news from the long country: the right wingers are trying to steamroll the new constitutional document, which they totally can do based on the seats they got: bans on abortion, unions, and lgbt people doing this or that have already been announced, as well as constitutional protections for the private pension and healthcare systems. the very experts, about 60% elected by the right wing, are "worried that it won't be a neutral constitution anymore", which is already sayin something, as they were appointed by the extremely conservative senate. hopefully it'll be rejected on december.
on unrelated news, does anyone have a good explanation for the rise in fascism we're going through? certainly this isn't a chilean thing.
Chilean thread y wea
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zompist
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Re: Chilean election thread (?)
Sure! I got three:
1. Historical memory is approximately two generations, ~ 70 years. That is, when all the people who remember a problem die off, it recurs. So, Grandpa remembers the Nazis, but he's dead or no longer matters.
2. The far left imploded, especially when the USSR disappeared. It wasn't that it was a good alternative, but it was a spur to keep democracy, equality, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism going so the commies had less to work with. Besides, the moderate left is far more appealing when there's an extremist left everyone is scared of.
3. Plutocracy has created a large class of people who feel left out. Marx told us that they should align with the other dispossessed, but it turns out they are easily convinced to align with aggrieved conservatives instead.
About the only consolation is that the current crop of fash is maximalist and not too bright, so they tend to implode themselves when given power.
Re: Chilean election thread (?)
I want to note for the record that I have a short reply to zompist's latest post over in the US politics thread:
https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?p=72825#p72825
https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?p=72825#p72825
Re: Chilean election thread (?)
ooo, nais. let's see
1 is a contributing factor, as in it removes a possible inhibitor to the dependent variable. people are less likely to say or give weight to others saying "man, this is kinda like the nazis". like, yeah, i think there's evidence for this, we treat "that's like the nazis" like a fallacy.
2 I totally share: i don't think it's a coincidence that no more soviet union and reaganomics becoming the economics is a coincidence: but like, yeah, that would shift the balance of power, the right is well funded and technically supported by the cia etcetera, while the left has no such buffs: but dislike neoliberalism as I do... can we really say that neoliberalism, or the rise of the right-wing even, cause fascism? was 1920s at the tail end of a period of exceptional weakness of the global left?
3 yeah, this one's good. the old "capitalism's contradictions intensify". a freer (to rentseek, speculate and exploit, to be clear) post-soviet capitalism of laissez faire deregulation is going to have fewer fetters on its own destructive tendencies than the highly regulated, almost planned economy of the postwar.
welp, hopefully the next soviet union is better.
EDIT: turns out, it does!
Okay since we're in the chilean thread... here's the thing about that: the coup itself was 50 years ago, and the transition was exceptionally intelligenty managed. like, they wrote the constitution! they for most of my youth the senate was full of "senadores designados". pinochet himself was a senador designado. he wrote laws, and voted on the laws. there were at least two, that i remember, moments where it was not clear whether los milicos would do another coup or not. lets say that for our purposes, los milicos means 'the military' but like... in a broad sense: active military personnel, but also the sort of military class of chilean society: you see, we here -and i bet this is the case in other countries, but here it's like pretty strong- have a thing we call the military 'family'. if someone is a soldier, they're very likely sons or nephews or cousins or something of somebody who is a soldier: back in the day they lived in military villages and complexes, at least many did, cause the army would just build houses and let them live in them. on the other hand, most people do not have *any* family members in the armed forces, especially not left-wing people, and this is not accidental: in order to enter the military you're background checked, and rejected -or kept in low-tier roles- if it is found you have left-wing family members or sympathies. perhaps this is not the case so much these days (though i wouldn't be sure, i'd have to see research here), but it definitely was the case in the nineties.
for an anecdote, there is an official identification card for the familia militar: la TIFA, tarjeta de identificacion familiar: they give it to family members of military. back in the 90s it got you out of car tickets, it allowed you to skip identity controls, and it let you get to the front of the line in many places.
