Tom, I don't take behavior lessons from trolls. Respond or shut up.

Tell you what. You explain to me how to square the circle you've drawn, in which a group (the left) is defined by its reliance on government solutions to all problems while simultaneously containing the majority of anarchists who have ever lived, including a sizeable contingent currently alive.

Until you do so, I will continue to treat you as I always have: as a pathetic troll who spews right-wing bullshit and then changes the subject as soon as he is called on it. You are a mendacious asshole, a poison in this community, and if I were in charge you would be banned posthaste.

Or, if you prefer, "99" or "Yay!" or "LOL". There is a reason you are greeted by a fair number of commenters here as an enormous joke: because you are one.

The existence of a counter example rather underlines the fact that the point isn't proven.

The thing I think you're missing is that the left is not defined by its relationship to the power of the state. I'd say the key thing that defines the left is an emphasis on egalitarianism in social or political arrangements. Taken to the extreme, you get communism and other forms of hard egalitarianism. But even communism doesn't technically require the power of the state, even if that's the only way to make it work on a large scale.

Anyway, the point is that the state has little to do with an abstract definition of the left.

Your problem is that you simply aren't dealing with why the left supports government solutions to certain problems. You act as if the only thing you need to know is that the left favors government solutions and then you can be done. As if the left favors government solutions for the sake of giving government something to do. This isn't the case, and it's a facile way to think about the left.

That's a pretty far cry from "I believe progressives will do everything in their power to resurrect socialism".

If the person believed in government solutions to those things, or to only government solutions to all things? You're playing fast and loose with definitions here. It is manifestly the case that those on the left believe that SOME "problems are solved via proactive, collective governmental design", but that's not the statement you made initially. Which one are you trying to argue for?

Also, you seem to be having some necessary/sufficient problems. If you said someone believes that all problems are to be solved by the state, that would certainly be sufficient to place that person on the left. But is it necessary? That's the key problem with your approach here.

Bingo.

Then you're arguing against a straw man. It's not our job to pretend to match your description of us in order to help you win an argument.

Indeed. And it's even harder when you tell people they have to list specific taxes they want increased and specific government expenditures they want cut.

Speaking only for the left, I think you could get fairly broad agreement to cut the military and homeland security (including TSA, etc), border patrol, the parts of DOJ or the FBI that handle drug crimes, the Bureau of Prisons, Gitmo, agriculture subsidies, fossil fuel subsidies. You would likely get large sections to agree to remove tons of loopholes from the tax code, including the mortgage deduction and the employer health insurance credit, in exchange for a lowering of overall rates (although not all of the left would agree 100%).

If you want the parts I'd throw on top of that, you can include basically every penny we spend on ATF, a general shift away from overt regulation to Pigovian taxes (which would likely reduce spending to some degree), and a privatization or partial privatization of the operational functions of the FAA. I'd probably also cut the Export-Import Bank, and I'd be open to means-testing Social Security and reducing spending on Medicare through mechanisms like the IPAB and the "doc fix". This second list is not meant to include all liberals or members of the left.

This, of course, lays bare all of the conceits we construct around our policy disputes: it's not the left that's allergic to budget cuts and the right that's allergic to tax hikes (although I would argue that the vast majority of the actual right really is allergic to tax hikes of most any kind), it's the center that is opposed to both. And, you know, large majorities of the American public.

We're talking about the center, right? (Not the center-right.)

I should think the center is almost totally defined by its eagerness to subsidize those interests, plus also the war-making ones.

To be fair, I think he wasn't! If we're going to hold up individuals, Paul Ryan seems much more like "the right" to me than GWB was.

We can have a separate conversation about the relative merits of the Democratic Party (few) and the Republican Party (literally none), but that's not a terribly interesting conversation - and I think it's going to get us almost nowhere, since the vast majority of the regulars here are not invested in that kind of team sport.

How are we defining the left here? I'm going to need some evidence that the left is interested in subsidies for agribusiness, big finance, crony capitalists, and the AMA, just to pick out the members of your example list that strike me as the most insane. And when is the last time anyone voted for the left? Russ Feingold lost in Wisconsin, if you'll remember.

I'm pretty sure the notion that the left refuses to moderate spending on government programs is... not true. I mean, how much of "the left" was howling about the IPAB during the health care bill shenanigans? None, I think. We (I'm speaking for the left for some reason) want to slash military spending, reduce any number of government subsidies, and switch to single-payer. On the latter: we want universal health care for moral reasons; we have largely settled on single-payer for fiscal ones.

Accusing the left of profligate fiscal irresponsibility is a nice talking point, but I don't think it comports with reality all that well.

Barry announces that the Repubs have declared a war on leaning.

Is this why my mom was always on me about my posture?

IOZ actually had a post the other day in which he said exactly what Jaybird said about the Fountainhead. Worlds collide.

I think your explanation is the same as mine, except you insert "Do I like this?" instead of "Could someone easily derail my argument?" Either one probably works. My take above put "I like this" under part (a) and "My argument is going to get derailed" under part (b).

Also, to be fair, he's not that "new" a version. Samuel L. Jackson has been Nick Fury since 2001 in the comics. His first movie appearance as the character was 2008. And I want to be careful to point out that he's not "black Nick Fury" in the comics. He is *explicitly* Samuel L. Jackson playing Nick Fury in the comics. Explicitly.

Actually, I've just synthesized a bunch of things (your question, Duck's original comment, my part (b) above) into a better answer: Samuel L. Jackson is too hard to call the Token Black Guy in this instance. Sure, you can bring it up, and you might be inclined to if you haven't read the Ultimate comics, but there's an easy answer: the Ultimate version of him *is* Samuel L. Jackson. It blunts the entire notion that he's a TBG. Elba, on the other hand, is a black guy playing a character who has never been portrayed as black (this also goes for Miles Morales as Spider-Man). The nefarious left can't blunt your attack; Elba can be safely portrayed as TBG without any danger of someone messing up the talking point.

(I'm somewhat less charitable to the conservative position here than the conservatives might be, but that's because I think conservatives are deeply terrible human beings. Sue me.)

You should also not discount part (a)! There were motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane!

I would say it's part (a) Samuel L. Jackson is special, (b) the version of Nick Fury in the Ultimate timeline of Marvel Comics is pretty explicitly based on Samuel L. Jackson, so this was more like getting him to play himself in a movie than anything else.

Alyssa Rosenberg also loved it.

The real racism is making it harder for white people to complain about what black people are doing wrong.

Yeah, I have no real complaints about the Katniss casting either, although that may be because of the other fooferaw (Jennifer Lawrence isn't skinny enough!) that made me want to kill everyone.