We should piss on the poor
How dare you say that reading comprehension on this site is piss poor
We should piss on the poor
How dare you say that reading comprehension on this site is piss poor
rightists can describe themselves as eg "to the right of attila the hun" and it vibes well. you instantly Get It even if it's clearly an exagerattion, it taps into primal vibes, and it's past the statute of limitations so it sounds less awkward than "to the right of hitler." left should grab some of those vibes; "to the left of wang mang," "to the left of mazdak," etc
The problem is that nobody knows who those losers are.
I went to look up one of those losers, and now I want to share excerpts of the somewhat farcical Wang Mang wikipedia article.
Wang Mang (Chinese: 王莽) (45 BC[1] – 6 October 23 CE[2])
a great editorial debate took place in the dating scheme
founder and the only emperor of the short-lived Chinese Xin dynasty.
RIP Xin dynasty
Wang Mang’s late reign saw large-scale peasant rebellions,[4] most notably the revolt of the Red Eyebrows.
Imagine having to tell your generals to suppress the Red Eyebrows with a straight face. In the end he lost to the Green Mountain rebels, and their puppet emperor was in turn overthrown by the Red Eyebrows who were (still/again) rebelling.
Wang Mang was a son of Wang Man
When Wang Mang’s powerful uncle, Wang Feng
In 16 BC, another of Wang Mang’s uncles, Wang Shang
Wang Mang had only a single wife, Lady Wang
these names keep getting worse
After this event, the Wangs gradually and inexorably lost their power.
I know it’s a perfectly normal Chinese name, but I’m pretty sure the Wikipedia editors were snickering as they wrote this
While the examination process was proceeding, the mayor of South Chang'an submitted a rock with mysterious red writing on it. The message on the rock was “Wang Mang, the Duke of Anhan, should be emperor.”
Real Monty Python hours here. Just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar painted rock at me, etc
For many people, “the environment” is less about ppm of atmospheric carbon and more about the view when they walk their dog; this is after all, a venerable environmental tradition stretching back to William Morris and beyond. They are pursuing what they see as a just environmental cause, and they don’t mind if it reduces growth—it just so happens that this particular flavour of environmentalism increases rather than reduces carbon emissions.
-Works in Progress, Degrowth and the monkey’s paw
🤔
the uncommon allergy haver to anticapitalist pipeline
in January 2023, companies became required to label sesame on all products it was present in, and undergo rigorous cleaning procedures to prevent sesame contamination, after it was declared the 9th "major" food allergen in the United States.
so, instead of considering this a mandate to give a single shit about people with sesame allergies, almost all American companies decided to just add sesame flour to all their relevant products. because apparently that was cheaper.
it's almost impossible for me to find hot dog and hamburger buns without sesame now. and I am one of the lucky ones. I'm someone who just so happened to notice the label updates, not get caught unawares and have a severe allergic reaction. I'm someone lucky enough to be surrounded by multiple choices of supermarkets, and someone with the incredible privilege to have parents who'll help me search the shelves, and cover those costs that my allergies rack up. not everyone with allergies/other intolerances has all or any of those privileges to begin with.
most food allergies will never be prevalent enough that under capitalism, it will be profitable to give them the level of accommodation that they deserve. I speak from experience with a wide portfolio of hypersensitivity quirks when I say that the rarer the food allergy, the worse it gets.
and here's the thing: I can live without hamburger buns, with only superficial decreases in my quality of life. but sesame isn't my only rare allergy, and ever since this legislation hit, I've been lying awake at night, afraid of what I might lose access to next.
I've been lying awake at night wondering what I'll have to do to live, to obtain enough safe food to survive, if any of my other allergies get this same treatment. and I reiterate. I am one of the privlidged ones.
what these companies have done is completely legal. what these companies did has also cut off up to over a million people from what were previously safe, affordable staples of their diets. a system that has any incentive not to accommodate the dietary needs of any population is not a system that can be allowed to exist. this is the uncommon allergy haver to angry, fuming anticapitalist pipeline.
Considering the government made a poorly considered regulation that hurt the people it was supposed to help, it is interesting that this wasn't an uncommon allergy haver to angry, fuming anti-regulationist pipeline.
