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Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦's posts Post Back to profile
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Riley S. Faelan

@504DR The trick is convincing they're helping the poor out of pure, unfettered, egoism.

This has been done before, too. It was the basis of patron-client relations in the Roman Republic for several centuries, for example. And in the Ireland's era of many little kings, a king's essential duty, in return for being allowed to call themselves a king, was feeding and equipping his whole retinue, which, IIRC, was specified as at least fourteen people with nothing better to do than follow their would-be king around.

@rysiek

15 January at 4:56 | Wall-to-wall | Open on toot.cat
7 comments
Riley S. Faelan

@504DR Specifically — it is not very widely known, but before Rome introduced public bread for the poor, as a part of the reforms geared towards recruiting people who couldn't buy their own weapons and armour into Rome's military, zillionaires handed out bread to the poor on a private basis.

Rome being Rome, and doing a lot of bad things that we later implemented safeguards for, it came with the string attached that the recipients of the bread were bound to vote for the zillionaire who had bought it.

@rysiek

@504DR Specifically — it is not very widely known, but before Rome introduced public bread for the poor, as a part of the reforms geared towards recruiting people who couldn't buy their own weapons and armour into Rome's military, zillionaires handed out bread to the poor on a private basis.

Rome being Rome, and doing a lot of bad things that we later implemented safeguards for, it came with the string attached that the recipients of the bread were bound to vote for the zillionaire who had bought it.

15 January at 13:36 | Open on toot.cat
504DR

@riley @rysiek

I can't put much stock as to what has happened in the past as a basis for dealing with what is happening now.

As a whole, our attitudes and behaviors have changed, to the point that past solitions are most often irrelevant in today's world.

We are in unprecedented times. Never before in human history have we faced our own extinction with the knowledge beforehand that we know we are facing extinction. (There may be a chance a past civilization knew what they were facing in the five great extinctions that has happened before, but it's a slim chance.)

The level of greediness and selfish self-promotion at the expense of all others now seeps into all levels of society, with the exception, ironically, of the poorest classes, who still exhibit an altruistic caring for others, maybe bc of their economic position they still understand we all do better when we work together to help each other.

Again, I'm looking at this from my lived experiences and education as an American, and it could be very different from another society's experiences and education.

I would rather see that society as a whole didn't require or rely on the wealthy to give charity to the lesser classes as a function of society.

I'd rather that governance be based on spreading wealth equally amongst all members.
Uber wealth is a poison. It creates, and maintains different classes of citizens.

Healthy societies don't need charity. Healthy societies take care of all citizens equally.

@riley @rysiek

I can't put much stock as to what has happened in the past as a basis for dealing with what is happening now.

As a whole, our attitudes and behaviors have changed, to the point that past solitions are most often irrelevant in today's world.

We are in unprecedented times. Never before in human history have we faced our own extinction with the knowledge beforehand that we know we are facing extinction. (There may be a chance a past civilization knew what they were facing in the five...

15 January at 15:42 | Open on climatejustice.social
Riley S. Faelan

@504DR If we're likely to see some form of "a zillionaire has to support a bunch of people" mechanism to return, I suspect a corporate-style empire-building would be the likeliest source of the culture. This practice is weaker in the present time than it used to be a couple of decades ago, but it still exists, and could probably be transferred to other fields of life.

The downside, of course, is that accepting such a development would put us on a pretty direct path towards introduction of other elements of neo-feudalism.

@rysiek

@504DR If we're likely to see some form of "a zillionaire has to support a bunch of people" mechanism to return, I suspect a corporate-style empire-building would be the likeliest source of the culture. This practice is weaker in the present time than it used to be a couple of decades ago, but it still exists, and could probably be transferred to other fields of life.

15 January at 15:46 | Open on toot.cat
504DR replied to Riley S. Faelan

@riley @rysiek

That's still building on old models.

For true and real change, the whole present system needs to be torn down and rebuilt.

