“Jeremy Corbyn tried to pass through a law that would required private landlords to make their homes safe and “fit for human habitation” last year – but it was rejected by the Conservatives.
Labour proposed an amendment to the Government’s new Housing and Planning Bill – a raft of new laws aimed at reforming housing law – in January last year, but it was rejected by 312 votes to 219.
According to Parliament’s register of interests, 72 of the MPs who voted against the amendment were themselves landlords who derive an income from a property.”
Whatever you think about the man as an individual or politician, he sure is on the right side of history a lot.
More regulations driving up the cost of housing <—-> Right side of history
the regulation about not cladding the outside of high rise buildings in flammable material tho
having sufficient fire escapes
for that matter fire alarms
very poor choice of example of regulatory harm
I’m sure our dear Voxette wouldn’t mind losing the regulations in favor of requiring all landlords to carry insurance against the death or debilitating injury to occupants with a cap at $1 million per occupant, reflecting the cost to the rest of society of people dying in unsafe housing. After all, it would be terribly immoral to give the landlords a subsidy, right?
They will of course also be required to carry sufficient insurance for neighboring buildings. It wouldn’t be very fair if they got away with a huge fire burning down someone else’s property just because they were bankrupt.
Right, and the insurance company needs to prove that it can actually cover these policies, which requires them to inspect the properties and regulate their safety, such as not covering the exterior with fuckin’ inflammable cladding.
You’re going to get regulation one way or another.
But I’m not sure that the property in question would be “unfit” under the Landlord and Tenant Act. Section 10indicates that the standard for “fitness for human habitation” is determined in respect of enumerated matters. Houses are regarded as unfit for human habitation if and only if they are defective in one or more of the enumerated matters:
In determining for the purposes of this Act whether a house is unfit for human habitation, regard shall be had to its condition in respect of the following matters—
repair,
stability,
freedom from damp,
internal arrangement,
natural lighting,
ventilation,
water supply,
drainage and sanitary conveniences,
facilities for preparation and cooking of food and for the disposal of waste water;
and the house shall be regarded as unfit for human habitation if, and only if, it is so far defective in one or more of those matters that it is not reasonably suitable for occupation in that condition.
If the house is not defective inone or more of these enumerated matters, the house cannot be condemned as unfit for human habitation. “Flammability” is not on this list. Nor is “hazard to human life.” It isn’t clear that the enumerated matters include anything that would have condemned this residence: If the residence was constructed with flammable materials, there was no defect of “repair.” If the residence was stable, there was no defect of “stability.”
If “repair” or “stability” under section 10include fire hazards, then there are few principled reasons why the landlords should not also be caught under section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act, which is unaffected by inflation, which requires short-term lessors undertake to:
(a) to keep in repair the structure and exterior of the dwelling-house (including drains, gutters and external pipes),
(b) to keep in repair and proper working order the installations in the dwelling-house for the supply of water, gas and electricity and for sanitation (including basins, sinks, baths and sanitary conveniences, but not other fixtures, fittings and appliances for making use of the supply of water, gas or electricity), and
If “repair” or “stability” include flammability, then the housing here should be condemned because it had failed to “repair the structure and exterior of the dwelling-house”.
The language of section 10 is less impressive. There is no declaration that the house is “unfit for human habitation” if the landlord fails to abide by section 11. But no one has any statutory authority to condemn the house in section 10, either. The Landlord and Tenant Act didn’t empower anyone to go around condemning houses or forbidding sales.
All it did was this:
In a contract to which this section applies for the letting of a house for human habitation there is implied, notwithstanding any stipulation to the contrary—
(a) a condition that the house is fit for human habitation at the commencement of the tenancy, and
(b) an undertaking that the house will be kept by the landlord fit for human habitation during the tenancy.
If the landlord failed to comply with section 10, he was in breach of a statutory and contractual duty. There might be some action for damages or specific performance. There might be some action for negligence if house caught flame. Do you know what else would be grounds for such a suit? If the landlord failed to keep the property in good repair.
But those actions would lie with the landlords and tenants, who have the contract, not with any public authority. You can’t sue to enforce a contract you’re not privy to. The Landlord and Tenant Act doesn’t grant any statutory authority to prevent any sale or lease from happening. Itdoesn’t even have an inspection regime.
Do you know what does have an inspections regime? The Housing Act 1985. In section 604, the Housing Act includes the very same language that was included in the Landlord and Tenant Act:
The difference was that section 10 of the Landlord and Tenant Act created an implied covenant between landlords and tenants. Section 604 of the Housing Act set the terms by which local housing authorities could condemn houses as unfit for human habitation, which they were empowered to do by section 606:
This was the public regulation regime to complement the private regulation under the Landlord and Tenant Act. But if you look for sections 604 and 606 in the Housing Act 2004, you won’t find them. If you look for “unfit for human habitation”, you won’t find it anywhere. Why? Because sections 604 and 606 were replaced by a regime that covered fire safety.
Prior to the introduction of the HHSRS housing fitness was governed by
section 604 of the 1985 Housing Act. Section 604 embodied a pass or
fail test of housing fitness based on similar considerations to those set
out in section 10 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985. Where a local
authority identified a property as unfit it had a duty to take action; it
was left to the authority to decide upon the most appropriate course of
action.
