The thing about the "we can't do health care because we're heterogeneous, unlike European countries" line:

1) Factually inaccurate, there are plenty of non-white people in Canada and France and England and so forth.

2) When pressed at how it appears you're saying that we can't have a welfare state because of the lazy blacks, these guys have learned to have a fallback positon, "Oh no I'm just saying that EVERYONE ELSE is racist. Now, I'm going to write several paragraphs about lazy people stealing welfare."

But like, uh, think that through buddy! Saying that American society is so poisoned by white supremacy that we won't implement objectively superior policies is a VERY LEFT WING POSITION. That's not consistent with the rest of the **** you wrote about conservatives! You gotta pick one, you can't lecture liberals for being sanctimonious and refusing to compromise with right wingers if you're also saying that right wingers are so overcome by racial animus they advocate for worse health care policies.

You can also avoid blatantly mischaracterizing people's posts, although this applies more to Wookie's rendition than to you.

Good talk?

For ****'s sake well named demanding that bad faith be treated as if it's good faith is garbage.

Like, BoredSocial has personally said,

OK, for one thing, my dude here seems like he's about 3 posts away from advocating for an ethnostate with death panels(Xtreme Centrist Logic and Reason, baby), but for ****'s sake, HE'S PRETTY GODDAMN BITTER ABOUT PUBLIC BENEFITS HIMSELF.

Please lecture BoredSocial about personally attacking himself, plz

Instead of wriggling your finger at Wookie and Noodle, you may want to acquaint yourself with BS's posting history. Not to mention BS just whined about being called racist when everyone was just talking about the impoverished if you're concerned with mischaracterizations of arguments.

My complaining about Noodle/Wookie's specific posts does not constitute an endorsement of BS' bad posting (such as it may be). I chose to address one specific thing because it interested me and caught my attention. Also because I think there's a more interesting conversation there, potentially, regardless of whether or not BS is able or willing to contribute meaningfully to it.

Anyway, please carry on. :P

his wording was pretty stilted but I understood his meaning to be that our country is full of people who are living off of welfare instead of working. he claims they are intentionally avoiding a job so that they can collect that sweet and comfortable welfare.

in fact, he claims that this is the case for the majority of welfare recipients. imagine that.

he also claims that us liberals personally know quite a few of these people bc they are so ubiquitous.

I mean, the guy is clearly an amazing genius to know such things with such accuracy. despite all evidence, studies, and basic math to the contrary, BoredSocial is so smart he is the one who actually sees the truth. We really should bow to his expertise and listen to what he advocates.

and btw fly, he has explicitly advocated for death panels in other posts on this board.

Who is that you want to change their behaviours?

Nazis aren't likely to be open to rejecting tribalism

The GOP? The entire foundation of their "ideology" is F**k your feelings (while having complete obsequiousness to my feelings)

Smart centrists that rare and mythical creature are fine. That's the goal you're looking for.

Centre leftists are already so milquetoasty that if they bent over any further backward they'd snap their spine.

So essentially you just want flywf to be nicer?

The op way overstates tribalism as the root problem. It is a sizable political problem though and mischaracterizing peoples views is one of the way's in which it manifests.

I don't see how you make it the root problem but it's a very real problem. There's an aspect to politics which is like a sporting event where which team people support is a useful predictor of whether they claim an incident was a foul or not.

People's views and allegiances do change but it's on a complex spectrum - making it a jump between small boxes, as tribalism tends to, makes progress much harder.

Poland has been under slightly mad far-right nationalist rule for a while. A few years ago the interior minister said that a bull elephant in Warsaw Zoo must be put down because he was refusing to mate and must therefore be gay and you can't have gay elephants in Holy Catholic Poland, apparently.

But the march you mention, a regular event for some years, is multi-national, drawing in the far right from a number of countries, and this year it is specifically American in inspiration.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a8048561.html

tribalism, by definition, cannot be "the" root problem, if it is itself a problem that stems from another problem, mainly that humans aren't perfect.

a discussion of why tribalism sucks makes sense, but pretending that solving that one specific issue fixes some nebulous 'everything' is kinda nonsensical.