... okay, it calls itself that, my people -leftos- call it los milicos: anyway it's military personnel, it's their sons and daughters, and its the people who may not be like soldiers themselves anymore but were at some time: soldiers retire afte 20 years service on a full paycheck plus lifetime benefits, so by 40 they're set for life, and are free to be exceptionally politically active, to have small businesses, and overall be, ethnically, a strong power bloc. What i'm saying here is that los milicos, those who surived the coup anyway, remain a powerful constituency in chile, as do the businessmen they collaborated with during the dictatorship. add to that that the chilean center-left concertación were like super collaborationist with these ruling classes (for example, half the famous concertacion politicians were in the boards of AFP, the organizations that manage money from mandatory retirement salary deductions, which is like 10% of the collective income of the formally-employed working class). milicos also include the truckers, cause duh, a lot of people learn to drive large vehicles in the military, right?
what i'm trying to say is that this isn't germany: we don't have anti-denialism laws, we don't have a strong social or media consensus about the coup and the dictatorship being bad, the right wing here doesn't go "i condemn the pinochet regime", they go "i condemn the human rights violations": a non-political chilean hears something like "pinochet saved us from communism, though yeah some excesses happened" and think that's... normal! hell, it is a normal opinion here. this has been changing the last 10, 15 years, but still if you look at almost any famous or prominent chilean, there's a fair chance you'll find that became famous during the dictatorship, that they became rich off of the privatizations, that their first political involvement was being appointed mayor or something by the dictatorship, that there are pictures of them in chacarillas (the chilean version of the nazi political rituals, complete with torches and eagles, i shit you not, google it).
so like... sure, people alive lived through the dictatorship, but a lot of people, and especially a lot of people that matter, remember those times quite fondly.
1 is a contributing factor, as in it removes a possible inhibitor to the dependent variable. people are less likely to say or give weight to others saying "man, this is kinda like the nazis". like, yeah, i think there's evidence for this, we treat "that's like the nazis" like a fallacy.
2 I totally share: i don't think it's a coincidence that no more soviet union and reaganomics becoming the economics is a coincidence: but like, yeah, that would shift the balance of power, the right is well funded and technically supported by the cia etcetera, while the left has no such buffs: but dislike neoliberalism as I do... can we really say that neoliberalism, or the rise of the right-wing even, cause fascism? was 1920s at the tail end of a period of exceptional weakness of the global left?
3 yeah, this one's good. the old "capitalism's contradictions intensify". a freer (to rentseek, speculate and exploit, to be clear) post-soviet capitalism of laissez faire deregulation is going to have fewer fetters on its own destructive tendencies than the highly regulated, almost planned economy of the postwar.
welp, hopefully the next soviet union is better.
I wonder if phpboard supports this sort of crosslinking...
EDIT: turns out, it does!
Okay since we're in the chilean thread... here's the thing about that: the coup itself was 50 years ago, and the transition was exceptionally intelligenty managed. like, they wrote the constitution! they for most of my youth the senate was full of "senadores designados". pinochet himself was a senador designado. he wrote laws, and voted on the laws. there were at least two, that i remember, moments where it was not clear whether los milicos would do another coup or not. lets say that for our purposes, los milicos means 'the military' but like... in a broad sense: active military personnel, but also the sort of military class of chilean society: you see, we here -and i bet this is the case in other countries, but here it's like pretty strong- have a thing we call the military 'family'. if someone is a soldier, they're very likely sons or nephews or cousins or something of somebody who is a soldier: back in the day they lived in military villages and complexes, at least many did, cause the army would just build houses and let them live in them. on the other hand, most people do not have *any* family members in the armed forces, especially not left-wing people, and this is not accidental: in order to enter the military you're background checked, and rejected -or kept in low-tier roles- if it is found you have left-wing family members or sympathies. perhaps this is not the case so much these days (though i wouldn't be sure, i'd have to see research here), but it definitely was the case in the nineties.
for an anecdote, there is an official identification card for the familia militar: la TIFA, tarjeta de identificacion familiar: they give it to family members of military. back in the 90s it got you out of car tickets, it allowed you to skip identity controls, and it let you get to the front of the line in many places.