A number of problems were identified with the Housing Fitness
Standard. Some of the most serious health and safety hazards, including
fire hazards and fall hazards, were not covered by the standard. In
addition, it was seen by some as a blunt instrument that could only pass
or fail a house, and therefore sometimes did not distinguish between
defective dwellings and genuine health and safety hazards.
So there we have our answer: the amendment wouldn’t have covered flammability, wouldn’t have prevented rentals, wouldn’t have been enforceable by statutory authorities, and wouldn’t have empowered an inspection or sanctions regime. It wouldn’t have granted anything but a private right of action, which they should have had anyways.
The United Kingdom already has statutory authorities empowered to inspect houses for safety – the local housing authorities empowered by the Housing Act 2004 and the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (England) Regulations 2005to inspect and condemn houses where “exposure to uncontrolled fire” (reg. 3(1)(24)) might result in “death from any cause” (reg. 2(1)(a)). Under section 5 of the Housing Act 2004, local housing authorities had a duty to take action.
It seems the fault here lies with the Housing Act regulators, not the unamended Landlord and Tenant Act 1985.
reality of a thieves guild: tumblr shoplifting fandom
This post is just petty-bourgeois whining about how real rebellion is dirty and morally implicating and doesn’t live up to the romantic fantasies they had about it.
Long live the lifting fandom.
actively harming workers by stealing from sephora as communist praxis
“Actively harming”
Nice wildly misleading language you got there, where’d you learn it, the cop store?
Workers are tasked with preventing theft
If you steal shit, it’s docked from their pay or they get fired
I see economcis stuff about birthrates in western countries every once in a while from economists (In addition to the white genocide types of course), and I do wonder what a state would do that took seriously issued of birthrate. For right now it’s not a critical problem, but I wonder what policies you would need. Universal childcare? Paid Surrogacy?
I do wonder about that last one sometimes actually, would it be possible to raise entire generations as basically wards of the state? Is that going to be the future? At some point hopefully, the world will be industrialized, so the current solution won’t last forever.
It depends on how serious they really are, and what the dominant ideology is.
Liberalism’s answer is to import immigrants, but if that weren’t feasible they’d begin running out of options before they’d have to switch to another ideology.
Someone like me would be willing to take more drastic measures as total collapse loomed, including having the state raise children on its own if necessary.
I don’t think really any state is serious about this. Not Japan, not even Singapore.
None of them are serious, but one thing that might make them serious apart from worsening demographic crisis is some sort of artificial gestation. Carrying a child right now is a deeply personal act, if you had this then technology then it might not be. Would that change things?
You’re right though, it sort of sits awkwardly with the ideas of the liberal state where we’re all individuals. If you’re going to bring people into existence as an act of policy, then I think you either need some sort of strong commitment to welfare of said people or some sort of greater cause that both the people and the state are in service to in order to make the system have legitimacy. If a state literally raises a generation and then there is no job for them, then “personal responsibility“ doesn’t really cut it.
At this point though, I’m not convinced either way on whether boring welfare state solutions like child benefits and universal child care wouldn’t solve the problem though. Those don’t require a fundamental re-orientation of the relationship between a citizen and the state and can be done in a theoretically liberal way, but they do require things we seem to be unable to do right now.
You need to be run by Republicans. I’m not joking.
Because Republicans have policies that create affordable families, and Democrats don’t.
Uhh, policy ideas like child benefits, paid higher education, providing healthcare for minors, paid family leave?
Republicans have affordable housing. Which means you can have that third/fourth bedroom, that short commute, and extra money left for the extra food.
Also, Republicans have early and long-running marriages. (The direction of causation I leave to you)
The demographic transition is a world-wide phenomenon of developed countries, not a peculiarity caused by US home prices.
Fair enough.
But the hardest causation in American politics is the amount of time that white women* spend married to Republican vote share. And Red states do have notably higher fertility. (Not, you know, African levels, but 2.3 vs. 1.8).
* I mean, it might also be true for minorities, but when that flips the black vote from 85% to 95%…
What that is saying is that the demographic transition has not yet totally sweeped the US.
The US is actually less developed in some ways. This messes with the healthcare prices.
What if all alt-right use of the word cuck as an insult is an attempt to have the left take up cucking themselves in response and meme themselves into extinction.
Well I thought it was funny to imagine you all as Discourse Suit pilots. Ah, well. But don’t worry. Once my visual respresentation software is complete, it will be able to represent any network of partisan/ideological prosthesis as a mech, and I can use neural nets trained on hundreds of thousands of anime characters to generate a true rattumb mecha anime.
I have seen exclamations like “I bet he does not even have one gay/black/jewish“ friend, used as some kind of bait, to make the target say the unfortunate words.
That’s when to either go meta, attack along another vector of the same topic (“oh, so the only real gay people are the ones that already agree with you?”) or flip the switch and start shitposting about how you are friends with literally every Jew on Earth, including the questioner.
“I can’t be racist, I have Jewish enemies!”
“Some of my best friends are homophobic!”
“I asked a racist and he hates it, so it must be woke.”
“Oh, so you’re saying that minorities only count if they agree with you, otherwise they’re not people? You know who else thought that? HITLER. Get the fuck out of this fucking building, you racist piece of sht!”
