The entire government system has sold out thanks to corporations hijacking lobby groups through funding.
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Aren’t we too easy on ourselves when we attribute omnipotence to the opposition? @milliefink, @funruly, @Israel_B, @jsroberts, @shaddack, @miasm, @Comrade, @William_Holz, @slybevel, @TobinL and other grumpy and less-grumpy avatars I’ve digitally met here don’t seem like the sort to say it’s all over before the task has even started. (Sorry, I’m out of likes, or I’d be liking your post.)
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Opposition? I’m not a member of the Democratic Party.
I’m a socialist.
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We don’t need to join the Dems to oppose the GOP, right? … Are you DSA? (I am.)
Do your democratic socialist commitments favor caucusing with the regular Dems?
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You mean a rebel to the establishment.
Because United States of America, has become the Oligarchy of Corporate America.
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I have nothing to do with their party really.
I’m hardly a rebel though. Just an engineer with a kid in college.
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As I see it the fat lady isn’t on stage yet. But anyway as far as donkeys vs elephants, now it’s more like monkeys flinging poop
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Splitter!!
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I consider it more a largely understandable manner in which the rules of the ‘game’ and humanity’s predictable irrationality wove together.
I’ll agree the system as it exists isn’t worth salvaging as a form of collective government because without several drastic changes you’re going to end up with the same results eventually, it gives too many advantages to the drama queens with pathological personality disorders and too few to the rational and reasonable.
I like to think it’s exploitable though, or at least it’s possible to do an end-around of the system and create a civilization of choice rather than trap everyone in a birth nation lottery.
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Two questions come up for me here. One, it’s less a system than our friends and neighbors and those relationships are by definition worth honoring and protecting, right?
Second, a democratic rather than plutocratic social economy is needed, yes? There’s not sufficient reason to conclude that can’t be achieved by democratic means … esp. if, for example, corporations are reformed first.
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Well, the smaller groups tend to need less governance for interactions between them, and the need for governance actually drops the less external forces are ‘micro-managing’ them (which is part of why our few truly peaceful societies and Utopian experiments that have some success tend to do that same ‘small groups on the same page’ approach)
Can’t really govern a Nation if small groups is your only model though, right? You still need a way to weave 'em together that isn’t a race to the bottom. Nations succeed at the first while failing at the second.
Well, I think we need to NOT be overly optimistic and pay attention to what evidence indicates happens. When we’ve combined democracy with capitalism we’ve gotten plutocracy every time on this planet. Sure, the more socialistic systems tend to be a little better from a standard of living standpoint, but it’s not like Norway doesn’t have any unearned inequality or every citizen as the same initial influence on how their government works.
Sure, there’s a chance somebody can make it work, but I’d rather it be an experiment that people can move away from if it doesn’t work (or towards if it does) than than imposing some generic variation that a huge group ‘settles’ for but not everyone actually wants and trap their kids in there because that’s where they were born, y’know
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The smallest groups — families — tend to need lots of intervention to prevent or respond to intimate partner and other violence. Informality actually increases the risk of violence.
Yeah, I meant smaller as in 'the number that science and evidence indicates is our sweet spot…a.k.a. Dunbar’s Number/150-ish/the Monkeysphere’ rather than ‘the smaller the better’. We’re biologically designed to function optimally in a very specific sized group.
And also, there’s no ‘perfect’ solution, there’s only the quest for better and attempts to make sure people aren’t trapped in scenarios like you describe…and even then we’d want some group of people with the ability to protect the innocent and free people just because there’s too many scenarios to deal with generically.
Personally I’m a big fan of giving people lots of options to escape from those scenarios into ones that are vibrant and positive…i.e. new lives surrounded with non-abusive people or places to be safe that aren’t just ‘places for battered moms to hide’. That wouldn’t solve everything, but it would free a LOT of people from the scenarios they’re in right now. I don’t think our current situation is effective, people shouldn’t ‘own’ people nor should they control their movements/freedoms.
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I know, but the science and evidence isn’t conclusive while 1 in 3 women and 1 in 6 men are suffering trama from gender violence they encountered primarily within smaller groups (i.e., acquaintances).
