What kinds of middle policies would you like to see?
Genuine question. This is a surprising opinion to me because I see the democrats as a center left largely moderate party. Agreed that the democrat candidates are appalling and generally show no conviction.
The Democratic Party may be center left and largely moderate. Democratic politicians are further left than that, especially the ones that seem to attract microphones.
Now, the mainstream media plays the most outrageous statements because they attract the most eyeballs. And the Republicans play up the most outrageous Democratic statements (a process sometimes called "nut harvesting"). But the point is, what the average person hears is the most extreme statements made by Democrats, and that frames their view of the Democratic Party. You want to change that? Stop the more extreme ones from talking into microphones. If you can't do that (and you can't), then the next best is to have someone authoritative (say, the senior member of the House, or the chair of the DNC) officially and publicly repudiate the more extreme statements.
The furthest left member of Congress, AOC, voted to give Israel more military aid and never pushed for a floor vote on Medicare for all. None of them are center left. They're all right wing.
Talking about the "middle" is the wrong way of framing it. The problem is that the Democratic party sandbags any meaningful reforms, as they're still beholden to that same Epstein class when it comes time to campaign. For example the Democrats' grand attempt at healthcare reform included making it mandatory to patronize the "insurance" cartel! Is it possible for regulatory capture to be any more brazen?
So people get frustrated with the hamfisted top-down plans tailored for those deeply wed to the system, tire of the hypocrisy, and then either stay home or vote for the alternative that doesn't even bother promising to try and constructively fix anything. It's a game of bad cop worse cop. We desperately need ranked pairs voting.
Several countries with universal healthcare use the "you have to buy private insurance" model, such as the Netherlands and Switzerland. There doesn't seem to be anything inherently wrong with that system.
ACA has survived 12 years and enabled a lot of people to obtain health insurance that would not have been able to otherwise, with Republicans wanting to kill it that entire time but failing to do so. Do you think there was any other system Democrats could have passed instead that would have lasted that long?
> Do you think there was any other system Democrats could have passed instead that would have lasted that long?
You're buying into the paradigm wherein sandbagging it was necessary for pragmatic reasons, and justifying within that. While this is true to an extent, it doesn't really change my overall point.
I do get that the ACA was a significant piece of legislation that has helped many people. And if you want to talk system design, such a mandate might make sense in a system with much much more regulatory bandwidth than ours, where it's not just forcing people into a corrupt system. But as it stands, they didn't even address the antitrust issues of bundling healthcare plans with employment or price fixing between insurers and providers. So I stand by my characterization of the dynamic as brazen regulatory capture.
Switzerland has a “public option”, price controls, and IIRC private insurers have to be non-profits (and possibly that designation means more in their system than the US, I dunno about that).
ACA mandates that ~80% of insurance co. revenue must go back towards medical service. So not "non-profit" per se but there is some kind of restriction there.
also 3) many "insurance" companies are in the provider game, meaning they can preferentially shuffle surplus to their other arm
(2) and (3) were part of what I meant by a lack of regulatory bandwidth in another comment. There are rules that could be enforced to promptly impose steep penalties for a company that tries to skirt them. But they just aren't, so after one company starts doing it the rest inevitably follow suit.
Add to it that all our retirement accounts are invested in these companies, and it kinda looks indistinguishable from a really roundabout way to have a very-regressive redistributive retirement scheme that also has crazy-high fees (whatever part of the overpayment to healthcare companies that doesn't make it to shareholders is basically part of the account management fees)
Yes, I'm suggesting that like 10% of our nominal GDP is actually a deeply fucked up regressive wealth redistribution scheme that doesn't buy tangible productivity, but is essentially a tax-like drag on the economy, but way less efficient than most government-run redistribution schemes. Because it is.
