Random Political Thought Thread

[Northstar]

Here's a pretty good criterion for being rich. Your mileage may vary.

https://www.businessinsider.com/pers...wealthy-2019-8

Living off passive income just seems fundamentally wrong to me in a society where it's only for few, mostly those who have inherited their fortune.
If you're still perfectly capable of working, you should be working to benefit everyone.

[Adam Strange]

Living off passive income just seems fundamentally wrong to me in a society where it's only for few, mostly those who have inherited their fortune.

I absolutely agree that living off passive income is fundamentally wrong in a society where it's only for a few, mostly for those who have inherited their fortune.
Living off passive income should be available to everyone, regardless of their level of wealth.
Most societies today are rich enough to provide a basic living wage for every citizen, and the benefits of this include a society in which people get even richer, because they aren't distracted by the possibility of starvation if they have one single financial incident.

In a way, we already support people to about a 99% level. I didn't have to work to get a language or a political system. Instead, I just inherited them. The same thing applies to most things in my world. The only areas where it doesn't apply are in financial surplus, and even that is underwritten by society, in the sense that other people work to preserve the status quo and keep strangers from stealing my stuff.

All that aside, I do not favor a society which allows inheritance. Imagine what the richest people would have to create in order to ensure that their own children would do well, if their children could not inherit directly but rather could only rise or fall through using the resources available equally to everyone in society.

You might get a society in which billionaires want to build schools and hospitals.

Personally, I inherited from my parents an amount equal to about eight months of my present income. It was nice, but not world-changing in the way a decent health care system in the States might be. I'd gladly trade the former for the latter.

If you're still perfectly capable of working, you should be working to benefit everyone.

I have a hard time with this one. I've always been capable of working, but I really don't want to work to benefit anyone other than myself. That sounds like slavery to me. But maybe I've misinterpreted what you meant.

If you live in Europe, you might be seeing average wages falling and industrial factory owners and their families getting ridiculously rich, basically on the backs of the common worker.
What you are seeing is real, but it is a consequence of an economy in which export sectors of the economy (basically, factories) are subsidized by government policies which work to make those export goods cheap and therefore competitive in the world markets. The policies basically force workers to subsidize the owners of factories. The policies lower the factory's costs by suppressing unions and by suppressing worker wages. The policies include an undervalued currency, which increases the profits of factory owners who sell goods, and makes everything which is imported more expensive for workers to buy. These policies increase the price competitiveness of the manufacturing and export sectors at the expense of the household's ability to consume.
This price competitiveness in global markets is not a result of virtuous increased production efficiency by the factories, but rather is a consequence of class war between the rich and the workers inside a country.
Right now, Germany is running a huge surplus in trade. German workers are getting poorer and German factory owners are getting fabulously rich.
This isn't a law of nature, like gravitation. This is a result of intentional trade agreements, made by those German factory owners in a very non-democratic way, and enforced by their actors in government.

This might be why you are noticing that a few, who have inherited their fortunes, are reaping the rewards of unbalanced and unfair trade agreements and are getting passive income, while everyone else has to work forever.

[chriscorey]

[CosmicCat]

1. Japan is the most average nation on Planet Earth.
2. The United States is having a very hard time competing with the Japanese, academically speaking.
3. Therefore the United States is below average, academically speaking.

[Darth Cultis]

Stormy for President 2024!

[godslave]

Yet another one Joe Biden's faux pas and its consequences on an entire country.

[FreelancePoliceman]

@godslave Aren't you French? Just wondering; why do you care what an American President says about another country?

[CosmicCat]

Japan has the right to be xenophobic if they want to. Perhaps they have cause to doubt that the mystery meat model of Brazil or the righteous brotherhood model of South Africa are the ideal societies.

[godslave]

@godslave Aren't you French? Just wondering; why do you care what an American President says about another country?

Yes I'm French (Franco-Tunisian).I care about all my fellow human beings ! I was just observing that he lacked a bit of diplomacy. I don't blame him because he is an old man and well, he manifestly has some issues relative to his age. I was touched by some japaneses having their feelings hurt. I mean, I love Japan and its culture very much and I felt kinda sad about this incident. That said, just like you and probably all the people of the "Free world", I was raised in an environment where the USA culture was very present so in a way, ich bin (auch) ein Amerikaner !

