Forums / Discussion / General

I don't personally think gray was responsible, but i have noticed that whenever him and a couple other users post here on the forums all of a sudden the like dislike counters change by like 3-5 now I don't think it's him because it doesn't seem like he'd complain about dislikes and draw attention to himself while doing that, but it was a thought

anyways back to normal posting

To go back to… I think it was chewbunny's question about wins for the left, minnesota basically just went absolute batshit in passing progressive legislation. Highlights are cementing roe v wade, a bunch of financial and legal protections for teachers and other school employees, tons of money to fight homelessness, a panel to regulate drug prices, a right to repair act that forces tech companies to make repair kits available, allowing inmates to vote as soon as they are released from jail, and a fuck ton of other good shit.

The xs indicate things they successfully implemented as well, not just the checks

https://twitter.com/SydneyJordanMN/status/1661092702014849042

Minnesota dems with a one vote margin:

I don't believe you, but okay.

Apparently there's been some nasty wildfires up in Canada, and some of the smoke is blowing south into the continental United States. I saw some air quality alerts in the northern Midwest earlier today.

I was speaking primarily in the realm of international geopolitics.
I've been deep diving this on my own lately, and I am struggling to find any coherent modern "left wing" framework to describe modern geopolitics. Overcoming South Africa's Apartheid seems to be the last major victory.
But it's more of trying to ascertain a world view. I personally think that post-colonialism, and Third-Worldism has proven itself obsolete and, extremely simply, insufficient.

Nice. (Except the abortion one and the fact legalized pot a la lassiez faire. Fucking cinge on this last one)

A win for the working class is a win for the working class no matter how bittersweet it is.

A few of these raise some red flags but otherwise that's pretty cool. I'll look into the ones that are raising alarm bells real quick so this post has purpose…

First possible red flag: 2023's HF7 bill, on Minnesota going carbon-free by 2040. The biggest problem I see with it is that it, for some reason, accepts the burning of trash but not nuclear power. It's a bit unsurprising, as the limitless power of the atom is a constant blind-spot for environmentalists, and the construction of new nuclear power plants isn't currently allowed in the state. Hopefully they wise up and reverse course on this oversight, lest they run the risk of accidentally increasing their net carbon output.

Second, HF14. Requiring people to get a special permit to transfer ownership of a firearm is… interesting. I don't see anything glaringly wrong with it, outside of the problems innately caused by adding more and more bureaucracy to everything. Let's hope it's not abused.

HF15. I disagree with "red flag laws" on principle, since they're so easy to abuse and give the police more power that they don't need. Doesn't help that the bill constantly uses a nonsensical scare phrase, either. Interesting that being an illegal immigrant is considered grounds for gun seizure, which doesn't seem very "progressive" to me. This shit will be abused.

I find some portions of HF16 to be questionable, but keeping in with the principles I stated on the previous page, I won't discuss it further here. If you're really curious, you can ask for my Discord and we can discuss it in DMs there.

And with HF28, my only concern is that there could be ulterior motives to this, though I'd have to have stats on the voting demographics of convicted felons in Minnesota to confirm. Otherwise it seems pretty reasonable; time spent in jail is supposed to be the bulk of the punishment. I'd be, perhaps, a bit more extensive with my restoration of felon's rights, but it's still not bad.

The rest don't seem to have anything interesting going on with them at all, so that's good I think.

Well most of these sound good except for
"allowing inmates to vote as soon as they are released from jail" which is utterly idiotic

One of the easiest ways to suppress a populations votes is to criminalize them more then other groups so they can't vote anymore. Its why Reagan started the war on drugs and then proceeded to spread drugs in black communities.

I mean sure, but rapists and murderers should not be allowed to vote
and I don't think drug possession should be a felony

Looks like that fascist has officially announced his running today for president

The problem is that mostly only poor criminals go to jail, look at Eipstein island

On a stream with a quite frankly absurd amount of technical difficulties even for an audience of that size

Meatball Ron never fails to bemuse me

target is pulling lgbt related products because of nutcases threatening them

Bit of column A, bit of column B. Their stock price started to take a hit this past week, so they may be trying to do damage control in hopes that it doesn't get too far out of hand, like what is happening with Anheuser-Busch.

