Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
On April 15 2024 23:33 JimmiC wrote: Trump laps Biden on who’s crazier again with his most recent history lesson. Were you guys aware Lee was not in favour any more? Were you aware he talked like a leprechaun? Trump teaching murica.
“Gettysburg. Wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E. Lee ― who’s no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor ― ‘Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.’ They were fighting uphill. He said, ‘Wow, that was a big mistake.’ He lost his great general, and they were fighting. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys!’ But it was too late.”
He’s gone from spouting bollocks I profoundly disagree with to me genuinely not knowing what point he’s even trying to make
Today was Day 1 of one of Trump's criminal trials... and Donald Trump was caught napping in the courtroom. I thought that Joe Biden was supposed to be the one who was "Sleepy"?
On April 15 2024 23:33 JimmiC wrote: Trump laps Biden on who’s crazier again with his most recent history lesson. Were you guys aware Lee was not in favour any more? Were you aware he talked like a leprechaun? Trump teaching murica.
“Gettysburg. Wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E. Lee ― who’s no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor ― ‘Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.’ They were fighting uphill. He said, ‘Wow, that was a big mistake.’ He lost his great general, and they were fighting. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys!’ But it was too late.”
He’s gone from spouting bollocks I profoundly disagree with to me genuinely not knowing what point he’s even trying to make
My guess is he watched Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and thought "I have the high ground" was a catching slogan, but needed more dog whistle.
On April 15 2024 23:33 JimmiC wrote: Trump laps Biden on who’s crazier again with his most recent history lesson. Were you guys aware Lee was not in favour any more? Were you aware he talked like a leprechaun? Trump teaching murica.
“Gettysburg. Wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E. Lee ― who’s no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor ― ‘Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.’ They were fighting uphill. He said, ‘Wow, that was a big mistake.’ He lost his great general, and they were fighting. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys!’ But it was too late.”
He’s gone from spouting bollocks I profoundly disagree with to me genuinely not knowing what point he’s even trying to make
My guess is he watched Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and thought "I have the high ground" was a catching slogan, but needed more dog whistle.
He should have watched the other films. Everybody knows the ‘I have the high ground’ memes but Obi-Wan defeats Darth Maul from the low ground in Phantom Menace.
Here we go, *inhales* Obi-Wan doesn't need to be on the high ground, the high ground just needs to exist within the battle; Obi-Wan knows that when he has the low ground, he really has the high ground, from a certain point of view; see Diagram A.
Look at his battle record:
Maul: Has low ground, wins Example A
Dooku: No high ground, loses
Dooku rematch: No high ground, loses Example B.
Greivous: Has low ground, wins Example C
Vader: Has high ground, wins
Vader rematch: No high ground, loses
Obi-Wan with the high/low ground is canonically the most powerful Jedi. This is fact. Had Yoda not denied his request to battle The Senate with typical Jedi arrogance, Obi-Wan could have defeated Palpatine in the Senate building, which housed a variety of different altitudes; this was designed so that the Chancellor could always have the moral high ground in political debates….
Absolute fake nerd.
Not one of mine alas, I can only aspire to such a combination of sound logic and observation, research, humour and utter, utter pointlessness such as this
On April 14 2024 09:02 Sermokala wrote: Who could of guessed who bj though was worth empathizing with. That poor lady having to rejoin the workforce after her company failed like many others do naturally in the face of capitalism. But forget the poors and forget capitalism a rich person is suffering.
Oh I guess they aren't rich anymore so fuck em right bj?
Unsurprisingly what you’re offering here is the same as all your posts. “I care more about the poor than you so I’m a better person, you capitalist” “I care more about grandmas dying of covid than you so I’m a better person, you anti-vaxxer.” The premise is always the same, the other words are interchangeable.
Funny how you take zero effort to actually explain why the policies you support are more beneficial than the policies I support. That’s irrelevant to you. What matters to you is making sure everyone knows that your motives are the most morally good, results be damned. It’s purely an exercise in vanity.
I love this post and everything it confesses from you. Being morally good isn't a reason to support a policy its just an exercise in vanity. Showing respect for and valuing human beings isn't beneficial to you and is irrelevant to your worldview. You don't even see a point in attempting to have any morals or values, so there's nowhere to start in trying to explain the benefits in any position. Capital is your god and anyone who gets hurt along the way is just the cost of doing business.
On April 14 2024 09:02 Sermokala wrote: Who could of guessed who bj though was worth empathizing with. That poor lady having to rejoin the workforce after her company failed like many others do naturally in the face of capitalism. But forget the poors and forget capitalism a rich person is suffering.