I don't think squinting and framing things that way is particularly productive on its own, and you didn't go anywhere with the idea. One could also characterize it as big jobs program. But these framings belie that the structural "inefficiency" is the crux of the problem - both resource-consumption wise, and also in terms of (not) providing good healthcare. For example, how many full time skilled doctor equivalents are flat-out wasted by being spent jumping through "insurance" company bureaucracy? Or how many nurses is the "insurance" industry wasting directly?
I agree that the core problem is that we’re simply spending far more than necessary for the level of care we receive, but the side effects like being a white-collar makework jobs program (the upscale counterpart to the military, sort of) and redistributing (a little of the) money toward retirement accounts are what make the problem “sticky”. There’s a lot of temporary collateral damage if you fix it.
But does that framing have predictive utility? Which would you say resonates more with voters, especially the middle/upper-middle class voters with skin in both games - "Healthcare reform is going to make your retirement account shrink" or "Healthcare reform is going to take away your employer plan and replace it with the same option the poors get" ?
Also my additional point is that nobody really thinks we need to create additional jobs for doctors, as we've currently got a dire shortage of healthcare. I just inquired about rescheduling a primary care visit for my aunt and the office told me they're scheduling out an entire year from now. That's obviously not the same as how soon they could see her for something urgent, but the sheer magnitude of that delay does highlight a problem. I've also seen many 4+ month waits for specialist appointments.
>ACA has survived 12 years and enabled a lot of people to obtain health insurance that would not have been able to otherwise, with Republicans wanting to kill it that entire time but failing to do so.
My insurance is more expensive than ever and quality of care lower quality than ever.
>Do you think there was any other system Democrats could have passed instead that would have lasted that long?
Medicare for all. Or lower the age gradually (cover kids and elderly first). They should have voted on it during the pandemic but Pelosi blocked it and AOC wouldn't do anything. They're all fakes.
You'd probably have the rising cost issue no matter what had happened, because that problem affects pretty much all first world health care systems. The US is way more expensive than others, but the ratio of US costs to the costs of others has stayed roughly constant over at least the last 40-50 years.
Exactly this. They went the entire pandemic without even bringing a vote on Medicare for All. The democrats are not left wing at all. They are complete corporate sell outs. They don't actually do what their voters want, they represent only their donors.
Agreed, but at least the Democrats (or their specific donors) were smart enough to not kill the geese that lay golden eggs. Republican policy is now like "it's free meat! and killing is a natural process!"
It's hard to tell if it's more accurate to still label the Republican party as also "complete corporate sell outs", or if the real dynamic is its controlling corpos got bought by foreign interests aiming to take down the whole United States (rather than merely being content extracting wealth from the masses).
I swallowed my pride and started voting conservative (aka Democrat) in 2020, but that doesn't mean I'll stop criticizing them.
I do have to wonder if say pushing the Democratic party itself to adopt something like ranked pairs voting for primaries would be more effective than hoping for it in the finals. The idea being that as time goes on that becomes the "real" election where more people feel enfranchised from being able to express themselves, and generally happier with the results if they still have to end up supporting a compromise in the finals.
(This is assuming what's left of the Republican party doesn't dramatically reinvent itself after it's finished crashing and burning)
This is complete nonsense. Moderate Democrats loudly and vigorously support all these things. Either you’re ignorant or you’re trolling from your actual far-right position.
Ah, yes, lots of ICE officers are locked up in state prisons, and Trump's empire is being dismantled out from under him. There are lots of state-level investigations involving the $4B in bribes he took this year.
- Free market economics.
If this were true, it would be possible to buy fire insurance in California, and Biden would have broken up dozens of monopolies. No spending bills would pass without provisions to do more of this because a coalition of the moderate democrats, libertarian republicans and far left democrats have more than enough votes to fillibuster and override vetos.
- Freedom of speech / privacy / assembly
California is rolling out mandatory age verification laws for operating systems this year.
Remember: I'm talking about moderate democrats. These are the ones that are more likely to vote for Trump appointees than some Republicans. These are the ones that cast the deciding votes to make sure health care would be rolled back for millions of americans this past January. There are about 10 of them in the senate, which is enough to give the republican leadership the ability to pass whatever the heck they want, even with internal consent.
