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FiveThirtyEight midterms projections update: Republicans favored to take the Senate

Deacon923 said:
That does not mean, and no one but you has suggested, wholesale adoption of some other country's political system. It means getting our collective heads out of our jingoistic butts and realizing that there are better ways to do things than the 'murica way
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I want us to be the best America we can be. And that means looking at what others have done well and what they've fucked up and also coming up with new ideas on our own. And then laying them out and taking the best and making them work for us.

And it also means honestly looking at ourselves and seeing where WE'VE fucked up. We love to talk about what we've done right, but we are absolutely incapable as a country of looking at our flaws and directly addressing them. A lot of people love to talk about personal responsibility, but nobody wants to talk about national responsibility.
 
And that's not to say that we should copy the exact same healthcare provisions that other countries have adopted either. One major difference between America and European countries is the level of diversity that we have combined with the sheer size of our population. Scandinavian countries are able to handle things in certain manners due to a largely homogenous population. We can absolutely take many positive aspects of other countries' take on healthcare and drug policies though. There's no reason why in 2014 a free nation should still be debating same-sex marriage or whether or not pot should be legalized IMO. It's silly and it drains time from tackling serious problems by allocating dollars and attention away from other issues that are considerably more important. One reason behind this at least in my opinion, is how inextricably linked religion is with every other aspect of their lives - including politics. This relationship makes it nearly impossible to have a healthy, rational debate on a wide array of topics IMO.
 
What is considered "liberal" today would have often been moderate or conservative thirty or forty years ago. A perfect example of this is VRA ruling by the Supreme Court. Thirty years ago it would have been unthinkable to accept a case from a county that had been adjudicated multiple times for discrimination to get them off such a list. The EPA was created by Nixon. Now, RWers think it's the devil. Reagan did an absolute immigration amnesty, Now even a dozen years of waiting, a hefty fine, no criminal record and much more is too much. School districts are banning books and not teaching true science or history.

We are living in a very, very conservative time in relationship to the past half century.
 
RJKarl said:
What is considered "liberal" today would have often been moderate or conservative thirty or forty years ago. A perfect example of this is VRA ruling by the Supreme Court. Thirty years ago it would have been unthinkable to accept a case from a county that had been adjudicated multiple times for discrimination to get them off such a list. The EPA was created by Nixon. Now, RWers think it's the devil. Reagan did an absolute immigration amnesty, Now even a dozen years of waiting, a hefty fine, no criminal record and much more is too much. School districts are banning books and not teaching true science or history.

We are living in a very, very conservative time in relationship to the past half century.
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Kennedy cut taxes.
 
Cutting taxes from 90% doesn't make him conservative.
 
Most aspects of the ACA have been supported by the GOP for two decades before a pretty drastic shift occurred (aka Obama proposed it). In a similar vein the NRA and most GOPers supported the reforms Democrats have been proposing for background checks and gun control back in the 1990's and as recently as the mid-2000's but all of a sudden now they're viewed as "taking away my second amendment rights."

The GOP has been on a hard right slant the past 20 years.
 
Wrangor said:
lol. You know I am not one of those guys. I just get tired of people complaining about how conservative we are as a country. We are who we are. Comparing ourselves to Sweden/Germany/France is pointless. We aren't and never will be a country like Sweden/Germany/France. All we can judge ourselves by is in fact ourselves. Comparison politics doesn't work because of the exact reasons brought up earlier. There is no nation like us, and there never will be (because we would never allow another country to do the things we did which gave us our advantage...mainly eliminate and marginalize an indigenous population and over run our neighbors in order to take advantage of all the geographical advantages of North America.

The reality is that we are a pretty good mix of conservative and liberal philosophies as a country, and that has a lot to do with our success. Any nation with that holds too closely to either sector of the political sphere eventually runs into major problems. I think the last 16 years has been a good example of that. We have swung from the far right to the far left (not commie libs left, but clearly left when Dems held all three seats of power) and I don't think either the Pubs or the Dems time in power have been particularly well spent. We are better off with a balanced government that works together. The dems spent the last 4 years of the Bush presidency hammering Bush and it worked to get Obama and the rest of the Dems elected. Pubs learned a lesson and took even further and are trying to do the same thing. It is a bad cycle, and it is going to take the American electorate to stop it. I doubt we have the stamina to do so.
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Where do Native American genocide and slavery fit on the conservative-liberal scale? Those were two pretty big factors early growth of the US.
 
Hmm...colonialism is definitely big government. Slavery is more pro-business owner, anti-worker. So a mixed bag.
 
vadimivich said:
And despite being ruled by incompetent (at best) and outright malicious (at worst) rulers throughout it's history, Russia is one of the few nations in the history of mankind to achieve superpower status ... and is still rich as hell and super powerful. And they don't have 2 oceans - hell, they barely have ports at all. And if Russia can't fuck it up, it's probably just impossible to fuck up period.

The success of the United States is largely the result of geographic luck and an extremely idealistic, extremely liberal group of founders willing to blow up the conservatism of the land they came from. The fact we've gradually calcified into one of the most conservative nations in the world isn't a highlight, it's a sad reality that being rich and successful for so long has turned us into the old grumpy man of the world unable to look around and see that those damn kids on our lawn might have some really good ideas that we're going to need to take advantage of if we're not just going to totter off into the darkness of old age.

We're far too happy with who we are, and not looking at who we want to be nearly enough. We talk about the American Dream a lot, but the American Dream is now the Swedish or German dream (other than the UK, nowhere in the western world has less economic mobility between generations than we do now). We're so far up our own asses we don't even know what's "extreme" anymore. "Extreme" is normal for us, and normal is "extreme".
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All of this.
 
PhDeac said:
Where do Native American genocide and slavery fit on the conservative-liberal scale? Those were two pretty big factors early growth of the US.
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Apparently genocide within the last 80 years is the new moderate way of thinking that we should aspire to.
 
so where do you think the various Houses of Westeros fall on the Conservative - Liberal scale?
 
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