The rise of right populism

[Radiant head]

Which, I argue, could've been prevented had leading social democrats done a better job at handling the changes that came along with globalization.

fair, but i would say their failure to do so speaks volumes about the limits of social democracy.

gonna just leave this here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/02/sweden-welfare-social-democracy-socialism/

Edited November 13, 2016 by Radiant head

[Life]

that's not really a biological viewpoint, that's a philosophical viewpoint, don't get them confused

no such thing as purpose or meaning in biology, just chemical reactions

Ok, fair way of explaining it. Still doesn't mean that I think that I should take away their rights in any way.

[Yojinbo]

fair, but i would say their failure to do so speaks volumes about the limits of social democracy.

gonna just leave this here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/02/sweden-welfare-social-democracy-socialism/

Let's agree to disagree then. We're getting off the initial point anyway, which is that the rise of right populism is directly related to the decline of social democracy. I think that's something most of us can understand and agree on.

[Res]

fair, but i would say their failure to do so speaks volumes about the limits of social democracy.

gonna just leave this here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/02/sweden-welfare-social-democracy-socialism/

Thanks for this, it was a very interesting read!

[Phoenix Wright]

Ok, fair way of explaining it. Still doesn't mean that I think that I should take away their rights in any way.

what explicitly is meant to be conveyed when you say trans folks that undergo genital operations forego their humanity?

[Nobody]

fair, but i would say their failure to do so speaks volumes about the limits of social democracy.

gonna just leave this here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/02/sweden-welfare-social-democracy-socialism/

Do you know what caused that change in first place?

You might want to study a little bit of the swedish crisis of the early 90s and what caused it. And also why, from a pragmatic point of view, your "solution" would not work. Or why Sweden needed to trim their walfare in order to keep most of it.

I mean, their welfare is not currently as huge as it was before that crisis, but nowadays they run exemplary balanced budgets, which means the current welfare state (which is still extensive) is not at risk. It's not all a conspiracy of the elites to fuck the poorest.

Edited November 13, 2016 by Nooooooooooooooooooooobody

[Radiant head]

no it's not a conspiracy, a basic analysis of society shows over and over that that the rich and poor have directly contradictory interests.

i didn't even propose a solution besides vaguely saying that a welfare system/social democracy is inadequate, but wow i'm sure all those homeless people in sweden are really relieved about "balanced budgets" lmao.

Edited November 13, 2016 by Radiant head

[Nobody]

I'm sure these homeless people in sweden are relieved to have an welfare that helps them not die of hunger and also have health care and some income. I'm sure the swedish people also like the fact that the homeless are a very small percentage of their country population. Those things wouldn't be guaranteed if their debt had continued to increase as it did back then.

When the government budget goes beyond control, many bad things happen, including, in drastic cases, high inflation. High inflation eats people's incomes, and sometimes even leads to shortages. While it's obvious these things wouldn't easily happen to Sweden, it's naïve to think that everything would be okay with a debt growing at 15% per year (which was what was happening at Sweden just before the crisis). This is actually most of the issue that is happening right now in Venezuela. Their government ignored their budget, expended more than they could, the country got hyperinflation, the government wouldn't cut the deficit but rather tried to freeze prices. By freezing prices, producers started losing money by producing goods. No one would be willing to produce stuff without getting money and actually losing money by doing it, which leads to shortages. The government tried to produce these things by themselves, but they don't have the capacity to do it, and that actually indebts them even more, which makes the problem worse.

You see, even in a society as developed as Sweden, the out of control government deficits caused problems. The real income was falling and the unemployment was soaring BEFORE the welfare cuts and the thing that reversed these was the government controlling its expenses. People don't care about debts and deficits because they "hate the poor". They do because they know that, without paying attention to these, things will be worse for everyone else, the poor included. A government can (and imo should) take care of its country's poor people. They can't ignore economic rules in order to do it, though. That only hurts the entire country, including the very poor they would be trying to help in first place.

Edited November 13, 2016 by Nooooooooooooooooooooobody

[Radiant head]

i'm on my phone so i can't type as much as i would have wanted, but i'll just throw these out there

1 - wealth inequality has been accelerating in sweden since the welfare state has come under attack. yeah it's still better than other countries in the world, but the trends are more important than just taking a current snapshot of things. a country that was actually on the path to trying to eliminate homelessness is now literally going in the opposite direction.

