Office of Delegate JustinTimeCuber

[JustinTimeCuber]

I'm running for the Southern Chamber of Delegates. I want to be a strong, progressive voice in the Chamber who will work across the aisle with Delegates more conservative or libertarian than me on issues where we can find common ground, without compromising basic progressive values that I believe can help poor southerners succeed in life, that can protect minority and LGBT southerners from discrimination, that can create true equality of opportunity. I may not be the most qualified candidate, but I can say this: If I'm elected, southerners will know that they have a principled progressive fighting for them in the Chamber of Delegates. I ask for your vote in the election starting March 10 and ending the 12th, five weeks from this weekend.

Platform:
- Minimum wage increase [PROPOSED LEGISLATION]
- A ban on "right-to-work" laws in the South
- Increased regional funding for higher education
- Opposing secret ballot election reform, "don't fix something that isn't broken". Former President of Atlasia Blair2015 makes some good points on this topic.
- Do an infrastructure project to create hundreds of thousands of decent-paying jobs for southerners.
- Propose an amendment to allow for an increase in the number of Representatives to Congress if the Atlasian voter population grows.

I will begin writing legislation to implement this platform, so that if elected, progressives in the Chamber of Delegates can quickly start playing offense instead of defense. My proposals list may expand over the next few weeks as I think of more specific ideas to improve southerners' lives.

Endorsements:
White Trash/Southern Gothic, Former Representative to Congress and Feb '17 Labor VP Nominee
NeverAgain, Southern Delegate and Feb '17 Labor Presidential Nominee
OneJ_, Representative to Congress, Minority Whip
Harry S Truman, Prime Minister of Fremont
1184AZ, Representative to Congress
CXSmith, Lincoln Assemblyman
Blair2015, 40th President of Atlasia
VirginStar (Peebs' real account), Representative to Congress, Minority Leader

[JustinTimeCuber]

Endorsed. While I do support a secret ballot, the rest of the platform is great

Thanks for the endorsement! I am of course willing to hear different points of view, but my current position is that there could be accountability problems. I don't believe that Governor dfwlibertylover would cheat in the counting of votes, but having just one or two people in charge of the votes is generally concerning.

[JustinTimeCuber]

Beautiful platform! Obvious endorsement here! I look forward to your candidacy, and your work in the CoD! Please let me know if you need anything!

Thanks!

[JustinTimeCuber]

Endorsed! I'd be happy to work with you in the Chamber.

Glad to have the support of a potential future colleague.

I wrote a draft of a minimum wage bill (see OP). It's open for suggestions, I want to get these platform proposals made into well-written, clear legislation before (hopefully, if I'm elected that is) they get debated in the Chamber.

[JustinTimeCuber]

Endorsed! You've produced an excellent platform, and I'm sure you'll make a strong addition to the Chamber of Delegates.

Glad to have new people running and taking the initiative! Endorsed!

Thanks for the support! I think with these endorsements from Fremont politicians, I should get 100% of the vote out of Fremont. lol

Endorsed.

Endorsed.

[JustinTimeCuber]

Platform:
- Minimum wage increase [PROPOSED LEGISLATION]

To carry out this part of my platform, I have been working on a bill. I'm looking for suggestions on how to improve this legislation. I want to have very clear and detailed bills ready to implement a progressive platform if I'm elected to the Chamber.

[JustinTimeCuber]

It's a nice bill but Atlasia already recently raised the national minimum wage

Are you talking about the A Real Living Wage Act? If so, this bill is supposed to be an extension thereto. Notice the correspondence in the effective date, April 16, 2017.

Speaking of the A Real Living Wage Act, Section 2 seems somewhat vague. 20% of the minimum wage? 20% of the average wage? 20% of the minimum wage hike? Can someone clarify?

[JustinTimeCuber]

Yeah I'd definitely blame who-ever wrote that legislation I'll make sure to amend/fix the tax credit part of the bill.

It's great to see a new player this active, and brings me back memories of my own youth in Atlasia. Endorsed

Glad to have your support!

[JustinTimeCuber]

I have begun work on an anti-right-to-work constitutional referendum.

[JustinTimeCuber]

Congratulations to President-elect dfwlibertylover on his victory tonight!

