Who's the bigger offender: Conservatives or Liberals?

We don't hear as much about politicians running on 'family values', mainly because so many who did so got caught either in affairs , or soliciting prostitutes in public bathrooms.

You're ignoring one word there: pursuit. You're entitled to the pursuit of happiness. You are not entitled to have happiness handed to you on a silver platter.And the preamble to that phrase is, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...." All men - and let's include women too, just for fun - are entitled to the pursuit of happiness, e.g. they are entitled to compete for your job.And don't forget that the pursuit of happiness means being able to choose the person you marry, regardless of race, color, creed, gender, etc. I don't.You're the one who thinks he's elite, remember? But you could work your way up to ordinary. It's up to you to do that - by embracing ordinary things like universal healthcare. You can aspire to becoming civilized. You can come into the twentieth century - and then, who knows what? Then your position doesn't add up. The unwashed masses are your enemies and you want the military to protect you from them. It shouldn't. Nationalism is one of the worst plagues ever known to mankind. It caused two world wars and a lot of smaller ones. Untold millions of deaths. Shove your nationalism back up your ass where it came from. Of course. What's bad about that? Not at all. My fellow countrymen have better access to education than most people in the world. They already have a leg up. They don't have to step on the less privileged to get ahead. They're already ahead. But they do have to earn the right to stay there. Stop it. I told you I'm not an elite. Don't move the goalposts.And you're still just talking about your own petty entitlements. Say something about liberals and conservatives.

That's right. Some of them were idiots and some of them were evil.

Funny, I can't think of a single Trump supporter who is not an evil idiot.

Tribalism, whether nationalism or religion have doomed humanity and the planet, with America leading the march, Fuck 'em all!

So in other words, being the brave global elitist that you appear to be, America has essentially doomed the planet. And your solution is to support your fellow educated class from the entire planet...the brave new (secular) globalists to lead humanity forward and away from tribalism, mythos, and ignorance. Got it... But what you do with dragonflies is pretty and likely quite useful. As Nationalism diminishes in the future, the United States will also diminish in scope and influence. She has been abandoned in favor of an entire planet being our collective humanist starship.I fear that it is a mistake, but keep in mind I believe that Jesus is likely coming back once we humans trash our ecosystem and are at each other's throats. And I also believe in a major economic correction....whereby the blue-collar working class will demand we use the military to keep competitors like China and its hungry billions from dominating the shrinking global food stocks. I know....sounds like a bad movie! I'm praying to be more loving and understanding, but I'm not ready to abandon the arsenal of democracy in favor of kum ba yah...have you hugged your planet today? Main reason being that I don't believe in humanism as the final solution. How meritocracy harms everyone — even the winners

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We typically think of meritocracy as a system that rewards the best and brightest. For Markovits, it is merely “a pretense, constructed to rationalize an unjust distribution of advantage.” Here’s a clarifying stat: At two Ivy League schools that Markovits surveyed, “the share of students from households in the top quintile of the income distribution exceeds the share from the bottom two quintiles combined by a ratio of about three and a half to one.” The point: Meritocracy is a mechanism for transferring wealth from one generation to the next. Call that what you want, but you can’t call it fair or impartial.

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Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

Edited by Phat, : added quote from article

What's with this throwing of insults? Don't you claim to be a Christian?Sure, Republicans like to throw the accusation of "elitist" against Democrats. But if you look up the dictionary meaning of "elitist", it is the Republicans who best fit that definition.

What Markovits is talking about is the existing American system. What you have been arguing against is a true merit-based system, under which, for example, China could take precedence over the US because it does a better job. You're advocating a system under which the US always takes precedence, no matter how bad a job it does.Edited by ringo, : Spoiling.