2 - this is exactly why i'm saying welfare is inherently unsustainable. capitalism's contradictions are what causes the need for welfare in the first place, and welfare being the artificial fix that it is just makes those contradictions manifest in other ways, ie. inflation. like when household incomes are directly dependent on the profits of employers that are hurt because of capitalism's boom-bust cycle, that sounds like a conflict of interest to me.

though post-keynsian economists have suggested ways to have the cake and eat it too, but it doesn't really matter as long as it's in the interests of oligarchs to direct money away from welfare and into ways that help their self-interests (so again i'm not interested in moralizing about whether they "hate" the poor or are "evil" for acting in their interests).

Edited November 13, 2016 by Radiant head

[Nobody]

Yet every time something more drastic than it was tried, things went much worse. Every time the theories of Maxism-Leninism were tried, the results were disastrous. You also seem to be mistaking increasing inequality with increasing poverty.
A big part of the homeless in Sweden are immigrants or descended from those (I'm not against immigration. I'm saying the small but existing homeless population isn't, in general, people who used to be well off and then got poor). It's not the actual population that used to be rich and then went to poverty. Even then, according to statistics, the population of sweden that lives on shelters or on the streets is at around 5000, which is just a small fraction of the countries 9000000 inhabitants.

Welfare is not unsustainable, the current welfare that Sweden has is perfectly sustainable. Even if it were, Marxism-Lelinism certainly wouldn't be an alternative. It's funny that you say you have "no love for communism" and is more of an "anarchist". Of course, that is an easy thing to say. Communism was tried extensively and failed catastrophically. Anarchism is so abstract and absurd it wasn't and arguably can't even be tried. Every time I ask you what you think and what the solutions to the current day problems would be, you just dodge the question. Idealism without pragmatism is useless, harmful and causes populism in first place. Things might not be perfect, but, at least when it comes to most first world countries and, specially Sweden, they're better than a lot of alternatives, including your so loved Marxism, or the insanity of anarchism. Change has to be done moderately, gradually, democratically, backed by economic and social studies and extensively discussed by specialists and society.

Also, do you have a source saying things were all sunny and well in Sweden before the crisis (which would be irrelevant anyway, since, as you know, the model they used to have back then was unsustainable)?

EDIT: Sorry if I sounded a bit too aggressive in this post lol i mean no offense

Edited November 13, 2016 by Nooooooooooooooooooooobody

[Radiant head]

my profile title is mostly a joke, i'm a marxist strictly in the sense that i take a dialectical materialist view on the current system, which has proven to be extremely reliable over and over again. yeah, the soviet union was a disaster, though at the same time they had a lot of accomplishments dramatically transforming an agrarian society into a superpower and dramatically raising the standards of living that can we can selectively learn from. and the "threat of communism" is a huge part of what made the social democracy compromise in finland and scandinavia.

i'm not really sure exactly what my ideal post-capitalist system would look like, though at the same time i'm not terribly interested in imagining utopias, and more interested in seeing what can be done within the current system with a marxist perspective, which for now (imo) just means defending what is left of welfare, dramatically raising wages and reducing work hours (all doable in the current state of automated labour), maybe having a universal basic income, and introducing enterprises that are collectively owned by workers. the eventual transition outside capitalism will depend on future generations when the working class is more powerful and the material conditions then.

if you think welfare is sustainable, i hope you're right, but i have no reason to believe that any of the current parties aren't interested in dismantling more welfare. i know for sure the right parties want to gut the 30 hour week program.

Edited November 13, 2016 by Radiant head

[Life]

what explicitly is meant to be conveyed when you say trans folks that undergo genital operations forego their humanity?

They sterilize themselves in order to switch gender. That's both messing with biology and knowingly taking yourself out of the reproduction game in one move.

[Irysa]

So do dudes who get vasectomies? Are they also "subhuman"?

[UNLEASH IT]

They sterilize themselves in order to switch gender. That's both messing with biology and knowingly taking yourself out of the reproduction game in one move.

