The State should not force the prisoners to work, but it also shouldn’t be the State’s responsibility to provide janitors or cooks to look after them.

You should understand that this represents a logistical problem for the prison. Now they have to ensure that prisoners are certified and trained to handle food, no small feat, and you also have to be conscious of the idea that prisoners could pretty easily stop doing dishes, making food, eating food, as a form of hunger strike, in order to protest the very fact that they’re being made to make food, on top of the fact that they’re being extricated from society, deprived of the right to be a productive member of society, deprived of the ability to socialize with other people that aren’t criminals, deprived of free access to information, really, any freedom whatsoever.

That’s along with the argument the other commenter brought up, about prisoners just organizing themselves into a de-facto government where the most shat on prisoners will have to do everything. If you decide to come up with a constant rotation, a chore wheel, then at a certain level this just devolves into massive levels of prison corruption, where a couple bribes to a couple prisoner guards can change around some labor forms and then suddenly, again, the most shat upon prisoners are doing all the labor.

You don’t eliminate these inefficiencies at any point, either, these inefficiencies rear their heads more the more people you arrest and put into the prison, the more things you criminalize, the higher the recidivism rates. None of these issues resolve magically, they get worse.

This is effectively just the same as advocating for the status quo as it currently exists, with the only minor difference between, say, making license plates or fighting fires, being that instead, they’re just doing domestic labor which is much closer to them in proximity, and easier for you to think of as their personal responsibility to handle. That doesn’t matter so much, what matters in reality here are the numbers.

The idea is that you’re trying to recoup the costs immediately through something like a labor camp, which is what this still is. That’s sort of an option of last resort, or an option that is used, in most circumstances, as it is right now, for members of political opposition or other kinds of outright status-quo threats. You instead should make the calculation in the broad strokes, years down the line. Can these murderers, thieves, and perhaps even, gasp, loiterers, be taught to be functioning members of society? Can they give back more than they have taken from the taxpayer over the course of their life? More than just for the individuals, but can these prisoners do this on the whole?

That’s the way you should be thinking about this, not “Can we save 15 bucks here and there by not paying someone to clean up or cook for the prisoners?”. By framing it like that, you’ve bought into the argument that supports the status quo organization, here.

7. Joker laugh HAHAHAHAHAHA

no no, I think it’s really that she wasn’t horribly racist enough. really, it’s that she didn’t tack hard enough to the right. she should’ve promised to build two walls, one on canada too. she should’ve promised to kill the palestinians even faster, actually, she should’ve resurrected the corpse of kissinger and then sent him to michigan to explain why they needed to die. THAT will solve things.

to be honest if I was the representative of moldova WHICH I’M NOT and it was the 32nd consecutive year in a row that the same shit had happened and nothing had changed then I might also take a day off

I would like to point out that this is just what robin hood is

Seems like the short version of my Intro to American Politics class at Uni.

What’s insane is that’s something you have to go to university to be taught. In this society, where it is purported that democracy is part of the fundamental fabric, most people understand absolutely nothing. If they even get taught about relatively basic things like what I’ve described, which is to say nothing of the legalese-reading abilities you might need to verify that, say, a ballot measure is what it says it is, they apparently don’t end up remembering any of it. So instead we get doomed to listen to the same conversations, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, every election cycle. They’re like cicadas, waking up every couple years, chirping, and then immediately going back to sleep as soon as it’s over.

I dunno. I find legitimate political debates to be interesting, informative, at least sometimes when I can tolerate the cringe levels at work there. I’ve been unfortunately forced to take a crash course, kick start education on every political conflict that’s been started as a result of israel, which also includes like, political context surrounding every country they fuck with, and every country that supports those countries that israel fucks with. I find that, if heartbreaking, to be a good opportunity for me to learn, because at least I get somewhere with that. But I dunno, I feel like the tendency of the average commenter is just to scroll past, or read whatever the top line I’ve posted is and then try to get me to spoonfeed them on that basis, which is obviously never going to work because they can just spin the conversation whatever direction they want, where they’ll probably end up learning less than nothing, they’ll probably just use me as another vector to reinforce their own beliefs.

