r/SocialDemocracy

This is about a month old, and I have no faith in the Democratic Party - but I’m curious what people's takes are on betting/prediction markets.

As long as we live in a capitalist economy, I think the near-future solution is regulating prediction markets, not banning them outright. I want to know what other people think.

I’d like to call attention to a recurring tension within the left—one that doesn’t just create internal friction, but actively strengthens the right.

Disagreements that would traditionally fall within a broad democratic spectrum are increasingly reframed as moral failures. Positions that were once debated on their merits are now sometimes treated as evidence of bad faith or harmful intent.

With a new election cycle, the left understandably wants to take a leading role. That’s fair. But there is a pattern in which that momentum shifts from building consensus to narrowing the kinds of internal disagreement considered acceptable.

You can see this in how certain arguments are handled in online spaces. For example, a user argued that refusing to vote for a flawed candidate—on moral grounds—can still have real-world consequences, and that accepting those consequences may reflect a position of relative privilege. You don’t have to agree with that argument. But it reflects a longstanding tension in democratic politics: the balance between moral principle and harm reduction.

And we can see cases where comments like this result in a permanent ban.

What makes this more striking is that the moderation framing explicitly claimed that “both positions are valid.” So, on paper, disagreement is allowed. In practice, however, one side of that disagreement—questioning the consequences of abstention or assigning any responsibility to voters—is treated as unacceptable.

Maintaining civility is essential. But some moderators treat moderation as a tool to shape which conclusions can be expressed, rather than how they are expressed. That shift has real consequences.

First, it moves from persuasion to exclusion. Instead of arguments competing on their merits, some positions are simply removed from the conversation.

Second, it deepens polarization. When internal disagreement is constrained, people don’t become convinced—they disengage or fragment.

Third, it weakens coalition-building. Broad political movements depend on a range of perspectives, including less ideologically rigid ones. If those are consistently sidelined, they don’t disappear—they leave.

You might say: of course, you can’t go into a clearly ideological space and argue the opposite position without consequences. That’s expected.

But what’s happening now is different. General-interest spaces—meant for everyday or non-political discussion—are increasingly saturated with political framing, while at the same time narrowing what kinds of disagreement are allowed within that framing.

The result is a political environment that is comfortable assigning blame outward, but increasingly uncomfortable with internal scrutiny.

And that has real costs. A movement that cannot tolerate internal disagreement cannot build durable coalitions. It becomes better at policing boundaries than at winning power.

In practice, this creates an asymmetry: it is acceptable to assign responsibility to institutions, but not to voters. That imbalance removes part of the political feedback loop. When voter behavior cannot be examined or criticized, strategies become harder to evaluate and correct. It also pushes the discourse toward a populist logic—one where institutions are always to blame, and “the people” are insulated from criticism.

So the question is: if even internal debate about responsibility and consequences is constrained, how does the left adapt when its strategies fail?

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TLDR: Parts of the left are turning internal disagreement into moral failure. When moderation narrows which views are allowed, it silences internal criticism, weakens persuasion, fragments coalitions, and ends up strengthening the right.

In the post on X Sunday, Palantir shared a number of rules, including one that read: "National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost."

The call from Palantir Technologies drew attention online after its post was reposted, prompting debate about the role of private defense‑tech firms in shaping national policy

P.S. The fervor for war is growing among Americans. After Iran, would they go Greenland?

I hate that every company feels like a tiny dictatorship where my labor belongs to the king and my opinion is meaningless. I like the idea of starting my own company but then it would just be me in the thrown and no better or id need a bunch of other people to form a coop and I'm not that charismatic enough to do all that. How can you form a company (by yourself) in a way that ends up being good and fair for the people that would eventually be employed there if it is successful?

My idea:

Build into the foundational documents of the company the following rules that can't be changed by anyone.

-The company's ownership% is locked to 66% [employees], 33% [share holders]. The 33% can be bought and sold as desired but never more than that. The other 66% can never be exchanged in any way. It can only be earned by joining the company and working for 2 years. As you work, you get a prorated % of the company in terms of profit share and voting rights until you hit 2 years when you get an equal share to every other employee for as long as you work there. So if its 2 people working there, each would have 33% of the profits and voting rights for company wide decisions. When a third person gets hired, they would have 0% but after 1 year they would have 11% and after 2 years everyone would have 22%. Everyone of course would still get normal wages and such, this would just be on top of the normal wage expected for that job anywhere else in that industry.

-leaders are elected, not assigned. That means everyone with a vote in the company gets to use their %voting power to make decisions about who's the c-suite people, and who the management all are. All management must be elected, and those that work under that manager can have the right to kick them from being in charge of the team. So everyone votes managers in, teams can vote then out.

-hiring & layoffs are a voted upon decision. So if everyone is overworked, they can vote to hire more people and split the profits more or not to and keep more money but work harder. Likewise, if no money is coming in, everyone can collectively decide that some cuts need to happen to keep the company afloat. If that happens, at least then everyone CHOSE to make the layoffs happen and if they dont like it, they can quite and save everyone the hassle of choosing who to lay off. Who gets layed off would not be a vote, they would be decided by management since no one wants to layoffs their friends. Same with firing. Firing would be decided unilaterally by management but must be justified to the company as a whole with evidence for offenses and after a firing happens, the company must collectively discuss what went wrong and try to make changes to avoid that in the future.

