daltotron

He can cease arms shipments to Israel, but not without losing the election by angering the Jewish voters

This is a good point I shockingly hadn't thought about until now, but, true, biden could stop sending weapons, and then harris could decide to still stand as though she supports israel in order to minimize any viable hit to her polls, since he's the one in power but he's not actually running for re-election. But also, what jewish voters? What, single issue, jewish voters, exist in a valuable swing state, that aren't already voting for republicans? You could maybe put up nevada or arizona, where they make up 2.6% and 1.7% of the state's population, but you have to weight that against michigan, where muslim voters make up 2.4% of the population. I think wisconsin also has a larger percentage of muslim voters than jewish voters, as well. I've also seen a couple polls that suggest that jews have about as favorable a view of israel as the average american, I'm not even really sure that they're a specific demographic to point out. Orthodox and conservative jews, maybe. There's another handful of calculations you can make there, but that also doesn't really factor in that by far the largest cohort which is going to be voters on supporting israel is probably evangelical christians, which are also obviously going to be a huge piece of the republican base, and that's not something you're going to strip away by outflanking them, like democrats are currently also trying to do with the border. The main democratic base, though, is going to be a myriad of different people, since they tend to be more popular overall, more popular in ethnically diverse cities, whatever, and it's definitely going to be very alienating to the base to decide to keep pumping weapons into israel, take a harder stance on the border, and provide no real tangible economic policy to improve people's lives.

Not to mention, none of these electioneering calculations, over less than 3% of the population, in very particular states, really means that it's a good decision ethically, economically, geopolitically, to not pull back on the reigns of the rabid dog we've had plopped down in the middle east. Mostly to protect an insanely stupid global trade port that we're using to help ship chinese goods to europe, and maybe also using to train a couple cops we can deploy to shoot fare evaders and also like 3 other people. Everyone loves to play at an election journalist and say, ah, well, this just a strategic move that exists for some other theoretical person that exists, it's not really for me. They never actually defend the policy on it's own merits. Then, consistently ignore the same thing happening, repetitively, for like 30 years, since that electioneering shit was really coined as a strategic rhetorical move afaik. The country shifting rightward, that's not just some sort of like, crazy coincidence, and it's not something that's due to random chance events that happened to screw the democrats over and force them to consistently slide to the right for the last, well, last 80 years, at this point. It's because the like 30% of hardline voters are willing to parrot the same swill they're given, and are totally willing to slide as right as is necessary and follow the dems off a cliff, it's because the american population at large is captured by a huge corporate propaganda apparatus that the democrats are not willing to do anything about, it's because the american population is swamped by a nosedive in standards of living and a shrinking middle class and are looking for an easy scapegoat. At any point, dems could've pointed out that illegal immigrants are, in total, fucking 3% of the population. They don't, because they don't really care, because it's the institutional security stance that we should be more xenophobic to shore up against climate refugees.

Me? I'm not a swing state voter, so I'm just gonna vote for whichever third party candidate is a valid write-in and also maybe seems like they'll get enough to get federal funding, if that exists, and otherwise I'll just vote for claudia de la cruz.

If the economy were operating under rationality it would probably stop feeding elderly people as they can’t do any work and don’t provide much in the way of productivity, for example.

See, so that's like, I dunno if that's so much a problem. First off, rationality is sort of just a method that you're using to affect some type of process, in this case, economic efficiency Under which it probably also wouldn't make sense to, say, just throw old people off of big towers or whatever type of thing. People would probably overthrow your system, you'd deal with a high level of instability, and being unable to track people's ages effectively, which seems pretty inefficient, people might also try to move, or leave your system as they get older. So I'd expect some level of brain drain there, which leads to another point: You're also decreasing any worker productivity you would gain from old joe who ran the lumber yard still being around, so you can ask him questions about the quirks of the lumber yard. Maybe old joe even just boosts worker productivity by the fact that he makes his family and friends happier, and more able to tolerate bad working conditions, longer work hours, or more desirable than that, maybe he gives them the will to learn more, and bring you better higher level jobs where they will be ultimately much more efficient for whatever time they do end up spending on production. But back to rationality, that's just a method you're using to evaluate things. In this case, maybe "efficiency", which is sort of a proxy value for other, more real values. Efficiency to do what? Usually by, economic efficiency, we mean like, we're minimizing the necessary inputs, to affect some productive capacity, while maximizing the outputs, in like, a material way. But then, maybe the sort of our core value that we're chasing after should be to maximize the happiness that old joe is capable of giving to his friends and family, or something harder to define and measure, and more along those lines. That, that would maybe be a flaw of socialist systems, that we don't have some universal definition of a "good" to work towards, but I would say that, again, that's not a distinct flaw of those systems in particular, and in capitalism, that just gets subsumed by a bunch of other bullshit values. You don't have a universal definition of good, because you're always just making short term moves to maximize the profit of your company. Moral miasma, zombification.