Let me try to explain it to you. Fanatical extreme minorities are not the same as 35% of the adult population going after some crazy ideas.

The crazy gun lover racist uncle exists in europe. But its like 1-2 in 100. In us it's the normal guy in many rural areas. Its like someone that not every1 else laughs about as a life oddity.

I agreed on the existance of some problems qualitatively similar everywhere. i disagree on the intensity.

Victor, conservatives still have a lot of good ideas. Like... regulations.

If you disagree with the notion that currently, in all western society, the total amount of existing regulations is very far from optimal and "too big", i think you are wrong.

Do you know that if you dedicate your entire life to a single topic you still cant know all the rules that apply to it perfectly? do you think that's even close to reasonable?

Don't you agree that the sums of all the rules that apply to some position should be well within the personal median capabilities of that position holders to fully learn and understand? and that as a a cap, not as a optimal rule-total target.

Image you play a game where the person that dedicates his whole professional life to learn that games rules, doesn't know all of them.

Wouldn't you call that game grossly, ridicously, overregulated?

Let me elaborate a bit more on 1). Because you americans are very strange for us europeans.

white isn't a race. white isn't an etnic group. White isn't a single colour, culture, or anything. White simply isn't a proper label for a group of people, in europe.

A mafia guy from sicily is "white". A finnish rendeer farmer is... white? seriously?

Whiteness as a single group is a recent invention in america. Some time ago italians weren't all white. Irish weren't all white. GERMANS for **** sake weren't really white either.

So boredsocial (and all the americans using this false "omogeinity" myth talking about european countries) isn't wrong because in UK 10-12-15% of people are brown. He is wrong because being white until recently wouldn't mean **** in the UK. Rich white guys had white indetured servants.

And they didn't start to pay taxes for their welfare because they felt close to them etnically. They cared 0 of their well being, and they felt disgraced by their existence. They were forced to do so contrary to their will by politics.

So the idea that the welfare state was born out of etnic solidarity in europe, and this is why it couldn't work in the us, is a total fraud.

Except of course for scandinavian countries were the idea actually applies and is true.

But in germany, italy, spain, france, uk? lol wat? rich people couldn't care less about the well being of poor people, and every 20km you had a different culture, a different dialect, different eating habits, different social norms, and no ingroup homogeinity AT ALL when those vastly different mini-countries got united (this is german and italy history mostly).

Multiculturalism as an impediment to welfare his a fraud.

And, just to be clear, i am not a welfare-lover. But i'd like for the topic to be discussed as it is, not with smokes and mirrors. There are plenty of reasons to despise big welfare nets. Multiculturalism isn't one of them.

I think conservatives and others who bring up poor people mooching have lost their perspective since its not even that prevalent. We have grifting presidents and his people flying around in private jets funneling money to whatever business they own or to any friends they can find. Talk about eroding social trust. You want me to play the equal treatment routine with the guy stealing crumbs with the guy building second houses off the govement dime. No.

Not "everything". But in the absence of strong tribalism, a rich society can manage easily to let every1 at least "live somewhat decently" , and that seems a very good tier 2 target , given that perfection is out of reach.

Just look at japan and what they achieve with less productivity of the us and not such a big welfare state. But without strong intra-societal tribalism. To the point that they basically had a one-centrist-party rule for 60+ years almost ininterrupted. Like 60+ years of a RINOs+DINOs goverment.

The median japanese quality of life is so lol-tastic better than the american one that it's almost a joke, considering the real gdp per person is lower.

The panama papers revealed a lot of info about tax avoidance. Someone on a mainstream BBC political program tried to compare it to people avoiding tax by buying duty free at the airport.

One of the reasons social trust is being undermined is because we have far more idea about what the rich and powerful do. This is a good thing but finding the rot in your house is still highly unpleasant even if it's far better than not noticing.

It's somewhat analogous to what happened in the UK post WW1 where the working class get to see the upper class at first hand.

