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#261 Re: Guns N' Roses » New Autographed GUNS N' ROSES Drumhead Appears To Confirm Lineup » 484 weeks ago
Meanwhile Matt and Duff have proven fantastic chemistry in a live setting. VR doesn't even have that many awesome songs but I know a bunch of people who will say the contraband live shows are amongst the best gigs they saw, let alone the UYI tour.
To be fair though, we haven't heard Duff and Slash play with Frank in any real capacity yet. They might have hit it off at early rehearsals when they were still debating wether or not to bring Matt or Steven in and just decided that they have great chemistry with Frank as well.
#262 Re: The Garden » 2016 Presidential Election Thread » 484 weeks ago
TheMole wrote:In short: the US needs Bernie at this point in its history.
No. We need a social liberal and a fiscal conservative. Enough of the back and forth. We need stabilization in a positive direction. If someone truly fit this description and could generate name recognition, they would be an easy winner.
Yes. You need a correction towards the left before you can stabilize, on fiscal issues as well as social issues. The current system is overly biased towards a specific class of citizen and is unsustainable.
#263 Re: The Garden » 2016 Presidential Election Thread » 484 weeks ago
Smoking Guns wrote:Holy fuck, I represent the center!!! I am what we should hope every politician to be! Hahaha
I want to get back to this point. While on the surface it does seem to make sense, I don't think you always want your politicians to be middle-of-the-road in everything. I believe most of the time it's better if they clearly stand for something, allowing voters to make a clear informed decision on which direction they want to see the country go. If you think about it in terms of making a 'correction' to the current state of affairs, it makes sense that you'd vote for a politician that is further along both axises than where you really want to end up.
#264 Re: The Garden » 2016 Presidential Election Thread » 484 weeks ago
ME TOO.... Poor test if we can't even answer in the middle.
Actually, it's commonly accepted that a good survey forces you to make a choice and doesn't have a middle option for opinion polling. For factual questions, you can make an argument that a "don't know" type option should be made available, but even there not all statisticians agree it's a good idea.
Having said that, this test could've been improved with a second multiple-choice response as to whether you find a given policy idea/position important or not, to give weight to the individual question (so, each answer would have consisted of a score on how much you agree and a score on how important you think it is). That would've been more accurate.
It's still a good test though, I've seen much worse political surveys than this.
#265 Re: The Garden » 2016 Presidential Election Thread » 484 weeks ago
polluxlm wrote:Not a bad assessment, in my view.
It's not. My question is, do you trust him?
If I did, I would consider Bernie. He talks a similar game to Trump, and he's more intelligent about it. Yet I'm not feeling the Bern.
Bernie is pandering to people that want free shit. That alone pisses me off because it comes across to me as "vote for me, I will get you the free shit". NOTHING IN LIFE IS FREE. SOMEBODY ALWAYS HAS TO PAY. So I don't like those kinds of promises. I do however respect his passion and intentions. And on many things I agree. But he is only going after one kind of voter. Seems to hate rich people.
I don't think he hates rich people, at all. I think he mostly hates the influence the extremely rich exert over the political system (which he has in common with Trump).
He also isn't pandering, he clearly really believes that people deserve access to basic healthcare, education, minimum wage and public infrastructure regardless of their income level. And he clearly says where the money needs to come from. He's nothing if not transparent about it.
#266 Re: The Garden » 2016 Presidential Election Thread » 484 weeks ago
My question is, do you trust him?
I do, more so than Hillary (the only other viable candidate for me) at least. And way more than I trust Trump or Cruz. Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he's willing to say anything to get elected (and has changed positions on issues in a matter of days), which makes the search for his real policy positions akin to searching for a needle in a haystack. Obfuscating your real positions for the sake of electability that badly makes him very untrustworthy for me.
Cruz... well, anyone that religious should not be president if you care about personal liberties.
#267 Re: The Garden » 2016 Presidential Election Thread » 484 weeks ago
Maybe. For me the "problem" with Sanders is not his stated policies. They mostly look sensible and intelligent, and I agree with many of them. What makes me reject him is the way he talks. When he goes on about "the big bad rich" I see that as coming from the mind of a communist. Then looking into his past and I find communist ties, the deal is off for me. Communism is what I fear the most, and if there's a chance a candidate is that, I'm not buying him however good a game he talks (and Bernie talks a good game).