... okay, it calls itself that, my people -leftos- call it los milicos: anyway it's military personnel, it's their sons and daughters, and its the people who may not be like soldiers themselves anymore but were at some time: soldiers retire afte 20 years service on a full paycheck plus lifetime benefits, so by 40 they're set for life, and are free to be exceptionally politically active, to have small businesses, and overall be, ethnically, a strong power bloc. What i'm saying here is that los milicos, those who surived the coup anyway, remain a powerful constituency in chile, as do the businessmen they collaborated with during the dictatorship. add to that that the chilean center-left concertación were like super collaborationist with these ruling classes (for example, half the famous concertacion politicians were in the boards of AFP, the organizations that manage money from mandatory retirement salary deductions, which is like 10% of the collective income of the formally-employed working class). milicos also include the truckers, cause duh, a lot of people learn to drive large vehicles in the military, right?
what i'm trying to say is that this isn't germany: we don't have anti-denialism laws, we don't have a strong social or media consensus about the coup and the dictatorship being bad, the right wing here doesn't go "i condemn the pinochet regime", they go "i condemn the human rights violations": a non-political chilean hears something like "pinochet saved us from communism, though yeah some excesses happened" and think that's... normal! hell, it is a normal opinion here. this has been changing the last 10, 15 years, but still if you look at almost any famous or prominent chilean, there's a fair chance you'll find that became famous during the dictatorship, that they became rich off of the privatizations, that their first political involvement was being appointed mayor or something by the dictatorship, that there are pictures of them in chacarillas (the chilean version of the nazi political rituals, complete with torches and eagles, i shit you not, google it).
so like... sure, people alive lived through the dictatorship, but a lot of people, and especially a lot of people that matter, remember those times quite fondly.
Re: Chilean election thread (?)
Thank you, that's very interesting background information!
We do have some of that here, but I don't think to the same amount. There are fascists in the military, there are probably families with a tradition of being in the military, there is mutual hostility between the military and left-wing subcultures, and during the mid-to-late 20th century, there were way too many older people around who remembered the old days fondly.
That said, having been in the military or at least being closely related to people who were there is, or at least used to be, a much more common experience, so there used to be less of an opportunity for the military to set itself apart from everyone else. We used to have conscription, and back then, even the professional soldiers were to a large extent recruited from among young men who were the right psychological "type" that, when they underwent conscription, they looked at their experience and thought "Hey, I wouldn't mind doing that for a living for a while. Beats the alternatives."
We do have some of that here, but I don't think to the same amount. There are fascists in the military, there are probably families with a tradition of being in the military, there is mutual hostility between the military and left-wing subcultures, and during the mid-to-late 20th century, there were way too many older people around who remembered the old days fondly.
That said, having been in the military or at least being closely related to people who were there is, or at least used to be, a much more common experience, so there used to be less of an opportunity for the military to set itself apart from everyone else. We used to have conscription, and back then, even the professional soldiers were to a large extent recruited from among young men who were the right psychological "type" that, when they underwent conscription, they looked at their experience and thought "Hey, I wouldn't mind doing that for a living for a while. Beats the alternatives."
Re: Chilean election thread (?)
in local news, most of the polling companies are saying the "reject" option will win by a comfortable margin. some analysts predict there will not be a vote on december. the document is not finished, but it already has the republicanos (the alt-right party) program all over it.
Re: Chilean election thread (?)
piñera, the only right-wing guy (if you don't consider the centrist-neoliberal coalition right wing) to be elected to the presidency since before pinochet, died a few days ago after an accident befell a helicopter he was piloting. the entire media has been sucking his you know what ever since. rather ironically, this time a pinochetist died during a helicopter ride.
