I mean like if you translated Project 25 so the opposite or reverse of every single policy prescription it makes is compiled, could that be the playbook for a much better and equitable future society?
Sorta like a Project 21st Century™️
EDIT: I’m not necessarily saying if they say “=18% corporate taxes” == “-18%” or “+36%”, I just mean they want to lower the taxes to reach that so why not consider raising it in the opposite direction so you’re moving away from anti-utopia
No, and that’s part of the problem with fascist tactics in general: there’s a fundamental asymmetry in that contrarianism & tearing down institutions is a lot easier and more constrained than designing new policies and building things up. In a lot of cases, “the opposite or reverse” of a project 2025 policy isn’t a single thing, but an unbounded number of possibilities.
(This is related to how fascist bad-faith rhetoric is so difficult to counter, since stooping to their tactics often only helps them achieve their objective of poisoning the well. See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law)
I feel like the easy approach to dealing with misinformation folks is to ask them to cite their evidence in one source and have that source live debunk their asses
Problem is that, in the post-truth world we are living in, there are large groups of people in online spaces who put feelings over facts. It doesn’t matter what you can prove, it only matters what you know, because other things they believe in like religion and conspiracies that define their isolated worldviews can’t be proven either.
Drag asked someone to cite a source the other day and they refused. They wanted drag to cite a source for saying there wasn’t evidence. You can’t prove a negative!
Yes.
More seriously, although they’re wrong on every point, the obvious inverse isn’t always a clear gameplan for improvement.
I dont necessarily mean the polar opposite, like if they want to lower corporate tax to 18%, why not take the delta % they want to lower it in their wet dream and simply raise it that if it can be reasonably found to be too low already which I believe is plausible in a big-money place like America
Agreed, just that their plan is so robust and so specific something like “make porn illegal” doesn’t translate well to “make porn super legal”.
That said, the more I think about specific examples the more it’s they want to move further in a shitty direction, and moving about that far in the opposite direction sounds about right.
Edit: and I do like your point that they already put in the effort identifying everything that should be changed :D
Project 2025 is mostly destroying existing systems that benefit the masses to save rich fucks money, and those systems have a lot of inequity due to social reasons.
Anything Project 2025 wants to destroy is most likely a benefit to society in general and that would make a good list of things to improve.
At best the opposite of everything there would be a good start but much of it isn’t really reversible. You don’t need to worry about specifics if you’re trying to break things, but we do when we try to build. I can ruin a snowman just by raising the temperture, but I cannot build a snowman just by lowering it.
This is what I believe will make a great society.
Strong social democracy.
You have a country with relatively high taxes, a government providing strong safety nets and a free market boosting the economy.
Fines are all dayfines with no upper limit.
Education is free, to a point, you get grades 1-12 for free and you get to have two trade school/college programs for free with automatic grants for spending money, and low interest loans for those who want more. If you fail to complete the educations then after the second one, the grants and low interest loans are forefit.
Healthcare costs say 20EUR for a normal appointment, after ten appointments in a year any further appointments are free.
Emergency care is free.
Medicine costs are low, but if you have to pay more than 300eur for prescription drugs in a year, further prescription drugs are free.
There is an upper limit to personal wealth, you can make 500 million EUR, way more than anyone will ever need, any further money earned will be put in a fund for social and environmental development. The money you earn will however still be logged as having beened earned by you, so you get put on a highscore list and can show others your acchivement. You’ll still be rich, you just won’t be flying private jet all over rich, or owning 17 super yatchs rich.
Prisons will focus on rehabillitation and realively short punnishments, at first, at the third sentence where a criminal reoffends, they will be given a storage sentence, much longer prison time where the government protects society against criminals who are not interested in living a normal life.
Rhetorically: What’s the antithesis of an 18% (base) corporate tax rate?
Project 2025 is fucking awful, but just doing the opposite of them doesn’t make sense when the working conditions of regular people can only be improved through a materialist view of the world, as the opposite of their goals isn’t what our goals are.
Rhetorically: What’s the antithesis of an 18% (base) corporate tax rate?
An 82% (base) corporate tax rate?
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Can you prove that’s the antithesis, and not -18%?
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Would 82% be the best for regular people? If not, who would it be best for?
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I was thinking -18% tax rate. So if you’re a corporation, you get 18% subsidies on top of your profits.
opposite 18% corporate tax
Whatever the reduction delta is from where it is now, raise it that? They want to lower it to that so it makes me think theres fat they are trying to hide and augment with that number
Edit: like if you asked a billionaire what tax rates they’d want to see over the next like 5 years? Cant you take whatever their suggestions are and even if they bullshit the stats but leave off at a reasonable doubt single choice, just use that to inform where policy should be leading for them and everyone else in a paired evaluation
That delta (+3%) would still concede ground to conservatives when pre-Trump corporate taxes were at 30%. Even Biden told Congress it should be at 28%.
It’s just too reactive to want the opposite of what the new conservative playbook is. The best corporate tax rate for the average person has nothing to do with what Trump or P2025 think, so formulating our economic systems around the opposite of them won’t work either. We need a materialist analysis of our economy by experts and academics to determine what any particular tax should be in able to develop economic situations that best benefit regular people the most.
When you say it wont work, i feel like thats all or nothing thinking. Withhout having to think about it or spend anymore money, wouldn’t at least be an easy step in the right direction?
I don’t like the cut of this jib because its what delayists like on their side say. We cant do the right thing because we need a billion studies, or its not proven to be perfect so it must be rejected but delay tactics should be ascribed presumptive correctness a priori 🤔
I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think it’s all-or-nothing thinking to question the effectiveness of just doing the opposite of what conservatives propose. If we don’t base these decisions on real data or thorough analysis, we might end up with a policy that feels good politically but doesn’t actually deliver the best results for people. I’m not suggesting endless studies or using that as an excuse to delay action, but rather that we should be intentional and evidence based in making these decisions. Especially given our elected officials have cabinets full of paid staff who can already read the studies that have been published. No new studies and waiting is necessary.
trying to match and invalidate every poor policy is unfeasible because it’s easy to come up with a terrible policy that targets vulnerable populations.
you’d forever be playing catch up.
increasing civil rights and workers rights, on the other hand, protects people fundamentally, so it doesn’t matter how many unjust 2025 policies they come up with if civil rights are fundamentally protected.
laws about what women are allowed to wear, what medicine women are allowed to take, what surgeries women are allowed, If personal autonomy becomes an inviolable right, it doesn’t matter how many ways conservatives try to constrain a woman’s liberty.
Sort of, but not quite. I get where you’re going with that though, and it’s the right idea.
The explicit goal of Project 2025 is simply to make it easier for greedy and power-hungry privileged right-wing assholes to bring harm to people and to the nation as a whole for their own imnediate benefit. So yes - it actually serves as a sort of backhanded guide to what is of value in government.
It’s just that doing the opposite of what Project 2025 calls for would mean expanding agencies and regulations rather than reducing or eliminating them, and that’s likely not the best option, since it could just lead to governments run rampant instead of corporations run rampant.
As with most things, the optimum lies between the two extremes.
But yeah - at the very least, it can be taken as a rule of thumb that there’s a direct correspondence between the value a thing provides to the people and the nation as a whole and the degree to which Project 2025 opposes it and intends to destroy it.
