I think the most important part of that sentence is the word "seen". While there are a few "far left" Democrats, they do not control the party. Yet how often have we heard the right wing screech "socialist/communist" at Biden despite the fact that he has been a very moderate candidate.

I think the built-in advantage that the Republicans have in politics has something to do with Republican success at getting their policies implemented (including anti-abortion)... Voter suppression, gerrymandering, an electoral college and Senate that gives more weight to states that have more cows than People.

If it were a "fair" fight, the Republicans probably would not have had held any significant power over the past couple of decades (not with their current policies/ideology anyways). But Moscow Mitch was able to block much of Obama's agenda (including his supreme Court pick) despite the fact that Republican senators came from states representing less than half the US population, and Stubby Mcbonespurs was able to nominate 3 supreme court justices (as well as approve an unpopular set of tax cuts for millionaires) despite the fact he was elected with a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Clinton.



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That may well be the case, but I suspect the fear among the "middle ground" is that they might find a way to do so.

You maybe need to unpack what they actually mean when they say this. Often what that means is an elitist, technocratic, management state that promises some kind of utopia resulting from progress guided by experts and bureaucrats while actually making the population ever more dependent on an ever larger state with the background of society being understood as a struggle between an oppressed class and an oppressor class whose interests the "socialists/communists" rhetorically represent.

There is nothing to unpack.

The only thing they mean when they say this is, "We don't understand what communism or socialism are."

If anyone believes that any of the mainstream Democrat politicians are anything more than slightly left of centre they are delusional.

Communism and Socialism have been around as ideas for, what, 200 years? They have meant a great many wildly contradictory things over that period. This game where we take a broad concept with a variety of historical meanings, and then pretend that actually the meaning is very precise and somebody is using the word incorrect is silly. It's a cheap rhetorical trick.

And that'd be right. I've mentioned this enough times in the past couple of weeks to feel like I'm harping, but the Democratic party as a whole has not been in favor of abortion rights until very recently. In hindsight it's obvious that they should have been, but the people who have argued that they should invest some political capital into redundantly preserving the legality of abortion have been the more generally socialist side who don't understand that incrementalism, bipartisanship and compromise are the real key to lasting change.
And that'd be wrong. Taken as a whole and divorced from political context, voters support socialist goals like universal health care and codified abortion rights. That's why those issues get ignored by moderate Democrats; anyone who cares are already safe blue votes. What they're unpalatable with are the "swing" voters that moderate dems fall over themselves to court, the people who see one party of hateful face-eating leopards and the other trying to make things better for everyone and genuinely can't decide.

That's a lot of unpacking for "ooga booga."

One might have hoped, obviously in vain, that after those 200 years people would know the difference. Ther are many breeds of cats in the world too, but when the family moggie scratches at the door only a fool yells "tiger attack!"

:rolleyes:
What additional risk to the life of the mother do you consider acceptable before you woud permit a termination?
A 25% additional risk of death?
50%
100%
200%
400%
800%

Gerrymandered is one.

A second is there is often a dominant party so the primary, not the general, is the election that counts so candidates aren't even trying to appeal to the majority, rather a majority of the people in their party and who vote in primary elections and at that usually in non-presidential years. This generally means angry people with time on their hands.

Related to that is that some states and municipalities seem to go out of their way to make voting difficult. I had to make phone calls to figure out when my town election happened. It was a random Tuesday, not a holiday, etc. In my town of 2500 people the mayor was elected by a vote of 187-19.

That sort of thing...

Sure, but that isn't how these kinds of words work. "Socialism" and "Communism" are much vaguer words than "cat". All sorts of things are Communist, in a sense.... or Socialist, from a certain point of view. They simply aren't clearly demarked positions with well policed boundaries. It's like the definitions of Left and Right in politics. People who are left wing in one persons perspective could be right wing in another.

This isn't going to turn into the continuum fallacy, is it?

And here is where we are:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...irth-abortion/

Note that this conservative columnist has started calling the anti-abortion crowd "forced birth," no longer "pro-life."

1/ A fetus is not a baby in law or in the teachings of most religions. 2/ If it was, on what basis do we say it has the right to compel any other person to risk their life, their health and their economic condition for its benefit?

There is also "convenience" as a word for not having to birth and be responsible for a human being. Implying that it is frivolous .

If men could get pregnant there would be storefront abortion clinics in every town.

Is it that they not been in favor of abortion rights or is it that they are in favor of them and just took it for granted that no sane Supreme Court would ever overturn such a basic right?

Obviously, hindsight is 20/20, but it was not an unreasonable assumption.

I'm not sure that valuing another life, or some class of lives, is something that you can really be reasoned in to if you don't feel it. At the end of the day, any concept of rights, and who they apply to, is either coldly utilitarian, or derives from these kinds of gut instinct.

And if women could get pregnant, there would be no concept of child support.

You can feel and believe anything you want and live accordingly. The question is whether you should be able to impose your feelings and beliefs on anyone else, with criminal penalties for anyone who disagrees.

I don't think definitions are as vague as you might think.

Communism has a pretty specific definition (workers control the means of production), etc. Plus we have a pretty clear example of 'communism in action' (e.g. the USSR). And no democrat (even the most 'left wing') wants anything resembling that.

The term 'socialism' is perhaps a little vaguer (e.g. even Bernie Sanders has used the term to describe himself), but even there the mainstream democrats are not proposing anything near what 'socialists' want.

Plus, part of the reason the terms are seen as vague is because the republicans themselves keep misusing them. They distort the meaning of the word, then claim "the meaning fits because we ourselves have helped distort it".

