2020 Democratic Presidential Primaries

This does summarize the core issue with America. The founding principles of the country were ultimately aimed at preserving the privileged life of wealthy landowners who were fighting a government that gasp wanted them to pay taxes and be part of a more centralized vision. From that, the Constitution emerged as a document preserving that setup.

The entire founding of the country is based on rejecting the idea of sacrifice for the greater good, and instead focusing on the exultation of individual achievement. It was libertarian before Libertarianism was really a thing, and that means right at the beginning this country was working to put money in the hands of the wealthy.

It was never actually structured to benefit the “common” people, but rather to enrich a wealthy elite who would then be sufficiently enlightened and generous to give back to the common people.

All issues emanate from that point - the worship of profit over social responsibility.

You’re seeing us try to unwind that in a system that was never built for it by trying to negotiate with people who can’t conceive of another way of life. This is why we talk about revolution and dramatic change - because we have loads of people in this country who are fundamentally not on board with the concept of being a country.

Stockholm Syndrome is a fair way to describe it I suppose, but I think the pertinent issue there is that we are legitimate hostages. Of course we have grown fond of our captors - we are trapped, and it seems as though we lack the power to free ourselves.

It’s an apt description, and also means that it’s unlikely to change unless acted upon by outside force.

I legitimately do not believe America can fix itself without the rest of the world forcing the issue. Sanctions would be the diplomatic answer, and I think it’s highly probable that the world will get there with us if we can’t get it together.

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This is really more a capitalism issue than an American issue

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America: “Anything that is not cruelty is defined as ‘socialism’ and therefore demonized.”

It’s theorized that if you lose consent of the police you have basically lost the ability to govern. I’m sorry to say America’s police force is absurdly racist as an institution.

That’s why talking about change in America is like watching deck chairs being arranged on the Titanic. You get pushback from all of the people who want to drown everyone in steerage.

I mean, at this point, the USA is Capitalism: The Country, so this is true but largely academic. I think we have to undo some fundamental aspects of America in order to uproot toxic capitalism.

I go back to the oft-repeated “states’ rights” line. That’s essentially laissez-faire capitalism as applied to government, and we have seen what happens when that is left unchecked. We legitimately need stronger federal regulation of state government, and that moves us solidly away from a confederation and towards a strong central government.

The last time that conflict arose, we fought a war about it.

If we could crank the machine such that additional states were created from territories, we could fix it.

If we could crank the machine such that universal voter registration actually happened, we could potentially fix it.

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It’s worse than that. Half the people in steerage are voting for their own drowning.

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A war we didn’t finish.

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We could, but we have to do it through people who already don’t want the existing country. I’m not sure how to get people across that bridge except by force.

I won’t disagree at all, but as has been stated multiple times in this thread, calling Americans specifically as suffering from Stockholm Syndrome seems disingenuous. It’s not like there isn’t massive wealth inequality in Europe, or that many of the same capitalist abuses don’t happen there. Just because most European nations are more socially progressive than the US doesn’t mean they still aren’t running the same government OS as us.

Peter Coffin has a good video about this, although pretty much all of his content is in the same vein. In essence the idea is that although capitalism likes to sell you on the sense that participation in it is voluntary, it really isn’t. If you want to work against the system, the system is designed so that you will suffer. And it’s kinda conceited to demonize any particular person for not dying on that hill. It’s inherently exploitative, you start at the bottom where you receive the least amount of compensation for your work and are sold the fairy tale that you can be at the top where you receive the maximum value for the least amount of effort, which can only be done by exploiting those at the bottom.

It may be possible to fix the system, you’ll need enough informed actors at the top who are willing to give up resources for social improvement. As a member of the middle-class, I don’t think there’s anything shameful about believing that we can collectively create enough influence to motivate those above us to aid those below us. Personally, I do what I can; I donate to charities I believe will actually use my money for greater good, I vote for candidates or laws that improve social good, I practice ethical consumption to the extent that I can maximize good. But I’m not going to accept the narrative that I’m not doing good enough or that I’m being tricked into actually doing bad because at the end of the day there isn’t any truly ethical consumption under capitalism, and asking me to completely reject the system doesn’t fix anything.

