Whom did you calibrate your Christmas with.

Uncle Buck.

My kids, grandkids and Mother in law. Now headed to visit parents and sister for a few days. 

Spent time with close friend Dede Callichy and her husband John.
They had a small crowd there, anthroposophists, shamans, pantheists and atheist socialists.
Dede runs the coup; we followed her like chickens.
The courses of vegan dishes were spread out over eight hours
with activities in between - openings of silly presents and challenges to makes up stories about them,
each person invited to do a performance from their store of creativity,
communal singing with guitars and didgeridoo,
and several intervals of free chat.

One of the conversations was about how and why the left of democratic politics
had done so well between 1947 and 1980,
but has done so badly since, losing ground to a right that drifts ever further right.

We came to the conclusion that the left has been doing a terrible job of educating the populace.
It is not sufficiently explaining exactly why the trickle-down economics idea of the right doesn't work and cannot work.
It is not broadcasting the statistics and evidence of how the rich are getting richer and more powerful
while the poor are becoming far poorer and far more numerous, and the social problems caused by that multiplying.
It is not explaining exactly how left-wing economics provides both fairer and more efficient economics as well as prosperity.
And it's failing to show how democratic socialism has nothing to do with communism;
how the latter is, in fact, the most right-wing of all fascism.

Then one of the guests pointed out that since the last world war, Germany has had a radically different taxation system.
A proportion of each person's tax goes direct to the treasury to be used as the government sees fit,
but the other proportion goes to what the taxpayer most wants to fund.
The payer must put something into each section
but can choose to put say only 2% into defence while putting 40% into education, medicine, social and services and 8% into renewable energy infrastructure, and so on.
Thus you get a financial democracy in which the total will of the people is expressed exactly in direct proportion to what the people want.
One thing it did was ensure that Germany went a long way down the path of transitioning to renewables and cleaning up their natural environment and pollution.
The fact that Germany has prospered so well under this system suggests that it works.

I can see that they had an advantage in adopting it after the war. They were utterly devastated and had to start rebuilding from scratch.
For Australia or the USA to transition from their existing systems would have to take time, maybe ten years or more.
Well, one would have to campaign on the benefits for a long time just to get the changes put up for voting and legislation;
that might be nearly impossible to achieve.
One would have to allow existing budgets to fulfil and complete their long term goals.
One would have to hold back on commitments to big projects and wait to see how voters allocate their funds before knowing what you have to work with, where it goes and what's possible.
But it seems that because there is a wide spectrum of values and views, in the end, all needs get met.
I love this idea. I'd love to see it spread and catch hold everywhere.

A quality of discussion like this one made my Xmas day one of the best I've ever had. :)

How was yours, Ele? Did you spend time with family and away from all the madness? This post was edited by inky at December 27, 2019 11:52 AM MST

Only those im in tune with and make sweet music with at the moment....:)

Garrus, of course....

I spent Christmas with my boyfriend. Up next...New Year's Eve!!!
We may need to pay the neighbors a visit so he can show off his pet yankee 

With a bunch of Americans, who crossed everything up by using feet instead of metres.

 

  (Whom did you calibrate your Christmas with? With whom did you calibrate your Christmas?)

 

  It wasn’t my own doing, it was my mother, who calibrated Christmas by introducing our family to Kwanza. I was a tot at the time, and I appreciate having learned something different and something new.
  Decades later, I practice neither of the two, the former because it has been far too bastardized over the past 2 to 3 centuries into the completely commercial venture and money-making opportunity for taking advantage of its “followers” that it has become today, and the latter because even though it has its assets (and few liabilities of which I know), it was not imbued in me deeply enough to attach itself as an important rite.

  I am grateful to Inky for having caught the pun of the question; if not for her post, I would not have stumbled across this, and even if I had, believe I would have missed the play on words, the same way that many others did.