[News] Post a D&D Picture

Previous incarnations of Cleveland/P&C/D&D have had an image thread, to handle political cartoons and other image-based stuff that doesn't belong in the general post-a-picture threads.

If any of them spawn an extended discussion, please spawn it off into its own thread. Replies to non-picture replies should take the form of a link pointing to a post on a different discussion thread.

And I shouldn't have to say it, but the images still need to abide by the rules.

If the work is really that important and crucial, maybe they should be kept happy and given all that they've asked for.

Great, so to avoid some "dire" consequences if things shut down we have... checks notes demonstrated that the government will step in to undermine labor and protect corporations. Fantastic.

We need a goddamn general strike, everywhere. Rail. Air traffic control. Service industry. Construction. Everyone needs to just stop for a few days.

Robear wrote:

At some point, we have to be pragmatic.

I am so f*cking sick of being pragmatic. Everything I f*cking do is in the name of pragmatism. If I have to vote for one more wet noodle sycophantic pseudo-progressive because I have to be pragmatic, I'm going to f*cking scream. "The republicans won't let us" can't be good enough reason anymore.

We just need to vote hard enough to allow the Democrats to take back the gerrymandered House, then get 60 61 63 65 70 90… Senate seats.

The goalposts will move forever as the Dems never actually do enough to improve things for most Americans.

NSMike wrote:
Robear wrote:

At some point, we have to be pragmatic.

I am so f*cking sick of being pragmatic. Everything I f*cking do is in the name of pragmatism. If I have to vote for one more wet noodle sycophantic pseudo-progressive because I have to be pragmatic, I'm going to f*cking scream. "The republicans won't let us" can't be good enough reason anymore.

It's not that "Republicans won't let us" it's that doing the non-pragmatic thing has very real negative political and economic impacts.

You want months of media coverage about how the Democrats ruined Christmas, triggered a recession, and increased the costs of basic goods like food (during a time of rampant inflation) because they encouraged a national rail worker strike? Let's roll into the next election cycle with a bunch of laid off workers from various rail-dependent industries who all blame Biden and the Democrats for their woes.

Sure, in a utopia you can say "let them strike," but in the real world you have to figure out how not to actively f*ck over tens of millions of Americans just to give 115,000 Americans everything they ask for when it comes to better wages and working conditions.

It's why Democrats always blink when the debt ceiling comes up: because 'scoring one' on the Republicans wouldn't remotely be worth the absolute global economic carnage that would happen if the US would default on its national debt.

It absolutely sucks to be the only political party of adults in the country, but that's where were at.

OG_slinger wrote:
NSMike wrote:
Robear wrote:

At some point, we have to be pragmatic.

I am so f*cking sick of being pragmatic. Everything I f*cking do is in the name of pragmatism. If I have to vote for one more wet noodle sycophantic pseudo-progressive because I have to be pragmatic, I'm going to f*cking scream. "The republicans won't let us" can't be good enough reason anymore.

It's not that "Republicans won't let us" it's that doing the non-pragmatic thing has very real negative political and economic impacts.

You want months of media coverage about how the Democrats ruined Christmas, triggered a recession, and increased the costs of basic goods like food (during a time of rampant inflation) because they encouraged a national rail worker strike? Let's roll into the next election cycle with a bunch of laid off workers from various rail-dependent industries who all blame Biden and the Democrats for their woes.

Sure, in a utopia you can say "let them strike," but in the real world you have to figure out how not to actively f*ck over tens of millions of Americans just to give 115,000 Americans everything they ask for when it comes to better wages and working conditions.

It's why Democrats always blink when the debt ceiling comes up: because 'scoring one' on the Republicans wouldn't remotely be worth the absolute global economic carnage that would happen if the US would default on its national debt.

It absolutely sucks to be the only political party of adults in the country, but that's where were at.

I think you justified exactly why they should or give a final warning for the strike as the railway posts billions in profits and they are almost to final agreements.

On the one hand, I think that big strikes that severely impacted all Americans would actively turn them against corporate greed and executive robber barons.

And then I remember where I live and sigh.

Strikes are HARD on the strikers and their families.

Saying "everyone should strike" is ignoring the fact that your proposal itself is going to inflict massive harm on untold people.

