EPTOverall I really appreciate your well thought out opinion that, in principle, is a reasonable and compromising position between some groups who don't normally agree on anything but I worry that most schools of thought will be quick to yell at the parts they don't like rather than get on board with the parts that they do.
US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2840
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ZackAttack
United States884 Posts
Overall I really appreciate your well thought out opinion that, in principle, is a reasonable and compromising position between some groups who don't normally agree on anything but I worry that most schools of thought will be quick to yell at the parts they don't like rather than get on board with the parts that they do. | ||
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farvacola
United States18857 Posts
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Oukka
Finland1683 Posts
On November 19 2020 10:07 mikedebo wrote: It's probable that many of you have seen David Shor's election postmortem, but am posting in case you haven't. The Democrat connection to "real voters" is a popular point of argument, as is needing to mobilize disenfranchised voters, and Shor covers a lot of this while being able to cogently compare the impact of these trends on actual change. There's also a (short) nod at the end about the difficult concessions that "successful" socialist movements in other countries needed to make in order to get to the point they are now. An excerpt on a topic that gets batted around here pretty frequently: + Show Spoiler + So how do you change a party’s national brand? This does get to your earlier question and to this very real tension that exists right now in the Democratic Party. Voters are now determining their opinions about parties in a unified way and not reading about individual local candidates. There’s arguably less local news. But people’s consumption of local news has definitely decreased, while their consumption of national news has increased. So it’s hard for candidates in redder areas to differentiate themselves from the national party than it used to be. This is part of why ticket-splitting is declining. And that does create some awkward trade-offs. Like, it is now true that what a left-wing congressperson in a deep-blue district says will get transmitted adversarially by the Republican media, and to a significant extent by the mainstream media, to people who disagree. And those people won’t say, “Oh, this left-wing congressperson, well, he’s crazy. But Max Rose? He’s dope.” They’re just going to say, “Oh, Democrats support socialism now, because there’s this one socialist congressperson.” I think the reality now is that whenever any elected Democrat goes out and says something that’s unpopular, unless the rest of the party very forcefully pushes back — in a way that I think is actually very rare within the Democratic Party currently — every Democrat will face an electoral penalty. And that’s awkward. But I think it’s a natural consequence of polarization and ticket-splitting declining. I think progressives try to get around this awkward reality by saying, “Well, Republicans are going to demonize us no matter what we say or do.” But I don’t think that kind of nihilism is justified. What they say actually does matter. Parties and candidates that say less controversial things, and are associated with less-controversial ideas, win more elections. I think that the only option that we have is to move toward the median voter. And I think that really comes down to embracing the popular parts of our agenda and making sure that no one in our party is vocally embracing unpopular things. I know that sounds reactionary. But moderates don’t have a monopoly on popular ideas and progressives don’t have one on unpopular ideas. There are a lot of left-wing policies that are both popular and transformational. Worker co-determination. A federal job guarantee. There’s still a lot we can do. And we also still have a chance to limit how much we need to compromise by winning in Georgia and then passing sweeping structural reforms. But if we don’t, then the reality is that the median voter who gets to determine Senate control is going to remain a non-college-educated 55-year-old in a pretty Republican state who voted for Donald Trump. Probably twice. That’s who we’ll need to win over in order to govern. Thanks for sharing this, it was interesting to read. This will be the umpteenth time the FPTP voting systems are lamented, but by gods it's miserable to read when parties discuss moving to the median voter. I'm somewhat familiar with the game theory behind it and there is nothing surprising in it, but it is also very sad that the parties and representatives don't adopt policy positions because they believe in them as the right thing to do, but because they are the winning policies. I just cannot think of a single reason why FPTP is a good system to choose representatives. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26740 Posts
