Random question, what is your opinion on worker's unions?

Is this about historical unions or the modern day versions?

A quick search finds critical articles from both the left and right. A Reason article is critical of both private prisons and guard unions, but says the latter are bigger.

While American Libertarians fall on the right of the political spectrum, it does seem a little reductive to identify them as a critical voice from the right generally. Pretty complicated, though.

I think the reason why it's complicated is because all of those are certainly right-wing economically, but it ain't necessary for them to also be so culturally (though, from what little exposure to libcaps from the US, Canada and UK I had, a large amount of them are culturally right-wing, too). Another piece of evidence that the political compass test ain't the best such political test.

sometimes corrupt, excessively anti-competitive, or power-abusive.

Ie. same as the "capital" side of the equation. Turnaround is fair play if you ask me, given "labour" tends to be the primary victim when the latter slips its leash.

But with public sector unions, they're opposing government, which kind of represents the people, rather than opposing capital.

See "privatised prisons", but more to the point pretty universally the State isn't known as a particularly generous paymaster for its rank-and-file workers (having to at least try to run vaguely balanced budgets has some relevance to that) - just ask teachers and such for the proverbial second opinion. There's an old (late 1800s-ish) Finnish proverb that roughly translates "the official's bread is long but lean", ie. job security is good but the pay mediocre at best (and the first no longer applies these days anyway obv), and while it referred more to the petite bourgeoise cog-in-the-machine bureaucrats the principle naturally applies more widely.

Also not really seeing why public servants in general and ones who do an unpleasant, highly necessary and often quite dangerous work in particular should be denied the essential right to argue for their interests vis-a-vis their employer in an organised fashion.

Police and prison guard unions don't seem to be in the net public interest.

Are we talking US context here? Because those would be basically irrelevant there (save for their members' collective professional interests natch, don't see why they shouldn't get to organise to promote those like everyone else) compared to the grossly dysfunctional mess that is the organisation of law enforcement in that country, and doubly so the utter counterproductive idiocy that is privatised prisons.

Yes, US, and I disagree with their being irrelevant. The police unions are a big part of why it's hard to bring the police in check, AIUI the guard unions lobby for longer prison terms. Both kinds of unions spent lots of money to defeat California's 2008 Prop 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_Officers_Association

"The CCPOA has supported campaigns for tougher criminal sentences, including large contributions to the 1994 campaign for Proposition 184, the 'three strikes' ballot initiative, which puts repeat offenders behind bars for lengthy terms. "

"CCPOA political activity routinely exceeds that of all other labor unions in California."

A quick search finds critical articles from both the left and right. A Reason article is critical of both private prisons and guard unions, but says the latter are bigger.

You're confusing symptoms and causes. The fundamental problems with US law enforcement come from, on one hand, its farcical pattern of organisation (or rather lack thereof) which is decentralised to the point of dysfunctional atomisation - with nigh every administrative level having its own regional one all the way down to all but the smallest municipalities having their own locally organised semi-independent ones resulting in a giant mess of overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions and Devil of a time trying to impose some kind of unified standard or systemic reform on the whole tangle; on the other, various unpleasant attitudes deeply rooted in the social and cultural background context (not in the least centuries of outright chattel slavery combining with the usual racial hierarchies European "settler societies" erected everywhere often quite against the wishes of their mother countries) - trying to root which out of the system being heavily complicated by the aforementioned excessive decentralisation to the point of unmanageable fragmentation.

Whereas the matter with the guard unions is merely one facet of the underlying and far more serious problem of commercialised incarceration which is what creates interest groups with vested economic interest in more and longer jail sentences in the first place, not to mention such a bloated prison industry it can try to push its particular interests. Lest we forget the US has more people in jail per capita than, IIRC, any three other countries put together and that's including blatant repressive police states - this should speak volumes of why that industry can wield enough clout to try to affect policy to begin with.
The guard unions are simply acting rationally (as far as their members perceive it anyway, which really isn't saying much given the general political and economical illiteracy of the US population - analysts who actually know their shit don't necessarily agree with them) within the framework of a system that, to be quite blunt about it, to a fairly large degree exists to extract at public expense a profit margin from societal problems.
Yay for using prisoners for profit-oriented menial labour which totally isn't subsidised profiteering from de facto indentured servitude and blatantly unhealthy competition! Free market 4 muh freedums! o3o

By way of comparison I can't recall ever hearing of our (ie. Finnish) prison guards pushing for longer sentences; this assuredly has much to do with our prison system being entirely state-run rather than being at least half in the hands of profit-seeking private enterpreneurs which cannot but also have an effect on how the "grunts" view their jobs, as well as a very different cultural attitude to the whole topic of crime and punishement in general. (Far as I've ever heard their complaints are just the usual ones about wages, pensions etc. and being perpetually rather understaffed, ie.basically the same as any public servants'.)

