she/her

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I’m not a fan of the nepotism and I don’t plan on defending it. Biden claims he needs to do this to keep his family safe from an unfair system. If he’s going to do stuff like this and acknowledge our institutions are flawed how about do stuff for the American people, Ukraine, or anyone without the last name Biden. The peaceful transfer of power to fascism, but his family got theirs leaves a bad taste in the mouth.



  • It was nuanced and most did not “get it”.

    This is less directed at your argument and more at the general usage of nuance that I’ve seen. Your argument is the most recent example for me anyway. Nuance has been put on a pedestal as this universally good standard. Nuance is only as good as it is useful. For something to be nuanced it needs to get into the weeds of a topic because that level of specificity is essential to or otherwise facilitates a good faith discussion.

    This is the word your argument is using.

    nuanced

    : having nuances : having or characterized by subtle and often appealingly complex qualities, aspects, or distinctions (as in character or tone)

    a nuanced performance

    Whenever the movie focusses on Van Doren and Goodwin and Stempel, it treats them as nuanced human beings. But other characters in the film … are sketched less fully. — Ken Auletta

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nuanced

    Since I am subscribed to a descriptivist approach to defining words here is the new definition of nuanced as I have seen it used.

    nuanced

    2 : having a good or correct quality

    Nuanced news, everyone! — Professor Farnsworth



  • There can be more than one lesson to learn from an election cycle. We need to learn all of the lessons. Accelerationism was a problem this election cycle. The right-wing information sphere continues to be a problem in the US.

    The Democrats are not blameless either. Democratic consultants ran the Harris campaign into the ground and they are refusing to learn the lessons. As one of the two viable political parties, the Democrats are still our most useful tool out of those two political parties, but we have to recognize that they are neoliberals. edit: clarification


  • Biden delivered on incremental changes typical of a neoliberal. These accomplishments did not fundamentally change our institutions. We need systemic change to our institutions because the problems with our institutions are systemic in nature. This is progressivism in a nutshell which Biden has wholeheartedly rejected.

    The Democrats are not the left. They are a leaning-right of center political party. Their most recent campaign was sunk in large part because of consultants who are payed millions of dollars to ensure the Democratic Party does not stray far from the status quo. They are some of the people who need to learn abandon neoliberalism, but of course they are effectively payed not to.

    Even if the Democrats won’t listen, the rest of still need to learn the lessons. One of those lessons is learned by an evidence based analysis of what the Democrats delivered actually changed. Over the last four years, the Democrats have changed who is control of our institutions, but they have not fundamentally changed the institutions themselves. In short, we need to acknowledge that the Democrats aren’t progressives, but neoliberals. They have been since Bill Clinton.







  • Here’s part 2 of my comment because lemmy wouldn’t me put this in the first reply.

    I’m not familiar with this one, and a brief search makes me think it may be HOAs on steroids. Do you have an explainer you can link?

    What Does It Mean to Decommodify Housing?

    Federal policies enabling real estate speculation have allowed private actors to profit off housing investments while evading their fiscal, social, and legal accountability to tenants (Ferrer 2021). Combined with the disinvestment in public and subsidized housing, this has led to an unprecedented level of commodification, which produces and perpetuates housing injustice. To achieve increased (and ideally universal) housing affordability and access, advocates are calling for housing to be removed from the speculative market, or decommodified.17 This entails removing a significant portion of the housing stock from the private market, thus reducing the impact of speculation on housing access and ensuring permanent affordability by shifting to alternative housing models that promote public or community ownership and focus on protecting residents from displacement.18 Decommodified housing models fall into two broad categories:

    ◼ Public or social housing, which is generally owned by governments or other public entities, and

    ◼ shared equity models, in which ownership is generally shared between residents and community members or organizations

    https://www.urban.org/research/publication/decommodification-and-its-role-advancing-housing-justice

    ? You mean just more of them? We have them in like every park around here.

    For a while, Pierre-Louis writes, drinking fountains were a more popular source of water than bottled water. But the trend reversed and today drinking fountains are, by all accounts, disappearing. “Though no one tracks the number of public fountains nationally, researchers say they’re fading from America’s parks, schools and stadiums,” she writes.

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-thinking-public-drinking-fountains-are-gross-problem-180955931/

    I would at least give various levels of police support for the wellness check, ranging from a police radio to backup close at hand.

