Fireman saves kitten and no money changed hands. Fuck that communist bastard fireman! /s
Worse yet, the fireman was paid for by mandatory taxes by everyone even though most of them have never needed a firefighter in their lives
/s for good measure
This is a regular bit on FOX News. The list all the platform points of a Democratic official and play it as if it’s offensive when they should be positive points and are, popular policies according to most polls.
I’ve seen lists played this way on FOX for years now, including the original Green New Deal.
I don’t understand how this works, and am disquieted that it does. FOX is super confident in the thrall it has over it’s viewership.
It works because the average Fox News viewer:
- Is old, and already has Medicare, and doesn’t want it changed.
- Is retired and would see no benefit from a 32 hour work week
- is old, and sees environmental regulations as costs to them now with benefits in a future they won’t see
- Is old and retired and would see no benefit from free college
- is old and probably owns a house substantially paid off, and would see no benefit from a government housing program
- is a selfish asshole who doesn’t want others to enjoy these benefits, not even their own children
That gives me a glimmer of hope, that the boomers dying off (and some of us Xers) will allow the Overton window to shift again away from tribalism and towards mutualist values.
It is curious though, since the silent generation and greatest generation both had a sense of legacy, e.g. planting trees knowing you will not live to feel their shade. I wonder if it’s related to the rise of consumerism and the disposable product economy.
It’s negative programming. It’s a psychological technique used to prevent the subject from engaging with a subject earnestly when a source of free information is available by ‘poisoning the well’ ahead of time by associating the idea with an ‘opposed ideology’ thus discrediting the source of further information ahead of time.
Works on enough people to matter.
Clown world is the only place this could not be a joke. Like what else could they have on there? Free oral sex on request? Support for kittens?
Housing for all? No genocide?! These mosnters!
Looks great to me.
Ah yes, thanks faux news for accidentally advertising socialism and making them look cool
Well, unfortunately they can just show this, because a third of the country apparently hates these things for some reason
Well those things are obviously bad, if they weren’t, their “team” wouldn’t fight so hard against it!
When you’re so racist and classist, that you’ve become afraid of “all”.
I like how the Free Palestine bit clearly wasn’t part of whatever presentation they stole this from.
Health care ? Stable economy ? You really want that ?
You’ll end up just like Boomers with fancy “pensions” and “cabins” and happy grandkids DO YOU REALLY want tha… yeah that sounds pretty pretty pretty good comrade.
Soon enough it’s going to be “Food? Clean water? Those aren’t in the constitution, that’ll be 50 dollars for that small bag of rice, cash or klarna?”
They’ll put a tax on oxygen after
Klarna or
physical enslavementprison labor?
this is scary if you are someone that relies on exploitation for your livelihood.
I don’t find anything wrong.
What blows my mind is that basically all of these fit in with fiscal conservative ethos.
- Healthcare would benefit the most from economy of scale, which is the bedrock of corporation above the mom and pop level.
- Education is literally capital reinvestment for sustained growth.
- Housing is a commodity like like any other.
- 32 hour work weeks are scientifically proven to increase productivity and decrease Fraud, Waste, and Abuse.
- Taxation is another instance of capital reinvestment for sustained growth. Hell, it’s (demi-god of capitalism) Henry Ford’s “pay the line workers enough to buy my products”.
- The Green New Deal is not quite as cut and dry, but there is plenty of both “leveling the playing field to promote free market competition” against fossil fuel subsidies AND capital reinvestment.
Palestine opens a whole other can of billions of dollars of foreign government spending separate from the ethical concerns, which is less clear cut on market economics and would need to be an essay by itself. So I will just stick with the 6 out of 7 low hanging fruits for this argument, and mock the completely not fiscally conservating mess the Republican party has become.
There was a time where I was moderate, willing to believe the word of conservatives who said they wanted fiscal responsibility. I now know that they are craven liars, and have become fully radicalized.
Preach! I still consider myself to be a moderate or centrist as a leftist libertarian (social progressive and fiscal conservative), and also haven’t believed Republicans were actual fiscal conservatives since Bush Jr. They have been only social conservatives since arguably at least Regan. Still pissed off that insane Ayn Rand utopian individualists and Christian Nationalists became the entire libertarian movement.
