hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
3d ago
I like roundups so long as they’re organized on more or less the same topic. Eg ‘abortion on the ballot in the fall’ with examples from several states, or the country politics roundups that sometimes get posted. What are simply random topics strung together can be difficult to deal with.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
Colonization is very very expensive and the kind of groups that would take that deal are not very popular.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
There’s tons of economic use cases for near-earth space exploration. There’s fewer for exploration at remove and the only one for actual space colonization is paying people to go somewhere conveniently far away.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
And teenage boys in the USA use the n word because it offends people, same thing.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Plenty of stuffy blue tribers will claim ticktock spreads pro-Trump sentiment, or worry about like tradwife content or whatever. I think the common denominator is that old, established people just don't like ticktock and it spreads mildly taboo things.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Doesn't MDMA occasionally get used as a date rape drug?
I agree that most cases of 'roofies' are actually just drunkenness.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
McDonald's salads are unhealthier than the burgers, at least if you put dressing on it.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Uh, doesn't Ukraine put women in combat?
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Yes, in deep third world countries there’s slavery in agriculture and mining. Cocoa in west Africa, for example, uses slaves(disproportionately children). The Congo has slaves in its mines. But the kind of labor slavery which needs huge slave strata is, well, a feature of very low HDI deep third world countries. Notably Central America, an impoverished region which produces very similar cash crops to west Africa and likewise features high corruption levels and limited government control, doesn’t have much agricultural slavery.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
There's a reason the north didn't have slaves on its wheat farms, although I can't pretend to know exactly why.
Even the Romans abandoned slave worked wheat plantations eventually. Different crops are cultivated most efficiently in different ways and it's pretty plausible that wheat- or possibly temperate-climate crops more broadly- don't do well with the kind of agricultural system that meshes well with slave labor.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Yes, the default niche for non-third world slavery in the 21st century, like actual slavery, is sex work. There's a few other niches where it hangs on, but they're niches. There's a few unfree domestic servants and a small number of unfree people working in sweatshops, but by and large the hondurans making sub-minimum wage in a meatpacking plant in a company town in deep rural areas chose to be there and could easily leave and get another shitty job if they want, and most of the indonesian children making sneakers are there because their parents want them their and not because their bosses force them to be. Yes these people face unfair labor practices, but it's not slavery- they choose to put up with it. Even the Bangladeshis in Qatar building world cup stadiums aren't really slaves; they're paid labor which gets a shitty deal by first world standards.
Prison labor is probably the largest category of unfree labor in the modern, even semideveloped world, and it doesn't make any economic sense, it just gives prisoners something to do other than fight each other and try to smuggle in drugs, and lets the rest of us feel better about making them be productive. Most heavy labor slavery is deep third world because machines just make more sense for the kinds of tasks that slaves can do.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
I don't think it's traditionalism/conservatism. I think they just want to be unhappy.
There's a joke about an old Jewish man taking a customer satisfaction survey. He says "I am very upset". "Why?" "I couldn't complain." "But you said you're upset" "Exactly, I couldn't complain."
My mental model of big parts of the environmental movement, greenpeace very much included, is a lot like that old Jewish man. They just want something to be conspicuously upset about, either so they can be professional protestors instead of having to get real jobs that involve, like, actual work, or to have an excuse to be the center of attention, or because they're mentally ill, or to sleep with true believers, or whatever. There's environmentalists doing actual environmental protection stuff, sure. But greenpeace doesn't want a solution, they want to veto things. There's a difference.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
I dunno that that's true. Brown immigrants vote D for transparently self-serving reasons, or occasionally machine politics, and not due to ideological affinity.
There's also plenty of eastern Europeans who would like to move here who would be willing to vote R. Current law just doesn't allow working class immigration except for illegal border crossers.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
"Christian fascism" with or without racial undertones is a perpetual progressive bogeyman and was thrown at George W. Bush as well. The gist of the idea, as far as I can tell, is that the republican party is running cover for some kind of weird hybrid of the KKK and Christian theocracy that's going to implement some kind of sharia-law-esque system with precursors disguised as your local evangelical megachurch. Older versions of the fever dream tended to have fantasias about this theocracy turning against Catholics, Jews, and sometimes completely random other groups, but that idea seems to have fallen out of favor recently with right-wing Catholics being integral to Trump's staffing plans and Jews turning towards the right with recent events.
Of course in reality the Christian right has functionally no religious test, anyone can visit an evangelical megachurch and report back that sharia law doesn't seem in development, and religious conservatism understands full well it's a junior partner to whatever the dominant faction in the republican coalition is at any given moment.
Why this idea is flaring up now is some combination of dobbs derangement and Trump looking extremely likely to win; historically the "Republicans are going to usher in a white supremacist fascist (often specifically evangelical protestant)Christian theocracy" rhetoric has been a response to an ascendant right wing.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Uh, what selective pressure do you think the potato famine exerted? As far as I can tell it just killed random poor people, with those wealthy enough to be exempt being mostly non-Irish.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Enforcing patent laws against Indian subsistence farmers is taking a loss because it costs money to try and they don't have anything to give you.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
$15/hr for a cashier was already on the way just due to general price inflation. Preexisting cashier wages were already a premium over other unskilled labor because you need someone who can count, make change, be nice to customers, and not look fucked up, and even without the labor crunch we would've seen it.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
There are plenty of democrats who aren't in favor of open borders and the issue is a huge political liability for democrats.
I believe kafir is on the same level in South Africa and preto is in Brazil, both of which have meanings essentially identical to nigger.
I would also challenge you that the N-word is overwhelmingly more taboo than anything else. That may be true among the PMC, but blue collar workers near me use phrases like ‘nigger-rig’(fucked up) and don’t consider it particularly more offensive than other construction worker English phrases like ‘no matter how I do it it’s always just a cunt hair off’.
As an interesting historical example, Latin had ‘landica’(clitoris) which was considered so offensive that minced oaths were taboo.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Yes. Twitter, 4chan, kiwifarms, and rdrama. /r9k/ is probably your best bet if you want it to go viral because people stalk it for things worth screenshotting to discuss on other platforms.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Because the south wanted to keep its slaves and then lost a war.
hydroacetylene
6d ago
A woman wanting to be raped by a particular man, or subset of men, does not mean she wants to be raped by whoever has the opportunity to do so. Like fifty shades of gray was pretty clear the guy was hot and rich.
hydroacetylene
6d ago
There's a pretty strong case that the welfare state broke black families apart, leading to the current state of social dysfunction.
I feel like solar/batteries, specifically, are exempt from a ‘f you, greenies’ push by republicans because government solar programs are so often about giving middle class people free money.
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