Striking without the backing of a union that will put money in your pocket while you're out on strike is orders of magnitude harder. Remember that study a few years that showed that most Americans couldn't handle an unexpected $400 cost?

I get the frustration but that's not a useful solution.

Mixolyde wrote:

On the one hand, I think that big strikes that severely impacted all Americans would actively turn them against corporate greed and executive robber barons.

And then I remember where I live and sigh.

The absolute boost to republican fund-raising, party motivation, and faux-news machinations would be off the charts and for 30 years they would run on how Biden and the Democrats should never be in power again.

There must be a name for the paradox that getting one's preferred party into power puts one's interests at the most risk (and vice-versa: achieving the goals of one's interests puts one's preferred party at risk). Like, Trump's victory and the precipitous fall of the NRA and gun sales (till COVID came along), and the impact of the SC abortion ruling on the mid-term elections.

EDIT: And if there's not, I'm calling Mao's Paradox from now on.

Assuming the country would survive that long under a Republican regime.

A constitutional convention is long overdue in this country, the problem is one party isn't just regressive, it's aspirationally despotic.

Why I want a general strike is because I don't want a revolution with violence. With even just two of those four sectors of labor in a general strike, demanding reinstatement of labor protections at a bare minimum, the subsequent change would be staggeringly powerful. And when it works, it won't be forgotten quickly.

It's not realistic anyway, too many Americans have been convinced that their peers are the problem and not the moderately rich, the generally rich, the super rich, and the ultra rich.

The rail strike isn't even close to the biggest reason I want this. It's just the latest injustice. The only reason their demands are being characterized as overreaching is because the American perception of fair practices towards labor has been perverted into blind corporatocratic kowtowing. The American laborer is being portrayed as a grizzly bear clawing at the faces of the rail company while actually being Oliver Twist, holding up his bowl, asking for more gruel.

And for some reason, it's the intransigence of the union that is the problem, not the rail company.

Mixolyde wrote:

IMAGE(https://i.redd.it/ghgsh9zbog2a1.jpg)

Well, I'm screwed.

Damn.

Veloxi wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

IMAGE(https://i.redd.it/ghgsh9zbog2a1.jpg)

Well, I'm screwed.

Damn.

One of us! One of us!

Veloxi wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

IMAGE(https://i.redd.it/ghgsh9zbog2a1.jpg)

Well, I'm screwed.

Damn.

Who is the lucky punter that controls you guys?

Jonman wrote:

Strikes are HARD on the strikers and their families.

Saying "everyone should strike" is ignoring the fact that your proposal itself is going to inflict massive harm on untold people.

Striking without the backing of a union that will put money in your pocket while you're out on strike is orders of magnitude harder. Remember that study a few years that showed that most Americans couldn't handle an unexpected $400 cost?

I get the frustration but that's not a useful solution.

Gee, it's almost as though the solution to preventing protest and strikes it to make it damn near impossible for the protestors and strikers to financially survive protesting and striking.

Wait, picture thread...

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FivpROkXkAEwyLu?format=jpg&name=large)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/1OcBdV3.png)

True, not true - more complex?

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/g3khhDL.jpeg)

Well the part about Reaganomics is 100% true. But it's about tax cuts on the rich and a lot of other sh*tty policies he enacted too, not just the stocks

But is is tied to when working class wages stopped rising?

farley3k wrote:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/1OcBdV3.png)

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EpYZsbZWMAAmtnb.png)

farley3k wrote:

But is is tied to when working class wages stopped rising?

It is strongly correlated, but it's impossible to know whether other loopholes/excuses/etc would have been used to siphon off wealth to the elites in lieu of rising wages or not.

(Obviously, I strongly suspect that if it hadn't been stock buybacks, it would've been some other tactic instead)

I gotta ask, as a Canadian who lives in a country with 5ish* Federal political parties and who is also wholly ignorant of American politics: what stops a 3rd or even 4th political party from emerging? Is it a constitutional thing that you can only have two?

*I say ish because our Green Party is still fairly niche and the Bloc Quebecois only has members from Quebec and no other province.

IMAGE(https://i.redd.it/oh40zwog113a1.jpg)

Let's get that guaranteed for every worker in America.

