Politics Thread!

[zip accident]

It's not the working class who are going to lose their jobs, though. Sure, your shitty office job is gonna get eaten by AI. Hell, even your well paid programming job is going to get very much "downsized". It's the middle class, maybe the lower middle class, they're gonna get really fucking badly hurt. But the working class? Those people who were unable to take Dio's elitist "just upskill" solution, either due to location, ability, or class / race / sex bias, a lot of their jobs still exist. Sure, the manufacturing sector got decimated as manufacturing went overseas, and that's not coming back any time soon, mining went the way of the dodo, and a lot of manual labour, particularly in agriculture, has been removed due to mechanisation,

I agree it's the middle class who will suffer first, but I think you misunderstand the potential suffering of the rest of us.

but there are a shit load of jobs that you simply can't automate away, and those jobs need to be done.

What and where?

I can't be arsed to do dusting, and it's becoming a problem. I can easily imagine a robot doing it for me, while I wouldn't feel right or trust a human servant, not that I could afford one.

And those jobs, sadly, /are/ being taken away by immigrants. Because the immigrants are willing to work more hours in worse conditions for less pay. Don't believe me? Get off your comfortable office chair, and go put a month in on a building site.

As a tenant, I've seen the builders the landlord employs, and cowboys fits the bill. They're probably skiving off their real jobs on a real building site, when they work here.

70s and 80s leftism doesn't work? Bollocks it doesn't. Might not work to save your fucking cushty little office job, but it does work to make everyone's life better in jobs that actually involve doing real physical work. The reason people don't think it works is because they've been told to think it doesn't work. All those strikes, couldn't save the mines. Nothing could save the mines. What we need is more radical leftism, not less. An actual move away from capitalism, and particularly away from the free market capitalism that's been fucking us up the arse since the '80s. We don't need to tax the rich, we need to string the cunts up, display their severed heads on pikes on London Bridge.

You and whose army?

Civil unrest became impossible before the first world war, machine guns can kill hundreds in minutes.

Beside which, people aren't nice. Unity lasts until someone can take advantage, and they always do.

[Dio]

I dunno. I accept some, maybe even most of the points. But I don't see a proposal there that will work. I see a proposal to tear the system down and hope. The result might well be a system that fails to work for everyone. Most probably it's a system that works for almost nobody except a few people who are a little more equal than the others.

Which, as I've already said, is not to say that I have a solution either.

I do agree that humans are likely to become more valuable for their hands than their brains. And skilled manual labour is well within my definition of 'upskilling' - it's not all, maybe not even most, pure knowledge jobs.

[Harlequin]

I just hope the first mass replacements by AIs will be of the CEOs and other multi-millionaire executives getting paid exorbitant amounts for a few weeks' "brain work" per year. I particularly want to see Musk's positions being eaten by xAI.

[tufty]

Nobody saw a replacement that would work. But post 1917, everybody was so fucking scared of the masses rising up they started giving concessions to the workers.

Everything you have which is good, comes from socialism. Weekends off? 35 hour week? Paid leave? Retirement? Just enough socialism to stop the workers rising up. Sure, the man would like you to work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week until you die, but they accept that that's part of what is going to drive you to something more radical. Social security? The man would love to just let the very poor starve to death. But before they die, they're gonna rise up. Socialised health care? Again, just enough socialism to stop you rising up, plus it keeps the workers healthy enough to work. And so on. Until relatively recently, the balance between the erosion of those rights, and keeping those rights, has been more or less managed to keep the masses comfortable /enough/. But since the perceived fail of communism with the fall of the Soviet bloc, and the introduction of shiny iphones and social media to keep you distracted, that balance has been removed. The man is tipping the scales.

What has capitalism given you? Fuck all. It's moved the capital to the ultra rich, and spent decades trying to remove anything that makes your life better by telling you it's not good for you; shitting in your mouth and telling you it tastes of chocolate.

Take the backlash against tory cuts to the NHS. So egregious that they quite probably lost them an election. They thought they could get away with it, by telling you the NHS wasn't working and we needed to move to a paid system. It's probably the first time that the lie has managed to get picked up, but even then my parents are now moaning that the NHS is terrible and we should probably do away with it. And no, Labour aren't doing any better.

There is a system that works better. A system that focuses on the people who do the work, and not on the people who take all the money. And it doesn't have to be better for everybody. It needs to be a helluva a lot worse for some. And they need to understand that it's that or heads on pikes.

As for the "you and whose army" shit, the answer is "the same army its always been". 90% of the population.

[zip accident]

I dunno. I accept some, maybe even most of the points. But I don't see a proposal there that will work. I see a proposal to tear the system down and hope. The result might well be a system that fails to work for everyone. Most probably it's a system that works for almost nobody except a few people who are a little more equal than the others.

Which, as I've already said, is not to say that I have a solution either.