Since I work on a cattle farm, I've actually been messing with biology quite a bit (through estrus synchronization) and knowingly been taking animals out of the breeding pool. We actually use vasectomised (not castrated, there's a difference) bulls for estrus detection as well as in semen collection (as mounts for other bulls) for artificial insemination. There is a part of me that thinks it goes against nature but I believe that I'm helping a lot of people by doing so, that a lot of the progress that mankind has made has come about from messing with biology. I guess that you could counter my argument that these people don't actually help anyone else by doing these operations and your point would be valid in some way. But I still have to disagree with you, since I don't think that they're actually hurting anyone else by doing these operations and don't deserve to be treated any less for it, neither do they need to be blindly regarded as paragons of virtue (something that, from personal experience, very few of them actually want)

And just as another point, it can be argued that circumcision is also a violation of biology, but one that many men throughout history had to do (especially before the development of modern medicine and the principles of hygiene) or risk contracting an illness that could've possibly been life threatening.

The second you feel the need to have a completely unnecessary medical procedure in order to change your sex because "you don't feel comfortable in your body", you have forfeited your right to be treated as a human being. Full fucking stop. It is a perversion of the animal kingdom. And before you want to jump down my throat for possibly thinking the same way of homosexuality, that is incorrect because homosexuality also exists within the animal kingdom, especially in primates (but not limited to).

As for why it is not on the same level as saying "Chink" or "Kike" or whatever, it is because the operation itself is unnecessary whatsoever in any medical capacity. It is something that the person is choosing the change. Race is from your DNA and ancestry. There is no medical procedure available to change race.

As a bit of a counter argument to this, there have been many arguments made that circumcision is now an unnecessary medical procedure especially in countries such as America, due to the advance of modern medicine and hygiene. Yet it's still something that's being done today and seen as the norm in America and Israel, countries who don't need it anymore (despite not being the norm in many European countries), with very little being done to change it.

Edited November 14, 2016 by UNLEASH IT

[Lord Raven]

I'm going to say now that it's not really worth trying to revive this discussion so much as continue a previous one.

EDIT: I've seen zero response to this post in particular.

Edited November 14, 2016 by Lord Raven

[Time the Crestfallen]

They sterilize themselves in order to switch gender. That's both messing with biology and knowingly taking yourself out of the reproduction game in one move.

Your continued insistence on using 'biology' as a justification for this view is perplexing. In theory, would you disapprove of trans-humanism or human enhancement through technology?

On the matter of the 'reproduction' game, there's more to life than just fucking and making babies you know.

Edited November 14, 2016 by The Blind Idiot God

[eclipse]

GUYS, this is the populism topic.

[UNLEASH IT]

GUYS, this is the populism topic.

I apologise for that, it was selfish of me. I just felt like those were thoughts I needed to get off my chest.

[Time the Crestfallen]

GUYS, this is the populism topic.

Perhaps move these posts into another topic? Unless everyone's find with stopping that is.

[Phoenix Wright]

They sterilize themselves in order to switch gender. That's both messing with biology and knowingly taking yourself out of the reproduction game in one move.

all of medicine is "messing with biology." all of genetic mutation is "messing with biology." and if someone doesn't want kids, why the hell do you care? and how does the inability to procreate (or ridding oneself of the ability) relinquish their humanity?

I'm going to say now that it's not really worth trying to revive this discussion so much as continue a previous one.

true.

welfare is entirely sustainable. having a military-industrial complex simultaneously is not.

Edited November 14, 2016 by Phoenix Wright

[eclipse]

Perhaps move these posts into another topic? Unless everyone's find with stopping that is.

While that would be the most obvious solution, I'm trying to figure out how that topic will look in about a week, and I'm not encouraged. I'll have a better answer tomorrow night, because I'm dead tired right now.

[Time the Crestfallen]

While that would be the most obvious solution, I'm trying to figure out how that topic will look in about a week, and I'm not encouraged. I'll have a better answer tomorrow night, because I'm dead tired right now.

Yeah, now that you mention it...

*shudders*

Best to just leave it be.

[Rezzy]

While that would be the most obvious solution, I'm trying to figure out how that topic will look in about a week, and I'm not encouraged. I'll have a better answer tomorrow night, because I'm dead tired right now.

Is that from election fall-out or is there some event going on next week that I'm unaware of?

I would like to add some points about transgenderism, but should I just wait for a dedicated topic? I don't really want to derail this one.

[Lord Raven]

Is that from election fall-out or is there some event going on next week that I'm unaware of?

If you read the post I linked, you'll see exactly what she means.

[Rezzy]

If you read the post I linked, you'll see exactly what she means.

I read your posts responding to Life about transgenderism, but not sure what the one week time frame would be, or if you meant the White house thread already showed where the discussion will head. I tried to stay away from the White House thread until the end of the campaign.