I guarantee they will not see that coming. Once you’ve stunlocked them, start using other Discourse moves…
Anime Girls (& boys, but mostly girls because we’re trying to sell manga here) of Rationalist/ Adjacent Tumblr
Discourse Suit Aries: Fires of Orion
@ranma-official: Argumentative girl thought to be flirting with protagonist in comedy filler episode 17, actually interested in protagonist’s love interest. Side plot is dropped entirely once she becomes member of ship’s crew.
@mitigatedchaos: Loyal officer of the season 1 main antagonist and mobile suitknightmare frame mech pilot. Actually believes in main antagonist’s plans to bring about World Revolution, and the Hard Choices this requires. Thought to have been defeated and killed by the protagonist ¾ through season 1, returns to investigate/fight the Mysterious Organization behind the World State in season 2.
@slartibartfastibast: Ship’s lab-coated biologist. Secretly working against the Mysterious Organization, as hinted in season 1.
@the-grey-tribe: Ship’s engineer. Keeps the protagonist’s Super Prototype Mech Discourse Suit functioning in between combat engagements.
@collapsedsquid: Journalist investigating the true motives of the season 1 main antagonist, thought to have been killed by the Mysterious Organization near the end of season 1, but revealed to be alive in season 2.
@kontextmaschine: Esoteric ‘hipster’ gets little screen-time, revealed as former member of the Mysterious Organization currently in hiding in season 2, annoying viewers as an underwhelming use of foreshadowing in season 1.
@xhxhxhx: Reasonable Authority Figure of World State District 11, origin point of the protagonist’s ship.
@wrathofgnon: Even more war-hawkish general of the main antagonist.
@silver-and-ivory: Handsome Mech Discourse Suit pilot from other battlegroup rescues protagonist twice in season 1, once in season 2. A fan favorite but doesn’t get much screentime.
@theunitofcaring: Peace activist focused on by plot but brushed aside by ludicrously destructive Discourse Suit war. Finally achieves goal in end of season 2.
@yudkowsky: Thought to be the secret identity of the main antagonist, turns out to be just a philosopher in one of the space colonies.
@bambamramfan: Additional philosopher on Earth. Encountered by the protagonist in season 1 to impart some wisdom with a few other philosophers before departing.
@slatestarscratchpad: Another space colony philosopher. Explains the goals of the Mysterious Organization in season 2 when Yudkowsky is found, but not actually a member of the Mysterious Organization.
@argumate: Generic owl-themed harem protagonist of the spin-off series.
[This article is incomplete. You can help by expanding it.]
I’m actually really curious what environmentally-minded lefties plan on doing about the fact that people in Africa are having way too many goddamn babies
Like Macron just recently pointed out that this was a huge problem and a lot of lefties went bonkers and got really mad but the African population boom and all the resulting effects are going to be more or less catastrophic for the planet
Screaming ‘that’s racist!’ whenever anyone mentions it seems to be how they deal with a lot of issues
For the left, environmentalism is just thinly disguised anti-capitalism, and for the globalist elite, environmentalism is about creating a world state. Actually trying to protect the biosphere from potential threats is not something anyone in politics is really sincerely concerned with - kind of a frightening thought
I don’t know that high population growth is necessarily such a terrible thing, though, having more people in the world has a lot of positives to it that usually winds up outweighing the negatives, even for impoverished Africans. Most of the time the people who are concerned with population growth have a skewed zero-sum view of the economy that only lets them see more people as more mouths to feed, but especially in the future that won’t be the right way to look at it
Setting aside that not everyone wants to live in Coruscant, that depends enormously on energy prices, and I’m not optimistic about medium-long-term energy prices.
Much less a bunch of chronically malnourished people don’t give you as many of the benefits of high population. There’s a lot of argument about the heritability of intelligence, but it’s less controversial that it isn’t that hard to damage intelligence development with environmental factors.
I’m actually really curious what environmentally-minded lefties plan on doing about the fact that people in Africa are having way too many goddamn babies
Like Macron just recently pointed out that this was a huge problem and a lot of lefties went bonkers and got really mad but the African population boom and all the resulting effects are going to be more or less catastrophic for the planet
The plan is to migrate them all here, because developed nations have infinite money and structural reinforcement. Or there is no plan. Just cross your fingers and hope it all works out.
Hitler is the Satan figure of modern progressivism/liberalism. Anything that even has the slightest whiff of something he might maybe have once possibly considered doing for a few seconds is tainted by association. On top of that, there have been previous racist actions in the developed nations. On top of that, it has been decided that the majority whites of the developed nations bear the original sin for racism.
Telling people to have fewer kids is worth celebrating by progressivism, but only if you’re telling white people. Telling anyone else is vile racism. (Even, of course, if it would lead to terrible conditions in majority-PoC countries.)
For the progressives that actually notice that you can only consume what is produced, and that while the wealthy have a pretty good-sized amount of money it isn’t anywhere near unlimited, embracing any discouragement of population growth is considered too dangerous, a slippery slope to eugenics and baby licenses.
…even to the ones that “jokingly” suggested swapping everyone’s babies to end “genetic chauvinism”, I would imagine.
Of course the Conservatives keep trying to kill abortion in those areas with their controls on American government aid funding, so mostly they don’t really care, either. Catholics I’ve encountered seem to believe that God Will Provide or something, one of them talking about the Earth supporting a potential population of 100 billion.
Only a few villains see this as an issue, like you, me, and Emmanuel Macron.
I believe the progressive line on this is “education and improved public health lower the birth rate.” And it’s also the neoliberal line and not too far removed from the libertarian line.