Oh I guess they aren't rich anymore so fuck em right bj?
Unsurprisingly what you’re offering here is the same as all your posts. “I care more about the poor than you so I’m a better person, you capitalist” “I care more about grandmas dying of covid than you so I’m a better person, you anti-vaxxer.” The premise is always the same, the other words are interchangeable.
Funny how you take zero effort to actually explain why the policies you support are more beneficial than the policies I support. That’s irrelevant to you. What matters to you is making sure everyone knows that your motives are the most morally good, results be damned. It’s purely an exercise in vanity.
I love this post and everything it confesses from you. Being morally good isn't a reason to support a policy its just an exercise in vanity. Showing respect for and valuing human beings isn't beneficial to you and is irrelevant to your worldview. You don't even see a point in attempting to have any morals or values, so there's nowhere to start in trying to explain the benefits in any position. Capital is your god and anyone who gets hurt along the way is just the cost of doing business.
Ever heard of the expression the road to hell is paved with good intentions? See, all you care about is appearing morally good. You could give 2 shits about whether your policies are actually beneficial. It's just virtue signaling.
Let's look at another progressive attempt to help. In 2021 St Paul voters approved an ordinance for rent control so those greedy landlords couldn't raise the rent on poor people's housing by more than 3%. The ordinance was so marvelous that it didn't even make exemptions for changes in occupancy or newly constructed buildings.
In a stunning twist that could have only been predicted by anyone that has taken an intro to economics 101 class, building permits for new multifamily buildings were down 80% within the first 3 months of the ordinance passing. Eventually the necessary take-backsies were performed and the ordinance was rolled back significantly.
Despite this being a very elementary point about how removing the ability to obtain a profit on an endeavor could hurt the supply of housing for the poor, I have little doubt this will blow right over your head and your response will be "Omg BJ thinks poor people don't deserve the dignity to have housing without greedy landlords profiting off them" or some other nonsense. Unfortunately there are astonishingly many smooth brained individuals that can't think more deeply than "profit = bad. capitalism = evil." and that's the end of the discussion.
When I talk about doing the necessary work of utilizing organized civil disobedience to disrupt the ability for the US to aid and abet genocide unimpeded, this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. It's got nothing to do with "lesser evilism" electoralism.
imo Democrats need to dig deep, find their humanity, and organize their own campaigns of civil disobedience to disrupt the US's ongoing support of Israel's ethnic cleansing campaign (or at least reconcile their complicity with their worldview/self-image).
On April 16 2024 22:06 Gorsameth wrote: good of people to peaceful protest for what they believe in.
Just need the people that ostensibly oppose genocide to join them (and/or organize their own) instead of offering empty support, sicking fascist police on them (while increasing police budgets), complaining about the inconvenience, and telling them pledging their vote unconditionally months before the election to a guy aiding and abetting genocide is helping.
We don't just need them to find their humanity and step up to stop the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians by Israel, but to prevent a fascist racial capitalist global hegemony from finishing off hollowing out the vestiges of democracy that linger in the US.
Alas these protesters are still shouted down and kicked out of Biden events instead of Biden supporters turning their rhetorical/ostensible opposition into actually siding against genocide.
On April 14 2024 09:02 Sermokala wrote: Who could of guessed who bj though was worth empathizing with. That poor lady having to rejoin the workforce after her company failed like many others do naturally in the face of capitalism. But forget the poors and forget capitalism a rich person is suffering.
Oh I guess they aren't rich anymore so fuck em right bj?
Unsurprisingly what you’re offering here is the same as all your posts. “I care more about the poor than you so I’m a better person, you capitalist” “I care more about grandmas dying of covid than you so I’m a better person, you anti-vaxxer.” The premise is always the same, the other words are interchangeable.
Funny how you take zero effort to actually explain why the policies you support are more beneficial than the policies I support. That’s irrelevant to you. What matters to you is making sure everyone knows that your motives are the most morally good, results be damned. It’s purely an exercise in vanity.
I love this post and everything it confesses from you. Being morally good isn't a reason to support a policy its just an exercise in vanity. Showing respect for and valuing human beings isn't beneficial to you and is irrelevant to your worldview. You don't even see a point in attempting to have any morals or values, so there's nowhere to start in trying to explain the benefits in any position. Capital is your god and anyone who gets hurt along the way is just the cost of doing business.
Ever heard of the expression the road to hell is paved with good intentions? See, all you care about is appearing morally good. You could give 2 shits about whether your policies are actually beneficial. It's just virtue signaling.
