SuddenDownpour @ SuddenDownpour @lemmy.world

Posts

7

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155

Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm an Ex-christian. Religion has provoked plenty of suffering against me and my family through my life. I want to have the right to burn a Bible. The same way, I want Ex-muslims to have the right to burn the Quran.

We don't really want religions to have the right to determine what is and is not hate speech against them. If given the chance, some of these people would define women not having their hair hidden or someone undergoing gender transition as offensive.

Before any of the usual suspects comes in to defend LinkedIn for "trying to make money", have you tried publishing a job offering on LinkedIn? If you haven't, shut up, they're already making cash. If you have, my brother in Christ, you think they need MORE???

'Murican right-wingers be like:

"Down with pedophiles, it's the chair for them!"

"Down with democrats, they're pedophiles!"

"Down with these weird people, they're pedophiles!"

"HEY! You CAN'T call out this pedophile! He's OUR pedophile!!!"

The rules of the channel state:

Must be articles relevant to US political news. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed.

It would be reasonable for this channel to be dominated by US politics if that was simply a consequence of the demographics of the site. It is not reasonable to appropriate the name 'politics' in the largest instance that also happens to be named 'world'. This is the equivalent of someone making a channel called 'food' and forbid posting anything that isn't traditional Scottish cuisine.

It gets even worse when you see the mods dismissing this reasonable criticism as "trolling". They have decided that this is their turf because they've gotten here first, regardless of utility or rationality. Pretty much describes the whole state of politics in their country.

We need a powerpoint explaining the 5D transphobia.

Cis guy here. Based mod.

If the Irani government already intends to arrest her, her only avenue to "help Iran" was taking up arms. I think everyone here has enough brain cells to understand why you can't shame any random person for just not making that choice.

Spain is a fairly difficult country to get into if you want the law to treat you in equal terms as any other citizen, if you belong to the wrong nationality. Latin Americans are often received with open arms, while Africans usually end up working below minimum salary without legal protections due to the lack of means to regularize their situation and the fear of getting deported.

Agreed.

I'm starting to miss Reddit's feature to collapse heavily downvoted comments.

1. Pretend that the default of internet discussions should be your country's.
2. Complain that other people are complaining.
3. Stay mad.

What are you talking about? No one is saying "Delete this channel", but rather "Either change the name of the channel to USpolitics or remove the rule that forbids discussing non-US politics in the 'politics' channel".

If you think that asking for the bare minimum fairness that the name "politics" shouldn't be a default of the US, your problem isn't that your country is being treated unfairly, but rather that you want your country to be treated with privilege.

Centrist =/= Centralist. Centralism means wanting to concentrate power in the central government.

We all heard them bring up different minorities they want to criminalize out of the blue at the debates for no good reason, no need for second hand sources for that.

Introduction to Spanish politics in 2023 for lemmytors:

Simplifying everything, the Spanish speaking right-wing is led by the mainstream right party Partido Popular or PP, which needs the support of the far right party Vox. However, Vox is radically centralist and wants to take away functions from Comunidades Autónomas or regional governments (similar to the US' individual states), which makes it impossible for a PP-Vox coalition to reach any agreement with the Catalan or Basque parties, for which autonomy of the regional governments is a core issue.

This means that the only viable government is one formed by PSOE (socialdemocrats/liberals) and Sumar (democratic socialists/anticapitalists), supported by ERC (Catalan left wing), Junts (Catalan right wing), Bildu (Basque left wing) and PNV (Basque right wing), which is a very similar composition to the government we had before these elections. This means a parliament that isn't too shaky, but also not too stable, because these parties have a lot of divergent goals and are mostly united by not wanting PP-Vox to reach the central government.

What has the government done during the previous 4 years?

These years have been fundamentally marked by the pandemic first, and by the war in Ukraine later. The pandemic was met with a moderately strong lockdown, which likely contained a potentially far more difficult disaster but badly damaged the tourism-based Spanish economy, while the right-wing opposition was promoting denialism and COVID conspiracy theories. In order to protect companies and employment, the government issued processes of temporary suspension of employment, where companies were forbidden to fire workers during the lockdown but their salaries were subsidized.

The sanctions on Russia shouldn't have affected Spain too much, since we mostly get our gas from Algeria, and this is backed by the fact that Spain got one of the lowest inflation rates of the EU in 2022. However, this didn't stop energy distribution companies from getting embroiled in a speculation process that has fundamentally affected basic goods, so even though in macroeconomic terms we have had a low inflation in comparison with other European countries, that inflation has been unevenly distributed and damaged humble families the most. A criticism that should be made here is that the government didn't do enough to regulate and/or punish distribution companies that engaged in speculation that wasn't driven by real cost increases.