Yeah a lot of people sure do seem to be in a hurry to label me don't they?

As stated earlier I voted for HRC when the polls opened and I let my wife dump a thousand bucks on her campaign. I also had a prop bet going on this thing with a friend that I lost badly. The cognitive dissonance was insanely real.

I'm not trying to be a centrist because I'm only a centrist in the sense that I'm a liberal that thinks a lot of modern government programs have turned pretty cancerous and are in need of major reforms. I don't want to do away with the government... In some areas I want it expanded (in the case of healthcare massively expanded) and in other areas I want it expelled completely. For instance I think that many laws are cash grabs for lawyers (because most lawmakers are lawyers ldo). I also think that many laws were written by the people who they cover to the great benefit of whoever had the best lobbyists. In particular I think healthcare has been absolutely choked with deliberately restrictive regulation designed to prevent competition. I think this is the case rather a lot and I'm not ashamed to say it.

I don't necessarily think the government has my best interests at heart anymore than I think that the free market tends toward competition. The government is run by people who all have their own agendas. Similarly the free market is just a bunch of people all frantically trying to do as well as possible. The best way to win that game is to cooperate and cooperation is the opposite of competition.

Saying to yourself 'we good they bad' over and over is blinding us to the stuff that isn't so pretty about our side. We need to fix that stuff to make our arguments better. That way when we face a Donald Trump who is screaming 'what have they done for us lately' we don't limply say 'Obamacare... and now 10% of the population can be just as miserable as the rest of us'. Obamacare was an incredibly tepid compromise bill that disappointed everyone who understood it the day it was passed... And the gays got the right to marry through a Supreme Court that was majority conservative. Woo ****ing hoo.

We have to do better folks. These programs we're trying to protect need a massive facelift before we can get anything new done. What we have now simply costs too much for what it does and most people aren't willing to pay any more money than they already are to fund it.

If we want to be a party of big government it also has to be the party of ruthlessly good government. I don't think anyone wants to try to explain to me why we have almost exactly the same number of Federal Employees we did in the 80's before we invented the personal computer. Maybe we should be just as angry about stories like this as a conservative would be. Anybody whose bull**** detector isn't going off frantically reading that story should probably stop following public policy because they are awful at it.

Thi thread is going OT so fast.. wasn't it about tribalism? now it's about gvmnt role in society. Whatever.

From outside, for me, it's pretty clear why they are attacking you.

You smell of bothsidism in a bad way.

In the current american scenario you have a baddish center-left party, and an horrendous, demagogic monster on the right.

And am i saying this as a right-wing european, on the far (economically) right in my country.

As long as you don't admit to smart people, like 2+2 posters are, that no, there is no compromise possible with abominations like current trumpist republicans, like churchill did with hitler, you will get attacked, mocked, and so on.

Because they are right and you are wrong.

Your position is perfectly reasonable in a normal country with normal major parties. Republicans since 2010 have been transformed in the parody of a party, in something worse than the worst stereotype their adversaries could think of 20 years ago.

And this is why trying to cooperate, compromise and find a political centre with them specifically sounds not only dumb but mischievious.

The current republican party should be wiped away from the face of earth before politics as normal can come back again in the us.

And given that that outcome isn't probable, that's why i think you americans are doomed.

You caught me after all my edits. Nice.

Yeah. The sanitizing light of day is sometimes a painful cure. Though anyone who did not know US politicians and the rich work the system before the panama papers have had their head in the sand. Deep.

OK, what is the correct amount of racism we should tolerate? What does the liberal duty to accommodate racists look like?

Indeed. The same is true of the sexual harassment/assaults being revealed - any gasps of amazement are hard to take seriously. Still facts help a lot - you might be pretty sure you have rot in the house from the smell but still need to find it to deal with it effectively.

Moderate to low in the general population and zero to none in law enforcement officers?

You get that you can't actually legislate thought right? People are going to have bad thoughts and you can't actually make them stop. Particularly the tribal stuff like racism. That's part of human nature and here to stay. The groups change all the time but the dynamic sure as **** doesn't.