Don't know if they fired their literal Satanist designer yet. I feel like that might help a lot, since that seems to have been what caused people to go from "this is kind of cringe" to "hey wait what the fuck".

I gotta wonder, how many times has "X is absurd, X ain't gonna happen you're just overreacting" been said (or remotely said) in these threads only for them to happen?

Rapists are such a small basket of wastes of space that their votes won't matter compared to the rest of the population. It's no issue to allow them to vote.

Murderers can be much more nuanced depending on the individual than the rest, and are still a small basket of individuals compared to the rest of the population. Of course, they were convicted because they were charged with killing another. Regardless, very few people ever kill another person compared to the rest of the population, so again no issue.

There's not going to be a lot of chances for criminals to turn a vote by single numbers, and legislation can be voted away again, so it is a waste of time trying to suppress voting rights. Remember, felons can't run for or hold public office, they can't own or possess firearms, they can't join the military, can be barred from federal employment temporarily or permanently depending on what position, travel can be restricted depending on the charge, etc. Those are the rights that are lost across most felony convictions.

I am starting to DRASTICALLY change my mind I dont think humans are at all equiped to deal with global warming effectively.

I mean…what are we going to do about it? Past experiences are showing me that the answer is nothing, nothing at all…we arent going to do anything even if it gets disastrous.

When do goverments do anything besides caving in to corporate interests after all

On the anniversary of Harambe's death the Turkish dictator completes his reelection rigging

There goes Turkey…

Lira has fallen to records low and for better or worse Erdogan, the autocrat islamist has gotten the mandate to continue his rule. I am not looking forward to the continued diplomatic spates and horror stories of a democracy slowly falling.

Also, it's been a while since I posted here ! It seems a lot has happened. I'll try to read up on the discussion.

@Greyblades

I guess my last response would have been something along the lines that it's the continued slippery slope. Same as the recent news of the death penalty in Florida, it's worrying that a state has given itself the power to imprison and take away kids to this extent.

Of course, the argument is that it's "justified", there are edge cases, but I've heard that same argument for Abortion and for the Book Bans. Than those actions went beyond their stated limits, they were given an inch and they took a mile.

Do you expect one to let themselves be fooled a third time?

>No rights lost, merely privleges rescinded.

I'd like to point out that's a very dystopian thing to say. So much so that if we changed the context, I wonder if you or anyone else would agree with that phrase.

No one has any rights, except the ones we make and everything can fall apart. That's the impression I got after speaking to someone from Izmir.

Anyway, I'm also reading there's been drama here, so I'd understand if this topic is closed. I've just wanted to say something that should have been said a week ago.

We can start counting, biased as it may be.

I'm sure everything going on about Religious Extremists probably falls within that banner.

At this point I get terrified and distrustful the moment a politician starts talking about god

Discussions on rights and privileges are always infinitely complicated, as everyone has different opinions on what's what and which ones are more important. It's also further influenced by culture; for example, I've observed that Europeans, on average, value the freedom of speech significantly less than Americans, despite being more liberal on paper.

Is it a right to use whatever bathroom you want? Is it a right to make a right turn on red? Is it my right to wash my my balls in the Burger King soda dispenser? Who's to say, really.

Well, that's why there's this forum for one, isn't there? It's fundamentally a discussion on what our priorities should be.

You make light of it with flippant examples, but that's you. Was it a free speech issue when a soldier leaked a bunch of documents in what's known as the Pentagon Papers? Do you have the right to try to enter public buildings? Is there a standard in how you should talk to officials? To what extent do you have a right as a parent?

Is there a right to guns? Is there a right to education? Is there a right to a clean environment? Is there a right to religion in schools? A right to a school free of religion? Is there a right to self-determination? To bodily autonomy? To life?

I'm sure some of those have been debated here. Who's to say? Us and our own judgement, we don't have much else.

I'd also like to push back on this easy "America has more free speech" statement (and not in the usual sense of trading rights). I've heard it multiple times, and I've becoming less convinced of it.

Does the US have more free speech? There's still the two big monolithic parties which forces discussions down a binary (to the point it's becoming two cultures which hate each other). I recall quite a few times where the administrations cracked down on discourse (ex: Bush again) and the US seems to be the only ones who have administrations who've banned the usage of the word such as "climate change". That and there's apparently fights with people showing up to libraries with guns, among other things.