Getting even more off topic, I think in general though my main counterargument is just that like. Any risk we take by defining a "good", right, a good to work towards, I think that's a good risk to take. To take the risk that, by defining the good, you eliminate other definitions of "good" that could'veexisted, and the freedom to have those other definitions of good. It's better to take that risk, and define that good, and then work towards it (and mostly, even to point out that such a core value exists, in practice, even acknowledge that it exists, more than anything else.). I think it's better to do that, than substitute your "good" for "freedom", which, like efficiency (and even like "good", but shhh), is just a proxy value for other things. In the market, in capitalism, we define freedom as the ability to own capital, own property, spend money on what you want to spend it on, and work to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 flipping calorically and nutritionally deficient burgers for a bunch of other people who have worked to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 doing equally insane things. We define no "good" in capitalism, we just leave that shit up to the market, and the market already reaches a decision, which is that every little corporation should just replicate authoritarianism in their little shithole section of the economy. Every little corporation gets their "good", and then they fight it out in the marketplace. Ends up that actually, we've just blown this up to be even every single individual, because, again, we've adopted freedom as our current value. Swim in the water, stop knowing that it's there. Big shocker when the individuals at the highest level of the market, having passed through many tests to get there, big shocker when their personal definition of "good" is fucked up, short sighted, and when they can't implement said definition if they even have one, because when they decide to do so, they get curbstomped for engaging in too much long term thinking compared to just sucking up as much of the industry as is possible at the time. I'm also not even saying that a monopoly is bad necessarily, right, as an alternative to this, I'm just saying that it's hypocritical to the supposed value of capitalism, which should be to use market economics to do these calculations at basically every level (which I'm also not convinced would be more efficient then just doing them somewhere else). It also tends to be bad because it still exists within this context in which all this short term incentive is naturally floating around and in which the highest powers in the land are naturally selected to be bad authoritarians.

