When we say landlords are bad, it’s not really about the individual people so much as it’s about the system as a whole. Ideally, the human right to housing should be guaranteed for everyone, along with the right to be cared for in retirement. How many elderly people don’t own their own homes, and have rent to pay as an additional expense making it harder for them to retire? Sure, landlordism can provide a source of income for people who can’t work, but for every case of that, there’s another case of someone who can’t work who doesn’t have the privilege of owning a home, such that the existing system makes them even more desperate. So logically, it doesn’t really make sense as a justification.

Cases like this should be considered when we’re looking at how best to implement our ideals, but not for determining our ideals in the first place. The just thing is that everyone should have a secure place to live. That’s the ideal. In implementing that ideal, we should consider that houses currently are used as a form of investment and many people simply use them that way without a second thought, because of social norms. If we simply seized and redistributed everyone’s properties tomorrow, some people like your aunt would be disproportionately affected, compared to if they had invested in stocks that can be just as unethical. It would probably still be better for most people than doing nothing, but we ought to craft policy in such a way that we’re not trolley probleming it (except regarding the people at the very top, for whom it’s unavoidable), but rather such that it provides benefits while harming as few people as possible.

When society is organized justly and the wealth of the people on the top is redistributed, there will be enough to go around that everyone ought to be able to benefit from it. Therefore, it shouldn’t be a problem to compensate small landlords for their properties and ensure that they aren’t harmed by any changes in policy.

I don’t understand why people think in these terms, “If you approve of violence being done by your side, you must also approve of violence done against your side.” I’m not taking a principled stand in favor of violence for violence’s sake. I support that which hurts the enemy and oppose that which hurts friendlies.

Stealing from the rich? Good. Stealing from the poor? Bad. Killing exploiters? Good. Killing the exploited? Bad. There’s no contradiction here because my stance is based on self-interest and the interest of my class, not on any sort of categorical moral claim about some particular form of action.

who love nothing more but to suck terrorist cock.

You’re goddamn right!

I can see it now…

We’re out on one of the beautiful beaches on the island of Bali, in Indonesia where there’s no extradition treaty with the US and where the weather ranges from the 70’s to the 90’s all year round, Lay Me Down is playing in background, we kiss between sips of margherita and then he lays back as I move down and unbutton his pants…

The rule of law already works selectively, we’d just prefer it works selectively for us instead of them.

No one? What if your profession is being a guard at Auschwitz? Is it “disgusting” to say that the SS deservered to die based on their profession?

That’s fair. I only wanted to set the record straight.

The comments I mentioned were long before Huntington affected him in his later years. Like, I’m talking about his comments on events as they were happening, when he was fully cognizant, and singing and writing smack dab in the middle of his career. You can’t just put your own positions into his mouth and write off everything he ever said to the contrary to Huntington’s. It’s both demonstrably false and also not really cool for you to do, like, he’s entitled to having his own views regardless of losing his mind to illness later on.

Woody Guthrie was ditched by his deadbeat, KKK member dad at 14, and grew up into the Great Depression. Those circumstances don’t tend to produce moderate politics. Everything I’ve seen about him suggests he saw things in very black and white terms, with the communists (including the USSR and Stalin) being the only real alternative to the racism and poverty he saw under capitalism and fascism. You can say that wasn’t the right perspective but that was his perspective.

You are, of course, right about Korea, but I brought it up because at the time it was a pretty controversial and fringe view, that he was willing to standby even under threat of persecution.

This was before Stalinism and a lot of the bad connotations given to communism since - I doubt he would have embraced much of what have happened in the name of communism.

Well, Guthrie was actually alive at the same time as Stalin so we don’t actually have to speculate on that. In reality, Guthrie praised Stalin, even going so far as praising the Soviet invasion of Poland, and criticizing the US for providing supplies to Finland during the Winter War. It actually wasn’t that uncommon for left-wing people in the West to support Stalin at the time, though some, for example, Pete Seeger, later changed their views. Guthrie never did, even during the height of the Cold War, when McCarthyism meant he got blacklisted, he was still saying stuff like, he hoped the communists won in the Korean War, and he never apologized for or recanted his views on Stalin.

