Lessons Learned from Politics.com, FullPolitics.com and JustPlainPolitics.com

There's been a lot of people come and go, I think the craziest people I ever met were all on politicalsoup.com though. Anyone ever meet JimMorrison (the user)?
 
CanadianKid said:
Libertarians are all frauds....
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How exactly does our experience on our three forums prove this? If anything, our forums lean libertarian in several ways. So much so that many of the libertarian staple issues (civil liberties, drug war, victimless crimes and somewhat less so foreign policy) are considered a given and aren't much discussed.

And even markets there was mostly broad agreement about for a long time. Only since the bailout and since the Obama victory seemed eminent has a large part of the left around here almost completely abandoned capitalism as a "failure".

A few years ago, these were the same people saying they loved capitalism and free enterprise, and they only wanted sensible regulation and were opposed to unfettered free markets. Now they want to nationalize the banks for all intents and purposes!

All of the forums had strong libertarian posters, though, and in my case they were very influential to me. I was a very uptight Conservative Democrat (almost trending toward Neo-Con) before Politics.com and by the end of politics.com I had made my way over to considering myself libertarian.

So, I owe a debt of gratitude to the very legitimate libertarians (even the anarcho-capitalists) who helped show me the way.
 
KingCondanomation said:
yet almost all of them see the Repubs as a blob (with the sole exception of Ron Paul) and the Dems as a blob and pretend that they are all the same. Which of course is complete rubbish when you look at their voting records, there's variety within parties themselves and both parties are almost always at odds with one another in voting.
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I think your persistence on this point won out eventually though, Dano.

The Ron Paul thing definitely changed the landscape of the libertarian movement in the country, and most of us here, to my understanding abandoned the LP because we realized it was a bad vehicle for getting anything done.

I learned a lot from the LP, though. Mostly what not to do, but I would really suggest it to anyone who wants to get involved in politics to go try working with a third party briefly as an experience to realize how really hard and unfruitful it is. Or try starting one on a single-issue or something.
 
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Adam Weinberg said:
I think your persistence on this point won out eventually though, Dano.

The Ron Paul thing definitely changed the landscape of the libertarian movement in the country, and most of us here, to my understanding abandoned the LP because we realized it was a bad vehicle for getting anything done.

I learned a lot from the LP, though. Mostly what not to do, but I would really suggest it to anyone who wants to get involved in politics to go try working with a third party briefly as an experience to realize how really hard and unfruitful it is. Or try starting one on a single-issue or something.
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The simple fact is our system doesn't make room for another ideological party. Our two parties are imperfect coalitions (which unfortunately vastly over represent some ideologies). You could form another coalition party, but what would be the point of that? Like, my ideal coalition would be one in which the liberals joined with the fiscal conservatives and jettisoned the social conservative populists (basically the Reagan Democrats). But it would be a hell of a lot easier to join the Democrats and try to reform them than to literally try to create a brand new party.

I still think we need proportional representation though you faggots!
 
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Adam Weinberg said:
How exactly does our experience on our three forums prove this? If anything, our forums lean libertarian in several ways. So much so that many of the libertarian staple issues (civil liberties, drug war, victimless crimes and somewhat less so foreign policy) are considered a given and aren't much discussed.
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Yeah there's pretty much a massive agreement on that stuff. The only person I know of on this site that was opposed to legalization and such was BB. Neo-conservatives don't exist on this site, besides poor Dix.

Adam Weinberg said:
And even markets there was mostly broad agreement about for a long time. Only since the bailout and since the Obama victory seemed eminent has a large part of the left around here almost completely abandoned capitalism as a "failure".

A few years ago, these were the same people saying they loved capitalism and free enterprise, and they only wanted sensible regulation and were opposed to unfettered free markets. Now they want to nationalize the banks for all intents and purposes!
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And eventually sell them off once they're healthy. It's a Keynesian idea, not a socialist one. It's not like I'm proposing another economic system.

Although many ideas in Keynesianism have been discredited, to the point where modern Keynesians are sometimes considered closer to neo-classicals than anything else, not all of it has.

Adam Weinberg said:
All of the forums had strong libertarian posters, though, and in my case they were very influential to me. I was a very uptight Conservative Democrat (almost trending toward Neo-Con) before Politics.com and by the end of politics.com I had made my way over to considering myself libertarian.

So, I owe a debt of gratitude to the very legitimate libertarians (even the anarcho-capitalists) who helped show me the way.
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Even though I've trended left in the past year I am admittedly massively influenced by libertarianism. For instance, free trade and immigration are two issues that I'm sad that the left has started to turn their claws against. That will be a massive net negative to the poor and the middle class. And of course, I always try to describe things in a libertarian way, and I've never turned to that "spread the wealth" nonsense.

You've actually gone a bit to the right though, it seems. It probably happened around the time you became a Republican instead of a Democrat. :)
 
RStringfield said:
The only two posters on board to use there real names are libertarians. So we're frauds?

And I was on politics.com when it first went up and served as a moderator. That was before it turned into a crappy site. I left for a while and came back to it later.
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I use my real name as well. I was DivingDW back on politics.com, DW being my initials. Now I just use my first name.
 
Watermark said:
You've actually gone a bit to the right though, it seems.
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Only seemingly. I political compassed myself the other day and I'm pretty much where I've been before. Partially center right and decidedly libertarian. So, in a sense, I'm ready to come to the table on a lot of issues because I'm not all the way over with Milton Friedman, but I'm still not in that other quadrant where most everyone else hangs out.

I think that my use of language has changed. My vocabulary has expanded to try to push the argument that libertarian ideas are fundamentally conservative political ideas, because of the fact that they depend on conserving a constitutional system of government. And, yes, my frustration with the left has increased a bit because I feel they're going in the wrong direction just as they're about to get into power.
 
Adam Weinberg said:
Only seemingly. I political compassed myself the other day and I'm pretty much where I've been before. Partially center right and decidedly libertarian. So, in a sense, I'm ready to come to the table on a lot of issues because I'm not all the way over with Milton Friedman, but I'm still not in that other quadrant where most everyone else hangs out.

I think that my use of language has changed. My vocabulary has expanded to try to push the argument that libertarian ideas are fundamentally conservative political ideas, because of the fact that they depend on conserving a constitutional system of government. And, yes, my frustration with the left has increased a bit because I feel they're going in the wrong direction just as they're about to get into power.
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Well heresme:

View attachment 77
 
uscandidates2008.png


No wonder Dixie loves Palin.
 
KingCondanomation said:
This is just more proof that politicalcompass is the worst political placement tool on the net. Obama is rightwing, the guys voting record is under 10% for the Conservative side.
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In congress Dano. This site is a more universal scale. It is not amero-centric. All American politics takes place in the right quadrant. There simply aren't any senators that radically to the left. That is a fact. And Obama is no Ralph Nader - it wouldn't make sense at all to put them in the same quadrant.
 
CanadianKid said:
Who is still around from back in the Politics.com days....

I remember Stirfry, Dano for sure....

I think Threedee and Desh were on there, and maybe Dixie....

Thats about it.... Those were the glory days...

CK
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Ahem! Although, I don't count as a regular..... thank goodness.
 
I'm so nostalgic I read the whole thing. Yep, I was a 16-year-old high school junior who typed www.politics.com into the url one day and found myself on a forum. I have always been Threedee except right after SR deleted my account on FP in January, 2006, and I became Damian for about 3 months.

Now I am 22 and working on a Master's degree. "Time does fly, and so do you, I see!" (Capt. James Hook).
 
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