To me, the point of the article wasn't so much that people are complaining about high gas prices specifically. Although someone choosing to drive a massive car/truck and then complaining about how much they have to pay for gas, does underline the cognitive disconnect that leads to petulant behavior. The bigger point is about how inconsistent these complaints are in general, and how much we are complaining about things rather than using common sense and adjusting to and solving problems. Now this said, the author is complaining about a specific set of people, and believe me there are examples of the same sort of disconnect in groups other than the pro-truck/anti-socialist group highlighted in this article. For one, I'd point out the cognitive disconnect between the need for stable electricity generation and opposition to nuclear energy that is held by many who want to reduce use of fossil fuels because of its effects on climate. Again, in both situations people get their hackles up and it blinds them to being able to adapt and overcome hard problems. Anyway, just my two cents...
Hey @bayred, finally got my schedule cleared. As I said waaay upthread this was then and still is a very good question. The quick simple answer is that there is no answer, or at least no good answer. There is no perfect system of government (in my opinion) and because there’s not, what we will always have is competing opinions, ideas and philosophies. Those philosophies get tried out in elections, some you win, some you lose. But to return to your central question of what better would look like in the US? First off, it is not one party rule whether that’s the Democrats or GOP. One party rule gets you into the swamp of benevolent dictatorship wherein the party in power usually starts making rules and laws based on their loudest supporters. And that’s a slippery slope that leads nowhere good. The way things are in the US, it’s pointless to talk about or hope for a 3rd party. It’s my experience and opinion that those looking for 3rd party solutions are usually those who want to jettison the loonies from the fringes of their own party and run on a “sensible” right/left platform. Democrats/GOP in all but name; centrist, I’ll grant, but wolves in sheeps’ clothing. I believe the worth of a society is largely, though not exclusively, based on how the least thrive and survive, not on how many billionaires the society creates. A billionaire still only needs the same amount of toilet paper as those on the poverty line, if you follow me. A successful, thriving society lifts all boats not just 100m yachts. A huge part of the problem these days is that for many or all on the right, it’s a truism that corporations are seen as having more power and needs than individuals. Unfettered capitalism is the greatest good and anything that gets in the way is evil. And this mindset has to be reinvented. It’s not the socialists who have outsourced manufacturing industry to Asia, moved huge amounts of capital offshore to avoid taxes, privatized so many government agencies and companies (education, health, transportation, etc.) selling them to companies whose sole responsibility is the shareholders and not the common good, who have fought against increases in the minimum wage, unions, fair working practises, fair health and safety. Unfettered capitalism has led to the gig economy where we have to work at the behest of the company without fixed schedules (more on that below*), sky high rents with no chance of buying, zero % pay rises, barbaric student loans all being facilitated by a right wing economic ethos that insists on breaking unions, austerity, demonising the poor allied to a quasi police state that protects the 1% while dumptrucking tax cuts upon them. Those reality programmes on TV about benefit cheats? Great TV. Fur coats, lobsters and ne’er do wells we so would never want to break bread with. Horrible people, dreadful people, 46 grubby kids, how dare they? And Amazon pays the how much in corporate taxes? $4.56 and complains about it. In the U.K. it paid £1m a few years ago and that was several years of back taxes. But we must shame Fred and Doris who are claiming $200 a week in benefits while doing off the books work. Hayek, Thatcher, Reagan and today’s Tories and GOP have much to answer for. We are in a more unequal society than the Golden age of the Robber Barons and in my opinion much closer to a feudal society than not, wherein the the Elect throw some bread, occasional circuses at the underclasses all the time keeping those same classes perpetually divided against each