But take the ICE, for example. I fucking hate the ICE. Mostly because it has enabled mass market automobiles to become a thing, which has impacted our transportation infrastructure in a very adverse set of ways, with an adverse set of incentives. Suburbanization blows up out of white flight as america, conceived as a sort of colonial experiment in a time of slavery, obviously has a lot of hangups around 18th century conceptions of racial superiority. Then you have the corporate lobbying that affects the political system, on top of the general political system just being tailored for the wealthy from the jump (and being tuned to the wealthy over time), and badda bing badda boom pretty soon you're ripping out LA's streetcars to instead flood the streets with massive chunky automobiles that kill a ton of people per year, fill the air with leaded and mostly unregulated particulate emissions, and we're like a century into that as a system now, so we're basically locked in, and none of the fundamental problems with cars as a format have been solved, even with EVs, you're still getting particulate emissions from brakes, lithium mining issues, you're still getting road wear and expenses from that, you're still spreading out cities much more than they need to be which massively increases the necessary power consumption by decreasing the r-values of homes by increasing the surface area of homes and increasing the surface area of a home in which a singular person is going to live and increasing the volume of air inside the home per person which is necessary to be heated, and then we have relay stations so we need to spend more money to pump more electricity and water a longer distance and so on and so forth. We can talk about socialism as a distinct set of values as mostly divorced from questions of authoritarianism, because it's assumed that we're doing this, in good faith, to decentralize ownership of everything, ownership of the workplace, restoring the ownership of the means of production to the proletariat and all that good shit. We can assume all that to be the case, right, oh, and then since we don't want market economies to really re-emerge, replicating class dynamics inside of the apparatus of the corporation, we go from having a co-operative to just having the corporation be owned by the public, and then maybe that's "authoritarian" even if we have a more democratic voting system than a capitalist country is allowed to have. Whatever, those are all good debates to have, those sorts of debates, they're what socialists are gonna talk about in a sort of abstract sense, and then they're all gonna draft up lines like, oh, I'm a marxist because of XYZ, whatever. My concern, personally, is sort of like, I look at the market economy, at capitalism, and the supposed "freedom" it provides people, in the market, to make totally dunderheaded, propagandized decisions, that if you look at them in the abstract, make totally no sense whatsoever. My concern is that we currently find ourselves in a system where all of that shit about the ICE exists, and the ICE isn't just used to power like, a bunch of farm vehicles somewhere, and then everyone else takes the train because if I talk through every other point about car use then obviously none of it makes any sense to any set of values that isn't "I want to kill people with my car" or "I want to waste a lot of gas" or "I want to intentionally spend a lot of money" or "I want to look cool and feel cool and manly", type shit. That, is multiplied for like every other facet of the economy, that times a million. I hate that shit, mostly more than anything. That we can come to the correct takeaways and decisions, and then do nothing about it because the system doesn't care. I don't care so much how we get there, or even necessarily how authoritarian a given system is, because I think about the most that can be expected from people who have been in a capitalist society is to vote for the replication of said capitalist society with maybe some socialized benefits, democratic socialismo style, and I fully expect that shit to get rolled back in 50 years and also to exploit the third world since obviously people outside the jurisdiction of the state aren't allowed to vote in the state's elections. Really all I want is for everyone to just have healthcare, everyone to have good regional transit, for our energy infrastructure to make sense, our food infrastructure to make sense, I want people to stop dying in wars, whatever. The current global system fucking sucks for all that stuff. That's mostly the only reason why I get pushed towards socialism. Mostly the specifics only exist for me insofar as they affect or not my ability to enforce that idea of "good", which I think is pretty sensible once it actually gets spelled out into the material.

I feel like if I told you to go and read a book on socialism, and how it functions, and what some theoretical structures for it would be, that would be kind of useless and repetitive, since you've probably gotten that before, it's a pretty popular response. But I think that would probably be the best solution for your confusion here, any given book you decide to pick up or get recommended on the subject will probably be able to inform you better than some random person's re-translation of the book.

If you have gotten that response before, then I gotta ask, along with everyone else that would've gotten that recommendation and then not done so, why you'd still be talking about a topic that you're not willing to invest like, I dunno, 7-8 total hours in. Probably could've read das kapital, and taken notes on it, and then shot those notes at a professor or other talking head online or even just some other random commenter, and then probably been done with it in the amount of time you've spent talking about that shit on lemmy. And that's probably the most dense and fundamental book on the subject if we're not getting into weird french postmodern bullshit.

Random half-baked schmucks from all walks and different schools of socialism and communism are going to present you with a litany of different explanations as to what the system actually entails, that they're probably half-remembering and then regurgitating from youtube videos, or whatever random collection of academic works they've gone in for. That's obviously not the best way to learn about the system, or really to learn about anything. Means that you'll get weirdass definitions like:

to capitalism but if private ownership of capital isn’t a thing anymore.

Which sounds pretty much completely incoherent at its face. I have no conception of what that would look like, because the ownership of capital is a foundational enough belief in capitalism to be what the system is named after. It's like socialism but without any socialized stuff, or communism without communal ownership.

Like, I've never heard of socialism entailing that you buying a product a company sells entitles you to shares in that company. You're not a worker at said company, that doesn't really make any sense. You also later on talk about "schizo" capital (?), shit about where money comes from (you can answer this one in capitalism, as well. Also, money =/= capital), and the economic calculation problem, which, I dunno man. I'm not going to say so much that that shit's made up, but it's not really a big problem, and it's also a problem that capitalism still basically has to reckon with at a fundamental level, it just ignores it and then decides to crash every decade or so, so that the market can "prune" itself or whatever bullshit. Go hit the paul cockshott vape pen, or go read the book about walmart or whatever.

