Technowolf posted:

2

Titus Sardonicus posted:

Except opioid addicts (i.e. white people) are recognized as needing treatment, it's the crack addicts (i.e. black people) that should be permanently incarcerated/left to die in the streets.

Titus Sardonicus posted:

Except opioid addicts (i.e. white people) are recognized as needing treatment, it's the crack addicts (i.e. black people) that should be permanently incarcerated/left to die in the streets.

Technowolf posted:

1

Abyssal Squid posted:

I mean you're fine there, but it's super creepy when people use the exact same arguments that were used to justify war crimes during the Bush years. I don't personally think the post hoping Garrison suffers ironic punishment was over the line, but there should be a line somewhere and it's not a waste of resources to remind people of that.

Democrazy posted:

Of course Tinsley would worship a guy whose comic is more bland that Heathcliff.

Trogdos! posted:

loquacius posted:

e: I'm really tired and not expressing myself well and am in no shape to enter a debate or discussion rn

Shangri-Law School posted:

Is this really how they see pragmatism, not as a focus on feasible ways to achieve change espoused by people who fundamentally agree with them, but as a dishonest effort to preserve the status quo espoused by people who are philosophical enemies? It would explain a lot.

Jurgan posted:

"I don't personally care, but I'm *concerned* that other people might be upset." This is one step away from the puppetmaster defense.

Shangri-Law School posted:

Is this really how they see pragmatism, not as a focus on feasible ways to achieve change espoused by people who fundamentally agree with them, but as a dishonest effort to preserve the status quo espoused by people who are philosophical enemies? It would explain a lot.

Abyssal Squid posted:

Yep. I've been trying to organize my thoughts about how the far left seems to view outcomes as independent from process, and how "you can't get from here to there" is treated as a failure of imagination at best, and counterrevolutionary at worst, but sometimes there simply is no process that will achieve a certain outcome. For a hopefully uncontroversial example, there is no way to get North Korea to give up their nukes or their missiles now, because to do so would be to sign their own death warrant. Negotiations, sanctions, coercion nuclear war, Kim Jong Un isn't going to just roll over and die without putting up a fight.

A lot of people apparently liked this cartoon (I tried pulling it directly from twitter but there's no text hooks on the tweet and that account has a zillion posts so I'm not going to infinite scroll a goddamn month and a half back):


"Look how much simpler (and therefore better) it is when you just say what you want, and ignore the steps necessary for making that work!"

Like don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of public libraries, but subsidizing book consumption would be way simpler to implement than running public libraries. Both plans would require funding, but that's about all a well-designed subsidy would need. With libraries you need to build physical facilities, you need to decide where to build those physical facilities, you need to staff them, you need to decide what books to buy and how many, you need to decide when to remove books from circulation, and so on. That cartoon's probably the clearest example I've seen of "My ideas are better than yours because I'm counting on Implementation Fairies to make everything work" on the left. On the right, of course, we have Donald Trump promising endless winning and better health care, and of course Ronald Reagan's famous rebuttal to Jimmy Carter's health care proposal, "There you go again. "


(Here's some things that are great about public libraries: they're a public space, which is something American society desperately needs. They're a quiet public space. They're free to use, so you can explore lots of books with minimal investment. They're free to use, so children have access to books. Librarians are less mercenary than publishers so they're more likely to promote books on merit rather than profit. Librarians can help patrons research and guide them to books they might be interested in. Note how none of these things is "library systems are easy to set up and maintain.")


I originally responded to someone who was yelling at someone else for thinking "you should be beaten until you suffer brain damage" was over the line, so it's not like I'm not bringing up hypothetical people out of nowhere.

Abyssal Squid posted:

A lot of people apparently liked this cartoon (I tried pulling it directly from twitter but there's no text hooks on the tweet and that account has a zillion posts so I'm not going to infinite scroll a goddamn month and a half back):


"Look how much simpler (and therefore better) it is when you just say what you want, and ignore the steps necessary for making that work!"

tyblazitar posted:

I don't want to get into the endless leftist vs. centrist argument, but I think you're misreading the comic a bit, at least the way I interpreted it it's not so much criticizing "pragmatism" as a concept, just pointing out the hypocrisy of the very selective application of the "but how will we pay for this policy?" angle of attack.