I do agree that humans are likely to become more valuable for their hands than their brains. And skilled manual labour is well within my definition of 'upskilling' - it's not all, maybe not even most, pure knowledge jobs.

Well, now you've provoked me. This isn't the platform of any party I know of, and I'm not starting one.

Checks and balances first, no one is ever above accountability. everthing always by default index-linked so what started out being for the top ten percent by wealth of society or the bottom 10% doesn't drift to being for 50% or !%.

Big tax iincreases all around, especially for the rich, but some for the modally wealthy people too.

Single person's unemployment benefits slightly down, child benefits non-trivially up.

End the "right to buy".

Build millions of small cheap houses with adequate insulation, 1940s prefabs were fine.

Fund the armed forces, education and the NHS from the taxes.

Housing prices are included in inflation figures.

The difference from socialism for me is that you don't have the "she's a good socialist, we will trust her utterly with all our lives and property" thing going on, there are checks, balances and constant scrutiny, because almost everyone will take advantage ten or twenty years down the line (some a lot sooner than that) if you let them and we can't spot the actually trustworthy people before they are dead.

[Dio]

I'm not arguing with any of that. But again I'm not sure I see a line from that to real fixes for the problem. I mean, it's not significantly different from the stated - if not actually executed - policies of any of the current parties.

And it doesn't have to be better for everybody. It needs to be a helluva a lot worse for some.

But it does have to be noticeably better for most of the somebodies if it's to be a net win.

[tufty]

it's not significantly different from the stated - if not actually executed - policies of any of the current parties.

Yeah, and of course I won't cum in your mouth. None of them care. None of them want to make things actually better, because making things better means making things less better for the people funding them.

zip says he wants tax increases. I don't. I'm not arguing for punitive taxation. I'd argue for people and companies paying the fucking tax they are supposed to, and removing every single fucking opt-out and "tax efficiency" loophole, with brutal and very punitive prejudice. When I was back in the UK, around 2001, I was earning around 100K before tax. That put me in the top 10%, and it's around the point where you have a tax accountant. Where you go to see your tax accountant and he asks you "how much tax do you want to pay?", and then, if the number you give is non-negative, he looks at you like you're mad. For people like me, tax was basically optional. That wasn't acceptable then, and it's not acceptable now. FWIW, I paid the tax I was supposed to, and my accountant said "I don't know why you bother coming to see me".

And it doesn't have to be better for everybody. It needs to be a helluva a lot worse for some.

But it does have to be noticeably better for most of the somebodies if it's to be a net win.

Yeah, my bad, I should have worded that better, your wording was implied.

[KlaxonCow]

The President who keeps on grifting.



He brings such integrity and gravitas to the job.


Well, at least those tariffs will bring all that depressing low-paid factory work back to America, right?

[PFVA]

The war of the water re-started in the south of this country.
Apparently most of the assigned water will go the one crop people, those grown in plastic green houses, and the big extensions of fruit to export. Traditional people who rotate cultures and things like that are being left out.
They are taking it to court, the national one, and threaten to take it to the EU courts if the problem is not solved.

[Harlequin]

Water wars worry me. And I expect to see them escalating around the globe in the not-distant-enough future.

[F-ZeroOne]

So remember how in the run-up to the election we weren't supposed to call them fascists and such?:

https://www.wonkette.com/p/bomb-in-war- ... ernational

https://www.wonkette.com/p/rfk-jr-and-j ... lternative

[PFVA]

I assume that to be accepted as a foreign student you have to be a supporter of Trump and friends.

In the meantime here it's about to become official that the "noisy right", Trump's friends are the 2nd most voted and will be 2nd in number of reps in the Assembly. Emigrants living outside this country elect 4 reps, 2 for Europe, 2 for the other countries. Each group voted 1 for the center right and 1 for the noisy right.
Center left and noisy right got exactly the same number of reps inside the country, with the 2 extra they got fm the emigrants now they are 2nd.
One would think that our emigrants living outside the country wouldn't vote for a party which by definition anti-migrants but it's exactly where they have had more support since the beginning.

[PFVA]

I found this interesting. They count the votes of the emigrants by country.
In terms of Europe Noisy Right won in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg but not in Germany and Holland
In term of the other countries Noisy Right won in Brazil, but lost everywhere else and specially in the USA and Canada. Thank you Trump for endorsing them, that's where they used to win. There is hope.

[PFVA]

Just now in my TV news Karol Nawrocki, the candidate supported by Trump and friends won the elections in Poland.
Their President has limited power because they also have a PM but he does have the power of veto (just like ours). He is anti EU, anti immigrants, anti gay marriage, anti several other things, and from the right wing of the Catholic Church.

Fun times for us in Europe ahead.

[F-ZeroOne]

What a bunch of petty, vindictive little... urghs make up the current US administration:

https://www.military.com/daily-news/202 ... -ship.html

Which will history judge had more military value and contributed more to "warrior culture", I wonder - one Pete Hegseth or Alan Turing?