The Way Forward - Your Vision for a Post-Trump America

[bad_teammate 13,132]

So when I specifically say "not production of shows" you think it means... what?

Quote

Now transmission-- we sorta, kinda already have that. It's called the FCC.

 

The FCC is a regulatory body that doesn't have anything to do with the physical reality of how the Internet moves around. This is a public utility, like how your water and sewage operates. Only with Internet tubes instead of shit tubes.

[bad_teammate 13,132]

 

[DixonHur 11,171]

15 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

What is "them"? What is production vs. transmission, in your mind?

I'm assuming, by production, you mean content.

But content means nothing unless it's transmitted.  Under your scenario, the government would have final say over what gets transmitted.  In other words, they could choose to only transmit what they agree with.  

For example, all Fox News all the time.

[Cacti 191]

45 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

As goes the Shag, so goes the nation?

I'm obviously talking about this group of people who would be the only ones reading my post.

The vast majority of Surly posters on the politics forum won’t be around long enough to banish Trump. They’ll either have a heart attack, stroke or nervous breakdown before then, or, at the very least won’t be physically able to cast a ballot because their prolific posting has caused a severe case of carpel tunnel syndrome.  

[Clob94 121]

7 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

So when I specifically say "not production of shows" you think it means... what?

The FCC is a regulatory body that doesn't have anything to do with the physical reality of how the Internet moves around. This is a public utility, like how your water and sewage operates. Only with Internet tubes instead of shit tubes.

Just clarifying bruh... you say "production" I say potato. 

 

So we put the government in charge of providing said internet lines to ALL citizens? Ok. 

 

What could go wrong??? I mean, the Obama care website killed it. Right? 

 

I appreciate the esteem and the value that you hold and the faith that you place in our big, burly, lumbering government. But let's be honest. What is our government really good at? I mean really good at? Only one thing: 

 

We can fucking kill you in 31 different flavors. We are hands down the best ever at that shit. We are a killing machine. We've invented ways to kill mother fucker that would make the Tower of London staff from the 16th century green with envy. 

Bullets, bombs, aircraft, poisons, chemicals, nukes-- we actually have weapons that turn your organs to liquid shit just seconds before your lungs prolapse out of your mouth. Hell, we've got shit that will just suck your lungs out of your mouth without turning your insides to liquid shit first. You can be sitting out on some dune in east Africa playing with your pet falcon during a monsoon in the dead of night and some JR officer in Virginia on a video game presses a button, puts a warhead on your forehead, then pours himself another triple latte mochachino. 

 

We are the best at this..... and sadly, only this. 

 

 

[DixonHur 11,171]

15 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

So when I specifically say "not production of shows" you think it means... what?

The FCC is a regulatory body that doesn't have anything to do with the physical reality of how the Internet moves around. This is a public utility, like how your water and sewage operates. Only with Internet tubes instead of shit tubes.

The FCC also controls the allocation of broadcast spectrum...radio, TV, and communications.

[realgreggym 832]

1 hour ago, Huckleberry said:

Pretty sure Melania speaks English.

and 4 other languages so maybe she will be able to vote 5 times for her husband. 

[Clob94 121]

3 hours ago, Whitman said:

 

#MeToo.

 

Mole over the right corner of her mouth. 

 

Would not bang. 

[Clob94 121]

10 minutes ago, DixonHur said:

The FCC also controls the allocation of broadcast spectrum...radio, TV, and communications.

Agreed. Here comes "slippery slope" argument. 

[bad_teammate 13,132]

25 minutes ago, DixonHur said:

I'm assuming, by production, you mean content.

But content means nothing unless it's transmitted.  Under your scenario, the government would have final say over what gets transmitted.  In other words, they could choose to only transmit what they agree with.  

For example, all Fox News all the time.

It already does.

Do you think television is currently unregulated by the government? Do you think television stations do not have to adhere to government rules right now or risk being taken off the air?

 

23 minutes ago, Cacti said:

The vast majority of Surly posters on the politics forum won’t be around long enough to banish Trump. They’ll either have a heart attack, stroke or nervous breakdown before then, or, at the very least won’t be physically able to cast a ballot because their prolific posting has caused a severe case of carpel tunnel syndrome.  

As a veteran of the posting Wars I demand you come to my house to both take my vote and listen to my rant about how space communism is the future

15 minutes ago, Clob94 said:

So we put the government in charge of providing said internet lines to ALL citizens? Ok. 

Yes, just like we put the government in charge of providing access to electricity and telephone service to all rural citizens. By the way, we should provide high-speed broadband to all rural citizens.