Re: Chilean thread y wea
Vis a vis something in the US thread, namely this
the details of the specific requirements vary from year to year [we chileans love bureaucracy and numbers and stuff, did you know they ask you for your unique government ID when you buy like a can of arizona or something? yes, even in convenience stores sometimes] but the broad strokes are as such: you have to be "in the lower 60% of homes by income", already be accepted to some uni undergrad program or something, not have a college degree already, not be behind on your studies if you're already a college student [i.e. if your degree nominally takes 3 years, not be in your fourth year], and be either a chilean or a foreign national with residency papers.
of course each and every one of these conditions has a bunch of clauses, subclauses, exceptions, justifications, and strategies that will permit you to avoid them or work around them. as an example of a real case, someone may make decent money, or even amazing money, and still get it (right wings politicians are famous for it): all they need to do, is to have their kid go live with their grandma, since a household is a household: they can also write in the application that they do, no one's gonna check. if granny's pension is pennies, as is the case for most old people, then you're in the lower 60% unless your kid themselves work. you may be in your fourth year of a 3year degree, as long as you justify that you had, say, some significat disease through papers doctors give you. you can be a bit over that 60% lower income household threshold, as long as you can credibly ascribe, through your dad's medical bills for example, that enough of that money went to his medicines. I've rumm4ged around the syst3m gov3rnment 3mployees use to qualify these cases and the sheer volume of ifs, thens and elses that go into the decision of "yes, give gratuity to this fellow" or "no, don't give it to this other fellow" were staggering. As I understand it, fulfilling the formal conditions mostly guarantees access to the benefit, though, but it's not hard to get something wrong, to forget to upload some paper, or make some other procedural error: there's an appeals process for that, but i understand the success rate for requests is lower than 80%. all in all, college in chile is not, in fact, free: there's just a scholarship program the government runs whose name suggests so: you need to fulfill conditions, get good grades, blablabla, and most students don't have it free.
in 23, about 40% of students in university (we have no college-uni distinction here) had gratuity. there's all sorts of other benefits, each with a different bureaucratic processes and stables of freelance bureaucrats involved, but their relevance has declined: most of the benefits students get are gratuity cause, hell, which one would you like, a 2%-a-year-loan for 30k, for example, or not paying for college in the first place.
I don't know for sure, but it wouldn't be totally surprising if the effect the market fundamentalists find here was at least somewhat correct: at least here, and likely everywhere, school grades and standardized test scores are strongly correlated with parental educational achievement, parental income, neighbourhood of residence and other indicators of socioeconomic status so if college is free, and you get into it based on your grades, then you'll have the rich kids getting in at higher rates than the poor kids do, especially to the top universities: this is a known effect. recently it's been decreed that schools that get public funding cannot select kids [you know, say stuff like 'of the three kids that are applying, imma take the two with the best grades' etcetera], which should reduce this effect in the next 30 years or so through reducing the delta in quality of education you get between rich and poor, though not to that big a degree since there's still gonna be private schools around. chile is in a perpetual state of extremely slow educational reform, so who knows what's gonna happen.
before gratuidad our main model of financing university was, much as in the US, predatory loans that often burden people for their entire lives. This had the slight benefit of being more or less universal, moreso than gratuidad at least, since no matter how poor you were the banks were happy to lend to the 30kusd (in a country with a median wage of 0.5kusd, mind you) you needed to study whatever it was, since the loans were originally at 7% per year and if you defaulted the state would pay them anyway, leaving you in the second-class-citizen category of person in the privately-administered list of debitoribus of the republic. lately it's become much easier to get out of that list, named Dicom, partly because so many people were in it as a result of these loans as to make some important political pressure, so when I went to college the deal was anyone could get into college, a good one or a bad one depending on your grades, as long as you either get the big loan, Crédito con Aval del Estado, you get some other kind of loan... you know, just a student loan, from a bank if you didn't qualify for CAE, or you could not get a loan and just go if your parents were well off or better, half a median wage or so. it was, like all neoliberal policies, ultimately a scam to put public money in the pockets of rich cunts, and coincided with literal malls opening banks in order to capitalize on it: the whole scam was hatched by son of a whore 'center-left' 'socialist' politician Ricardo Lagos, to bipartisan acclaim. it was a scam, but it worked in the sense of making access to university education, or technical education, practically universal. moreover, bad unis were a lot cheaper back then. honestly, everything was.
so i'd have to check the actual study to say if it's true or false that access went down after '14, but it could have: at the very least I don't know if the proportion of poors who access higher education has gone up or down since gratuidad, but it wouldn't be surprised if it was the same, and honestly I'd be somewhat surprised if it was higher. my guess is whatever the direction, the effect size is a low one. of course, that's just access: *harm* is much lower now, since gratuidad kids can try our programs without burdening themselves with a hundred median incomes worth of debt at 21, and I hear as many tearful accounts of "my son is the first university graduate in our family" in focus groups as I used to hear when I was an undergrad 15 years ago. as in the us, the mass forgiving (what's the word? a pardon? we call it condonación) of these loans is a promise the 'center-left' routinely shouts during campaign, only to renegue on it when in power, to bipartisan acclaim.