On November 19 2020 15:39 GreenHorizons wrote: Why? Succeeding under capitalism basically requires integrating exploitative hegemonic beliefs like you're articulating (the liberal version) to one degree or another. The what is the framing and blaming of 'culture' for a system that is dependent on having poor people no matter how hard-working and well educated they are. As well as the idea that being a retail worker is less worthy of dignity and a living wage than something better paying or requiring specific certification like being an engineer, coder, or working in a lab. Haha time for some Wombat anecdotal experience! As someone who is in his fourteenth year of retail and is retraining to code, a rare chance indeed to discuss being in both camps/vent on it. Retail isn’t actually that inherently bad. Depends what you’re doing, depends how you’re wired. Wages could be better, for Northern Irish standards we’re actually not that badly paid, our employer benefits are actually pretty decent too. My other options in trying to extricate myself sounded like living hell (telemarketing especially), at least in retail I’m on my feet doing stuff people actually need. Where things have deteriorated massively, noticeable over my span (first and only job, started it at 17 the year before college, am now 31) is stability. Stability of any kind. While wages are a problem, I feel stability is really lost in the conversation. It’s a gigantic, gigantic stressor for many of my colleagues and myself and it’s much, much worse than it used to be. We’re 300+ in number now and it’s something like 20-30 of us are on full time contracts. The overall number of employees and the ratio of part-timers to full-timers has massively increased over my tenure thus far. Chatting with a colleague, let’s call him ‘George’ as that is his name, older fellow now but he’s been a lifer, bought a house as the single breadwinner from working full time in retail and enjoys entertaining the grandkids over there. It’s not just the house ownership that is borderline unfathomable to many of us, it’s even having a full-time gig. You end up with a workforce that for anyone who actually has bills, family, or in my case a degree to fund that is stuck on small contracts and almost entirely dependent on variable overtime, it’s enormously stressful. You can’t budget and you can’t make many plans socially or whatever because you’ve got to work when the trough is free. It’s really, really stressful, especially for someone wired as I am. I like to make plans and stick to them, even if it’s a bit brutal for a bit I can handle it. Case in point when Covid first hit, and I was saving for school, with nothing else to do and I’m a bit of a lunatic workhorse anyway I had unlimited overtime sorted with one of the bosses so I couldn’t come in whenever, leave whenever. Wouldn’t say it was fun but I’d saved a thousandish dollars in a month doing things like 5pm-5am shifts for a week. Then, rather than offer hours to existing employees and getting temps in to cover the gaps, they took on a ton of temps to cover the expected Covid absences, of which there were few. So folks like myself were expected to both drop down to their contracted hours a week (10 in my case) and also train the new folks up. So yeah I’m stuck for 3 whole months basically doing 10 hours a week and ended up having to start dipping into my previous college savings and have to take out a loan to go to college. Hm this went on longer than expected, anyway yeah the TLDR is how can you expect poor people to make good long-term decisions financially if they have no short to medium-term predictability in their lives to begin with? | ||
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Salazarz
Korea (South)2591 Posts
On November 19 2020 12:13 Mohdoo wrote: Cultural deterioration is what happens when a population loses hope. They begin to accept their bad situation and do nothing to remedy it. They laugh off the idea of going to school to be a doctor as if its physically impossible to do so. I don't want to offend you by discussing your mother, so I will instead illustrate my point using a friend of mine. He grew up poor, his parents weren't particularly successful and after high school he basically just kept working his retail job. He would get fired or laid off from time to time and here we are 14 years after graduating high school and nothing has changed. He didn't believe he could be an engineer or a doctor, so he never tried. He just assumed all he could ever be was what he was. If he would have endured all the things working against him to just go to school to make good money, he'd be 999999999x happier than he is today. Regardless of how or why, the right thing to do is to push through it. There are a lot of really unjust parts of our country and it takes a lot of work to climb out of a bad situation because the US has very poor mobility. I've already described all the things that make the phrase "its very expensive to be poor" true. The deck is stacked against America's poor. But the cultural deterioration occurs when that injustice makes people lose hope and stop trying to better themselves and escape the bad situation they are in. I want to be clear that cultural deterioration is a reason to SUPPORT social programs aimed at empowering poor communities and INCREASING mobility, not an argument against it. I bring up the cultural issues with America's poor because it is impossible to solve a problem that isn't being accurately framed. It is important to consider all components of a problem, not just the pleasant parts. America's poor rightfully are very deflated and sad. The highlighted part is a huge assumption you're making that is not at all grounded in reality. As a matter of fact, doctors and engineers in modern capitalist societies aren't significantly happier than the retail workers, on average. It's not really some "mo' money mo' problemz" thing, but fixating on increasing your income / savings the way so many people today do simply does not lead to an increase in long-term happiness or fulfillment, rather it tends to lead to