The poisoned Skittle problem, from the perspective of a non poison Skittle
The metaphor of the bowl of Skittles, some percentage of which are poison, and how many of those Skittles you want to eat, has been used by feminists about men, and republicans about immigrants. I'm increasingly devoid of shits to give about what kind of vile things I'm going to be called, so what the heck, I'll use it too for this.
With class and housing in the US, there is a poisoned Skittle problem; the lower income you go, the higher the percentage of assaults George type people are in the mix. (Please note now that I am Not claiming that the elite are not prone to being assaults Georg, or that there's no assaults Georg in higher income brackets) For added fun, the poorer you are, the more you have to be in physical proximity to others who live in your area, while walking to the store or taking public transportation, increasing your vulnerability to being assaulted, etc. In the suburbs, a lot of the time, the guy who lives three houses down from yours and you have literally never seen each other, so it doesn't matter if he would immediately grab your crotch if he was in crotch-grabbing range, because the two of you have never been that close together. If you live in a more dense environment and travel by foot, your chances of being in crotch-grabbing range are much higher, so a crotch-grabber, etc. in your area is a more concerning problem for you.
Most people very reasonably prefer to live somewhere further away from assaults Georg. The thing is, other people also prefer to live further for assaults Georg, and if you were just living next to assaults Georg, you are a Skittle of indeterminate poison. So when a nice redlined Blue suburb with a great school district is considering if they're going to permit some affordable housing, they are going to look at the income bracket that will be living there and say, "There's too high a percentage of poison Skittles in that income bracket. We don't want to live in a community with assaults Georg, or invite assaults Georg Jr into our nice school, so we don't want affordable housing here."
So now you, as an innocent non poison Skittle are left trying to figure out how you are going to communicate your non poison status so you can get the heck away from the poison Skittles. The current way this information is conveyed is by convincing a higher paid job to hire you, making more money, and buying your way into a better neighborhood. This is a rather lossy way to sort, and shit like constantly disrupted sleep at the weekly hotel from all the shitty people who live there with you doesn't help with better job thing. There's plenty of non poisoned Skittles in that bowl, but how to extract them safely?
The obvious next question is why we as a society don't seem to have any solution to the problem of getting assaulted by assaults Georg other than to individually just try to scramble away from where such folks are statistically and to price the entire category of people who are statistically more likely to be assaults Georg out of certain areas. And now it's a criminal justice system problem and I'll leave that for another day, but overall, the criminal justice system seems a lot more interested in hassling people based on statistical similarities to assaults Georg than doing fuck all about stopping assaults Georg.
this post kind of seems to contradict itself? If suburban neighbors can live close by but never interact (true) why does it matter if Assaults Georg moves into the neighborhood?
My overarching unified theory of a lot of conservative thought is that they have One Weird Trick to solve social problems: just get rid of the bad people. If there are Problems, get rid of the people causing them. Crime - lock em up. Housing - not in my backyard. Immigrants - build the wall. This is common sense to them and they have a hard time even talking with people who don’t immediately see the wisdom of them getting rid of the bad people. There are many obvious problems with all of these “solutions” but it helps me understand where conservatives are coming from.
Literally everyone thinks that just Getting Rid of the Bad People is one weird trick. Doesn't matter if they self-identify as conservative, liberal, republican, democrat, socialist, communist, anarchist, monarchist, fascist, or something else, they think that society just needs to get rid of the Bad People and everything will be great.
The very specific, extremely common example given above was about Democrat dominated towns rejecting affordable housing over and over again. If this is conservativism, who isn't a conservative?
Not everyone! In the mirror from @apollopigeon is an overarching unified theory of a lot of progressive thought: there’s no such thing as bad people because bad things are not really done by people at all, bad things are done by Structural Factors which bodyjack some randomly selected innocent victim to manifest through.
Thus, when Rashid Brimmage racks up forty convictions for crimes that “he” committed, progressives will assert that that could have happened to anyone and Brimmage is really a particularly unfortunate victim who needs extra comfort and sympathy, it’s the rest of society around Brimmage that should be blamed and punished for creating so much Structural Factors that possessed Brimmage.
