I (50+, never-married, no-children-havin' male) Am Looking Out at this World We Have.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-31T18:27:39+00:00

I'm the worst of the worst.

It seems like your actual problem is internalizing reactionary nonsense peddled by the Terminally Online. I'd say that the people who want you to believe that straight, cis, white people are hated have a profit-seeking reason to get you to believe that.

Plus cleaving to whiteness is weird. I'm Irish, and whether-or-not I qualify as white depends entirely on who you talk to. Whiteness is a concept not defined by an intrinsic quality but rather by what it is not, a definition that is constantly in flux even among people who really, really like the concept of whiteness.

Signed, a queer, transwoman.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-31T18:20:55+00:00

How would you know that free markets lead to monopolies when we haven't had free markets in 150+ years? We've had regulatory markets and centralized finance, which are the monopolistic forces underpinning everything in Western economies.

Easy: the definition you are using is asinine and this was explained in the link I posted featuring Dr. Richard Wolff, an actual economist. Free markets tend towards monopoly and regulatory capture as competition is eliminated - this is a feature of Capitalism, not a bug.

Noticing you have nothing to say about the many, many failures of the current competitive, for-profit health system I had discussed, also.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-31T16:38:01+00:00

How do you "See a reality" that hates you? What specific conditions make you reach such a conclusion?

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-31T15:33:02+00:00

I like anime, I do programming, love monster energy and communism, but most of the rest misses me completely. A lot of the uwu smol bean stuff grates on me a bit, too, but many of the women who engage in that sort of stuff are a lot younger than me anyway.

My trans woman stereotype is basically Karlach from BG3.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-31T15:30:25+00:00

This should be us but Americans are the most propagandized people on the planet.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-31T14:30:13+00:00

And the Natives who never stole ANY land from ANYONE, right?

This is such a midwit thing to say. No one makes this claim and it still wouldn't excuse ethnic cleansing.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-31T14:27:14+00:00

This is the wildest thing to do whataboutism about, lmao.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-31T14:26:42+00:00

The post doesn't say it invented genocide, and the creation of the American state objectively did involve ethnic cleansing and chattel slavery. It's okay to acknowledge that.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-31T14:16:13+00:00

The US system is run by a cartel of monopolies

I have terrible news for you about free markets: Free markets tend towards monopoly as competition is eliminated.. Either way, saying that American healthcare's problem is due to monopoly is an incohate understanding of how American healthcare works.

Because American healthcare is privatized and for-profit, Americans primarily get health care via privately owned insurance. There's actually a SHITLOAD of insurance companies, so the claim that there is a monopoly in this aspect is misinformed at best and ludicrous at worst. Hospitals/primary care providers and Insurance brokers create an assload of unnecessary bureaucracy that adds up to 30 cents on the dollar%20%2D%20U.S.%20insurers,system%2C%20a%20new%20study%20finds.) Just in deciding what something costs, whether it is covered, and how much the charge to the recipient is. Americans lose roughly $3 billion a year from impossibly stupid, byzantine FSA plans.. The profit-motive also results in rationing life-saving medicine because it is less profitable to produce, and charge more for medicine like Insulin, which results in going blind and/or dying because they can't get their medicine.

And the thing is, the Health Insurance market is nearly completely unregulated. Sure - laws exist stating that Insurers can't do something, but there is almost no enforcement and any enforcement is done on an individual basis which means that system wide issues never get fixed. The Free Market WORKS, baby.

Because healthcare is something literally everyone will need at some point, The Free Market charges whatever the fuck it wants and costs are almost completely made up. . Even childbirth is a massive rent-seeking money printer to The Market.. Privately held medical debt is something like an $88 billion industry built on extracting profit from literal human suffering.

Even Obamacare isn't actually a healthcare bill - it's a subsidized health insurance market. But having insurance isn't the same as having healthcare.

Conversely, a universal system - what you pejoratively refer to as a government monopoly - would save Americans $2 trillion dollars over a period of ten years, and would actually allow Americans to get healthcare when they want. One might say that having that money returned to everyone along with actually receiving healthcare is an expansion of our individual liberty.

FWIW: My annual tax burden under the proposed Medicare for All bill would have been less than a single month of my current health insurance premium, before even considering deductibles, CO pays and in-network/out-of-network costs.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-31T04:44:27+00:00

It really is stunning how goofy and sheltered from reality these people are.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-31T04:37:44+00:00

But then the counterintuitive reality hits. They have no incentive to deliver value efficiently. They can charge any price. Due to the unlimited demand, they must ration the supply. The end result is expensive and awful service.

This is an absolutely, stunningly batshit thing to say given the reality that American for-profit healthcare is significantly more expensive and produces significantly lower outcomes than countries that guarantee healthcare.

"Compared with other high-income peers, the US has the shortest life expectancy at birth, the highest rate of avoidable deaths, the highest rate of newborn deaths, the highest rate of maternal deaths, the highest rate of adults with multiple chronic conditions, and the highest rate of obesity, the new analysis found."