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And the EU (or any other democracy) is different in this respect how?

Okay, and fair enough. I misunderstood your point there.

The fact is, everything you discussed there, I could accomplish in the United States (barring the roaming thing due to cellular technology not even existing) over a larger geographic area for about a hundred years. Oh, and we haven’t had any of those member states fighting wars with each other over said hundred years either.

Yes, it’s awesome that much of Europe got its act together over the past 30-40 years or so. It’s awesome that additional countries, such as Romania, were able to participate, once they got their acts together too.

And I don’t disagree with that. I just fail to see the relevance of that to what’s going on in America.

Okay, and it’s good that Europe got its act together to be able to do stuff like that. That’s great and I don’t disagree.

Well, I got side tracked by you bringing up how awesome Romania has become. My mistake there.

Hey, I don’t disagree that the whole health care thing is a mess. The problem is that when you have a ton of people who think changing the system is bad or just don’t give a rat’s ass about it, it’s hard to get anything done. That’s not a problem with the process. That’s a problem with the people. As I stated earlier, Europe seems to have fewer stupid/evil people voting than the US and that is big chunk of why some (many? most? YMMV here) things are better there. Unless you want to throw out democracy and replace it with some [hopefully] benevolent and competent dictatorship, there isn’t much that can be done in the US in that regard so long as people are willing to vote against their interests or don’t bother voting at all.

FWIW, some parts of Europe, like Switzerland, have an Obamacare-style health care system. Granted, Switzlerland isn’t part of the EU and I believe their regulations on the private insurers are tighter than those in the US (e.g. basic heath care services must be insured at not-for-profit rates), but it’s not like the Obamacare-style system is unique to the US.

Well, pay taxes and be part of a centralized vision without any sort of say in said vision. Otherwise, yeah, I mostly agree with you there.

Well, American capitalism is breaking down to the point of turning into crony capitalism, similar to what we see in Russia. Capitalism with a robust social welfare safety net (which America admittedly lacks compared to its peers) is arguably the least bad of the economic options, especially when one looks at history. I mean, the Nordic states are also capitalist, but they have some of the richest social safety nets out there, and by and large people living in them are very happy with that balance. They also tend to have among the highest average standards of living on the planet as well.

Now, if we achieve a Culture-like (or even Star Trek-like) post-scarcity society, I can re-evaluate my position on economic systems. However, given that we aren’t there yet, I think a hybrid approach is still the best option.

Perhaps on the first, but I’m not as positive on the second. There are too many people who are apathetic about voting. Voter apathy is as big a problem as anything else in America. Unless voter apathy (and to an extent voter cluelessness as well) can be solved, I don’t think expanded voter registration will make much of a difference. Most of the people who actually care to vote already jump through the hoops to register and vote. I don’t think universal registration will make a significant in participants as I feel like most of the people who haven’t registered actually give a rat’s ass about voting.

But can’t the same be said about any economic system that the world has produced so far? At most, the only differences are the people who are running the system.

The propaganda is why capitalism has been able to persist and get away with the flagrant abuse it does. If a dictator performs mass executions to quell resistance we say that’s because dictators are bad. If a company uses sweatshop labor to produce cheaper products we say the company is bad rather than condemning the system which values profit over ethics. The danger of our late stage capitalism is that it obscures its own culpability so that even ethical actors within the system can’t actually make ethical choices.

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I think the difference is actually in the socially progressive programs. Wealth inequality is a byproduct of capitalism, but many European nations also expressly value social welfare as its own aim.

In the US, capitalism is our social welfare. It’s the entire premise. You are a good citizen by trying to be the best capitalist you can. We rely on successful individuals giving charity to the less successful. It’s all capitalism, with no emphasis on a need to care for your neighbor.