 

[godslave]

Yesterday in the chat @Ikite iru brought an interesting take on the development of society becoming more and more "fascist" like.

I agree that something is changing and I see signs of "fascism" everywhere. I think PC is a real killer, I mean there is a kind of inquisition of thoughts that doesn't say its name, lingering in the atmosphere of the zeitgeist, one can almost smell its stench. I mean, we are living in a time where people can't let their idea run free, that's censorship. The inquisition doesn't have any sense of humour, let alone self-derision. It can't take a joke, so everybody has to be careful, that's censorship.

People know it when they are not free anymore, when they keep to themselves even the basic common sense and bend the knee to whatever God-like Lobby which have the power to make them or break them. We find "watchdogs" at all level of society, the problem is when the system which is supposed to watch the watchdogs is broken.

[VewyScawwyNawcissist]

ppl who hate gays are gay
ppl who hate women are also gay
n4z1s are prolly j3ws
and ppl who hate n4z1s maybe other n4z1s

[godslave]

The political situation in France is more entertaining than ever ; National assembly dissolved, trahisons, disgraces... I loooooove it !!

[Socionics Is A Cult]

@Ikite iru

My preferred policies of the main political parties standing in England in the 2024 UK general election:

https://voteforpolicies.org.uk/?resu...rsonal_results

Some areas are a lot more important to me, like environmental issues (primarily to tackling global warming), adopting Proportional Representation, improving the tax system, building infrastructure. Some were very difficult to decide between parties - Pensions being the key example - the parties promise pensioners everything so there's little between them and/or they're unrealistic or of low priority to me.





My choices:

Green Party:

Crime

• Implement community-based policing, end routine use of Stop and Search and facial recognition software
• Give elected politicians open access to data to enable effective scrutiny of policing
• Focus on rehabilitation through investment in the probation and prison services
• Focus on prevention through restoring the funding for youth services and through community-based policing
• Implement a new UK-wide strategy to tackle gender-based violence
• Make misogyny a hate crime, and support the right to religious expression

Economy

• Expand government spending to invest in protecting our climate, without triggering dangerous inflation
• Bring railways, water companies and the Big 5 retail energy companies back into public ownership
• Raise £172bn per year through taxes on personal income and wealth, business taxes and carbon taxes
• Strengthen global agreements to stop corporate tax avoidance and evasion, and ensure HMRC has the resources it needs
• Ensure new trade agreements respect workers’ and consumers’ rights, and join the Customs Union as a first step towards full EU membership

Education

• Invest £8bn in schools, including £2bn for a pay uplift for teachers
• Extend childcare to 35 hours per week from nine months, and free breakfast clubs in primary schools
• Give all children a daily free school meal made from nutritious ingredients
• Restore maintenance grants for higher education, scrap undergraduate tuition fees, and rejoin the Erasmus Programme
• Invest £5bn in special needs (SEND) provision within mainstream schools
• Remove charitable status from private schools, and charge full VAT on fees (except for SEND places)

Environment

• Transition to a zero-carbon society before 2040
• Introduce a frequent-flyer levy, and ban domestic flights for a journey that would take less than three hours by train
• Almost triple support to farmers over the next five years to support the transition to nature-friendly farming
• Take the water companies back into public ownership

Foreign Policy & Defence

• Raise international aid to 1.0% of GNI, and increase the climate finance budget to 1.5% of GNI by 2033
• Push for a durable political solution that ensures security and equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians, and an immediate and permanent bilateral ceasefire
• Sign the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and cancel the Trident programme

Health & Social Care

• Guarantee rapid access to a GP, and bring down hospital waiting lists
• An additional £8bn for the NHS in England in year one, rising to a total of £28bn in 2030, plus at least £20bn more over the next five years
• An immediate additional increase to the budgets for NHS staff costs to tackle the staff retention crisis
• Put mental and physical health care on an equal footing, and push for accessible, prompt assessments for children and adolescents
• Invest £20bn per year in social care, and provide free personal care to ensure dignity in old age and for disabled people
• Abolish wasteful NHS competition, re-establish public bodies and accountability, and restrict the role of commercial companies