These two matters aside, the government did also:

• Enact a relatively ineffective minimum income, which according to official statistics has supported almost 2 million people, but looking deeper into the data you find plenty of bureaucratic traps that provoked these grants to become far too difficult to get and somewhat easy to lose.
• Several feminist reforms, such as allowing 16 year olds to get abortions without parental permission, allowing doctors to grant paid medical leave due to particularly painful periods, and a reform on the law regulating sex abuse crimes. This measure has been particularly controversial as it provoked roughly 100 sex offenders to be released early, which according to the responsible minister was provoked by judges wilfully misinterpreting the law.
• The "Trans Law", which grants the right of gender self-determination, allowing people to change their legal gender without permission from a doctor or a judge, making Spain one of the first countries of the world to recognize this right. While this provoked a lot of controversy in mass media and social media, voters mostly supported the reform, with over 50% supporting it and barely 20% opposing it.

• A not too successful reform on rent, allowing cities to enact zones where landlords are forbidden to raise rent if they notice sharp increases. However, this hasn't prevented rent prices to continue raising. Near the end of the period, the government has started drafting plans for increasing public housing, but it's undeniable too little and too late.
• Continued increases of minimum salary, aiming to get closer to France's, gradually increasing from 900€/month in 2019 to 1080€/month in 2023. During the same period, unemployement has decreased despite the pandemic. Inflation was within control until the start of the war.

It should also be mentioned:

• Stagnation of Catalonya's indepedence process. While PSOE promised to negotiate with Catalan parties, the idea of a referendum has further slipped away across the years. While it remains unclear how aggressive Catalan parties will be during the incoming rounds of negotiations, their loss of support during these elections leaves them at a weakened position. It could be argued, after yesterday's results, that many Catalans have decided independence isn't too important for them as long as the Spanish-speaking right wing isn't ruling from Madrid.
• Looking forward, there will likely continue to be tensions between PSOE's extremely moderate economic views, and Sumar's ambitions for wide reforms. One of the core measures Sumar has campaigned for was a reduction on the workweek. The ever rising price of rents will likely make housing a hot issue, but PSOE will find itself in tension as many members in the higher echelons of their party tend to appeal to landlords' interests.

What has the right wing campaigned for?

PP, the mainstream right wing party, has ran a rather dull campaign based on common talking points for any opposition party, such as the ideas that the ruling party has mismanaged the economy, but haven't been too explicit regarding their actual plans.

Vox, on the other hand, has a very strange tendency to straight up copy the talking points of the US' republican party, regardless of how well accepted they are in Spanish society. Two particularly notorious examples would be their denialism of climate change and their attempt to capitalize on transphobia, despite Spain being one of the European countries most acceptive of trans people:

After the recent local elections a few months ago, many town councils now ruled by a PP-Vox coalition have engaged in a variety of measures such as the early removal of LGBT flags, and the censorship of media pieces that display LGBT realities in local services.

Edit: What the hell is this about me having a newsletter lmao. Thanks for the supportive comments though.

You have two distributions of populations:

Distribution A has 50% of the population scoring 10 happiness, and the remaining 50% scoring 0.

Distribution B has 100% of the population scoring 5 happiness.

Your research has shown that these two distributions are the two options that allow for maximization of happiness, and you can achieve any of them at the same cost with exactly the same externalities. This data is confirmed with perfect mathematical precision to a point currently unavailable to our scientific institutions for the sake of this thought experiment.

There is no objective reason to choose one over the other; if none is chosen, a suboptimal distribution will be chosen for you.

Fuck Elon and I can’t wait till the Saudis come to collect on that $44B they loaned him.

Well, this is news to me. The Saudis owning Tesla is definitely going to be a bitter joke.

Are you saying this as a retort to me indirectly calling tankies authoritarians? If so, that's pretty rich.

The Soviet Union suppressed people who used Marxist analysis to argue that the higher echelons of the party aparatus had constituted itself as a separate, dominant class that held the ultimate political power, which resulted in a tendency to exert that power undisputed and continued accumulation of privileges. Once enough time had passed, some of the people leading that aparatus decided they wanted an even larger share of the cake, so they decided to drop the pretense, drop the nominal communism and embrace privatisation. When working people tried to oppose that process, the authoritarian state used its repressive forces to protect the ruling class. What is most interesting about this is that you can see similar processes in almost every single country that followed the leninist vanguardist model, ultimately losing any political equality that was initially sought in its revolution, and any self-respecting Marxist should have taken the hint that this makes Leninism and its godchildren a failed avenue for socialism.

To connect this with your not too hidden assertion that "since every state is authoritarian, me supporting authoritarian states is ok": any state and society is going to decide the margins outside of which behavior and politics are not acceptable, but that is absolutely no excuse to give free reign to any government to become as authoritarian as they aim to no matter the cost. When we do that, we come across disgusting situations such as the difficulties for working class Chinese people being unable to self-organize and protect their rights if the local party strongman arbitrarily decides they're too much trouble. Any kind of emancipatory project soon turns crippled under those circumstances, which you could have easily noticed if you weren't drown in liturgy.