As for the reason why people tend not to go for "vocational" training and opt for university degrees instead, that's easy: they're much less prestigious, the quality of education is much lower in general (like, shitty teachers and, for example, literal ethics classes where they're told about god, about how abortion is bad and about how taking medical leave is the behaviour of losers and thieves, i swear I'm not being poetic here). in addition, most government jobs require university degrees, as well as most managerial jobs, even in the few heavy industries we have, so studying a technical degree means, sure, maybe you'll spend less money and do as well or better than your uni compadres, but then again, your career is probably at its peak six years after you graduate, or will have to get an ingeniería in something in order for you to be, say, a low level manager, instead of a 24 year old nepo baby with a uni degree in business administration. In addition, university is the dream most kids, and especially most poor kids, grow up hearing their parents tearfully hoping for them: no one tells their kid "I want you to have what I didn't have, so hopefully you'll study hard to become an electrician".
first of all, chile does not, in fact, have free tuition. we have a policy that's called gratuidad, gratuity i guess?, but it is a benefit for specific people which has to be requested and vetted and there's a whole bureaucratic apparatus to which you send a request for it that will answer yes or no depending on a number of factors. I have a relatively solid understanding of this bureaucracy since a social worker very close to me routinely freelances for them during their periods of high workload.Ares Land wrote: ↑Thu Jul 25, 2024 9:07 amThis refers to Chile apparently introducing free tuition in 2014. The conclusion that free tuition means poor students have more trouble when tuition is free is extremely surprising. That's fine, there are plenty of counter intuitive findings in economics, but frankly this calls for a lot more detail.Mercatus center wrote:These findings demonstrate that, far from achieving increased affordability and accessibility, free college tuition actually pushes college further out of reach for the poorest students, owing to the increased competition for placement.
the details of the specific requirements vary from year to year [we chileans love bureaucracy and numbers and stuff, did you know they ask you for your unique government ID when you buy like a can of arizona or something? yes, even in convenience stores sometimes] but the broad strokes are as such: you have to be "in the lower 60% of homes by income", already be accepted to some uni undergrad program or something, not have a college degree already, not be behind on your studies if you're already a college student [i.e. if your degree nominally takes 3 years, not be in your fourth year], and be either a chilean or a foreign national with residency papers.
of course each and every one of these conditions has a bunch of clauses, subclauses, exceptions, justifications, and strategies that will permit you to avoid them or work around them. as an example of a real case, someone may make decent money, or even amazing money, and still get it (right wings politicians are famous for it): all they need to do, is to have their kid go live with their grandma, since a household is a household: they can also write in the application that they do, no one's gonna check. if granny's pension is pennies, as is the case for most old people, then you're in the lower 60% unless your kid themselves work. you may be in your fourth year of a 3year degree, as long as you justify that you had, say, some significat disease through papers doctors give you. you can be a bit over that 60% lower income household threshold, as long as you can credibly ascribe, through your dad's medical bills for example, that enough of that money went to his medicines. I've rumm4ged around the syst3m gov3rnment 3mployees use to qualify these cases and the sheer volume of ifs, thens and elses that go into the decision of "yes, give gratuity to this fellow" or "no, don't give it to this other fellow" were staggering. As I understand it, fulfilling the formal conditions mostly guarantees access to the benefit, though, but it's not hard to get something wrong, to forget to upload some paper, or make some other procedural error: there's an appeals process for that, but i understand the success rate for requests is lower than 80%. all in all, college in chile is not, in fact, free: there's just a scholarship program the government runs whose name suggests so: you need to fulfill conditions, get good grades, blablabla, and most students don't have it free.
in 23, about 40% of students in university (we have no college-uni distinction here) had gratuity. there's all sorts of other benefits, each with a different bureaucratic processes and stables of freelance bureaucrats involved, but their relevance has declined: most of the benefits students get are gratuity cause, hell, which one would you like, a 2%-a-year-loan for 30k, for example, or not paying for college in the first place.