Housing

• Provide 150,000 new social homes a year, scrap the so-called ‘right to buy’, and support councils to provide affordable social housing in places where people live and work
• End no-fault evictions, introduce long-term leases, and empower local authorities to introduce rent controls
• Invest £29bn to insulate homes, ensure new homes meet Passivhaus or equivalent standards, and require house builders to include solar panels and low carbon heating

Tax

• Align tax on investment income with the tax and NIC rates on employment income
• Tax assets above £10m at 1% and assets above £1bn at 2% annually
• Reform inheritance tax, ensuring intergenerational transfers of wealth are taxed more fairly
• Remove the limit that restricts the amount of National Insurance paid by high earners
• Reform Capital Gains Tax by aligning the rates paid by taxpayers on income and taxable gains
• Re-evaluate the Council Tax bands

Welfare

• Increase Universal Credit and legacy benefits by £40 a week, and scrap the bedroom tax
• End the unfair five-week wait for benefits and, in the long term, push for the introduction of a Universal Basic Income
• Increase Carer’s Allowance by at least 10% a month
• Abolish the two-child benefit cap
• Increase all disability benefits by 5%, and oppose plans to replace the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) cash payments with vouchers

Liberal Democrats:

Democracy

• Introduce proportional representation for electing MPs and scrap the voter ID scheme
• Give 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote
• Cap donations to political parties, and enshrine the Ministerial Code in law to hold Government ministers to account
• Increase powers and resources for local authorities, and end the imposition of elected mayors on communities who do not want them
• Transfer greater powers away from Westminster and Whitehall, with a written constitution for a federal UK, and oppose Scottish independence

Energy

• Provide free insulation and heat pumps for low-income households, and expand incentives to install solar panels
• Invest in renewable power so 90% of the UK’s electricity is from renewables by 2030
• Remove restrictions on new solar and wind power, and support investment and innovation in tidal and wave power
• Maintain the ban on fracking, ban new coal mines, and implement the UK’s G7 pledge to end fossil fuel subsidies

Equalities & Rights

• Champion the Human Rights Act, uphold the Refugee Convention, and scrap anti-protest laws
• Develop and implement a comprehensive Race Equality Strategy to address deep inequalities
• Respect and defend the rights of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities, and ban all forms of conversion therapies and practices
• Give every disabled person the right to work from home, and incorporate the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities into UK law

Immigration

• End the hostile environment and invest in officers, training and technology to tackle smuggling, trafficking and modern slavery
• Work with Europol and French authorities to stop smuggling and trafficking gangs behind dangerous Channel crossings
• Replace the salary threshold with a merit-based system for work visas
• Introduce a service standard of three months for processing asylum claims, and lift the ban on asylum seekers working if they wait more than three months
• Scrap the Illegal Migration Act and the Rwanda scheme, and provide safe, legal routes to sanctuary for refugees

Labour:

Jobs & Work

• Make the minimum wage a genuine living wage, and remove age bands, so all adults are entitled to the same minimum wage
• Introduce basic rights from day one to parental leave, sick pay and protection from unfair dismissal, and create a Single Enforcement Body to ensure employment rights are upheld
• Ban zero hours contracts, and end fire and rehire
• Guarantee every young person two weeks of work experience, and access to training, apprenticeship, or support to find work for 18- to 21-year-olds
• Reform the Apprenticeship Levy, creating a Growth and Skills Levy to ensure qualifications offer value for money

Transport

• Deliver a unified system with Great British Railways, including better rail connectivity across the north of England
• Bring railways into public ownership under Great British Railways, and lift the ban on municipal ownership of bus services
• Maintain and renew our road network, tackle congestion, and phase out new cars with internal combustion engines by 2030
• Give local leaders powers to franchise bus services, and lift the ban on municipal ownership
• Give mayors the power to create unified and integrated transport systems, and to promote active travel networks

Conservative:

Pensions

• Guarantee both the State Pension and the tax free allowance for pensioners will rise with the highest of inflation, earnings or 2.5%
• Impose no new taxes on pensions, and maintain the 25% tax-free lump sum and tax relief on pension contributions at their marginal rate
• Consider the Ombudsman report into WASPI women and provide an appropriate and swift response
• Maintain all current pensioner benefits, including free bus passes, Winter Fuel Payments, free prescriptions and TV licences

[Socionics Is A Cult]

However I don't think any of the parties had manifestos that were on the whole are financially acceptable to me (I think they'll all be budget deficits), and my choice of policies would be even worse on that point.