Looking at it from a European perspective, I agree with you: I'd never vote for someone using Bernie's rhetoric on our side of the pond. I'd vote (and have voted) for parties that have very similar policies though. However, in the context of the US I'm willing to give him a pass on that for a number of reasons:
- The two-party system forces him to be more outspoken to get the nomination for 'his' party, to set him apart from Hillary. In a parliamentary democracy with multiple viable parties you can (need to) be more nuanced in your positions.
- The American media feeds on polarization (more than most European media does). In order to get any amount of screen time, he needs to exaggerate and simplify his message more than a similar candidate would in Europe.
- In order to effectively bring his message across, get through to the average American citizen, and pierce through the "USA is #1 in everything" reality distortion field that some perpetuate, he needs to create a threat to the American Way of Life(tm), a boogeyman if you will, and big nameless corporations are an obvious and easy target, especially given that they really have contributed significantly to the wealth gap over the past few years/decades.
- There's no way in hell that the American people will allow anyone to turn their country into a communist authoritarian nation, the US constitution has many provision that provide protections against that and 4 years (or 8) is not nearly enough time to dismantle that entire framework. So even if you buy into the idea that Bernie is a real communist (he isn't), 4 years of having him in charge is likely to push the US more in the direction of a Western European-style Social Democracy (which would be a good thing), it'll never be enough to push the country over the edge into full blown Communism (a very very bad thing).
In short: the US needs Bernie at this point in its history.
#268 Re: The Garden » 2016 Presidential Election Thread » 484 weeks ago
Someone should take the time to do this for Trump, Cruz, Hillary and Bernie to see where they are on the spectrum based on their published policies.
Well, I should have figured that someone would have done this already, and the website hosting the test would be a likely candidate:
So we all should be voting for Sanders based on this (even SG and Polluxlm), especially if you consider yourself a libertarian 
. If this is a reliable picture (big if), the American people are sorely misrepresented by their leadership (and vice versa) and it does explain why Sanders is such a runaway success with younger people.
For those of you that have called Sanders a communist before, I recommend reading the paragraph about him on https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2016 (replicated here):
Quite why Sanders is describing himself to the American electorate — of all electorates — as a 'socialist' or 'democratic socialist' isn't clear. His economics are Keynesian or Galbraithian, in common with mainstream parties of the left in the rest of the west — the Labour or Social Democrat parties. Surely 'Social Democrat' would be a more accurate and appealing label for the Sanders campaign to adopt. While Sanders claims to admire particularly the Scandinavian model, he neglects to point out that a characteristic of all social democracies is a low defence budget, reflecting not only a degree of anti-militarism, but also social spending as a priority. Beyond tinkering, though, Sanders has no appetite for significantly cutting the Herculean defence budget or criticising imperial adventures. His urging for the World's most authoritarian country, Saudi Arabia, to assert a stronger military presence in the Middle East is a bizarre position for a social democrat to hold. These odd clusters of attitudes are reflected in our placement of Sanders. Domestically the man is an undoubted progressive — not the least for his courageous attack on corporate campaign funding. But on foreign policy, you could expect a President Sanders to be strikingly similar to his predecessors.
Not a bad assessment, in my view.
#269 Re: The Garden » 2016 Presidential Election Thread » 484 weeks ago
Interesting test, I'm about as libertarian as I expected, but I would've characterized myself as more right-leaning than left:
Someone should take the time to do this for Trump, Cruz, Hillary and Bernie to see where they are on the spectrum based on their published policies.
#270 Re: The Garden » 2016 Presidential Election Thread » 485 weeks ago
pollux from a European stand point. Which republican candidate is least likely to start a nuclear war or at least another Iraq that I should cheer on at 2:AM in the morning while watching CNN?
The answer to the question is Kasich, followed by Rubio.
I consider nuclear war very unlikely for any candidate. Nobody can profit from it, so therefore nobody wants it. Even if someone like Cruz was the religious extremist he portrays himself as (which I doubt), and for some reason wanted to start a war for his God or whatever, he would get little to no support by the people around him. Imo he would be impeached or assassinated before he could reach the button.
I agree that a republican president starting a nuclear war is highly unlikely, but Trump and Cruz's temperament and rhetoric are more likely to flame hatred across the globe, they are more likely to incite less enlightened nations to act first. And with a president Cruz or Trump in office, I'd say it's much more likely they retaliate disproportionally than with a president Kasich or Rubio.