You know how you just sign up to get water and it's cheap and clean? It's like that. This really isn't a big scary deal unless you just want to get mad for no reason.

 

Edited July 19, 2018 by bad_teammate

[BillyBadAss 189]

4 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

You know how you just sign up to get water and it's cheap and clean? It's like that. This really isn't a big scary deal unless you just want to get mad for no reason.

 

I'm not arguing one way or the other about whether it's a good idea or not, but it's a little different. 

The water pipes pretty much transmit water or they don't. But water is water for the most part. When a bunch of people who aren't capable of critical thought or just don't understand technology suddenly have the keys to the internet, there is the potential for stupid. See net neutrality. 

[bad_teammate 13,132]

5 minutes ago, BillyBadAss said:

When a bunch of people who aren't capable of critical thought or just don't understand technology suddenly have the keys to the internet, there is the potential for stupid. See net neutrality. 

Net neutrality is only an issue because of the private ownership of the means of transmission and the corresponding profit motive. From the perspective of a publicly-owned non-profit, bits would be bits like water is water.

And there would be democratic oversight to make sure that idiots didn't ruin things and, if they did, we could quickly vote the bums out.

[BillyBadAss 189]

Quickly voting the bums out hasn't turned out to be so quick, or easy.

Again, I'm not arguing one way or the other, just saying it's much more complex, with the potential for much greater of a shit-show than letting the govt pipe water to our homes. I can see some pros as well though. 

[LongestHorn 759]

Republicans will support POTUS come hell or high water.  Fuck the traitors at DoJ, intel community, free press, and diplomatic corps -all Deep State actors who threaten democracy.  Republicans take their orders from Putin and Trump.  Authority, yo.

[RDCanecutter 26,249]

1 hour ago, bad_teammate said:

What is it you think I meant by that?

A bunch of boring-ass NPR with people smacking their lips before they sigh.

[DixonHur 11,171]

1 hour ago, bad_teammate said:

It already does.

Do you think television is currently unregulated by the government? Do you think television stations do not have to adhere to government rules right now or risk being taken off the air?

Classic BT pivot. Bravo.

I should have taken my own advice and not engaged you in the first place.

[bad_teammate 13,132]

8 minutes ago, DixonHur said:

Classic BT pivot. Bravo.

No, I think you just failed to understand how it works now.

Right now, Cox or AT&T or Comcast don't approve or disapprove of programming before it goes over the wires and tubes, and all a nationalized transmission service would do is what Comcast and Cox and AT&T already do. Your assertion that I advocate government censors approving and disapproving of content before broadcast is 100% the invention of your paranoid brain and you're desperately trying to backfill a rationale because you can't actually argue with what I'm saying, you just know you don't like it for ... uh ... reasons.

[Mole 4,320]

Here's my unrealistic answer of what a good post-Trump America would look like:

In my view, the biggest cause of our current situation isn't any particular ideology (Trumpism isn't particularly coherent ideologically) but rather an overemphasis on ideology and team politics. Rather than vote for good representatives, we treat our votes as a referendum on a mixed bag of unclear political points. This means we'll vote for someone unqualified or unfit because they agree with us on abstract political ideas. That doesn't mean the ideology and policy isn't important, but just that it should be maybe 3rd or 4th on our list of considerations. There are of course exceptions when an ideology might be too radical, but they'd likely fail my test anyway.

So, my dream scenario would be for voters to trend towards something like the following test for how they vote:

1. Are they morally/ethically fit for office? Out of recent presidents, this would eliminate Trump and Bill Clinton. I don't expect my politicians to be perfect, but they should have some level of ethics and be mostly not corrupt. They should also be mostly honest.

2. Are they intellectually fit for office, thoughtful about issues, intellectually honest, and argue in good faith? This would certainly eliminate Trump, and depending on your standards, eliminate W as well. It's important to not confuse coming to different conclusions with intellectual unfitness. You can be intelligent and thoughtfully come to conclusions all across the political spectrum. If our government was made up of people who engaged in debate from this standpoint, we'd come up with really good answers rather than failed ideological ones. I think I want an idealized version of academia.

3. Are they competent? This would eliminate Trump for sure again. I'd argue that it eliminated Obama in his second election, but that's debatable. This is where Clinton shined.

4. How much do they agree with me on issues that are important to me? Given a pool of candidates that meet the above criteria, then I'd be happy to vote on policy positions, but we don't have the basics down right now.

The difficulty is decoupling the first three tests from the fourth. It's so easy to think there is something defective with someone who disagrees with us. In short, we seem to have forgotten that we have a representative democracy. We should be looking for representatives. There are many people in this country who meet the above criteria, but very few of them are in elected office.