other convincing them that their problems all stem from the Other. *Zero hours contracts or contracts where you work entirely at the say-so of the company rather than a fixed 9-5 schedule have got to be the biggest cause for the week to week, paycheck to paycheck poverty that so many find themselves in. You can’t schedule daycare, pregnancy, school pickups, medical appointments, funerals etc. because you never know from one day to the next when or if you’ll be working the next day. Those contracts do benefit Amazon etc., but have the probably intended consequence of keeping those already on the poverty line on the poverty line forever. But, hey!, the Lotto is $1bn+ this week. Also, the continuing moves to make these gig economy workers independent contractors, thereby saving Amazon a ton of billions is a huge disgrace that penalizes, once again, the least of us. All of the above is a huge part that needs to be fixed in its entirety. Now I do realize that big employers are needed and they do contribute, but they need to pay their fair share to society and also stop exploiting workers in the above methods. Another problem at the moment is the outsized influence of the fringes and this applies exclusively to the Right. The Right fringes speak of Communism! and Socialism! in terms of looking to control and micromanage people’s lives. Yet they are the ones looking to restrict medical care, ban books, constrict voting and above all, elevate their form of Christianity as the rule of law. The minute you hear, “…as a person of faith…”, you just know it’s going to be followed with some proposition, idea or policy that will be restricting some form of liberty. No way, no how should religion have any say on public policy. I truly don’t care what religion you are or if you believe in god or not, that’s none of my business, but for you to say that because my god is all knowing, all seeing, all powerful and all good, therefore I cannot sell you condoms or I can deny you goods/services that I grant to those of whom I approve is complete bullshit. Religion has become a battering ram to deny rights to and punish those who don’t pray the same way as you. Anyway, I could go on and on here, if I haven’t already done so! A better form of government probably doesn’t exist; what’s more likely to happen is what has already historically happened. Cyclical left and cyclical right. Roaring 20s, Depression 30s, elevation of the middle class in the 50s and 60s, rise of the corporations in the 80s and 90s and beyond and rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. I truly wish there was some mechanism whereby political parties could learn from history rather than constantly throwing it out, saying, this time will be different. It never is. Making and keeping a permanent underclass while simultaneously restricting and demonizing that underclass and elevating and deifying the billionaire class is not a way to a decent society, it’s not a way to lifting up the least of us. Show me a way to get both political parties to be on the same page on this and I’ll call that progress. There is definitely more than one approach to get there, it doesn’t have to be the Democratic way only, it doesn’t mean throwing out all GOP ideas, but at the moment it appears to me that for the GOP it’s 100% no taxes for anyone or any corporation, 100% our moral positions on everything and hang all those who disagree with you because we’re the party of God. The Democrats are better than that, definitely, but give them enough rope and eventually they’ll become GOP-like. A decent, credible opposition is the most fundamental requirement of democracy. It’s not there at the moment.
Great post, Sami. Thanks, worth waiting for. I'll try to address some of your points over time but I'll say now I'm in complete agreement on things like fairness based tax reform and riding herd on the unfettered aspects of our capitalist system.
My opinion has always been that people shouldn't be getting their hackles up quite so sharply unless they know some relevant bit about (or have a reasonable thoughtful perspective on) the subject that they are talking about. Access to a bloody keyboard and FaceBook has put everyone on a soapbox on Speaker's Corner when they venture out into public reality these days. Back in the day it was only the quite-mad and the knowledgeable who pontificated about their fields of learned knowledge.... It's the inverse of philosophy, what's going on nowadays ... compliments of irresponsible scum like Donald Trump, and their catchment assault upon the most easily deluded.....
