United States Politics Thread 46

[Travis B.]

You might object that the device with the screen costs money, too, which is true, but for an intense reader, it won't take long to recover that money by saving money on individual books.

And one doesn't need to buy a separate e-book reader to read e-books if one already owns a phone, tablet, or PC, too...

[Travis B.]

jcb: Wagenknecht might be left-wing, or she might be right-wing, or whatever - in any case she's pretty bad. She started out as a Stalinist, and now she's flirting with Nazis. Neither of those two positions is in any way defensible.

I have no patience for people who defend being 'economically left-wing and culturally right-wing' myself. After all, socialism is for all workers, not just workers of a chosen nation, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or like, and being 'economically left-wing and culturally right-wing' is essentially purporting that one favors one group of workers over other workers.

So is president-unelect Musk running the show now?

It might be a good idea to focus on Musk being bad a lot in the near future. "Unelected idiot billionaires who try to destroy the working class are running things" and so on.

Agreed.

[Travis B.]

I should also note that being 'economically left-wing and culturally right-wing' is always a lie ─ the 'economically left-wing' parts are invariably abandoned once the right has achieved their goals (and for those who still believe in them, remember how things turned out for the Strasserites on the Night of the Long Knives).

[Ares Land]

Their grievance is that their lives suck. Immigration and trans rights are just what they're *told* is the problem by the right. Left parties need to offer an alternative explanation (the true explanation) about why their lives suck: billionaires and capitalist accumulation.

My answer to that is two-fold.
First: how about immigrants and trans people? Don't their lives suck, too? According to the BSW, if your life sucks it only matters if you're a straight white German.
Second: why does the BSW go with the right-wing explanation if it's not a right-wing party? why don't they offer the correct explanation?

So, when Democrats strategically abandon working class economics/voters to try to attract more suburban voters, they're they're still left-wing

Honestly, by wider international standards, the Democrats are not left-wing and never really have been. In the context of American politics, yes, they are to the left of the Republicans (which isn't especially hard to do, I grant you that.)

but when Wagenknecht abandons some cultural issues (but keeps the economics) to keep working class voters, she's no longer left-wing?
Again, this is exactly what I mean by the deletion of economics from politics. Wagenknecht is also aware of this, and it's the reason why she declines to use the word "left" to describe her party

I mean, she even says so herself! More generally, hitting on immigrants, or trans people is dividing the working class into a respectable part and an underclass. Having an underclass is not just a cultural issue; it's an economic issue as well. You get a group of potential workers with essentially no rights, which is excellent for capitalism. I think most of agriculture in California runs on illegal immigrants. The issue isn't with the 'immigrant' part, but with the 'illegal' part.
Extremely convenient to have workers that are 'illegal', isn't it? Or 'legal' workers that entirely depend on their employer.

Immigration particularly so. You can't be conservative on immigration and socialist when it comes to the economy; or conversely liberal on immigration and conservative on economics. It just doesn't work that way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0

I usually like Bernie, but he's dead wrong on that one.
When you're tough on immigration, what really happens is that immigration still happens -- but the 'tougher' you are, the closer their status is to slavery.

I think the ideal situation, for anti-immigration people, is basically the one of migrant workers to the UAE or to Saudi Arabia.

[Ares Land]

Really, Qu'ils mangent de la brioche, anyone? If you read paper books, you know what they cost. I trust you to have some familiarity with the financial situation of poor people, both in the richer and in the poorer parts of the world. So how can you ask this question?

Now, if you don't visit online stores as a matter of principle, you might not know this, but when a place sells both paper books and electronic books, the electronic versions are usually cheaper - sometimes they cost only half as much as the paper version, or even less. And that's before we get to the possibility of breaking laws.

E-books being cheaper than paper books is true of the English-language market. (Maybe in Germany too, I don't read German well enough.) Here in France, paper books are cheaper than in England or the US, e-books are more expensive. Paper and e-books end up costing about the same.

There are quite a few ways to get books cheaply, or even for free: libraries, secondhand books, borrowing from a friend, donations, public bookcases. None of these work with ebooks.
Most libraries do offer ways to borrow e-books (I've been involved in such a project myself ) -- it's not nearly as convenient as the traditional way.

But but paper is better than screens so poor people would pay for paper books if only they knew what's best for them!

I don't necessarily agree with MacAnDàil on the dangers of screens; but the article's conclusions were that kids relate to paper books better. This fits in with my experience. (Toddlers like to interact with books in a physical way, which you can't do with an e-book, for instance.)

[Raphael]

E-books being cheaper than paper books is true of the English-language market. (Maybe in Germany too, I don't read German well enough.) Here in France, paper books are cheaper than in England or the US, e-books are more expensive. Paper and e-books end up costing about the same.

OK, in that case, I apologize for my outburst. Without knowing about the situation in France, it basically looked to me as if MacAnDàil was asking people with little money to explain why they can't eat large amounts of caviar.

[Travis B.]

But but paper is better than screens so poor people would pay for paper books if only they knew what's best for them!

