Why Does No One Remember Iraq? For All Of Trump's Faults, At Least He Didn't Start A War That Killed

Exactly. A civics professor I had in college had a lot of fun telling us how one of the most hated occupational groups in America ended up running everything.

As for why people believe that politicians get paid so much, I think the answer is related to the ignorance of the mechanism behind "corruption", as stated above. We read about politicians accepting absurd amounts of money from corporate interests and assume that it is a function of greed and desire for personal enrichment (which it certainly sometimes is), rather than a desire to fund re-election.

Conservatives also have an interest in portraying politicians as decadent and wasteful with the average person's tax dollars, so that also contributes.

What about direct-democratic planning, with or without the recommendations made by a committee or any individual?

Instead of subordinating our economic desires and the associated information to the anarchic market, why don't we discuss potential economic activity and share all perspectives and information?

I’m not sure what a socialist society should look like, but I’m pretty sure of this: factor markets should be replaced with national, regional and local planning

I first encountered the idea of "pay politicians more to reduce corruption" in college in the context of economic development in the global south. IIRC, there is evidence that this is true.

The problem is that in a liberal/capitalist economy, what people describe as "bribes" or "corruption" are part and parcel of the system of governance, as much as taxation or lawsuits. We can ban all the symptoms of this relationship that we like (steak dinners, exceptionally unethical agreements, outright fraud/collusion) but it isn't going to change the fact that if you want political power in Texas or Montana, you are going to have to satisfy the largest and most powerful of your constituents- oil/gas and ranchers, respectively.

Anyway now that all that dress drama has faded: members of congress are underpaid, and creating a less corrupt congress means paying them and their employees more (while banning all sources of outside income and making them divest from individual stocks).

As a separate matter, future pay raises beyond the new standard should be indexed to median wage growth- their incomes won’t grow unless their constituents’ income grows

Pretty sure that the massive industrialization experienced largely by the North, and the development of a complex state apparatus suited to the demands of the century is what allowed the US to become a world power. I doubt that agrarian landowners, many of whose activities actually disrupted peaceful economic and social reconstruction (such as the Klan and assassinating the president who had, all things considered, treated them with a decent amount of mercy) were in any way responsible for healing the divide post-Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln wasn’t the greatest US President because he led the nation through civil war, he’s the greatest because he lead the nation through civil war and then managed to completely prevent the numerous atrocities that oftentimes follow civil wars where the winning side proceeds to utterly annihilate the losers through systematic persecution/extermination.

Abraham Lincoln’s vision of unconditional forgiveness for the South (which admittedly took some time to enact and didn’t truly come to fruition until the Grant administration and the end of Reconstruction) is what enabled America to quickly recover from the war and go on to become a major world power by the turn of the century.

So no king anywhere has ever said anything close to "I want to build up a massive army so I can beat my rival" or "I want to sleep with your wife"? From the other direction, are you also suggesting that ambition and ruthlesness are nowhere to be found among the peasant populations as well? From the other other direction, perhaps the stereotype of the lazy/fat noble exists for a reason?

Also just in general wrt “the king wants the same things as the peasants but the barons don’t”, I’m really skeptical of the amount of faith that monarchists tend to invest in that relationship because it seems like it has at least as much to do with the idea of kingly purity (e.g. “if only the Czar knew”) as with the actual relationship. But even where that relation exists, it’s not a statement that rulers of larger domains are more likely to agree with the peasants. The way the “king and peasants vs. the aristocracy” setup works even when it works is that the king is playing the two factions against one another and using the perceived legitimacy of his mandate – something lesser aristocrats lack – to defend himself against the faction otherwise most dangerous to his rule.  If you fragment that kingdom and now every barony is a tiny kingdom with its own court, the political class relations change completely; you can’t extrapolate them from how the region functioned as a province of a larger entity.

Very strongly endorsed. I see lots of predictions/imaginings of socialism that envision 90% of people living in (dependent) luxury while a small number of enginners and planners actually "run the economy." I don't consider this an ideal system!

I think it also explains why so many people have these purely destructive/venegful understandings of revolution - the prospect of fighting and dying just to win the right to discuss/debate production statistics every month isn't very appealing. Yet I think most people feel powerless because they have no way to provide input or control over the society/economy as a whole. The only antidote to powerlessness is power, which goes hand in hand with responsibility.

Got this phrase stuck in my head: "socialism is the fight for the right to take responsibility". Haven't quite worked out what i mean by this, but something to do with it being a move from a mass of atomised and so helpless individuals who have no ability to effect change and so can flee from any sense of responsibility for the state of the world to the formation of a working class collectivity which can take decisive control of society and so the members of which must face up to the responsibility this control entails. This is why revenge fantasies or apocalypse fantasies are ultimately antithetical to socialism -- they're a flinching from responsibility, a retreat to that irresponsible atomised view of the world.

Hanania may have changed his mind on trans people, but he also tweeted "These people are all animals, whether they're harassing people on subways or walking around in suits" after Daniel Penny was arrested.

The Richard Hanania discourse is weird for me because no one is willing to be specific.

Like, periodically someone links one of his pieces, and I read it, and it's generally pretty anodyne. But of course I'm reading pieces (1) that are current and (2) that people I like are recommending. This is not a good way to figure out what his worst takes are!

But I'm too apathetic to go, like, scrolling through his blog looking for the bad takes. And when people criticize [engaging with] him they never link specific posts or quote specific things he said. They say he's a "white supremacist race realist" and like, that probably means he said some things I'd disapprove of, but I can't tell how strongly I'd disapprove because a lot of people use those terms rather more promiscuously than I would.

(And even if someone made specific allegations, it's hard to know if they're doing a Tumblr Callout-style list where the first three entries are "he literally ships Jen and Fred even though we once had a flashback to when Jen was 17" and then somewhere in the middle is "literally killed and ate several children". If I read the first three links and conclude that it's all bullshit that's not even necessarily right!)

So it's just very hard to get a sense for "how bad are his worst views" and also "to what extent does he still hold those views?" And I don't really have motivation to actually figure it out, so there's just a bunch of slightly dumb discourse that I'm not able to evaluate.

‘This Will Be The End Of Late Stage Capitalism,’ Says Increasingly Nervous Communist For Seventh Time This Year

referring to “late” capitalism is a content-free vocal tic that only serves to mark the speaker as a muddled thinker

this is horrifically uncharitable but I just… I know too many people right now who are dealing with steep cognitive decline/dementia/blah and I have reached Too Many Feelings

so

teach me how to believe. Teach me how to know what makes a good person is not inside our brains, that we can’t fall apart.

That we can still choose good even when we’ve begun to forget what choices are

When we lash out

When we truly don’t remember.

Teach me what the rules are when all that’s left is fear and anger. Teach me how they stay when everything else goes.

I’ll need them when it’s my turn, if cultivating kind emotions isn’t enough to be good in the end.

Teach me how to hope like you. Teach me how you write the moral law in something untouchable by plaque, unmaulable by aneurysm.

Teach me how the imprints stay when everything else disappears.

I'm not sure why anyone would seriously mourn the death of Ted Kazcynski, when both a) his basic critique of technology is stupidly, fundamentally flawed to anyone who thinks about it for five minutes and b) plenty of morally palatable and effective enviormentalist protestors exist. But nobody's making any "Jessica Reznicek did nothing wrong" memes.