Georgia senate elections

[Seanchaidh]

I do not feel satisfied in that regard. I think the government has been overly lax in their allowances for corporate interference in the market for quite a while. I certainly have my complaints about the status quo, even within the Republican Party. A Coolidge conservative was pro-business because they were pro-consumer, where their opposition was pro-labor, and I think both sides of that argument have lost their way and care more about hating business or hating government than they do about supporting anything. But like, no amount of complaints from me over the inadequacy of current governance is ever going to make me think the solution is the complete dissolution of modern society.

Who is proposing that..?

Like, you might note, I didn't say to house power as close to the individual "as possible" as you wrote here. I wrote as close "as feasible". Which is quite a different thing. If I want as close as possible, you could certainly imagine a society where everyone has their own little subsistence farm where they have absolute power over and responsibility for their own existence. But that's not feasible,

It's also nowhere near necessary to accomplish the goal. It may be sufficient, I guess, but that's quite beside the point and it is best not to confuse sufficiency for necessity in order to construct a false dilemma.

Individual agency is not an absolute that needs to be prioritized over all other considerations.

It seems like a pretty big deal when your economic system has a tendency toward the concentration of wealth and power to challenge at the very least that tendency in a robust way, and that means removing the power that certain individuals have over other individuals without adequate justification. The absentee landlord vs. the tenants, for example. The shareowner vs. the worker. The military force that occupies vs. the people who live under occupation. And so on.

You imagine a world where individuals don't own any more of any business than what they personally operate, and I can understand how that seems like a preferable option in a vacuum, but there are downsides you should be considering before advocating for something.

I imagine a world where business decisions can be decided democratically rather than autocratically with, yes, greater weight on the input of those who are more affected by the results of a decision.

 

[Agema]

B) Trump's gotten Arab nations to sign peace treaties with Israel. The idea that putting the embassy in Jerusalem would promote more perpetual conflict in the Middle East was always a stupid notion, but with hindsight I can't believe you're making that claim. We're closer to peace between Israel and the rest of the Middle East than we have been in decades.

Yes and no.

The USA has real clout, and the Trump administration threw it around heavily this year in an attempt to score some sort of "win" in time for the election. The USA got the latest concession, for instance, by publicly backing Morocco's claims over Western Sahara, which is heavily disputed. The obvious concern here is if that destabilises the thirty-year ceasefire - and if so congratulations, thousands of deaths so Israel can boast another embassy. Then of course remembering the real basis of Arab - Israeli peace is not actually peace, it's attempting to stitch up a coalition to fight another enemy (Iran). This is even without the tricky issue of what all this means for the Palestinians, who are still completely boned, as if their safety, liberty and human development doesn't matter a damn.

So the first and obvious issue is that Arab-Israeli peace involves exchanging conflict for conflict. The bottom line here being that people - particularly the American pro-Israelis and through them Trump, simply could not give the slightest damn about how many people suffer and die just so long as Israel is sorted. In particular, they barely seem to view the Palestinians as human.

The second is that this is low-hanging fruit - in a way, normalisation is making overt what everyone knows has really been going on a long time that Arab nations have been working with Israel to some degree. The third is that this is all paper thin: the minute Trump walks out, a lot of it can be forgotten or undone. This is not a concrete step towards peace, it's a PR blitz based on nothing but the USA's willingness to pay other countries for the benefit of Israel.

 

[Shadyside]

Word on the street is that Republican voters in Georgia don't want to vote, since they think the Dems will steal it. Guess the Dems will win by a landslide for the senate.

 

[Trunkage]

Word on the street is that Republican voters in Georgia don't want to vote, since they think the Dems will steal it. Guess the Dems will win by a landslide for the senate.

At this time, there is almost as many people early voting for the run off as the general election.

McConnell is desperate for a relief deal to bump the numbers. He's indicating that he thinks there is going to be trouble

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Word on the street is that Republican voters in Georgia don't want to vote, since they think the Dems will steal it. Guess the Dems will win by a landslide for the senate.

What better way to "prove" voter fraud? "They could never have won by that many votes honestly!"