@squareallworthy‘s reading is probably a fairer one, and it’s what they’re hoping for with the crossed fingers.
To add on, it should be noted that the birthrate is falling there, even if it’s still crazy high and may end up exceeding the carrying capacity anyway. World population is forecasted to stop growing somewhere at something like 9-11 billion.
I see economcis stuff about birthrates in western countries every once in a while from economists (In addition to the white genocide types of course), and I do wonder what a state would do that took seriously issued of birthrate. For right now it’s not a critical problem, but I wonder what policies you would need. Universal childcare? Paid Surrogacy?
I do wonder about that last one sometimes actually, would it be possible to raise entire generations as basically wards of the state? Is that going to be the future? At some point hopefully, the world will be industrialized, so the current solution won’t last forever.
It depends on how serious they really are, and what the dominant ideology is.
Liberalism’s answer is to import immigrants, but if that weren’t feasible they’d begin running out of options before they’d have to switch to another ideology.
Someone like me would be willing to take more drastic measures as total collapse loomed, including having the state raise children on its own if necessary.
I don’t think really any state is serious about this. Not Japan, not even Singapore.
They very people who are capable of solving this problem (and most of our other big problems) are the ones disappearing. We’re fucked.
The IQ bleedoff is slow. We just have to make it another 20-30 years for genetic engineering, which China and Korea will pursue even if we don’t.
I’m actually really curious what environmentally-minded lefties plan on doing about the fact that people in Africa are having way too many goddamn babies
Like Macron just recently pointed out that this was a huge problem and a lot of lefties went bonkers and got really mad but the African population boom and all the resulting effects are going to be more or less catastrophic for the planet
The plan is to migrate them all here, because developed nations have infinite money and structural reinforcement. Or there is no plan. Just cross your fingers and hope it all works out.
Hitler is the Satan figure of modern progressivism/liberalism. Anything that even has the slightest whiff of something he might maybe have once possibly considered doing for a few seconds is tainted by association. On top of that, there have been previous racist actions in the developed nations. On top of that, it has been decided that the majority whites of the developed nations bear the original sin for racism.
Telling people to have fewer kids is worth celebrating by progressivism, but only if you’re telling white people. Telling anyone else is vile racism. (Even, of course, if it would lead to terrible conditions in majority-PoC countries.)
For the progressives that actually notice that you can only consume what is produced, and that while the wealthy have a pretty good-sized amount of money it isn’t anywhere near unlimited, embracing any discouragement of population growth is considered too dangerous, a slippery slope to eugenics and baby licenses.
…even to the ones that “jokingly” suggested swapping everyone’s babies to end “genetic chauvinism”, I would imagine.
Of course the Conservatives keep trying to kill abortion in those areas with their controls on American government aid funding, so mostly they don’t really care, either. Catholics I’ve encountered seem to believe that God Will Provide or something, one of them talking about the Earth supporting a potential population of 100 billion.
Only a few villains see this as an issue, like you, me, and Emmanuel Macron.
The thing is that political correctness, in the sense of an orthodoxy that exists in terms of what opinions you can express without ostracism in a community (particularly a progressive community), is a very real phenomenon, and can be quite pernicious. But in the sense that it is generally used by conservatives at present, it is basically a catch-all snarlword for anything that they disagree with, but especially for oppressed groups standing up for their rights. And it is used so much more frequently in the latter context that I question its usefulness in the former.
Pretty much every potentially weaponizable political term gets turned into a snarl. Not sure if it’s because it gets into the hands of dumb yellers, or if it’s just always that tempting.
I know we want the same things so why does it have to be so hard
Humanity evolved in an environment of total war. We aren’t yet over the sort of species-wide trauma that induces.
and like that probably sounds trite or whatever, but there are many layers to this. if we ever find a perfectly peaceful species, with no sense of tribalism, it means that species was engineered. almost any species capable of space flight will have to be social and omnivorous.
I see economcis stuff about birthrates in western countries every once in a while from economists (In addition to the white genocide types of course), and I do wonder what a state would do that took seriously issued of birthrate. For right now it’s not a critical problem, but I wonder what policies you would need. Universal childcare? Paid Surrogacy?
I do wonder about that last one sometimes actually, would it be possible to raise entire generations as basically wards of the state? Is that going to be the future? At some point hopefully, the world will be industrialized, so the current solution won’t last forever.
It depends on how serious they really are, and what the dominant ideology is.
Liberalism’s answer is to import immigrants, but if that weren’t feasible they’d begin running out of options before they’d have to switch to another ideology.
Someone like me would be willing to take more drastic measures as total collapse loomed, including having the state raise children on its own if necessary.
I don’t think really any state is serious about this. Not Japan, not even Singapore.
I will say, rattumb migrationists have the virtue to believe that gentrification, too, is a necessary tradeoff in favor of freedom of movement/commerce, and thus are more ideologically consistent than a number of left politicals.
And therefore we don’t get the double-bind where the ethnic majority either leaving or entering the city is considered problematic in both directions at once, acting as a cover for what are actually class concerns. (And also rattumb has greater awareness of what might actually sort out housing prices.)
one of the funniest things about the “kids are exposed to too much violence nowadays” arguments
is that people literally used to be executed in the town square and entire families would go out to watch these people be killed and it was a huge event and people thought it was great fun
joke: kids are exposed to too much violence
woke: kids arent exposed to enough violence
toke: the violence that kids used to be exposed to was aimed at building social cohesion and community spirit, whereas the violence of today’s mass media is premised on nihilistic individualism
I feel a bit uneasy about that hot take there Argumate, but I think you just passed the Ideological Turing Test for WrathOfGnon.