Seems to me that speech is becoming dangerous there. Quite a few European countries seem to have Lèse-majesté laws, and Germany has stringent hate speech laws (which I get why, but still). There's a lot of issues as well, no one's perfect and it's debatable.

However, there is one thing I won't budge on, for example:

The US is also on a book banning spree, may I remind you? That is unacceptable, and while it's going on I don't want to hear any preaching about "Free speech"

I think I typed that a few weeks ago.

Beware of assumptions is my point. The fact that it's easy to assume one right is important and unassailable and that something else is trivial and easily dismissable is the heart of the issue.

Nothing is obvious, it's why they are complicated.

Rightfully so

You are right. We are not equipped to do so.
Global Warming is the consequence of rapid material improvement. We are not prepared, as a species, to give up that material wealth for a "promise" that it would prevent some sort of hypothetical disaster. It's too big of a sacrifice to make on a society bereft of faith in anything anymore.

You highlight the ideological issue I have with how the whole issue is viewed. You wrote:
"When do goverments do anything besides caving in to corporate interests after all"

The problem here isn't corporate interests. The problem here is the byproduct of modern industrialization. Once you really digest that the problem of global warming isn't some greedy cabal, but a multi layered economic reality we all contribute to, benefit from, and refuse to give up on, is when you start digging at the heart of the issue.

Which major country wants to sacrifice their material wealth and industrial capacity to reduce their impact on a global issue? China – increasingly becoming command-economy – produces 1/3rd of all CO2 emissions int he world. Twice as much as the US. In that context, is it fair to ask a country like, say, Belgium, to sacrifice their material wealth just to offset a tiny fraction of what China does?

Now layer that with the fact that most of our western societies are democratic, i.e political institutions are beholden to a multitude of groups – some competing some cooperating – to reap greater benefits for themselves.

So I have to ask, is it fair for a country that produces a tiny fraction of pollutants and CO2 emissions to make massive economic sacrifices, just to reduce their footprint by half? Is it fair for the farmers, the miners, the laborers in industrial sectors to have to lose their livelihood to offset a tiny fraction of what this country – halfway around the world – is doing? No. It's not just unfair, it is politically suicidal as we are seeing.

The new Zelda game out and it's a hit. You want it so you buy it, but you also have to buy the console. Both the console and the game utilize rare-earth materials for their respective chips. These rare earth materials are pollution-heavy, causing major ecological problems. The plastic shells of the console and the game is made out of oil by product. But most people will simply never think about it in those terms. Even if they declare themselves the biggest environmentalists. They will usually participate in, utilize, and benefit from the system they argue they are against.

No one wants to give this up for some sort of hypothetical. Especially if you are the only one that is making the sacrifice.

Thinking realistically, there's nothing we can do about climate change at this point. It's not some far off thing in graphs and charts anymore, we're living in it. See: new climate records being set every year in so many places. The best we can do is hope that we can lessen the future impact, but as long as fossil fuels are profitable and the corporate world demands endless consumption of resources I have a feeling we're not gonna get too far.

Yep you are right

Which is why we are FUCKED, WE ARE SOOO FUCKED

So long as the 1% and their giant corporations exist, nothing will get better

So long as the 1% and their giant corporations exist, nothing will get better

Most other first world countries have school uniforms because they recognize that if you give kids literally anything they will find a way to bully each other.

Canada doesn't, but we also have most of the problems the US does with regards to the education system because we're culturally just diet America with an identity crisis.

I think you're mostly right but I have a couple nitpicks.

China produces as much pollution as it does because the world has centralized industry there, for more than a couple reasons, though that trend is reversing as the biggest one, Chinese demographics, moves from a blessing to a curse to Chinese industry, though chances are we'll just make everything in India and Africa instead. Though that's far from the only reason for Western de-industrialization – it is definitely convenient for our upper classes to not have to look at the ugliness of industry or have to pretend to care about the lower classes or negotiate on wages or anything like that – also ghost towns are more cool and "liminal" than billowing smokestacks or chemical snow when you're flying from NY to LA and back. And we get to blame China for all the toxic waste they produce as a byproduct of making our cheap shit, and pretend to give a shit as they crush protests to pave way for new factories, while we pretend to stand in solidarity with our protestors and refuse to build absolutely anything anywhere because of the environment or native rights or something.