The ideological and team politics gave us Trump, but I don't think that a particular ideology inherently gives us Trump over any other ideology. It might look different, but there's a lurking authoritarianism in liberalism/progressivism/crony-capitalism/whatever-else-ism as well.

I have no expectations that we'll actually start thinking this way, but it's my political dream.

Edited July 19, 2018 by Mole

[EMAWesome 101]

13 hours ago, bad_teammate said:

No, I think you just failed to understand how it works now.

Right now, Cox or AT&T or Comcast don't approve or disapprove of programming before it goes over the wires and tubes, and all a nationalized transmission service would do is what Comcast and Cox and AT&T already do. Your assertion that I advocate government censors approving and disapproving of content before broadcast is 100% the invention of your paranoid brain and you're desperately trying to backfill a rationale because you can't actually argue with what I'm saying, you just know you don't like it for ... uh ... reasons.

When the Joint Chiefs of Staff report to Cox, AT&T or Comcast then all a nationalized transmission service would do is what Comcast, Cox, and AT&T do. 

[Guest]

21 hours ago, bad_teammate said:

I don't know what it is, but I know it's terrible.

Like any party, there is not lock-step agreement on everything and there is no concrete plan for every contingency, but there are some basic things that are concrete DSA musts.

1)  Vital industries need to be nationalized

In the current political climate, one whose language is so dominated by right-wing political shaping, this comes across to many of you like saying we should drill down into the Earth's mantle and eat lava. But it's really not that big of a deal. The Green Bay Packers are not functionally different from other NFL teams and still win bigly. NASA got to the moon. The trains run on time. Our military can still blow everyone up. Etc...

What does nationalization entail? Non-profit operation and the board of directors are subject to democratic forces. There are a dozen ways this could play out, but the principal is that the profit motive is removed from vital industry so that vital utilities are never withheld from citizens.

So what is vital? Utilities are the obvious place to start (electricity, gas, water, television (transmission, not production of shows), and Internet). Healthcare.

"MY GRANDPA BUILT THIS DILDO FACTORY AND I'LL BE GOD DAMNED IF ..."

While your dildos are cool, they aren't vital.

But speaking of your grandpa's dildo factory...

2) Non-vital industries need to be socialized

The profits of for-profit enterprise should be shared more equally among the workers. Again, there are a dozen ways this could work. The ultimate principal goes into the EXTREMELY TRUE thing Obama said that made idiots mad, "You didn't build that."

Grandpa didn't actually build that dildo factory by himself. Lots and lots of people helped him build it. And the entire American taxpayer used their money to fund the infrastructures necessary for that dildo factory to be built and operate.

Profit sharing is the most obvious and least intrusive way of operating. Instead of Jeff Bezos having $150B and his workers making peanuts, what if that wealth was spread among his workers and he only had $500M to scrape by with? (And yes, I realize that isn't liquid cash and is tied to Amazon's worth in the marketplace, but the principle is still there in terms of ownership shares.)

There are two things. There are a lot more, of course, but those are kind of the most important in terms of Democratic Socialism.

You're missing the more straightforward and effective solution to distribute wealth.  We should turn the $1 bill into the $10,000 bill.  The wealth of each poor person will be raised by thousands of dollars. You might think at this point "but won't all the rich people's wealth increase along with the poor people's wealth?"  The answer is no, not by the same proportion.  Rich people have a comparatively smaller percentage of their wealth in cash; and what they do have is not likely to be $1 bills.  All their wealth in real estate and company ownership and stocks & bonds will not increase.  

[HOOK'EMHOOAH 1,606]

First and foremost, any and every elected official must always be a Constitutionalist. Right now, there is only one major party that is not completely over run by apologists for the cancer among them, that being the Democrats. So while I don't agree with many of their policies, I can at least trust that they will stand for the Constitution and not deviate from it or fuck over the Republic or our allies for personal gain from our enemies. Once the current cancer has been excised from office and the Republican party as a whole - which is what I believe is the personal motivation of Mueller and the few Republicans who aren't compromised - the Republican party will likely be too small to take on the Democrats alone and will have to acquiesce into other parties. There may be some conservative Democrats that leave their main party and join whatever party the former Republicans join provided its moderate enough on civil and financial issues.

As for future elections where a foreign government intervenes in our elections, legislation may come out that states something to the effect of "ballots are to be recast to ensure the validity of the election and the will of the people is upheld."

It would also be helpful if biometrics were implemented for voting as it would do away with the need for IDs and each person would be able to keep a printed record of whom they cast their vote for if ever there was a question of ballot tampering. The infrastructure for this would generate a lot of revenue and ensure secure and free elections. It also ensures that everyone who is supposed to vote gets to vote and only gets to vote once in each election.

