I don’t have any evidence for this but purely speculation on my part: racism can explain a good amount of that. Biden has in the 90s voted for “tough on crime bills”, he is the definition of political establishment, and is a white man from Wilmington. Obama definitely is not textbook underpriveleged but he doesn’t have those points that biden does

Its not idiotic, because democrats have had numerous opportunities to enshrine abortion and contraception into law, while controlling both the legislative and executive branch. Republicans are perfectly able to pass their abhorrent laws, but democrats seem to not be able to pass good legislation even when they control the government. Until Roe was overturned, this state of affairs was actually very beneficial to democratic politicians, because they could recycle abortion as a rallying point every single election.

Another interesting point is whether we attribute the successes and failures of a state on it’s particular social, economic and political situation or it’s ideology as the root cause of anything. Most people, when they agree with an ideology, will attribute the good things to the ideology and the bad things to specific circumstances, and the opposite with ideologies they do not agree with. The more nationalist Americans will tell you that Cuba is poor because it is communist, and that Bush invaded Iraq either because he was corrupt or because he was promoting freedom. However there’s also the argument that Cuba is poor because it is sanctioned to hell by the US, and that Bush invaded Iraq because of American capitalist imperialism. Which one of these you agree with pretty much entirely depends on your ideological opinions rather than what actually happened, and as far as making a valid argument either one is at least a coherent point.

The reality is that you have elements of both the fundamental ideology and the specific political circumstances in every social outcome you see. Which is an idea quite fatal to most of the rhetoric you see nowadays and part of why it’s impossible to have any political discussion with people you have fundamental disagreements with.

I was actually thinking about what it would take to have a truly peer to peer video site. Have clients simultaneously consume, serve and transcode content. It would obviously be concentrated in the hands of big enthusiasts and small video companies, but presumably it would be similar to the fediverse where you can choose from many instances.

I am not talking about individual choices but rather the social factors influencing those choices, please read a history book

But their countries are only poor because of the imperialism of rich countries for centuries. You’re saying they should be grateful for rich economies helping them develop, when those rich economies are the reason they are poorer to begin with.

I fail to see why you think helping corporations earning money will help individuals, especially with raising taxes on them. Corporations’ interests are lower wages and higher prices, worker’s interests are higher wages and lower prices. The only way to then increase wages is to force companies to do so, either through job disloyalty, strikes, regulations, or etc. Don’t see how lower taxes will make them pay more.

I mean the opinions of the voting public are nearly always more complex than either Republican or Democratic party dogma. The problem is that there is no substantial way of politically engaging besides voting. I would argue actually that generally the public is way more left wing than it is given credit for, but a lot of people have no accessible ways to transform these ideas into action. And for this I don’t have an easy answer. Disclaimer, am a leftist so I would obviously think this, but I do still think that we would see more diverse political ideas if our political systems were made to be more open.

I find the “raise taxes to pay for social programs” and “cut corporate taxes” to be somewhat contradictory. Reagan and Thatcher were textbook neoliberals if you need any examples, and they destroyed social programs and labor unions rather than supporting them.

One thing I also wonder is, does it matter? Things have definitely improved for marginalized groups over time, but I can probably find texts from 2000 years ago that talk about discrimination over immutable traits being wrong. Discriminating as a head of state with presumably good access to information is equally wrong at any point in time.

If by “left” you mean democrats then they will not do this because it is not what their views are. They are ideologically as neoliberal as Reagan and Thatcher. This is part of why they don’t do as good of a job opposing the far right as they could, because they only exist as long as their only opposition is unhinged far right politicians.

Sunbird is somewhat suspicious to me because of the “we won’t open source because it’s less secure”. Makes me wonder what godawful nightmare their app is if they don’t want to let people look. Oh and if they’re doing it as a business decision I don’t want anything to do with them either as it’s still vendor lock in.

Not sure if this is directly applicable but there’s the concept of dual power, where you can organize a bottom up power structure that takes some power from the regular government without needing to either submit to it or outright overthrow it. With that said it has only ever been successful in cases where the government is incredibly unstable to begin with.

While there were issues with the way things were done with vaccination, you have to understand why it even got there. We had a situation where people were unreasonably made scared of vaccines which were by every metric substantially safer for the general population than the side effects. If right wingers convinced the population that they should do 150mph in a school zone and this is fine behavior because speed limits are a conspiracy and crashing into someone else doesn’t actually hurt them, how would you deal with this? I don’t think there are any good answers here, but the vaccines were better than not, and you need herd immunity for things to get better. And again, forcing people who can get vaccinated to get vaccinated, with overwhelming evidence that this was safer for everyone involved, is not the same as exile or imprisonment based on political beliefs.

How far did they even go? Forcing people to stay home and wear masks during a pandemic is not the same as saying you want to exile leftists(which FYI trump did say). They are not equivalent and being unaware of that is dangerous.

It’s definitely going to be the far right who will throw people into camps if we get there. The most far left politicians in the US rarely if ever advocate targeting individual right wingers, but I can name a few far right politicians with substantial followings that suggested punishing people who disagree with them. I don’t have a lot of love for democratic politicians in the US but they don’t seem like a possible near term threat to people’s safety, they just won’t stand in the way of the people who are.

There’s also the centralization advantage and long lifespan. Centralized power generation is nearly always most efficient, and EV batteries degrade relatively quickly, while there are real life examples of 30 year old trolleybuses still operating fine.

My opinion on that is that someone would’ve done what musk have money for at some point as well. All of those companies were mostly rehashed concepts that became viable due to faster computers, better materials, and better battery technology. I usually don’t say this about actual inventions made by scientists and engineers, but most of the time billionaires just provide a concept and daddy’s money and that really doesn’t take a lot of skills that I think are worth anything.

I realize it sounds utopic but it’s not nearly as insane as people think it is, especially when compared to mass boycott proposals.

To illustrate this point I will use meat because it’s probably the easiest to ditch of all major environmentally irresponsible behaviors. You first need to have a public where ~40-70% of the population is passionate about ditching meat, with most of the rest not caring and so falling into line. You then need to make sure that people who depend on the meat industry one way or another(which includes farmers/ranchers, fast food workers, people who cannot easily access vegetables, etc) are taken care of or understand that the overall social benefit to them outweighs the individual cost of ditching meat. You also need to have some way to coordinate this action to happen reasonably synchronously so that societal ideas about meat aren’t reinforced. This level of public organization and power is more than enough for things like general strikes or even regime changes.

You’re right, individuals can do a lot. We can take all of our politicians, CEOs, and corporate shareholders, and throw them out to one of their private islands that they love so much. Then, build a society where you aren’t pressured or even forced to drive, to replace tech every 3 years, or have a logistics system reliant on fossil fuels. Oh was that not the kind of public action you were talking about?