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

Is there NO ONE that can keep it in their fucking pants?!

… it does seem to be a rare talent.

Society… and I don’t know if it’s western society, or the whole world, places an overwhelming amount of emphasis on sex and money, particularly as elements of patriarchy and of (toxic) masculinity.

@PoM:

I don’t like cash transfers because the cash goes into the pockets of people who aren’t needy: landlords and service providers. The provision of benefits to the needy is an afterthought. Since it is possible to provide benefits to the needy without the middleman, it makes sense to me to do that. Middlemen do not need to be enriched. Period.

ETA: I guess what I’m saying is that cash transfer benefits try to operate within a capitalist system, which we all know to be kind of shit.

Your proposal also tries to operate within a capitalist system. And it is your proposal that actually delivers cash directly to the nonneedy. If your housing is a “public/private partnership” the money goes to a property company. Welfare benefits earmarked for specific uses, and accepted by only specific businesses, goes to those businesses. You’d have the government decide what poor people eat (and what they have to do without). Unless the government starts up its own large-scale farming operations, they’re going to be delivering that money not to the pockets of farmers, but to whichever giant ag conglomerate had the lowest bid.

You want to know something that distorts economies? Giant government contracts won by single suppliers.

Cash transfers directly to individual people, on the other hand, will result in that money being spent to diverse businesses, sometimes to small or local businesses, rather than to a tiny set of giant government-contractor companies that win big while all the others lose.

While we still have capitalism, it seems like the choice that benefits smaller businesses and stimulates demand and competition from below is far preferable to the one that just picks a few winners from among incumbent big businesses and shovels yet more pork to these. Neither does a UBI preclude phasing out capitalism over time.

Let’s also consider what sort of post-capitalist world each suggestion points toward. The government-mandated-specific-things one looks an awful lot like Stalinism to me, and that particular variety of socialism had its chance and proved to be a failure. Now maybe that’s just my politics — I plot in the lower left quadrant, a left libertarian, and maybe you’re a left authoritarian instead — but I think I like the post-capitalism a UBI moves us toward more than the post-capitalism your alternative moves us toward.

@Shadowplay:

If everyone gets a universal basic income, what need is there for 90% of the services? You got your money, you pay for what you need.

To combat market abuses of various types, mostly monopolistic and other rent-seeking behavior. Single-payer healthcare, for example, can effectively bargain with the private sector health care industries, while individual consumers — whatever their income source — when in health trouble would basically be negotiating over the barrel of a gun, and in the US get taken to the cleaners as a result.

@WWTH:

The issue is that the narrative of people who aren’t doing paid employment as lazy and useless is inherently oppressive

@Gussie Jives:

We’re bombarded with feedback that we’re only as good as the wealth that can be extracted from us.

People are ends in themselves, rather than means. So all classifications of people into “useful” vs. “useless” or similarly constitute category errors. The only reason such blatant mistakes in reasoning are so commonplace is because they are mistakes that the plutocracy finds very convenient.

(Classifying people as “useful” or “useless” also exposes an interesting dichotomy. Useful or useless to whom? Either everyone is, a priori, equally important, and then we’ve clearly put the cart before the horse; or else there’s one group of people who are supposed to be useful to another group of people. The latter, obviously, is kyriarchy, and constitutes our enemy. So when it’s not a mistake it’s outright treason…even if you’d propose replacing a kyriarchy of undeserving privileged white cishet male plutocrats with a new kyriarchy of arguably-more-deserving disabled and underprivileged-under-the-old-kyriarchy lords benefiting from the exploitation of the abled and formerly-privileged. Our enemy must be kyriarchy itself and not just the particular kyriarchy we’ve got in the here-and-now.)

@Scildfreja:

I have to go shovel a bunch’a snow

But it’s not even December yet!

Cash transfers directly to individual people, on the other hand, will result in that money being spent to diverse businesses, sometimes to small or local businesses, rather than to a tiny set of giant government-contractor companies that win big while all the others lose.

That’s also exactly why the concept of ‘trickle down’ was always bullshit.

Give money to the rich and they’ll just hide most of it away, which only weakens an economy.

Give that money to the poor and the economy will go into over-drive as that money will be spent locally on necessities that were unaffordable before.

take the form of government going into competition

I think this should be the case for all necessary services.

Some people frankly need to be punished for not working. I know, and I’m sure everyone else knows, folks who are perfectly capable, who have skills, who just don’t feel like working but instead feel like sitting at home doing nothing but playing video games and being supported by Mom or by a partner.

This is the exact same “Argument” that Republicans use when they whine about welfare.

It’s shitty and wrong when they use it, and it’s shitty and wrong when you use it. Seriously, what in the fuckbastarding fuck?

Louis C.K.! What a disappointment. Granted, I’ve never been what anyone would consider a ‘fan’ of his (or honestly any comedian with the exception of perhaps Tig Notaro), but I thought he at least seemed like a decent guy. You just can’t trust celebreties, man.

And poor sweet Paddles… as the years go by I become more convinced that cats should be very strictly indoor pets.

@freneticferret,

Indoor kitties for the win! They’re safer, they live longer, and local wildlife is better protected. You just have to make sure they have plenty to do so they don’t get bored. Some ppl get very defensive about it so I try not to be overly zealous in public 😀
In any case, we have a lot of cane toads around here, so even if I wanted my fluffets to roam, it’d be too dangerous.

Re the conversation on UBI & related issues: it’s indeed fascinating reading people’s points on this, & it’s an essential topic that I haven’t given enough thought to.
The notion of punishing ppl for not working (et cetera) … oh, jeez. My family background is what USians might refer to as “white trash”, and there’s a long history of mental illness to boot. We do all actually work (except my brother) but I still went cold all over when I read that. People here (Aust.) are already punished for not working, to a degree that borders on cruelty.

@Gussie Jives,

Just based on my experience, I think a big part of it is just low self-esteem. I mean, let’s face it, this world that we live in doesn’t exactly lend itself to reflections of affirmation. We’re bombarded with feedback that we’re only as good as the wealth that can be extracted from us.

Your comment was particularly interesting, as I just finished reading Selfie, by Will Storr (the title & the promo blurb do the book no favours – it’s actually quite nuanced & well researched). Anyhoo, Storr’s thesis is basically the opposite of what you’ve described; he argues that ‘we’ (white westerners) have far too much self-esteem.
My own view is like yours, but I still really liked the book. The chapter on Ancient Greece, & the final section on the Silicon Valley culture, are fascinating 🙂

My goodness, and I thought it was bad in London! I know it isn’t brilliant in the U.K., but still, we’re still so lucky to live in a country that still has some vestige of a socially responsible government.

Sorry, I meant that for @
Shadowplay.

Any reason to make fun of Jeff Sessions is a good one.
Meanwhile, a Maine politician who told the women’s marchers to get back in the kitchen just lost re-election to a female candidate. Guess he’ll be making his OWN dinners from now on…

Hm.

American hyper-capitalism breeds the lonely, alienated men who become mass killers

@PoM
It’s not that people are misunderstanding you. It’s that you’re wrong, and part of the way you’re wrong is that you’re ignoring how your plan would inevitably be implemented if the starting point was our present political economy or anything that closely resembled it. Another part, of course, is that you’re ignoring the actual needs of the people you’re supposedly trying to help, several of whom have expressed those needs here in this very thread. In this regard, you’re following in the best traditions of American social work/social services, and demonstrating why those are so abominably awful in practice.
Also, as has been noted, that’s not at all how inflation works.