psychothumbs @ psychothumbs @lemmy.world

Posts

680

Comments

410

Joined

2 yr. ago

Both sides in regards to what? I'm pretty sure he's firmly aligned with the Democrats against the Republicans and the left wing of the Dems against the right wing.

Yeah basically the traditional alignment is for people to vote farther left the poorer they are and farther right the richer they are. Dealignment is when that pattern gets a little scrambled as it has now, with the overwhelming support for the left by the highly educated and corresponding losses among the uneducated poor. As you say there are a lot of poor, so leftists are trying to come up with strategies to reverse that dealignment and win them back.

Important life lesson: never listen to Republicans

The OLIGARCH Act specifically establishes four tax brackets:

· 2% for all wealth between 1,000 and 10,000 times median household wealth;

· 4% for all wealth between 10,000 and 100,000 times median household wealth;

· 6% for all wealth between 100,000 and 1,000,000 times median household wealth;

· 8% for all wealth over 1,000,000 times median household wealth

For reference, current median household wealth is around $120k: https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/

So a the current rate would be

· 2% for all wealth between $120 million and $1.2 billion

· 4% for all wealth between $1.2 billion and $12 billion

· 6% for all wealth between $12 billion and $120 billion

· 8% for all wealth over $120 billion

That top tax rate would apply to only two people, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, with a few more just barely below the $120 billion line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_by_net_worth

Amanda Marcotte is the author, a reasonably distinguished and well known figure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Marcotte

What you’re calling “socialism” is not socialism You’re talking about capitalist reforms. Socialism is the end of private property and wage labor which can’t be established through parliamentary transition due to the class nature of capitalist society - ie. the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

I haven't described what my conception of socialism is, just described one mechanism socialists have used and are trying to use to enact the changes we want. So far we have not ever seen a developed capitalist society transition to socialism, so I don't think parliamentarism has been ruled out as a mechanism for that happening any more than anything else has been.

This is all very tangential to the actual issue. It doesn’t really matter from the point of view of the struggle whether they’re controlled directly or indirectly. You’ve been nitpicking very insignificant points the entire time without addressing the main points and it’s starting to look like trolling at this point.

I think this point just seems insignificant because you're not getting what it is. Unions are not controlled either directly or indirectly by the Democratic Party. Instead, unions are one of the social forces that control the Democratic Party, which is ultimately an incoherent mess of forces and agendas stuffed into a big tent by the oppressive American electoral system that only really allows for two parties.

What I mean about the US not having a social democratic party is that the Democrats are to the right of what we'd usually refer to as social democrats - at best a hybrid between a social democratic party and a liberal party. Classic European social democratic parties were born as socialist parties aiming at a gradual parliamentary transition to socialism, which through a combination of moderating themselves and being defeated electorally never actually managed to get there. DSA does have a lot in common with that earlier version of social democracy, though in the present day they're more aligned with the further left parties like die linke or podemos than the official still existing social democrats.

As for the union issue, you're not distinguishing between unions being a major constituency of the Democratic Party and their being controlled by it. Democrats are obviously not as consistently pro-union as we'd like, but they for the most part accept them as a valuable part of their coalition who they need to keep happy, as opposed to Republicans who want to bathe in their blood.

Is there anywhere in particular you're referring to? The US at least doesn't really have a social democratic party, and the closest thing we do have, the Democrats, certainly don't have any level of institutional control of the country's labor unions.

Both of those examples are from shortly after WWI. And both involve attempts by armed communist groups to seize control of the state, which for good or ill is not something we're going to be dealing with in the US for the foreseeable future.

When they ultimately fail to contain the class struggle they will side with the fascists and turn their guns on the working class like they did in both world wars.

Uhhhhh what? WWI was pre-fascist, WWII had social democrats on the same side as liberals and communists against the fascists.

Why is that?

Yeag you are spot on, the big problem with Mastodon is that they have all these ideas about how to be better than twitter that actually just break what people are looking for from the twitter experience.

I don't know if him scheming to take away online privacy makes me think of him as "sleepy"

Haha well yes anyone in any situation could coincidentally already have had their right to vote taken away for an unrelated reason.

Definitely agree that taking away the right to vote is not an appropriate punishment.

In theory everyone in jail as opposed to prison should get to vote since at that stage you haven't been convicted of a crime that would justify a punishment like taking away your right to vote.

In reality it's just a factor of the difference between a comedic cartoon and live action, but I sort of love the idea of it being an actual cultural difference between the two timelines, with people in the even more utopian lower decks era having gotten looser and wackier.

This article came out in February and seems to have been pretty dead on, down to Musk reviving the ridiculous x.com branding.

Not sure what you're saying about the handlers, nothing in the article about that, but yes it does make sense.

Idk if that kind of ranking applies to daily kos, it's a blogging platform where anyone can post. You can't really talk about the accuracy of the site as opposed to a particular contributor any more than you can for medium or substack.

Yeah sorry about that - I liked the article and couldn't be bothered to come up with a better headline than the original clickbaity one.