[JustinTimeCuber]

It's just one week until the Southern regional election. Here are the people I support. (colors are by national party because no one cares about the regional ones tbh)

Governor: NeverAgain
Running against: diptheriadan (NPP)

Chamber of Delegates: fhtagn and Jacobin American (also vote for me lol)
Running against: Classic Conservative, Carpetbagger, Ben Kenobi (ACP)

I hope we can turn the south red (pink for you hamarambois) by showing up at the polls and voting for Labor candidates.

e: RIP Nev stole Peebs' governor run
e2: lmao Santander also dropped out
e3: I swear to god guys make up your mind

[JustinTimeCuber]

BRIEF STATEMENT ON SOUTHERN BILL S2
S2, which was recently introduced in the Southern Chamber of Delegates by Delegate Ben Kenobi, would ban all physician-assisted suicide in the South. I am very strongly opposed to this measure.  It's absolutely ridiculous for people to claim they support freedom, but then when it's someone who is going to die in the next 6 months, who is over 18 years old, and who makes a decision based on free will that they don't want to suffer through those final months filled with physical, mental, and emotional pain, they don't support that person's freedom of choice. Delegate Kenobi and anyone else who joins him on this issue should be ashamed of the suffering they will cause people.

[JustinTimeCuber]

Have you meet with Ben and heard his concerns?

I'm PMing him and his concerns are things that are already clearly illegal under the current law (someone got killed by a doctor who was in a vegetative state, and therefore clearly couldn't give consent)

[JustinTimeCuber]

Have you meet with Ben and heard his concerns?

I'm PMing him and his concerns are things that are already clearly illegal under the current law (someone got killed by a doctor who was in a vegetative state, and therefore clearly couldn't give consent)

Still feel the same way about Ben?

I don't personally dislike him, but I think it's immoral to force someone to suffer through up to 6 months of, like I said earlier, physical, mental, and emotional problems.

If he's concerned about individual cases where the doctor proceeds without consent of the patient, that's clearly illegal under the Atlasian Death with Dignity Act of 2016. A doctor that does that should be charged with murder. However, in the vast majority of cases where the law is followed, that's not the case. He's trying to fix people breaking the law by creating a law. That's absurd.

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Which is why we should oppose euthanasia as it violates the principle of 'first do no harm'.

I would argue that euthanasia isn't "harm", at least not in the sense it's meant in the Hippocratic oath. It actually REDUCES the amount of pain, mental and physical.

[JustinTimeCuber]

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Justin, may I ask you a question? If a friend came to you and said that their life was difficult and that they would rather die than continue living, what would you do?

Would you attempt to help kill them or would you try to treat their suffering?

Are they going to die, with more than a 99% chance, in the next 6 months?
Yes?
Then if I'm their doctor, and if the safeguards are met, then yes, I would have to painlessly kill them. What else would I do, let them suffer potentially severe pain for 6 months? They're going to die anyway.
No?
Then under no circumstances would I kill them. They should get a therapist though, if they feel suicidal.

[JustinTimeCuber]

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With what? A knife? Some drug, idk I'm not a doctor

How would you find out that your friend was correct in stating that this was the chance of him dying in the next six month? He might have told that to you - but you don't know. He might be lying to you. Did you miss the part about me being his doctor? I obviously wouldn't do it if I weren't his doctor and didn't know what condition or disease he had.

If he were lying to you, and you killed him, you'd be in jail for murder. He couldn't just lie to me, "doc I have cancer" "okay I believe you"

What I will say is this - nothing is quite so precise in medicine. You are never going to get a 99 percent chance of dying in 6 months unless you've taken on massive radiation exposure. In which case it will be much sooner than 6 months. We're saying 6 months is the absolute limit. Usually you wouldn't know with such certainty by 6 months, of course.

And why 6 months? Is it better than 4 or 8 months? It seems very arbitrary to me. Would you kill someone who had a 99 percent chance of dying in 7 months? So the only options are 0 months and infinite months? Arbitrary things are set all the time.

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Enjoy the time that they have left and spend time with them? you can't really enjoy the time if you're in severe pain ftr

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What do you think would happen to the market for psychotherapists if they could kill themselves instead? Would it increase or decrease. So you think wanting out if you're going through a terrible illness is the same to wanting to kill yourself when you're physically healthy? It's definitely not.

