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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Ok, I’m willing to admit that a quid pro quo relationship between a politician and their voter base is not necessarily a bad thing. And, yes, you’re also right that it is a bad thing when politicians say one thing to a voter base and then don’t follow through or keep their promises. And, yes, this instance with Trump is an example of a politician making a promise to prospective voters and then keeping that promise. I just don’t think that’s always a good thing. If a bunch of voters want a politician to do some fucked up shit, the politician promises to do said fucked up shit, and then follows through on that promise, that’s not a good thing, even if it is politics working the ways it’s supposed to work.


  • Well, your initial comment just took issue with the quid pro quo nature of the exchange, and I was just pointing out that it’s how politics is done.

    I take issue with the quid pro quo nature of the exchange, and politics in general. Politicians need votes, but they also need money. When politicians are courting groups, they’re not just seeking their votes, they’re seeking their money and donations, as well. This incentivizes candidates to seek the support of those with the most money to give. Support for a candidate, through both votes and donations, is an investment, and the expectation is a return on that investment.

    Also, while it makes perfect sense that a politician would seek the votes of those with whom they are ideologically aligned, the ideology itself matters. Even if no money is exchanged between the politician and the candidate, if their shared ideology is that some people should be able to get very rich, even at the expense of others, then those voters will give their votes to the candidate believing that it is financially beneficial for them to do so.

    Plus, what if the ideology of the politician and the voter group they are trying to court is aggressively hostile to democracy itself? A quid pro quo relationship between them would make sense, but it is antithetical to the overall institution.




  • Yesterday my colleague Kate Riga noted a trap Senate Democrats keep falling into: in an effort to court Republican defectors they temper their criticism of the various Trump nominees. But since there are and will be no defectors they lose on both sides of the equation, gaining no defectors and making their critiques tepid and forgettable. This is unquestionably true. But we can go a step further still. Far from courting potential defectors, they should be attacking them.

    If trying to court Republican defectors is a futile effort, who should the Democrats be trying to court? This article seems deliberately vague on that point. The article implies that the Democrats should make less tepid, less forgettable critiques of Trump nominees, that they should attack them, even, but for what reason? Seemingly, it’s to court people other than Republican defectors, but who would that be? Relatively moderate, neoliberal technocrats? Do any still exist?






  • Partly. The hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, etc can be private, but I think there need to be laws in place stipulating that they must be not-for-profit organizations. But, the health insurance should be a universal, public, single-payer insurance. It’s essentially the Canadian system, only I think I’m Canada healthcare providers can be for-profit companies.


  • There is a legitimate reason for insurance companies to involve themselves in the healthcare market, and that is that many, if not most, patients don’t have the cash available to pay for all of their necessary medical services. Healthcare services are expensive, for a lot of complex reasons, but one reason is that healthcare providers can be greedy, too. Many healthcare providers are also for-profit companies, and they want to maximize their profits as much as possible, also.

    Enter health insurance, which spreads those costs over a large base of people, thus making healthcare services more affordable. Health insurance sucks, but without it, very few people would be able to afford anything other than relatively basic care. That is unless you happen to have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars laying around.

    So we have healthcare providers, equipment manufacturers and suppliers and pharmaceutical companies all trying to maximize their profits, and then health insurance companies as well, and it’s a recipe for absolutely exploding healthcare prices.

    The thing is, healthcare is always going to be relatively expensive. Doctors and nurses are skilled workers, who spend a lot of money getting an education, so they deserve to get paid. Medical equipment and supplies aren’t necessarily cheap to make, neither are pharmaceuticals. Providing quality healthcare is just always going to have certain costs associated with it.

    Profit, however, is not a necessary component to this. Adding to the price of all of these things to generate a surplus that goes to owners and investors is just unnecessary. So, profit should be eliminated from healthcare, full stop. No more for-profit hospitals, clinics, etc. That will help, but only so much. Even without owner/investor profit, healthcare would still be too expensive for many people. So, we absolutely need to spread those costs out, but not among the customers of many different private health insurance companies, but among the entire population of the nation.

    Healthcare providers must be not-for-profit (but still regulated, because executives at not-for-profit companies can still be greedy assholes, and need to be kept in check), and there must be a single, national health insurance provider that everyone is required to pay into, through a progressive tax system.


  • I’ve felt for a while now that there is more than one kind of nationalism. One is supremacist, colonialist, and imperialist. This, I think, is the nationalism people think of when they think of nationalism. This is the nationalism of Nazi Germany, for instance. It’s the nationalism of people who believe strongly in hierarchies, especially ones that they believe are “natural.” They believe that some individuals are inherently superior to other individuals, and they believe that some groups are inherently superior to other groups. They seek to establish hierarchies of power within their nation, but also between nations.

    In the context of today’s world, in which the US is the dominant global superpower, American “nationalists” believe that the US is inherently superior to all other nations, and, therefore, that the US global hegemony should not only be maintained, but expanded. They believe it is right and good and natural for the US to rule and dominate the globe, because, in their mind, we are just superior to all other nations.

    I think there is another kind of nationalism, though, one of people who seek independence and autonomy for their group or nation, usually from an imperialist power. It’s one in which people who value their distinct culture and history want to see to it maintained and preserved. They don’t believe their culture is superior to all others, they just believe it should exist without interference from outside groups.

    I understand and sympathize with the latter kind of nationalism, but I do not understand, and I in fact hate and despise, the former. I do not believe that any group of people is inherently superior to any other. I reject supremacism in its entirety. I believe that any nation has just as much right to exist peaceably as any other. I wholeheartedly reject colonialism, expansionism, imperialism, and supremacism, but I support the right of any nation to exist, on their piece of the Earth, with their distinct culture, independently and autonomously, so long as they can do so peacefully.



  • The title of the article is: ‘Jimmy Carter Wasn’t a Liberal,’ yet here they say,

    It would be wrong to call Carter himself a conservative. He was instead a Southern liberal, which meant that from a national perspective he was a somewhat conservative Democrat.

    So, which is it? Is he a liberal or not? They can’t seem to make up their mind.

    Also, the article says that Carter helped usher in the Reagan era, which is true, but the political paradigm that reached its zenith in the 80s under Reagan was neoliberalism.

    We here in the US really need to stop using “liberal” to mean left wing. It’s stupid. Let’s join the rest of the world and start using words correctly, maybe open a book that covers a part of the world other than the US.

    Liberalism is not necessarily left wing. In fact, I would argue that liberalism is generally center to center-right. Some liberal ideologies are further left than others, for instance social liberalism, but that’s only one kind of liberalism. The dominant form of liberalism over the past forty to fifty years is neoliberalism, and it is definitely a center-right ideology.

    So, yes, Jimmy Carter was a liberal, he just wasn’t a social liberal, he was a neoliberal, which is center-right.