TheDemonBuer

Why don't the primaries in 2016 and 2020 count? Just curious, asking in good faith.

This is abhorrent, and anyone who is ok with this is a terrible person.

I find that a bit hard to believe

Why? Two things can be true at once. I can believe that a woman can do whatever she wants with her body, while also acknowledging that if liberal women stop having kids, before too long there aren't going to be very many liberals.

Unless you think my saying that is some form of coercion. But that would be silly because my words can't force a woman to do anything. My words aren't taking away any woman's agency, especially since I'm not necessarily advocating for anything. You assumed I was, not that's not my problem.

I wouldn't count on spontaneous liberal epiphanies and teenage rebellion to preserve the liberal hegemony.

I'm not necessarily advocating for anything. If you don't want to have kids, don't have kids. I'm certainly not going to mourn the death of liberalism, but I'm not thrilled about Conservativism taking its place as the dominant ideology.

I didn't say they were. I certainly believe that a woman can do whatever she wants with her body, and if some women choose not to have children, that's their right, as far as I'm concerned. But, the fact of the matter is, if women aren't having children, before too long there won't be any more people. It's really as simple as that.

We can't play a clean, full 60 minutes this year. I want the Niners to make another run for a title, but, honestly, at this point I would settle for one god damn solid game, start to finish.

You're confused. It's my fault. I said:

Maybe the problem isn't so much liberalism specifically

And you took that to mean I was defending liberalism. I'm not. I was positing that maybe the problem was deeper than liberalism. I never said that liberalism was a "necessary evil," but I get why you thought that. In the US, liberalism is the status quo, and American experts will tell you that facts and evidence support liberalism. But, contrary to what liberals think, they don't have a monopoly on facts and evidence. Some economic experts who have analyzed the facts and evidence and have to come to different conclusions than the liberal experts would be the economists Ha-Joon Chang and Yanis Varoufakis. Even here in the US there are experts who are critical liberalism, like the economist Richard Wolff. Wolff is a democratic socialist economist. Even the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, while not a socialist, is critical of neoliberalism.

Yeah, you're right. It's just ideology so often becomes like a religion, and adherents become similarly incapable of absorbing new information or data, adapting to changes, or analyzing their system critically or objectively.

The one that actually benefits the people who are supposed to be represented by the system instead of the wealthy elite at the top.

What would that be? The liberals at least have specifics, they have a system. You have some vague goals. It's not enough to tell people you're going to make their lives better, you have to tell them how you're going to do it.

Campaign on popular policies that the working and average person will actually want and benefit from.

What would those be?

Y'all keep thinking liberalism will work

I don't.

so why are you so sure liberalism is better than any other ideology

I don't.

Your ideology lost,

Yes, it did. It lost conclusively. But it's not liberalism. My ideology is democratic socialism, and, yeah, it lost. It was a massacre.

Sure seems like the data and the people are repudiating liberalism, so... Sure sounds like liberalism is the wrong one here

I don't necessarily disagree, but if the problem isn't ideology itself but just that we have the wrong ideology in place, well, what do we replace it with? What's the "right" ideology? I'm not opposed to getting rid of liberalism, but I don't want to see it replaced with something that will be no better, or even worse, for the average person. Like I said, I don't think all ideologies are equal, and I DO think there are ideologies that are worse than liberalism. I don't want a worse ideology to replace liberalism, just because some people believed it was better. By all means, let's replace liberalism, I don't think it's working well enough, but let's use facts, data, and evidence to determine what that better ideology would be.

Yeah, that's the thing. There's the Trumpist Republicans, who are unified and devoted, but then there's everyone else.

I think the "everyone else" block can be broken down into a three main groups: leftists, progressives, and liberals. And it's frustrating because people use these terms interchangeably, as though they're all the same, but they are NOT. Leftists are socialists, of one variety or another. Progressives are social democrats, and Liberals are social liberals and neoliberals, which are center-left and center-right respectively. These three groups do not agree on some key issues, and they do not necessarily like each other.

The neoliberals are going to more closely align with moderate conservatives than social democrats or socialists because they just agree more with moderate conservatives on key issues. The Democratic party is a neoliberals/social liberal party. They are center-left to center-right. Therefore, socialists and social democrats should not look to the Democrats for representation. They don't agree with you, they don't necessarily like you, they will not represent you. Unfortunately, the US is a de facto two pay system, so progressives and leftists are essentially without representation, outside of a handful of independents, like Bernie Sanders.