A good example of political correctness is the party line on Joss Whedon shifting over time.
One can try and stay ahead of the curve, hence the stern admonitions about the new Doctor Who being problematic because the lady is white.
But one can be politically incorrect by being too far ahead of the curve; much like trading the market one must be careful not to be too early or too late.
The trick is to never show enthusiasm for anything until you know whether it is problematic or not.
And be prepared to instantly disavow or recontextualise past opinions every time the winds shift; for this is in fact what political correctness means.
Political Correctness Limit Hypothesis: For any given item X, the odds of being declared problematic approach 1 as the time t goes to infinity.
I have it on good authority that not wanting me is an act of oppression.
If only Eliot Rodgers had waited a few years…
I’m sorry, but unlike me, he was a member of [OTHER GROUP] and I am a member of [CORRECT GROUP], therefore for him to want anyone is an act of oppression.
(Although more seriously that guy was fucked up. Don’t huff Incelthought, kids. You’ll go mad and blind.)
Didn’t the incels actually tell him off? At least some manosphere people did, asI recall.
Someone did. He was unsurprisingly accused of being an MRA or something along those lines, but of course all the MRAs thought he was nuts. There was some other group, but I don’t think it was incels.
Why do you think people give Scientology so much more flack it seems than other religions? It seems strange to me considering Scientologists havent done any of the kind of atrocities traditional religions have in the past and even in the present with the Catholic Church having mass pedophile rings
It’s probably a ratio thing, where they’re smaller in scale but higher concentration of crazy, plus of course old cults are grandfathered in.
hey some advice for young girls is don’t trust men. they know. they know what they do.
Don’t trust whom? Stephen Hawking, Prince Harry, your younger brother? Your friend who knew you since childhood? Elton John? Your grandpa? There is no such thing as men in general when it comes to social interaction.
lmao this is my favorite response
don’t trust prince harry
stephen hawking and prince harry teamed up to kill my grandpa so jot that down
guys op is a terf :/
(OK so @dubvictor let me know if you want me to delete this/are getting shit over the post and just want it gone. Also I’m sorry in advance, this turned into a bit of a novel.)
this. this is the reason that I say ‘casual man hate is bad, actually’; this is the reason I say “we really should not be making fun of people for things they can’t help, even if the things they can’t help are things that make them privileged”. it’s notbecause I’m a squishy moderate who thinks it would be nice if everyone was nice. it’s because this stuff directly hurts vulnerable people.
you ever notice how these ‘funny’, ‘relatable’ man-hate posts keep going around, right, and they get a thousand notes or so, and then someone notices, ‘hey, OP is a terf’. And everyone stops and goes oh because they realise, ‘hey, OP doesn’t actually mean men.’
…if you have a category of people that are Acceptable Targets- a group of people you can performatively hate, no matter what, to the point where you can advocate for their genocide and people will understand it’s ‘just’ a joke- asshats will go to whatever lengths they can to equate the people they hate with Acceptable Targets.
TERFs try to make trans women look like men, because for a lot of feminists, men are an Acceptable Target. ableist feminists try to write off their discomfort with ‘creepy’ autistic behaviour* by saying it’s ‘male-coded’ or ‘masculine’, because men are an Acceptable Target. racist feminists talk about thugs and racially-charged Stranger Danger stereotypes, and then they expect you not to call them on their shit because- you guessed it- men are an Acceptable Target.
and yes, trans women are women, trans women are not men, equating the two is wrong. but, like… just because they’re ‘not men’ in the abstract doesn’t mean they can’t get hurt by stuff that is directly aimed at them. on top of that, there are people who are men- who are also lgbt+, or disabled, or poc- who get hit with the splash damage. if you’re already told all day every day by the media and the people around you that you’re a terrible person who’s not to be trusted, how do you think it feels coming from a place that’s supposed to be ‘safe’?
when you say ‘it’s okay to make fun of this group of people for a thing they didn’t choose to be, because the thing they didn’t choose makes them privileged’, what you’re effectively saying is 'it’s okay if there’s Acceptable Targets, as long as they’re not people like me.’ whether or not you intend to, you’re giving carte blanche to the people who want an Acceptable Target so they can keep being bigoted in a socially acceptable fashion.
*I’m talking about, like, infodumping, not stalking. a lot of sexist creepy men will try to do the exact same thing in reverse and go “b-but i have a disability :( why are you being ableist :(”. and i’m not defending them, either.
wouldn’t the internet, a digital network designed with the sole purpose of sharing information more conveniently and accessibly, completely invalidate the basic premise of Fahrenheit 451??
the whole story is fucking pointless if it includes the ultimate plethora of knowledge and information, which’ll probably be government supplied
No, but it would necessitate a tonal shift.
Unusually for sci-fi, Ray Bradbury is a bit of a technophobe, and the real intended moral of the book is very, very close to boomer cartoons about youths on their cellumaphones, except about television.
The destruction of books was possible because people en masse did not even care any more.
I have it on good authority that not wanting me is an act of oppression.
