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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
A bit more practical issues:
State unveils a 10-year plan to restore habitat and control toxic dust storms along the Salton Sea's receding shoreline
. For those who don't know, the Salton Sea in southern California has been drying up for years, causing fish kills, bird kills and a major air quality problem all over southern California. They've been bickering for years on how to fix it. I think this proposal is weaksauce bandaid, though.
What we need is mandatory intensive reeducation for anyone and everyone who has, within the past forty years, voted for a Republican presidential candidate, contributed to a "family values" organization, or watched a TLC reality show.
Someone did tell me life was going to be this way.![]()
Let's not indulge our authoritarian power fantasies too much (or perhaps ever).
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I'm really not sure how you would explain that to people in a way that would stick and not get lost in some sort of propaganda push about how that would violate "one person, one vote" or something.
Still I kind of wish we could have Proportional Representation for things like Congress, though I admit that would be even more politically impossible.
edited 18th Mar '17 7:02:01 AM by Mio
it's simple, one person one vote, you get to move your vote once if your first choice is eliminated.
Still I'd just go for having a president elected by the popular vote before you try and pick a better popular vote system than FPTP.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThe heart of the story:
My family’s generous health insurance costs about $20,000 a year, of which we pay only $4,000 in premiums. The rest is subsidized by taxpayers. You read that right. Like virtually everyone else on my block who isn’t old enough for Medicare or employed by the government, my family is covered by private health insurance subsidized by taxpayers at a stupendous public cost. Well over 90% of white households earning over the white median income (about $75,000) carried health insurance even before the Affordable Care Act. White socialism is nice if you can get it.
Companies can deduct the cost of their employees’ health insurance while employees are not required to report that benefit as income. That results in roughly a $400 billion annual transfer of funds from state and federal treasuries to insurers to provide coverage for the Americans least in need of assistance. This is one of the defining features of white socialism, the most generous benefits go to those who are best suited to provide for themselves. Those benefits are not limited to health care.
When I buy a house for my family, or a vacation home, the interest I pay on the mortgage is deductible up to a million dollars of debt. That costs the treasury $70 billion a year, about what we spend to fund the food stamp program. My private retirement savings are also tax deductible, diverting another $75 billion from government revenues. Other tax preferences carve out special treatment for child care expenses, college savings, commuter costs (your suburban tax credit), local taxes, and other exemptions.
By funding government programs with tax credits and deductions rather than spending, we have created an enormous social safety net that grows ever more generous as household incomes rise. It is important to note, though, that you need not be wealthy to participate. All you need to gain access to socialism for white people is a good corporate or government job. That fact helps explain how this welfare system took shape sixty years ago, why it was originally (and still overwhelmingly) white, and why white Rust Belt voters showed far more enthusiasm for Donald Trump than for Bernie Sanders. White voters are not interested in democratic socialism. They want to restore their access to a more generous and dignified program of white socialism.
In the years after World War II, the western democracies that had not already done so adopted universal social safety net programs. These included health care, retirement and other benefits. President Truman introduced his plan for universal health coverage in 1945. It would have worked much like Social Security, imposing a tax to fund a universal insurance pool. His plan went nowhere.
Instead, nine years later Congress laid the foundations of the social welfare system we enjoy today. They rejected Truman’s idea of universal private coverage in favor of a program controlled by employers while publicly funded through tax breaks. This plan gave corporations new leverage in negotiating with unions, handing the companies a publicly-financed benefit they could distribute at their discretion.
No one stated their intention to create a social welfare program for white people, specifically white men, but they didn’t need to. By handing control to employers at a time when virtually every good paying job was reserved for white men the program silently accomplished that goal.
White socialism played a vital political role, as blue collar factory workers and executives all pooled their resources for mutual support and protection, binding them together culturally and politically. Higher income workers certainly benefited more, but almost all the benefits of this system from health care to pensions originally accrued to white families through their male breadwinners. Blue collar or white collar, their fates were largely united by their racial identity and employment status.
Until the decades after the Civil Rights Acts, very few women or minorities gained direct access to this system. Unsurprisingly, this was the era in which white attitudes about the social safety net and the Democratic Party began to pivot. Thanks to this silent racial legacy, socialism for white people retains its disproportionately white character, though that has weakened. Racial boundaries are now less explicit and more permeable, but still today white families are twice as likely as African-Americans to have access to private health insurance. Two thirds of white children are covered by private health insurance, while barely over one third of black children enjoy this benefit.