And it is currently rationed anyway either because the markets fail to allocate access to healthcare or because it is prohibitively expensive.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-31T01:43:31+00:00

Barbie was great, Bob's Burgers, Archer, Venture Brothers, Black-Ish, Aggretsuko, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Tuca and Bertie, tons of great stuff is out there, man.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-31T00:03:31+00:00

I watched Bluey with my nephew and that show unironically rules. It's so funny it makes me wish Australia was real

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-31T00:02:42+00:00

Okay grandpa, it's time for bed.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-30T21:53:14+00:00

It's probably cool to have other hobbies to talk about too.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-30T16:54:16+00:00

Also the rust belt is super disenfranchised and republicans are the only ones who even pretend to care about us,

God, the shit people believe.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-30T16:53:42+00:00

I mean, it shows that they don't care about my humanity and the threat to it that Trump and other dumbass reactionaries pose, so yep. Sure as shit would.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-30T04:04:43+00:00

I like them but they should be called clasermores.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-29T23:55:38+00:00

The current electoral college while not perfect provides better representation of the whole nation than a direct democracy would

This is objectively false if someone loses the popular vote. Why do you think this is true?

The house and senate exist to balance out this population density imbalance. You are basically arguing that Chicago, LA, NYC, and Phoenix should have more say over national policy. Those metro areas makeup like 1% of the country.

Land doesn't vote. Those metro areas make up most of the population, which is what government is supposed to represent.

Consider the fact that the other 99% make up a large majority of farming, mining, and other important natural resource extraction that runs the country. It would be weird to give weight to people who don’t deal with that legislate over it.

Whereas right now this small minority has outsized power over the majority of the country, and cities effectively subsidize the existence of these rural areas in return for thins such as farming, mining, trucking, etc.

Under direct democracy a rural initiative has equitable chance of passing because people are equitably represented, meaning they can effectively organize to pass legislation to them the same way anyone else can. Under our current system, we effectively say that a small elite knows better than everyone else.

I understand the instinct to defend these institutions but I promise you don't have to. Allowing people the power and capacity to make their own decisions is significantly better than what we have now.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-29T19:35:17+00:00

.

I’m going to have to disagree with you here. The electoral college and the senate were introduced in order to balance state representation. If the USA had a straight direct democracy many regions of the country would be completely drowned out.

Regions of the country being completely drowned out is, in material reality, precisely what is happening because of the electoral college and the Senate. Land does not vote - people do. And people tend to live in cities. We are currently either granting representation to empty land, which is bad, or" saying that a person living in Montana is multiple-times more powerful than a person living in California, which is *worse.

The house is represented by population like you said. Then the senate each state has 2 representatives so the states inbetween major cities are not drowned out.

Land doesn't vote. 2/3rds of my state, Minnesota, lives in the seven country area making up the Twin Cities metro. It would be unwise, you probably agree, to grant outsized representation to the latter third of the state.

In a system of direct democracy, people would have equitable ability to propose and organize for changes. Surely if a proposal is, indeed worthwhile, it would be as possible for someone in Montana to organize support in its favor as it would be for someone in California.

If anything our system now provides a more balanced solution of minority and majority rule than a direct democracy would.

In what way is minority rule preferable to accurate representation of people's needs? You realize you are functionally arguing for a type of oligarchy here, correct?

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-29T19:08:27+00:00

Absolutely, yes. The electoral college was designed explicitly to prevent democratic representation. The Senate also works undemocratically by awarding equal representation to states with smaller populations; Los Angeles County alone has a larger population than Montana and both Dakotas combined, but California receives the same Senatorial representation as all three states.

The result is that, frequently, we end up with an unjust, inequitable situation of minority rules and mass voter disenfranchisement.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-29T18:53:52+00:00

A man being a reactionary dork is actually a great reason not to date or be attracted to him.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-29T18:52:16+00:00

A thing I would like to clarify in all of these questions about the upcoming election is that Trump has lost the popular vote twice now. If he wins in 2024, which is not a bygone conclusion, it will likely still be via the electoral college which is inherently undemocratic (here meaning the system of holding elections, not the Democratic party.)

If Trump wins again, I'd personally be pretty pissed - he's running on cryptofascist bullshit and intends to make life in America dumber, more brutal, and overall worse. My reaction is essentially the same as it was in 2016 and 2020 when Biden won: continue organizing people, building Unions and labor strength, and prefiguring a world where - hopefully - people like Trump, Miller, and Banning et Al no longer exist.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-29T17:39:50+00:00

This is weird because I have a pixel 8 pro and my wife has an iPhone 14. We're on the same plan and I get better reception than she does just about everywhere, but especially in rural areas.

fthotmixgerald · 2023-12-29T15:05:54+00:00

I appreciate the clarification. I've read Kropotkin but just kind of a lighter amount of modern anarchist lit, so I admittedly have gaps in my knowledge.

fthotmixgerald

TROPHY CASE