Anonymous asked:
You are a shitty person and devoid of a personality. I feel sorry for your parents having an embarrassment like you smh.
Like imagine being as bold and stupid as you are on your posts, it must hurt being that ignorant and that unaware.
isaacsapphire answered:
Lols, I’m an embarrassment to my parents for lots of reasons, including some that you would probably find sympathetic.
It hurts to be assaulted, and it hurts to see people who want others to be assaulted. It hurts to see people who live in ivory towers and refuse to put their asses and money where their mouths are crap on others for having the audacity to object to their hypocrisy and plans to hurt them.
This is a low-quality anonymous ask that doesn't actually engage with any of your arguments, just randomly and contentlessly insults you. Getting a low-quality response like this is some amount of evidence that no one could come up with a better counterargument.
Anonymous asks are cheap and easy to send to oneself. Because of that possibility, I don’t think they should count as evidence one way or the other.
i feel like the school shootings as like a go-to criticism of the US are like an automatic "this person is innumerate or ignorant" signal. the US has tons of problems! the US has a truly massive amount of problems, many of which are rare among wealthy countries! and yeah, school shootings are *bad*, obviously. but to anyone capable of basic division they are so obviously not a big deal.
I mean you are right quantitatively but I can't help but read this as
This Is not a Big Deal, Says Only Country where This Happens
Somewhat more frequent per capita here, but mostly we just have more capita than anyone else being compared.
And the US has been more violent per capita since the 1600s with minimal changes in ratio of (US murder p.c./UK murder p.c.) ever since - it’s probably related to having a very high %rural compared to anywhere in Europe or the Anglosphere.
Yeah, I think the overall murder rate for a developed country not currently in the throes of a war is pretty troubling, but mass shootings in particular are a much smaller part of that than the news cycle would lead one to believe.
My main point with the 1600s part is that it isn't, can't be, the people. That's changed far too much in four centuries, and none of that change made a difference. The evidence doesn't entirely rule out the laws, but it comes pretty close - we've changed a lot in our state, and at the beginning we had the same law as the UK and a much higher rate of violence.
That doesn't leave much. Feels like a koan, almost - "not the people, not the state - land is killing". High percentage of residents in rural areas is one thing that has stayed pretty consistent across the history of the colonies and then United States.
It could be the people. Britain used to sentence criminals to "transportation" - transportation to the colonies. The population of America may actually be more criminal than the population of Britain for no other reason than because Britain sent many of its criminals to America.
That was true in the 1600s. It stopped being true by 1780. And we had huge inflows of immigrants, starting before independence and continuing, who were largely selected in the opposite direction, which slowed and came in many separate waves but never stopped. And those immigrants didn’t move the needle.
So it can’t be the people.
How about one of the subpeoples?
I have posted this survey of homicide trends before, and I expect I will do so again.
The United States of America contain heterogeneous peoples, verging on a sort of sub-nation. Here and elsewhere, it may be useful to disaggregate commentary on how “America” works with regard to various outlier statistics.
Or imagine that tomorrow Nigeria was lumped into “Europe” for statistical purposes. The homicide rate in “Europe” would skyrocket because Nigeria has more homicides than [the rest of] Europe put together.
That’s sorta how America works: the African-American 13% do more homicides than the rest of America put together.
European-Americans at 4.5 homicides per 100K per year are much closer to the overall European homicide rate - currently 3 per 100K per year, according to Wikipedia. (The European rate is somewhat pulled up by Russia, but the “White” rate in the table above is somewhat pulled up by Mexicans, etc.)
i feel like the school shootings as like a go-to criticism of the US are like an automatic "this person is innumerate or ignorant" signal. the US has tons of problems! the US has a truly massive amount of problems, many of which are rare among wealthy countries! and yeah, school shootings are *bad*, obviously. but to anyone capable of basic division they are so obviously not a big deal.
I mean you are right quantitatively but I can't help but read this as
This Is not a Big Deal, Says Only Country where This Happens
Consider school shootings in Germany and in Germany and in Finland and in Finland and in Denmark and in France, to name some developed countries where this happens.