A quick search finds critical articles from both the left and right. A Reason article is critical of both private prisons and guard unions, but says the latter are bigger.

While American Libertarians fall on the right of the political spectrum, it does seem a little reductive to identify them as a critical voice from the right generally. Pretty complicated, though.

I think the reason why it's complicated is because all of those are certainly right-wing economically, but it ain't necessary for them to also be so culturally (though, from what little exposure to libcaps from the US, Canada and UK I had, a large amount of them are culturally right-wing, too). Another piece of evidence that the political compass test ain't the best such political test.

It's generally a good idea to properly define and distinguish between the economic and social axes of the political spectrum - it's perfectly possible to hold views that cheerfully combine the "opposite" ends on those. A classic case in point would be the OG Fascists and Nazis who combined rather "Leftist" economic ideas - such as subordination of the economy to the common good and generally quite sincere populist desire to improve the lot of the "common man" and hatred of "finance capitalism" - with authoritarian-reactionary social and cultural values so far out to the "Right" they literally redefined the extreme end thereof. (In practice of course they found it necessary to reach an accommodation with established economic and societal order; Hitler's purging of the more far-out populist "Red Nazis" -the sort who tended to read a little too much into the "Socialist" in National Socialist- in the Night of the Long Knives was partly that and partly internal power plays.)

The axes just get conflated in Anglo-American politics because the "first-past-the-post" voting system used across the former British Empire inherently produces a polarised de facto two-party system - for want of viable alternatives people who actually want their votes to go towards electing meaningful degrees of political representation (ie. more than tiny irrelevant groups or even individuals somewhere in the margins) are obliged to band together with often only very vaguely like-minded folks under the auspices of one of whatever the "big two" parties in the relevant context now happen to be.

Which is pretty much why to a Continental Eurofag like me, used to very colourful coalition governements, UK politics read as a farce and US ones as morbidly pathological. (The latter was actually a fairly common characterisation even in scientific literature already a few decades back when I studied PolSci...)

"Also not really seeing why public servants in general and ones who do an unpleasant, highly necessary and often quite dangerous work in particular should be denied the essential right to argue for their interests vis-a-vis their employer in an organised fashion."

No one's said they should be denied that right. Doesn't stop us from pointing out the harms those unions cause. And I've been seeing a lot of leftists call for police abolition, so "highly necessary" is debatable.

Yes, the US has highly decentralized police departments. How does that make it not a problem that police unions protect criminal cops?

"the US has more people in jail per capita"

Doesn't mean prison guard unions can't be part of the cause of that.

"The guard unions are simply acting rationally"

So? The Koch brothers or some corporation lobbying for deregulation are also acting rationally. Does that morally excuse them? Does that mean we shouldn't call out the harm they do?

Doesn't stop us from pointing out the harms those unions cause.
...
Yes, the US has highly decentralized police departments. How does that make it not a problem that police unions protect criminal cops?

Confusing symptom with cause, again. The unions are not protecting dirty cops because they're unions, they're doing it because of far deeper problems in the whole system - ingrained attitudes (not in the least a strong "us vs. the rest" occupational ethos and culture), issues with lack of real accountability in part due to excessive organisational independence at the local level, widespread corruption etcetera. Dissolving the unions would do exactly nothing to address any of that shit and instead likely only worsen the working conditions of the honest cops - only encouraging them to become corrupt and cynical simply to make ends meet, a dynamic amply attested in Russian law enforcement (which is orders of magnitude more centralised and more dysfunctional, because lol Russia).

And I've been seeing a lot of leftists call for police abolition, so "highly necessary" is debatable.

It is not. Those people are ignorant morons and can be ignored as such. A society without some form of higher authority systematically and consistently enforcing such laws as exist inevitably and in quite short order degenerates into the "primal ooze" of vendetta law where the only real security derives from the deterrence of such retribution as you and yours can exact for being wronged. This is already how things practically work in the lawless underworld within organised societies, much as the more organised kinds of criminal try to regulate their interactions with various codes of conduct (naked greed and opportunism routinely overrides those).
There's a good reason why one of the most popular refrains in royal propaganda since very ancient times was the monarch as a "lawgiver" who brought and upheld peace and order.

