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Social democracy is an American tradition. If you hate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her views, you would have hated every single one of America's Founding Fathers too!

Progressive taxation was supported by the Founding Fathers for a good reason.

Following a number of deaths due to tainted drugs at music festivals there have been arguments that pill testing should be available at such events. One prominent critic of the idea is former leader of the social democratic Australian Labor Party, Mark Latham.

The more you are informed and educated about the facts and the evidence, the more your views will align center-left. Not with the radical left, not with marxists and anarchists, but with social democrats, German neoliberals, and proponents of the "open society." It Is a fact that conservatives and right-wingers are generally uninformed about the matters on which they have the strongest opinions.

Neoliberalism is a lot like socialism/communism. It's a broad term that covers a lot of extremely different ideologies, some better and some worse. "A Neoliberal's Manifesto" is a lot like "The Communist Manifesto." When I read it, there's a lot that I disagree with but there's also a lot that I agree with. Overall, the ideology is flawed, but it makes many valid points.

Coincidently I'm sure, yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the German Workers Party, who one year later changed their name to the National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party.

Initially a tiny organisation, they recruited disaffected, angry and often unemployed young men. They began with protests much like the one in St Kilda yesterday, often hugely outnumbered by police and counter protesters.

I understand the contemporary fashion of blanking out a person's name when they say something truly stupid. In part, it is to show that the comedy should be directed at the comment, rather than the person. Likewise, it is a principle of charity - you want to give the person an opportunity to improve themselves, and who knows, maybe if they discover they are part of a meme that the world is laughing perhaps they will take the opportunity for self-reflection.

Just wanted to share an insight from John Médaille’s book on distributist political economy. In the book, he distinguishes between legitimate interest and usury and this insight becomes really interesting in light of modern money theory (MMT):

Trump's decision to ignore his military advisors and withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan is a disastrous proposal. ISIS will regroup and come back in full force, Christians and Kurds in the Middle East will be slaughtered, and Islamic extremism will rule the Middle East perpetually. Trump bowed to Erdogan's will and agreed to withdraw troops. Erdogan is a supporter of Islamic terrorism and racist Arab nationalism. The only reason he wants America to withdraw from the region is so that Turkey can resume its genocide against the Kurds, which was halted when the U.S.

In the 1990s, Norway set up the equivalent of what would have been "the mining tax", the public accumulation of a wealth fund to capture resource-based superprofits.