Even though the Greens on the whole are closest to my ideology, I cannot vote for them at the moment because of two of their stances - although only one was especially objectionable to me, and led me to cancelling my membership. So my party of choice is the Liberal Democrats.

In any case, I will probably be voting Labour for tactical voting reasons this time even though I hate having to do so.

[godslave]

This is the trajectory my life could take as a binational minority asexual/demisexual Hikikomori with severe anxiety disorder, if the far-right gets an absolute majority next sunday...

[Poptart]

Is it too early to speculate on who Kamala would pick as VP if Biden drops out?

[godslave]

Is it too early to speculate on who Kamala would pick as VP if Biden drops out?

As cruel as it sounds, I think she thought (like a lot of people did) that after Biden first election, he will never be able to make it to the end of his term of office and that she de facto would become the first black lady president of the United States. I think she is still holding to that dream so it's not in her best interest to advocate the idea of find a remplacement to Biden's running.

The mandate from Kamala Harris’ camp: Stay the course, dispel Biden replacement theories

PS. Biden can't beat Trump in this elections, I don't know if Kamala can guarantee her position as Vice President if there is a remplacement. I have reason to believe that if that would have been the case, she wouldn't oppose the remplacement theory so strongly (?)...

[Poptart]

As cruel as it sounds, I think she thought (like a lot of people did) that after Biden first election, he will never be able to make it to the end of his term of office and that she de facto would become the first black lady president of the United States. I think she is still holding to that dream so it's not in her best interest to advocate the idea of find a remplacement to Biden's running.

The mandate from Kamala Harris’ camp: Stay the course, dispel Biden replacement theories

PS. Biden can't beat Trump in this elections, I don't know if Kamala can guarantee her position as Vice President if there is a remplacement. I have reason to believe that if that would have been the case, she wouldn't oppose the remplacement theory so strongly (?)...

If Biden ends his candidacy, I believe he’ll want to give the appearance that he made a dignified choice to step down (the worse/more embarrassing narrative is that he was forced out). Assuring her support for Biden allows Kamala to 1) let Biden and the party save face if he leaves, but also 2) if he stays in the race, how bad would it look if people knew that she had turned on him and urged him to quit? It’s the beginning of a holiday weekend here, so I don’t expect that we’ll see any news before next week. Man, I tried to swear off politics, but this debacle has sucked me back in!

[godslave]

If Biden ends his candidacy, I believe he’ll want to give the appearance that he made a dignified choice to step down (the worse/more embarrassing narrative is that he was forced out). Assuring her support for Biden allows Kamala to 1) let Biden and the party save face if he leaves, but also 2) if he stays in the race, how bad would it look if people knew that she had turned on him and urged him to quit? It’s the beginning of a holiday weekend here, so I don’t expect that we’ll see any news before next week. Man, I tried to swear off politics, but this debacle has sucked me back in!

Excellent points !

[FreelancePoliceman]

ppl who hate gays are gay
ppl who hate women are also gay
n4z1s are prolly j3ws
and ppl who hate n4z1s maybe other n4z1s

It only sometimes works like that. Usually it doesn't. Gays can generally avoid serious dealing with women. Most serious misogynists are heterosexual because they try and generally fail to fight their sex drive. Mishima has an essay on this, "Discourse on Misogyny," where he says "...Such people repeatedly meet a terrible fate with women, but are unable to fully abandon their fixation with them, so when they once again approach them they once again meet a terrible fate, and as their hatred combined with their love increase a hundredfold, they extend their Hassliebe for individual women to women in general..."

