Like in 2017 Griftmerica, we can't be that far way from the GOP plausibly trying to say that we should rollback Medicaid and in exchange, we all get a tax credit if we agree to sign up for Ted Cruz's 3 Part Webinar where he teaches us how to become our own Personal Brand Ambassador, Refine Our Social Media Elevator Pitch and Launch Our Own Personal Lifecoach Business.

Well I admittedly do love public transit but now that I've heard your idea to make it private, I must say I'm convinced.

What is your solution to air pollution?

As we've discussed before ITF, this kind of privatization fundamentally misunderstands the nature of public goods. I'm talking about the econ 101 textbook definition here. This proposal isn't even coherent, in other words.

I'm strongly in favor of gender equality--the label "feminism" can go **** itself--but theoretically it should be possible to pursue both of these goals, no? Are you theorizing that too much political capital was spent on gender equality over the past X years? That the price of Title IX was all the Democrats who insist that single payer will "never, ever happen" in America? That a lot of voters are actually anti-feminist or misogynist and hence won't support a platform that benefits women while it ignores issues that concern the general public? Something else?

Regardless, I think this is drastically underestimating the way Republicans' structural advantages--e.g. the electoral college--have shaped policy.

Allocate air rights and allow individuals and organizations to transact in pollution, obviously.

There should be a lot of hitchhiking imo.

Also, DVaut, I'm kind of surprised you fell for the strategic Hillary vote trap.

Call it "Pocohontas" over and over?

tax it

so here's the long pitch:

everything in the us is a disaster. amtrak/the ny metro/all the other trains are all horrible. trying to build new transit in new york costs 5x as much as in paris or london, so mostly it just doesnt happen which is the opposite of what liberals want. it's so bad that there are americans in my twitter feed every other day complaining about something new catching fire.

it might in theory be possible to just reform those agencies and make them work better but there's no reason to think anyone has the actual ability to do it. so instead do what the uk did in the same situation: get someone private to run it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact..._1830-2015.png

you shouldnt give up (full) ownership, just outsource the running of the systems. and when people complain about privatisation of public goods and all the other boring cliches then tell them private companies are already running stuff like the stockholm metro, commuter trains and several intercity routes, the copenhagen metro and italian high speed rail. and are generally doing it well.

in the end running stuff well will make it far easier for liberals to get more of it and they should have ideas, other than just throwing more money at it, for how to make that happen.

I do believe I've seen this movie before

Isn't it quite common for, say, farmers to behead chickens?

If you call undocumented Central American refugees working in giant factories "farmers" then yes.

I'd like to add to this that the GOP currently has total control over the government at a time when demographics are shifting in a way that should give huge advantages to the dems. You can blame it on gerrymandering or voter suppression if you want, but it still shows that the current dem strategy is an incredible mess.

I mean that's true, but NYC doesn't build the new subways, they contract out the work to someone.

Paris transit is world-class and state-owned and run, yeah?

China's rail systems are absolutely fantastic.

yes, most transit systems around the world are state or regionally run. and it's fine many places. the swiss state owned system is extremely well-regarded too. im not saying it cant be done

but it's working terribly in the us and a solution many places has been have to get private companies to run them (though rarely to own them).

mtr in hong kong is private and runs transit all over the world. much of transit japan is privately owned too

30-40 years of them voting for centrist, market-friendly forces should show where the median Democratic voter has been. An unwillingness to admit this is why many Bernie supporters thought the nomination was rigged.

This is my disagreement. I think the reason the left has acquiesced is because they have less power in the Democratic Party. They raise less money, they elect fewer and weaker politicians, they don't have as much party influence, and so on. Saying that the left should be more insistent about their goals is meaningless without also saying how they should get the power to be more insistent. The left has been saying the Democratic Party should follow their priorities for as long as I can remember, they've just not had the power to make it happen (at least, not to your satisfaction; I still regard the ACA as a big victory for the left's priorities).

However, I don't think this is bad advice for the left. The left should press their own goals as much as they can. I was objecting more to the talk about "throwing in the towel" on the current coalition. I thought you might have been referring to something more drastic than trying to gain ascendancy in the current Democratic coalition.

Wouldn't you know I saw a hitchhiker today, so I had to pick him up. Grad student at Stanford. Not an Axe Murderer.

Ass, grass or cash?

Last time I had the chance to pick up a hitch hiker he was so happy to get an immediate lift from the North to London he gave me a tab of acid.

That dates it.

handy list of alt-right scumbaggery

https://www.adl.org/education/resour...aming-the-hate

Hitching quite popular among backpackers travelling through Eastern Europe. Not so much in the rest of Europe.

Never did it myself because I can afford $5 for a bus ticket.

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As is always true, your political opponents often accuse of never reading the other side. But I do often. And I couldn't help but notice this one cross my path:

http://www.theamericanconservative.c...progressivism/

He then goes through all the right-wing bugaboos about how the country was ruined by Lincoln, or by Alinsky and the Progressives, or by the 1960s. Then says, nope, actually, it's been bad from Day 1:

Glib translation of the The American Conservative: come to think of it, the American Experiment was a terrible ****ing idea, this country sucks, democracy is terrible, and we sowed the seeds for our destruction with the founding.

I don't mind this at all, it's basically what right-wingers claim all the time, just in a half-assed incoherent way as they fetishize the Founders and rally around the flag: that democracy is terrible, interconnections are a bad idea, individualism is tyranny. The left certainly has their critiques of the state, of the founding, of the assumptions underlying the creation of the country. But I always appreciate when the American Exceptionalism and MAGA crowd let their guard down and acknowledge that small-l liberal democracy is incompatible with their world view and upon reflection something approximating 16th century feudal European society ("family, community, local markets, Church") was actually the best form of governance and social organization and that the chains of democracy are shattering them.

Liberals and the left would do well to remember these takes when prattling on about norms and democracy and how sacrosanct voting is, that underlying tons of real right-winger hearts and minds is actually the dream of returning back to what can only be described as fuedalism.