Sounds more like a paranoid description of how almost all political change, positive or negative, happens. You push for what you want, but if that gets too much opposition, you moderate your proposal the next go-round.
The other approach, of course, is to pursue incremental change. In the same "ZOMG tricks" lens, that's boiling-the-frog-slowly.
No, you push for massive overreach. You never start negotiations asking for what you want.
Then it goes to an "election", the "opposition" party (come on, they all drink at the same bars, do lines of coke in the same toilets) wins, and the "watered down" bill basses with bipartisan support.
We don't live in democracies. Two reasons:
1. regular employees don't get a "winter break"
and
2. Until we have real time visibility of political donations, filtered through an anti-corruption body, we can't know whether the people in government deserve, or are eligible, to be there.
Indeed. I find the ignorance about the European labor market amazing.
Not only do most Europeans get our 4-6 weeks of paid vacation. We also don't subtract any sick days from vacation days as is common in the US. We also get paid while sick. In some places by the employer, in some places by the government. Sometimes full pay, sometimes a reduced amount. We also have excellent government paid health care. We also have long termination notices. We have protection for temporary workers (so generally few Europeans work in Amazon jobs with day laborers picked up in the outskirts of the cities). Working weeks are typically 35-40 hours. We have protection for part time workers too. They can not be discriminated against. We have 1-3 years paid maternity leave. In some countries it's paid by employer (with refund from government), in other places it's paid by government directly. Usually the pay is part of salary. We have high participation of women in the labor market. We have paid paternity or parental leaves that are often longer than the American maternity leaves. We have government or labor union set minimum wages but most people make more than the minimum wages. Very few Europeans hold two jobs. If we lose our job, we have various welfare payouts and most importantly; we don't lose healthcare. At the end of working life, Europeans retire with public pensions and private supplements.
Now, there are variations from country to country since not all of the above is EU based; actually little of it is. I am speaking as someone who live in Denmark, Spain, the US and now Bulgaria. Every country in Europe has more of one thing and less of another. In Denmark, for example, the paid maternity leave is only at around one year, and women get paid what amounts to only a small fraction of their salary. In Bulgaria it's up to 3 years, of the first is 90 percent of salary, the second is around minimum wage and the third is without pay.
But generally speaking, European workers live a very sheltered and, I would say, privileged working life. I have yet to meet Europeans fearing loosing a job the way Americans do.
I didn't call anyone a name. I characterized the "nowhere is a real democracy" rhetoric as anarchist wank. It's a spiel I have no time for, after talking to enough of these people.
The US at least is barely a democracy. We are much closer to an oligopoly than anything else.
If you really think we are a democracy, then do you think someone in the US could win the presidency with a good platform and no money, versus someone with a bad platform and a lot of money?
Trump’s election was the most democratic thing in perhaps the history of US politics. Maybe 1% of oligopolists supported him before the primaries and many prominent Republicans didn’t even support him when he had the nomination. In the wake of 2016 one could easily argue that US politics has become far more democratic (the founding fathers intended it to be much less democratic than it has become).
This shows that “democracy” is not a synonym for “good governance.”
If you can't convince HN, confuse them?
On topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Now please allow me to smear you with terrorism or tin foil hats in case i can't find any further arguments. It's only fair since you dropped the paranoid smear already. ;-)
These two are both as old as the hills and well known to people who read sales manuals as the "door in the face" and "foot in the door" techniques respectively.
The other approach, of course, is to pursue incremental change. In the same "ZOMG tricks" lens, that's boiling-the-frog-slowly.