If only Eliot Rodgers had waited a few years…
I’m sorry, but unlike me, he was a member of [OTHER GROUP] and I am a member of [CORRECT GROUP], therefore for him to want anyone is an act of oppression.
(Although more seriously that guy was fucked up. Don’t huff Incelthought, kids. You’ll go mad and blind.)
“[Ghost in the Shell] is a perfect overlapping of form and function. They speak directly to the audience and say “the patriarchal corporation made Motoko white because they consider it more marketable.”
The irony of the film is that people [online] have bought entirely into the corporate logic and are now arguing that ‘authentic’ Japanese identity is superior because it’s even more marketable - literally that the movie would have made more money with an authentic Japanese on the posters.
In this view, Cutter was bad not because he was using billions of tax dollars to vicisect people for profit, but because he failed to make enough profit for his shareholders. He was not exploitative enough - he did not ‘Think Different". Cutter’s sneering racism is unfashionable, and so his Caucasian deathbots were left in the dust by the burgeoning Japanese-Looking Fucktoy industry.”
An interesting response, though I believe the arguers actually wanted it for authenticity/racial representation reasons and only made the argument about money because they thought “be more moral (according to our morality)” wouldn’t be convincing.
I hope McCain takes the time left to him to reflect on the experiences he’s lived through - for someone to suffer through some of the worst of the pointless cruelty war has to offer, to then turn around and work to inflict that on others, is something I’ll never be able to comprehend
Hearing about his brain cancer got me thinking, though…I don’t know that the rest of the world would forgive the US if we had something like the Nuremberg trials for everybody involved in the last few administrations, the targeted drone killing program, the decisions to begin wars in various countries under false pretenses or completely without justification, Guantanamo Bay and all the rest of it, and brought the country back under some semblance of the rule of law
But I’m pretty sure they won’t forgive us if we don’t do something like that before too many of the war criminals involved start dying of natural causes without seeing justice under the international law we once championed
It took the memetic force of Donald Fucking Trump to get the Republicans to admit the Iraq War was a bad idea. Hypocrites that they are, the Democrats have mostly given the Obama Administration a pass, even though from what I’ve read Libya is now worse off. Although really the worst thing about all this is this shit doesn’t even work and they have the backbone for drone strikes but NOT the backbone to properly occupy Afghanistan and forcibly modernize it over one generation so that the “nation building” sticks. And forcibly modernizing the territory SHOULD be a lot more threatening than just wrecking it!
It’s racist for a Swiss person to perform surgery on a Japanese one
No no, it’s racist because humans can’t just decide to make some dude half-Omnic. Omnics have a long and complex history of oppression at the hands of humans, and -
the other day i made a joke about manlets to my brother and he just said completely dead pan “brother, we cannot ridicule those of a stature that does not match our own” and i can’t stop thinking about it. it was like he got possessed by a manlet sympathizing spirit
I dunno @ranma-official, it sounds like you might be taking punching down a little too literally.
this is why they don't want to let birds on Tumblr. wildlife conservation is gonna be pissed after you've grimaced yourself to death on discourse. don't you owe it to Australia's environment to log off and go hunt small rodents?
I just find it amusing that every self-described leftist who accuses me of being a fascist invariably gets torn to pieces by other self-described leftists a week later, who then get torn to pieces in turn, and so on ad infinitum, like a bizarre political karma system.
also yes, the phrase asexual didnt used to exist, they just were part of the bisexual community because they werent attracted to men or women/because they were attracted to them equally
Well, how does one get people to become willing to literally fight to the death to support wishy-washy liberal multiculturalism and large-scale migration?
After all, under such conditions, one does not really own one’s country, or any country, and everywhere is just a multicultural blend, so the logical thing to is just leave whenever threatened until your back is against the wall and it’s reduced to one nation again.
Who will fight in the nation’s army if there is no national pride as all developed nations are in the debt of infinite sin?
Say what you will about Philippe Pétain, but at least he fought for the Third Republic.
This is something a bit worse than that.
In this world, only the willingness and ability to use force can ensure that an ideology is instantiated, even if it is in ways that are bound up in rules and procedures and called law.
Is that dangerous?
Yes. But it applies to every ideology, from the cruelest of the Second World War, to Human Rights.
If an ideology cannot even generate enough power to defend itself, then it will be replaced by one that can. That is why it is essential to construct ideologies that can create that power but which are still worth living under.
A fact about NATO that to me seems to go strangely elided in the discussion: the alliance has plenty more countries in it than just the US and the Baltics. US clearly has strongest single military, but even if assuming maximal US waffling and vagueness, any threats againt NATO members are still held in check also by, for starters, pretty much the entirety of Western Europe.
That’s fair, but I believe the United States has advantages in procurement, development, and air support, larger reserves of manpower and materiel, and more military experience than the Europeans.
In a non-nuclear confrontation with Russia, I believe only the Americans have the combined arms forces with the military superiority to roll back Russian positions in Poland and the Baltic states.
The United States has about 14,000 military aircraft, while Russia has 3,800. But the principal allies together have fewer aircraft than that: France has 1,300, Britain has 850, and Germany has 700.
Even if qualitative and personnel superiority allow the smaller allied forces to fight Russia to a draw – and the Russians will have combat experience that allies lack – I’m skeptical that Europeans will have the air superiority they need to advance on the ground.