Green New Deal is also incredibly sound economics and conservative ethos. Economically speaking, which is better: something you have to spend a bunch of time and effort mining for and then can only ever use it once or something you spend a bit more effort mining and manufacturing, but then can receive gains off your investment for decades? Gains that exceed your initial investment well before expected end of life.
And that’s just the economics of the gains; completely forgoing the cumulative costs burdened upon society by climate-change (increased heating/cooling-costs, early deaths because of pollution, crops failing and the mass-migration as a result of that). Continuing with fossil fuel is very very dumb if you look at the medium to long term.
For sure, but I focused on just the easily quantifiable economic returns because most people who would call the Green New Deal the Green New Scam are also climate change deniers. So, focusing on just their own pocketbooks with things that can easily be measured and calculated seems a better approach.
True, although we shouldn’t pretend that the cost for building a coal mine or developing an oil field is more single use than a solar farm or wind turbine. Many oil wells and coal mines operate for decades with relatively small operational costs after initial build out. Time in production difference is not statistically significant enough to make that a linchpin argument.
The jobs created by solar and wind in R&D, manufacturing, and construction and maintenance, along with most importantly the carbon emissions benefits are the most relevant economic points. Nuclear should also be part of the Green New Deal, but fossil fuel companies successfully fear mongered that sector to death.
The conservatives abandoned ethos long ago in favor of being against everything the progressives are for.
One of the bits that blew my mind was watching foreign politics and learning other countries have right wings further left than our own left. Fucking Overton windows.
Healthcare would benefit the most from economy of scale
would it? i’ve had far worse experience in large medical systems than i have in small clinics.
From a customer service standpoint, no, but I was talking about the cost perspective. A single payer system financing small clinics would be the best answer here, getting rid of the corporate hospital impersonality while keeping costs low. If a doctors office doesn’t have to deal with the insurance middle men and pharmacy middle men who are parasitically draining the system, you will have more neighborhood clinics and hospitals that care about their city’s residents.
If you see this and think these things are bad things to have in your country, you are seriously fucked in the head and I hope you die a horrible death from colon cancer.
Terry? 🤔
Oh no! It’s… European centrist?! And a rogue Free Palestine with a steel chair from the corner!
These are a bit too left-leaning for European centrists. Especially the 32-hour-workweek, even in the most “socialist” European countries this is a position only taken by dedicated “leftist” parties.
In France we have a 35 hours workweek, and our centrists fight that with all their might.
Imagine being so In love with the billionaires that you want less free time
My day job is unionized and it’s 35 hours per week. 🇨🇦
In the UK I think it averages 37.5 hours for salaried jobs. I haven’t looked that up.
I’m in the UK, 35 hours a week, with a compulsory 1 hour lunch break. University life… It’s flexible though 08:00-16:00 through 10:00-18:00. As long as you get seven hours in.
That’s pretty good, though legislation says they only have to give you a 20 minute break, and only if you work over six hours. Otherwise, 37.5 tends to be standard.
If you have enough time to think, that means we can strip you down to a 15 minute break
Thinking is clearly inefficient!
Is it? The average work week in the Netherlands is 30 hours. That is the current status quo, not even what the “left-leaning” parties propose for the future.
If it’s about the same as Germany, then the reason for that is that there are a lot of part time workers, who often don’t get enough money to be able to live off it on their own (e.g. married people, single parents who also get government assistance to make up the difference). That’s very different from declaring the full-time work week to be only 32 hours.
It’s somewhat similar to Germany, yes, though Germany has fewer part-time workers. In Germany (where I also live) the default options are 35 or 40 hours, though it’s becoming more common to have options to work less even in “full time” type of jobs.
Anyway, I doubt the “democratic socialists” in the USA want to ban working more than 32 hours, they just want people to have the same option people have in rich European countries.
Anyway, I doubt the “democratic socialists” in the USA want to ban working more than 32 hours
They want 32 hours to be legislated as ‘full time’ – meaning that employers legally must pay overtime (1.5x normal wage) for any amount of time worked over 32 hours per week.
This is already the case for 40 hours, but they want to reduce the number to 32.