"the US has more people in jail per capita"

Doesn't mean prison guard unions can't be part of the cause of that.

They're not, though. The profession is not so large and wealthy as to have much in the way of real political clout. Their employers, that is the prison industry and its shareholders, is a very different story and finds a very ready political and rhetorical ally in the stereotypically Right "law & order" narrative the Republicans have been pushing for decades.
Which works, too.
Case in point: back during Obama's years in office I could still be arsed to actually trawl US online political discourse (I quit the habit years ago in disgust at the exponentially increasing levels of toxic bullshit involved). One article that stuck to mind discussed the polled & openly stated pro-Republican stance of the local prison-guard unions in, IIRC, Florida or thereabouts which interviewees specifically stated came from the GOP's "tough on crime" image which in their assumption obviously meant job security for themselves.
The catch?
These were state and federal prisons, and what the unions were apparently forgetting or actively ignoring was the GOP's general giant hard-on for predatory privatization and being in bed with the private-sector prison industry which is no friend of unionised labour at all, or spending any more than it must on actually running its jails for that matter. Thus insofar the members of these public-sector unions voted according to their expressed preferences they were factually undermining their own group interests basically merely because they were buying into some frankly rather crude political propaganda.
Which is one reason I added the caveat to the "rational actor" bit.

The US general public being staggeringly politically (and come think of it literally) illiterate and reliably reacting to perceived upticks in crime with calls for more and harsher sentences is part of the same equation. The knee-jerk reaction is pretty universal, of course, but most countries have at least somewhat less ignorant voting populations, less pathologically polarised politics and mostly the good sense to not fucking privatise their prisons in the first place (IIRC it was actually experimented with in 17th-century France and quickly ditched as a Bad Idea).

"The guard unions are simply acting rationally"

So? The Koch brothers or some corporation lobbying for deregulation are also acting rationally. Does that morally excuse them? Does that mean we shouldn't call out the harm they do?

No, but the point is you're barking up an entirely wrong tree. You're blaming a convenient scapegoat for far larger and more complex systemic problems it is at most a minor symptom of.

last edited at Jun 8, 2020 7:58PM

Dissolving the police department and unions and recreating it worked out well for Camden. https://world.wng.org/2018/03/camden_s_new_day

The primary if not sole employer of prison guard unions is public prisons. Private prisons are 8.2% of the incarcerated population, and falling. https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-prisons-united-states/ They're a problem, but blaming them as a major problem is barking up the wrong tree.

Dissolving the police department and unions and recreating it worked out well for Camden. https://world.wng.org/2018/03/camden_s_new_day

Emphasis on recreating - as per the article about half of the old guard were kept on with retraining. Good for them and better still if they can keep it going, but basically irrelevant in the grand scheme of things given the fundamentally local and "isolated" nature of municipal law enforcement organisation in the country.

Finnish cops would likely nod in agreement with the "smile-campaign" strategy adopted there though, as they deliberately and consciously opted for similar policy starting already in the Sixties or so - making it stick being made whole lot easier when law enforcement is vertically integrated on national level. Works, too; in polls the police have for decades been consistently ranked as one of the most trusted and respected occupations in the country, even the criminal element tends to have a sort of grudging "fair enough" relationship with them.

The primary if not sole employer of prison guard unions is public prisons. Private prisons are 8.2% of the incarcerated population, and falling. https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-prisons-united-states/ They're a problem, but blaming them as a major problem is barking up the wrong tree.

...varying from 0 to 50% depending on state, and you bet your ass the relevant actors spare little effort lobbying for their interests as business now does.
Political influences have been instrumental in determining the growth of for-profit private prisons and continue today. However, if overall prison populations continue the current trend of modest declines, the privatization debate will likely intensify as opportunities for the prison industry dry up and corrections companies seek profit in other areas of criminal justice services and immigration detention.
...so basically, yay greener pastures opening elsewhere. Nothing new about Capital shifting focus as circumstances change, of course. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The private prison lobby is a problem but no more the fundamental underlying one than the guard unions - if anything it is au contraire explicitly a symptom, as the entire industry didn't exist before 1985.
This is where we start approaching the actual core of the problem, namely the pants-on-head retarded US approach to crime and punishement as embodied in the black farce that is the "War on Drugs" and the resulting obscene ballooning of US prisoner population.
Thanks, Reagan!

