President Donald Trump

are Americans better off with those guys in south sudan or in America? in south sudan.

American interests are always the only thing that should matter for every policy consideration of American politicians.

when other people or countries interests enter the picture it should be exclusively because Americans are better off to help them or have them as allied and the costs to achieve that are lower than the benefit.

if you can come out with an even better outcome please tell me how, otherwise whatever is better than keeping them in the USA should be done.

that's how the world should operate and did operate until very recently, until the eversive, treasonous mentality of politicians acting for something different than the strict interests of their constituents became accepted because of leftist morals

no Montreal.

as per the data I provided people making less than 50k per year voted far less for the socialist candidate than people making more than that.

please stick to reality, not your dreams

No, I didn't. And you really need to re-examine this word "proof"

I thnk there is a vital qualitative difference. Jalfrezi may or mau not agree

Capitalist tax the wealthy just to redistribute and pay for stuff. A more democratic socialist view that I hold is that it's a vital part of reducing excessive the wealth inequality that is is currently a crippling problem for society and fast becoming (and may have already become) a catastrophic threat to democracy. So a situation where the wealthy are paying lots of tax but increasing their weath compared to everyone else is not one of the necessary purpose of a socialist inclined wealth tax.

i'm a new resident of seattle

it's wild stuff, downtown is basically apocalyptic full of stale urine and homeless and all the money has fled to the suburbs who commute in for work and bus out any homeless who make their way over

i am living on mercer island, only 15 min away from downtown when not rush hour and being an island connected only by i-90 there's very few homeless and those who cross the bridge are quickly rounded up by police and brought back to the city

and these people, who pay 2-3 million for a normal house which would cost 700k anywhere else, they pay that much specifically to avoid raising a family among a homeless encampment are all overwhelmingly progressive

it's amazing how the same people who pretend to be all about compassion will pay 5x markup in real estate to ensure their children never bump into any blacks, latinos, or homeless

my gf lives in ballard, a "very nice" and upscale neighborhood by seattle standards

it's very much half suburban half city proper

and she can't take her kids to any of the local parks because they are overrun with homeless encampments and they just do drugs out in the open under the monkey bars

the cause of overbearing student debt isn't capitalism: it is government intervention obviously.

if only good credit prospects got funds the only people with student debts will be smart people who studied useful (=for good income) subjects, with very low drop rates among them.

also gvmnt should allow those debts to be discarded in bankruptcy, preventing that is intervention as well.

the cause of overbearing housing costs is... the government again!

the local gvmnt because of absurd land use regulations. state and federal gvmnt because of absurd rules to build.

and the federal gvmnt again because it... subsidises loans to buy houses (see the pattern?)

and also because of absurd immigration laws AND absurd non enforcement of the existing laws. 10m illegals occupy a lot of housing which would otherwise be available for actual Americans.

so young people get ****ed because gvmnt obscene intervention in markets for high education and housing, and the problem is free market unregulated capitalism.

every ****ing time like this

oh and state and local gvmnt mandating college education for jobs doesn't help either

i also used to regularly go to sf for work when i had a tech career

the entire city smells like stale urine because of all the homeless

literally every conversation entailed one of the two things:

1 finding affordable housing away from the homeless/crime

2 telling me not to go to certain neighborhoods after dark

not a definition of sh*thole according to thread

I'm sorry, I gotta get this correct, and I think ricky has me on ignore so somebody help me out, but are you telling us that the police round up and forcefully relocate homeless back to downtown Seattle for the ...crime (?) of walking over a bridge and through public lands to a wealthier part of the city?

And then... you're cool with this? You have no problem? (I mean, except for when you criticized progressive people for living on the same island you do)

I know the police are famous for harassing the homeless, but forced removal in this way is a step above.

this is clearly capitalism fault (???)

Isn't vagrancy a crime or something? Asking, I genuinely have no idea.

i agree to a large extent, ie i just willingly moved to seattle - but i'm constantly reminded every day just how awful so much of it is, with failing infrastructure and social services that you don't see anywhere else in the world

of all the cities i've lived in, where the majority are in the third world, the only two places worse than seattle in those regards are giza and kathmandu - it's probably on par with places like siem reap and vientiane

now mercer island and bellevue - those are wonderful places - but only because people left seattle and put up financial barriers to keep out the problems facing seattle

@KoG - Oh, and I don't really want to get into the socialism debate today, not in the mood. Sounds like you have plenty of other friends to play with anyway.

Well, yes, obviously. I mean, I know the conservative/fascist/reactionary answer is "these people have a defective culture", which I guess you find compelling

yes, everyone on mercer island is cool with it, that's exactly why the homes here cost millions of dollars (and no, they are not mansions, they are normal upper middle class homes, the kind that would sell for 700k in new england or 300k in iowa)

The problem is you. You're a pussy. That's why you had a million convos with your tech bros about how to avoid the frightening homeless zombies on the backs of which you earned massively more money than you ever came close to deserving.

it is illegal to camp anywhere on public property in Mercer island.

you know democracy? that thing where people vote and decide how to use stuff which the people collectively own? they just passed a very normal (for europe) law that they enforce.

they also don't have homeless shelters

? my answer is their use of public land should simply be forbidden because it prevents too many other uses by other people.

and that happening or not is simply a voters choice and has nothing to do with capitalism.

it's public land

Mostly very critical of our current supposedly labour goverment but at least they have abolished the law against homelessness.

Not that anyone on the left is in favour of homelessness. It's about what we think is the cause and what we want to do about it. I certainly dont want to harass the homeless for being homeless.

So, why on earth are you whining at me? Go yell at the authorities which failed in their initial attempt to deport him.

He is hardly the first immigrant you have to finesse back to the country of origin, and he won't be the last. The authorities instead tried to rewrite the rulebook, and they did it badly.

And spare me the outrage bingo, this isn't Twitter.

can you at least wait for the litigation on that to end before claiming they did it badly?

that they found opposition by liberal judges isn't proof their solution was illegal.

SCOTUS for now is allowing that solution, then we'll see later on.

Well, you obviously wouldn't have them walking around on private land, so... those homeless are pretty ****ed! Out of sight, out of mind, Schrodinger's Human Misery.

I understand that in your ideal world they would simply be tossed into an active volcano.

I think that if housing exist somewhere in the country that they can afford (with welfare or local jobs) and they insist on being homeless in very expensive places and ruining public goods enjoyed by millions of others they aren't poor people deserving sympathy rather leeches deserving to be mistreated as much as possible.

I am not 100% sure about the UK but in the USA there are plenty of places where housing is veeery cheap .

now in Singapore or Macao I could see discussing the topic in a different way.

but jfc when your country (UK) gives public housing to immigrants, the existence of British homeless people is a moral crime of the utmost gravity, again caused by government ,not a single immigrant should get public housing access until the last British person is housed.