higher stress and burn out. There are plenty of studies that illustrate this; obviously people living in abject poverty tend to be unhappy and have high levels of stress, but the correlation between income and happiness is very weak once you look past folks that are destitute. In fact, a common theme of 'rags to riches' stories is that folks who have a chance to 'make it' become so fixated on increasing their income that their quality of life suffers significantly as they sacrifice their hobbies and leisure time, leading to all sorts of negative outcomes. Here's one link discussing this effect quite succinctly: https://www.princeton.edu/news/2006/06/29/link-between-income-and-happiness-mainly-illusion I agree with some of your ideas about 'cultural deterioration' -- and I think it's a very serious issue. But it's not a problem of poor people or lack of ambition, quite the opposite. It's a problem of obsession with money, it's a problem of equating success and happiness with money, and it's a problem of complete lack of real understanding of how to live a truly fulfilling and happy life. | ||
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Stratos_speAr
United States6959 Posts
The only thing striking about it is the framing. Traditionally, when talking about socioeconomic status, conservatives try to paint all poor people as having a moral failing while progressives refuse to acknowledge any personal shortcomings in a poor person's life. Anyone who grew up poor or poor-adjacent should be able to tell you that plenty of poor people make absolutely horrendous decisions related to their personal and financial well-being and have a poor work ethic. The problem is that everyone does, and society wants to pick that out and uniquely use this to blame poor people for being poor when those that are not poor have a significant structural advantage that helps keep them protected from their terrible life decisions. As Farvacola alluded to, the entire concept of "personal responsibility" and "moral failings" shouldn't be the basis of public policy. Even if 95% of poor people were poor due to their bad decisions, that shouldn't matter; we should still be making public policy to help them, because the alternative isn't a viable option for the long-term health of society. There are extensive structural disadvantages that have been conclusively shown to contribute to poverty beyond any individual's capability to influence, and until we have fixed those, any talk of "personal responsibility" or "moral failings" is lazy hogwash that is just used to abdicate our societal responsibility to address injustices in the system that we continue to support. | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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Nevuk
United States16280 Posts
Issues: 1. The deadline was before they reversed course 2. They've already signed an affidavit that they certified the vote (they signed a new one yesterday that they want to disclaim their previous one) Per AP In Wayne County, the two Republican canvassers at first balked at certifying the vote, winning praise from Trump, and then reversed course after widespread condemnation. A person familiar with the matter said Trump reached out to the canvassers, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, on Tuesday evening after the revised vote to express gratitude for their support. Then, on Wednesday, Palmer and Hartmann signed affidavits saying they believe the county vote “should not be certified.” https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-targets-vote-certification-29da6aac9cc41e47f3095855e7af7031 Also in that AP article, there are apparently some issues with AZ certifications of rural counties (for probably similar reasons) | ||
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LegalLord
United States13779 Posts
On November 19 2020 15:39 GreenHorizons wrote: Why? Succeeding under capitalism basically requires integrating exploitative hegemonic beliefs like you're articulating (the liberal version) to one degree or another. The what is the framing and blaming of 'culture' for a system that is dependent on having poor people no matter how hard-working and well educated they are. As well as the idea that being a retail worker is less worthy of dignity and a living wage than something better paying or requiring specific certification like being an engineer, coder, or working in a lab. This bolded part is the real key here. There are plenty of Mohdoo types out there who miss the forest for the trees and say stuff along the lines of "poors are poor because they make the bad choices that keep them poor." Which may be true, but it misses the reality that if more than just a few poors are able to break out of that cycle then the system doesn't work. Hence the goalposts tend to move - no longer is it just that you have to be educated, but you have to have the right degree. And maybe the right school, the right work experience in college, graduate education, and so on. Best to limit the upward mobility to just enough people that it's possible (and to pad the ego of the Mohdoo types who make it and make them believe it's due to their own personal strengths), but just rare enough that it's a drop in the bucket. | ||
KwarK
United States43964 Posts