Let's look at another progressive attempt to help. In 2021 St Paul voters approved an ordinance for rent control so those greedy landlords couldn't raise the rent on poor people's housing by more than 3%. The ordinance was so marvelous that it didn't even make exemptions for changes in occupancy or newly constructed buildings.
In a stunning twist that could have only been predicted by anyone that has taken an intro to economics 101 class, building permits for new multifamily buildings were down 80% within the first 3 months of the ordinance passing. Eventually the necessary take-backsies were performed and the ordinance was rolled back significantly.
Despite this being a very elementary point about how removing the ability to obtain a profit on an endeavor could hurt the supply of housing for the poor, I have little doubt this will blow right over your head and your response will be "Omg BJ thinks poor people don't deserve the dignity to have housing without greedy landlords profiting off them" or some other nonsense. Unfortunately there are astonishingly many smooth brained individuals that can't think more deeply than "profit = bad. capitalism = evil." and that's the end of the discussion.
Other lessons in economics 101 would surely include finite resources that people actually need to survive not tending towards mutually beneficial market equilibriums emerging between producer and consumer no?
What is the price of a basic family home in the great San Francisco area currently and what are rental prices like?
I’ve yet to see any real semi-universally applicable policies from tightly regulated/state-intervention capitalism to a libertarian wet dream from different locales that address some of these issues.
Hey give me socialist utopia by all means but in the here and now I’ve no innate objection to market competition being the bedrock of many things, because hey certain key principles actually, demonstrably do occur. With the exception of very few things, public transport operation and infrastructure being a biggy, housing infrastructure and distribution being the biggy.
It’s not an area you see much innovation in, it’s not an area where competition drives down prices, and never mind arguments more based in moral intuition.
Add to this wider externalities. Imagine the macro-economic benefits of decades of productivity increases, wages if housing prices had even slightly tracked with wages. That’s a hell of a lot of discretionary spending power that’s available, savings for entrepreneurial endeavours and so on and so forth.
The bolded is precisely the problem, or if not ‘make a profit’, ‘make how much profit?’ Folks won’t invest in this sector unless there is an absolute guarantee that they’ll make money. So any attempt to maybe threaten that, they immediately pull back in a big way.
So, if we’re looking at effective policy to actually redress an issue, I agree with you that this is bad policy. Either from past local efforts, efforts elsewhere or just observation this is quite a predictable outcome.
At the same time you seem to place an inordinate focus on the failures to redress problems rather than the problems and their root causes themselves, and indeed solely left-leaning attempts. Which isn’t really much less myopic than ‘capitalism bad’.
On April 16 2024 22:01 GreenHorizons wrote: When I talk about doing the necessary work of utilizing organized civil disobedience to disrupt the ability for the US to aid and abet genocide unimpeded, this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. It's got nothing to do with "lesser evilism" electoralism.
imo Democrats need to dig deep, find their humanity, and organize their own campaigns of civil disobedience to disrupt the US's ongoing support of Israel's ethnic cleansing campaign (or at least reconcile their complicity with their worldview/self-image).
I’d rather they picked a more black and white issue like China completely trying to erase multiple cultures from existence. But with China being totalitarian the news does not make it out in the same way, and with the main sources of propaganda being Chinese allies we are never going to see it. Not to mention China being the backbone of global consumerism.
Nice to see people using their right to protest. Also, really nice to see the democratic countries letting it happen. Imagine the blood shed if it happened in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, so on.
It is important when all you read are negatives about these big democracies to take a step back and look at them comparatively and realize that while there is a ton of work to be done, they are SO SO much better than a dictatorship no matter the branding.
And what should they protest in order for what action to be taken by the US government to stop China erasing cultures?
Don't send our weapons to Israel is a very easy, clean and simple action for the US to take. It costs the US basically nothing (plenty of other markets to sell said weapons to) and doesn't require the US to strong arm another nation directly. If Israel wants to do these attacks there is little we can do to stop them. But we can stop supplying them with the weapons to do so very easily.
On April 16 2024 22:01 GreenHorizons wrote: When I talk about doing the necessary work of utilizing organized civil disobedience to disrupt the ability for the US to aid and abet genocide unimpeded, this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. It's got nothing to do with "lesser evilism" electoralism.
imo Democrats need to dig deep, find their humanity, and organize their own campaigns of civil disobedience to disrupt the US's ongoing support of Israel's ethnic cleansing campaign (or at least reconcile their complicity with their worldview/self-image).
I’d rather they picked a more black and white issue like China completely trying to erase multiple cultures from existence. But with China being totalitarian the news does not make it out in the same way, and with the main sources of propaganda being Chinese allies we are never going to see it. Not to mention China being the backbone of global consumerism.