So, I dunno. It all seems totally hopeless to me. I remembered forums being a much more useful vector for talking to people, but more and more often it seems like it’s less worthwhile, and I just end up retreating to my own bubble, using whatever outlet I find to post like I’m posting to a personal blog that I know nobody is going to read. It’s worthless. If I were to optimize this paragraph I’ve written, with citations, much clearer language, and make it more succinct, and then post that under all these types of posts, or, propagate that as copypasta, then despite it being more well thought out and ultimately much less spammy than the idiotic bad faith trolling that most people tend to engage in, it would probably, maybe rightly, get banned on the basis of being spam. More and more, this place, every place online, reveals itself to just be another horrible vector for the propaganda of whatever interested parties decide to manipulate the levers and pulleys controlling the tubes.

Now I classify myself as an anarchist. Not sure what went wrong.

And, see, I never even got that far. I’m still just some guy that want everyone to have healthcare and good public infrastructure, and wants wars and genocides to not be happening constantly. I don’t even know what political system is supposed to make that work, and I don’t really give a fuck which one it takes, I just want that to be the case.

Yeah, pretty much, that’s pretty much all I’ve said, yeah

Unfortunately, after a year of witnessing their entire ethnicity being written off as an acceptable casualty in the name of international diplomacy and foreign lobbying, they’ve become numb and just stopped caring.

The craziest part of this to me is that this isn’t the first time this has happened since it’s started like… since the country has been founded. So the fact they’re really still willing to engage politically at all is a pretty good testament to their character, I would say.

Everyone else is basically going to give you dogshit answers, here, and I’m not gonna read through the thread to confirm that because I’ve been in enough of these threads on lemmy to know that it’s going to be the most oversimplified and horrible hand-wavy explanations you could’ve hoped for. I think maybe the collective effort people put into their posts on the internet is dwindling as a result of mass adoption and various social media incentive structures, to the point where even platforms like lemmy are gonna get filled with horrible dogshit and just the worst oldest facebook memes of all time. Don’t listen to all those fucking morons, listen to me, I’m the only one effortposting in this removed, because I have psychosis and like to write these out as a way to take notes and review my talking points.

SO, at the lowest level, you have gerrymandering. This applies to things like city council seats within cities, it applies to what gets defined as “inside” and “outside” the city and the county, it applies to districts that elect representatives at the state level, and it even, to a certain degree, applies to the states themselves. Basically, every time the electorate gets subdivided, something you would otherwise think is a good thing, as it lets people be governed more with concerns local to that subdivision, instead, those lines get drawn up most often to favor the party that is currently sitting in that seat. Being that this is instituted at pretty much every level of governance, and that people don’t tend to change addresses super often, especially homeowners, this contributes to why most states are not swing states, and why most votes are very predictably “wasted”, or, are used by the parties to cancel out other very predictable votes, or are used to further secure and entrench power with more overwhelming margins.

You also have first-past-the-post voting in the vast majority of places, abbreviated as fptp voting, in which you have a single, non-transferable vote. Proponents of this system can basically only defend it on its braindead simplicity, because there’s not really any reality in which it accurately represents the interests of the voters. If you think of a voting system as being a way for voters to clearly communicate their preferences, and have those preferences followed, then fptp voting only provides one bit of information: “I want this guy”. It doesn’t rate candidates in relation to each other, it doesn’t tell anyone whether or not you would prefer one candidate over another. So, people get locked in to voting for one candidate which has proved to be consistently popular, and has a good chance of winning so they don’t “waste” their vote, which as previously described, is probably already wasted, and so we get locked into a two-party system pretty much everywhere.

Both these systems combine to severely limit the weight of anyone’s vote. It effectively means that, outside a couple gerrymandered suburbs, in particular swing states, which can be figured out well in advance of elections, the rest of the votes don’t matter. Most votes are just locked in a system where they are effectively being used by the sitting parties to cancel each other out.

