Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Rolan7]

Warren has dropped out. Only Biden, Bernie, and Tulsi Gabbard are left.

But it's still news, and we're just waiting to see who she decides to give her vote to.
I was truly close to giving her my vote.  I'm regretting that I almost did... glad I didn't, now.  But it's not like there weren't signs, I just wanted to believe.  And I'm more moderate than many.

But if Trump has taught us anything, it's that the right person in the right place can make all the difference.  Congress has abdicated all its power as if half of them are literal traitors who deserve to swing.

[Naturegirl1999]

I don’t know much about Gabbard, does anyone know what his policies are?

[Rolan7]

Her policies were more or less centrist like Biden.

[sluissa]

I don’t know much about Gabbard, does anyone know what his policies are?

Her.

Gabbard's a bit of a weird duck. In many ways she's a moderate, she has a history of growing up in a conservative family and has a few quotes on record that bother some people. She's also got history in the military, but instead of turning her into a hawk, that's apparently made her fiercely push for peace as a policy, ending wars and all that jazz. She's also been vocally anti establishment, even though excepting those couple of quirks, she's pretty much a mainstream moderate democrat. She probably would have stood a decent chance until Biden joined in, she kinda filled the same niche as Buttigieg though. Young, moderate, military history, but with a lack of experience and a few glaring flaws she'd have to get past.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Gabbard is pro-Hawaii, anti-DNC, sympathetic to Baathists and Modi, and always, always angry.

[scriver]

Yep. Norway's current right-wing coalition government has been actively dismantling and selling off the public transportation system to private actors, because apparently someone thought that you could apply free market competition and avoid monopolies when managing the country's singular, government-built railway network.

Also they've been cutting funding and staffing for public health providers, then complaining that the public health institutions are underfunded and understaffed so we need to open up for more private providers. By giving them the money to set up and run their businesses.
/quote]

And Sweden is even worse off in this regard, we have completely abandoned the Nordic Model for Neoliberal Heaven. Which makes it extra sad that Norway is following in those steps because they could have just looked at Sweden and gone "nope, see how that turned out, that's why it takes seven Swedes to change a light bulb, we're not doing that here too".

We do actually have a literal communist party though. They recently hit a milestone achievement and got a whole seat in parliament for the first time.

I haven't been able to take the Swedish communist party seriously since they changed their name from The Communist Party the Marxist-Leninist the Revolutionaries (KPMLR) to just "the Communist Party". If the communist party doesn't even have a ridiculously convoluted name then  what is even the point of voting for them

[Kagus]

It's even worse over here, our communist party is just called "Red". That's it. Not even "The Red Party" or "The Reds", just... "Red".


Also usually the only time Sweden gets mentioned in politics over here these days is when the righties point over there and say "Lookit all them fukken' immigrants! It's all gone wrong!", and then they slap a brown person.

The Facebook meme lady I mentioned actually took an impromptu trip to Sweden, officially announced "Yep, it's shit" and went home again. People were very miffed, seeing as she had violated procedure and completely foregone informing the Swedish government that she was making a diplomatic visit.

But that's one of those things that doesn't matter when you're right, y'know?

[Reelya]

What does billionaires per capita mean anyway? That your countrymen are more adept at aggregating unrealistic amounts of wealth?

It means a higher proportion of the society are able to succeed. It's not just at that level, it's at all levels.

The GINI coefficiet of Sweden is 29.2, while the USA has a GINI of 49. So they've got more billionaires, but it's not at the expense of their countrymen. They've got a higher proportion of people with decent income at every level from the ground up. The point here is that the Scandinavian welfare state model distributes the goods from capitalism both more evenly and efficiently than the American model.

[wierd]

How high the top can climb is not a good indicator IMO-- I would look at the median availability of all aspects of social achievement, rather than just how high the wealthy have managed to perch themselves.

[Cthulhu]

Hard disagree.  You can become a millionaire off pluck and sweat, I'll give that one, but one only becomes a billionaire to laugh in the face of god.

[Cheesy Honkers]

Yeah you can be a millionaire off of pluck and sweat as long as the pluck and sweat aren't yours

[Naturegirl1999]

Thanks. I thoought I saw a political ad with a guy about Gabbard. I must hae saw an ad for someone else with a G name

[dragdeler]

-

[Reelya]

How high the top can climb is not a good indicator IMO-- I would look at the median availability of all aspects of social achievement, rather than just how high the wealthy have managed to perch themselves.

I don't know, it's not cut and dried. Sweden has a high general standard of living, and lower overall inequality (by miles), but also a higher proportion of people who've "made it". So just saying "a lot of people got rich so it must be bad" isn't necessarily a straightforward conclusion to draw. What that suggests is that in Sweden there's much higher social mobility, so talented people do in fact get rich more often. If you have a situation where you can say "well there's only one billionaire in my country, so accumulation of wealth is less of a problem" then clearly that is a problem. That means you have very high inequality and low social mobility.

Saying you don't want any rich people, because that's bad because someone else is poor, is basically saying you want a system that actively works to keep everyone poor and actively steps in to hamper anyone with initiative. You could keep everyone perfectly even, getting a GINI even lower than the mid 20's that the Scandinavian nations have, but that would come at great expense. Everyone would be equal. Equally eating dirt, basically.

[scriver]

Yeah you can be a millionaire off of pluck and sweat as long as the pluck and sweat aren't yours

Swedish companies have (or perhaps I should say have had, since his is retrospectively speaking) a tendency of treating their Swedish employees and partners very well and their foreign sources not so much.

Like IKEA for example, my own grandfather made lots of money betting on them (against the establishment) as a subcontracted "furniture clothing" factory. But IKEA also made heavy use of prison labour in the good ole East Germany.