[VewyScawwyNawcissist]

It only sometimes works like that. Usually it doesn't. Gays can generally avoid serious dealing with women. Most serious misogynists are heterosexual because they try and generally fail to fight their sex drive. Mishima has an essay on this, "Discourse on Misogyny," where he says "...Such people repeatedly meet a terrible fate with women, but are unable to fully abandon their fixation with them, so when they once again approach them they once again meet a terrible fate, and as their hatred combined with their love increase a hundredfold, they extend their Hassliebe for individual women to women in general..."

relation between bisexuality/homosexuality and cluster B mental disorders. lack of self control. experienced trauma and neglect, lack of understanding or due consideration of boundaries, right or wrong. the hottest ppl are bisexual cuz they can be autosexual kinda more accurately but also know what the opposite gender wants simultaneously. perhaps if homosexuality even or bi is related to repressing attraction to women due to hate in some individuals + having the option of doing it with men hence affording to repress and hate women, like women are perceived differently by ppl who are bi or gay and have different dynamics and ways of relating to others hence somehow influence the development of hate or longing

[Socionics Is A Cult]

Is it too early to speculate on who Kamala would pick as VP if Biden drops out?

See what this says in 3 days, when the community prediction will be available. The question creators have put forward a list of names, but I don't think there's an option for more names to be added later.

I doubt they'd choose someone as old as Bernie Sanders because it will seem rather reckless even if there's a long order of succession after him. But who knows?

https://www.metaculus.com/questions/...ntial-nominee/

[Socionics Is A Cult]

ppl who hate gays are gay
ppl who hate women are also gay
n4z1s are prolly j3ws
and ppl who hate n4z1s maybe other n4z1s

Maybe I'm Socionics.

[Still Alive]

Imagine nominating Clinton over Sanders because he's too old just to nominate him 8 years later at 82. No matter what Dems do they will appear extremly weak

[CosmicCat]

No U.S. citizen who votes for D.J.T. on Tuesday, November 5th, 2024, either in person or via mail-in voting, can reasonably expect to receive an intuitive thinking type.

[CosmicCat]

"There will come a time when the rich will own all the media, and the populace will no longer be able to discern the Truth." - Albert Einstein (ca. 1947)

[FreelancePoliceman]

I was watching a documentary that featured a few of JFK's speeches. It struck me how far standards seem to have fallen in just about everything, but especially politics and anything related to public image.

What got me thinking was his mention of Pericles in his City on a Hill speech. When was the last time an American politician made a speech referencing a historical figure who existed before the 20th century, and wasn't Lincoln, Washington, or a few of the Founding Fathers? Who would even bet that Harris or Trump knows who Pericles was, let alone would make a speech assuming their audience had a basic understanding of Western history?

That JFK tried to articulate his policy positions and demonstrated a concern that his audience understand the reasons he made his decisions -- something that would seem so basic is completely absent from politics today. Even with the most cynical opinion possible about JFK, he was at least trying to present some vision to people. The current strategy seems to be saying as little substantive as possible. Trump's campaign is radio silence, probably because it has nothing but "Lock Her Up (for real this time)" and "somehow, in some way, make prices stop rising quite so quickly." Harris' campaign OTOH has gone the psyop route in A) telling people who think prices have gone up a lot recently that they're wrong, and B) trying to make whatever vacuous tropical bullshit comes out of her drug-addled mind into memes before the opposition can circulate clips of it. I know there are half-hearted attempts at platforms, but they aren't really publicized and aren't taken seriously. It reminds me how every company seems short-staffed, engineering and tech seem increasingly dysfunctional (recent news about Intel, Boeing, NASA, the ship hitting the Baltimore Bridge, the Palestine Ohio train derailment are big examples), and if you have a problem, customer service is some telephone call to a robot or to an overseas contracting company where English is barely spoken. Everything is about the bare minimum of pretense.

[chriscorey]

Freedom of speech and thought matters, especially when it is speech and thought with which we disagree. The moment the majority decides to destroy people for engaging in thought it dislikes, thought crime becomes a reality.

-Ben Shapiro