Fillibustering random things because of Californian local law isn't going to fix things at the federal level. It wouldn't correct the (bipartisan!!!) manipulation of American monopolies, nor effectively combat the "think of the kids!" rhetoric that both parties love.
Free market economics and freedom of speech have been worn down for decades. The bipartisan value of this private/public sector cooperation is indeed disgusting, but very deeply entrenched.
I gave high-level and then concrete examples of state and federal problems created by moderate democrats working with conservatives to block what would be considered far-right policies anywhere else on earth.
I'll get downvoted by both sides but this is what a winning political party policies look like for most of Americans not in NYC or in SF Bay Area, LA, SD, Seattle, Portland:
-Medicare for all
-Lower income taxes (federal and state) cut all the useless bloat like the $20B in homeless spending we can't even account for in California
-Free state college tuition for local residents (we need to significantly decrease cost of college)
-Universal background checks on guns
-Ban abortion after 20 weeks
-America first and only (stop being Israel's bitch)
-Strong on crime laws (none of this bullshit we deal with in blue states where we catch and release violent offenders constantly and let people run over and kill entire families with ZERO consequences)
-Having no stance on DEI, LGBTQ, or other cultural issues that serve only to divide and distract
This comes off as a grab bag of non-issues and non-national issues mixed in with a couple of attractive seeming ideas. For example: Crime is down why bang on that issue instead of the 2000 Americans killed every year by cops? The young voters who will dominate in coming elections see, on their video feeds, how cops behave. The time for Clintonesque pandering on law and order has passed. It's not that Trump is different this time, it's that a lot of of his voters have died, and RFK Jr. is Charon at the Styx for more of them.
> I'll get downvoted by both sides but this is what a winning political party policies look like for most of Americans not in NYC or in SF Bay Area, LA, SD, Seattle, Portland:
I don't agree on all the specifics, but I think that's the absolute right way to be thinking about this. If you actually want to make things better, you need to have empathy for people who aren't like you. Despite their self-image, I don't think liberals are actually any better at empathy than anyone else.
> -Having no stance on DEI, LGBTQ, or other cultural issues that serve only to divide and distract
This is a key point. The focus on those issues is probably the only reason the plutocrat/big business Republicans even have a chance.
In other words, it is largely a moral panic manufactured by the right. If democrats give in, the right will concoct a new one, ad infinitum, until democrats and republicans are indistinguishable.
> In other words, it is largely a propaganda push by the right.
Who cares? It works, and why does it work?
I tell you why: it works because the Democrats give them the ammunition.
Edit: I see you edited the line I quoted to:
> In other words, it is largely a moral panic manufactured by the right. If democrats give in, the right will concoct a new one, ad infinitum, until democrats and republicans are indistinguishable.
I don't think that's true, it's just a story to discourage effective change to keep some faction happy.
Democrats used to be able to win in so-called red states, because they used to be able to adapt to local conditions. Following your line of thinking just means they'll keep losing.
Abortion used to be a Catholic issue until a Republican strategist saw an opportunity.
The point is to get citizens fighting each other on things that are personally important so we're too busy to fight for things that are nationally important, like corruption or the decay of democracy.
Both parties suck because the system is broken, and both parties benefit from perpetuating it -- along with those who fund them.
Well, I'll just say this: I was a "vote blue no matter who" voter following Trump 1, but after seeing the complete limpness of democratic leadership in Trump's proto-fascist America, I'm not sure I could actually stomach voting for a politician like Newsom, who basically quacks like a republican circa 10 years ago. What would be the point? When ICE is pulling my neighbors from their homes, will he step in to protect them? When the executive order gets signed to federalize polling stations, will he bother to do anything about it? I am far from the only person who feels this way.
