At the end of the day, COVID-19 made people realize:
- They could work from home and that most offices are shitty places.
- Their job was really shitty.
- Governments could finance pretty much anything they wanted.
- Global warming could be stopped.
- The really important jobs were the ones that are the worst paid (nurses, for instance).
- Most governments are run by idiots, who are in the pocket of the wealthiest.
@ParadeGrotesque @dialect @IPEdmonton
What people might know in their hearts, what they know but won’t admit to themselves, mean nothing if the incentives and coercive systems don’t change.
@ParadeGrotesque @IPEdmonton @dialect
You may be right 🤷♂️ … I hope you’re wrong; bc it’s people who quietly know truths, even ones they can’t acknowledge yet, that are people who will be able to significantly and fairly quickly shift their lives / behaviours once the incentives change.
I know that even in ‘liberal’ Edmonton, the social pressure of Alberta culture is strongly against letting people know you have doubts about the status quo.
@DavidM_yeg @ParadeGrotesque @IPEdmonton @dialect
when I've tried to enlighten conservative friends, I'm "just showing off how educated and politically correct" I am. They enjoy the status quo.
@pinhman @darwinwoodka @DavidM_yeg @ParadeGrotesque @IPEdmonton @dialect
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
--Upton Sinclair
@ParadeGrotesque I think I disagree with this...
- government can finance whatever short term project they want. Don't think you can just spend indefinitely. But there's certainly a few one-off projects that they could fund to make a big impact on climate change.
- the people doing the "important jobs" are still getting the shaft, and the grifters are still getting rich, so I guess no one cares?
See some of my previous posts: politicians can finance pretty much anything they want, as long as they are willing to tax the wealthiest.
Since they are now in the pocket of the wealthiest, they won't tax the hand that feeds them.
Also, people may have realized that nurses, janitors, delivery people, etc... Are the ones holding society together and doing real work. But politicians are still unwilling to tax the rich, hence nothing has changed.
@ParadeGrotesque It may have made people *realise* these things, but we don't seem to have *learned* any of them.
_sigh_
Absolutely true as well.
I believe that many already forgot all of this... 
- most governments don't give a shit about actually keeping people healthy and safe
@ParadeGrotesque Then there was that whole BLM thing, where people were reminded that police control the governments of all major US cities, and liberals mumbled until they could go back to increasing funding for police.
One of the things people leave out of a lot of political analysis, for the US or for a lot of places, is that most people don't willingly support governments; they feel helpless and afraid in the face of them.
Because states are based on violence and threats of violence.
@foolishowl @ParadeGrotesque I have always had mixed feeling with the "defund the police" slogans.
I mean, I would like more police women/men. But I would like less cameras, drones and weaponized police and more actual human beings with empathy / training / psychological assessment/following. It might cost more in the end in term of money, but less in term of violence.
If anything, I feel safer with more unarmed or very lightly armed police presence, patrolling by foot, bicycle or horses, multitasking by offering other services like helping elders crossing a street, giving out directions to people, etc, than police cars full of assault weapons.
@oook @ParadeGrotesque You are absolutely not safer with police around.
It's not a simple matter of poor training or an oversupply of weapons. Police are a major power bloc. They literally control city governments.
There have been many efforts at police reform. Police routinely ignore rules they don't like. The reform efforts simply feed more cash into police budgets. New police officers who object to the behavior of other police are pressured to resign, at least.
@foolishowl @oook @ParadeGrotesque
Agreed that police mostly do not help.
We would be better off to separate the jobs police do and give most of them to people without guns. But police like that they get money to do all of those things, however badly, and they will throw a fit when this gets suggested. And there are almost no elected officials willing to tell the police we don't want them; politicians are much more likely to seek police endorsement than to withdraw their funding.
Somehow "defund the police" never actually got action, but "fund police more" took off with ease, even while it was based in part on the lie that police were actually defunded at some point.
I guess you just need to be competent enough not to touch things that work; that's the baseline.@ParadeGrotesque
- There are lots of gullible (or just stupid) people* out there that have pushed their own bullshit version of “facts” on others. And other gullible (or just stupid) people believed them. More people died because of this.
* Ant-vaxxers, 5G freaks, right-wing nut-jobs, red hat wearing morons, etc.
- That disasters are golden opportunities for disaster capitalism and corruption.
- That there's a misinformation industry, pumped up by a large part of the mainstream media, that sells lies.
- What a Labour government in NZ could achieve when cut off from its focus groups.
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