So while wealth inequality exists elsewhere, the US has the most egregious examples of any industrialized nation (and possibly literally any nation on earth). We have more millionaires and billionaires than any other country on the planet, and a lower median wealth than other comparable developed nations.

Capitalism makes wealth inequality, no doubt. And because the US worships capitalism, we have the worst wealth inequality.

Hence, eat the rich. I don’t care if it didn’t work out for France, roll out the guillotines and forcibly redistribute wealth.

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Holy fuck yes this.

I was chatting with my dad not so long ago trying to talk about the issue: there are more unoccupied houses than there are homeless people, which we sought to nickname the “housability crisis”

And his solution is this charity/startup he heard about which solicits donations from super rich people and gives them a list of tick-boxes that they can tick to show how they want their donation used to help people.

I was sort of dumbfounded that the best answer he could come up with was one reliant on the charity of the super rich. I suggested literally the same thing but make it compulsory, make it a tax. His response: “I’ve found that things go over better when it’s not forced, people respond better when asked rather than compelled”

smh

I don’t entirely disagree there. Much like Karl Marx stated, “I am not a Marxist,” after seeing what happened when various states tried to implement his philosophies, I’m sure Adam Smith would say, “I am not a Capitalist,” if he were to see what has become of his system. Adam Smith was up front about paying fair wages for labor and all that, after all. He would not approve of sweatshops and would consider such a corruption of the system he envisioned, albeit one that may have been somewhat inevitable that he overlooked. You could say he made the mistake in believing the market would automatically fix everything, instead of turning into a race-to-the-bottom, which in many ways it has become. Hence the need for strong, reasonable regulation and social welfare programs to counterbalance the tendencies for capitalists to become exploitative, whether because they themselves are jerks, or because they have no choice in order to compete with the jerks.

True, although the inequity gap in Europe tends to be less than that in the USA. I think the average ratio of CEO to lowest-level employee pay in Europe is something like 40:1, whereas in the US it’s more like 400:1. And that’s just for income. It doesn’t take into account all the ways the wealthy can play games with their money on paper without doing anything that’s a net benefit to the economy. At least capitalists who invest in startups and such can be said to at least be benefiting the economy as a whole as said startups will hire people, provide jobs, and hopefully useful goods and services. Someone who makes their money by trading hedgefunds or buying companies on the cheap and finding ways to profit by shutting them down (e.g. Toys ‘R’ Us) certainly shouldn’t get to reap anywhere near the rewards of their investments that they currently do, if any rewards at all.

Umm, Russia on line 1. China is probably up there as well. Though I’ll say that the US probably has the worst of any industrialized democracy on earth. I’m also assuming that you’re considering Russia and possibly China to be comparatively developed nations. The danger is that the US is dangerously close to turning into another Russia with how its capitalism is turning into crony capitalism.

Agreed, hence the need for progressive policies to balance it out, so to speak.

Well, he has a point to a limited extent (even though I agree he’s full of BS in this particular instance). It’s always better to get people to do things when asked as opposed to compelled. However, there are instances when it’s better to compel people for the greater good because people otherwise wouldn’t do squat. People as a whole are lazy, selfish jerks. A role of a functioning government is basically to find ways to prevent the lazy, selfish tendencies of people from fucking over society.

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It’s legitimately already there:

We officially have a larger share of wealth heading to the wealthiest than Russia does.

If we’re already there according to those stats, then we’re already there… About the only thing I can say is that the floor in America is probably above the floor in Russia, but that gap is still huge and does need to be addressed.

Inequality on its own isn’t necessarily too bad so long as the floor isn’t too low and those with higher incomes don’t have a disproportionate share of the political power. I.e. if everyone had health care, a livable income, housing, vacation time, educational opportunities, etc., and the very rich couldn’t buy off politicians, then it wouldn’t be so crazy bad. The main problem is that there tends to be a snowball effect where too much inequality tends to magnify the problem and keep making it worse.