No, in other words you are mistaken. I'm not an elitist, global or otherwise. I pointed out the planet Earth is fucked and it is humans that fucked it. And the United stated of America, as the largest consumer of resources, the largest economy, the richest country in all of history, and until recently the most technologically advanced county, with the most powerful military, and the most gunshot victims,has done most of the fucking. All of humanity is responsible.Tribal competition got us here and global cooperation could solve the obvious impending disaster, but humans cannot even cooperate within their own tribe and we will never do anything to work toward a common goal, survival.You are just making up shit and trying to smear it on me, well fuck you! Nationalism is not diminishing, and will destroy everything. U. S. influence is diminishing because many other countries will no longer allow the us to exploit them. Once again you erroneously imply that is my position. Human cooperation could solve our worst impending disasters, but my position is that that will never happen. Like I said, that is one of the primary reasons earth is fucked, Santa Claus is coming to town. So, no matter how totally fucked up humanity is, your delusion of a savior will decide we deserve saving. You really are an insulting little prick!And what is the arsenal of democracy?And the only possible way all of humanity could form a cooperative society that benefits the planet and all of its inhabitants is if it is organized democratically. I am unaware of any societal system that benefits all that is better than democracy. I have no idea why you thought this bullshit was an appropriate response to anything I wrote.Edited by Tanypteryx, : Added US has most gunshot victims

Well, we should not make the mistake of taking the words Phat is using at face value. Nor according to their actual meaning.Where is he getting this nonsense from? The right-wingnuts? The ones who constantly redefine words and ideas in order to create new boogeymen with which to scare their listeners, like Phat?I've been getting the same kind of nonsense for decades from creationists. They'll go off complaining about "evilution" and its "consequences", none of which makes any sense if you understand anything about evolution. When you ask them just what they're talking about, they immediately deflect and divert. To be honest, it's almost a sure thing that they themselves don't understand anything that they're saying, but rather they're just repeating what they've been told.So just what the hell is Phat talking about? One thing I'm pretty sure of is that he has no idea himself.