This is woefully ignorant of reality. People are not immune to propaganda. It’s noble that you think most people are rational and politically informed, but that’s very clearly not the case. Rhetoric has been extensively studied and developed for literally millennia, there’s a reason.

Of course. Which is why effective propaganda and rhetoric is generally more sophisticated than just “our side good.”

80 million people voted for that.

More like 158 million.

No one has suggested that. Shifting a few degrees to the right isn’t supposed to win over Trump voters, it’s supposed to win over moderate conservatives that don’t care for Trump.

So… Trump voters.

What happened to caring about The Truth over all?

What happened to pragmatism over truth?

I don’t consider it true that everyone who votes for Trump is a fascist. There are plenty of reluctant Trump voters who are primarily motivated by negative partisanship, which is to say, voting against the Democrats.

When one side says their candidate is the Messiah, and the other side says their own candidate is deeply flawed, where does that push someone on the fence?

Probably the one that admits to their candidate’s flaws. The side claiming that their side is the Messiah can only reach people who are willing to believe that narrative. It tends to be very alienating to the average voter.

What’s baffling to me is that there seem to be a lot of people on the democratic side who simultaneously believe all kinds of contradictory things. Trump voters are all blindly devoted to their cult leader, but if we just shift a few more degrees to the right, that will win them over, somehow. Or, the key to winning elections is by winning over moderate swing voters who don’t feel attached to either party, and the way to do that is to demand blind devotion to our candidate while screaming that the other side is Hitler and anyone who even considers them is a fascist. It’s absurdity. And yet, no matter how many times these strategies fail, people refuse to learn from them.

I happen to come from a conservative family, and that made it immediately obvious that even the best attempts by someone like Biden or Harris to win over the right were doomed to fail, and the Dick Cheney strategy was absolutely not even close to “the best attempt.” The reason is that Biden and Harris look and sound like typical, mainstream democrats, who their entire political identity is built on opposing. Of course, my parents are always going to vote Republican, but the one person on the Democratic side I’ve ever heard them say they respect is Bernie Sanders. DNC strategists and their loyalists cannot comprehend this.

So many people adhere to this overly simplistic ideological model as if it’s just a truism - that the things people support are more or less innate characteristics randomly developing from birth and the combination of those things makes everyone fall someone on a one dimensional spectrum from left to right, and everyone votes according to who’s closest to them ideologically. And so the only way to win is to assume the far left votes will fall in line behind you while you move right to appeal to the centrist swing voters. But that whole model is bullshit, and it has been proven to be bullshit time and time again.

A large part of Trump’s appeal is that he’s able to present himself as an outsider. Moving right and shaking hands with Cheney, trying to be like, “See, the whole political establishment hates Trump,” merely reinforces Trump’s credibility as an outsider while also tying Harris to the disastrous policies including the War on Terror. The failure of the Bush administration is a part of why conservatives turned to Trump in the first place! It’s insanity.

If you wanna win by peeling off Trump voters, the best way to do that is by targeting people with libertarian values and running on isolationism and staying out of foreign entanglements. But that would require actually doing that, or at the very least, it would require not painting everyone who disagrees with your interventionist policies with the same brush of being a “Russian bot.” Alternatively, you can say, “screw Trump voters, we’ll win by mobilizing the base,” but that would require adopting popular leftist policies that would hurt their donors’ profits.

So, being unwilling to actually play the game, all that’s left is to put forward the same platform of interventionism and neoliberalism that has simply outlived it’s moment and does not have enough adherents to win.

I happen to believe in a little something called “The Truth.” I don’t believe that everything I say should have to serve an immediate strategic purpose. In fact, I don’t think it’s at all sensible to even set a strategic purpose until you have first clearly identified and laid out the truth. Even if the truth is inconvenient or counterproductive, I’m not really interested in a political project that’s based on ignorance or deception.

If the truth isn’t enough to get people to back your political project, then perhaps your political project isn’t worth backing. Regardless, it’s likely the truth will come out eventually, at which point you will lose credibility to the opposition. And if the left doesn’t speak out for fear of hurting the democrats’ chances, then the only opposition will be from the right.

