Poltifact: “Mostly false”

Not the most evil bastard in history, but I think the world would be a vastly different and better place if Klemens von Metternich died young.

he did.

*organized labor forced him to do.

You might dig No Joy, Lush, Cindy Lee, the Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine

What the hell is shoegaze, anyway?

Ask four different people and you’ll get four different answers, but the term first started to get thrown at bands as an insult around the late 80s in the UK because guitarists in certain alternative bands would be using so many different effects during their performances they’d spend the whole show staring at their pedalboards (I think a review of a My Bloody Valentine show in particular is where the term got coined)

Also, I’d be amazed if they didn’t have a way to get contact information from non-political sources. Like, off the top of my head - if I’m running a Dem campaign I’d be talking to every car dealership I could and seeing if I can buy their list of people who signed up for updates on EV availability to see if I can turn some of those people to donors, and I’m pretty certain there’s no laws or regulations that would stop them from doing that.

Lol, yeah, I’m really good at being nuanced and understanding right up until somebody starts talking about a person or subject that hits one of my angry buttons, and then I’m all “Bill Clinton will pay for his many crimes when the revolutionary vanguard takes power!”

But, yeah, when I’m not pissed beyond reason the thought I keep coming back to is that we all need each other to keep fascism at bay

Yeah, say what you will about free market acolytes, they know how to jump on to a successful brand

I already dropped one wall of text on this post, but something you might find interesting - there was a history podcast called Revolutions that looked at revolutionary periods in history, when it wrapped up the host did a whole series of appendix episodes on different recurring themes he saw in the different periods he looked at, and in one of those he talked about how the word “radical” can be hard to define because throughout history there were people who had radical goals they wanted to achieve through moderate means and people who had moderate goals they wanted to achieve through radical means and the inverse of both of those

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=0nukt_9HmLE&t=2m21s

So yeah, I think it’s helpful to separate out how big a transformation in society you want to see from how far you’re willing to go to get them

So, this is a very complex topic I don’t have the time to give the treatment it deserves, but to try to give a very summarized historical viewpoint on it -

Liberalism was a set of ideas that cohered around the 18th century as a reaction to monarchism that emphasized universal civil rights and free markets (there were a ton of weird things going on with noble privileges and state monopolies issued by royal administrations and mercantile economics this was a response to)

Socialism was a set of ideas that cohered around the 19th century as a reaction to liberalism (and the whole industrial revolution) that said universal civil rights didn’t go far enough and we needed to establish universal economic rights. Some socialists think the only way to achieve these things is by overthrowing or limiting the power of governments and ripping up contracts between private parties, which liberals tend not to like.

Progressivism was (sort of, I’m being very reductive here) an attempted synthesis of these traditions that cohered around the early 20th century, and (essentially) argued “ok, free markets but restricted by regulations (e.g. you can’t sell snake oil, you can’t condition the sale of property on the purchaser being a specific race), and open elections for whoever the voters want but with restrictions on the kinda of laws that can be passed” (e.g. no poll taxes).

Like I said, I’m simplifying a lot here and I’d encourage reading Wikipedia pages and other sources on all of these things (like, I’m eliding a whole very dark history progressives have where their attempts to perfect society had them advocating for eugenics and segregation early on because there was academic support for those ideas at the time, and there’s a lot more to be said on how a lot of the first anti-racist voices were socialist ones and why it took progressives and liberals time to get on the right side of that issue, and how fights for colonial independence tended to be led by socialists and against liberals), but the fact that liberals progressives and socialists are all ostensibly “on the left” is a big cause of the infighting we see.

I mean, academically speaking you’re totally right, but because Americans discuss politics in extremely simplistic terms a lot of people use the word “liberal” when they mean progressive or socialist or just anything to the left of center, so it would probably be helpful to define these terms a bit

Haha, well said!

Nonchalantly replying to their own comments is the behavior of the goodest of faith commenters /s

Given enough time, our first past the post system will always lead to two large coalition parties shaking out of the variety of movements/ideologies we’ve got going on at any point. It just makes too much strategic sense for groups B and C who don’t want group A getting power but don’t agree on anything else to team up to try to get the plurality in a single round of voting that counts as a win under our system.