So then nationalism is yet another concept that you do not understand. A simple definition of nationalism, especially as it currently operates, is "Everything for us and just us alone ... fuck everybody else!" America First isolationalism was also strong right up until Pearl Harbor: "So what if Hitler conquers the rest of the world and now moves in to conquer us as well, America First!" Why should we care that the ship we're on is sinking? We are sitting in First Class! Your problem with the ship sinking does not concern us in the least.I have a background in wargaming. Basically, wargaming is a technique for creating simulations of realworld conflicts (and imagined worlds as well -- one of the first games I participated in was a Star Trek miniatures ship-to-ship combat game being playtested on base). One of the purposes of gaming out a conflict is to study it -- eg, I played an Operation Market Garden game shortly before the movie, "A Bridge Too Far" came out. I also got bogged down trying to take the bridge in Nijmegen (I didn't even begin to realize that I should have used my engineer units and their boats to take the bridge from both ends -- a bridge can be one helluva choke point) while the airborne troops at Arnhem were being overrun.For the Good of the Order (a military concept given lip service at morning quarters) we have the story of the Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU). Western Approaches Command, based in Liverpool, was in charge of all the incoming convoys and their defense -- hence WAC was in charge of waging the most important battle of WWII, The Battle of the Atlantic. They took a washed-up RN commander (later promoted to captain), Gilbert Roberts, disqualified from sea duty on a medical (tuberculosis), and put him in charge of the newly formed WATU manned primarily by young WRNS enlisted (Women's Royal Naval Service, AKA "Wrens" (love their flat hats) ) and charged with analyzing German U-Boot tactics and developing ASW counter-measures. They performed their mission through wargaming. First they worked out what the Germans were doing (new unexpected tactic was to sneak into the midst of the convoy and attack it from within) and how to counter it (Code Name: Raspberry as in "blowing a raspberry at Hitler" AKA "bronx cheer" AKA derisive fart sound AKA Trump (refer to Spike Jones' song used in a WWII Donald Duck cartoon -- see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWF8iRCan7I ) ). Just to CYA (euphemistically "cover your actions"), they gave later ASW tactics fruitish names like "Pineapple". Engagements in the Battle of the Atlantic could last for days, so convoys under attack would radio in the situation to WAC who would refer it to WATU who would game out the situation and come up with counter-measures that WAC would radio back to the convoy. By 1943, ADM Dönitz' only response to the devastating U-Boot losses was to withdraw his submarine fleet. The Battle of the Atlantic was effectively over. After the war, Capt Roberts visited Germany's submarine command headquarters only to see a photograph of himself on a wall with the legend, "This is your enemy." Far more recognition than he ever got from his own government.The most famous story out of WATU was when WAC got a new Commander in Chief (CINC), Admiral Sir Max Kennedy Horton, Britain's best and brightest submarine commander of WWI, who, in Navy-speak, "really knew his shit." He was skeptical of WATU, so when he visited them he immediately waved aside the traditional dog-and-pony show and asked to be shown what they could really do. He personally took command of a German submarine attacking a convoy. He was surprised when he was quickly informed he had been sunk. Five more times he attacked the convoy and five more times he was sunk in short order. Now duly impressed, he demanded to meet the officer who had defeated him because men such as him were direly needed in the convoys. He was introduced to the victorious convoy commander, Janet Hay Okell, a 20-year-old Wren rating (ie, enlisted, not an officer) who had beaten him from a closed room where she was only fed standard action reports.There are a number of YouTube videos about WATU. In your search, use the entire name, Western Approaches Tactical Unit, since WATU will direct you to some band. No, Phat, I do not expect you to actually take the time and effort to look that up. This one is for the lurkers (AKA visitors).In a negative wargaming story, in preparing for Midway the Japanese used wargaming. The story goes that they lost in their game, so they changed the initial parameters until they did win. Furthermore, as the story goes, that changed parameter was our ability to return the Yorktown into service (she had been severely damaged in the Battle of the Coral Sea) which we did achieve beyond everybody's expectation. See the footnotes for a related story I was surprised to learn. 
OK, having established the value of wargaming out situations, let's look at a global simulation and how well your "nationalism" plays out. This is from Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians -- have you ever heard of it?Addressed to lurkers/visitors (sorry, I'm rather old-school). Bob Altemeyer is a now-retired university psychology professor from Canada. In his PhD exams he failed the authoritarian section so he had to re-research that part and as a result he devoted most of his research to right-wing authoritarianism. After decades of statistical math intensive published articles, he ended his career with a very readable work, "The Authoritarians". Download it for free (as a PDF) and read it. Especially the footnotes that he keeps warning you away from; those footnotes are the best part of the book.OK. There are a number of simulations/games in which participants play the leaders of countries. There was one being run by Altemeyer's son, so Dad appropriated a couple runs. First Daddy made sure that all participants rated high on his right-wing-authoritarian (RWA) scale. The results were disasterous with the game ending in nuclear war (then restarted two years prior and ended on the verge of a second auto-anniliation). Then Daddy selected on the low-RWA participants and we all survived and the earth too!Here's the text (pp 30-34):

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Unauthoritarians and Authoritarians: Worlds of Difference

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By now you must be developing a feel for what high RWAs think and do, and
also an impression of low RWAs. Do you think you know each group well enough to predict what they’d do if they ran the world? One night in October, 1994 I let a group of low RWA university students determine the future of the planet (you didn’t know humble researchers could do this, did you!). Then the next night I gave high RWAs their kick at the can.

​

The setting involved a rather sophisticated simulation of the earth’s future
called the Global Change Game, which is played on a big map of the world by 50-70 participants who have been split into various regions such as North America, Africa, India and China. The players are divided up according to current populations, so a lot more students hunker down in India than in North America. The game was designed to raise environmental awareness, and before the exercise begins players study up on their region’s resources, prospects, and environmental issues.

​

Then the facilitators who service the simulation call for some member, any member of each region, to assume the role of team leader by simply standing up. Once the “Elites”in the world have risen to the task they are taken aside and given control of their region’s bank account. They can use this to buy factories, hospitals, armies, and so on from the game bank, and they can travel the world making deals with other Elites. They also discover they can discretely put some of their region’s wealth into their own pockets, to vie for a prize to be given out at the end of the simulation to the World’s Richest Person. Then the game begins, and the world goes wherever the players take it for the next forty years which, because time flies in a simulation, takes about two and a half hours.