Thank you for sharing, Smark. I know this took a lot of time. Let's take a look at some of your points here. Just want to put a pin in this before you directly contradict yourself. So are you saying a sensible, compromising, centrist party is one to be weary of? Wolves in sheep's clothing, as you said? There were 4.2 million fewer people in poverty in 2019 than the year before, and the poverty rate is the lowest since the statistic was first kept in 1959. The 2019 mark was the fifth consecutive annual decline in poverty. Poverty rates declined for all race and Hispanic origin groups. Isn't that very encouraging progress and goes hard against the narrative the left likes to sing about a growing underclass? Corporations are made up of people. These people have to provide a good or a service that is worth your money or they don't exist. Yeah, we could have kept all our manufacturing jobs here domestically and everything else we outsourced in the last 50 years but would the average American be willing to carry the price tag associated with that? Which is better (in general) in the United States, a private education or a public education? Bryant Park in NYC is managed privately. They built a public bathroom for $271,000. A very nice one, I might add. Another one in the city, built by the government, was built for $2 million (and it's a basic ass bathroom). This is just one of countless examples where the government somehow has the leakiest of buckets. Gig economy workers aren't held at gunpoint. They do the job for a reason, because it makes sense for them. We can argue about what led to the "gig economy" existing but it's obviously not so horrible that no one will do it. Sky high rents exist because people pay them. That's my industry and it's an industry I've been in for almost 10 years now, so I know. If you want to lower rent, you build more supply. If you want to build more supply, you get government out of the way as much as possible. There's a great example of this in the Twin Cities. St. Paul instituted rent control. Minneapolis did not. Guess who has no supply and who has developers flocking to it? No one is opposed to unions when the unions aren't mandatory and aren't unreasonable in their demands. No one is demonizing the poor, but there is probably some demonization of the lazy (no, I'm not equating lazy with poor). What police state? Not sure what TV programs you're referring to. The whole corporate tax thing is based on many misunderstandings that I don't want to go into too much detail here as to not bore everyone to tears. In short, the tax code operates under different accounting rules. For tax purposes, governments use what’s called “taxable income,” which is defined by law and accounts for three important factors: a company's net operating losses, where a company earns profits and how much a company invests in equipment and machinery. Funny, it's only the right wing that does this? There's not a constant dividing of the public into little boxes of various social and economic status right now by the left in order to sell the idea that they're perpetually being held down? Really? Could it be that career politicians get elected when they convince their voters that they need to be scared of X regardless of party affiliation? Again, people take these contract jobs. If they all decided that this arrangement was unacceptable, it would force the employers in question to change their policy. Do you ever notice that big corporations who support government legislation for things like "$15 minimum wage" do so because they can afford it and it will crush their competition who can't? If Amazon thinks a worker is worth $15/hour, why not pay them that amount instead of coercing the government to make it a law for every employer? This is hilarious when we go back and reference the first point you made about how one party rule would be horrible for a democracy. According to you the right/Republicans are the real problem here. If they would just f uck off and let the Democrats run everything, there would finally be true justice and harmony in the world! Did it ever occur to you that someone's religion might shape their values? Doesn't your values dictate how you feel a healthy society should be? So it's completely out of the question for anyone to reference their religious beliefs (let's just call it beliefs without the religion) when it comes to specific issues of morality? I think the majority of Americans believe in "hey, you do you and just leave me out of it if I disagree." But more and more there's a "well if you don't agree with my actions and the agenda I'm pushing you're a BIGOT!" That comes almost exclusively from the left. But that can't be right, right? I mean you just said that all the evil we're experiencing is directly due to religious zealots in this country. I could argue for days that the left is who is keeping a permanent underclass and calling it a voter base. Really? This is exclusive to the GOP? The left and the Democrats aren't doing the exact same thing with things like transgenderism, abortion rights and medical mandates? The whole "cancel culture" is birthed from this. You're just so in your bubble that you still haven't been able to tell me one thing, one policy, one decision that the left/Democrats are doing wrong. The bottom line is, the government has no competition, no incentive to make things better. They're just elected bureaucrats that stay elected by promising you more stuff and protection. Protection is what they're supposed to be doing. The government's job is to protect the people. Military, police, fire, medical. I would even go so far as to say that there needs to be a basic medical coverage for those who those who don't have access to a high quality insurance through their employer. Non-crony, free capitalistic societies are the freest and least impoverished that this world has ever seen and it's only through our spoiled, 1st world brains that we would ever think of messing that up.
FFS, you must have creamed your pants when Sam posted his thoughtful comments. !!! A while back you accused me of nit picking some of your more ridiculous points of on of your alternate history posts. And here you are playing your word games again. Arguing for the sake of making an argument, playing at Devils Advocate not because you believe the stuff you pull out of your arse but because you think it’s a high school debating class where you win points by presenting alternate ideas. Then you wonder why you get jumped on and someone had the temerity to suggest you’re QAnon.
Another from that left wing libtard outfit PBS. About disinformation from the oil companies on their part in climate changes. The Power of Big Oil (Part One: Denial) FRONTLINE examines the fossil fuel industry’s history of casting doubt and delaying action on climate change. Part One of this three-part series charts the fossil fuel industry's early research on climate change and investigates industry efforts to sow seeds of doubt about the science. if anyone is interested they show it in here. https://www.pbs.org/video/the-power-of-big-oil-part-one-denial-redxh6/
I say this with all respect to Ken and the other posters on here: does this post make any sense to anyone else based on what I posted? I'm being 100% serious.