What I think we need is a) some political upheaval resulting from one of the two parties collapsing, b) a focused and determined effort during that time of upheaval to change our vote counting systems to something less dumb (e.g. insrant run off ranked choice voting is probably the simplest but still effective model).

They’ve all deserved it for a long time and for a lot of things. I’m pretty sure nobody in an elected position in DC today was there in 1964 when Goldwater’s clique inside the GOP turned it anti-civil rights and pro-Southern Strategy, but every elected Republican in DC today knew that had happened and signed up anyway

The Republican party is the disease that needs curing*, everything they’ve done are just worsening symptoms of that disease

*For the record, I think violence would be an ineffective and self-defeating course of treatment

Oh no, pretty much nothing they’re doing is anything I want out of my government, I’m just saying that I think that their preferred strategy for dealing with critics of their policies would have been to shut down the social media those critics are most likely to use and it’s left then a bit out of sorts not having the power to do that handed to them by Congress yet

Well, let’s be fair to Biden, Congress was supposed to have already given him the TikTok ban he also said he’d sign right away, and that would have shut up a lot of the people who complain about his support for an ongoing genocide

looking at Ginny Thomas.

Also, we need to talk about Leonard Leo

Well, seems like this legislation has done wonders for the sealion population at least

I agree with the ends, but I have my suspicions the ends aren’t going to be as effective as we’ve estimated, because estimating the responses of independent actors to an inducement is really tough even in simple controlled experimental settings, and energy markets are anything but simple. Also, this all just reminds me way too much of when we gave telecom companies subsidies to build out better internet infrastructure in the late 90s and early 00s and they were able to exploit legal loopholes to just take the money without actually building out their networks and serving unserved populations. The companies were dealing with are smart, they’ve been dealing with and exploiting government regulations and institutions for a very long time, and they are masters of having their cake and eating it too when it comes to this stuff.

Moreover, I really think we should not be giving one dime to oil and gas companies under any circumstances, whether its indirectly through these no strings attached tax credits we’re giving to renewable energy companies that are majority owned by traditional energy companies or all the money we’re throwing at carbon capture research that’s probably not going to return meaningfully useful technology in time to matter. With campaign finance and lobbying laws as loose as they are and with these companies’ histories of bankrolling some of the most harmful lawmakers and judges in our nation’s history, we’re basically feeding the monsters we have to fight. Also, it just sends a terrible message to all the other business leaders and corporations of the world if you can literally knowingly destroy the global climate for decades and never face any kind of punishment.

However, the IRA did get passed and those subsidies are out there now, and I think it’s possible they will do some good and that blowing them up now would be really disruptive and damaging to a private clean energy industry that’s currently* our best hope of not completely destroying the environment, so if I could wave a magic wand I would leave everything from the IRA in place and just add a lot more fees and penalties and taxes that targeted the oil and gas industries on top of it. Subsidies of any sort turn my stomach, but I think subsidies plus targeted fees and penalties is our best bet with where we’re at now.

Ultimately, I think we should nationalize all these companies and turn them into public agencies with open records open meetings and elected administrators who hire subject matter experts that guide the administrators’ policy decisions*, but I appreciate that’s a number of steps away from where we are now and I think there will have to be some kind of gradual process to get there.

**This is also what I want to have happen to health insurance, education, housing, and social media (with the stipulation that private market based competition to these public agencies is totally encouraged in situations where it’s practicably possible (e.g. power grids usually require monopolies of certain aspects, but there’s no reason we couldn’t have smaller more specialized private insurance companies in a country with publicly administered single payer universal healthcare))

Yep, a fossil fuel industry whose potential for methane emissions the government has been badly underestimating and which rose in 2023. And instead of holding those companies accountable for any of that, we just decided to hand out a bunch of monetizable and transferable tax credits to renewable energy companies that are being bought by corps like BP, who take the money and just keep on drilling