Most local races are funded at the local level, meaning they tend to favor older, much more well-off candidates which don’t necessarily represent the majority of people’s interests. This outsized power can be increased with gerrymandering. Americans also tend to favor sitting candidates over new candidates, both because of FPTP, and also because culturally FPTP has become ingrained, meaning incumbent candidates tend to be able to sit around for as long as they want. Primaries are pretty much unilaterally controlled by the parties that run them, as we have seen in this election, and they are able to pretty effectively select who it is that they want to be elected through the funding and backing of the party, within their territories, which is something that’s happening at every level, and not just at the presidential level. So, economics and economic disparity has a great role to play in who is able to run for local positions, on top of obviously having a very clear role at higher levels. Less money can also have a very outsized impact in local, smaller elections, where candidates can court corporate interests and party interests and then bankroll their way into a position pretty much guaranteed. This is why you can pretty much dismiss anyone who’s going to suggest that you go and run for local office, as though that’s some gotcha. They wouldn’t know, because they probably also haven’t run for their local offices, but especially at the higher levels, those local offices tend to be controlled by elderly small business owners and a bunch of lawyers. Canvassing and commercials are pretty effective, especially when you can concentrate these on the gerrymandered fraction of the population with values already favorable to institutional powers, which is having an outsized impact.

So, given that your vote is pretty much guaranteed to not matter, is especially guaranteed to not matter at the federal level, and is very especially not going to matter if you live anywhere with any significant population density, lots of people take that as an opportunity to piss their vote away on jill stein or whatever other scammer that’s running. Of course, third parties would probably be more effective at the smaller local levels, building up larger and larger bases of support until they are more adequately able to challenge the major parties at the federal level, and even try for federal funding, but we’ve seen such a level of institutional capture at pretty much every level that it’s sort of a fucked game to begin with.

It’s so fucked up at every level that I’m not sure I would really fault the parties that are running with like, 2% of the votes, in polling, compared to the fucking massive country-wide institutions that are actually controlling elections and messaging. Those that can even get 2% of the votes are likely to get those votes because they’ve been donated to by one side, the other, or, much more commonly, both, on top of business interests and foreign powers, who all believe that adding in another spoiler candidate will help their candidate get elected.

To hopefully dissuade some idiotic criticisms before they happen:

Q: Well, then what am I to do!?! If I can’t vote on a candidate, and have my vote be effective for that candidate, then what have I done politically? What’s the alternative?

A: None of that really contradicts any of what I’m currently saying, it’s not a valid counterargument. I’ve told you the reality of the system, if you have a problem with how your current strategy is not effective in that reality, then take it up with reality, not me. I would probably say that organizations outside of the system, organizations owned by a majority of the people within them, organizations that can wield political power, those would probably be useful. Organizations that can punch above their weight class economically would be most useful. We’ve seen a recent, very minor rise in unionization and union activity, after decades of downturn as a result of government policies, which has been good, but I am concerned again about many of these unions, and especially the older ones, being subject to institutional capture at the highest levels as a result of ill-thought out internal structures and a desire to “keep out the raffle”, from elitism, classism, or racism. If I had thoughts of reformism, then I would aim there, and I would probably also aim to create a lot more interconnections between these smaller unions which are more individually vulnerable. One big union, would be a good idea suited to the moment, and I haven’t seen it taken up a lot.

And sure, go out and vote, right, but, don’t harbor any illusions about what you’re doing when you go out and vote. Focus more on your local candidates and your obscure, idiotic local laws and regulations which are probably going to be explained poorly in some half-baked blogpost or news article, if you’re even afforded that dignity rather than just having to read shit straight from the charters and laws themselves. Don’t just get invested every 4 years when you get threatened with a new form of fascism by corporate media. If you’re falling for that shit, then you’re probably running around like a chicken with their head cut off, doing worse than nothing. If you’re not willing to put in an hour or two of concentrated reading and research in the right places, then you would be better off, at that point, just ignoring all those anxieties, not voting, and eating jalapeno poppers at chili’s or whatever else.

Q: This shit is too long, I can’t read it all!