​

The Low RWA Game

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By carefully organizing sign-up booklets, I was able to get 67 low RWA
students to play the game together on October 18th . (They had no idea they had been funneled into this run of the experiment according to their RWA scale scores; indeed they had probably never heard of right-wing authoritarianism.) Seven men and three women made themselves Elites. As soon as the simulation began, the Pacific Rim Elite called for a summit on the “Island Paradise of Tasmania.” All the Elites attended and agreed to meet there again whenever big issues arose. A world-wide organization was thus immediately created by mutual consent.

​

Regions set to work on their individual problems. Swords were converted to ploughshares as the number of armies in the world dropped. No wars or threats of wars occurred during the simulation. [At one point the North American Elite suggested starting a war to his fellow region-aires (two women and one guy), but they told him to go fly a kite--or words to that effect.]

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An hour into the game the facilitators announced a (scheduled) crisis in the earth’s ozone layer. All the Elites met in Tasmania and contributed enough money to buy new technology to replenish the ozone layer.

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Other examples of international cooperation occurred, but the problems of the Third World mounted in Africa and India. Europe gave some aid but North America refused to help. Africa eventually lost 300 million people to starvation and disease, and India 100 million.

​

Populations had grown and by the time forty years had passed the earth held 8.7 billion people, but the players were able to provide food, health facilities, and jobs for almost all of them. They did so by demilitarizing, by making a lot of trades that benefited both parties, by developing sustainable economic programs, and because the Elites diverted only small amounts of the treasury into their own pockets. (The North American Elite hoarded the most.)

​

One cannot blow off four hundred million deaths, but this was actually a highly
successful run of the game, compared to most. No doubt the homogeneity of the players, in terms of their RWA scores and related attitudes, played a role. Low RWAs do not typically see the world as “Us versus Them.” They are more interested in cooperation than most people are, and they are often genuinely concerned about the environment. Within their regional groups, and in the interactions of the Elites, these first-year students would have usually found themselves “on the same page”--and writ large on that page was, “Let’s Work Together and Clean Up This Mess.” The game’s facilitators said they had never seen as much international cooperation in previous runs of the simulation. With the exception of the richest region, North America, the lows saw themselves as interdependent and all riding on the same merry-go-round.

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The High RWA Game

​

The next night 68 high RWAs showed up for their ride, just as ignorant of how they had been funneled into this run of the experiment as the low RWA students had been the night before. The game proceeded as usual. Background material was read, Elites (all males) nominated themselves, and the Elites were briefed. Then the “wedgies” started. As soon as the game began, the Elite from the Middle East announced the price of oil had just doubled. A little later the former Soviet Union (known as the Confederation of Independent States in 1994) bought a lot of armies and invaded North America. The latter had insufficient conventional forces to defend itself, and so retaliated with nuclear weapons. A nuclear holocaust ensued which killed everyone on earth--7.4 billion people--and almost all other forms of life which had the misfortune of co-habitating the same planet as a species with nukes.

​

When this happens in the Global Change Game, the facilitators turn out all the lights and explain what a nuclear war would produce. Then the players are given a second chance to determine the future, turning back the clock to two years before the hounds of war were loosed. The former Soviet Union however rebuilt its armies and invaded China this time, killing 400 million people. The Middle East Elite then called for a “United Nations” meeting to discuss handling future crises, but no agreements were reached.

​

At this point the ozone-layer crisis occurred but--perhaps because of the recent failure of the United Nations meeting--no one called for a summit. Only Europe took steps to reduce its harmful gas emissions, so the crisis got worse. Poverty was spreading unchecked in the underdeveloped regions, which could not control their population growth. Instead of dealing with the social and economic problems “back home,” Elites began jockeying among themselves for power and protection, forming military alliances to confront other budding alliances. Threats raced around the room and the Confederation of Independent States warned it was ready to start another nuclear war. Partly because their Elites had used their meager resources to buy into alliances, Africa and Asia were on the point of collapse. An Elite called for a United Nations meeting to deal with the crises--take your pick--and nobody came.