That last one is actually a good idea. Doubtless, some hand-wringer somewhere will have qualms about littering/poisoning space!!
a). Putting giant behemoths out of business under terms of instituting models of practical sustainability is something self-governing societies might choose to do --- b). Trying to get short term productivity of oil up in order to offset oil pricing surges (which are due to the confluence of a variety of unusual factors) is something that isn't completely insane either. I don't know if you've noticed but a) & b) here are not related in terms of a time-scale. Therefore they are not related - other than that they both concern oil. We know that burning too much gas is a problem and we also know that we are going to be doing it for the foreseeable future. Shortening that forseeable future (in a good way) is the problem here. Not prolonging it. item c). I drove to work this morning, nonetheless whilst supporting Biden's idea to get the world to use less oil as a reasonable thing. These are not incompatible positions. As for Covid -- Good God - what cr@pulous nonsense..... How did this sinister they that wakes you up at night get all the other countries to sacrifice themselves for this greater (and even if it existed, pointless) 'effin' plan? Why would all the doctors and scientists collude in such a fabulous fabrication? Who organized these massive pre-conferences, and how did they take place? Why would the Irish Prime Minister or the new Zealand or the Japanese one have wished on not just their people but themselves, this utterly fantastically illogical idea you are postulating. Pustulating would be more apt a term...
I'm in similar agreement on this sentiment. It's what FDR among others felt about life and society and - in the poisoned America of the 30s it got him a lot of powerful enemies. There's no perfect system, as you noted, but when societies tend toward granting full power toward those who would maliciously interfere with the concept of social safety these will inevitably be fuelled at the apex by liars and distortionists, whose business is always to rankle, frighten and distort the normal, self-reflecting will of the people to constantly assess its own levels of monetary subsistence control. On the toilet paper issue, though - i'm certainly convinced that Trump needs wayyyy more than the average person.... (He's gonna need to learn rationing when they bang him up....)
Reagan and every republican govt since the successful union breaking of the 1980s was against them. Part of their wrecking ball effect on the stability of the country. The breaking of labor unions allowed for corporations to go multi-national and outsource and worship at the feet of the new god - the stock dividend. Back before this .... All of the industrialists in the age of the creations of Unions were against unions. Union breaking was one of the big stories of the 20 and 30s, and would have continued were it not for the industrial needs of WW2. Its a heck of an anthropological morphing jump to go from an entire class of people being against something to no-one of them being against it.....
"...sow seeds of doubt about the science..." If you're not constantly 'questioning the science' and investigating those 'seeds of doubt,' are you are a scientist or a dogmatist? Why do you hate opposing views so much? Why don't you want all information in the public square?
WTF are you talking about Lucy. You don’t understand sarcasm?? The report is about deliberate misinformation from the oil companies trying to hide the scientific truth. Your closed mindedness and right wingnut dogma is affecting your comprehension. Did you watch the show? Didn’t think so. Frightened that you may learn something.
Oh, there was a raid? We Love the raid, don't we, folks? It was a beautiful raid. A big, tremendous raid. Some people said , Sir it was the best raid they had ever seen.
The scientific consensus is that humans have caused an unprecedented acceleration of climate change. The only people who question that are people who put profit over everything else.
Hmmmmm. Largely correct, but there’s another significant segment who also play a role. The Kool Aid drinkers, who see “climate change” as a leftist plot and opposition to any ameliorating efforts as an article and show of faith in a right wing ideology.
“Knock! Knock!” “Who’s there?” “The Deep State continuing it pathological unhinged persecution of a lonely, loveable old man who never did anything wrong except for an attempted coup d’etat that one time. And they broke his safe.”
This is forgetting all the people who do "their own research". You know, like those Q-Anon kooks on the Delphic oracle's modern cousin - the Internet.
I don't blame the average dupes in the street for exhibiting recalcitrant arguments. Outside the US and Russia/China most countries don't have large TV channels dedicated to misinformation propaganda, blaring across their wavelengths. Watching people whom you are supposed to trust, as if they are engaged with you in some sort of parley of information for your knowledge betterment, when they are not, is bound to lead to that kind of mind-set. Well, I suppose that was the point of the whole set-up, wasn't it....?