It's likely you'll know someone who was in the top 20 and if you look at them you'll see that they made some good choices. They looked after their health, they trained, they showed up on the day of the race, and so they earned it. And so if you look at them in a vacuum it'll appear the system works, they did the work and the system rewarded them. But there are things that you're not seeing. Firstly, that the game is rigged. That some people don't have the same biological capacity to win a footrace as others and that assigning success based on their capacity to sprint is arbitrary, cruel, and insulting to the basic human dignity we all deserve. Secondly, that the guy you know who worked hard and earned his spot in the top 20 had a trainer, time off to train, access to sports facilities, and so forth that the guy who came 25th didn't. The guy you're seeing worked, but did he work harder than the guys he beat? Because if he didn't work harder than the guys he beat and he still got rewarded then we can't truly conclude that the system rewards hard work, even if it rewards people who did work hard. Thirdly, it disincentivizes trying if you're not naturally advantaged. If you're from a background where you don't know many winners, where nobody in your family has been in the top 20, where you don't have access to sport facilities, and where none of your role models won, why would you spend all your time training for the day of the race? Everyone tells you the race is bullshit and looking at how the same group of people keep coming out on top each time you'd be inclined to agree. If white men always seem to win the footrace, even when they didn't work as hard, then as a black woman you'll be disillusioned with the race. And most importantly, the footrace is intrinsically incapable of taking care of the participants. It's set up so 80/100 get nothing. All of them could be clones of Usain Bolt trained from childhood and it wouldn't make a difference because the inequality is built in, the 80 have to get nothing so the 20 can get more. As a system for allocating resources it can't ever take care of the group. Advocates of the system point to someone like myself who was born with the capacity to make top 30 pretty easily but had to get their shit together and work hard to get into top 10. They will rightly say that if it hadn’t been for the foot race system I never would have gotten in shape and trained the way I did. That the foot race system has made me fitter and more productive, that instead of languishing in the top half I’ve been encouraged to work hard by the threat of competition and the promise of reward. But looking at the successes in isolation misses the forest for the trees. Ultimately it promises that if you’re a productive member of society you will be given permission to steal excess value from other members of society and that promise can never be universally fulfilled. | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15743 Posts
On November 19 2020 15:54 ZackAttack wrote: Mohdoo I would like to say that you have a very interesting perspective on things that I had not considered before. I completely agree, but I think you are going to run into trouble with almost any unnuanced opinions. On the one hand, people on the right are going to dislike that you advocate and "uneven" amount of help to one part of the population that technically has the ability to better themselves if the try hard enough. On the other, people on the left are going to jump on the fact that you are casting some blame on people who fail for their failures, when it is really the system that is holding them back, not to mention that "cultural deterioration" sounds on its face to be a racist dog-whistle even though the way you use it is genuine. Overall I really appreciate your well thought out opinion that, in principle, is a reasonable and compromising position between some groups who don't normally agree on anything but I worry that most schools of thought will be quick to yell at the parts they don't like rather than get on board with the parts that they do. Thanks for the feedback. In my eyes, both the group's criticisms can be addressed in the same way: Living as a member of the very poor in the US is plain and simply terrible and no one should be blamed for losing hope in that situation. It is unreasonable to expect people to merrily whistle down the street on their way to their job that intentionally doesn't give them enough hours for healthcare, won't offer stable hours, and will likely lay them off soon. For people who are bouncing around minimum wage jobs their adult career, it is downright soul crushing. They have no reason to be optimistic and it is crazy to expect them to be optimistic. Losing hope is a natural result of being victimized as a class of people for many years, watching your parents having been victimized in the same way you now are. Part of this is likely related to the idea that people have many definitions of "poor". People living in a not-fancy house, going on a vacation once a year are not what I am talking about. There is a huge class of people who are working minimum wage jobs in their 40s. They are rightfully incredibly discouraged. Once these people are discouraged, matters get even worse. How many times does giving up make a situation better? Not often. And yet, do I blame these people for losing hope? Of course not. Unfortunately, people who have never been in this situation have a hard time understanding what it feels like to have your soul broken in this way. So there will still be plenty of middle class folks who say "so stop being a whiner and DO something about it". Edit: and t o finish my point, if they did somehow overcome all the things working against them, working unreasonably hard to rise from the poor class, they *would* be successful, of course. But that isn't a reasonable expectation. And when we are creating policy for hundreds of millions of people, we should form our policy based on reality, not what is "technically possible". The fact of the matter is, a very small % of people rise out of the poor class. | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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LegalLord
