That and collective withholding of the labor power of the working class (strikes) are the only 2 ways any national ruling class has ever been meaningfully opposed. Take your pick and do everything you can to make it happen first.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34057162. (This is not a response to the content of your comment here. I'm just adding a reply to your most recent post since the previous comment is already a day or two old. It doesn't seem fair to do that if you don't see it.)
That is a very shallow angry view of the modern world which leaves out so many methods the people have successfully used to exercise their power.
Voting, for example.
I, for one, will likely never be in a position where it makes sense to go on strike and you won’t find me with a pitchfork and torch at the home of the latest social target. There are other methods, and much more needed ones than strife and violence in the 21st century.
Game theory says otherwise. If there's a substantive distinction between the rich and the poor, then the interests that align them need to be greater than their own individual interests for any sort of peace to work. As it stands, the rich frequently engage in bottom-of-the-barrel, self-interested machinations, so it makes 0 sense from a game perspective for the poor to refrain from doing the same.
The obvious answer is to make the distinction not substantive, i.e. have a middle class; unfortunately the U.S. seems too preoccupied with other things to enact this solution
In a certain sense this is true. Giving to charity is a self-interested machination because the giver gets something out of the transaction: satisfaction, a belief in their own goodness and self-worth, the esteem of others, maybe a ticket to heaven. But in a more useful sense this is false. We use "self-interested machinations" to describe things that are deceptive and harmful to others, not adopting puppies. Even people who apply the nihilistic self-interest-all-the-way down argument to neutralize criticism in one case will tend to abandon it in another and become the critic.
In the fight between the rich and poor, voting is not very effective when both parties have been captured by the wealthy.
However there are effective non-violent means of change, like organizing labor power, mutual aid, and supporting legal funds to help get the laws changed.
>We like to point the finger here in the US about how corrupt Russia, Ukraine or any other country is but we’re no Saints.
Our finger-pointing is not due to coincidence; it's due to conflict. Specifically, the conflict is between the inherent interests of competing national ruling classes.
>The executives of these companies should have their addresses listed as well as all the politicians on the take and let the people do with them what they will.
The executives of these companies answer to the company owners (corporate boards) who collectively control the state by leverage of capital. Because we are a capitalist society, the owners of the capital have the power. Any apparent exceptions will always be withheld from accumulating meaningful influence, short of revolution by the working class.
In other words, this is not a matter of faulty policy. It is a conflict of power. Let's discuss it as such.
You can't attack others like this here. Since you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly in other contexts as well, I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to do this with.
They are not "legal and regulated" for recreational use.
Furthermore, some argue that even medical use is over-regulated, to the point that people with genuine needs for them are being denied them by doctors who have become overly hesitant to prescribe them out of fear of the regulators. (Of course, if these claims of excessive prescriber hesitancy are true, that hesitancy itself is not a cause of the "opioid crisis", maybe rather a consequence of it; instead, that hesitancy would be a contributor to the "pain crisis" which has been with us since the dawn of time.)
One thing I personally find shocking - in a number of Australian states (and I believe the same is true in some US states), terminally ill people in severe pain can legally request assisted suicide – and yet, they can't legally have diamorphine (heroin) as a pain treatment, despite evidence that in some cases it is actually a superior pain treatment to any other opioid available.
Claims made by government agencies in some countries (such as the US or Australia) that diamorphine has "no legitimate use in medical treatment" are simply falsehoods. In some cases, it is the best clinical option. Those cases may be relatively rare, but they aren't non-existent, and to continue with an absolute ban on its clinical use (despite the fact that other jurisdictions, such as the UK, use it clinically with no major issues) is totally unjustifiable
NZ has never had a left wing government. NZ's government is neoliberal, which is not left wing in any way. Neoliberalism is in all actuality right wing.
If you're calling Jacinda Ahern a right-winger, the term has lost all meaning. Do you need the state to seize the means of production in order to call a government left-wing?
Utter nonsense. If nurses didn't previously expect decent work conditions, what on Earth motivated them to unionize? Your comment is just total garbage all the way through.