Also just like. I dunno, maybe we don't need 15 brands of peanut butter at the supermarket which are superficially different but fundamentally the same. Maybe we can get away with just having chunky and just having smooth. Maybe the measure of an efficient economic system isn't that there's shelves full of a range of insubstantially different products and then also that 30-40% of the food is wasted, maybe there's a better measure of "efficiency" there. You can't assume that the decision making choices of people in the market are 100% rational, maybe by assuming that they're rational we just leave the corporate propaganda apparatus totally unacknowledged, which is exactly where that apparatus likes to be. You can't assume that there aren't externalized costs that aren't factored into the initial price, like how suburbia is subsidized, like how climate change is happening. You can't assume that there's no monopolies, which are just going to sit on top of a singular element of the chain, do all the calculations completely internal to themselves, not communicate that with anyone else, and then effectively be a centrally planned authoritarian state for that particular sector of the economy which they and they alone control completely.

Most of all, I think that you can't assume that the government isn't totally conscious of all of these flaws, and have decided to ignore them at the behest of corporate donors. The can gets kicked down the street.

I mean, I dunno. It's been the "future of the internet" since the 90's, but nobody can solve the fundamental problems with such systems existing in the actual real material world, so we just get hit with an ever dwindling supply of larger and larger social media monopolies. Same as it ever was.

You know you're also using the internet, right?

I mean I do think banning them is a good idea, and in general I think nazis should be taken on helicopter rides, most especially the enablers of nazis, their financial leash handlers which basically bootstrap them into these positions in order to push the dialogue further rightward in service of corporate interests, and probably also in this case in service of "geopolitical security" since we're going to be seeing oncoming climate refugees in the coming years, and combatting that in any way but increasing the security apparatus is off the table.

More than that, though, I worry that realistically just banning them, though a great temporary measure, won't do much, say, five years or a decade down the road, because it's not gonna solve the core hypocrisies and discrepancies that neoliberalism is not so keen to solve. If you want to actually solve this problem long term then you need to combat those core problems. Instead, though, I think that probably the party being banned will just see them either form a new party, or else tone down their rhetoric to an acceptable degree, or just join the next furthest right party and then decide to push them further right, and so on and so on, until we've all collectively just shifted rightward to an incredible degree.

Ad nauseam, et cetera, regardless of the political apparatuses at work, until collectively the western world plummets towards fascism.

Sturdy trees are good in the city, since they are low upkeep and very good for air quality and shade.

Sturdy trees WOULD be good for the city, yeah. Unfortunately we've decided to, in basically every major city (at least here in NA and I suspect other places), plant non-native trees that have low survival rates and are basically all male. Being male, they tend to also shit pollen basically everywhere. I'd imagine you could deal with the fruit falling to the ground in a number of ways, as well. Could put some canopy underneath the fruiting trees, as to collect the fruit more easily, you could just pay people to come and collect enough of the fruit for use in things like applesauce that the rest of the fruit really presents no issue as far as just sort of rotting and draining into the ground. You could set up a bunch of easy disposal compost boxes every couple feet, so you can just sweep all the fruit up and throw it into that.

I suspect a larger problem would probably be that inside of the city the fruit would be exposed to more than an acceptable amount of brake dust, including that which drains into the planter box, and would maybe not get enough light, but I think those are generally problems we should be solving anyways since they don't disappear just because we decide not to plant fruit trees. Brake dust on the fruit or carcinogens inside the fruit means that those things are also going to be going into your lungs.

That would imply the point is shit, which I don't think it really is. It's more like they're buzzing around the point like how a fly will buzz around a chili dog at a baseball game. Likewise, they are being annoying and making it harder to digest.

The fact that you are not american, and apparently do not understand our political system, means that you probably shouldn't be talking about our elections. There's only around 10 states at any given time that actually decide the outcome of a presidential election, by design, and the rest of the states are pretty well locked in, most especially the majority population centers like new york, california, texas, many southern states, cascadia. It's only realistically medium density states, flooded with suburbs, that are really up for grabs in the EC, which doesn't necessarily directly correlate with who becomes president. Every state, bubbling from local city districts, to state level districts, are also gerrymandered to shit, which further decreases the power of your vote directly.