The problem is, no matter what, we're finding out that the industrial revolution was only a temporary break from the Malthusian trap. We could try and find a compromise, where we keep some of the advantages of the post-industrial era in exchange for giving up some of our excesses and also get back some of the benefits of the pre-industrial era in the process like tighter knit communities and more greenspace… but we can't because if we put resources towards any of that we'll be outcompeted by those who go full steam ahead.

WELL THIS IS FUCKED

Literally all these people were doing was organizing bail fund collection. Bail is supposed to exist to allow non violent offenders to not be locked in prison while waiting for trial, but its prohibitively expensive for a lot of people, which is why bail funds exist. By arresting people who were helping peaceful protesters afford bail, they basically admitted they want bail to only be usable by the rich and that the poors should be locked up, and that trying to help them is fucking terrorism apparently.

Bail is only given to people who the courts do not consider a flight or violence risk, so calling paying for their bail terrorism is egregious.

This statement by the governor basically admits he considers peaceful protesters and people who pay bail to be terrorists

These people are protesting the cop city that atlanta is trying to build, basically a small city façade that the cops will use to train how to better supress protesters and civilians. Its an extreme waste of taxpayer funds, since any possible benefits like training swat and such are already fulfilled by different locations. They are basically building an anti protest training facility and persecuting anyone who protests the building of it. Its disgusting

I find cop city so egregious because it's using taxpayers money to build basically a city playground for the cops to learn how to better suppress said taxpayers rights, instead of the money being invested back into Atlanta directly to eliminate the causes of crime like disrepair and poverty.

Atlanta's Mayor would rather build a fake city than pay to support the one that he actually runs, and is getting pissy that people are protesting it

I'd also like to push back on this easy "America has more free speech" statement (and not in the usual sense of trading rights). I've heard it multiple times, and I've becoming less convinced of it.

I meant that more in the sense that the people are more inclined towards the freedom of speech here.
When it comes to governments, I'd say we ultimately have a shared core issue: our politicians and bureaucrats have increasingly grown to consider their own population to be a threat that must be contained and restrained. This manifests differently between America and Europe, but the goal is the same. There are some common trends, though, such as trying to disarm the population.

The US is also on a book banning spree, may I remind you?

I think the conflation of an actual book ban – where a book is actively and tangibly illegal to read or own – with shelf removal is lazy at best and sinister at worst. It's a sort of semantic game that's increasingly common these days, unfortunately, but that doesn't make it a good thing. The two do have some commonalities, and they do overlap, but ultimately they aren't actually the same thing; the biggest operating difference is that in the latter case, the books aren't illegal in any sense.

Having it come as a directive from a high level of government is certainly not a good thing, however. It should be decided on the community level. Some degree of this already exists; many libraries, especially those short on space, quietly get rid of books that nobody checks out every so often. There just needs to be a higher level of transparency when it comes to the contents of school libraries, I guess.

As for the bail thing, I think I heard of something similar happening elsewhere in the country. Let me find it…

Bail system should be replaced with tracking tech. If we're going to have a surveillance state anyways, might as well use it to track people who have been formally charged with a crime.

We uh, have that already. They're called ankle monitors. Bail is for people who aren't flight risks, ankle monitors and house arrest are for those that are

"Incivility, mockery, and disdain of other users in debate, off-topic trolling in debate thread, sarcastic bad-faith arguments in various comment sections. Political debate and commenting in general must be civilized."

Which of those did I do? What was the offending line? Don't know, all I got was "you have been suspended" that quote and a url to the rules. Didn't even get a warning for this rule, all the ones I got before were for the "not cool" one.

I initially thought it was fair, as I certainly was starting to feel disdainful for the "nu-uh" "ya-huh" routine, but a week on looking back, I have no idea.

With our usual level of discourse this precedent enforced equally would see Mistress Fortune left talking to themselves for however long it takes for the server funding to dry up.

I think the lack of specifics might have been the point, can't make sure I don't do it again if I don't know what "it" is. Rhetoric and logic are hard, a chilling effect is easy.

I don't think there was like botting, if it was it would have to be a remarkably long lived and highly restrained one; this is hardly the first time I have been buried like this, yet I have regularly been allowed to bounce back.

I think there are about 10 people of varying degrees of progressivism that read this thread semi regularly.