And because US voters are sociopolitical illiterates who swallow "tough on crime" populist bullshit (it's been a favourite GOP hobby horse in particular since at least Ronnie Raygun) hook line and sinker there's no end in sight to this soi-disant War, which roughly everyone who actually understands the first thing about the dynamics of crime and drug abuse flatly declared lost on Day One.

So, yeah. Systemic problems - more specifically a boneheaded and blinkered insistence on throwing offenders behind bars instead of trying to do anything about the socioeconomic causes of crime. Because it's way cooler to spend dosh on cool weapons and dramatic drug busts than on the well-being of the populace or fixing your goddamn bridges since that would be oh noes socialisms durr, amirite?

Interesting discussion, but could we talk about something other than politics? How about our favorite ships? Some of mine are Yachiyo/Mifuyu, Iroha/Sana, Felicia/Tsuruno, Tsukasa/Tsukuyo from Magia Record; Mai/Yui from Bofuri; and Madoka/Homura and Kyouko/Sayaka from Madoka Magica.

^ Way to inspire split loyalties inside me, as I have a vested interest in both the political discussion and the shipping discussion.

Let's ship politicians then, which have the most potential?

last edited at Jun 9, 2020 8:28AM

My tier list(not counting yuri manga):
T0: NanoFate, MiraiRiko, Mio x Aine
T1: Asuka x Lili, AzuYui, Senran girls, Aikatsu girls, UniGear.
T1.5: whatever main yuri ship of whatever I'm watching/playing/reading at the moment.

Let's ship politicians then, which have the most potential?

Winnie the Pooh x Trump-chan OTP.

last edited at Jun 9, 2020 9:28AM

RitsuMio is my religion, Kagami x Konata my philosophy, ChikaYou is my hobby and Neppy x Noire together with Uni x Nepgear is my work.

Lili x Asuka and Sakura x Karin is my dream

last edited at Jun 9, 2020 8:58AM

Let's ship politicians then, which have the most potential?

Trump is shippable with any other ruling authoritarian.
Putin? Check.
Xi? Check.
Orban? Check.
Erdogan? Check.
Kim Jong-Un? Check.
Duda? Check.
Berdimuhamedov? Check.
Modi? Check.
Bolsonaro? Check.
Salman? Check.
Milo? Check.
Vučić? Check.
Lukashenko? Check.
Aliyev? Check.
I could go on forever with this list.

last edited at Jun 9, 2020 8:57AM

Oh yeah, UniGear is T1*

So in SB69 fes a live, I was reading listening the BVL band story and wanted to take a moment to appreciate how fucking gay Peipein is. Holy lesbians she's gay af for her dear master. I wish there was more artwork of them.

Given this site, we should be shipping female politicians! :p

NanoFate, Hayate/harem, Graham/familiars
Ranka/Sheryl
MadoHomu, Sayako
Sayaka/Yuu
Youko/Suzu/Shoukei + Youko/Rakushun
Rin/Saber
Charlotte/Anje

Given this site, we should be shipping female politicians! :p

Does this count?

I like how both of the Discord servers I visit on a daily basis currently have nice discussions ongoing (Dynasty discord server and the Legacy, before you ask which two)

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
That is all.

Given this site, we should be shipping female politicians! :p

Does this count?

Yesn't.

https://www.deviantart.com/theenigmaticuser/art/Dead-or-Alive-5-Yuri-Tina-Armstrong-X-Mila-696664842
DoA Tina x Mila
Watch out for idiots in the comments btw.

Tina and Mila are so easy to ship with anyone in the game really (the girls of course) hahahaha but we also have Ayane x Hitomi and Mary Rose x Honoka

last edited at Jun 10, 2020 9:38AM

I finally got my fairy I wanted in FEH after hitting 40 rolls which means I got to pick her. I also got Lysithea today too.

I am in my 40s and I have a "friend" coming over next weekend to have an anime marathon and spend the night. She's never seen Puella Magi Madoka Magica and has no idea what it's about, so I am going to introduce it to her because I am evil... I'm having flashbacks to high school and slumber parties and it's super weird but nice, lol.

Nice hahahaha, will it be the movies or the anime?

The anime and then Rebellion I hope! Should have plenty of time for that, plus time to make her embarrass herself on BeatSaber as badly as I embarrass myself, lol.

@shadesofgreymoon Wait she's never seen Madoka? What kind of rock has she been hiding under for the last almost 10 years?