And apologies. Let me know if you'd prefer the PMs. This is your office after all. I'd rather have an open debate, really. I'm worried about the effects completely banning PAS would have, and I think it's immoral to force someone to live through months of physical pain, and potentially becoming a vegetable.

e: subtle grammar mistake involving the conditional tense of 'to be'

[JustinTimeCuber]

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As opposed to being dead? Pain can be treated, death cannot.
Well, would you prefer, say, 2 months of being stuck in a hospital, knowing that you will certainly die, or just not have to go through that? Even if you answer the former, what right is it of the government to make that decision for you?

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Well sure. However, medicine doesn't cut that fine. If you're likely to live for 6 months, you're as likely to live beyond a year as less than 6. I'm not saying it does, just that 6 months is the absolute maximum.

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Most would see it bad if a death sentence were based on something arbitrary. And yes, I believe we should try to treat people the best way that we know. Many cures have resulted from patients who would otherwise have died choosing to fight it out. So you want to force them to "fight it out"? Again, who is the government to say that? While it may not save the life of that patient, the breakthroughs have gone on to save the lives of other patients. If there's a 99% chance I'll die anyway, and I won't be able to enjoy those last, say, 2 months, then what's the point of keeping me alive? 1) for me, it's painful, physically and mentally, and 2) it's a big waste of money if I don't even want to fight out the last 2 months.

Those breakthroughs would not have been achieved if we killed the patient. The patient is making that choice. They aren't a lab rat.

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Actually, I'm not saying that at all. I'm drawing a distinction between wanting to kill yourself and asking someone else to kill you. I don't agree with suicide, but I agree that freedom, individual freedom should permit someone to make that choice. The same is not true of euthanasia. There is a difference between me doing something and me doing something to someone else. But, you're the one making the decision. The doctor isn't just going to shoot you with an AR-15. The doctor is acting in the interest of the patient, if the patient is making fully conscious decisions.

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As opposed to killing them? Why don't we kill everyone who's sick? 2 things wrong with that. One, we don't kill anyone, it's not forced. It's a free decision. Second, most illnesses aren't terminal.

[JustinTimeCuber]

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But we are killing them. That's the point here. Euthanasia is killing a person. What you are arguing is that it is more merciful to kill someone by their own free will, it's hardly murder than to let them suffer.

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Is it? If someone is in so much pain that they want to die, do you believe that this decision is truly 'free'? Do you believe that if they were no longer suffering pain that they would want to die? I would argue that it is coerced because they are in terrible suffering. And we have an obligation to lessen that suffering. Ideally, that decision would be made before someone's organ fails or they have severe internal bleeding or something, but again, they will die anyway, so if they want to end the struggle before it gets worse, what's the problem with that?

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For myself? I would prefer to live the best I can in the time I have. There is nothing more I can do. As for the government, the government *does* have the right to intervene in certain cases. Murder is one of them. Is it really the moral equivalent to murder? The government has the obligation to protect their citizens, particularly the weak and the helpless in their hospitals. They are week and helpless, so let's take away their freedom of choice.

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If that were the case, why do we generally refer suicidal people to psychotherapy? We believe that they are in need of treatment, not death. In short we believe that to desire death is a sign of mental illness not wellness. Yes but those people are physically healthy, at least for the most part. That's a false equivalence.

If you're the man in the desert with your arm pinned under a boulder, and you make the choice to stay and die, is that really a choice? No, but let me ask you this: You are in the middle of a desert, thousands of miles away from civilization. You will die of thirst, 100% guaranteed. You will die. You have a lethal dose of a drug that you can inject, which would painlessly kill you in minutes. Would you try to escape from the desert, knowing that you won't make it and will die slowly and painfully as your body is depleted of water, or would you give up and take the drug? You might be the "fighter to the end" type, but does that mean that you, JCL and Santander should force everyone to do that?

[JustinTimeCuber]

It's just one week until the Southern regional election. Here are the people I support. (colors are by national party because no one cares about the regional ones tbh)

Governor: NeverAgain
Running against: Jimmie

Chamber of Delegates: fhtagn and Jacobin American (also vote for me lol)
Running against: diptheriadan (NPP) (I guess I'll rank him 4th), Classic Conservative, Ben Kenobi (ACP)

I hope we can turn the south red (pink for you hamarambois) by showing up at the polls and voting for Labor candidates.

e: RIP Nev stole Peebs' governor run
e2: lmao Santander also dropped out

Carpetbagger also added his name to the race.