On the ground, the United States has about 5,900 tanks and 41,000 armored fighting vehicles. Russia has about 20,000 tanks and 31,000 AFVs. The Europeans have fewer than that: France has about 400 tanks and 6,900 AFVs, Britain has about 250 tanks and 6,000 AFVs, and Germany has about 550 tanks and 5,900 AFVs.
I don’t have the technical expertise to evaluate those military numbers, but the Europeans are not prepared to fight and win a ground war against Russia without air superiority, and I don’t know how long it would take the Europeans to procure the materiel and manpower to reverse Russian gains.
They would need that, because Russia will have an enormous military advantage at the beginning of the war. NATO runs war games, and the outcome isn’t happy, even with US and European allies working together:
Across
multiple plays of the game, Russian forces eliminated or
bypassed all resistance and were at the gates of or actually
entering Riga, Tallinn, or both, between 36 and 60 hours after the start of hostilities. Four factors appeared to contribute most
substantially to this result.
First and obviously, the overall correlation of forces was
dramatically in Russia’s favor. Although the two sides’ raw
numbers of maneuver battalions—22 for Russia and 12 for
NATO—are not badly disproportionate, seven of NATO’s are
those of Estonia and Latvia, which are extremely light, lack
tactical mobility, and are poorly equipped for fighting against
an armored opponent. Indeed, the only armor in the NATO
force is the light armor in a single Stryker battalion, which is
credited with having deployed from Germany during the crisis
buildup prior to the conflict. NATO has no main battle tanks
in the field.
Meanwhile, all Russia’s forces are motorized, mechanized,
or tank units. Even their eight airborne battalions are equipped
with light armored vehicles, unlike their U.S. counterparts.
Second, Russia also enjoys an overwhelming advantage
in tactical and operational fires. The Russian order of battle
includes ten artillery battalions (three equipped with tube artillery and seven with multiple-rocket launchers), in addition to
the artillery that is organic to the maneuver units themselves.
NATO has no independent fires units at all, and the light units
involved in the fight are poorly endowed with organic artillery.
Third, NATO’s light forces were not only outgunned by
the much heavier Russian units, but their lack of maneuver ability meant that they could be pinned and bypassed if the
Russian players so desired. By and large, NATO’s infantry
found themselves unable even to retreat successfully and were
destroyed in place.
Finally, while NATO airpower was generally able to take a
substantial toll on advancing Russian troops, without adequate
NATO ground forces to slow the attack’s momentum, there
is simply not enough time to inflict sufficient attrition to halt
the assault. Airpower is rate limited, and against a moderately
competent adversary—which is how we portrayed the Russian
Air Force—NATO’s air forces had multiple jobs to do,
including suppressing Russia’s arsenal of modern surface-to-air
defenses and defending against possible air attacks on NATO
forces and rear areas. This further limited NATO air’s ability
to affect the outcome of the war on the ground. Without heavy
NATO ground forces to force the attackers to slow their rate of
advance and assume postures that increased their vulnerability
to air strikes, Russian players could meter their losses to air by
choosing how to array and move their forces.
Russia’s tactical advantages make victory in the Baltics a fait accompli. That means that Europeans can only make victory in a protracted campaign, and I am deeply skeptical that the Europeans are willing to go it alone. I’m not even sure they’d be willing to do it with American help.
European electorates outside the Russian borderlands are also deeply skeptical of military action, even in defense. Only 18 percent of Germans, 27 percent of Britons, and 29 percent of the French are willing to fight for their country. The French and British establishments believe in the alliance, but I’m skeptical that the deeply pacifist German electorate is prepared for conflict.
If there were a political solution available – supposing the Russians install an amenable client government in the Baltic states, and offer a compromise peace with the Western Europeans – I am not certain that the Germans would hold out for something more.
Without Germany, without the United States, and with the Baltic states already under Russian occupation, I don’t think the Atlantic alliance has a leg to stand on, even if the Balts and Poles put up a heroic resistance. Even with the Americans and the Germans, the Russian fait accompli in the Baltics presents the allies with hard choices, as RAND points out:
A rapid Russian occupation of all or much of one or two
NATO member states would present the Alliance with three
options, all unappetizing.
First, NATO could mobilize forces for a counteroffensive to
eject Russian forces from Latvia and Estonia and restore the territorial integrity of the two countries. Under the best of circumstances,
this would require a fairly prolonged buildup that could
stress the cohesion of the alliance and allow Russia opportunities
to seek a political resolution that left it in possession of its conquests.
Even a successful counteroffensive would almost certainly
be bloody and costly and would have political consequences that
are unforeseeable in advance but could prove dramatic.
Any counteroffensive would also be fraught with severe
escalatory risks. If the Crimea experience can be taken as a
precedent, Moscow could move rapidly to formally annex the
occupied territories to Russia. NATO clearly would not recognize
the legitimacy of such a gambit, but from Russia’s perspective
it would at least nominally bring them under Moscow’s
nuclear umbrella. By turning a NATO counterattack aimed at
liberating the Baltic republics into an “invasion” of “Russia,”
Moscow could generate unpredictable but clearly dangerous
escalatory dynamics.
