If by "left" you mean democrats then they will not do this because it is not what their views are. They are ideologically as neoliberal as Reagan and Thatcher. This is part of why they don't do as good of a job opposing the far right as they could, because they only exist as long as their only opposition is unhinged far right politicians.

My stance on this starts with the things that a lot of people for the most part can admit are problems. Corporations with the power and wealth of small countries, concentration of money in the hands of a few, absurd costs of living, decreasing access to education, the environmental crisis, constant wars that destroy poorer countries, and in many countries poor healthcare outcomes. And this is by no means an exhaustive list.

Now why do these things happen? In my opinion the origin of these issues comes down to private ownership of vitally important organizations and infrastructure, and the resulting profit seeking regardless of the consequences. This also is how I would define capitalism, because capitalism is at its core only a way of organizing the economy.

There are then multiple answers to how we should address them. Regulating companies and reforming capitalism without addressing the root issue are a common one, and in some cases somewhat effective. However, in most cases such movements(which I would call social democratic) have a tendency to quickly walk back their achievements. For example, Tory attacks on the NHS in the UK have contributed to its reduction in quality. Or the walking back that the Mitterand administration did in France. Or the deregulation of trucking in the United States which led to substantially lower wages. This is also a western-centric argument on my part, because social democracy also relies on ruthlessly exploiting poorer countries' workers but that's a whole separate can of worms.

One could think of this backtracking as faults in the political system, which they perhaps are, but I think they are inherent to capitalism, because when you have such overwhelming power in megacorporations, they will inevitably eventually get their way as long as they exist. It's the equivalent of being surprised that you will eventually burn up if you try to stand on the sun despite your thermal shielding or other mitigations. Which isn't that absurd of a comparison because the sun's surface is only ~15 times hotter than a human if you measure from absolute zero.

The next answer is to try to, through monopoly breaking or other means, to revert capitalism to a former state of less concentrated capital. This is a fool's errand and a reactionary stance in most cases, because monopolization is inherent to capitalism, especially now that companies' fixed costs are immense, but the marginal cost of each new unit(be it a package sent through a carrier or a complex electronic device) is nearly negligible in comparison, making a monopoly the inevitable outcome.

And about at this point in my political development I found out about Marxism and it's overall proposal for an alternative to capitalism, and I found it the most compelling. The history of Marxism is also a whole separate can of worms so I won't go too far into it, but I agree with the Marxist class analysis that there are owners(most of which aren't even individuals anymore) and workers, and that workers' main political strength are their numbers. And a lot of capitalism reform proposals do actually rely on mass political organization of workers. Now what I say is, I think we can be more imaginative as to what that power can be used for. I don't think what comes next after capitalism will be perfect, but I think we can do much better.

Are they that good per view(and hence per bandwidth cost) though? Everyone I've heard who knows more than I had been saying that internet ads have always only marginally paid the bills and that purchases for microtransactions make way more money.

See this kind of shit is why I pirate, not because I can't afford to pay $10 a month. When the $10 for a lot of content becomes $10 per month per piece of media you like, and you can't watch it on your platform of choice, and you can't watch it on a flight without paying more or not at all, this makes the $5 per month I pay for a VPN sound like a far better service.

I find the "raise taxes to pay for social programs" and "cut corporate taxes" to be somewhat contradictory. Reagan and Thatcher were textbook neoliberals if you need any examples, and they destroyed social programs and labor unions rather than supporting them.

Because the AUR is a pretty low quality repo. Not sure if anything has changed since 2 years ago, but last I used arch, the AUR was full of broken, abandoned, and unbuildable packages. The Debian repos, fedora+rpmfusion, etc, provide a comparable number of software packages with substantially higher quality, hence no need for the AUR. Fedora actually has COPRs which suffer from the same quality issues as the AUR for similar reasons.

A lot of things that US courts have recently done(this included) is making making me wonder about how judicial review should work. Because what I keep seeing is that US courts will strike down shitty band aid solutions(which AA was, it was an attempt at a quick and easy solution for a very long list of social issues) without offering better alternatives. I do think that affirmative action should not have to exist, but the better choice is full scale education reform, addressing systemic racism, an understanding of how privilege affects educational outcomes, and greater availability and lower cost of the highest quality tertiary education. As it is today I am observing courts not choosing perfect over good, but rather destroying half baked solutions because they oppose the intended outcomes of those solutions.

Hot take: the narrative that politicians do not understand technology due to their age is giving them too much credit. They have entire offices full of staffers whose entire job is to explain these things to them in ways they understand, as I am sure they have for some of the more important things. They just don't care because their purpose is to serve corporations, not the public.

But their countries are only poor because of the imperialism of rich countries for centuries. You're saying they should be grateful for rich economies helping them develop, when those rich economies are the reason they are poorer to begin with.

Perhaps my opinions are different from others but I feel like these websites are forgetting that they're an optional part of people's lives. There are plenty of things I can spend my time on besides reddit and YouTube, and Netflix is forgetting that it's marginally more convenient than piracy.

The thing is the American revolution wasn't about taxation itself. The taxation without representation bit was more of a minor component over how society should be organized. The question was whether the inherited aristocratic titles or ownership of land(later means of production) determined your social power. There's nothing about the ideology of the American revolution that is about the levying of taxes, it is about who gets to collect them.

With the soviets, the problems and successes are significantly more nuanced than "Stalin was bad dictator"(although that is a true statement). Which on one hand makes a lot of western criticism of the USSR questionably true, but also makes the actual issues(which there were) harder to address because they happened not because of one guy being bad.

Probably they would make the battery removable from the bottom with some screw on the bottom. At least that's how I'd do it if I were them considering the batteries are linear anyway and are usually in the parts sticking down.