    Having security for social and health care workers or someone to restrain a patient is a separate concern from what the police do. If the police show up they can use deadly force, which isn’t wanted in health care cases. Social workers will most likely own a cell phone to call 911 and could easily be provided with one. I recommend watching Last Week Tonight, they’ve done extensive research into police reform.

    https://themighty.com/topic/mental-health/police-respond-mental-health-crisis-check-dangerous/

    https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-police-are-trained-to-do-when-confronting-suspects-2015-4?op=1

    How do you even go about that?

    The Strategic Interactive Approach (SIA), which I have developed and tested to combat cult mind control, encourages a positive, warm relationship between cult members and their families while helping to raise essential questions for cult members to consider.

    It seems there has been work done on this topic. There are apparently more effective ways to go about it than 1970s cult deprogramming techniques. By all means, do those. But the answer cannot be to do nothing. It’s got to be to do something.

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-of-mind/202303/beyond-cult-deprogramming

    My own parents are the best possible argument for it,

    My Mom and my deceased Grandmother are as well. I’m sure lots of people can attest to this.

    but it would still need to pass muster in terms of the Constitution.

    I definitely have a distaste for media that attempts to proselytize, though.

    The foundation of freedom is the truth. That’s true of free speech and free press. At the bare minimum the media needs to be committed to telling the truth. To be clear, correcting errors is important, but I am referring to the Fairness Doctrine. We used to have standards for this.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine


  • No, I didn’t mean climate science hasn’t been replicated.

    We are discussing climate science, so this wasn’t relevant at all. Specifically we are discussing climate science in the context of Chris Murphy’s assertion that we need to embrace climate science skeptics and other people on the right. A populist movement will be able to bring uniformed or even misled people into a broader movement without needing to compromise on any of the social, cultural, gun and climate issues listed in his tweets. The Democratic Party needs to build a populist narrative that will attract people into a coalition, not continue the failed strategy of trying to grab moderate Republicans while alienating progressives and socialists.

    The above paragraph is what is relevant to the discussion at hand. I thought it was fair to exchange a general list of positions since part of the topic is coalition building. I am going ahead and responding to most of these topics, because what we as individuals need to be doing is educating ourselves and others.

    Also, I’m not google, and I don’t always have the free time to respond. If we dive too deep into any of them we will miss the point of this discussion and the lengths of our comments will get too long. If you want to go deeper into any of these topics, I recommend starting a post in Ask Lemmy or another relevant community. As it is I am going to have to break this reply into multiple comments because we’ve hit the capacity for comments with our discussion.

    for COVID they also needed to trust a wider apparatus that included government.

    The anti-vax movement, which has existed for centuries, is the reason the COVID misinformation was so widespread.

    https://www.verywellhealth.com/history-anti-vaccine-movement-4054321

    If someone trusts the institutions only while their party holds them, they cannot be said to trust the institutions.

    For many people, if not most people, these are one in the same. The idea that institutions themselves are what need to be changed is seemingly unintuitive in today’s society.

    Yes, I think the main objection lately is only who controls them.

    There are people who want a dictator that agrees with them.

    Do you mean something beyond my “safety net”?

    Fear of losing customers, and therefore revenue, may prompt business owners to allow outdated payments. By not enforcing price increases for all clients, businesses ultimately will lose money as they struggle to satisfy unreasonable customers rather than focus on clients willing to pay the current rates.

    Best business practices involve not doing business with ‘unreasonable’ people who won’t pay higher rates. Unreasonable is a cute way of saying a person cannot afford to pay more. I’m sure for some businesses who only deal with rich people this advice seems harmless. But when it’s the same advice that a landlord would use when raising rent it goes from cute to making people homeless. In a capitalist society, it isn’t profitable to target the lowest income brackets. Especially when the initial investment the business needs to make is in new buildings.

    https://postpressmag.com/articles/2015/top-5-reasons-to-fire-a-customer/

    As far as I know, tech is the main area we don’t already do this, just because it’s relatively new.

    The majority of the industries in the U.S. have oligopolies that are dominated by a few large corporations. This creates significant barriers to entry for those wishing to enter the marketplace.

    We aren’t doing this enough in every sector. Tech is a noticeable example of this.

    https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/121514/what-are-some-current-examples-oligopolies.asp

    I’m partial to a “death tax” (estate tax) myself.