White socialism has had a stark impact on the rest of the social safety net, creating a two-tiered system. Visit a county hospital to witness an example. American socialism for “everyone else” is marked by crowded conditions, neglected facilities, professionalism compromised by political patronage, and long waits for care. Fall outside the comfortable bubble of white socialism, and one faces a world of frightening indifference.
When Democrats respond to job losses with an offer to expand the public safety net, blue collar voters cringe and rebel. They are not remotely interested in sharing the public social safety net experienced by minority groups and the poorest white families. Meanwhile well-employed and affluent voters, ensconced in their system of white socialism, leverage all the power at their disposal to block any dilution of their expensive public welfare benefits. Something has to break.
I'm wary of true proportional representation (like say, the Dutch do), and runoff systems do tend to favor certain parties (granted, these parties are moderates ones who are good at building voter blocs/present themselves as everyone else's second choice) and are hard to implement because said parties get accused of powermongering.
I think PR, with a minimum % to gain seats (5-10%) would be better. That keeps the fringe out of the halls of power in most cases.
And the President/head of state (in systems where this role is separate from head of government and actually has authority) should just be straight popular vote. In multiparty systems just hold a second round.
Of course, the absolute strangest thing about US elections is how goddamn long they are. The primaries are overextended (and give way too much influence to early states), and even the main campaign is about twice as long as it needs to be.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
The Dutch case is actually a point in favor of proportional representation; Wilders' party very nearly got the largest share of the vote (and had it not been for a scandal late in the game it's very possible they would have), but he had absolutely no prospect of becoming Prime Minister unless another major party lost its mind and decided forming a coalition with the PVV was not political suicide.
Is it weird that I'm actually worried about Paul "Capitalism means being allowed to eat the elderly" Ryan right now?
Ryancare is garbage and will kill people if it passes. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. I don't want him to go down for it, though. Not yet. I hate that we're having this discussion right now when there's so many far worse elements in Washington.
If Ryancare becomes the nail in the coffin of Ryan's career, it won't be a step in the right direction because he'll just get replaced with another Republican and, given the way the winds are blowing right now, probably one that's even worse than him. That's not progress.
Paul Ryan is certainly on the list of toxic elements that need to be removed from Washington but before it could possibly be considered positive momentum, we need to deal with Trump's cabinet and with the big kahuna himself. I worry that Ryan might become a sacrificial lamb to keep our eyes off the much worse elements infesting the capitol right now.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Basically: we need Ryan to turn on Trump. Not get buried by him.
That would have been an edit but I thought of it too late.
edited 18th Mar '17 8:50:22 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
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Frankly, I think it's a misplaced fear. Because the Tea Party has shown that all a fringe needs to do in the current climate is use parasitism on a larger party.
Had there been a multi-party system in place to encourage diddy parties to wave their own banners on their own two feet, this would not have happened because they'd've had to build an entire national party infrastructure from scratch instead of hijacking one. Contrast with how the Greens have been playing ball.
edited 18th Mar '17 8:54:35 AM by Euodiachloris
I have similar feelings based on what I've researched. I don't have the source on-hand, but some sociologists, historians and political scientists have argued that in any given socio-political climate, only one-third of the general population is needed to shift that climate in any given direction. The Tea Party is apt example.
Additionally, Trump's votes were something like 18.2 percent while HRC's were something like 19.6. Wasn't the percentage for third-party candidates in the single digits? That leaves about a third of eligible voters who did not vote. Just something for us to consider when we talk about how it doesn't take that many people to cause a lot of change one way or the other.
It really doesn't. Also, to dredge up another topic that got tossed around earlier, the effectiveness of nonviolent activism; even in the harshest regimes imaginable, it only takes the mobilization of about 3-4% of the general population to bring about the regime's collapse. That's very rarely the reason for the fall of a particular regime; usually it has more to do with internal power struggles than anything else, but when they are prepared to exercise it, the final say on what a society does ultimately does fall into the hands of its people.
Bidding specs for the Wall are out (height, make up, look but only on the American side, etc)
http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/18/politics/trump-border-wall-specifications/index.html
The craziest part to me is how they expect quality bids for a project this huge in two weeks. That's barely enough time to come up with a concept.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

The United States of America is going to need some serious therapy, revisions, and an overhaul in order to recover from this and come out of it better and with a stronger immune system against this sort of crap in the future.