United States13779 Posts
On November 20 2020 01:19 JimmiC wrote: I'm not sure if you completely misread mohdoo's posts on purpose or by accident but I suggest you read them again. The message you are saying he and "mohdoo types" suggest is not what mohdoo was writing. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not purposely being disingenuous to be mean, but rather you just missed it. So go back and give it another shot. If you're interested in making a point rather than just baiting - by all means, raise specific points rather than just the lazy "go back and read it again" response. On November 20 2020 01:17 Mohdoo wrote: Edit: and t o finish my point, if they did somehow overcome all the things working against them, working unreasonably hard to rise from the poor class, they *would* be successful, of course. But that isn't a reasonable expectation. And when we are creating policy for hundreds of millions of people, we should form our policy based on reality, not what is "technically possible". The fact of the matter is, a very small % of people rise out of the poor class. So what specifically do you think should be done about it that you think would actually make a difference? | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15743 Posts
On November 20 2020 01:44 LegalLord wrote: If you're interested in making a point rather than just baiting - by all means, raise specific points rather than just the lazy "go back and read it again" response. So what specifically do you think should be done about it that you think would actually make a difference? Enormous investment into work-study programs, parenting-assistance programs, job training, enormous overhaul of the education system. Nothing short of that will fix the system. The system is currently so broken it continues to break itself even worse. When something is very broken, it takes a lot to repair. I don't see it happening any time soon due to the cost, but I think it is worthwhile to recognize what would actually be necessary to fix it. Everything we've done so far in poor communities has been a tiny fraction of what is actually necessary. People will need to feel legitimately empowered and capable and be shown they can achieve a lot. | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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LegalLord
United States13779 Posts
On November 20 2020 01:48 Mohdoo wrote: Enormous investment into work-study programs, parenting-assistance programs, job training, enormous overhaul of the education system. Nothing short of that will fix the system. The system is currently so broken it continues to break itself even worse. When something is very broken, it takes a lot to repair. I don't see it happening any time soon due to the cost, but I think it is worthwhile to recognize what would actually be necessary to fix it. Everything we've done so far in poor communities has been a tiny fraction of what is actually necessary. People will need to feel legitimately empowered and capable and be shown they can achieve a lot. The problem with all that is that it really doesn't work at scale. We could certainly expand the opportunities for education and training - beyond even the opportunities that exist right now through federal aid programs that can help the very poor push through school - but they'll get another dose of hopelessness when, by virtue of the large number of newly educated/trained individuals, what they have is no longer valuable. It is the very scarcity of those upper level qualifications that make them valuable. It's possible to slip through the cracks and move upward, but if it's more than just a rarity then you don't have enough poor people to keep the system running. The race analogy from earlier is a good acknowledgment of as much - to make space for the winners, you have to have a large class of losers as well. It's not additional education that is going to make a big difference, because the goalposts will shift and that education will no longer be enough. It's already happened to an alarmingly large extent. | ||
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Luolis
Finland7166 Posts
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TheTenthDoc
United States9561 Posts
On November 20 2020 00:54 Nevuk wrote: Trump called the two GOP vote certifiers that initially tried to block Detroit (and only Detroit) from being certified, and they decided they wanted to reverse their reversal after his phone call. Issues: 1. The deadline was before they reversed course 2. They've already signed an affidavit that they certified the vote (they signed a new one yesterday that they want to disclaim their previous one) Per AP https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-targets-vote-certification-29da6aac9cc41e47f3095855e7af7031 Also in that AP article, there are apparently some issues with AZ certifications of rural counties (for probably similar reasons) It shouldn't really surprise me that the GOP's state level operations' years of recorded voter suppression efforts have metastasized into literally wanting to throw out votes from areas that lean Democratic without an iota of proof and no plan to recount or mend any fraud, but it actually does. Only a little though. An