On a tactical level, a counteroffensive campaign into the
Baltics would likely entail the desire, and perhaps even the necessity,
of striking targets, such as long-range surface-to-air defenses
and surface-to-surface fires systems, in territory that even NATO
would agree constitutes “Russia.” Under Russian doctrine, it is
unclear what kinds or magnitudes of conventional attacks into
Russian territory might trigger a response in kind (or worse),
but there would certainly be concern in Washington and other
NATO capitals about possible escalatory implications.
Finally, it is also unclear how Russia would react to a successful
NATO counteroffensive that threatened to decimate
the bulk of its armed forces along its western frontier; at what
point would tactical defeat in the theater begin to appear like a
strategic threat to Russia herself?
The second option would be for NATO to turn the escalatory
tables, taking a page from its Cold War doctrine of “massive
retaliation,” and threaten Moscow with a nuclear response
if it did not withdraw from the territory it had occupied. This
option was a core element of the Alliance’s strategy against the
Warsaw Pact for the duration of the latter’s existence and could
certainly be called on once again in these circumstances.
The deterrent impact of such a threat draws power from the
implicit risk of igniting an escalatory spiral that swiftly reaches
the level of nuclear exchanges between the Russian and U.S.
homelands. Unfortunately, once deterrence has failed—which
would clearly be the case once Russia had crossed the Rubicon
of attacking NATO member states—that same risk would tend
to greatly undermine its credibility, since it may seem highly
unlikely to Moscow that the United States would be willing to
exchange New York for Riga. Coupled with the general direction
of U.S. defense policy, which has been to de-emphasize
the value of nuclear weapons, and the likely unwillingness of
NATO’s European members, especially the Baltic states themselves,
to see their continent or countries turned into a nuclear
battlefield, this lack of believability makes this alternative both
unlikely and unpalatable.
The third possibility would be to concede, at least for the
near to medium term, Russian control of the territory they had
occupied. Under this scenario, the best outcome would likely
be a new cold war, with the 21st century’s version of the old
“inner German border” drawn somewhere across Lithuania or
Latvia. The worst be would be the collapse of NATO itself and
the crumbling of the cornerstone of Western security for almost
70 years.
If the Americans believe they must “trade New York for Tallinn,” or Rostock for Riga, or Calais for Kaunas, or Hampstead for Helsinki, I’m not sure they’d be willing to make the trade. So I’m a bit concerned. Yes, I’m a bit concerned about this, that, and the other thing, about events that might precipitate this eventuality, or perhaps something worse.
Americans and Europeans both might decide to “respect Russia’s interests in its traditional sphere of influence,” whatever that might mean for their six million Baltic allies.
Honestly, most of the people on the other side of the net neutrality debate are probably living in a completely different world from me. They have over a half dozen different options for ISPs, all of whom actually have to compete with one another to keep the customer happy.
Meanwhile I’m over here my little corner of Iowa, which in a duopoly in part because it’s LITERALLY ILLEGAL TO HAVE SATELLITE INTERNET.
said “Wait why in the world is it illegal”
I mean I’m pretty sure it’s because Mediacom and Centurylink want it to be. I have no idea what the justification is though.
Probably building out the lines (and then not spending money on upgrading them).
In some countries, the government builds the lines and then rents them out. Those countries have cheaper internet access.
What really gets me is that they won’t even let local power cooperatives compete on this, when they’re demonstrably better. (In fact, local utility cooperatives seem pretty good generally.)
Never forget that the Market actively pays people to sabotage itself.
“the word nazi has lost all its meaning now, thanks, liberals” is a cold take because people called each other nazis for no reason for over 50 years. what concerns me is the devaluing of the word “violent”.
Well, there was a time when the word “Neo-Nazis” meant something at least. Not so much anymore.
But yes, this equivocation over the meaning of violence is quite deliberate. Definitely trying to exploit the taboo sane people have against punching people who aren’t literally punching other people.
Also, all political ideologies can claim that their enemies being in power is “violent,” because states have number of cops greater than one (or anarchist villages use locals instead of dedicated cops). Really don’t want to normalize this.
life hack if you live in a flood zone and are worried put a sign up that says ‘welcome to california’ and then it floods the water will see the sign, realize it’s in the wrong place, and leave
this can backfire because incoming bills can also realize they’re in California and increase 5x
Oh fuck, the foreigners have found out how dysfunctional California is. We gotta get a big tarp and hide it.
Speaking of independent prosecution agencies for police misconduct, we should have those. Can’t have the prosecutors that depend on the cops for all their other prosecutions, bad cops could retaliate to cover for their buddy by refusing to cooperate with later prosecutions. Otherwise at least try it in another jurisdiction.
this awaken the horse ppl thing sounds like the hippie swpl progressive version of white identarians with a heaping spoonful of noble savage stereotypes abt native americans mixed in
from their website, about white people
This land does not belong to us. It is not ours.
We don’t know the stories here.
Our ignorant bliss offends and desecrates.
We remain an enemy to all life.
I fucking love being a white colonist holy shit
whiteness is basically the most black metal thing in existence
I mean, I don’t really want to hop on the “YAY WHITENESS” train, but like,
From a strategic standpoint, positioning white people as “an enemy to all life,” seems like a really bad plan, like when that one vegan started calling people “bloodmouth carnist” which does, indeed, sound like a metal band.
If you present only two options, and present them as “be evil or be destroyed,” people are gonna pick the former.
You want whities lobbying for independent police misconduct prosecution boards, you don’t want them shopping for jet black uniforms with silver trim.