I like how you had to go back like 20 years in some cases. yeah man Europe sure is as violent as the barbaric states of america.
thomas jefferson isn't going to fuck you
You were wrong, kircheis.
You had a great opportunity to say something like “Oh, I didn’t know about those” which might be for good reasons! For example because the press rarely covers school shootings in other countries and Europe has a lot of countries, whereas America is one really large country that gets more school shootings reported in ‘the same country’ despite having a similar rate of school shootings per capita. (Do you understand what per capita is?) America is also a more important country that gets its news repeated abroad.
Instead you chose to sneer and move the goalposts from “only country where this happens” to “as violent as”, and the grounds you picked for sneering was that I had provided a variety of examples across countries and years, showing that school shootings keep happening in Europe in 1989, 1994, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2022, which is evidence against it being any kind of one-off spike or single country that you would probably also have sneered at if I’d used that.
You are innumerate and ignorant.
Edit: also thin-skinned, he blocked me for this.
i feel like the school shootings as like a go-to criticism of the US are like an automatic "this person is innumerate or ignorant" signal. the US has tons of problems! the US has a truly massive amount of problems, many of which are rare among wealthy countries! and yeah, school shootings are *bad*, obviously. but to anyone capable of basic division they are so obviously not a big deal.
I mean you are right quantitatively but I can't help but read this as
This Is not a Big Deal, Says Only Country where This Happens
Consider school shootings in Germany and in Germany and in Finland and in Finland and in Denmark and in France, to name some developed countries where this happens.
Anonymous asked:
(1/3) In my game, I said that the power that animates (unintelligent) undead comes from destruction of the target creature's soul. I like this because it (a) establishes creating undead from Good creatures, who would go to Good afterlives, as a crime far worse than murder, (b) permits in-universe conflict over the ethics of creating undead from Evil creatures, who would go to Evil afterlives (right? wrong because it's their just deserts? wrong because suffering is still better than oblivion? ...
(2/3) …wrong because every mortal soul is redeemable?) and © makes it natural to incorporate real folk beliefs about death rites and proper burials in worldbuilding (can’t create undead on consecrated ground). I really like your use of the Negative Energy Plane, though! The environmental effects are a great tie-in, and I think I’ll work it into my version; I was never completely happy with my explanation for intelligent undead. (I said that their souls were not immediately consumed, but…
Anon, your part 3 appears to have gotten lost in the mail.
>no trains
>no healthcare
>no democracy
>fundies everywhere
>staggering levels of violent crime matched only by police brutality and corruption
some "developed" country
the us has been a dysfunctional mess governed by halfwits since forever but the 20th-century bunch of halfwits converted being an enormous resource and labor power into being an international empire, because if you run ridiculous surpluses you can afford having a bad government and still win.
for a time.
What do you mean, “no trains” ???
Further down that page, Wikipedia also lists fifty countries which literally have no trains, split into countries that formerly had trains (like Bahamas which had a plantation line) and countries that never had trains (like Bahrain which is an archipelago micronation).
If you go by usage instead, the US is 10th in passenger-kilometres traveled by rail, and other stats on that page.
The US very much has trains.
(OP has more wrong points, but let’s start with the trains)
“The beauty of Community Notes is not just that it has restored the comments section that journalism deleted from all of its sites, because the democratic mass of people often disagreed with them, and regularly offered evidence of *why* the journalists were wrong—
But that it can crowdsource the absolute best evidence for why journalists are wrong, or outright lying
With evidence that it would once have taken a normal person far too much time to collect on their own, because that should not be the responsibility of a normal person
"Journalism” was once the idea that they would collect the truth, to provide to the people, as experts in truth
Thus the second the journalists shut down their own comments was the second we knew they were liars. Thus the restoration of the comments is the restoration of truth.“
For a recent illustration of journo lies, Keith Fucking Olbermann is still repeating that same lie about the Second Amendment and hasn’t been kicked to the curb like Alex Jones.
He’s lying, he’s unambiguously lying, he’s repeatedly lying, he’s lying despite corrections, he’s lying about a topic where he ought to know better, he’s lying in an industry which boasts of its skill at fact-checking and importance in fighting misinformation, et cetera.
