Sunday, February 21, 2016

Three Negatives

I have three negatives on Clinton. But they're all positions which she presently takes the right side of. Problem is, she wasn't always on the right side.
1. The war in Iraq. It was eminently clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but she voted in favor of the authorization of force. She should have known better.
2. Landmine ban -- she has traditionally been opposed to it. Her present position is to favor the ban. But her opposition to the ban was one of the distinguishing differences between her campaign and Obama's in 2008.
3. The Arab Spring -- the last judgement call where she was on the wrong side of history was her favoring of keeping Mubarak in power in Egypt. I mean c'mon. Luckily the Obama administration put the kibosh on that.
And I don't think anybody's going to be as good at the office of POTUS as Obama, but those lapses in judgement on HRC's part make me... concerned.

Friday, February 5, 2016

Socialist Meme

So. There's a lot of back-and-forth on the social mediae about "socialism". Much of it is about how roads and plumbing are all examples of socialism followed by those who insist that, somehow, public roads are not socialism.
Which is... odd.
There's a bit of a disconnect about where the line between "socialism" and "capitalism" lies. To presume that it's somewhere around Bernie Sanders but not around (say) public roads requires a bit of a logical breach though.
And things like Social Security are historically directly related to socialist (and occasionally anarchist) activism.

But it's sort of like that relatively recent meme that the US isn't a democracy, it's a republic. Which is a weird and new way to split hairs but seems to mostly be the result of a new-found fear that the populi are turning against gun nuts. But they don't want to say we're a democratic republic, or a constitutional democracy, so they change the definition of "republican" to mean "constitutional" (and seemingly without any reference to democracy at all.)