Okay, I hadn't checked this for a while. Time to reply.
John Madden said:
1) Immigration policy is not limited to refugee policy; on the broader front we're indisputably further to the left of everyone in Europe, or did I miss DACA and DAPA?
Points to the US when it's due, but I think the response to the likes of Syrian refugees carries more weight on where a party is placed on the left-right (or liberal-conservative) axis. They are a bigger red flag to the right than the programs you mentioned.
2) Reading comprehension is important: further left than anyone but Germany.
Alright, let's try reading comprehension:
John Madden said:
on immigration? the Dems are arguably further left than any major party in the EU. only Germany even comes close to our Overton window, and that's arguably because a grand coalition is currently in government.
You were saying Germany is close to the Dems but not close to the left of them,
close to the right of them.
John Madden said:
You'd think the private sector would have a win rate of more than 40% (and that they'd ever win more than damages incurred by regulation, and that they'd have ever won a case against the US) if those courts were actually "run by the corporate lobby".
Those processes, while in need of improvement with regards to transparency and appellate mechanisms, are legitimate.
Legitimate in what sense? In line with international law? Or actually making right decisions, whatever they may be? Of course I wasn't talking about legal legitimacy.
Arbitrators in investor-state dispute settlement tribunals tend to have close ties to big corporations. Okay, it grants them experience on the subject, but that doesn't change the fact that those ties are there.
Why should corporations even win the full damages incurred by regulation if the regulation is the right thing to do? Why should we assume that full damages = fair outcome? What's the logic here?
A 40 % win rate is low compared to... what exactly? What's your comparison point? And there are many reasons why the US might not lose. Maybe its legislation is friendlier to big companies to begin with.
Thus far, this appears to be the only substantive area of economic policy on which the Democratic Party is actually "further to the right" than its international center-left counterparts - and even then the party's deeply split with regards to whether they actually want to pass trade agreements like the TPP that entrench US IP interests.
e: Also, I forgot to add this to that earlier post - but, like, the IP and corporate-national arbitration segments of the TPP are precisely what's getting it torpedoed by the Sanders (and now Clinton) wing of the party.
"Deeply split" meaning how many? And I mean in terms of actual action, not just lip service. E.g. Hillary is
now against the deal or at least some aspects of it, but are we really supposed to assume this flip-flop is genuine?
But alright, maybe a large number of Dems will vote against it in Congress. Anything's possible; I guess we'll see.
[img139]http://i.imgur.com/gFzxbJ3.jpg[/img139]
He doesn't need to tell me that "abortion and guns and LGBT issues" are not economic issues, strictly speaking, and yet he still did anyway!
I didn't bring it up because I thought you didn't know the difference. I brought it up because you changed the subject.
John Madden said:
"she's a centrist/conservative on economic issues!"
John Madden said:
the only kind of person in america with the ideological room to legitimately call hillary clinton "conservative" on economic issues is so far left that history has already rendered them irrelevant
You only brought in other forms of right-wingness afterwards. Nothing wrong with it per se, but they have nothing to do with my original point (or evidently yours either).
Yeah, let's focus on the area of policy where the entirety of Europe - sans the UK, which has tended to take the "let's be America's lapdog" approach since Thatcher - has decided "cede peacekeeping authority to North America" is the way to go.
Or, y'know, let's not.
I'm not trying to argue about when noninterventionism is a good idea and when not. That is irrelevant to whether it's a leftist or socially liberal position.
John Madden said:
]Neither are many of continental Europe's systems - but in any event, the ACA framework allows for the federal government to eventually move to something similar to any of them.
The Democrats had filibuster-proof control of Congress for approximately a month. They spent that month negotiating the ACA.
But you're welcome to explain, to the guy with an MPA, that they had more room to negotiate potentially contentious policy than they actually did!
It's saying that they could've done more than they actually did that's putting me firmly in "condescending dick" mode, because, like, even an entry-level undergrad public policy class would give you the impression that they were lucky to get what they did given the sheer number of stakeholders they needed to work with and the sheer breadth of ideological difference in the pre-2010 Democratic Party.
This is not a parliament; whipping is not quite as efficient even when the parties are more ideologically homogeneous, and the Sanders/CPC wing vs the Blue Dogs/Lieberman are definitely not what I would describe anywhere near being "ideologically homogeneous". So he should probably stop acting like we are one.
There were negotiations, yes, but with whom? With Dems who didn't support single-payer or a public option.
You're right about the Dems being more loose as a political coalition than most left-wing parties, much of which is because of the election system. But that only proves my point. You can't be a real left-wing party if you're not ideologically homogeneous enough and much of the ideological mass is center-right.
Like, what were you even trying to contest with me? If your position is that the Dems are a loose coalition of various center-left, centrist and center-right forces, then congrats, you're right! That's perfectly compatible with my argument.
But also I'm dropping credentials again because, well... we're reading the same posts, right? Because he seems like he's still coming at me like I don't know anything about the different types of policy or how we differ from our European counterparts in, like, every field. He doesn't need to tell me that "abortion and guns and LGBT issues" are not economic issues, strictly speaking, and yet he still did anyway!
The problem is that the credentials are irrelevant for that.
For the record, I don't think your political knowledge is the problem. It's about logic and argumentation.
GhostAnime said:
that's pretty much his shtick. inject Europe in every US election topic somehow and usually going way over his head about how US Politics actually works.
Dude, I was contesting your logic more than political knowledge. Like, "the US system is the best because I won't compare it with anything else"? Really?
This is why when you e.g. demanded figures of the Hispanic population, I said it wasn't what I was talking about. Because it clearly wasn't!