If your interpretation is correct, I'm still with Lubchansky though.

D.N. Nation posted:

There's nothing wrong with promising sweeping reform that poses risk of being gunked up in process, there's also nothing wrong with being curious about process mechanisms.

There's something wrong with treating every question pertaining to the latter as an anti-sweeping reform conspiracy, and there's something wrong with being so hung-up on specifics that you fail to make a "this thing is good" case to voters.

I am happy with the Medicare-4-All bill, and I am annoyed with some of its I'm Being an Online Twitter Lefty Today proponents boiling its implementation down to "one neat trick for sexy abs" promises. (I mean, loving LOL at Ryan Cooper being all "no worries, folks, we'll just do jobs programs for people who lost theirs" when THAT WAS THE SAME loving THING YOU SAVAGED CLINTON FOR W/R/T THE COAL INDUSTRY.) But ultimately I'm the former the most. Yay Medicare-4-All, people should run on Medicare-4-All.

DariusLikewise posted:

Holy poo poo lol

Healthcare is not some magically fairy you Neoliberal shills, there's like 50 other countries with much better systems you can basically carbon copy

Shangri-Law School posted:

I may be misinterpreting him, but Lubchansky explicitly associating both with "pragmatism" is why I read it like that.

Begemot posted:

There's a weird idea that more complicated ideas are actually better. Like it's ACTUALLY cheaper and more efficient to make a rube goldberg machine that subtly lowers the price of books than to just build a free books building. Of course that's not actually provable in any concrete way but if you look at these statistics you can see-

It keeps these programs safely enshrouded in political fog. It sounds complicated, so most people will be indifferent or vaguely supportive if the outcomes sound good. It also makes it easier to reduce things to political tribalism. Like how the policies of the ACA were wildly popular, but Obamacare was reviled.

loquacius posted:

Something I said in the post I edited out earlier is that people who are obsessed with calling everything magic unicorn magic fairy dust magic magic magic, regardless of its actual implementation details, like to describe themselves as "pragmatic" a lot, and to describe the act of shooting down every worthwhile proposal that actually helps people as "mature"

DariusLikewise posted:

Holy poo poo lol

Healthcare is not some magically fairy you Neoliberal shills, there's like 50 other countries with much better systems you can basically carbon copy

Despera posted:

I mean Bernie Sanders single payer plan had a well thought out and thorough plan to pay for itself.

Dr Cheeto posted:

The pragmatist character in that cartoon does not represent the healthy vetting and skepticism that any new legislation should be subject to. It represents a population of pundits and voters that have been successfully inoculated against progressive policies while simultaneously numbed to expensive conservative policies.

loquacius posted:

And yet the Internet is still full of individuals, punditry, op-eds, and thinkpieces calling it unicorn fairy farts or whatever. Hence the "pragmatic" guy from the Lubchansky cartoon. It doesn't even matter what a progressive policy's implementation plan is; the conventional wisdom is that it necessarily has none. That's what we've been conditioned to believe.

Despera posted:

I was being sarcastic. Lol if you believe that poo poo. It had zero ways to pay for itself other than a drop in administrative costs.

D.N. Nation posted:

Also military spending in the US is to the nth power of insane, and the fact that no Democratic legislature of any clout spends the bulk of their time decrying it is a real bummer. On the subject of pipe dreams and such, defund the Pentagon entirely for one year and use the money to solve US poverty entirely, FFS.

loquacius posted:

It literally included a wealth tax, which is an idea that has never been tried before in this country.

Here, read the actual plan if you'd like, Literally The Pragmatist Character From That Lubchansky Comic Come To Life.

e:
https://twitter.com/internethippo/status/881161169469403137

Despera posted:

Dude that has as much detail as trump sending a post it note to congress saying "Wall". Yeah half a trillion miraculously saved by administrative costs. 50% income tax would go over well. Were you the intern who spent an hour writing that poo poo?

loquacius posted:

It doesn't even matter what a progressive policy's implementation plan is; the conventional wisdom is that it necessarily has none. That's what we've been conditioned to believe.

DreamShipWrecked posted:

Man conservative comic artists must think their audience is composed of utter morons

Now let me drastically misinterpret this blindingly obvious comic