I don't know for sure, but it wouldn't be totally surprising if the effect the market fundamentalists find here was at least somewhat correct: at least here, and likely everywhere, school grades and standardized test scores are strongly correlated with parental educational achievement, parental income, neighbourhood of residence and other indicators of socioeconomic status so if college is free, and you get into it based on your grades, then you'll have the rich kids getting in at higher rates than the poor kids do, especially to the top universities: this is a known effect. recently it's been decreed that schools that get public funding cannot select kids [you know, say stuff like 'of the three kids that are applying, imma take the two with the best grades' etcetera], which should reduce this effect in the next 30 years or so through reducing the delta in quality of education you get between rich and poor, though not to that big a degree since there's still gonna be private schools around. chile is in a perpetual state of extremely slow educational reform, so who knows what's gonna happen.
before gratuidad our main model of financing university was, much as in the US, predatory loans that often burden people for their entire lives. This had the slight benefit of being more or less universal, moreso than gratuidad at least, since no matter how poor you were the banks were happy to lend to the 30kusd (in a country with a median wage of 0.5kusd, mind you) you needed to study whatever it was, since the loans were originally at 7% per year and if you defaulted the state would pay them anyway, leaving you in the second-class-citizen category of person in the privately-administered list of debitoribus of the republic. lately it's become much easier to get out of that list, named Dicom, partly because so many people were in it as a result of these loans as to make some important political pressure, so when I went to college the deal was anyone could get into college, a good one or a bad one depending on your grades, as long as you either get the big loan, Crédito con Aval del Estado, you get some other kind of loan... you know, just a student loan, from a bank if you didn't qualify for CAE, or you could not get a loan and just go if your parents were well off or better, half a median wage or so. it was, like all neoliberal policies, ultimately a scam to put public money in the pockets of rich cunts, and coincided with literal malls opening banks in order to capitalize on it: the whole scam was hatched by son of a whore 'center-left' 'socialist' politician Ricardo Lagos, to bipartisan acclaim. it was a scam, but it worked in the sense of making access to university education, or technical education, practically universal. moreover, bad unis were a lot cheaper back then. honestly, everything was.
so i'd have to check the actual study to say if it's true or false that access went down after '14, but it could have: at the very least I don't know if the proportion of poors who access higher education has gone up or down since gratuidad, but it wouldn't be surprised if it was the same, and honestly I'd be somewhat surprised if it was higher. my guess is whatever the direction, the effect size is a low one. of course, that's just access: *harm* is much lower now, since gratuidad kids can try our programs without burdening themselves with a hundred median incomes worth of debt at 21, and I hear as many tearful accounts of "my son is the first university graduate in our family" in focus groups as I used to hear when I was an undergrad 15 years ago. as in the us, the mass forgiving (what's the word? a pardon? we call it condonación) of these loans is a promise the 'center-left' routinely shouts during campaign, only to renegue on it when in power, to bipartisan acclaim.
As for the reason why people tend not to go for "vocational" training and opt for university degrees instead, that's easy: they're much less prestigious, the quality of education is much lower in general (like, shitty teachers and, for example, literal ethics classes where they're told about god, about how abortion is bad and about how taking medical leave is the behaviour of losers and thieves, i swear I'm not being poetic here). in addition, most government jobs require university degrees, as well as most managerial jobs, even in the few heavy industries we have, so studying a technical degree means, sure, maybe you'll spend less money and do as well or better than your uni compadres, but then again, your career is probably at its peak six years after you graduate, or will have to get an ingeniería in something in order for you to be, say, a low level manager, instead of a 24 year old nepo baby with a uni degree in business administration. In addition, university is the dream most kids, and especially most poor kids, grow up hearing their parents tearfully hoping for them: no one tells their kid "I want you to have what I didn't have, so hopefully you'll study hard to become an electrician".