• 2 Posts
  • 104 Comments
Joined 11 days ago
cake
Cake day: October 19th, 2024

help-circle



  • I agree with Michael Moore’s theory that this was why many people voted for Trump in 2016. They felt ignored and powerless, so they said okay here, I’ll vote for this asshole, see how you like that! It was an expensive lesson that I don’t think the Democratic party has really paid attention to. Their response was to rethink their campaign strategies - many of them probably blamed their loss on trying to elect a woman for President - so they regrouped and managed to get Biden elected. But he didn’t put any bold ideas forward. All he really did was be a Democrat in the White House instead of a Republican. I don’t feel like Kamala Harris is playing that game. She really does want to move forward in a big way and not go back.













  • Okay but you could also lock people in a room full of water and say you’re not forbidding breathing. Technically the truth, but not if we’re being honest. Using the law to make something impossible is forbidding it. Taxation doesn’t address the belief that the big bad gubmint is stealing something you earned. I think the underlying problem is way more complex to solve by just doing that. We have to get rid of the scarcity mentality, a survival trait that will take a long-term effort to eliminate. We’re probably talking multiple lifetimes.




  • Correctamundo! Intellectual property law is yet another thing that needs reform. I don’t even like the term “intellectual property”. It’s a modern invention. For thousands of years everybody just repeated what they saw other people do, in a process called “the spread of civilization.” It worked great until inventions like the printing press created opportunities for business people who didn’t create anything to get rich by getting exclusive rights to other people’s ideas. But even then, copyright was always something you held not something you “owned”. The modern IP industry has done a very effective job at converting everybody to think of rights as property and infringement as theft. We need to return to the original concept that creators, who used to be freely imitated, can temporarily have exclusive rights to what they create because the public lets them. There’s nothing evil about this, it’s just a return to sanity.


  • That’s a legit worry, but since we don’t know where that tipping point is we don’t know if we’ve passed it or not. I think it’s just as legitimate to maintain hope, and here’s why. The repeating pattern we’ve seen is that when progressives start to institute policies to improve people’s lives, there’s always a lag before any tangible results. During the wait the pendulum shifts back to regressivism, Republicans get in control, and then proceed to take credit as things improve. They use this momentum for more elitist policies that reverse the gains, but the harm to the general public also has a lag and doesn’t become apparent until the pendulum has shifted back to progressives, who inherit a pile of shit to contend with.

    But MAGA has fragmented the Republican party so hard, after he loses the election it will take the party years to recover, as the rats claw each other to pieces trying to get on top. Instead of the usual 4-8 years it could take 12-16 for conservatives to regroup. This will provide enough time for progressive policies to take root and bear fruit, and for progressives to actually get credit and build on them. It will be impossible for Republicans to convince even their own that things are bad enough to go back to retro policies. They’ll have to think of a new playbook.

    I just think this whole period of time is going to move the goalposts to the left, America will still have a chance to resemble something like the ideal we were taught to expect.