What are /r/badpolitics' favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

I'm basically quoting /u/KaliYugaz for the explanation:

>This test is ridiculous and incorrect at a fundamental level. You cannot conceptualize political ideologies as things that exist in ratios of adherence to a single quantifiable set of principles.

>The reason is because political ideologies all hold different principles and different interpretations of the same principles. A libertarian and a Marxist, for instance, see "equality" as completely different things, and so do not share the fundamental ground required to place them both on a single hypothetical chart with "equality" as an axis.

>Furthermore, political beliefs always exist within a cultural context that can differ from place to place. For instance, this compass sees support for LGBT rights as being integral to libertarianism, when really this is only true of Western political cultures. In East Asia, LGBT rights don't make any sense because they already don't care if you are gay; Chinese and Japanese social conservatism expresses itself through a desire to uphold entrenched Confucian social relationships and traditions, not to police "sinful" sexual deviance.

By the way, Hubski seems to be a pretty nice website!

Libertarian socialists have no interest in creating a ‘socialist state,’ which is simply more nonsense put out by capitalist thinkers. The state exists primarily to protect the upper classes against the lower. (The Wealth of Nations, authored by Adam Smith, stated that the ‘civil government’ was instituted for this purpose.) With no classes, the state would clearly be unnecessary. Capitalist apologists frequently suggest that the Soviet Union or modern China were results of attempting to establish a stateless and classless society, but they never explain how it resulted in the opposite. That is because nobody can. It’s propaganda.

>Ukip support for all of these items was around 10 percentage points below BNP support, but around 15 percentage points above support among Conservative voters and 20-30 points above support among Labour and Lib Dem supporters. On immigration, hostile views were widespread, but Ukip voters were consistently the most intolerant group after the BNP.

>... Our survey asked whether voters felt that Islam posed a threat to Western civilization – 64% of Ukip supporters agreed that it was. This is lower than the 79% of BNP supporters who felt this way, but much higher than agreement among mainstream party supporters, which ranged from 31% (Lib Dems) to 49% (Conservatives). Goodwin and Evans additionally asked their survey respondents whether they would feel uncomfortable if a mosque was built in their neighbourhood – 84% said they would be. Again, lower than the 94% figure for BNP supporters but much higher than the 54% figure for the general population. On Islam, as on immigration, Ukip supporters are more negative than supporters of any other party – except the BNP.

https://www.academia.edu/245067/Strategic_Eurosceptics_and_Polite_Xenophobes_Support_for_the_UK_Independence_Party_UKIP_at_the_2009_European_Parliament_Elections

And about halfway down this page is a long list of articles on various UKIP groups, councillors, etc. outing themselves as racist.

This is economics, not politics. It's also not bad, although obviously oversimplified as any economics related meme would be.

>Libertarian socialists have no interest in creating a ‘socialist state,’

Nobody said libertarian socialist. They said socialist with a clear reference to socialist states.

>he state exists primarily to protect the upper classes against the lower. (The Wealth of Nations, authored by Adam Smith, stated that the ‘civil government’ was instituted for this purpose.) With no classes, the state would clearly be unnecessary.

None of this logically follows. The state can be formed to protect the interests of the upper class without actually causing class divisions in the first place. Perhaps it just exacerbates this difference. And even if the state would be unnecessary, that doesn't mean it would dissolve. Also, Adam Smith is a great economist but he's capable of being wrong.

>Capitalist apologists frequently suggest that the Soviet Union or modern China were results of attempting to establish a stateless and classless society, but they never explain how it resulted in the opposite. That is because nobody can.

Giving people absolute power corrupts them, as capitalists have predicted would occur. These were people who identified as socialists and communists, read literature based off these ideologies, were ranked in movements based off these ideologies, etc. The fact that every socialist state turns out like this should show you socialism doesn't work.

>Hell, there's even National Bolshevism now

Yeah, the National Bolsheviks' founder Limonov, Alexander Dugin, and all that crowd was active back then, too. They backed the NSF. A lot of that nationalist base, as well as the military guys, ended up backing Zhirinovsky too I think, but that's another can of worms.

I've been reading this book about the 90s in Russia, and the authors' basic argument is that Yeltsin's camp co-opted the rhetoric of the nascent democracy movement and quickly shifted to an authoritarian pro-market regime that would be more in line with Pinochet ideologically than liberal democracy. In part because of the chaos surrounding the 1993 crisis, and in part because the Kremlin played different groups against each other, there were a lot of people in both the pro-Yeltsin and anti-Yeltsin camps that went into coalition with one another that would seem like they'd be diametrically opposed. It's all very strange.

I don't have a huge background in political science, so maybe I'm off base here, but this seems like a pretty persistent thing in Russia, not just during upheavals like the early 90s. Like, where would you put Rodina--a far-right nationalist party that merged with a social democratic one--on the political spectrum? Or Alexei Navalny--who's usually referred to as a liberal--helping to organize ultranationalist rallies? Where would United Russia be, for that matter? It just seems to me that some people can and often do fall all over the map politically.