A: Tl;dr GOTO 10

I dunno about this shit I’m probably just voting PSL.

federated platform splits userbase into a million little fiefdoms, only somewhat interconnected, all differently starved for interaction

Yup, checks out

Probably would be better off with relatively minor adjustments to overarching standards over time, much akin to parking requirements, but probably that would look more like parking-protected bike lanes downtown, mixed-use zoning, making missing middle housing more available by getting rid of lots of zoning requirements on housing, or, like japan, making them much more comprehensive. None of that costs you anything economically. Parking protected bike lanes just require paint, and you can do that when you need to repave and repaint the main high traffic roads downtown. Eventually you may be able to justify an upgrade to a totally separated bike lane, or you might be able to justify shutting down main street to through traffic and routing things around.

Then you don’t really have to shell out for anything in terms of city transit, you’re just changing some regulations around, and people can walk or bike 2 to 3 minutes to the grocery store on their street corner, from their apartment, which is above a pizza place or whatever the fuck. Bike 3 minutes from the edge of downtown in their rowhome into main downtown where they can pick up groceries. Those people can also have jobs and be economically productive with the higher job density that such a development provides, and this all provides a much healthier and more stable tax base for the city since the utilities cost per person and per business is going to be much less. Course, you’re not gonna get heavy industry like that, but I haven’t really cooked up a solid approach to that sort of commute to a factory or industrial district that doesn’t involve a bus or passenger rail line that just heads straight there, like the USSR did.

The more significant problem with this isn’t so much that it’s some sort of like, totally impossible thing, it’s that any city doing that shit will probably be overrun by a shit ton of annoying gentrifiers, which is a harder problem to solve.

I feel like it’s pretty obvious that the main problem here is with the local NIMBY voters which might not like such a thing, and a significant lack of federal funding. There isn’t really a solid argument against any of the fundamental and somewhat universal planning principles which increase density, walkability, public accessibility, economic efficiency and productivity.

basically, the US is a one party system, but it has two parties

You could still probably blow with your mouth if you didn’t have your lungs connected, I imagine it would involve a kind of burping type of action. I think the bigger problem would be that if your nostrils closed up, you wouldn’t be able to breathe, and probably also talking would be a lot harder if your vocal chords and mouth were separate from your main air sacs.

I think the solution is probably just an easily opened and closed internal valve that separates the stomach and the lungs, rather than this bullshit we currently have with two separate valves that lead into both and open for one and then close for the other whenever it’s required. It’s still good to be able to close both when you want to, but you can already close your mouth on command, and another valve with the nose is a notable upgrade in that it keeps everyone from smelling bad smells they don’t wanna smell, and it also doesn’t take any more valves than we already have.

There’s probably some way you could fix this all with enough surgical intervention, I bet…

Use illogical, bad faith arguments to trick them into believing that the sky is blue, of course. People fall for horrible stupid dumb propaganda, it’s the nature of humanity. Only like 5% of people are really gonna bother to go actually read studies and shit, I don’t even really do that, I just look at the abstracts and then hope that the scientists didn’t fuck up and run the study wrong or engage in p-hacking or something. I couldn’t afford to go to college and take a statistics course, and my only form of education beyond that is watching 3brown1blue videos at 2x speed interspersed with useless escapist brainrot.

Everyone wants to believe that humans are some highly logical computer creatures that can just be convinced if we get hit with enough rigorous logical argumentation. We’re really not. You can make something much more convincing to someone if you validate their ego, or if you incentivize someone into believing a certain kind of truth as a result of their survival in a certain context, right. Even if we were purely logical beings, that wouldn’t even really solve the problem, because we’re all exposed to vastly different information landscapes, i.e. every MAGA guy you run into has probably be tweaking out to AM radio for 8 contiguous hours at their job, or socializing with a bunch of insularly sexist, homophobic, or racist good old boys in an echo chamber for most hours of the day, or whatever else, right. So, what hope can you have to change their minds over the course of a 1 or 2 hour conversation? If even that. And double this for everyone out there that spends their time listening to NPR, or has milder takes about things, or even just spends their time passively absorbing whatever propaganda floats at them through pop culture and escapist media consumption.