-company rules must be agreed upon collectively and open to change. Want to work from home? Everyone agrees upon what is acceptable expectations for someone if they work from home and what roles are eligible for it and then it is enforced by management.

-company meetings are once a month and it is treated like any other shareholder meeting. Except every employee is a part of it and gets to know what is actually happening with the company's profits and decisions.

All that and I'm sure there would be problems. But this would be a potential solution to the problem of "most companies are started by 1 or a few people who are looking to get rich and dont want to give up all thier power and profits if they have to hire people" I certainly wouldn't want to start a company, do all this work, make it profitable, hire 3 people, and get immidiatley kicked out because they have all the same rights as I do in a co-op situation. It also means that if the one who started it sucks to work for, you could fire them as CEO if you convince some of the other shareholders and all the other employees to do so, but they would still be a shareholder, just not an employee anymore. Or if the person who started it wanted out, they could sell thier share to someone else or to the employees and then it could become basically a coop but with extra steps.

Anyway, that's my shpeal. Thoughts? Thanks!

I never got to live in the golden era of socdem governments, during my entire life it has been a gradual dismantlement of it, slowly but surely. You know you are living on borrowed time because one day it will be entirely gone, this system our predecessors got to enjoy. The rich (usually old wrinkly bastards) want to pull up their ladders and leave the rest in the dust. The youth are dispossessed and have no future prospects and face the odd situation of being outnumbered by the old, which is a reverse of what has been a constant for millenia. They fall into apathy, for what is there to do? It is only going to get worse. You might raise some complaints in the newspaper but it's not like anything will come out of it, the fat politicians will ignore it anyway.

Where did the revolutionary zeal go? The shared solidarity and love for your people and human decency? Modern social democracy has gotten so meek and in bed with neoliberalism, selling out the people and the state to capital while the unions are only interested in harm reduction but not actual improvement (still better to harm reduce than nothing of course). Everything has become a managed decline, a race to the bottom.

I'm tired. It was over before it started.

Being a Spaniard I had to stay quite late that night till the results came in already; I didn't stay long though, given how horrified I was by the fact that it pretty rapidly became abundantly clear that the second round was gonna be almost definitely a matchup between Peru's former last dictator daughter Keiko Fujimori & even more MAGA-like extremist Rafael Aliaga.

BUT, there were 60,000 people who despite arriving on time to their polling stations could not vote, so it was decided to give these 60,000 people extra time to vote till the next day at 6 PM.

& this has been enough to change everything: it will not be Aliaga who qualifies for the second round but instead leftist Roberto Sánchez from the both progressive & democratic socialist coalition Juntos por el Peru, with Fujimori gettting 16.01%, Sánchez 12.01% & Aliaga 11.92%.

But here's what's even better, Aliaga is going full MAGA with fraudulent allegations of mass fraud & of he being the legitimate winner & that the election has been stolen from him, so it's pretty much fully guaranteed he will insist this is a sham & an indefensible farce till the very end & never endorse Fujimori, practically guaranteeing Sánchez's victory therefore.

People should reallly stop talking about Latin American political waves honestly, like they change their minds about whether the use

This show how Americans view the triumph of democracy in Hungary. They fear it.

Peter Magyar is in the process of making Viktor Orban’s party and it’s system illegitimate after 16 years in power, calling it corrupt, exposing abuses, and pushing to dismantle parts of the structure they built, including state media.

With his Tisza Party’s rise, he is not just trying to win power, he is challenging whether the old system itself has any legitimacy left.

It raises a bigger question: if a political movement is seen as having undermined democratic norms, can and should it become illegitimate in the eyes of the public? And if so, what should come next?

Should similar arguments be made about MAGA?

The world population has been growing exponentially for multiple reasons, one of them being that we have managed to generate the amount of resources necessary to sustain this growth. In particular, a very important resource is food, whose quantity, variety, and ease of access have grown at a faster rate than the population itself—so much so that we have moved from a state of “scarcity” to one of “abundance.” Obviously, each region is different and progresses at its own pace, but when compared to descriptions of lifestyles in previous centuries, most of the population now has greater access to food and can obtain it with far less effort than before.

Many animals accumulate fat to store energy, especially those that face food scarcity. Humans have also developed this ability to store fat, which, in a context of food abundance, is no longer necessary and has become undesirable. We have identified that excess body fat leads to health problems and, additionally, a body with a lower fat percentage is generally considered more attractive. In simpler terms, we try not to accumulate fat both to maintain our health and to look better. We no longer need to store fat because food is abundant and easily accessible.

What if we could make money a similarly abundant and easily accessible resource? Money is, in fact, abundant—the problem is that for most people it is not easy to obtain. Ideally, we would have simple access to money and would only store what we need, allowing others to also access money and the comforts it can buy. This idea comes from observing how so much value is generated by a part of humanity and it is stored by a fraction of it, preventing a bigger part from improving their standard of living. But how can we make it fair so that only those who contribute the most to the system are the ones who live better?