​

By the time forty years had passed the world was divided into armed camps threatening each other with another nuclear destruction. One billion, seven hundred thousand people had died of starvation and disease. Throw in the 400 million who died in the Soviet-China war and casualties reached 2.1 billion. Throw in the 7.4 billion who died in the nuclear holocaust, and the high RWAs managed to kill 9.5 billion people in their world--although we, like some battlefield news releases, are counting some of the corpses twice.

​

The authoritarian world ended in disaster for many reasons. One was likely the character of their Elites, who put more than twice as much money in their own pockets as the low RWA Elites had. (The Middle East Elite ended up the World’s Richest Man; part of his wealth came from money he had conned from Third World Elites as payment for joining his alliance.) But more importantly, the high RWAs proved incredibly ethnocentric. There they were, in a big room full of people just like themselves, and they all turned their backs on each other and paid attention only to their own group. They too were all reading from the same page, but writ large on their page was, “Care About Your Own; We Are NOT All In This Together.”

​

The high RWAs also suffered because, while they say on surveys that they care about the environment, when push comes to shove they usually push and shove for the bucks. That is, they didn’t care much about the long-term environmental consequences of their economic acts. For example a facilitator told Latin America that converting much of the region’s forests to a single species of tree would make the ecosystem vulnerable. But the players decided to do it anyway because the tree’s lumber was very profitable just then. And the highs proved quite inflexible when it came to birth control. Advised that “just letting things go” would cause the populations in underdeveloped areas to explode, the authoritarians just let things go.

​

Now the Global Change Game is not the world stage, university students are not world leaders, and starting a nuclear holocaust in a gymnasium is not the same thing as launching real missiles from Siberia and North Dakota. So the students’ behavior on those two successive nights in 1994 provides little basis for drawing conclusions about the future of the planet. But some of what happened in this experiment rang true to me. I especially thought, “I’ve seen this show before” as I sat on the sidelines and watched the high RWAs create their very own October crisis.

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So based on that, who would you rather have running your world? The "liberals" who try to work together for our mutual survival? Or your "conservatives" who would destroy the entire world and kill everybody off if it got them a few percentage points greater profit? 
 

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Operation K. A Japanese aerial attack and reconnaissance mission over Hawaii on 04 Mar 1942. In the long archipelago north of Hawaii (artifact of the Pacific Plate travelling over a magma hotspot -- it's now just east of Kona Hawaii) is the French Frigate Shoals, so named because of a French frigate that had run aground there. The Japanese were using it as a rendez-vous point for their operations. The two seaplanes used in Operation K rendez-vous'd there with a submarine which refueled them. From there, they flew on their mission which fell apart -- due to cloud cover they could not identify their intended targets so one bomb hit a hill next to a high school and the other fell into the ocean.However, Operation K did alert our Navy to Japanese activity at French Frigate Shoals, so we started to maintain a Navy presence there. Part of the Japanese plans for Midway was to maintain a submarine picket anchored on French Frigate Shoals that would detect the approach of US forces and determine their composition. If the Japanese had had that picket in place, they would have known about the Yorktown and the Battle of Midway, the pivotal battle in the Pacific, could have ended quite differently.

I was going to say, he's like a stormtrooper on a street corner shouting slogans.

Much of my argumentation is an addictive pattern of whining. I get caught up in poking the lion with a stick.

So stop doing that. Debate honestly.

OK but i might point out that being squeezed by the global population from the already spartan lifestyle which i now enjoy concerns and irritates me greatly. You don't wanna see me angry!If i dont get enough after my best attempts at forming consensus with the world then I /we will blow something up versus being humiliated and squeezed.Edited by Phat, : No reason given.