether it is a king or a communist or a libertarian making the rules, none of them are anything but human beings.
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Coolidge could have had an influence, but did not.
He was famous for not saying anything about anything.
He was America's mutest president.
My father referred to him as a "cold fish".
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Coolidge could have had an influence, but did not.
He was famous for not saying anything about anything.
He was America's mutest president.
My father referred to him as a "cold fish".
Then the government that governs best governs least is the principal that makes Calvin Coolidge perfect.
How could he have been better?
Is it the governments job to shape the nation?
Or is the government the possession and tool of the people?
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That is a stupid old saying that is untrue and proves nothing.
The government that governs least allows the society to decay and rot as a matter of principle.
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Does society depend on government to prevent rot?
Isn't society older than government?
What about governmental rot? What prevents that?
I do not think the government is dependably good.
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Yes, the society in a modern country must depend on the elected government to prevent economic collapse.
Government is the only entity than can do this.
It does not matter whether society or government is older. They both co exist in time everywhere.
Democracy prevents government from rotting, but this is NOT HELPED when moronic judges rule that cor[ortation are people, which they are not, and claim they have the rights of people to buy elections, which they should never have.
I do not think REPUBLICANS can be depended on to do more than suck up to the oligarchy.
Our democracy is being subverted by oligarchs in the name of "freedom".
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I can't see that governments prevent more economic collapses than they cause.
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.....to prevent economic collapse.
Government is the only entity than can do this.
But they do not, I posit that they cannot.
It might be hard to prove that governments can not prevent economic collapse , but it is easy to point out that most of the economic collapses we know of happened with government and at least half happen because of the government.
If it is possible for a government to truly prevent economic collapse , most of them must not know how else why would it ever happen where there is a government?
One of the biggest jokes of our lifetime was the centrally planned and scientifically managed economy of the Soviet Union.
Governments , like corporations, are human beings at their root, the fool proof human is not yet invented.
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rule that cor[ortation are people, which they are not, and claim they have the rights of people to buy elections, which they should never have.
Who do you want to buy the elections?
Corporations are people , they certainly are not anything else but people.
The first amendment applies because they are people , the first amendment does not apply to a horse or to heards of horses but it does apply to a human being and to groups of human beings.
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That is just bullshit
Our country is being wrecked by corporations.
The crap about the government that governs best, governs least was perhaps valid for a nation of self sufficient/ subsistence farmers. This is no longer the case. It probably was not much of an idea back then, but like the election of senators bu state legislatures, the three fifth rule and the Electoral Colege, it os passe ab=nd should be scrapped forever.
There should be NO MONEY allowed for campaign contributions. Free airtime should be provided by broadcasters for a reasonable period before elections.
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There should be NO MONEY allowed for campaign contributions. Free airtime should be provided by broadcasters for a reasonable period before elections.
This would be a tragic mistake !
Only the government would then decide who was a candidate to be in the government.
Such incest would invest an oligarchy with true permanence.
You ought to stop thinking of corporations as more dangerous than government agencies, the same things make both entities bad, when bad.
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No, it would not. That is what is done in many countries. It is what Costa Rica does, and the usual result is a change of party every term, since no president can succeed himself.
What we have now is huge fortunes being used to propagandize the ever-ignorant majority with meaningless slogans and stupid issues.
The campaigns run too long, the real issues are rarely discussed in any useful detail, and most of the ads are inane 30 second spots that mostly sling mud. The result is a government that is paralyzed and inept at everything. And it is getting worse.
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If it came with a strong term limit clause , I might put up with having a strong restriction on campaign spending.
There is already a very strong advantage to incumbency, if only the government could provide campaign financing , then the government could pick candidates strictly as the government chose.
Senators and congressmen already serve as long as they wish more often than not , then become lobbyists for second careers.
Should they choose their successors also?
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Term limits are not the major problem. The biggest problem is gerrymandering so that a maximum number of representatives have safe seats, from which they cannot be dislodged.
Politicians occasionally choose their successors, but the public has the final say: they can vote them or not vote them in.
If you have term limits, the same aides will likely advise the new guy that advised the old one. When people are elected to Congress, they often have no clue about how Congress works.
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Gerrymandering is an institutional unfairness, that the institution uses gleefully.
And getting to choose who was qualified to join the institution and who was not is an incestuous insidious institutional advantage.
The institution must crave it.
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It is the cause of the current uselessness of Congress.
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Do you imagine that giving that institution greater control of its new membership would improve its usefulness?
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We need to elect more honest congresspeople and reform the system thoroughly.
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By adding control of information to control of districting?
How are they going to resist using control to favor party?
Lets not turn campaigning over to the same people that do the gerrymandering.
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There should be a nonpartisan commission to apportion districts equitably. We have the power to make this a really great modern nation. We just cannot do it if we electe assholes who believe that "Government is the problem".
Because that is a CROCK OF SHIT.
Government is the solution.
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There should be a nonpartisan commission to apportion districts equitably. We have the power to make this a really great modern nation. We just cannot do it if we electe assholes who believe that "Government is the problem".
Because that is a CROCK OF SHIT.
Government is the solution.
How is this different from saying gerrymandering is the solution?
The government as it is looks after its own interest, it always wants a lot of continuity even if the people would benefit from some changes.
So they use the power of the government to improve the advantages of incumbency, this describes gerrymandering , it would also describe the use of any other increase power over elections that might be given to the government.
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Gerrymandering is not done for the benefit of the citizens. On the contrary, making most districts into places where the incumbent cannot lose promotes apathy among the citizens and corruption among the officeholders. Government has worked far better in much of Western Europe than it has in the US in terms of providing :the greatest good for the greatest number", as Philosopher Jeremy Bentham put it.
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Gerrymandering is not done for the benefit of the citizens.
Of course it is not, it is done to benefit incumbency.
It is government power used as government wills.
Why would you think the government would do anything different with any greater power over the process?
For Most of human history the predominant focus of the government has been itself, a leavening of democracy makes it listen to the people .
Usually a good thing.
I can't favor any measures that improve incumbency , the advantage is already strong enough to hinder the operation of democracy.