politics

This hasn’t been an issue for climate science at all. People have done separate studies and come to the same results.

No, I didn't mean climate science hasn't been replicated. It's also not a straightforward distrust of science, but that's not far off. Republicans will generally trust their doctor's recommendations, but for COVID they also needed to trust a wider apparatus that included government.

How much of this distrust a prospective member of the tent would share, I have no idea.

This is conflating trust in the institutions with trust in the people. I’m sure most people would be happy to change the individuals in charge of the systems.

If someone trusts the institutions only while their party holds them, they cannot be said to trust the institutions.

But I doubt those same people would be interested in radically changing those systems.

Yes, I think the main objection lately is only who controls them.

The US needs majority rule democracy.

Agreed.

The US needs socialism. We need a welfare state for the people who fall through the cracks. It’s too easy for businesses to fire the poorest customers on essential services like housing, even when a person works multiple jobs.

Do you mean something beyond my "safety net"?

We need to regulate businesses to prevent conflict of interests, malpractice, and oligopolies.

As far as I know, tech is the main area we don't already do this, just because it's relatively new.

We need to have a wealth tax on billionaires and millionaires to reinject the wealth that is not larger circulating in the economy.

I'm partial to a "death tax" (estate tax) myself. Even then, I think there is a risk of capital flight that needs to be mitigated somehow.

We need to redirect the owner class’ source of wealth. The workers need to own the means of production.

I don't trust that you can actually do this without triggering a catastrophe. I would be more interested if it were structured as incremental reforms.

I mean if we could get rid of those while keeping all the benefits the technologies give us that would be pretty cool right?

Eh... You might as well say it would be cool if we could all be Vulcans.

I see a stateless society like that as an ideal to strive for by removing unnecessary or theoretically redundant layers of hierarchy in our society.

I might fight you on the particulars... I like efficiency and simplicity, but redundancy can be valuable in critical systems.

I’m a social democrat. Some people would say I’ve taken from market socialism, but it’s not my fault if they only have one idea.

Market socialism is the only socialism that seems remotely plausible to me, and I have absolutely no objection to cannibalizing someone else's system. I'm a software developer, so that's pretty close to what I do.

The US is a federal presidential constitutional republic. I’m fine with federalism as long states’ rights are about governmental separation of concerns. When states’ rights become states have the right to be a dictatorship where people have no rights, that is where I have a problem.

Yes, that behavior is one of the main reasons the system as designed didn't have enough guard rails. That argument against the states only works so long as the federal government is trustworthy, though. We may be about to see the opposite scenario play out.

I would like to see a radical change with how we fund government agencies. We should get rid of the debt ceiling. Congress will still need to budget for the year. But if agencies need additional funding they should be able to pull from Congress who could choose to approve or deny funding as needed. Like a US military model of pulling resources as opposed to a Soviet military model of pushing resources. Government agencies shouldn’t be in a position where they aren’t fully funded or think they won’t be fully funded if they don’t use all of the allotted funding. But there should be transparency to the process of funding.

If we can find a way to make Congress take money seriously, I'm fine with all of that. Running a deficit should exclusively be an emergency measure, and the debt should then be promptly paid down when times are good.

I'm not including the debt that is important for the weird-ass way the global economy works now.

Single payer health care

Does anyone do it like you want? I agree that we need healthcare reform, but I don't generally see glowing reviews of other systems either.

free college tuition

This is mostly a budget thing IMO. If you can set aside funds for it, go ahead. If you can't, that's society deciding this is not worth doing.

decomodify housing

I'm not familiar with this one, and a brief search makes me think it may be HOAs on steroids. Do you have an explainer you can link?

public drinking fountains

? You mean just more of them? We have them in like every park around here.

Defunding the police by having them focus on solving crime and giving the excess funding to agencies that specialize in jobs we don’t want police doing like mental health or animal control, etc. Cops shouldn’t be making wellness checks on patients or wasting their time catching stray dogs.

I would at least give various levels of police support for the wellness check, ranging from a police radio to backup close at hand.

I recommend talking to people from this generation. The people I have met in person are all well adjusted people.

Yes, it's worth noting that was based on recent reports from teachers that I have seen on Reddit, in center-aligned politics subs. I am expecting that if it's a real problem there will be press on it soon.

We will need a massive and sustained cult deprogramming effort for people who have been watching Fox News for nearly three decades. The alternative is continued political unrest and domestic terrorism even if we manage to educate the rest of the population out of neoliberalism and fascism.

How do you even go about that?

Based on what you wrote I’m going to guess that the cult deprogramming position is going to be the most disagreeable with you.

My own parents are the best possible argument for it, but it would still need to pass muster in terms of the Constitution.

I definitely have a distaste for media that attempts to proselytize, though.

You’re likely to come across people and communities that are prone to fed posting, if you haven’t already.

I had to look that up. That is irresponsible at a personal level as well as a societal one.

On the other hand I don't think we're getting out unscathed from this trap we've set for ourselves.

(I had this name several months ago but apparently Lemmy pruned me? I am increasingly uncomfortable with Reddit, but my re-registration was actually prompted by a temporary problem that made me think the Reddit app was demanding notification permissions on my phone to continue functioning.)