Furthermore, people having correct political ideas and a clear understanding of the world is more important than any election, which is of secondary concern. A person’s political actions (or lack thereof) do not end at the ballot box, and when a person has correct ideas they are more likely to participate in productive actions and avoid harmful ones. Collective action, boycotts, protests, etc have more capacity to effect change than a political system designed by slaveowners explicitly to subvert the popular will.

Are you trolling?

Why did he constantly talk about how the attacks were politically motivated? What is the basis for claiming that he was motivated by religion?

Worst performance since the Republicans took California but hey who knows, could’ve been even worse somehow if they did anything differently. Clearly the right play is to learn absolutely nothing from this. Even the really obvious stuff like the fact that virtually everyone in the country hates Dick Cheney’s guts with extremely good reason.

Also is it still hindsight if a bunch of people were screaming that it was a terrible move before it blew up in her face? Because that kinda seems more like foresight.

You might be interested in GNS theory. TTRPGS try to do three things at once, be a Game, tell a Narrative, and Simulate a world. Different games will prioritize different aspects, some people want a fair challenge where they build a character according to the rules laid out to face a challenge, other people want everything to serve the story, even if it means fudging mechanics or breaking with realism, and then some people just want the simulation to be as realistic as possible.

Like many things with TTRPGs, it’s table dependent and emphasizing any of those elements over the others is totally valid as long as everyone’s having fun.

I’m not an anarchist but I’d like to elaborate on your question.

In a competitive economy (big disclaimer), especially in the case of plumbing which has a low barrier to entry, you and the plumber don’t have a significant power differential. You need a plumber, but you don’t need that specific plumber, and the plumber needs customers but they don’t need you specifically. If a bunch of plumbers got together and said they won’t work for you, it wouldn’t be too hard for someone to learn the trade and break the monopoly, in the same way, you could try to boycott the plumber, but they could just find other customers.

But that’s in the theoretical case of like, the free market actually working. There are lots of ways in which it can go wrong. If the barriers to entry are higher, then it’s easier to form a monopoly, and in some industries that barrier is naturally higher (say, microchip production), and it’s also possible to raise the barrier of entry if an entity gets powerful enough to influence policy - for example, if you had to obtain an expensive license to be allowed to practice plumbing. So it’s really two questions: is trade inherently explotative, and is trade potentially exploitative?

Boycotts are sometimes idolized as a way to prevent bad behavior without the involvement of the state. But this is problematic for two reasons. The first being that boycotts are difficult to organize and only sometimes effective. The second is that to the extent that they are effective, they’re not always used to do good things. To use an example, we can look at the Jim Crow South. If I own a business in a town full of racists, and I try to run my business in a non-racist way, then I’m alienating a bunch of my racist customers and racist businesses may refuse to serve or do business with me, until I go bankrupt or am forced out of town. This problem was only solved through federal intervention through the Civil Rights Act.

Under those circumstances, it’s difficult for me to imagine how anarchism could work. As a trans person from the southern US, decentralization and giving power back to local communities sounds nice on paper, but like, have you seen these communities? Have you looked at what they’ve done historically when federal authority was looser? Who is poised to take power in those regions in the event of the abolition of the federal government?

That doesn’t mean that anarchism is fundamentally unworkable everywhere, though. It just means that you have to evaluate the actually existing material and social conditions and figure out what can be done where based on that.

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal. Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.

The modlog shows you being banned from three communities: thefarside@sh.itjust.works, libertyhub@blahaj.zone, and comics@hexbear.net. You had exactly one comment removed from lemmy.ml, in which you said, “I love how all you idiots on lemmygrad, hexbear and .ml constantly show how stupid you all are.”

You know these things are public, right?

Comments removed recently from TheOubliette for “misinformation,” which just means saying anything the .world mods personally disagree with

The “finding out” should be that you lost while supporting genocide. Shouldn’t have done that, huh? Not very strategic or “adult in the room”, was it?

Did you miss all of the people supporting a lesser evil Harris genocide? Many are in this thread right now trying to preemptively pass blame for everything Trump does onto those who opposed the genocide and refused to vote for its committers. This is in no way a pro-Palestinian space, either. This thread has many examples of “the pro Palestinian protesters were a Russian plot!” and, “hope you enjoy Palestinians dying, non-voters!” sentiments.