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DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
13hr ago
The FairTax would make it so the truly rich couldn’t spend money without the government getting a quarter of it. Anything else either has loopholes or drives them out of the country.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
13hr ago
I’ve always put this somewhat before that. Around the start of the 20th century the idea that the West as a civilization was good and right and its ideas were good and right we’re already declining. Vietnam was more unveiling than the change itself. You can look to almost any institution you care to name, and in the 19th century they were self-confident, willing to impose themselves, and seen as obviously right and good, and the way forward is to impose those values and ideas on the world. Western Christians in 1840 were trying to impose Christianity on colonies. Now those colonies are more orthodox than Western churches who now apologize for ever taking Christianity seriously. In the past, it was self evident that imposing western ideas on the rest of the world was making the world better. Today, we have teach-ins to make sure that no one thinks that democracy, human rights, free trade, or science are better than tribal authoritarian governments that put women in tents and refuse to let them speak.
I submit that Western civilization is old and has various serious philosophical illnesses. Most of them are not fatal if treated in time. But I don’t think they will be.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
13hr ago
Point taken.
But “related to sexuality” isn’t really load-bearing. A big chunk of the politics leans on comparison to paraphilias. If being trans looks statistically different from crossdressing, or BDSM, or whatever else has gotten more popular since 2000, then it makes less sense to assert that it should be treated like those things.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
13hr ago
There aren't, but there are plenty of Amish a stone's throw from Cleveland, Columbus, Philly, and Pittsburgh. They even open furniture stores in these cities, and employ the English to run the stores, build websites, do customer service, and what have you. Doesn't take as much distance as you'd think.
DelendaEst
13hr ago
Even if we accept that this is the case, doesn't it seem like moving from a system where all social media is biased the same way to having at least one site be biased in a different direction is still a net positive?
BreakerofHorsesandMen
14hr ago
Sorry man, but you taught your kid to respond to random violence with wisely targeted violence.
Unless you are operating on a very different definition of pacifism than I am, you are a bad pacifist, but if it’s any consolation, you are a good dad.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
14hr ago
Been getting a little time in, actually. Not much to show for it; I'm mostly just experimenting with procedurally instantiating objects in Unreal and marvelling at how they don't behave how I expect and at how difficult it is to do anything with the Unreal editor.
gakles
14hr ago
Isn’t the solution to reduce executive power so whoever wins the next election can’t just destroy whatever’s been built? On the other hand, much of what restrained the executive was convention and tradition, which has been razed in the last 10ish years. This would force policy to become constructive instead of spoils based. I’m not exactly hopeful those in power (and the voters) will choose deescalation.
WandererintheWilderness
14hr ago
I mean it all comes back to his trans kid, doesn't it? Who came out in 2020.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
14hr ago
In terms of Joe, the best evidence that he didn't take bribes was that Republicans (a hostile party) subpoenaed his bank accounts and repeatedly found nothing of the sort.
Im not up to speed on how this discourse went, but I dont think kickbacks to Joe personally are especially relevant? He could have just played his part so that Hunter would have money. I mean whatever he was taking in at that point was mostly for the next generation anyway.
gakles
14hr ago
My position of authority on this subject is pretty weak (1 american polisci class) so take this with a grain of salt.
I agree that fiscal responsibility is a component of right wing ideology, but I want to point out that the deficit is not just enlarged by govt spending but also by tax expenditures. When the govt encourages certain actions through tax deductions (say a student loan deduction) its losing potential revenue. Trumps 2017 tax bill reduced the fed revenue by an estimated 1.9 trillion over the following 10 years. Also studies (Tax Policy Center) say it didnt end up paying for itself. In this way the deficit can be expanded through means besides dems funding trans operas in latin america.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14hr ago
I think that’s actually a terrible idea. While wealth is global and markets are global, citizenship is bound to a government and land, while the humans that create it are not. What I fear would happen is that not only would wealthy and smart people abroad not want to come here, but that a good number of people would renounce citizenship and simply go to a place with good infrastructure and low taxes. A smart country like Ireland or Russia or Korea could reap the benefits of our stupidity simply by not taxing the geese laying the golden eggs. All they have to do is resist the temptation to tax the free money coming in and reap the benefits of jobs created, inventions patented, wealth spent in their country by billionaires fleeing high taxes in America.
Wealth of any sort has pretty free exit, as do rich people.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
14hr ago
Defense spending is the republican equivalent. They are just as happy to feed Baal, it's just that the prefer to put the food in a different mouth.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
14hr ago
The case that trans operas in Latin America are useless to American interests has not been made. Whatever you think of trans operas in the abstract, it seems quite likely that transing a neutral country will bring it culturally closer to the American universal culture fold. This makes it less likely that it will randomly kick out or tax American businesses, thumb its nose at American products, back Russia or China in some international affairs matter or even host a Chinese military base. The trans operas might well be the by far most cost-effective way to reap those benefits, and it's not even clear if they benefit the trans agenda at home all that much.
If South Korea had a nationalist faction that opposed k-drama on aesthetic grounds, would it make sense for it to prioritise going after its foreign distribution?
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
14hr ago
The US unironically needs to raise taxes on the rich (I mean actual rich, not those earning large salaries). (Non-land) Wealth taxes are usually bad, but with the global reach of the IRS and their policy to tax worldwide income, there's no reason the US can't easily adopt a policy of taxing worldwide assets without too many bad side effects. This would raise significant money, imagine even a 1% worldwide non-US housing asset yearly tax on all US permanent residents and citizens (temporary residents get a pass because you don't want to discourage smart wealthy people from the rest of the world coming to the US), it would easily fill the black hole.
hanikrummihundursvin
14hr ago
The Joe Rogan problem for the 'left' is "We control everything except this one thing". I don't see how that is propaganda having its limits. Just that one side is not completely omnipotent. The propaganda still works well enough. We wouldn't be where we are today if it didn't.
yofuckreddit
14hr ago
I'm not a negative person by nature! I think this is the most intractable problem in American politics and culture. People with high IQs and (IMO) higher-than-baseline morality still cannot fathom cutting benefits. Our political class doesn't even have to deal with physical violence through riots, but they're still too scared to do what must be done.
The problem with the glass > half full approach is that I have not heard of a valid approach to solving the problem. It has only gotten worse during my lifetime. This was the most significant and serious approach to cut spending in a quarter century, and it failed miserably.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
14hr ago
Because it's not an environment suitable to small scale agriculture?
Alabasata
14hr ago
(Helen Lovejoy: "Won't someone think of the children?")
A YIMBY, /r/FuckCars or Tim Burton fan could use this to argue against any development where children would be driven to school by bus or their parents:
"Disconnecting children from their neighborhood robs them of the ability to learn from the excellence of those who live within it. They go off to college out-of-state not because of their wanderlust or Hero's Journey, but because they never learned of the value in where they lived. Thus the value must live somewhere else."
It is not hard to claim (with evidence!) that children live in an environment that was not built for them. They are less important to land use planners than any adult, cishet or degenerate. The adult outranks the child or the unborn, and rank has its privileges.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
14hr ago
What is the point of this negativity? Do you just want to watch the world burn?
I truly do not understand why people take such cynical mindsets.
KMC
14hr ago
A slop factory is still an improvement over what it replaced.
If we just look at things which are not just directly related to the changed political valence of the platform
Yes, setting aside the single greatest improvement possible it sure seems like nothing had been accomplished.
This is a straightforward example of my claim that "basically all objections to pacifism boil down to rejecting the doormat failure mode", and so whole-heartedly disagree with you :)
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