I don't necessarily agree with MacAnDàil on the dangers of screens; but the article's conclusions were that kids relate to paper books better. This fits in with my experience. (Toddlers like to interact with books in a physical way, which you can't do with an e-book, for instance.)

I get that is what the article actually said, but MacAnDàil was using that article to support the view that 'screens bad paper good' overall, which it does not actually support in the general case.

[Ares Land]

However, nothing prevents us from substituting these with other sources. The sun can be replaced with thorium reactors. Ecology can be replaced with imported materials and artificial tools. If materials are imported from under the ground or outer space, it may technically no longer be a part of any ecological closed loop.

I'd love to this tested out sometimes, preferably not by Elon Musk.

Seriously, though, not, you can't replace the environment. From a physicist point of view, yeah, the environment is a machine that turns solar energy into the specific kind of biomass we need and the climate we need to thrive. The tricky part is we don't really understand, or can substitute the bits in the middle.
Human beings have been hit by quite a few natural disasters this past year. There was nothing much we could do to prevent it.

What's wrong with romanticizing nature, besides? I personally would very much like to preserve woods, lakes, rivers and mountains as they are.

An ecology without economies of scale can no longer support our current population.

If you are not willing to make essential goods cheaper, you have nothing to offer the majority of humanity. They will vote for the other side whether they are fascist or not, whether they save the environment or destroy it, whether or not they will be directly responsible for the slaughter of their own grandkids.

In a given developed country, agriculture is about 1% of GDP; construction maybe 5%. From a degrowth perspective, we could cut the economy to ten percent its size and still not starve.

The inescapable conclusion is that much of human labour goes to non-essential stuff ('bullshit jobs', in David Graeber's words). This is an ethical problem already (I'm willing to work for the essentials, not to make shareholders happy) but the thing is, the current economic activity is destroying our environment in various ways: there's global warming, plus loss of biodiversity, soil artificialization, the works -- more generally, refer to the natural disasters I mentioned above.

In 1924 most of the ills in the world could probably be chalked down to insufficient production. Not so in 2024: we have the capacity to produce more than enough for everyone. There are more than enough goods to go around; the trouble is, you have to please a shareholder somewhere to get access to them.
As for economies of scale; again, that's problem that was fixed long ago and we're now seriously into excessive optimization.

I think you might enjoy reading into degrowth; suprrisingly, a fair bit of Marxism goes into it

That article argues for the importance of cities, not their lower ecological impact.

I'm positive zompist had something on this. If humans restrict themselves to cities, that could be better for the environment than us cutting down forests and spreading out all over the map. Of course, this would mean making the cities environmentally friendly first. Was it called Cities of the Future?

Yes, though I can't remember where that was -- in an older rant, I think. That cities can be environmentally friendly, more so than rural settlements in some areas is a point that needed to be made.
Concluding that humans should restrict themselves to cities, or restrict themselves to the countryside for that matter, is taking it too far. There isn't a single correct lifestyle. Not everyone is suited to city life, or people may enjoy it at some point in their life and find it inconvenient later.
There are quite a few medieval villages around here; I like how many of these have a pretty small footprint -- small, but relatively densely populated settlements. It looks about ideal. (Unfortunately, urban/suburban sprawl is still the more fashionable option.)

[malloc]

In 1924 most of the ills in the world could probably be chalked down to insufficient production. Not so in 2024: we have the capacity to produce more than enough for everyone. There are more than enough goods to go around; the trouble is, you have to please a shareholder somewhere to get access to them.

Quite. Growth is valuable up to a point but there eventually come diminishing returns and growing costs. It is good and necessary for an infant to grow into an adult but hardly beneficial for an adult to continue growing until they're fifty meters tall.

[keenir]

In 1924 most of the ills in the world could probably be chalked down to insufficient production. Not so in 2024: we have the capacity to produce more than enough for everyone. There are more than enough goods to go around; the trouble is, you have to please a shareholder somewhere to get access to them.

Quite. Growth is valuable up to a point but there eventually come diminishing returns and growing costs. It is good and necessary for an infant to grow into an adult but hardly beneficial for an adult to continue growing until they're fifty meters tall.

Oh I don't know, we get some pretty fantastic actresses that way.



(please let that joke have succeeded)

[Lērisama]

There are quite a few ways to get books cheaply, or even for free: libraries, secondhand books, borrowing from a friend, donations, public bookcases. None of these work with ebooks.
Most libraries do offer ways to borrow e-books (I've been involved in such a project myself ) -- it's not nearly as convenient as the traditional way.

For what it's worth, when the public library is a ≥25 min walk away, taking the bus is slower, my city is too small for any more fun public transport and I can't drive, being able to borrow e-books is really convenient. The problem is you are at the mercy of the service your library's chosen for it. We've been through three so far. The first one was amazing, then it stopped working and we had to use the one by the same people which was awful¹, then the library worked that out, and swapped to a different service².

¹ admittedly mostly in comparison – I don't think it was that bad, just so much worse than the original
² still not as good as the first one, of course