So, if you live in one of those majority population cities or states, your vote basically might as well just be going straight into the paper shredder. You might as well vote for a third party, which, given 5% of the popular vote, could qualify them for federal funding, you might as well vote for a third party to signal to the big two parties in which direction they should lean, you might as well vote for a third party so said third party can understand what their actual activist base is.

Doubly so when we have further evidence that the marketing of either party doesn't matter so much when they agree on every other issue regarding their actual political orientation. On economics, they're both neoliberals. On immigration, they're both hitting the same line because the only institutional response to the exploitation of latin america and the climate crisis has been to shore up the border militarily. On foreign policy, they are both completely aligned. On social issues, they might seem a little bit different, but I think you'll find that nobody in the democratic party really takes what is mostly used as an aesthetic ideological divergence seriously, or else they would actually be pulling any number of the levers available to substantially change things. Gay marriage might be legal at the federal level, sure, but see what kamala's record is as the DA of san francisco, and it's pretty fucking horrifying, and is obviously something that we know impacts marginalized communities to a greater degree.

Also don't hit me with the "oh she was secretly good as the DA". She was incredibly mid as the DA compared to every other "progressive" DA that san francisco has had, which is an incredibly low bar to still somehow not clear. One side will hit you with "kamala had 2,000 people locked up for marijuana charges", which is true because when you are arrested you go to jail for sometimes months or even years until trial, most especially when prisons are crowded with marijuana charges or graffiti charges, and then the opposition claps back with "well she only sent 45 people to state prison, which is less than the last guy for state prisons", despite the fact we have no information for county jails because they refuse to give us those statistics. That's on top of her deciding to prosecute parents for truancy, which I'm sure can be spun as actually being a good thing rather than a ghoulish curb-stomping of the working class which just needs to buck up and bootstrap themselves under the gentle threat of getting sent to jail, which I'm sure will help kids. I have a lot more then just that, too, and I can hit you with the citations if you actually want to read them. That's just her, also, a lot of this shit will float around about basically every other "progressive" democratic politician except for maybe bernie, AOC and other members of the squad, and maybe some midwestern politicians that happen to get a simple democratic majority.

Hot take but no. I've seen no convincing polling on basically any topic that says that the average voter, or, under-educated working class schmuck, is some hardline neoliberal, or free market libertarian. The average tends to skew populist, for pretty obvious reasons.

There's also a multibillion dollar propaganda apparatus spinning at all times which is created to convince people that climate change isn't real, natural gas cookware is good, their lives are actually great, they can work themselves out of the hole and into the dwindling middle class, and government austerity measures are good because the meritocratic private sector will just altruistically innovate and make everything more economically efficient, and if anyone's getting hurt, then it's the real poor who aren't like them at all, because those people are lazy and can't be changed. So what little anti-populist sentiment we see in the population, I would argue that's something that's been pretty deliberately manufactured.

It's also not like local or even state level RCV would realistically be sufficient for these whole sets of overarching problems that the US struggles with. You're not locally voting for RCV and then gaining the ability to vote for a party that will actually give you healthcare, will connect your city with others via rail to help rework infrastructure, will solve your housing problems and your homelessness, and they probably won't be solving unemployment. You can maybe vaguely hope that the existence of such a party would put pressure on the federal government to ask "why can't you do this", but that would only happen at the state level with one of the states that actually matter, like california or new york or texas, and good luck getting any of those places to go in for RCV considering how strangleheld they are.

The most you could hope RCV to improve is maybe to make it so you can get someone that's willing to make your ISP give you free shit, or establish a free ISP, and also maybe to give your town a bunch of roundabouts, and maybe approve some missing middle housing which will probably skyrocket housing prices in the surrounding areas since it won't really be doing anything to solve the problem at a national level. Which isn't nothing, right, but that's kinda boof.

Because I'm sure that LA, in california, is under threat of swinging right if people protest vote too much. I'm sure of it, it just makes sense.