You Should Know
YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.
All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.
Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:
**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities:
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Credits
Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!
view the rest of the comments
Watching from a far (The Netherlands), it always amazed me how the political scale in the US is described. Even the democrats in the US feel more to the right, then positioned in the US. Some people go as far to call democrats communist, but I don't think these people know what communist really is, in the same way that Americans don't seem to know what (neo)liberal actually is. It is both entertaining and concerning to watch.
Yeah, the idea that Democrats are center-left is hilarious - by the standards in most of Europe, they're not even center-right, just plain rightwing, whilst the Republicans are pretty much far-right (given their heavy religious, ultra-nationalis, anti-immigrant and warmongering - amongst others - rethoric).
The Overtoon Window has moved to the Right everywhere but in the US it did way much further than in most of Europe.
As for the whole neoliberalism stuff, it's pretty easy to spot the neoliberal parties even when they've disguised themselves as leftwing or (genuine) conservatives: they're the ones always obcessing about what's good for businesses whilst never distinguishing between businesses which are good for people and society and those which aren't: in other words, they don't see businesses (and hence what's "good for businesses") as a means to the end of being "good for people" (i.e. "good for businesses which are good for people hence good for people") but as an end in itself quite independently of what that does for people.
The Democrats are more socially left wing than the vast majority of European parties.
Don't confuse Identity Politics, aka "We care only about that inequality which doesn't involve the priviledges of wealth" as leftwing.
Those who disregard the biggest inequality of treatment there is by a HUGE margin (that of wealth) and only care about those inequalities which can be "fixed" without putting their own inherited priviledges (usually from being born in the high middle-class and above) at risk aren't lefties as they're not really fighting for the greatest good for the greatest number.
The kind of liberalism that ignores the power of money and ownership to constraint others' freedom of action is incompatible with getting the greatest outcome for the greatest number because they see restrictions of accumulation of wealth and resources and anti-freedom and it's been painfully obvious for decades that maximization of the greatest good for the greatest number is the exact opposite of the direction of concentration of wealth and ownership we have been travelling on.
Turning the other way while migrants drown in the Mediterranean isn't "Identity Politics" and the insistence on cultural homogenization and labeling plurinationalism "Identity Politics" is very typical of European right-wing social ideology that pervades the parties in power.
Now you're just using an "appeal to emotion" falacy.
A person who genuinelly wants to help others LOGICALLY starts by the ones most in need, and those are mainly those living in horrible conditions in refugee camps, not those who have a few thousand dollars to pay a trafficker.
Your barelly disguised neoliberal take on Equality with "oh so obvious" late XXth century marketing shaped appeals to emotion and eternaly repeated unthinking slogans which are fashionable within certain tribes (and hence social tokens of group membership amongst that crowd, who really are just in it for the sweet social ego-stroking) isn't left-wing, it isn't even a genuine want to do good by others, since it doesn't obbey even the basic logic of "to do the most good you start by those in most need" something which would force looking at wealth inequality.
The internal-inconsistencies needed to exclude wealth inequality from that bundle of easilly parroted marketing slogans that portrays to be a political theory that fights Equality are so large, that even the idea that help should be allocated by need not by "insert easilly visibly characteristice people were born with" is seen as a threat.
Caring about migrants' lives isn't an appeal to emotion.
Your very first sentence on your post was about how those who disagree with your politics are "ignoring people dying".
People making genuine, logical and well-founded arguments don't start by claiming that those who disagree with them are closing their eyes to the death of others.
Yours wasn't just an Appeal to Emotion Falacy, it was a particularly bad taste and sleazy one.
You're seriously misguided if you believe that.
Tell me how Romani are treated in Europe
You need to understand, our two party system is not part of the actual government as it was designed. They are basically a pack of oligarchs running a good cop-bad cop routine on the electorate.
Our voting system naturally favors this dynamic. Anywhere you see "first past the post", ask if the people feel like they're voting for the leaders they'd prefer, or against the candidates that scare them the most. Oligarchic duopoly is the dominant game theoretic strategy inherent to FPTP.
I actually come from a country with a mathematically rigged voting system (not quite as much as the US, but still the current guys in power got 41% of votes and have an absolute parliamentary majority with 52% of parliamentary representatives) but lived for almost a decade in The Netherlands (which has Proportional Vote) as well as about the same in the UK (which is more like the US in that regard than the rest of Europe) and my impression is that there are 2 things pushing that dynamic in countries with such rigged voting systems vs the ones with Proportional Vote like The Netherlands:
We have two organizations that peddle in power. The GOP and The DNC. They are private "non-profit" companies. They have employees and everything and they are free to do whatever is needed to push the candidate they think will best serve their needs first. They both sell that power to clients. These days those clients are more direct and they collect through campaign donations, job guarantees, speaking fees, consulting contracts through families, trade deals, stock tips, family opportunities, Since Citizen's United PAC money, and sometimes but rarely nowadays direct pay offs. The corruption is right in the open the difference between here and elsewhere is its all perfectly legal.
You're not wrong, but I'd warn against any false equivalency here. It's a pretty simple ethical dilemma and the least we can do is minimize the harm being done by the system with our votes.
I wasn't comparing them at all. If one or the others interest happen to better align with yours then thats a happy coincidence. For all but 1% of Americans the DNC will better align with their interests and covers a far more diverse group of interests. Just don't confuse that with your interests being priority for them outside of their need for your support.
Just elaborating on your point, not disagreeing at all. One can be better while both are shamefully lacking in many structural ways.
Most of our Dems voted to make it illegal for rail workers to strike.
I think our country is starting to look like the US more and more which is scary.
Yeah agreed. Last elections I wasn't really sure what to vote on anymore, the political landscape is becoming to extreme for my taste. There are virtually no center parties anymore, especially when you exclude the religious related parties. With the recent election and the debates, the media is also trying to create a left versus right, which is a very strange thing to do in our system.
In the end, it would be nice to just have a government that cares about its people and future, they have made way too many mistakes over the past decade, mistakes that were avoidable if only they had listened. Cases in point: reversing the student grant system, pushing important government tasks to local governments (while reducing their budget) and the whole childcare debacle. Literally for all of these f*ups, the government was warned by experts...
I dunno at least we switch leaders every eight years. The Rutte government is about to hit year 14, right?
Yeah, not fond of this situation either. Would love to have the same rule of capping the number of years someone could be in office. Additionally, I would also love to see a cap on the age someone could become (minister) president, something like max 10 years above nation average. I don't think someone at 80 could create the required policies, since that person will not have to live under them, nor will that person be connected to the average person in terms of values.