US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4189

On April 17 2024 00:25 KwarK wrote:

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 23:59 JimmiC wrote:

Stop buying all the shit made by the slave labor of the people being erased would be a great start. Especially for leftists.

edit: I get that it impacts one live a lot more than showing up at a bridge and gets way less clicks and cool guy points but it is more impactful .

On April 16 2024 19:34 BlackJack wrote:


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.

On April 18 2024 08:30 Sermokala wrote:

The path to hell being paved with good intensions feels a lot more appropriate when the ends are justifying the means. The cruelty being the point for conservatives is because they think the end goal will justify their cruelty, never having to face the fact that it was never necessary. Point in fact the quality of life of people living in red states vs people living in blue states. Minnesota being a top HDI state looks a lot like they know what they're doing and are focusing on the real issue of helping people. Missouri and Alabama being third world nations dependent on blue state transfers just shows that the ends will never justify the means when the ends are never justified.

Take a look at the other twin city that banned single family zoning. Gee its like trying different things to help people is possible when your focus is to help people. Oh you're saying that the council had the dignity to change their mind and switch paths when it was revealed that it wasn't working? Gee wilikers BJ if they just cared about just looking like good people why didn't they stick with the policy? No child left behind was designed at increasing the cruelty in school income by making the lives worse for people who were unlucky to be born in the wrong zip code with bad schools. States like texas who love kicking children off of healthcare and who refuse to take dollars to expand health insurance love it when people just go uninsured.

See BJ even the examples you think are slam dunks are again just examples that contradict what you are trying to say. The real smooth brains are the ones who convince themselves being a good person is the actual cringe to do.

On April 18 2024 14:45 RenSC2 wrote:

Do you believe that everyone should have the same set of morals as you? Obviously you should believe your moral system is best, otherwise you'd follow different morals. But there's a reason why there are many different religions in the world (and other philosophical thinkers) with differing moral systems. People can't actually agree on what is moral and what is not. I don't pretend that my moral beliefs are the one true moral belief system and thus the word of God that everyone must follow. I don't think anyone else should pretend either.

One famous author would posit that (slightly paraphrased) "productive achievement is man's noblest activity." There's more to it than that part, but that part sounds quite reasonable to me. Does it sound like a reasonable start to a moral system to you?

Let's look at what that really means. Basically, it is moral to produce more than you consume. Conversely, it is immoral to consume more than you produce. In that moral structure, people living on welfare are immoral. They're taking more than they produce. In that moral structure, the government taking from the rich and giving to the poor is immoral as it favors the immoral over the moral.

The author is Ayn Rand and she's pretty big in American conservative thinking. Blackjack's original point sounded very much like an Ayn Rand argument. If you want, you can learn more of her philosophy in her most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged. It's good to broaden your horizons and understand the other side, but I do warn that the audiobook for it is 63 hours long, War and Peace is only 61hrs. I finally listened to it very recently and I'd say a lot of it seems far more relevant to issues today than 1984 the novel, which gets referenced more often.

I think the author makes some good points, but I also think it's a highly flawed book and goes way too extreme, but this isn't a book discussion thread. The point is that cruelty is not the point. It's based on a moral system that sees weakness as immoral and strength as moral. It's a system that sees giving to the weak as immoral and a government doing so is aiding and abetting immorality.

Another part of Rand's core philosophy is that "reason is man's only absolute." That seems like another reasonable statement to me. So your observations about the success of some liberal areas compared to some more conservative areas is a good point. But the cherry picking can go both ways. Latest episode of Real Time's closing segment ended up cherry picking some examples of things going wrong in Canada and Sweden (and a long anti-trans section in the middle) + Show Spoiler + I'm pretty sure Blackjack watches as he'll often reference things from the show.

That's Bill Maher (who's a classic liberal who hates Trump) warning America about going too far left. He's been doing that a lot lately and I quite often agree with him. Just some things to think on.

On April 18 2024 15:39 Salazarz wrote:
You could make an argument about producing more than consuming being the 'moral' way of being in some ancient hunter-gatherer society, but in a modern capitalist civilization it is completely unreasonable. There's no way to adequately measure any individual's actual productivity since everything we do these days is hyper-connected, besides everyone's ability to be productive hinges on a vast number of factors including things that folks have very little influence over such as what type of family they were born into and what sort of education access they've had. Not to mention that a large number of enterprises and industries these days are bottlenecked by demand rather than their own productivity, so in a way from a capitalist's point of view consuming should actually be seen as 'moral' as it allows for further economic growth to happen.

Also, Ayn Rand was a raving lunatic, lol.


edit: Americans talking about 'virtue signaling' on the topic of forced labor in China has got to be peak irony, considering that slavery is straight up legalized in the US constitution. I assume people who try to make a stand against something like the situation of Gaza simply see the thousands of deaths and wide-spread starvation as a bigger and more urgent issue than forced labor, although obviously there are plenty of people who simply want to get on the latest hashtag as well.

Let's look at what that really means. Basically, it is moral to produce more than you consume. Conversely, it is immoral to consume more than you produce. In that moral structure, people living on welfare are immoral. They're taking more than they produce. In that moral structure, the government taking from the rich and giving to the poor is immoral as it favors the immoral over the moral.

On April 19 2024 06:22 WombaT wrote:
‘Why don’t the left actually do something instead of virtue signalling?’
* Does something*
‘Well… why aren’t they boycotting China?’

Totally doesn’t get tiresome

On April 18 2024 22:26 JimmiC wrote:

Are you talking about prison labour? Pretty easy products to avoid and makes up such a tiny part of the economy. Vs in China where outside of the elite few billionaires it is almost everyone and that is before we get into the continued attempts of destroying multiple cultures, genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Even your blatant whataboutism is lame. Did you get this straight from the dictators propaganda mouth piece or social media? What an awful awful hot take. Not only have you compared a kernel of corn to ship full of watermelon but you can actually be against both!

On April 19 2024 12:12 JimmiC wrote:

The slave labour is not remotely the same, which you know. Stop being so dishonest with your points.

No Im sorry there is a ton of choice, freedom, fairness, forced relocations within the totalitarian regime currently tightening their grip, their massive amount of billionaires and wealthy along with their even larger number of poor.