What are Progressive Values?

The one thing that most Progressives can agree on is progressive taxation.

And most often pragmatism.

 

You make your case, which is what Marx and Engels did. The same is true for religions, which is why sunnis and shias disagree with each other, or why protestants and catholics have never really gotten along all that well.

Where are the Martin Luthers of progressivism? What books have they written? What is the school of thought?

This is like saying that bad things are bad because they are bad. "Harm" is, indeed, harmful rather than helpful.

The world changed a great deal in the summer of 1914, but I'm not so sure this would be considered a good thing. Nor was the progress spawned by the industrial revolution necessarily good.

 

Ridicule is our most effective weapon because our opposition is already ridiculous.

 

Yep that's us.

 

Insular progressive bubbles and their constant feedback loops of reassurance will produce conclusions like this one. Thank you for the demonstration.

 

Or your posts could just be ridiculous. I mean it could be that. LOL

 

I am a Marxist, and thus I'm one of the most radical parts of the progressive wing of politics.

I value self-determination, calm and rational judgement, sparing use of force, and resisting those who would violate those principles by any means necessary.

 

How so?

Indeed as right and wrong are subject to an individual assessment thus subjective. Even within Catholicism there is much disagreement as Catholics are people with individual views that vary from person to person.

Why you asking me?

The litmus test I use when faced with a moral quandary is to assess if an action psychically, psychologically or materially harms anyone. If the answer is yes to any one or all then the action is immoral, if the answer is no to all then it is amoral. There are exceptions to the rule like performing a surgery where to heal one must first be harmed. A moral person is simply one who actively avoids causing harm to others.

And this has what to do with my argument that in general republicans and conservatives are progressive?

 

Nixon was a progressive.

 

The ability to make an objective argument coupled with tolerance of foreign concepts renders ridicule unnecessary.

 

By the same measure, Ronald "the vegetable" Reagan was an uber-progressive.

 

I would prefer consumption taxes over income taxes, but I do not aspire to keep up with the Kardashians.

 

They wrote (or rather Engels did because Marx had the handwriting of a drunken three year old) the communist manifesto which spelled out the entire idea behind their political ideology. Why it is necessary, how it will happen, and the glorious end result.

Where is the progressive manifesto? That's basically what the thread is asking, and the answer seems to be "Don't ask me".

See what I mean?

Sounds to me like you're an anarchist. The tax dude recently hurt a great number of people by demanding people pay for the upkeep of the state.

If this was true, there wouldn't be much animosity and lots more agreement between the two camps.

 

Of course he was. We all klnow that no conservative has ever or will ever do anything wrong.
Should anyone claiming to be a conservative gets caught doing anything wrong or turns out to be a failure, Nixon, bush, delay and the like, well they were never real conservatives in the first place....right?
LMAO!
You cons are something else.

 

A) NO child is safe where they should be the safest.
B) Your money isn't yours, since "you didn't build that!"
C) Yours is mine and mine is mine...(see bernies tax return)
D) Guns are bad, in fact, the 2nd amendment needs to be abolished...except for the people who protect us and our families.
E) Drugs are a good thing...especially when they get people of color killed. That way, we can blame the NRA and get rid of that pesky 2nd amendment.
F) When a new idea or product comes along, it MUST be regulated and taxed!

 

I think this thread is a good example of why the GOP can't win over independents right now.

Demonizing the opposition can be good for energizing the base, but independents tend to be familiar enough with the other side to see that you just make (*)(*)(*)(*) up.

The fact is that both liberals and conservatives tend to have the highest of ideals, even if those ideals are then compromised and distorted by all the things that stop us from living up to our ideals.

What's more, there's not much difference in fundamental values between the left and right. Both sides tend to frame the difference in terms of a fundamental clash of values, but that's just so that they can make the choice look simple. Do you want to vote for good (what we really want) or for evil (what they really want)?

Most of the political clashes between liberals and conservatives are not based on differences in ideals but differences in non-moral beliefs about the way the world works. The gun rights advocate and the gun control advocate alike are trying to keep their kids safe. And pretty much everyone wants a thriving economy.

 

See I won't even consider participating in this thread because you are encouraging non-progressives to tell you and us what our values or lack of values entail and they have only a superficial, shallow and ignorant idea of what we believe, which they proceed to turn into a caricature, a joke for ridicule. You don't really want to know what our values are, or you would try to provide an environment where WE TELL YOU what we believe and what we think. We are the only ones who know.

How you worded the OP question properly tells us progressives about your sincerity in really learning about us and the result in these pages is exactly what anyone could have anticipated. An honest discussion should at least be free of lies, snark and juvenile gamesmanship. You did nothing to provide that but instead invited that crap.

 

We fought to keep marriage as history handed it to us. Marriage really boils down to one major thing. Children and the law that protects them in the relationship they did not create.

Marriage gave children rights enforceable in court.

We who were born in the 1930s saw this from the get-go. We noticed how marriage once was. As kids, we knew it was there for our protection. When we later married, we knew it was to protect our children. While the wife could divorce, the kids can't divorce.

We only want the law followed. The law was vastly modified to get homosexuals to steal the term marriage.

We are not greedy. We endorse the free giving of all the money you own to your targets. If you target the poor, we applaud you and your donations. We reject the morality of stealing from select groups to donate to the poor.

Donations are charity.

I agree that so called progressives come in varying stripes.

But so do those you call conservatives.

 

Yeah, I can't see anyone learning anything about what progressive values are from this thread, because it isn't set up to gain information, but to mock progressives.

For as long as conservatives take themselves to be better authorities on what progressives think than progressives are, they'll never understand what progressives are thinking. And there's no weaker opposition than someone who can't get inside anyone else's head.

It is the same kind of thinking that cost the GOP elite control of the party. When they wanted to know what people outside their echo-chamber thought, they asked each other instead of listening to people from outside their echo-chamber. Listening to Fox, you'd have thought that the Tea Party had the same political agenda as the Wall Street Journal.

 

You must have some messed up state laws or you are confused. What right does a child of a married couple have that the child of an unmarried couple does not have in your state?

 

The child of the unmarried really lack rights.

However, the family has rights. And the family is the mom, dad and kids.

Not mom mom and one of their kids.

Nor man and man who can't bear children.

 

Exactly what rights do they lack?

 

It is interesting to read the first two dozen replies to this thread. The OP invites progressives ( and others) yet the others dominated the show. Why bother with our contributions, when they had plenty of lying, exaggerating and superficialities to fill the thread?

 

You say that but what rights are they lacking? In my state a child has a right to support regardless of the parents' marital status at birth; a child has the exact same inheritance right whether or not their parents are married. I am having trouble conceptualizing what right a child has that changes depending on whether or not the parents are married. Can you even point to one specific right under federal or California law (that is your location, right) that the bastard does not get that the not-bastard does get?

 

To dispel the inaccuracies, perhaps?

I predicted that you guys wouldn't participate in a meaningful manner, and I was correct. Now it's just "well, you guys are going to lie about us, so we won't bother explaining how you are wrong".

That's because you can't, dude. It's not about taking your ball and going home. It's about not having a ball in the first place.