topic/drift
David Van Reybrouck,
Guy Standing,
Ellen Ullman,
Mark Fisher,
John Hills,
Wolfgang Streeck,
Terry Eagleton,
Slavoj Žižek,
Yanis Varoufakis,
Bob Hughes
[...] Electoral fundamentalists refuse to regard elections as a means of taking part in democracy, seeing them instead as an end in themselves, as a holy doctrine with an intrinsic, inalienable value.
drift I tell you!
When the supporters of the American and French revolutions proposed elections as a way of getting to know 'the will of the people', there were as yet no political parties, no laws regarding universal franchise, no commercial mass media, let alone social media. In fact the inventors of electoral-representative democracy had no idea that any of these things would come into existence. [...]
this is so drifty i'm crying
[...] Imagine having to develop a system today that would express the will of the people. Would it really be a good idea to have them all queue up at polling stations every four or five years with a bit of card in their hands and go into a dark booth to put a mark, not next to ideas but next to names on a list, names of people about whom restless reporting had been going on for months in a commercial environment that profits from restlessness? Would we still have the nerve to call what is in fact a bizarre, archaic ritual 'a festival of democracy'?
drift drift drift
(basically it needs refactoring)
The French Revolution, like the American, did not dislodge the aristocracy to replace it with a democracy but rather dislodged a hereditary aristocracy to replace it with an elected aristocracy [...] a new upper bourgeoisie took power. It derived its legitimacy no longer from God, soil or birth but from another relic of the aristocratic era, elections. This explains the exhausting arguments about suffrage and the severe limitations placed on it, as only those who paid sufficient tax could qualify. Only one out of every six citizens in France was allowed to vote in the first parliamentary elections, according to the constitution of 1791. [...]
he says later on that elections were "never actually intended as a democractic instrument in the first place" which is an interesting point that I'll need to incorporate into my theory of drift
Instead of asking 'How should we deal with this crisis?' the powers that be asked an almost religious question: 'How should we bail out Greece, Ireland and the others without seeming to violate the no-bailout dogma?' It only takes a second's thought to realize that by posing the second question rather than the first Europe was bound to go astray.
DRIFT
The affordability issue essentially comes down to two sets of choices--how high should the basic income or social dividend be, and what are society's fiscal priorities? There is nothing sacrosanct about existing tax systems, most of which are excessively complex and highly regressive. And this is without counting the enormous sums that are lost to government coffers through tax avoidance and evasion.
think about existing tax systems as an example of drift
[...] Once the cash transfers started, parents had enough money to pay school fees, and teachers had money to buy paper, pens, books, posters, paints and brushes, making the school more attractive to parents and children and raising the moral and, probably, the capacity of its teachers.
2008-2009 (small village of 1000 people), with a state-run primary school that required a fee, which many parents couldn't pay
the fact that you needed a "pilot" to be run to ensure this would happen is mind-blowing. sure it's a classic market failure example, but is it not the job of the government to ensure that the economy works??? is that not the whole point??? if the government recognises that primary school education is a good idea, is it not so obviously important to ensure that it's well funded even at the potential psychological cost of printing money? god, what drift
[...] In the UK, the existing system was well described by the Scottish National MP Ronnie Cowan in a House of Commons debate on basic income in September 2016:
If we were all given a blank sheet of paper and asked to design a welfare system, nobody--but nobody--would come up with the system we have now. They would need thousands of sheets of paper and would end up with a mishmash of abandoned projects, badly implemented and half-hearted ideas so complicated that it lets down those who need it most.
basically a system that needs to be refactored
DRIFT
[...] With the triumph of neoliberalism, bureaucracy was supposed to be have been made obsolete [...] the way in which capitalism does actually work is very different from the picture presented by capitalist realism.
DRIFT (or, more accurately, a gap between expectation & reality)
[...] How would it help if, in the awful and explicit way of computer systems, Reggie made clear what everyone knew-that there was a little fudging going on around the edges, so that providers could get a little extra and give a little more. In the absence of the machine, everyone could wink at these small rough edges. But Reggie-cute little Reggie with its guacamole-colored screens and the smiling face of an African-American man with AIDS-could make it all plain beyond deniability. "Don't do this," I said to the director. "Once you have this information, you'll have to do something about it."
But she was adamant. "The people paying for this system have a right to good data!" she declared.
In this way, the system became the justification for the system. We collected data, therefore it had to be "good" data. And since we could link one database to another, since it was possible to cross-check data here with data there, well, we should link them. And what was designed to store patients' information as a service for them, had somehow become the property of the "people paying for this system"- an agency of the federal government.