Trachalio wrote:

I gotta ask, as a Canadian who lives in a country with 5ish* Federal political parties and who is also wholly ignorant of American politics: what stops a 3rd or even 4th political party from emerging? Is it a constitutional thing that you can only have two?

It's not that. Parties aren't even mentioned in the Constitution at all, and some of the Founding Fathers loathed the very idea of political parties.

There are two real problems. The first problem is that the two major parties in this country have a very large incentive to not allow a third party to emerge. Right now they control almost all the political seats in the country, they control almost all the media coverage, and they control almost all of the money. They also control things like the debates - the nationally televised debates that we have between the candidates aren't something set out in law, but are negotiated between the two parties. They've technically made it possible for a third candidate to join them in the debates, but they've set the bar high enough for how popular that third candidate has to be that realistically it isn't going to happen. They don't want to have to share their power with anyone else.

The second problem is our first-past-the-post voting system, where only the candidate who gets the most votes wins. Any third party that tries to emerge is going to primarily siphon off voters from one of the other parties - a Christian Nationalist party would take mostly Republicans, for example, while a pure Leftist party would take voters from the Democrats. The problem is that in a first-past-the-post voting system, when you take voters away from a party with an ideology similar to yours, you're only making it more likely for the party unlike yours to win - so in a district roughly split between Ds and Rs, a strong third-party Leftist candidate would split the Democratic vote and give the Republicans an easy victory. Due to our current political climate, it's generally far better to vote for a party that you don't completely agree with than to let the party with beliefs antithetical to yours win.

So a third party would basically have no power, no money, and no media coverage, and if they do manage to get a sizeable following despite all this, they'll only make it easier for the people that their voters dislike to win the election. The last time we had a significant 3rd party vote for President was Ralph Nader in the 2000 election, and his relatively strong campaign basically gave us 8 years of GWB.

Trachalio wrote:

I gotta ask, as a Canadian who lives in a country with 5ish* Federal political parties and who is also wholly ignorant of American politics: what stops a 3rd or even 4th political party from emerging? Is it a constitutional thing that you can only have two?

*I say ish because our Green Party is still fairly niche and the Bloc Quebecois only has members from Quebec and no other province.

This deserves a longer answer than I can give right now, but here goes: no, it's not a constitutional thing. However, the two party system is in many ways entrenched in election laws at the state & federal level. 3rd parties have to jump through hoops just to get on the ballots. And the vast majority of elections use first-past-the-post voting which discourages people from voting for 3rd parties.

Also our 3rd parties just kind of suck in general.

Trachalio wrote:

I gotta ask, as a Canadian who lives in a country with 5ish* Federal political parties and who is also wholly ignorant of American politics: what stops a 3rd or even 4th political party from emerging? Is it a constitutional thing that you can only have two?

*I say ish because our Green Party is still fairly niche and the Bloc Quebecois only has members from Quebec and no other province.

There are other parties already, but the voting method we use in most states are deliberately set up to favor having two parties. Any additional parties that start getting popular are seen as threats that will "steal" voters from whichever major party they're most similar too. It's why the tea party was courted and absorbed into the Republican Party rather than becoming it's own party, and also why Russia launched a pro-Green Party social media campaign in 2016 to help Trump win.
It's a deliberately manufactured problem though, since the major parties in most states have tied continuing state recognition of political parties to their performance in presidential and/or gubernatorial elections, they have to run "spoiler" candidates in those races if they want to have guaranteed ballot access for smaller elected positions. It also serves to discourage alternative parties from even forming, as they'd need to find a candidate willing to even run for those positions and do well enough in the race to retain their recognition. So most people who would be willing to be a candidate for a new party find it easier to either run under one of the main two or run as an independent.
Ranked choice voting can help with them not having a spoiler effect, but the official state recognition problem still exists.

If strikes didn't cause any hardship they would be pointless. As I'm sure everyone here knows so there must be more nuance here I'm not seeing.

I support the railroad workers strike but would rather see the yacht and private jet workers strike.

TBH, it's not that much different up here when it comes to vote syphoning. One of the major reasons why I voted for our current Prime Minister is because he promised to get rid of first past the post voting and replace it with ranked voting instead. Something he completely did not do when he was re-elected and has pretty much said "Yah no. We're not gonna change it because we know the NDP will win the next election if we do." Le Sigh