It was delusional. Especially in the sense that the best case scenario was a profound gutting of Roe/Casey that would make the right illusory. To the extent that hadn't happened already.

They've been rather apologetic about supporting abortion rights and that's done nothing but enable those that have seized the moral high ground.

Banning abortion was always the morally abhorrent position, but the Democratic party seemed to want to consider abortion more a necessary evil than something that greatly increases quality of life for those seeking it.

Our morality comes from our feelings and our beliefs. Without feelings and beliefs, nothing is wrong. We may add reason on top of that, but you can't ground morality in pure reason. This is why philosophers who reject tradition, and moral intuitions, keep coming back to defending paedophilia. "Yes, but why is it wrong"... is a great line of questioning, but ultimately the answer is "because I feel that it is". Very few people actually want to live in a society where feelings and beliefs aren't imposed on other people with criminal penalties. Such a society would be a chaotic, amoral, nihilistic mess. The only question is which feelings and which beliefs.

The Repubs use the word as an epithet and a scare tactic. If you ask Americans whether they support (or would if they had the chance) Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, universal health care, free public education, affordable college, a strong social safety net, etc., etc., the number for "yes" would be overwhelming. But call it "socialism" and they shudder ("mah freedumbs!"). What the Repubs are calling socialism is what used to be the mainstream Hubert Humphrey Democrat platform. Newt Gingrich has famously said he would like to "restore" America to the pre-FDR era, and that's the direction we're headed.

No, what it means is that the Republicans want to use scary words who's meaning they are distorting in order to convince their voters to vote for them, because if voters actually looked at their policies the republicans would never gain power.
So they want to avoid the Democrats possibly maybe in theory hypothetically wanting to establish some of utopia run by experts/bureaucrats causing oppression, so they vote for the republican party, which DEFINITELY wants oppression (witness their abortion policy which takes away women's rights, or their militarization of the police)...

Given a choice between a hypothetical abuse of power by the Democrats, and a very real abuse of power by the Republicans, I think I'd take the hypothetical.

Those are certainly definitions, there is no Academie Francaise imposing a single correct meaning though. After 200 years, the meaning is how the word is used.

Are a relatively small group of self described socialists on the fringes of the Democrat party the arbiters of what is and isn't socialism?

Is there some group of people that has a right to give words meanings, and some who do not?

American society never became an "amoral nihilistic mess" in the 50 years that abortion was legal and regulated. What it is has become now is a nation where a woman's legal rights, criminal exposure and risks to life and health change when she crosses a state border.

But that's not what is happening here. We're granting rights to not-yet-beings because of a particular religious belief over other religious and secular beliefs. The Constitution says that's a no-no, but the current Supreme Court is letting it happen anyway.

Just a side note that I feel this argument is garbage, and I see it a lot on here. It is a liberal fantasy that only Christians are not enthusiastic about relaxed abortion law.

Sure, "do you want free ****" always has overwhelming approval when you ask the question in the absence of some kind of discussion of the costs and consequences incurred by giving the free **** away. In many ways this is one of the fundamental issues with democracy in that it creates incentives for groups in power to find client groups that they can offer free **** to that they have appropriated from other groups and society turns into a game of competing to be one of the client groups.

I don't think there is any possibility of things heading to pre-FDR. Government is too big, and too many people have become dependent on it. You can't unwind these things.

Anyway, it is no more inappropriate to use "socialism" in the way Republicans do than it is to use "fascist" in the way Democrats do.

Seems that SOME Jews and Muslims are pro-choice.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...roup-rcna35812

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/...-rights-battle

Religious teachings are well-established, and most religions, and even most Christians, would not prohibit abortion. And even evangelicals supported the right to choose as recently as the '70s. The evangelical opposition to abortion is part of a larger right-wing, anti-democracy, anti-social freedom movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religi...ortionhttps://
http://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-ev...tion_b_2072716

The point remains that one religious sect should not be able to impose its views on the whole of a secular, egalitarian society.

Arguments from incredulity are actual garbage. Facts don't care about your feelings, as they say.


I didn't say "only". That's a strawman, which is also a garbage argument.

What I'm saying is based on history and statistics.

And yet other Western nations have no trouble funding the protection of their citizens' basic needs.

No, the constitution doesn't say "no no". People have moral intuitions. Those intuitions are necessarily informed by the cultural traditions they are raised in. You have an intuition that these are "not-yet-beings", other people's intuitions say different.

The meaning was clearly implied, as it always is around here. Perhaps you should rephrase your allegation if you are not pinning it on Christians, or contending that it is just a matter of religious belief.

The meaning was clearly implied, as it always is around here. Perhaps you should rephrase your allegation if you are not pinning it on Christians, or contending that it is just a matter of religious belief.

Which is why it is best left up to the choice of the individual. Those who don't like abortions are not required to have them.

Calling it "free" is begging the question, really. I guess well poisoning as well.

We are talking about distributing the benefits of participating within the bounds of a society. Framing returning some of those benefits to people to whom they do not actively flow as giving them "free ****" is just a way to stack the deck and ignore their contributions while implying their demands are frivolous.

:blush: And a tiger is a cat, but you'd still be a fool to fear the family puss will eat you.

Sure, but then unless you are very radical indeed, you are going to want other moral intuitions enforced. There is nothing wrong with enforcing moral intuitions on others, the debate is about which ones.

The basic issue is that if you ask people these questions in isolation, you get nonsense. You find people want high public spending, low taxations, a reduction in the debt and low inflation. The public are incoherent about what they want.