If democrats acquiesce to republicans, they will likely lose even more people than they already have while gaining absolutely no one from the maga camp. I think the real strat is to go full Mamdani across the board. Unapologetic, compassionate leftism focused on the economy and quality of life; no one thrown under the bus as a cynical ploy to scrap together a few undecided votes.
> Well, I'll just say this: I was a "vote blue no matter who" voter following Trump 1, but after seeing the complete limpness of democratic leadership in Trump's proto-fascist America, I'm not sure I could actually stomach voting for a someone like Newsom, who is basically a republican circa 10 years ago. I am far from the only person who feels this way.
It's not about who you would vote for.
> If the democrats acquiesce to the republicans, they will likely lose even more people than they already have, while gaining absolutely no one from the maga camp. I think the real strat is to go full Mamdani across the board. Unapologetic, compassionate leftism.
To be perfectly honest: I don't think you have the strategic sense to productively participate on a topic this. I kinda get the impression you're going for wish fulfillment.
You're not going to get it all. If you try to get it all, you'll lose. Your wish fulfillment candidate could win parts of California and New York, but those aren't the places you need to think about. Think about not crashing and burning in a Nebraska Senate race.
Why do you think you have the strategic sense to productively participate on a topic like this? Who even are you? What are your sources?
As for me, I look at polling results almost every day. My sense is that nothing I said is extraordinarily controversial among the voters who actually matter. People care about the economy, period. Outside of hardcore MAGA enclaves -- which will never change their vote -- the culture war bullshit is massively unpopular.
'Compromise' is strictly just code for becoming Republican, and I'm not going to vote for a Republican.
A great example of this is abortion, where for years Democrats did have 'moderate' positions on abortion. The end result has been taking away people's rights and stomping on any notion of any abortion.
Compromise is how we got to here in the first place, with feckless politicians unable to have any sort of spine and gradually shrinking the amount of constituents they'll fight for.
> 'Compromise' is strictly just code for becoming Republican, and I'm not going to vote for a Republican.
No it doesn't, and thinking that was shows the lack of "strategic sense to productively participate on a topic this." You're position basically seems like: give me everything I want, even if it's a losing platform.
> A great example of this is abortion, where for years Democrats did have 'moderate' positions on abortion. The end result has been taking away people's rights and stomping on any notion of any abortion.
They didn't moderate enough, where they needed to moderate. I know for a fact Democrats have lost Senate races in "red" states, at least in part, because the candidate couldn't take a clear pro-life position.
They were never going to get a pro-choice person there, but what else did they lose by insisting that's the only kind of person they'd accept?
> Compromise is how we got to here in the first place, with feckless politicians unable to have any sort of spine and gradually shrinking the amount of constituents they'll fight for.
Lack of compromise is precisely what leads to "gradually shrinking the amount of constituents they'll fight for." You're saying: if you're not 100% for everything we stand for, we won't represent you.
> They didn't moderate enough, where they needed to moderate. I know for a fact Democrats have lost Senate races in "red" states, at least in part, because the candidate couldn't take a clear pro-life position.
I know for a fact that Democrats have lost senate races in red states because the candidate took a clear pro-life position. Your arguments are not going to work on me, considering I've lived in Texas and have seen what happens when Democrats compromise their position into oblivion. Or hell, you can look at the DINOs and see how every goddamn time they torpedo'd policy over the past decade.
Any Democrat that chooses to compromise over issues like abortion or trans rights or anything like that should be chased out of the running. We should adopt the exact same strategy that Tea Party republicans used to gain control over the Republican party.
> I know for a fact that Democrats have lost senate races in red states because the candidate took a clear pro-life position. Your arguments are not going to work on me, considering I've lived in Texas and have seen what happens when Democrats compromise their position into oblivion. Or hell, you can look at the DINOs and see how every goddamn time they torpedo'd policy over the past decade.
The lost because of that? If so, it sounds like it was the red-state liberals being immature and choosing a no-win situation: either lose because you run a candidate that makes liberals happy but can't win the state or liberals doom a candidate who can win the state because he only offered the liberals 90% instead of 100%.