emperor with no clothes paves the way for naked members of the court in the end. It's kind of the inevitable consequence of electing people who literally believe they're on a mission from God (or their own ego in Trump's and some others' case) rather than just pretending like politicians of the past. It will get worse in state-level contests. It will get worse in 2022. And it will get far worse in 2024. They already learned that the optimal strategy is ignoring reality when it doesn't suit their narrative and that there is no negative consequences to lying in politics-they will learn this new lesson just as well. As long as you sue or even just claim your intention to sue and put it on Fox, your base will believe it. And if enough of your base believes it, you can bet someone with a small amount of power looking for their day in the sun will do whatever you ask of them. | ||
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Nouar
France3270 Posts
On November 20 2020 01:14 KwarK wrote: I like to describe the issue as being comparable to a footrace. Let's say we line everyone up and make them do a 100m sprint. The guy who comes first gets 30% of the money, the next 10 get 5% each, and the 9 after that share 20% between them. It's likely you'll know someone who was in the top 20 and if you look at them you'll see that they made some good choices. They looked after their health, they trained, they showed up on the day of the race, and so they earned it. And so if you look at them in a vacuum it'll appear the system works, they did the work and the system rewarded them. But there are things that you're not seeing. Firstly, that the game is rigged. That some people don't have the same biological capacity to win a footrace as others and that assigning success based on their capacity to sprint is arbitrary, cruel, and insulting to the basic human dignity we all deserve. Secondly, that the guy you know who worked hard and earned his spot in the top 20 had a trainer, time off to train, access to sports facilities, and so forth that the guy who came 25th didn't. The guy you're seeing worked, but did he work harder than the guys he beat? Because if he didn't work harder than the guys he beat and he still got rewarded then we can't truly conclude that the system rewards hard work, even if it rewards people who did work hard. Thirdly, it disincentivizes trying if you're not naturally advantaged. If you're from a background where you don't know many winners, where nobody in your family has been in the top 20, where you don't have access to sport facilities, and where none of your role models won, why would you spend all your time training for the day of the race? Everyone tells you the race is bullshit and looking at how the same group of people keep coming out on top each time you'd be inclined to agree. If white men always seem to win the footrace, even when they didn't work as hard, then as a black woman you'll be disillusioned with the race. And most importantly, the footrace is intrinsically incapable of taking care of the participants. It's set up so 80/100 get nothing. All of them could be clones of Usain Bolt trained from childhood and it wouldn't make a difference because the inequality is built in, the 80 have to get nothing so the 20 can get more. As a system for allocating resources it can't ever take care of the group. Advocates of the system point to someone like myself who was born with the capacity to make top 30 pretty easily but had to get their shit together and work hard to get into top 10. They will rightly say that if it hadn’t been for the foot race system I never would have gotten in shape and trained the way I did. That the foot race system has made me fitter and more productive, that instead of languishing in the top half I’ve been encouraged to work hard by the threat of competition and the promise of reward. But looking at the successes in isolation misses the forest for the trees. Ultimately it promises that if you’re a productive member of society you will be given permission to steal excess value from other members of society and that promise can never be universally fulfilled. Completely agree with that analogy. I take issue with the fact that a decent chunk, sometimes a majority, of the 80% that get shafted, vote to keep the current system going, instead of trying to change it to make it fairer, and are content with it. | ||
BisuDagger
Bisutopia19343 Posts
On November 20 2020 06:11 Nouar wrote: Completely agree with that analogy. I take issue with the fact that a decent chunk, sometimes a majority, of the 80% that get shafted, vote to keep the current system going, instead of trying to change it to make it fairer, and are content with it. I'm really fast. I know that in most cases I would win a footrace. I've made good choices that allow me to win a foot race. Now I'm told everyone else will get a 5 second head start. I start losing a lot with my disadvantage. How is it fair that I don't get to earn my potential because a system tells me I should be held back to give others an opportunity to earn money off the foot race? The organizer might as well pay people money just for participating. Something like universal basic winnings prize just for being part of the race. That way I can still earn as much as my potential allows with out feeling like the system is working against me. Or better yet, everyone who can compete for the top prize leaves and goes somewhere else where they hold a footrace that has no structure in place to hold us back. | ||
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