You're right, individuals can do a lot. We can take all of our politicians, CEOs, and corporate shareholders, and throw them out to one of their private islands that they love so much. Then, build a society where you aren't pressured or even forced to drive, to replace tech every 3 years, or have a logistics system reliant on fossil fuels. Oh was that not the kind of public action you were talking about?

Are they that good per view(and hence per bandwidth cost) though? Everyone I've heard who knows more than I had been saying that internet ads have always only marginally paid the bills and that purchases for microtransactions make way more money.

Not sure if this is directly applicable but there's the concept of dual power, where you can organize a bottom up power structure that takes some power from the regular government without needing to either submit to it or outright overthrow it. With that said it has only ever been successful in cases where the government is incredibly unstable to begin with.

Why do pro gun Republicans always use mental health as an alternative reason for excessive firearm suicide rates, and then are nowhere to be heard from when someone proposes universal mental health access.

Because "family values" in US discourse is usually code for homophobia and sexism, while "anti-communism" is usually just racism, classism and xenophobia.

"leftists" nowadays who defend Russia seem extremely pathetic to me. The only thing Russia has in common with leftism is a general dislike for the activities of the United States. But there are many other groups who opposed the US, such as Nazi Germany, which doesn't necessarily make them your ally. As a Russian-american I can say that a lot of media and discourse on Russia in the west has incredibly poor overall quality, but it's not a CIA psyop, it's a combination of American exceptionalism, genuine issues, and zero cultural awareness.

Obviously you can use whatever you want for outdoor temperature measurement or whatnot, but I think the US should switch to metric for anything of any importance. It's incredibly annoying when your PCB dimensions, your 3d printer, your fasteners, etc, are in millimeters, while your laser cutter is in inches. It introduces a cause of issues and undoubtedly is a headache for foreign entities trying to work with American industry.

As far as US politics is concerned it very much is. Going all the way back to framing of immigrants as communists in the early 20th century and using that to punish immigrant labour groups. Or using communism as a reason to destroy another Latin American or Middle Eastern country. Or using communism as a reason to arrest left leaning people in the US in the 1950s for no reason. Or the recent policies hostile to Chinese immigrants that were justified by the American public with anti-communism.

I am not talking about individual choices but rather the social factors influencing those choices, please read a history book

I realize it sounds utopic but it's not nearly as insane as people think it is, especially when compared to mass boycott proposals.

To illustrate this point I will use meat because it's probably the easiest to ditch of all major environmentally irresponsible behaviors. You first need to have a public where ~40-70% of the population is passionate about ditching meat, with most of the rest not caring and so falling into line. You then need to make sure that people who depend on the meat industry one way or another(which includes farmers/ranchers, fast food workers, people who cannot easily access vegetables, etc) are taken care of or understand that the overall social benefit to them outweighs the individual cost of ditching meat. You also need to have some way to coordinate this action to happen reasonably synchronously so that societal ideas about meat aren't reinforced. This level of public organization and power is more than enough for things like general strikes or even regime changes.

It'll also have third party apps. Wondering how hard it would be to import a European iphone into the US.

One thing I also wonder is, does it matter? Things have definitely improved for marginalized groups over time, but I can probably find texts from 2000 years ago that talk about discrimination over immutable traits being wrong. Discriminating as a head of state with presumably good access to information is equally wrong at any point in time.

I mean the opinions of the voting public are nearly always more complex than either Republican or Democratic party dogma. The problem is that there is no substantial way of politically engaging besides voting. I would argue actually that generally the public is way more left wing than it is given credit for, but a lot of people have no accessible ways to transform these ideas into action. And for this I don't have an easy answer. Disclaimer, am a leftist so I would obviously think this, but I do still think that we would see more diverse political ideas if our political systems were made to be more open.

I fail to see why you think helping corporations earning money will help individuals, especially with raising taxes on them. Corporations' interests are lower wages and higher prices, worker's interests are higher wages and lower prices. The only way to then increase wages is to force companies to do so, either through job disloyalty, strikes, regulations, or etc. Don't see how lower taxes will make them pay more.

I don't have any evidence for this but purely speculation on my part: racism can explain a good amount of that. Biden has in the 90s voted for "tough on crime bills", he is the definition of political establishment, and is a white man from Wilmington. Obama definitely is not textbook underpriveleged but he doesn't have those points that biden does

Millionaires are definitely still well off but just to make a point: the average value of a US house is $450k. Add to this a $250k retirement fund and you're already up to 0.7M in net worth.

I'm somewhat undecided here, because ultimately I don't care for federated services to become dominant at all costs, nor do I care if they shrink slightly. I want the users of these services to voluntarily choose them based on the principles that federated social media stands for right now. My personal opinion right now is let them federate, but defederate the minute the "extend" starts. But we'll see.

What is your ethnicity if I may ask? Because the anti communism bit does vary per society somewhat, but "traditional family values" are usually a far more constant in discouraging a wide variety of perfectly fine things.

A lot of transit can just be electrified with overhead wires

Why is it rooted in Nazi propaganda?

Not informed on this particular instance but 90% of illegal immigration to western countries happens because the US, UK, France, or etc, fucked up the migrants' origin country one way or another. A perfect example of this is the US: most immigrants are from places fucked up by either the US overthrowing any left-wing Latin American government, or by awful US drug policy. Most nations not only have a moral responsibility to migrants as fellow humans, but they are usually directly responsible for those migrants wanting to leave their homelands to begin with.

Its not idiotic, because democrats have had numerous opportunities to enshrine abortion and contraception into law, while controlling both the legislative and executive branch. Republicans are perfectly able to pass their abhorrent laws, but democrats seem to not be able to pass good legislation even when they control the government. Until Roe was overturned, this state of affairs was actually very beneficial to democratic politicians, because they could recycle abortion as a rallying point every single election.