> Any Democrat that chooses to compromise over issues like abortion or trans rights or anything like that should be chased out of the running. We should adopt the exact same strategy that Tea Party republicans used to gain control over the Republican party.
Such black and white thinking. You'd rather have 0% alignment on issues than 90% or 75%? Because that's what you get when a Republican wins.
Purity is a dumb strategy when the Tea Party republicans do it, and it'd a dumb strategy when liberals do it. Tell me: how many competitive races have "Tea Party republicans" lost because they ran a nut? The answer: lots. Uncompromising purity like yours is actually an exploitable vulnerability.
> The lost because of that? If so, it sounds like it was the red-state liberals being immature and choosing a no-win situation: either lose because you run a candidate that makes liberals happy but can't win the state or liberals doom a candidate who can win the state because he only offered the liberals 90% instead of 100%.
This is an incredibly nonsensical rationale. For some people, including myself, abortion is going to be a hard line. I don't care if you think compromise is a better option, if that line is crossed they are losing my vote. If abortion can be a single-issue policy for Republicans then I can damn well make it into one for myself.
> Such black and white thinking. You'd rather have 0% alignment on issues than 90% or 75%? Because that's what you get when a Republican wins.
Correct. I'm done voting for the lesser evil. If it works for Republicans it can work for the left. As much as you say it's a 'dumb strategy' we're in this situation today because it works. It's what got the current set of Republicans into power.
> Tell me: how many competitive races have "Tea Party republicans" lost because they ran a nut?
Most Republican elected officials in Texas? Ken Paxton is insane, incredibly corrupt and someone that should've been ran out of the state years ago. Same with Greg Abott. The idea that democrats should compromise a bit with insane assholes who are causing direct harm to women is a mistake. Even if you consider it 'tactically' correct, morally it is a mistake and is a losing proposition for their own voters.
> This is an incredibly nonsensical rationale. For some people, including myself, abortion is going to be a hard line. I don't care if you think compromise is a better option, if that line is crossed they are losing my vote. If abortion can be a single-issue policy for Republicans then I can damn well make it into one for myself.
Donald Trump and the MAGA right thank you for your service to their cause.
>> Such black and white thinking. You'd rather have 0% alignment on issues than 90% or 75%? Because that's what you get when a Republican wins.
> Correct. I'm done voting for the lesser evil. If it works for Republicans it can work for the left. As much as you say it's a 'dumb strategy' we're in this situation today because it works. It's what got the current set of Republicans into power.
I think you misunderstand how and why Republicans win in a lot of places, and how and why Democrats lose. Maybe you're also thinking too much about Texas. Everywhere is not Texas.
Also, even admitting for a moment that "it works for Republicans" (which I disagree with), you're assuming a false symmetry between the left and the right. To make a Starcraft analogy: the left could be Protoss and the right could be Zerg, and strategies that work for Zerg won't work for Protoss, because they're actually different. Getting mad at a Zerg for winning with a Zerg strategy doesn't change that.
> The idea that democrats should compromise a bit with insane assholes who are causing direct harm to women is a mistake. Even if you consider it 'tactically' correct, morally it is a mistake and is a losing proposition for their own voters.
There's a name for that: letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. You'll never get perfect, and if you demand it, at best you'll get less than you could have accomplished otherwise, and at worse, you're inviting total defeat.
And if your kind of thinking becomes dominant on the left, we're fucked (in more ways than one).
Funny how this logic doesn't seem to apply to Republicans. They run the absolute worst candidate I've seen in my entire life -- in any democratic country -- and they get everything they want. At no point did they feel the need to compromise in any way or adjust their positions any closer to the left. Apparently pounding the table until you win is a viable political strategy in America. Or maybe timing the political pendulum with economic swings simply lets you run any candidate you want.
No offense, but I'm not sure you have much strategic sense here either. Your take on how politics works in the US strikes me as utterly naive.