Nice to see people using their right to protest. Also, really nice to see the democratic countries letting it happen. Imagine the blood shed if it happened in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, so on.
It is important when all you read are negatives about these big democracies to take a step back and look at them comparatively and realize that while there is a ton of work to be done, they are SO SO much better than a dictatorship no matter the branding.
Yeah, I'm sure all the dead, displaced, and starving Palestinians feel much better about their situation knowing that it's a democracy that is doing those things to them.
On April 16 2024 22:01 GreenHorizons wrote: When I talk about doing the necessary work of utilizing organized civil disobedience to disrupt the ability for the US to aid and abet genocide unimpeded, this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. It's got nothing to do with "lesser evilism" electoralism.
imo Democrats need to dig deep, find their humanity, and organize their own campaigns of civil disobedience to disrupt the US's ongoing support of Israel's ethnic cleansing campaign (or at least reconcile their complicity with their worldview/self-image).
I’d rather they picked a more black and white issue like China completely trying to erase multiple cultures from existence. But with China being totalitarian the news does not make it out in the same way, and with the main sources of propaganda being Chinese allies we are never going to see it. Not to mention China being the backbone of global consumerism.
Nice to see people using their right to protest. Also, really nice to see the democratic countries letting it happen. Imagine the blood shed if it happened in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, so on.
It is important when all you read are negatives about these big democracies to take a step back and look at them comparatively and realize that while there is a ton of work to be done, they are SO SO much better than a dictatorship no matter the branding.
Yeah, I'm sure all the dead, displaced, and starving Palestinians feel much better about their situation knowing that it's a democracy that is doing those things to them.
It’s mostly Hamas doing it to them. Just like it wasn’t the Allies fucking up Nazi Germany, it was the Nazis who decided to try picking a fight with the rest of the world.
We attempt to hold Israel to a higher standard because we can’t hold Hamas to any standard at all, but it’s important to remember that Israel isn’t responsible for the situation in Gaza today. Gaza was seized by a radical religious death cult that wants Israel to kill Gazans.
On April 16 2024 22:01 GreenHorizons wrote: When I talk about doing the necessary work of utilizing organized civil disobedience to disrupt the ability for the US to aid and abet genocide unimpeded, this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. It's got nothing to do with "lesser evilism" electoralism.
imo Democrats need to dig deep, find their humanity, and organize their own campaigns of civil disobedience to disrupt the US's ongoing support of Israel's ethnic cleansing campaign (or at least reconcile their complicity with their worldview/self-image).
I’d rather they picked a more black and white issue like China completely trying to erase multiple cultures from existence. But with China being totalitarian the news does not make it out in the same way, and with the main sources of propaganda being Chinese allies we are never going to see it. Not to mention China being the backbone of global consumerism.
Nice to see people using their right to protest. Also, really nice to see the democratic countries letting it happen. Imagine the blood shed if it happened in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, so on.
It is important when all you read are negatives about these big democracies to take a step back and look at them comparatively and realize that while there is a ton of work to be done, they are SO SO much better than a dictatorship no matter the branding.
Yeah, I'm sure all the dead, displaced, and starving Palestinians feel much better about their situation knowing that it's a democracy that is doing those things to them.
It’s mostly Hamas doing it to them. Just like it wasn’t the Allies fucking up Nazi Germany, it was the Nazis who decided to try picking a fight with the rest of the world.
We attempt to hold Israel to a higher standard because we can’t hold Hamas to any standard at all, but it’s important to remember that Israel isn’t responsible for the situation in Gaza today. Gaza was seized by a radical religious death cult that wants Israel to kill Gazans.
while you have a point that we are holding a double standard, i think it’s silly to say it’s hamas killing the palestinians. it’s a complicated problem to solve, no doubt, but is there any world in which the final solution is violence? of course not. - i should admit a caveat here that while this is just the moral virtue signaling angle, we aren’t talking about proper war here. there is arguments to be made that war is necessary in some circumstances, against that too as i might be i would understand. but we’re crossing that line here straight into genocide.
so why do we send bombs as aid? to what other end than genocide? is that going to be the answer? i assume we all hope ‘no,’ but then in that case what are we doing?
again i fully understand it’s not a question we’ll answer here but i think we can probably answer the question of ‘is the right answer more bombs?’
it reminds me of that video of that poor soldier self immolating. the first responder needs fire extinguishers but all he gets is more guns.
i’m not sure if this is naive or if it’s just the case of when you have trillions of dollars of hammers everything looks like a nail.
EPT