Yeah when I posted that I thought the deadline had passed already (didn't realize the South does it differently than the federal government)

[JustinTimeCuber]

It's just one week until the Southern regional election. Here are the people I support. (colors are by national party because no one cares about the regional ones tbh)

Governor: NeverAgain
Running against: Jimmie

Chamber of Delegates: fhtagn and Jacobin American (also vote for me lol)
Running against: diptheriadan (NPP) (I guess I'll rank him 4th), Classic Conservative, Ben Kenobi (ACP)

I hope we can turn the south red (pink for you hamarambois) by showing up at the polls and voting for Labor candidates.

e: RIP Nev stole Peebs' governor run
e2: lmao Santander also dropped out

Carpetbagger also added his name to the race.

Yeah when I posted that I thought the deadline had passed already (didn't realize the South does it differently than the federal government)

Oh I didn't realize that. I guess Peebs will have to sort something out then.

the federal deadline is a week before the election iirc, the regional deadline is a day before the election

[JustinTimeCuber]

Southern Chamber of Delegates debate - responses to Classic Conservative's arguments

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We all believe that we must protect our citizens from crime. In different areas of our region, we have different roots of the problem, in our rural areas we have crime that is caused by drug addiction and in our inner cities, we have gangs that are causing a large portion of crime. In regards to drug addiction, we must follow the lead of many in the North including the Gloucester, Massachusetts Police Department, they have taken good steps to solve crime and help those who are addicted. In regards to inner city crime, I believe that we should help our police officers do their jobs. We must institute a regional stop and frisk policy and arrest violent offenders.

It appears that Classic supports stop-and-frisk, which is wrong for so many reasons. For one, its effectiveness is abysmal, and conservatives love yelling about government waste, is government waste still bad? Also, stop-and-frisk is known to disproportionately affect minorities, given racial biases in police departments. That's not okay. If CC is set on doing this, I will do everything in my power to stop him.

We should also not legalize any drugs in our region.

Here's a better idea: Instead of throwing people into a cage for 30 years because they used a substance, treat it as a medical issue. I do support regulating and taxing drugs though. Having a legal system in place to get drugs would solve so many problems, including cutting back on the massive black market that already exists for drugs. It would still be illegal to sell drugs to minors, of course, and they would be regulated in order to be more safe. As a society we shouldn't encourage the use of certain substances, in fact I think we should do quite the opposite and strongly discourage using hard drugs, but I don't think the government's role in this issue is to ruin the rest of your life by locking you up for years.

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I believe that we should have a closed border. We should construct a wall on our southern border, my wall plan currently has one large eighty foot concrete wall with barbed wire on top. Then we would have two electric fences on both sides of the war [Awesome Freudian slip there, I have to admit] and surveillance systems to stop all illegal entries into our region.

That much concrete alone could cost between 10 and 50 billion dollars, not to mention other large costs. So much for fiscal responsibility, right? You would rather spend $25,000,000,000 on keeping out immigrants, a problem that is nowhere near as serious as people would like to think, as the net flow of immigrants between Atlasia and Mexico is basically zero; or on random wars, than on assistance for the poor or scientific research.

We then must increase our border patrol and we must stop the flow of illegal drugs into our region. which we could do by putting them out of business by ending their black-market We should also defund all sanctuary cities in the south and pull all funds including education till they revoke their status.

Congressman, we have a word for that. Evil. You prioritize keeping out undocumented immigrants so much that you would sacrifice the education of Southern children of all backgrounds to accomplish your far-right agenda? The South is above that.

[JustinTimeCuber]

When exactly is the Southern Chamber considering a ban on the use of matches because arson is bad? Can someone fill me in?

[JustinTimeCuber]

So far, 6 people other than me have preferenced me first or second. Thanks for your support! If you haven't voted yet, go to the polls and vote for NeverAgain for Governor and our Labor slate for the CoD.

[JustinTimeCuber]

Thank you! Victory speech tomorrow morning

[JustinTimeCuber]

Congratulations on your election!

Thank you!