> Funny how this logic doesn't seem to apply to Republicans. They run the absolute worst candidate I've seen in my entire life -- in any democratic country -- and they get everything they want.
Complaints about the other side will get you nowhere.
And the lesson I got from Trump's win the real cause is Democrats are were so out of touch that they allowed someone as bad as Trump to win. The turn towards fantasy politics, where liberals just need to be more liberal and maybe bigger assholes and suddenly we get everything we want is completely unrealistic. All it will do really do is just ratify the Trumpian dysfunction.
> At no point did they feel the need to compromise in any way or adjust their positions any closer to the left. Apparently pounding the table until you win is a viable political strategy in America.
Are even you paying attention? Trump totally did adjust their positions closer to the left. When was the last time you heard about Social Security privatization, for instance? Trump also threw generations of right-wing free-trade economic policy out the window to pursue tariffs.
> No offense, but I'm not sure you have much strategic sense here either. Your take on how politics works in the US strikes me as utterly naive.
It's a lot more realistic than what you're offering. If you're not thinking about the valuable things you really want that you're willing to sacrifice, you're not being strategic.
A lot of people are angry, and looking for catharsis in fantasy. "What if we try just doing all the things that feel good to me, and none of the things I don't want to do? If everyone's like me, we'll win!" That's really dumb and won't end well.
What focus on these issues? Harris did everything she could to run from trans rights issues and the most we got from Biden was reinterpreting Title IX based on the finding in Bostock.
>Despite their self-image, I don't think liberals are actually any better at empathy than anyone else.
I can see how you think this, since othering and dehumanizing responses rise to the top when people ask how Republicans can support this administration.
Medicare for all doesn't seem to be a winning strategy, judging by the way it gets turned into euthanasia for all by our neighbors to the north.
Lowering the cost of necessary education is important, though in many cases the methods attempted just serve to make matters worse (much like how corporate average fleet economy regulations, in attempting to improve fuel efficiency, just made vehicles bigger). The structure of college itself (and schooling up until that point) is something I think we could stand to seriously reconsider, given how much of it really formed amid the industrial revolution and was modeled off of the ubiquitous factory models. I don't have some ready made model to address this, but do think there's room for an open conversation.
I don't care THAT much about abortion so much as the system that incentivizes it -- that is, the one that makes it particularly unaffordable to have children, and drives debaucherous, nihilistic behavior. In other words, the monetary system. Fix that, and see if a lot of this other stuff even needs to be fixed or resolves on its own.
Background checks, not licensing, I don't see a strong reason to oppose. I don't have a strong reason to back it, but not a total non-starter.
America first doesn't just mean cutting Israel's influence -- more importantly, it means cutting the influence of international bankers who bought our nation out from under us by printing OUR currency through the Eurodollar system. We've started to address this by leaving LIBOR for SOFR, but it's not a done deal, and there are decades of damage to undo.
Strong on crime needs to come with it sanity of enforcement. Another area I suspect fixing money can help, because I'm not convinced there isn't a fair bit of funded agitation to disrupt the social fabric that has law enforcement at its wit's end. That said, police killing people in the street is not a good look.
Your language suggests you’re an ideological supporter of trump but I’m curious:
What exactly is being imposed by anthropic?
This is from the anthropic letter:
> We held to our exceptions for two reasons. First, we do not believe that today’s frontier AI models are reliable enough to be used in fully autonomous weapons. Allowing current models to be used in this way would endanger America’s warfighters and civilians. Second, we believe that mass domestic surveillance of Americans constitutes a violation of fundamental rights.
Do you see these views as “left wing”? Or what do you disagree with here?
My current world view: for monster multiples you need someone who knows how to go 0 to 1, repeatedly. That's almost always only the founder. People after are incremental. If they weren't, they'd just be a founder. Hence why everything is done through acquisitions post-founder. So there's armies of engineers incrementally scaling and maintaining dollars. But not creating that wealth or growing it in a significant % way.