Most of the time I only touch upon the nerves of five to seven of them, this time however I had just committed a number of high heresies against current doctrine, enough to see even the most tolerant of them reach for the downvote.

No point complaining about it, that's what the downvote's for, I can only laugh at the overeager.

I agree. To an extent.
We have exported our industrial base to China. Which has been an ecological disaster, to be sure.
Precisely because China isn't beholden to US environmental policy. However, I will point out that the Chinese – like every other experiment with planned economics – has been far more disastrous to the environment than any market-orientated system. China, being the second largest economy in the world, with a semi-planned economy, can actually "greenify" it's economy. I argue, in fact, due to it's more authoritarian nature, and it's ability to disregard the broader public opinion, allow it far more leeway in experimenting with the kind of solutions the environmentalists demand. It has, so far, failed. Which is not surprising to me.

In my opinion the Industrial Revolution wasn't a temporary break from the Malthusian trap. It was the solution to the Malthusian trap. And we can see it clearly today that societies that become increasingly modernized become increasingly bereft of children. Nor is it evident to me that the pre-industrial era was "greener" than post industrial era. Example: there are more trees in the US today than there was 200 years ago.

My biggest critique with environmentalism and it's policies is that it is almost entirely bureaucratic-collectivist. Almost every solution offered is one that places power and authority to a government institution because it presupposes that the government, absent a profit motive, works entirely for the purpose of public good.

And that's a lie.
Hardly a single person works for the public good. Bureaucracy's sole purpose is to justify the necessity for the bureaucracy to exist. And that motivation is far far more insidious than one that is driven by greed.

Sure, but I've heard the same thing as about how Iranians are different from Iran's government People aren't their government, but judging a people is harder, debatable and devolves into anecdotal evidence.

Remember in my experience that I flashback to the Bush Era, the moment where Liberty & Freedom meant oppression, intelligence was ignorance (they loved to deride experts) and war was peace & security. And torture was technically "enhanced interrogation techniques".

I think the conflation of an actual book ban – where a book is actively and tangibly illegal to read or own – with shelf removal is lazy at best and sinister at worst.

And we've had this discussion before, it is a limiting of access and the attempts to downplay it are irresponsible at best, and downright sinister at worse (as well).

If you want to restart the discussion on book bans, we can, but in this context this was to say you can't exactly preach about free speech when you have to say "technically it's not a book ban"

Personally, in terms of environment I've grown disenchanted with both the Malthusian School & the Free-marketers (if they can even be called environmentalist).

The hardliner position to limit population and immediately curb lifestyles is not feasible, we all know it and I've found that Malthusians in general tended to be very depressed. Whereas those who try to blame China (turns out blaming each other is unproductive), or try out Carbon credits, or other schemes to limit emissions and pollution or trust in the fiduciary duty of corporations have shown absolutely no results, and has been nothing but a delaying action.

The idea that industrializing societies naturally lower birthrates ironically mirrors what the Malthusians are saying, but neglects how each person's individual consumption still exists. The only solution to the Malthusian trap is technology and unfortunately, hoping for miracle tech is very irresponsible.

The biggest successes in recent history was the Montreal Protocol to fix the Ozone, and that was because Dupont whose CFCs were responsible for the hole found a financially expedient replacement for that.

That's the only hope it seems, find a soft power way to influence markets and adopt new solutions (I'm all for mass-adoption of renewable energies) to have successes like Swason's Law, because other approaches are either a non-started or are just a way for corporations to do business as usual.

Oh damn guess it was inevitable my state would end up in this thread eventually. Georgia is purple in ways that honestly still kinda perplex me, like we went blue on the last presidential election (with some people speculating it's due to high African-American populations in major cities) and during the midterms the race between Warnock and Walker was so damn close we had to do a run-up where Warnock did ultimately win re-election by literally only 1%, but I'm still a bit confused how Kemp managed to beat Abrams by 8% more.

Because Georgia is full of old school Trekkies, obviously.

you're not some rebellious saviour going against the norm you're just an ass on the internet lmao it's not that deep

Is there any other way to be on the internet?

I think there's certainly better ways to go about it that I can think of other than parading yourself around as some sort of brave rebel against oppression because you want kids to get bullied in school

Idk pissing off unpaid jannies through the sheer act of existing is pretty based. They do it for free.