    Waiting for billionaires to die will take too long. We needed wealth redistribution decades ago. Billionaires have access to the best health care money can buy and they are in no hurry to die.

    Even then, I think there is a risk of capital flight that needs to be mitigated somehow.

    When it comes to tax policy, Congress has broad latitude to enact policy as it sees fit, within constitutional limitations, of course. And to that point, the constitutionality of retroactive income tax changes is well-settled. They are allowed.

    More recently, in cases such as United States v. Hemme, Welch v. Henry, and most notably, United States v. Carlton, the U.S. Supreme Court has reaffirmed that both income and transfer tax (e.g., estate and gift taxes) changes may be implemented retroactively, “Provided that the retroactive application of a statute is supported by a legitimate legislative purpose furthered by rational means…”

    We have the capacity to write tax laws that do not give legal windows for capital flight and we have the capacity to enforce those tax laws. The US legally freezes assets, usually as part of sanctions, routinely. We need the political will to do so.

    Also, we are currently spending more money than the next nine countries combined on defense spending. We are logistically capable of stopping billionaires who attempt to illegally move assets out of the country. The 2024 article is more recent but the 2020 article does have some interesting comparisons with the rest of the world.

    We also need to cut defense spending, because it’s taking money from education and essential services. Not to mention electing a dictator who does whatever other dictators want is bad for national security and military readiness. So not educating people is actually bad for national security and military readiness since an uneducated populace is easier for a christo-fascist dictator to manipulate to take power.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreylevine/2021/06/11/can-congress-really-increase-taxes-retroactively/

    https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-9-countries-combined/

    https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2020/04/30/us-spends-military-spending-next-10-countries-combined/

    I don’t trust that you can actually do this without triggering a catastrophe. I would be more interested if it were structured as incremental reforms.

    It’s not an issue of trust. It’s an issue of understanding ideas and math. This is the prevalence of neoliberal ideas my argument references. Incremental reforms will not work because the owner class will always take measures to thwart them. This is because they will always be incentivized to behave that way. And as long as they have the money to do so, they will be able to act on those incentives, both economically and politically. There is no catastrophe that will be triggered if rich people are less rich and everyone else is better off. Instead we would see economic prosperity.

    Eh… You might as well say it would be cool if we could all be Vulcans.

    This attitude could have been used to dismiss any technology. Star Trek popularized the idea of computer tablets. Now we have tablets. The humans in Star Trek live in a post-scarcity society. If we don’t dismiss it out of hand, people could be living in such a society or comparable society in the future. In real life the answer might not be replicators, but more equitable and inclusive political and economic institutions.

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/how-star-trek-artists-imagined-the-ipad-23-years-ago/

    I might fight you on the particulars… I like efficiency and simplicity, but redundancy can be valuable in critical systems.

    If the costs of the redundancy outweigh the benefits we should remove the redundancy. The redundant elements of society are billionaires and millionaires. As long as we use a market base system people are going to amass a certain amount of wealth that can easily stretch into the tens of millions. Billionaires have billions does not add anything to the economy. Having an investor class with tens or hundreds of millions that give loans can allow for new small businesses to take off. But we need to regulate these investments and eventually replace them with other systems or else investors will amass too much wealth.

    That argument against the states only works so long as the federal government is trustworthy, though.

    It works as long the federal government is representative of the majority of people.

    I’m not including the debt that is important for the weird-ass way the global economy works now.

    That’s what deficit spending is. The US is not a household. Deficit spending is a strategy and is not inherently irresponsible or responsible.

    Does anyone do it like you want? I agree that we need healthcare reform, but I don’t generally see glowing reviews of other systems either.

    There are currently 17 countries that offer single-payer healthcare: Norway, Japan, United Kingdom, Kuwait, Sweden, Bahrain, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Finland, Slovenia, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus, Spain, and Iceland.

    https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-single-payer

    This is mostly a budget thing IMO. If you can set aside funds for it, go ahead. If you can’t, that’s society deciding this is not worth doing.

    This is an issue of political will. As the Republican Party wants to rule, not lead, having an uneducated population makes their job of deceiving people easier. Trump is notorious for his comment on loving the poorly educated.

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-love-poorly-educated/


  • The replication crisis gives some validity to their concerns.