The police also killed 19 people but your comment doesn’t mention that.
In addition the military has not taken over, but currently seems to be honoring the demand of the protestors for new leadership and addressing the widespread corruption in the nation.
It’s too early to call, to be sure. But I’m hopeful that there can be a peaceful transition from here towards something better for Nepal.
This reads to me as a somewhat quaint snapshot of politics from 30 years ago.
What the author is getting at is the overlapping of the bundles of individual policy stances that we give the label of a single ideology, the folding of the left-right political axis through higher dimensional space. People who agree on some things disagree on others and the old categories become less useful.
These days I think JREG is doing good work tracking political categories if you’re interested and don’t mind some irony-poisoned jargon check him out.
Yeah, I think we've all seen the term "socialism" prettymuch destroyed into having no coherent meaning beyond "when government does stuff" for as long as I can remember, for example.
I mean, I've seen people decry market-oriented solutions to problems (eg congestion pricing) as "socialism" which is broadly hilarious.
> "socialism" pretty much destroyed into having no coherent meaning beyond "when government does stuff" for as long as I can remember
This is actually the best definition, for certain values of government. What's bizarre is that a bunch of people gave communists ownership of the definition of socialism. The communists who never even described it specifically, just refer to it as a mythical state that spontaneously occurs after all of the revolution that they do actually describe. Even worse, those people tho give communists total ownership of the concept don't claim to be communists (because it's too strict, and requires too much reading.)
Socialism is when people cooperate to do things as a group to benefit the entire group. Socialism as a governance system is when that cooperation completely subsumes other methods of resource distribution and dispute resolution. To be clear: Socialism is when the (popularly sovereign) government does stuff, and the more stuff the government does, the more socialister it is.
Markets can also be socialism. Markets are artificial constructs within which transactions are enforced by an overarching power. If that power is popularly sovereign, and the markets are meant to equalize distribution without regard to the power of individuals, of course they're socialist. There has never been a "socialist" society that has not introduced markets. There are still market socialists, maybe look them up.
Markets can be used for any purpose, but a very obvious one is that if people all begin with the same amount of currency, but with a different array of needs, they can use markets to get rid of the things they don't need to get the things that they do, in a fair way.
"Socialism" instead has become popularly defined among a certain class as a society that has infinite wealth and distributes whatever anybody wants to whoever wants it, without requirement or delay, and allows people to contribute in any way that they see fit. It's just rich kid summer camp.
A million kinds of socialists showed up to the First International. Communists bullied them all out (and they would eventually be the "social fascists" who were a bigger danger than even fascists, and needed to be liquidated), and decided that they were the Workingmen now. Now, the children of the most elite classes on the planet dictate that real socialism is their socialism.
It's very hard to find out about a lot of those different socialisms, because how overjoyed they were to see a worker's revolution had happened in Russia, how they flocked to it, and how those people were slaughtered or forced to conform to Stalin's new socialism with classes (S++, maybe? The Fabians couldn't get enough of it.) Whatever Kronstadt hadn't said was said when Stalin explained how some people deserved larger apartments than others, and ruthlessly suppressed those who disagreed.
Read Owen. Learn about labor vouchers. Read anything but Marx and Engels.
Engels was a mill owner who was sleeping with his employees, and Marx was a brilliant economist who relied on Engels entirely for his financial support. Engels served a badly determined mishmash of socialist theories that were already ancient by the time he arrived, wrote a nice thing about the state of the English working class, and needed Marx to lend him intellectual authority.
Marx wrote Capital, which adds almost nothing new to economics and makes the same mistakes that all other economists were making at the time (it's basically Ricardo), but wrote it from the perspective of the individual, as opposed to nations, which was revolutionary. It was not a message to princes, it was a message to wage-laborers.
Engels frankensteined this into his own warmed over cliches, and never allowed Marx to publish a word that he hadn't scribbled all over. Please ignore them when thinking about socialism. We've done the experiments (although we started with peasants instead of a society well prepared by capitalism), and the first output was Stalin.