We’re probably close to, if not already in, a new gilded age in America. The excesses of the original gilded age led to reforms such as Social Security, the right to unionize, trust busting, etc. Unfortunately, a lot of those reforms have been rolled back and there are new reforms that need to take place in order to properly cope with the nature of a modern society, i.e. the days when you can pay your doctor for treatment by giving him an extra chicken in your coop out back are long gone.

Coming from a strong union environment that has a great deal of resources put into politics, the loss of strength of unions in most states directly contributes to non-wealthy people being inadequately representing in politics. Here, in Oregon, a candidate being supported by a union is a major factor in many of their victories, local, state, or national.

I’m unsure the best way to fix this nationwide but one direction I’d like to see, especially for the games industry, would be the US version of Guilds, which represent workers in an industries rather than workers at specific sites, like the Writers Guild of America. Guilds would greatly help people in states with weak labor laws by being industry wide but also could help in politics by giving resources to candidates that promote worthy causes. My union, for example, was only able to contribute a modest amount financially but were able to a great deal more with people, having knocked on nearly 100,000 doors last election cycle for various candidates. I’m unsure if many of the Guilds, should that become a thing, would actually help in such a way, but even a few doing so would greatly reshape the political landscape in many areas.

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The games industry is particularly bad, although I’m not sure how bad it is relative to, say, non-union manufacturing with respect to the compensation you get for the crazy hours you put in (my own ignorance here as I haven’t looked things up). I mean, it’s pretty obvious when you have a bunch of CS majors wanting to get into the degree because they grew up playing video games, make video games as part of their final projects when given the choice, and then after graduating choose to work on operating systems/databases/compilers/enterprise hardware/system libraries/etc. (my era… nowadays you can probably add web stuff to that list, but web stuff wasn’t as “sexy” when I graduated as it turned out to be later). Games are fun and all, but when it came to a job that paid the bills nicely and didn’t destroy your work-life balance, the less flashy (but still interesting from a CS perspective) stuff was what people chose to do. Even then the games industry had a reputation for being the closest thing to a sweatshop that an ostensibly white-collar, highly educated worker could have, and hence why people chose to avoid it no matter how much they loved the products.

It’s especially tricky trying to deduce which direction to focus on organizing in some industries, like manufacturing, as automation will be taking more jobs over time. While a union could help mitigate the problems related to that, organizing could make management want to push for automation faster.

The issue with automation is that while I’m completely in favor of it so we can focus more on the arts, sciences, and generally fulfilling career fields, we need politicians who are willing to protect and empower citizens to thrive in an environment where labor no longer exists, at least substantially, in the form it has historically.

That is one of the arguments I’ve heard for universal basic income. Of course, I’d thrown in free job retraining and better enforced anti-age discrimination laws as well to help alleviate the displacements caused by automation.

Automation is one of the steps necessary to achieve a post-scarcity economy, but again, there’s a lot of displacement that will happen. Historically it’s not the first time it’s happened, though. The industrial revolution was also basically an “automation version 1.0” as manufacturing, if you think about it, has always been at least partially automated given that the humans working the machines didn’t need to do every little detail of the process when compared to someone making widgets by hand.

People who work unskilled jobs are also the most likely to be hit by automation, sadly. They also tend to be the jobs that have the lowest wages and benefits. Although, recent improvements in AI has started to allow automation to creep up into the more skilled fields as well.

I’m with you in favor of replacing the sorts of unskilled jobs that automation replaces with more fulfilling fields, hence the need for training (I’m assuming those that get replaced by AI have enough skills already to transition to another field without significant retraining) in those new fields. We’re probably always going to need plumbers, nurses, barbers, electricians, carpenters, etc., after all, even if the tools, materials, and techniques change over the years (e.g. copper and PVC pipes vs. lead and cast iron for plumbers). Of course, some of those jobs, given that they involve some level of skilled craftsmanship, may overlap with the “arts,” in a way.