This is false actually. Any claim can be dismissed and evidence doesn’t matter because nobody cares. The best way to convince people of things is with cheap psychological parlor tricks

Those “good old days” are mostly just an invention of modern propaganda, a narrative that people nowadays tell themselves about the past, so they have some sort of ideal reality to work towards and hope for the future. Norman Rockwell, George Quaintance type shit, and now you can have it AI generated. Never mind the leagues of working class men that still went underpaid, lived in shithole stick houses, died of the black lung, never mind the segregation and systemic racism and redlining which reinforced all this shit, never mind the fact that the system is and always has been a zero sum game with haves and have-nots. That all gets whitewashed, and people get presented some ahistorical vision of the good old days when you could get a king sized snickers for a nickel.

I dunno if that would be being allergic to strawberries so much, since most of these services have options for only seeing women if you’re also a women. The gay dating market in general seems much healthier, ime. It’s more as though you were drowning in strawberries, and then maybe one out of a twenty or twenty-five wasn’t rotten at the face, or, maybe one in twenty wasn’t a clone of the same five or six kinds of strawberries that you keep seeing. It’s ultimately the same problem for both sexes, though. An overabundance, and a lack of real ability to distinguish between everything because of both a glut and a drought of overly flattened data leads to a kind of processed apathy out of sheer volume. Then, neglect leads to desperation, and then for some, to resentment, and so on and so forth. What I really don’t understand is that for mostly purely cultural reasons there’s such a massive and self-reinforcing disparity, it’s kind of insane. There has to be a further underlying cause there than just like, 20 or 25% of men are desperate freaks and that sort of plunges everything into a downward spiral where everyone is sort of putting on this elaborate game of lying to each other because of a couple bad actors. Makes it kind of impossible to deal with any of this if you’re autistic, to be honest.

I mean I do think banning them is a good idea, and in general I think nazis should be taken on helicopter rides, most especially the enablers of nazis, their financial leash handlers which basically bootstrap them into these positions in order to push the dialogue further rightward in service of corporate interests, and probably also in this case in service of “geopolitical security” since we’re going to be seeing oncoming climate refugees in the coming years, and combatting that in any way but increasing the security apparatus is off the table.

More than that, though, I worry that realistically just banning them, though a great temporary measure, won’t do much, say, five years or a decade down the road, because it’s not gonna solve the core hypocrisies and discrepancies that neoliberalism is not so keen to solve. If you want to actually solve this problem long term then you need to combat those core problems. Instead, though, I think that probably the party being banned will just see them either form a new party, or else tone down their rhetoric to an acceptable degree, or just join the next furthest right party and then decide to push them further right, and so on and so on, until we’ve all collectively just shifted rightward to an incredible degree.

Ad nauseam, et cetera, regardless of the political apparatuses at work, until collectively the western world plummets towards fascism.

Sturdy trees are good in the city, since they are low upkeep and very good for air quality and shade.

Sturdy trees WOULD be good for the city, yeah. Unfortunately we’ve decided to, in basically every major city (at least here in NA and I suspect other places), plant non-native trees that have low survival rates and are basically all male. Being male, they tend to also shit pollen basically everywhere. I’d imagine you could deal with the fruit falling to the ground in a number of ways, as well. Could put some canopy underneath the fruiting trees, as to collect the fruit more easily, you could just pay people to come and collect enough of the fruit for use in things like applesauce that the rest of the fruit really presents no issue as far as just sort of rotting and draining into the ground. You could set up a bunch of easy disposal compost boxes every couple feet, so you can just sweep all the fruit up and throw it into that.

I suspect a larger problem would probably be that inside of the city the fruit would be exposed to more than an acceptable amount of brake dust, including that which drains into the planter box, and would maybe not get enough light, but I think those are generally problems we should be solving anyways since they don’t disappear just because we decide not to plant fruit trees. Brake dust on the fruit or carcinogens inside the fruit means that those things are also going to be going into your lungs.