    This hasn’t been an issue for climate science at all. People have done separate studies and come to the same results. In fact Exxon’s models seem to be highly accurate.

    https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-analysis-finds-exxonmobil-internal-research-accurately-predicted-climate-change/

    It doesn’t help that these people are by and large not scientists and don’t have the training to read the science.

    These news articles don’t require scientific training to read, but they contain the results of the research.

    These are non-issues.

    Ha! I don’t think you would easily find anyone to defend the institutions as infallible right now, least of all the trumpers. The Courts, Congress, the Deep State (career workers in the executive branch), it’s all suspect for them. I myself was counting on SCOTUS to hold until it didn’t.

    This is conflating trust in the institutions with trust in the people. I’m sure most people would be happy to change the individuals in charge of the systems. But I doubt those same people would be interested in radically changing those systems.

    I think you are significantly overestimating the pull granted by simply being in the tent.

    That is putting the cart before the horse. The policies of the tent are created as part of the groups forming the coalition. It’s not an afterthought. Your argument is underestimating the pull of populism in the early 21st century.

    Your turn.

    The US needs majority rule democracy. Currently US democracy is flawed as it has many institutional issues that lead to minority rule. The electoral college and our first-past-the-post voting system are two culprits. But also things like the House being capped at 435 seats, the filibuster in the Senate, the fact each state gets two Senate seats. The Supreme Court justices need an enforceable ethics code, term limits, and should be selected by popular vote.

    The US needs socialism. We need a welfare state for the people who fall through the cracks. It’s too easy for businesses to fire the poorest customers on essential services like housing, even when a person works multiple jobs. We need to regulate businesses to prevent conflict of interests, malpractice, and oligopolies. We need to have a wealth tax on billionaires and millionaires to reinject the wealth that is not larger circulating in the economy.

    We need to redirect the owner class’ source of wealth. The workers need to own the means of production. Which means workers need to own an equal portion of the corporations they work for in the form of non-tradable stocks or bonds. The workers need to receive regular payouts at least quarterly in the form of dividends or interest respectively. And those corporations need to be run like democracies in a way that reflects the number of people working there for things like choosing the C-Suite and company values.

    The goal is to eliminate a class of people, not the individuals themselves. As long as the owner class exists, they are incentivized to overturn our democracy. Even now we are seeing an oligarchy of billionaires forming around Trump as a dictator.

    Also, corporations are not people and we should get private money out of elections.

    I am adamantly opposed to abolishing money or ownership of real estate.

    I mean if we could get rid of those while keeping all the benefits the technologies give us that would be pretty cool right? I see a stateless society like that as an ideal to strive for by removing unnecessary or theoretically redundant layers of hierarchy in our society. I’m a social democrat. Some people would say I’ve taken from market socialism, but it’s not my fault if they only have one idea.

    I suspect you would more eagerly expand its power.

    The US is a federal presidential constitutional republic. I’m fine with federalism as long states’ rights are about governmental separation of concerns. When states’ rights become states have the right to be a dictatorship where people have no rights, that is where I have a problem.

    I support several federal agencies such as the FDA, USDA, EPA. This support is somewhat reluctant; if I could devise an alternative that didn’t accrue power to the federal government I would prefer that.

    I would like to see a radical change with how we fund government agencies. We should get rid of the debt ceiling. Congress will still need to budget for the year. But if agencies need additional funding they should be able to pull from Congress who could choose to approve or deny funding as needed. Like a US military model of pulling resources as opposed to a Soviet military model of pushing resources. Government agencies shouldn’t be in a position where they aren’t fully funded or think they won’t be fully funded if they don’t use all of the allotted funding. But there should be transparency to the process of funding.

    Single payer health care, free college tuition, decomodify housing, public drinking fountains.

    Defunding the police by having them focus on solving crime and giving the excess funding to agencies that specialize in jobs we don’t want police doing like mental health or animal control, etc. Cops shouldn’t be making wellness checks on patients or wasting their time catching stray dogs.

    I think social media may have ruined education for Generation Z, as if we had given them all really bad drugs. My aversion to government action is making me uncomfortable with what we may need to do.

    I recommend talking to people from this generation. The people I have met in person are all well adjusted people.

    We will need a massive and sustained cult deprogramming effort for people who have been watching Fox News for nearly three decades. The alternative is continued political unrest and domestic terrorism even if we manage to educate the rest of the population out of neoliberalism and fascism.