If this is what they want, it’s really not very well thought through. Employers can just pay the same amount for 40 hours (paying less for the initial 32 and more for the subsequent 8), and employees will have greater incentives to keep their working week at 40 instead of having more flexibility for work-life balance. This would discourage 32-hour work weeks except for those jobs where employers can easily hire more people to compensate for the 8-hour shortfall (and those jobs are very few in number).
In fact, in Europe it’s usually the opposite, where overtime is more heavily taxed, so both employers and employees have incentives to keep the work week within sensible hours. In addition, overtime tends to be restricted by collective wage agreements, which, in contrast to the USA, often apply to non-union members.
Employers can just pay the same amount for 40 hours (paying less for the initial 32 and more for the subsequent 8)
They’re going to have a lot of very pissed-off employees when they announce the company-wide pay cuts. And competing employers who instead use the strategy of dropping to 32 hours and hiring more employees to make up the difference are going to be able to pay the full rate without any pay cut, making them more attractive to workers.
Also … ask yourself, why aren’t they already doing this to get 50 or 60 hour work weeks out of their employees? Because it’s hard to find employees willing to work below market rate for 60 hours a week. (Most employers already strictly limit employee hours, because they hate paying overtime.)
Now, what you’re saying isn’t completely insane – I do recognize that some employers may try to do something similar to what you’re saying, while trying to justify the pay cuts as a reaction to the new law. Also, there’s nothing forcing them to increase the hourly rate, so for a lot of workers going to 32 hours instead of 40 would be a significant overall income reduction.
There will be some friction, especially at first, but I think that over time, the market will normalize around it, and (essentially) 4-day work weeks could become the norm. It’s nothing that hasn’t happened before, during the fight for a 40-hour 5-day workweek.
The average work week in the Netherlands is 30 hours.
It’s a skewed bullshit metric though and you can’t compare it to most other countries.
It’s quite normal here to have one member of a household working 40 hours and the other part-time, for example 20 hours. That’s 60 hours of labour for a family and indeed 30 hours on average.
Unfortunately most statistics only include people who actually work, instead of the total potential workforce. So a traditional family where dad works 40 hours and mom stays at home will have a combined total of 40 working hours vs our 60. But because mom doesn’t work she is ignored and the family counts toward the average for 40 hours. So they go into the books as hard workers and we are just lazy sobs.
The cherry on top: statistics often cut off around 60-62, while we can’t retire until 67+.
Remember: there are lies, damned lies and statistics.
In this case the median would be a lot more interesting than the average. Few do more than 40h (legally) but many do less -> the average always under 40. Similarly, in average men have less than 2 testicles, but >99% have 2.
If the median is 40, then it still means that over half the population have 40h weeks meaning it’s the standard.
The median employee in the Netherlands is just barely at the threshold of working full-time (defined as 35 hours or more). Few of those who work full-time cross 40 hours, and part-time can be well below 30; the average comes out to about 30.
Of those working part-time (less than 35 hours), about 12% would like to work more but has no suitable work available, so these are underemployed people working part-time.
But what’s the legally defined full work week? If legally the full work week is 5 days you don’t have a 4 day work week, you just have enough privileged people and part time workers to bring the average down to 30.
I don’t know if there is a “legally defined work week.” The “average work week” is just the average hours worked by anyone performing paid labour, which includes part-time workers, who consist of about half the workforce.
So I did some quick digging and it does seem that there overall work week in Netherlands is rather flexible. That said I did find this from Arbeidstijdenwet:
2 The employer organizes the work in such a way that the employee aged 18 years or older at most work performed during:
a. 12 hours per shift; b. 60 hours a week, and c. average 48 hours per week in each period of 16 consecutive weeks.Legally the upper limit you can work in a week is 48 hours. But that’s the upper limit and not what is happening in practice. So I looked that up as well. For full-time employees I found that men average 38.4 hours and women average 35.0 hours. The average work week of 31.9 hours doesn’t mean Netherlands has 32 hour work weeks, it’s just skewed lower primarily by part time workers.
It’s only a position taken by the Democrats in the U.S. because it’s something that will safely never pass. Kinda like in 2020 when we had candidates promoting Universal Basic Income.
Didn’t even get a clip art icon for them.
Socialism will give you scary big dicks












