politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
Libertarians by their very definition cannot be patriotic.
For starters, they want to destroy, defund, and minimize the state and beneficial services that make up a nation.
Secondly they want to sell it off the peices to private interests.
....and they want these things to reduce and avoid paying for their fair share, shifting their tax burden, and the tax burden for their companies to others.
Libertarians can't be patriotic, they by definition attack nations in the name of private enterprise, and personal profiteering.
They seek to increase the wealth gap, exploit their fellow citizens, and disband the connection in between, reducing all to the profit motive, because they can have no other values to maintain but money. They're nihilists, and comflict with all value systems which aren't, including the nation and patriotism.
Despite my Anarchist leanings, I still hate Tea-Partiers for their disregard for human life.
On the back end the Tea Party movement was always a conglomeration of Koch related organizations and think tanks, who teamed up with 'Americans for Prosperity ', Phillip Morris, and 'Citizens for a Sound Economy'.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Tea_Party
It's an accurate small scale model of what parts of Trumps campaign would later become, using the appearance of a "grass roots" movement to disguise the big money interests driving things just under the surface.
Not "always." I believe the Tea Party was a genuine grass-roots movement for at least a few weeks or months at the very beginning, before the Koch-suckers co-opted it. Frankly, it had a lot in common with Occupy Wall Street and I was holding out hope for a while that the two movements would merge.
Nah, sorry bud, it was always a corporate product aimed at reducing taxes on billionaires, organized by Koch organizations, and designed to look like it was grassroots as a disguise:
CSE = Citizens for a Sound Economy, Koch offered the role of Chairman of CSE to Ron Paul... So there was some blurring of the line between Ron Paul's 2008 campaign and later offshoots of CSE (which by that time was Chaored by Dick Cheney). CSE were doing the fundraising and organizing/publicity behind it (helps to have Phillip Morris on board for that type of thing).
It was always the same groups of billionaires and their adjacent politicians trying to not pay taxes.
Sometimes the PR, sentiment, and spectecal is just so good that it lasts a long time in memory... And no doubt the movement had genuine believers (I know Ron Paul did), but the whole crew were running with the same aims, sharing the same funding sources.
It's the whole Libertarian and Conservatives pretending to have values but actually serving billionaires. Of whoch the left has its own version. It all covers over much more serious structural and foundational issues which ideology alone can't touch.
I don’t think so, it was a well funded group from the get go. At the time there was pretty strong consensus that there were rich organizers starting the tea party groups from scratch.
The Koch brothers were documented backers of candidates in our district in 2009-10. Them winning so many seats after Obama was elected wasn’t just a coincidence.
The ideal of libertarianism is that it's better for the individual. It's naive and require rejecting pretty much all evidence, but the idea that they want the power to be consolidated in private companies inherently requires ignoring the ideals.
Its just like people who support Communism. It's good I'm theory but you have to really reject reality to convince yourself that it could actually work and doesn't just end up in an oligarchy or other such consolidated power system.