Maybe give the Left SRs a little attention, or remember Fanny Kaplan. It's a miracle that Bogdanov survived, but even the Bolsheviks couldn't bring themselves to kill the person who came up with the idea of "dialectical materialism" which they hopelessly butchered because Lenin clearly didn't understand what he was reading. Read Bogdanov. Lenin once "refuted" him by basically denying the existence of the material world, and sneering at those who believe in it. Lots of parallels there to today.
Sorry for hijacking your offhand comment. But congestion pricing is socialism.
> city-run buses are absolutely socialist organizations
I agree totally.
As for the military, I'm not so sure. As far as I know every military is run by a state. A private army is generally called milita. A military is also not really providing value to the people, but rather providing value to the government, sometimes over the people. Mandatory public military on the other hand might qualify for that term.
> Socialism is when people cooperate to do things as a group to benefit the entire group.
No, that's altruism: putting the group ahead of the individual.
Socialism is when the means of production are socially owned, instead of privately owned. It implicitly is altruistic by nature, but that's of course not guaranteed.
> just refer to it as a mythical state that spontaneously occurs after all of the revolution
I think you have switched the terms here. Communism is what the mythical state is called. The political agenda leading to, during and after the revolution until that mythical state, is called socialism.
It's true, that socialism used to describe also a liberal way to curing poverty, but that split occurred over 150 years ago. Since then the parties that intend to keep democracy call themselves socialdemocratic and socialism is used exclusively for those calling for councils and revolution.
I'm a bit tired of hearing times and times again, that actually maybe socialdemocrats are also socialists. Socialdemocrats are not against private ownership, they just want it distributed differently. That's not socialist.
Nah. Don't waste your time reading about Owenism and labor vouchers. It's utter tripe, wishful thinking made up by some random guy with no connection to objective reality. The labor theory of value has never and will never work in practice.
This isn't debate club, you can figure out sources yourself. The guy spoke groyper lingo, dressed like a groyper, posed for pictures like a groyper. It is not unreasonable to use duck typing.
Does this mean he IS a groyper? Ha, of course not, it is just anecdotal evidence pointing in that direction. But your argument is that because law enforcement says he has a transgender roommate or partner, he can't possibly be a groyper. Uh, sure. Okay.
I like a lot of the redesign suggestions but how much of that is a result of cards vs no-cards. For example removing the tags and using colored words ("privacy") could still be a good move while keeping cards.
I'm not super educated as a UI designer though can someone help me better understand the distinction?
author here (not super educated either). That's part of the idea — when cards are removed it becomes obvious that tags become the most noticeable part while not being the most (or any) important one. When you look at the cards you see cards and _something_ inside them.
So maybe if this post was in less flame-provoking tone I'd suggest trying to add cards back and see if it makes it better. It might, on landings there is a good chance it will.
I've been at companies where the company itself has no code assets but depends on a bunch of 3rd party enterprise services to run the core business. Brings up the question of how to measure how much code you have: if you depend on a legacy saas provider, do their lines of code count as your liability?
I think the top liability If you depend on a bunch of 3rd parties is if they close or are acquired and change the terms. Many times, we are using services from startups that were only well-funded and have not reached break-even and/or a sustainability business.
A lot depends on the details of what the service provides, but yea, the worst is when your critical data is not accessible or recoverable because someone else holds it for you and something happens that cuts you off. The doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use any service, but you do need to think through some worst case scenarios and think about your recovery strategy.
At a previous place we used a dreadful email marketing SaaS tool and it caused us no end of fire-fighting, even though we probably only had 500 lines of integration code. We ended up rewriting the functionality we needed and bringing it in-house and saved a ton of pain and money, and added ~3k lines.
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Genuine question. This is a surprising opinion to me because I see the democrats as a center left largely moderate party. Agreed that the democrat candidates are appalling and generally show no conviction.