One present proposal that addresses this is degrowth.
Revamping our monetary system to put ppl at the forefront vs corps.
Collective ownership or nationalized ownership of industry.
UBIs that allow ppl to live adequate lives without slaving at a job their whole lives.
A protection of the environment (the very life sustaining systems that allow us to exist in the first place) that supercedes ppl's desires for unnecessary comforts.

A system of governance that eliminates capitalism and authoritarianism, and goes beyond socialism, communism and all other previous forms of societal make up.

From historical data, the only successful societies (in terms of surviving and thriving without destroying our life sustaining planetary systems) were the small tribal communities.

With 8 billion ppl on the planet ( the core of every problem we now face, imo), that is not an option.

So something completely new must be tried if achieving a true and global egalitarian society is the goal.

@riley @rysiek

That's still building on old models.

For true and real change, the whole present system needs to be torn down and rebuilt.

One present proposal that addresses this is degrowth.
Revamping our monetary system to put ppl at the forefront vs corps.
Collective ownership or nationalized ownership of industry.
UBIs that allow ppl to live adequate lives without slaving at a job their whole lives.
A protection of the environment (the very life sustaining systems that allow us to exist in the...

15 January at 16:35 | Open on climatejustice.social
Riley S. Faelan replied to 504DR

@504DR Hey, I'm a software engineer. I know how much more enjoyable greenfield projects are than endless refactoring.

The problem is, there's very few situations in which you get a genuine greenfield chance at fixing a political problem. Because of politics' tight integration into modern governance & infrastructure, practical politics is necessarily almost entirely done by endless, mostly inadequate, refactors. It's unfortunate, but, at least for the immediately foreseeable future, there's no escape from it.

@rysiek

@504DR Hey, I'm a software engineer. I know how much more enjoyable greenfield projects are than endless refactoring.

The problem is, there's very few situations in which you get a genuine greenfield chance at fixing a political problem. Because of politics' tight integration into modern governance & infrastructure, practical politics is necessarily almost entirely done by endless, mostly inadequate, refactors. It's unfortunate, but, at least for the immediately foreseeable future, there's no escape from it.

15 January at 17:48 | Open on toot.cat
Riley S. Faelan replied to Riley S. Faelan

@504DR UBI itself is, arguably, one of these workarounds. It's, however, also one of the most elegant workarounds against a whole bunch of abusive features of modern capitalism, even despite all the messiness capitalist systems have.

Working towards UBI systems, popularising the general knowledge about how they work, and about how most of the arguments are just misunderstandings of how macroeconomy works, is probably one of the most useful medium-to-long-term social justice themed political efforts that one can do.

We also need short-term efforts, obviously. UBI will take time. But it's a worthy goal.

Preferential voting of some sort is another valuable goal. There's multiple distinct methods; all have significant benefits over FPV kind of systems.

In the specific contexts of electing multi-seat deliberative bodies through district-associated seat systems, such as UK and USA still use, replacing such systems with proportional voting systems would also be a beneficial change. (Preferential voting, such as IRV or ranked choice, and proportional voting are somewhat complementary; preferential voting fixes issues related to single-seat voting systems; proportional voting fixes issues related to dividing a multi-seat voting system badly into multiple single-seat voting systems.)

I don't know your ideas about revamping the monetary system, but I'd be happy to read about them.

@rysiek

@504DR UBI itself is, arguably, one of these workarounds. It's, however, also one of the most elegant workarounds against a whole bunch of abusive features of modern capitalism, even despite all the messiness capitalist systems have.

Working towards UBI systems, popularising the general knowledge about how they work, and about how most of the arguments are just misunderstandings of how macroeconomy works, is probably one of the most useful medium-to-long-term social justice themed political efforts that one can do.

15 January at 17:57 | Open on toot.cat
504DR replied to Riley S. Faelan

@riley @rysiek

For clarification, I write non of that with any expectation of it actually happening or being implemented.

Just drawing board suggestions and musings on possible solutions.

Whatever we do or don't do won't matter in a few decades.

3C will hit us before any changes are made, and then it's all moot.
(See my bio)

15 January at 18:12 | Open on climatejustice.social
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