Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/13/companies-love-misery.html
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But my shareholder value…/s
I keep getting told I am supposed get more ‘conservative’ as I get older but all that seems to be happening is I am getting more socialist.
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that’s been happening to me. it happened to my mother and father too.
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The Rebel State of California approves of Prop 10.
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I think it is the assumption that as you get older you have property to protect. That isn’t true of millennials (I don’t own a house and doubt I ever will), and some Gen-X and boomers are feeling that their property is threatened more by unrestrained capitalism than by socialism.
Alternatively people can take the Tony Benn and Carne Ross route and just lose faith in the institutions they used to believe in.
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Meh. As a homeowner I can definitely say it is a pain in the ass to take care of and I don’t mind taxes as it means I get infrastructure services right to my doorstep pretty damn cheap, as I really like my indoor plumbing and electricity and halfway decent public transit to get about places that are not my home.
I would definitely be happier with much much less back yard to deal with.
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Landlords across California have sent eviction notices to their tenants giving them 60 days to leave; other have announced massive rent increases – and tenants have been notified that these will be cancelled only if Prop 10 fails.
With these kinds of tactics perhaps the state AG should check if these landlords are Mobbed up.
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While it wouldn’t surprise me if they were affiliated, the Mob wishes they were in the same league as white collar criminals.
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In retrospect I’m glad we couldn’t afford a larger house (well, we could have, but I wanted to pay off the mortgage sometime before the Heat Death of the universe). We do have a pretty sizeable backyard for Austin, but the silver lining to a dry climate is not waking up to find Jurassic Park. Thinking about maintaining one the same size in your neck of the woods makes me shudder.
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Same with me, and I’m far from the target market for socialism. Maybe it’s the right’s categorising even the mildest Keynsian regulation or programme standard in other OECD countries as “The Road to Serfdom” that’s doing it.
Yeah, this too. Not only property but the lifestyle I enjoy as a reasonably affluent Gen-Xer. As bad as homelessness is now in places like California it would be much worse with “free”-market fundies in charge.
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Thanks to climate change we also have smoke season inbetween summer and and fall. But yeah that is about right.
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Another arc is that you start as an angry young conservative male who knows everything, and slide socialist as the BS wears off.
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I’ll cop to greedy materialist a bit when I was younger but now I just feel stuff is an anchor and we should be careful of how much of an anchor we have.
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Truthfully, my views haven’t changed that much since I developed them in my early 20’s.
I’m still socially hyper-anarcho-libertarian. I’m still a commons conservationist opposed to kleptocracy, obfuscated market speculation and the perverse incentives that abound. I still advocate the same reforms to our government. I’m still an macroeconomic (industry and fiscal/trade policy) pragmatist and a microeconomic (individual and small business) capitalist. I still favor building a real safety net and funding public education. I remain pretty skeptical of guilds while recognizing their utility in crackpot filtering. I’m still adamantly unbendingly anti-imperialist, against maintaining a globe-spanning standing military and in favor of veteran services. I still abhor bigotry as manipulation and willful ignorance. I still favor a national sales tax. I still think most (not all) revolutionaries don’t have a realistic plan beyond seizing power. And I’d still sooner have a capsaicin enema than go into politics.
The four things that have changed are I’ve gone from believing that law enforcement has a persistent minority of corruption to realizing it’s almost totally corrupt. I’ve come to appreciate the full scope of our injustice. I’ve realized the full scope of the corporate greed behind the prison-industrial complex and the systemic racism of the school-to-prison pipeline. And I’ve come to realize the curves of automation are going to inflect a lot sooner than I previously believed realistic and the concentration of the means of automation in the hands of the investor class would be a disaster of biblical proportions.
What has happened is that the Alt-Reich has dragged the Overton Window so far to the right that those mostly moderate stances now make me a left-wing radical by American standards.
ETA: I’m still pro-choice. I’m still an atheist with regards to humanity’s various deities, and agnostic about an unknown higher power, but for me that has no more to do with politics than recognizing that water is wet. And I’m still in favor of worker-owned and member-owned businesses.
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I’m becoming more conservative and more socialist at the same time. Figure that one out.
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Roger that!
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Seems like some extra-sleazy attacks on propositions this year. I got a call the other day telling me to ignore the “misleading” description of a proposition, and that it actually was about lowering gas taxes (which were “too high!”). I looked at the prop, and it (truthfully) was described as eliminating some infrastructure spending (which is what lower gas taxes would do). Then there’s the prop where both the pro and con sides both make identical claims to be for improved animal welfare and accuse the other side of being greedy corporate farmers trying to undermine them. The proposition itself claims to improve animal welfare standards while it seems to actually worsen them by over-riding a more stringent, existing law.
Then there’s the California Republican congressmen who are outright lying about their positions - like many of their cohorts, they claim to be staunch defenders of preexisting condition protections (while obviously being the complete opposite). I never though such brazen outright lying about their positions would be successful, but in the Trump era…
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With the Right nodding along to Rudy “Truth Isn’t Truth” Giuliani, by this point we’re pretty much full Orwell on that front.
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