pearable

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/

TLDR deregulating medicine has been a disaster. Monopolistic hospitals, ridiculous drug IP laws, and medical price middlemen with bad incentives make the US medical system the most expensive in the imperial core countries with the worst outcomes.

I don't know what that has to do with anything. I'm a lefty, life has never mugged me. I'm a leftist because bad things happen to everyone and the solutions isn't to hurt people until they're better people. Giving people time and resources just makes people and society better.

Because billionaires are morally good, hard working, and smart. If a poor person was all those things they wouldn't be poor /s

I'm going to vote for the democrat this November but I think most folks who talk about this issue are not disingenuous. Voting in the presidential election is a bare minimum, minimally effective political action. For me and most of the people I know it matters almost not at all because I don't live in a swing state. My local elections matter a hell of a lot more.

There are limits to the effectiveness of electoralism that are worth understanding. I think a lot of folks who talk about the Democrat's failures are advocating for political action beyond voting. Direct action is a far more effective form of political action that people should be putting their energies into.

Union organizing, renter's orgs, housing activism, talking to your neighbors, local politics, and lots more are much more effective ways to assert power in your life. Voting makes me feel helpless. We need to act as well. The primary thing preventing positive political change is the belief that we can't do anything to bring that change about.

I like old mountain bikes and more modern bikes with thicker tires. I find it improves the riding experience a good bit. Regardless, the bike you have, and ride, is the best bike

I don't think it's the source. I think it's a tool of social control that enables the powerful to create a bare minimum willingness to be ruled. For a long time the doctrine of Christianity was the Divine Right of Kings. Now it's the Prosperity Gospel. The books did not change but the people with all the money and power ensured the church leaders who served their interest had most of the money and thus followers.

If we didn't have religion, some other social construct would arise, and I'd argue, has arisen to fulfill it's role. Modern economic theory justifies the current power order in an unfalsifiable way that reminds me of religion.

Religion could be a liberatory force in society. In fact it has been. The liberation theology movement in South America and numerous heretical movements in the late medieval period are both examples of progressive Christian social movements.

That sort of thing can happen in extreme situations. Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany are the most prominent examples. Both examples involved not having enough stuff. When there aren't enough necessary goods to buy and people have plenty of money you're going to get inflation. Using the right combo of subsidies, government run production, purchase quantity limits, reserves, vouchers, and price fixing you can ensure the supply is stable and eliminate inflation even if there's lots of money.

That's true. That happens because people are stuck in the narrative of the government needing a balanced budget, just like a household. It also happens because the owners and the corpos use all their money and power to ensure workers pay taxes and thus decrease worker money and power.

Yeah, if the population was educated on MMT the ability to bring corpos to heel would be significantly increased. People arguing for it are fundamentally arguing for a change in how we think about money.

The nice thing about trials of corporations is discovery. We have evidence of Google intentionally making search worse, increasing the time spent looking for results, and this improving ad sales. All that came out in discovery.

Outside left. Funny that they put it near the center given I tend to think of myself well to the left of the Democrats.

Netanyahu has propped up Hamas for decades in order to separate the West Bank from Gaza. There hasn't been an election in Gaza for 18 years so nobody there had had the opportunity to choose an alternative anyway. Hamas didn't even get the majority of votes in that election. Finally, plenty of people who don't support Hamas, like queer folks and babies, are being indiscriminately murdered by the IDF.

The people in this photo are making a not uncomplicated but ultimately moral stance.

You might reread my last sentence, I didn't say anything about the EU.

The amount of material the US supplies to both Israel and the Saudis amounts to complicity. The tendency for the US to covertly cause coups throughout the world goes beyond complicity. The resulting government are almost always authoritarian and always support US economic interest. If Israel and the Saudis weren't there to serve the US's interests they would install someone who would.

I wish it was a simple issue of conservatism in the states causing this problem but is seems to be nonpartisan.

Al-Hirak is the most prominent

I like this Jacobin writeup of the recent history in Yemen if you'd like more context