I’m not sure I’m following what’s meant by “it’s” in the question. Is “it’s” referencing Dunbar’s Number?
If so, I just mean that the evidence overall is inconclusive for some of the broader claims we might want to make about Dunbar’s Number.
Like … will defaulting to groups of 150ish increase, decrease or be neutral for risk or protective factors for gender violence? We don’t know. The evidence is still inconclusive.
I think it’s a reasonable default in many ways. I haven’t understood you to want to speculatively extend it to other fields or use it as a purely arbitrary limit.
Well, I never said that ‘this number is some mandatory thing that the world must be organized around’, just that it’s a better default starting point than ‘several hundred million’. It’s a just a different starting default that opens up other opportunities.
Like I said, no system is perfect, but I fail to see how giving people options to escape bad situations or find better ones is a step down from not having any options. Are you assuming it’s anything other than a neutral step or step up?
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The number is only important in that
- It’s a good choice for default because it IS what science indicates is our default group size, and
- It’s far, far smaller than several hundred million, and therefore gives us more than one option for all Humans/Americans instead of just one.
The key here is the ‘more than one option’, not the starting point. SOME default had to be chosen and I think that’s a very good one and it’s based on some evidence, but there’s nothing preventing larger groups from forming or groups from merging. You’ll note that in every example I’ve put into writing I say ‘AT LEAST 42’, not ‘At most 150’. I’ve been very, very aware of this concept and never treated it like a limiting factor, I’m sorry if I’ve been unclear. I’ve always believed that groups of hundreds of thousands or more have tons of potential, just that the only way for them to be stable, vibrant things was for them to be choices rather than traps.
Right now people have no options. They have one system to be part of, that’s what I’m opposing. I don’t think civilization is something you should be born into, I think it has to be a choice.
Do you think that giving people full featured whole-life options would do anything other than decrease abuse?
(Also, have to point out that this is a tiny part of the conversation and honestly it’s a smidge unfair to expect me to solve everything. I should be competing with the status quo, not with an imaginary Utopia made of motionless, frictionless, perfectly spherical humans)
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Probably by observation. Having your job offshored, or participating in a labor market where the buyers can reasonably anticipate that the immigrants will work for less and can be threatened wit exposure and deportation if they cause trouble, certainly doesn’t suggest that globalization is doing much for your benefit.
Historical observation and/or mythologizing reinforces the impression: In the post-WWII period, you had circumstances where being blue collar was hard work; but often actually paid enough to let you qualify as some flavor of middle class(you, in the back, with your nonsense about how the strength of labor unions at the time may have had something to do with this, shut up…)
I suspect that these people aren’t correct, in that you can run an isolationist oligarchy as well as a globalized one; and unless the ‘oligarchy’ part is fixed the bottom rungs of the isolationist case will just end up earning walmart wages without even having access to walmart prices; but(while their perspective is somewhat myopic, missing the influence of organized labor, more-or-less-all-our-competitors-borrowing-money-from-us-to-convert-their-countries-into-smoking-rubble, GI bill, etc.) the idea that ‘Free Trade’ may have been quite the screwjob is far better supported and not nearly as delusional as the theory that voting republican would somehow improve your fortunes.
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Your summary here captures both the superficial attraction of blaming immigration for falling compensation and the the real social cost of the political mistake.
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It’s an unfortunate truth that immigration has, historically, been actively employed to screw over the American working poor.
If you look at the history of (for example) copper mining in Montana, you see a repeated wave of the mines being staffed by whoever the latest round of immigrants were. Basically, the mine bosses would employ a group of easy-to-exploit new immigrants up until the point where they’d established themselves and began to organise for labor rights, then they’d sack 'em all and move onto the next batch of fresh-off-the-boat victims.
The immigration system today is not what it was then, but the idea of “plutocrats used immigration to screw the working poor” is not totally without foundation. The big issue is in where do you direct the outrage at the situation: the exploitative bosses, or their immigrant victims? And for solutions, do you fight to prevent exploitation, or just choke off the supply of the most easily-exploitable workers?
Tragically, the plutocrat parties have a great deal of expertise at directing the hate onto the victims, and laws against workplace exploitation have gone sharply backwards in much of the USA.
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