Imagine if someone was like “I believe in the abolition of all nation-states! People should be free to live where they want, practice what culture and speak what language they want, and so on, free of the confines of national identity!”
And you were like “great! I totally agree!”
And then they saw the “I support immigrants” pin on your jacket and went “whoa whoa whoa, what’s all this business about immigrants?”
And you go “well, just like you said, I want to abolish all nation-states, all borders. So I’m voicing my support for immigrants who cross those borders!”
And then they go “you claim to believe in the abolition of nations but you support immigrants? Don’t you realize that immigrants only reinforce national stereotypes? I mean, how can someone want to ‘become American’ or ‘become French’ when they recognize that categories like ‘American’ and ‘French’ are bullshit and regressive? I mean come on. Like I said, immigration only reinforces the idea of nations. If you were a real anti-nationalist, you would support banning all immigration! God, I can’t stand it when Mexicans or Chinese people claim to be American. Sorry honey, you were born a Mexican and you’ll always be Mexican xoxo. Plus, don’t you realize how many heinous crimes immigrants are responsible for?”
And you’re just like... “what?”
This is the experience of talking to TERFs about gender.
Right back at you:
"Hey, have you considered that you may be French?"
"...huh?"
"I saw you eating cheese the other day. It's a thing French people do."
"I'm sorry, what? Everyone on this continent eats cheese, it wasn't even French cheese, and I'm pretty sure I am Polish and have been Polish, I don't even speak French."
"Sure, sure. I also saw you drinking wine, and I know for a fact that you have been reading Asterix comics. Why would you have interest in French culture of you're not French?"
"Why would you insist on me questioning my nationality? It's not like I ever complained about it."
"Tsk, why would you even want to be Polish, anyway? They're all a bunch of alcoholics and car thieves. I don't see you getting blackout drunk on vodka on weekdays, so I don't know why so you want to be associated with such a group."
While we’re playing with this metaphor, why is the “Abolish All Nations And States” militia forming a coalition with the “We Demand French Citizenship” militia?
As a veteran GM, I feel that kids these days complain more about the brute fact or moral law of Evil Undead in D&D or similar games, and I get questions from people wanting to use necromancy for good purposes like having tireless skeletons plow a field. Shouldn’t that make up for the [Evil] tag on spells like Animate Dead? Why is that tag there, anyway?
With a caveat that “Undead” in fantasy is a kinda vague category which can reasonably have some special cases and cosmological exceptions like repentant ghosts, here’s an attempt at describing how “core” undead like skeletons and vampires still count as evil and can be smote with Smite Evil, and making them is evil even if the necromancer has good intent in contemporary terms. This is mostly written with reference to D&D 3.5, which I like for its SRD, but the principles can be used elsewhere.
TL;DR: Making undead is like a faustian bargain but with Death instead of Mephisto, and every hand you lend to Death in the world is a corrupting influence even if you get something good from it.
The TLDR is inaccurate because the implicit contract is with the negative energy plane instead of a demon or avatar. Now for the long version:
You know even IF gun control worked the way these people make it sound, it doesn’t work
Like you snap your fingers, POOF, every gun on earth disappears, like magic. They’re all gone.
….every government on earth is going to immediately throw billions of dollars at any company that starts making them again
People will make them in their basements
Within a year you’ll have guns everywhere again and there’s no way to stop it from happening
While this is mostly true, I fear that similar logic would apply to your anarchist proposals, a.k.a. “government control”.
You snap your fingers, POOF, every president or prime minister or congressman on Earth disappears. People will start making electing them again. Within a year you’ll have governments everywhere again and there’s no way to stop it from happening.
In practice I expect both effects would be dampened. Loss of inventory, supply line, revenue, models, etc. would hamper gun construction and distribution, and it would take some time to get anywhere near the previous levels of expertise or production. Likewise, the new governments would lack the accreted dysfunction, privilege and totalitarianism of the old ones.
And in both cases there’s an implicit question of how much of the supporting logistics gets snapped out of existence, too. Do the gun factories vanish too? Do the journalists stop calling for regulation?