Dems win big! The Incels subreddit is banned! Celebrate in this open thread

@wwth

Didn’t take it personally at all. No harm, no foul. 🙂

And yeah, the hypocrisy often on display is somewhere between breath-taking and infuriating. If they’re going to talk personal responsibility (something I’m vastly in favor of) it starts with them. No excuses.

Universal basic income though …. most people are idle sods, given half a chance. How would UBI square a guaranteed income with getting the unpleasant stuff done that needs to be done in a complex society? Never seen an answer to that that takes account of human nature. Even Star Trek glosses over that bit! 😛

@kupo

I think we should do both. I’m not interested in reinstating Victorian work houses, but two of the biggest problems with being out of work is that skills atropy, and employers overlook the long-term unemployed. Volunteer work is great and all, but working for free is really only doable if you don’t need childcare.

As for the diabled? If they want to work it should be on the government to find work suitable for them.

Anyway, since we’re talking about Coal, John Oliver knocked it out of the park. Or at least, I think he did in that video. My internet connection’s too slow to check that’s the video that I remember.

r/incels was banned. So a new site takes its place. But now I wonder how many of them fled to the mgtow, trp, mra subreddits / created another one / sunk back into chan sites / or scurried towards the deep/dark web.

It’s an old progressive idea, but a goodie; offer guaranteed employment. Anyone who wants to work, should be able to, through the government.

I’m totally for that. Or at least having that during economic crashes like the jobs program through the ERA during the Great Depression. The problem is, those jobs won’t be great or well paying and the people that are reluctant to retrain for jobs that already exist probably won’t want those jobs either. They don’t just want a job. They want their old jobs and resent that they’re not there.

That’s part of why it’s darkly funny that the people in that profile were complaining about the NFL players and insinuating that people of color are entitled and don’t work hard. Because in my experience, those supposedly lazy black and Latinx people are so much more willing to take shitty jobs if they need to than (particularly middle aged) white people are.

I also remember that the 2008 crash hit men a lot harder than women in terms of joblessness. It turns out that men are pretty unwilling to apply for the service sector jobs that make up such a huge part of the job market these days. Women apply for them and take them if they have to even though those jobs are just as soul sucking and demoralizing for us as they would be for men.

White men just too often believe that they are entitled to high status jobs. Or at least that they have more of a right to good jobs over other people. I think that’s a part of the “economic anxiety” vote. Some of that anxiety is over having to stoop to the treatment that their perceived lessers receive.

Universal basic income though …. most people are idle sods, given half a chance. How would UBI square a guaranteed income with getting the unpleasant stuff done that needs to be done in a complex society?

Maybe that’s a cultural difference? In my experience most people want to work and get antsy when they don’t. Also, UBI would only guarantee enough for the basics. If you want enough money for nice clothes, travel, dinners out, a big house, whatever, you’d still need to work. Shitty jobs would get less shitty if people didn’t need them to survive too. Then there’s automation.

/r/incels has merely moved to http://incels.org, so it’s not as if there will be a shortage of content in the future.

@wwth – it could be a cultural thing. I recall a line from an old 2000AD comic, along the lines of: “The Brits had a unique answer to the unemployment problem. They all volunteered for it.” 😛

@Jenora – thank you for the link. I’ll read it shortly, as I am curious. Something has to be done, but what, I don’t know.

I do think that the sticking point is the idea of useful work. To pick an admittedly extreme example, sewage work is not only useful but vital, but there isn’t exactly a queue of people for any vacancies. If someone was guaranteed food on the table, would they bother to apply? Bearing in mind that no one ever wants to pay much for their sewage to be dealt with.
Meh, I’ll leave it to smarter people. Glaze over when the economy gets talked about.

And to make amends for the various seriousnesses and bad news links recently …

Mortal Tomcat!!!

@WWTH

All good points. And this;

“White men just too often believe that they are entitled to high status jobs. Or at least that they have more of a right to good jobs over other people.

Tell me about it. And all of society backs them up! I’m divorced, and I still have people scolding me that working interferes with my ex working. 9_9

“Maybe that’s a cultural difference? In my experience most people want to work and get antsy when they don’t.”

Good old Puritian Work Ethic for ya. But even given that some places are a little more relaxed, I’ve never met a culture that doesn’t like to work. I’m 100% convinced that 100% of the talk that we give ourselves about people being “lazy sods” is just us internalizing the lies we are told to justify fucking the poor.

@ shadowplay

it could be a cultural thing

There was a series in the 80s called ‘Play for Tomorrow’. One episode had people in the future looking at film of an old anti nuclear rally.

“‘No cruise’. What does that mean?”

“It’s a protest against holidays; they were mad keen to work back then.”

@Jesalin:
Of course. I was talking in the (very) general there as to how you can have a UBI without removing incentive to work. Though I still think that most people will want to work at something just to have something to do. It’s just going to be some of the messier jobs that may be problems.

Not to mention that costs of living vary significantly from place to place. A ‘we could live on that easily’ amount may not be so easy depending on where you live. For one end, I live in the part of Toronto that used to be the suburbs a hundred years ago, in a small house 70 years old, and the land alone is probably worth close to half a million these days.

@Shadowplay:
Part of the point of doing something like UBI is to make a much larger pool that money goes into and out of. Like with Surplus to Requirements’ comments about other social spending, a lot of the ‘infrastructure maintenance’ jobs would pretty much have to be government jobs with enough money behind them to attract people. Sure, nobody wants to pay money for sewage, but why should sewage be separate from the general tax pool from property taxes?

Granted, a lot of this (also calling back to Surplus to Requirements’ comment) is really a complaint that the current system isn’t working, largely because of ‘rent-seeking’ behaviour where somebody puts themselves into the middle of a transaction to extract money for just handling it, without actually contributing anything. There needs to be some way of reducing the ability to engage in parasitic ‘rent-seeking’ behaviour, otherwise the world will continue to be run by the folks who can afford to pay lawyers to argue for days about why they should be allowed to continue to live the high life on the money they are forcing others to pay them for the right to do business.

Car update:

So the dealership has had my car for two days and they have not been able to find a thing wrong with it!

It starts up and runs for them with no problem. They’ve driven it around quite a lot and it has not acted up at all. The computer diagnostic provides no errors. They looked around physically at the wiring and they say everything is in good condition and tightly attached.

So I am going to buy a refurbished computer and have the computer replaced. I can’t risk driving it if it’s going to do the same thing again, and this is the only thing I can think to do.

wrt: the topic

I’m cautiously happy! I think it’s too early to celebrate, but it’s not too early for careful optimism. \o/

*crawls out of burrow*

phew, uh, hi.

Been a rough month (months ?) cos I moved and the new place needs a looot of work done so I haven’t been keeping up too well (I’m on the Discord often tho). How’s eryone ?

Edit : @kupo

Honestly I don’t trust our government to implement something like guaranteed employment without skewing it in favor of the already wealthy.

Right now, France is a pretty scary example. The short of it is that forced employment is basically in effect now and they’re using *government aids* as leverage.

+1 for universal basic income. It’s either that, or the government guarantees food, shelter, heating, water, medical care, and other stuff essential for life for all people.

I’m in favor of option #2. I’ve described it before: guaranteed housing for anyone who wants or needs it, no questions asked, no means testing. Housing comes with food, etc. and the basic necessities; medical care is handled through socialized medicine in a parallel program. Everything provided directly by the government, not through through vouchers or cash transfers, which enrich landlords and service providers.

It met with some resistance here the last time I went through it, but my mind on it hasn’t changed.