Bernie feels the Bern? His union staff wants $15/hour

[DeusxMac]

rjmacs wrote:
This is a classic case for examining the old Realpolitik argument: if the system was designed to reward the most ruthless, amoral, corner-cutting, nigh-cheating, heartless, cruel, and inhumane campaign, does running a fair, honest, upstanding campaign just make you an honorable sucker?

"Win any way as long as you can get away with it. Nice guys finish last."
- Leo Durocher

[rjmacs]

DeusxMac wrote:
[quote=rjmacs]
This is a classic case for examining the old Realpolitik argument: if the system was designed to reward the most ruthless, amoral, corner-cutting, nigh-cheating, heartless, cruel, and inhumane campaign, does running a fair, honest, upstanding campaign just make you an honorable sucker?

"Win any way as long as you can get away with it. Nice guys finish last."
- Leo Durocher
The catch, of course, is that playing dirty just reproduces the system that rewards bad behavior... The salient question is: what achievable changes could we make to our system to make it less tilted this way?

[Ted King]

rjmacs wrote:
[quote=DeusxMac]
[quote=rjmacs]
This is a classic case for examining the old Realpolitik argument: if the system was designed to reward the most ruthless, amoral, corner-cutting, nigh-cheating, heartless, cruel, and inhumane campaign, does running a fair, honest, upstanding campaign just make you an honorable sucker?

"Win any way as long as you can get away with it. Nice guys finish last."
- Leo Durocher
The catch, of course, is that playing dirty just reproduces the system that rewards bad behavior... The salient question is: what achievable changes could we make to our system to make it less tilted this way?
Don't we first have to identify the kinds of changes we prefer to happen and then look within the set of those kinds of changes to see if any of them can actually be achieved (and perhaps in what priority)?

Sometimes social justice seems to require sticks and stones - like in the first Gilded Age when workers had to use violence to gain the ability to unionize. I don't think we're there yet. I think we are still at a point where a vision of a pluralistic society with better social justice and less economic disparity can be embraced by a majority of the country. The devil is in the details, though. In the compromises. I hope one of the Democratic presidential candidates can weave together compromises that a big enough coalition of voters will be willing to embrace (at least enough to vote against Trump).

With Trump molding himself into the strongman for the white tribe, though, and him being not right in the head, he will probably compete against that pluralistic vision with ever escalating appeals to white tribe fears. With the near cult-like character of many of his supporters, and his goofy-brain, we may unfortunately end up in a sticks and stones fight. Not yet, though.