    Based on what you wrote I’m going to guess that the cult deprogramming position is going to be the most disagreeable with you. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong. It is based on my own interactions with people who have uncritically consumed right-wing media for too long while trapped in an information silo.

    Outside of defending ourselves, violence is our least useful tool. It seems like your account is new, but people have multiple accounts. This take is probably on the milder side here on Lemmy. You’re likely to come across people and communities that are prone to fed posting, if you haven’t already.

    I firmly believe we can educate the population out of this problem and that education is the long term solution to fascism. There are a lot of people on here who do not feel that way. Regardless I believe the big tent can include all people on the left and even neoliberals and neocons who are willing to learn.

    Tankies are red fascists, authoritarian communists, and I wouldn’t include them anymore than I would include fascists. Both red fascism and fascism are far right ideologies. Hexbear and Lemmygrad are the two main culprits. With a few notable and welcome exceptions I suspect the majority of users on .ml are tankies.

    Thanks for sharing your views.



  • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zonetopolitics @lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    17 days ago

    You admit you have spare money to spend and use as donations to politics.

    Yeah, I had a job and disposable income before the company I worked for went out of business because of Trump’s covid policies.

    Me spending that $70 dollars isn’t the win for your argument you think it is. Harris got to a billion dollars because millions of people donated to her campaign. People solved a collective problem by working together collectively, not by being rich.

    Which is my point as most members of the Trans community does when they consider gender identity to be their biggest issue to deal with.

    For me it was stopping fascism. $70 seemed like a small price to pay to stop fascism for four more years. I care about trans people but the Harris campaign barely talked about trans issues so that wasn’t really a motivating factor. If they had talked about trans issues favorably I might have donated more. I gave $10 when Harris announced her run, I gave $20 when she picked Walz, I gave $20 when Harris debated Trump, and gave $20 when Walz debated Vance.

    It’s not true for all trans people but the ones I hear from tend to have cash and I have known plenty of the LGBTQ community to be the most conservative because of their wealth.

    I made $100k working at my job for a little over two years plus over $30k in my 401k after gas, tax, and rent. I’m not rich by any metric. Do you prefer if I can’t afford to communicate over the internet so you won’t be inconvenienced by my voice? You argument conveniently ignores I donated to Warren and Bernie. Are they not morally pure enough for you?

    So are they willing to use themselves in their pursuit of moral victory?

    I don’t want a moral victory. You clearly do. Don’t quit on the honesty while you were ahead.

    It’s an identity. I literally said I don’t care and then you went and repeated your line about how you are more important. As if people are using you or spending you like currency for the election. It wasn’t about you.

    People are more important than your moral victory.

    Yeah start being part of the larger topic then and get your head out of your own fart box.

    Please do that for everyone’s sake. Thanks.

    As if saying, ask the DNC party to care about more than the trans community and specific shades of minority to get behind large populace movements for support is some kind of deep moral victory at your expense.

    Refusing to vote for the Democrats until they are perfect on every issue is the pursuit of moral victory. It makes minorities the cost of doing business and isn’t a useful strategy for helping anyone. We didn’t get the right to marry who we want because people refused to vote for Democrats. Minorities strategically voted for Democrats for decades to get them and the US Overton window to shift to the left on that issue.


  • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zonetopolitics @lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    17 days ago

    Or you are the wealthy but new hotness in oppressed to the DNC to hook into

    ? edit: I mean, I gave 70 dollars to Harris’ campaign this year. I spent more on the Eldrazi Incursion commander deck at my LGS which was like 90 dollars. But I gave about $300 to Warren and $300 to Bernie in 2020 and none to Biden.

    above their own well-being will not work because people are as selfish as everyone else.

    People are self-interested in that they care about themselves and the people in their immediate social spheres. However it is in the interests of people to vote for Democrats and against fascists.

    I’m sorry but I really don’t care what happens within 2% of the population as long as they aren’t being killed

    Well it’s good of you to be honest, but fascists do want to kill us. Trans people and lots of other people are going to die as a result of fascist policies.

    So you won’t see me as a leftist using Trans as any kind of grandstanding cause I really don’t care or think you matter other than a funding source for pretend caring wealthy.

    At least you’re honest about using trans people in pursuit of your moral victory over the Democrats.