what is curious about your reactions, kma, is that you seem to have decided that it is you who gets to determine what constitutes "something of substance"---you refuse at every point to consider what i have been saying, what host is saying--that your "common ground" experiment presupposes a particular ideological control over the terms of debate. those terms of debate are conservative. period. you are not interested in common ground--you are interested in seeing the extent to which your frame of reference is THE frame of reference.
so that when objections to that frame of reference come up, you choose to either ignore them or declare them "without substance"--which is something i have come to expect from the talking heads that enforce this tiny debilitating frame on others in the context of opinion management shows on cable news networks.
example no. 1: you have no problem with wholly reactionary posts about welfare, that are predicated start to finish on the right's conventional "wisdom" concerning its origin, function and effects. every single element of that "understanding" of the welfare system is historically false, intellectually vacant and politically dangerous. but you are fine with it....as if it is obvious that the problem with the welfare system resides with th poor--which is insane outside the narrow world of rightwing ideology...that this bigger problem can be reduced to some kind of absurd "moral" question (see above)--and that from this it follows that unbelievably draconian, wholly illegal tyeps of searching/screening can be put into place.
you accept this kind of crap as rational.
it is really unbelievable.
example no. 2:
you say above:
Quote:
|
Free Market Issues (as related to the United States, not the world) - this seems to have some common ground on both sides. The trend seems to follow better regulation, not more. I also see some agreement on enforcement of regulations
|
just after i tried to raise a question about the notion of the "free market"--which you ignored--and which you then follow with a series of empty propositions that echo conservative buzzwords (not more regulation but better regulation--what does that mean? anything?)
and yet, after a post like this, you demand of host that he "add something of substance"???
you could at least be up front about it: you are interested only in a very particular type of "common ground" that you are trying to enforce this very particular type of "common ground"--that you are not really interested in anything approaching this "common ground" that might include positions which are critical of your frame of reference itself.
just dont pretend that you are or this thread is interested in finding some points of agreement across different political positions. you--and this thread--are about trying to find commanlities amongst political positions that do not have significant ideological differences between them. what is the point of that? you know that there is agreement about basic positions up front.