[HOOK'EMHOOAH 1,606]

22 hours ago, bad_teammate said:

I don't know what it is, but I know it's terrible.

Like any party, there is not lock-step agreement on everything and there is no concrete plan for every contingency, but there are some basic things that are concrete DSA musts.

1)  Vital industries need to be nationalized

In the current political climate, one whose language is so dominated by right-wing political shaping, this comes across to many of you like saying we should drill down into the Earth's mantle and eat lava. But it's really not that big of a deal. The Green Bay Packers are not functionally different from other NFL teams and still win bigly. NASA got to the moon. The trains run on time. Our military can still blow everyone up. Etc...

What does nationalization entail? Non-profit operation and the board of directors are subject to democratic forces. There are a dozen ways this could play out, but the principal is that the profit motive is removed from vital industry so that vital utilities are never withheld from citizens.

So what is vital? Utilities are the obvious place to start (electricity, gas, water, television (transmission, not production of shows), and Internet). Healthcare.

"MY GRANDPA BUILT THIS DILDO FACTORY AND I'LL BE GOD DAMNED IF ..."

While your dildos are cool, they aren't vital.

But speaking of your grandpa's dildo factory...

2) Non-vital industries need to be socialized

The profits of for-profit enterprise should be shared more equally among the workers. Again, there are a dozen ways this could work. The ultimate principal goes into the EXTREMELY TRUE thing Obama said that made idiots mad, "You didn't build that."

Grandpa didn't actually build that dildo factory by himself. Lots and lots of people helped him build it. And the entire American taxpayer used their money to fund the infrastructures necessary for that dildo factory to be built and operate.

Profit sharing is the most obvious and least intrusive way of operating. Instead of Jeff Bezos having $150B and his workers making peanuts, what if that wealth was spread among his workers and he only had $500M to scrape by with? (And yes, I realize that isn't liquid cash and is tied to Amazon's worth in the marketplace, but the principle is still there in terms of ownership shares.)

There are two things. There are a lot more, of course, but those are kind of the most important in terms of Democratic Socialism.

I borrowed my own comment from another thread to address your comment.

There is a revolution approaching that will change the way humanity interacts with each other and the planet, much in the same way that the industrial revolution did in the late 19th century. I don't know when exactly it will arrive, but it will. It will be the revolution of post-scarcity wherein the aspects that can become automated will become automated. We are already seeing some of the lesser roles in society being automated today, and that's a good thing. Instead of some man or woman going and working a dead end job and having no retirement to speak of and nothing substantial in their life, automated devices designed to perform whatever task will do them for them and society will be able to collect the revenue. Obviously, not everything will be able to be automated, like doctors and teachers and stuff... However, this automation will generate a massive amount of income that can be used to fund things like a universal basic income, pay for health care, and to go to a university or trade school. So the average citizen could then focus on getting an advanced education and our entire society will grow. This doesn't mean that people will just sit at home and choose to do nothing; sure some of them may choose to do that. But that gets fucking boring real fast. There's no adventure in that. There's no challenge in it. So don't push back against the coming age of post-scarcity. When I see someone with a nice house, a nice car, and more money than they know what to do with, I don't think to myself, "No one should have that much." Instead, I think to myself, "Everyone should have that much."

The age of post-scarcity isn't Democratic Socialism in the strict sense that you would have it as there will be a major political revolution to go along with it. It will likely be something of a blend between Libertarianism and Democratic Socialism. When everyone is able to have more straight away, the need to try and acquire from others by force becomes less. So People will be able to actualize more of their own freedoms, the right of self-governance and the right of self-determination than ever before. The primary point that should be taken away from the above is that with automation being a major driving force in the economy of the planet, the notion that some guy having to work in your grandfather's dildo factory goes out the window. Instead, that guy can go to architectural school and learn how to design the best dildos on the planet and have an automated assembly line make far more of them than any number of humans ever could and society will reap the rewards monetarily (and sexually). I don't agree that nationalizing everything is necessarily a good thing or that it will happen, or that it is even necessary once the humanity reaches the age of post-scarcity. Nationalization of the vital industries will only make it so competition doesn't happen (or slows to a crawl), which is a hallmark of the free market and a prime driver of innovation. For example, putting men on the moon. Do you honestly think that would've happened were the US and USSR not in a competing arms race/space race against each other? Today we have SpaceX and Blue Horizons and a few others in a race to get the cost of space flight down. My point is, without that competition, these things don't happen. Perhaps in the age of post-scarcity it may be different with regard to nationalizing some things, but innovation will always need competition as a prime driver. That's just human nature.