2020 US Presidential Election

https://maiotaku.com/topics/51042 I do not. If it ever gets legalized here I'm quitting my job to make soap and edibles.

I am having a fun time watching Pelosi lose her shit..... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqPltMpWIwo

its sad how old these fucks in office are we need a retirement age for them

max age for any elected office should be like a moderate amount above the median age of the population. we need people in office who are experienced, but they also need to be able to relate with the ya know, the people they're governing

the issue is these people are getting dementia in office you see that nancy pelosi sun downing episode?? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7P_6mv5oOQ i say 75 tops and there out. poor people like rbg was stuck in her position for politician advantageousness when these people should be out to allow new blood

oof that was hard to watch. almost seemed like she was just super super fried. reminds me of ppl who i saw abuse benzos at uni >_< like they could speak coherent sentences and they were related but it was just like, no real topic or cohesion. and yeah 75 is well older than i would say. maybe like 65. i think the standard for retirement could be good for politicians too! and yeah fuck working till the day you are too sick to move. gotta at least chill out a BIT at some point

Yes, some people hate their jobs. Some people hate their bosses. But guess what? In a free society. One has the ability to ask for a raise. The act of asking for a raise. Is a willful business transaction between you and the employer. If the employer is unable or unwilling to give you a raise. Then one has the freedom to look for another job. The freedom exist. Looking for another job is also a willful personal business transaction that one makes. Most people are not working for free. People ultimately get paid. You work X amount. I pay you X amount. It is a willful business transaction. Lets us assume we build this worker owned utopia. Where the workers partly or wholly owns the means of production. Guess what? Even in that worker owned utopia. If that worker does not work. He/she will not get paid. He/she will starve to death. If you work. You get paid. If you do not work. You do not get paid. This so called implicit violence still exist in your worker utopia. Food cost money. Food is not free. A place to live cost money. A place to live is not free. If you think that food and a place to live should be free. Then that is philosophical principal that we completely disagree on. People work for money. The main issue comes down to money. As long as money exist. This so called implicit violence that you have termed will always exist. Someone will always have the upper hand in in negotiating business transactions. How do you get rid of money so that this so called implicit violence goes away? Go back to the barter system? Make everything free? What is the economic system that gets rid of money and hence gets rid of this so called implicit violence? "I also can't help but find it funny how you put theft in the same sentence as rape and murder there as though those things are somehow on the same level." Yes, I also find it funny. Because it was your own logic. Putting explicit and implicit violence in the same sentence. When they are not the same. Willful business transactions are completely different from actual explicit violence. They are no where near the same thing. You stretched your abstraction way too far. Calling you a blue pilled person was not an insult. You are what you are. I am definitely not blue pilled. I am definitely not red pilled. I can stand back and look at the nonsense from both sides. Some solutions are best from the left. Some solutions are best from the right. Some solutions are best from the middle. Some solutions may require a completely new way of thinking. Solutions decoupled from the binary left vs right. Such as the eventual rise of AI and automation. Millions of jobs will eventually be replaced by AI and automation. The solutions from the left and right are still insufficient to address AI and automation. Technology is changing faster then the archaic political philosophies of the left and right can keep up with. @songofsisyphus

@nebelstern "I am not fascist" - > Spends next couple paragraphs talking about how othering is legit actually, that no-one cares about minorities and how we need to resist succumbing to degeneracy like we allegedly did in the sexual revolution. Hm. Now I'm not saying that you definitely *are*, but that does come off *really* badly. Also I legit don't even know what you're actually arguing on the 'stop women from degenerating' thing? Like, sure, I recall that in various countries, divorce proceedings could do with being a little less skewed one way or the other, but I don't see how that relates in any way to the 'essence of woman' or anything. Shouldn't women be able to be with who they want to be with? Like, are you opposed to how divorce courts seem to have it in for men, or do you just not like divorce as a concept at all, I can't tell. Now I will take your point that I think I accidentally swapped out 'globalism' for 'globalization', because I'm tacitly aware of how 'globalism' these days as a term is often used for antisemitic conspiracy theories. Honestly the way globalism is used as a term varies so much depending on who you're talking to. Also, no actually, the Free movement of people relates to people's ability to freely move within countries and across borders. I'm sure you have a strong emotional investment based on what you jumped to, but it has nothing to do with any of the non-sequiturs you just threw out. On Suleimani: Yes, I agree, he was a bad man. But if heads of state could just go around assassinating bad men they didn't like, I can assure you that Trump would not be where he is right now. On Brazil: Now obviously there's no plot by Jews against the left in Brazil, or anywhere else for that matter. However, given the CIA's track record in the rest of Latin America, I'm not sure I can quite so readily dismiss CIA involvement without doing a significant amount of research. And I highly doubt that the IMF has a specific plot against the left in Brazil, but I *will* note that the IMF is a very neoliberal institution and as such will always leverage its economic powers to oppose any remotely actually socialist policymaking, which I imagine would be pretty relevant to Brazil's Left. I trust you to note that Fascism and Nationalism have significant overlap. Not all nationalists are Fascists, I grant you, but all fascists I'm aware of have used ultra-nationalistic rhetoric. "Other countries are in a holy war against you"? Which countries? I didn't take you for an American exceptionalist. I will also point out that I.S. is not a country. Machismo: Okay, the last time I wasn't directly pointing at the fact that for previous presidents the media spectacle was generally only around them and their first lady. But with Trump he's roped in basically everyone in his family. I sorta thought it was obvious. Like his entire motivation seems to be a narcissism derived from an emotionally distant father figure, based on an interview with Trump that I saw once. He's so insecure about it he feels like he has to compensate in all of these different ways. I think that speaks to the kind of Machismo that fascists try to project outwards.

