OBJECTION!

No one was firebombed at YesMadam!

To my Lemmy family and community,

I sincerely apologize for any distress caused by my recent social media post calling for the firebombing of YesMadam’s corporate headquarters. Let me be clear: I would never take such an inhuman step. I deeply respect the value of all human life.

My social media post was a planned effort to highlight the serious issue of firebombing corporate headquarters. And to those who shared angry comments of voiced strong opinions, I say thank you. When people speak up, it shows they care.

Were YesMadam’s corporate headquarters really firebombed? Absolutely not.

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.

Important to note the key in the bottom left. The green lines aren’t trains, they’re generally bus routes that Amtrak coordinates with.

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?

If they would just reconnect Louisville-Nashville it would be so much more convenient. If you want to travel between Chicago and almost anywhere in the Southeast, you have to go by way of either DC or New Orleans, which can make the trip like 20+ hours. I challenge anyone to find an area that could better increase connectivity with an equivalent length of track. Hopefully the fact that they’re adding the cities to the network at all suggests that they have plans to connect them to each other in the future, because like, it ought to nearly double the passengers in both cities if you can go north or south, on top of the through traffic.

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.

Yeah pretty much. 2016 was crazier than this one for sure. This one didn’t have a competitive primary on either side, and it was predicted as a toss-up whereas in 2016 every poll and media outlet was saying it was impossible for Trump to win, and there was no precedent to predict what would happen when he was in office. This is like, after people have had eight years to come to terms with Trump being a thing in whatever form that looks like. The general trend though is that things are getting crazier, and that trend is likely to continue.

If that’s why Kamala lost, then explain why Tammy Baldwin is winning Wisconsin and Elissa Slotkin is winning in Michigan.

Not that specific example, but I have used that approach before. I think the first time was about 10 years ago. There were a couple queer people in my friend group who would throw around the f-slur, which was whatever, but one night when we were drinking one of my straight friends called me it, and that bothered me. So the next day I sent a group message talking about how it made me feel uncomfortable and I didn’t like it being normalized. It was a little awkward, but from then on everyone stopped using it and we all remained friends. In the long term, I think people actually respected me more for standing up for myself (since I was generally more of a pushover), and it stopped a behavior that had been making me uncomfortable and driving a bit of a wedge between us.

Most of the time, stuff like this don’t come from malice, but from people having different norms or expectations and not understanding each other. They might get defensive in the moment, but once they’re aware of it there’s a good chance they’ll stop. While people can be dicks, we are fundamentally social creatures and wired to avoid friction.

I will say it’s easier to confront people when you have a voluntary relationship with them, because if they’re dicks about it you can always just not hang out, but you can’t do that with coworkers. If they attack you for expressing how their behavior makes you feel, then you can probably bring it to HR and you’ll have a stronger case to say it’s malice.

This website completely changed the way I thought about this stuff and I found it super helpful.

The line to walk, generally speaking, is, “When you do [specific behavior], it makes me feel [specific emotion].” So for example, “When you ask me if everything’s ok, it makes me feel pressured/put on the spot.”

Keeping it about your own feelings makes it less confrontational while still bringing attention to the problem - you don’t wanna get drawn into a whole debate about whether there’s anything wrong with asking if someone’s ok, but you want him to understand how you feel and (hopefully) take that into account in the future. If he does get defensive, repeat the message once to make it clear you’re standing your ground, but then drop it and move on. A lot of times it’s just a matter of the other person not realizing how it affects you.

Having said that, speaking as someone who’s very much had the same mentality in the past, there are a lot of advantages to having friends in the workplace. Something to understand about this approach is that it’s actually good for building relationships because it allows you to confront the behaviors that bother you while openly communicating your feelings, and people may even respect you more for standing up for yourself. Just remember to walk a middle ground, you don’t want to veer into aggression or passivity.

There’s a difference between the government’s interests and the interests of individual politicians. Politicians don’t have access to public funds, in the same way they have access to the money in their bank accounts, so public funds must be transferred into the private sector. The easiest way to do this is through military contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. There’s a rampant and widespread conflict of interest where politicians give those companies lucrative contracts and the companies have various ways of giving them kickbacks. All the politicians have to do then is to sell the public on spending more on the military.

As long as the companies are paid, it doesn’t matter whether the money is coming from domestic taxpayers or from other countries. In the case of Israel, there are also various lobbying groups focused on that issue who can also reward politicians from doing what they want. So yes the US government may be giving the weapons away for free, but the individual politicians are getting paid, so what do they care?

Before the 90’s, it was easy to do that because they could just point to the Soviet Union as a threat (even though we massively outspent them even then). During the 90’s, there was a period of relative peace, which was a crisis for the shareholders, and there was some expectation that the bloated military budget could be cut, since the primary threat is was supposedly there to counter disappeared. But with 9/11, they found a new threat to justify it. Once those wars wound down, then it became China, Russia, and Hamas. If if weren’t them, it would be something else, and if they couldn’t find something else they’d simply create it. There must always be some existential threat to justify the spending, or else the war profiteers stand to lose a lot of money.

The US needs to vote third party in order to fix the voting system.

Then let me provide some context. Trump and Harris are both hawks who fully and unconditionally support arming Israel and slaughtering people in the Middle East. The same was true in 2020, when it Biden v Trump, in 2016, when it was Clinton v Trump, in 2012 when it was Obama v Romney, in 2008 when it was Obama v McCain, in 2004 when it was Kerry v Bush, and arguably even in 2000 when it was Gore v Bush

Those of us who are doves have been waiting for over 20 years for a candidate who isn’t an extremist hawk who wants to commit mass slaughter on the other side of the world, where it can safely be kept out of sight and out of mind. Neither party has ever delivered on that. The military-industrial complex is extremely large and extremely lucrative for politicians, and it has only gotten larger and more influential under Biden - as well as being much more deadly than ever, with what’s happening in Gaza.

We’ll never just be handed a choice to get in the way of that system, but it absolutely must end. The only ways of accomplishing that are 1) forcing politicians to oppose it by making our votes conditional on that issue, or 2) building our own party from the ground up that’s committed to opposing it. Otherwise we will keep seeking out new conflicts until we end up kicking off WWIII, and ofc in the meantime it will be impossible to fix the numerous crippling domestic issues we’re facing because so much of our money is tied up in bombs.

What does that have to with anything? No one’s claiming that Trump would be good on Palestine or that you should vote for him, it’s a whataboutism.

Correct! That’s a great reason not to vote for either of them.