Dropped a normie Liberal a thought puzzle about cousin marriage, culture, and racism. The results should be… enlightening.
I think the “robot“ thing comes from this thinking that the majority of the cost of the items we buy is the cost to produce the item. Every once in a while, I see someone go though the cost breakdown of an item, and it’s transportation, retailing, marketing, and all the other things that you have to do other than making an item that cost most of the money.
That might be some alternative ways to organize society that could take advantage of reducing those costs, but… I think they’d be so exotic that you couldn’t call them Communism anymore - not in the way we understand it now, and not in the Fully Automated Luxury Communism way, either.
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was shot at congressional baseball practice in Del Ray, Virginia, and possibly four others were injured by an assailant, according to another lawmaker who was at the practice.
Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama said on CNN that he and other lawmakers tried to apply a tourniquet with his belt on one injured person to try and stop the bleeding. Scalise crawled to the outfield.
More from Bloomberg.com: Russian Cyber Hacks on U.S. Electoral System Far Wider Than Previously Known
“There must have been 50, 100 shots fired,” Brooks said.
Brooks said Capitol security forces were firing back with pistols at the shooter until the shooter was tackled to the ground.
More from Bloomberg.com
Read Scalise Shot by Assailant at Congressional Baseball Practice on bloombergpolitics.com
I’m afraid that we’ve crossed lines we can never come back from. Attacks on public servants are an attack on democracy.
A truckload of presidents have been assassinated over the course of U.S. history. Congresscritters have been succesfully murdered before. Democracy will survive.
Attack more public servants imo
Do you want right-wing paramilitaries? Because that’s how you get right-wing paramilitaries.
We already have more right-wing paramilitaries.
Elevated above background levels for now, but they’d disengage over time as the narrative of leftist violence lost credibility. Doing stuff that will only seem to prove them right is not a good plan. Have you even been here? The Klan/etc are not actually that big. In fact, they’re pretty friggin’ small relative to population.
Escalating is not the right plan.
I’ve figured out why I take such a strong dislike to fantasy stories where people are persecuted for their special powers. They’re often modeled on real oppression of people who were considered unimportant–poor, unattached, and not influential within the community. The stories reframe them as having supernatural gifts that make them more special than their oppressors, and that makes their oppression wrong. But if you need to be special to deserve not to be oppressed, then what does that say about the real not-special people who were persecuted, cast out, and outright murdered?
muggle pride! although they are something of a majority, so not quite the same.
Reminds me of a great insight I got from (IIRC) John C. Wright: the X-Men is such a powerful fantasy precisely because it allows you to imagine being both the innocent victim of persecution, with all the moral legitimacy that conveys in the modern world, and the ubermensch, the next stage of human evolution – at the same time.
Everyone wants to be Adam Jensen.
it’s nice to see that Tumblr has both opinions on ethnic minorities, that they are bloodthirsty savages who carry knives and start fights and cavort in the streets with dark designs on our women or that they are precious smol cinnamon rolls whose quaint folkways and colorful costumes must be protected at all costs.
wait, cinnamon rolls isn’t some kind of lewd slang?
“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.
Glad we got that sorted out. Now onto the next item on our discourse agenda: Ugg boots - sexist, or female empowerment?
Steve Scalise is a racist, homophobic, anti-choice, shithead that gives speeches to crowds of white nationalists and called himself “David Duke without the baggage.” Please stop normalizing the murderous, bigoted agenda of the Republican party and pretending these right wing lawmakers just have a benign difference of political opinion.
The guy almost died, and you’re just going to insult him? What’s wrong with you?
Look, you nazi sympathizing, hentai loving piece of shit: Not a single shred of courtesy or sympathy is owed to an avowed racist that gives speeches at white nationalist events. None. Zero.
The only regrettable thing about this incident is that the shooter missed.
The original Nazis, the actual ones, not these washed-up, low status fringe guys that no one likes, came to power because of an environment of substantial political violence in which people were willing to make large, very large, tradeoffs to restore the perception of security.
Socialists and Communists literally fought them in the streets and it failed. It made the problem worse. It took empires to defeat Nazism.
You lot have this idea that if White Nationalism is not constantly suppressed, it will naturally grow and take over, but this perception is mistaken. Under normal post-war circumstances, white nationalism doesn’t have much to offer the typical white person. After all, Hitler made them all look both stupid and evil, and his thousand-year empire imploded in only a fraction of a century. White Nationalism has been mocked and made low-status for some time.
Now, normally, WNs don’t have much to offer the typical white male…
Unless you crank up the political violence such that WN ideas about erasure of whites and fundamentally incompatibility between races start to sound more reasonable to marginal people most vulnerable to WN conversion. Mass immigration doesn’t help, nor does not believing in borders or countries, since you can’t credibly offer them a home they’d live in for a lifetime, but it might be overcome by someone clever enough.
You think you’re fighting White Nationalism with your righteous indignation, but you’re actually creating it. You’re getting high on outrage while increasing the actual level of risk.
With every wrong password he entered into the stolen phone, the thief forgot a cherished or important memory.
have I mentioned how much I am into magic systems that require you to pay in happy memories
partly because there’s not an easy way to game them. it’s not like ‘extracts a price in pain’ (which is still fun too!), or even ‘damages you in some way’, because with those you can ‘cheat’ the system by using a payment option that you find disproportionately unobjectionable
if you’re paying in happy memories, you’re never going to have an easy decision to make, never going to be able to use magic without it being a wrenching necessity – because by definition the price depends on how good, how cherished, the memory is for you, how much you want to keep it
[cut for length]
I guess, but while I see the ability to bring about pain in the story, I can’t say it appeals to me, and I find myself thinking more in terms of “game balance”, I suppose. But I have a very technological orientation, one about human strength, human power, the capabilities of companies and states and continents. But these things are paid in mundane prices, mundane misery, mundane blood. A collapse here, a fire there, a polluted river, the hours of the lives of our brightest and the hours of the lives of pur most mundane. But all along, the goal is to ‘cheat’ as one would cheat at magic, to profit, and to profit off of that profit, in a self-reinforcing cycle as we ascend towards the skies and gain entire worlds. If a magic is a spiral that only ever leads downwards, then what use is it, except for the benefit that only be gained through immorality(/amorality)?
The Internet (also known as the “Titties and Kitties” Fandom),