@alephy I'm not sure if I should be taking lessons in freedom from someone who thinks that the 'freedom to starve' counts. In a perfect world, I'm sure everybody would be able and free to pursue what work they want at a wage that satisfies both them and their employer without fear of literally dying for the trouble of attempting to find that. However, that obviously not only isn't a world that we live in, it also cannot exist under capitalism for the vast majority of people. All bosses, all employers, hold a coercive level of authority over their employees. Simply swapping one boss out for another, for a historical example, would be like a serf thinking "Oh I really don't like my lord, he makes me farm corn for him and I get barely any of it", resolving to run away from his lord, travel and settle in a new domain, only to find that there is another lord there who expects more-or-less exactly the same of him. The problem is not with one or two employers, the problem is with the structure of employment. There cannot be a truly voluntary exchange between labour and wages unless a person is not at risk of destitution and/or death if they do not make the exchange. I've not really seen an argument against this point of mine yet. To address this 'utopia thing' - Ah, I see you're wrestling with the nature of money. Well, in the grand scheme of things, it would be important to phase money out and allocate resources based on need, rather than wage based on labour-time. Humans have indeed organised in many different ways in the past, and they can be organised in yet more different ways in the future. In fact, Wage Labour is a more recent invention than you'd probably think. A society organised in the interests of everyone would look after their needs *first* and then we can worry about everything else after that. Certainly one economic system that gets rid of money would be called Communism (using the definition of a communist society as a stateless, classless, moneyless society), which would also necessarily be an Anarchist society (that is, a stateless society). But in the meantime, as communism as a political ideology is not actually a utopian ideology, some people have suggested various ways of phasing money out (because the root of the money problem comes down to a particular form of exchange relation, that is, money being used to buy commodities, to then sell and make more money. As contrasted with commodites being sold for money to buy other commodities, which fulfil a useful purpose and meet a human need, want, or desire). If you think that people's needs ought not to be met, all so that we can prop up a machine that expropriates the wealth they produce and channels it into the pockets of very few individuals concerned chiefly with keeping that expropriated wealth, then I agree with you in your assertion that it is unlikely we will ever agree on this. That you still fail to see the distinction between the magnitude of the threat of violence, and actual instances between different kinds of violence remains amusing to me. Seems I won't get through to you on that one. EDIT to clarify: I also have never asserted that implicit and explicit violence are exactly the same thing (wouldn't need different words for them if that was the case), I believe I used the term 'functionally'; what is important is that implicit or explicit, it is still a coercive force which invalidates the capacity for there to be a genuinely voluntary nature of an exchange between labour-time and wages, which is the thing that we were discussing. Ah, fan of Yang perhaps? I'm afraid there isn't actually a centre, as such. It constantly moves depending on things like overton windows. There is nothing inherently more rational about an approach that seems more central. Also, the left *absolutely* has an answer to problems of automation. That is because in any rational and uncontradictory system of human organisation (that is to say, not capitalism), increasing productive power would not in the same stroke immiserate millions of people. AI is most certainly a more difficult problem, but that's chiefly from an ethical perspective and not a hard economic one. Important also to warn you that despite its contradictions, capitalism and all of its imbalanced power relations are rather better at adapting to new technology than you probably think they are. As a whole the system is *terrible* when it comes to coping with externalities, but it's very good at commodification. For instance, the internet did certainly affect many things, but it did not fundamentally change the way that society was organised in the way its founders doubtless envisioned. The drive to ever more commodification is all-consuming, and it will not be people in general who benefit from this; it will be the capitalists. I assure you, there are definitely ways to overcome the problems caused downstream of increasing automation, but you're not going to find them in the centre, the right, neoliberalism, conservatism or even your standard social democracy.

You know what sucks about today's politics is that the politicians are not having conversations like these. I would love to see politicians go into discussions raw and unscripted instead of being spoonfed what the test group says is a more likable thing to say. https://i.imgflip.com/zs0r5.jpg