OBJECTION!

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.

Yeah, full support for the Trump administration to have the power to say which social media is acceptable, that’ll fix everything! /s

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?

In the case of Russia and the places they influenced, it was a group of self-appointed elites that did the actual revolting, and then they imposed a new system on the populace.

What on earth are you talking about? How would “a group of self-appointed elites” even be enough to overthrow the government? That fundamentally doesn’t make any sense.

It’s also whitewashing the Tsar. As if the Russian people were happy and content while they were starving and subject to serfdom and being fed into the meat grinder of WWI.

Hell, Lenin is even on record saying that Russia wasn’t going to have a revolution, before it did, and by the time he arrived in Russia, the Tsar had already been forced to abdicate!

That’s fair. I only wanted to set the record straight.

The comments I mentioned were long before Huntington affected him in his later years. Like, I’m talking about his comments on events as they were happening, when he was fully cognizant, and singing and writing smack dab in the middle of his career. You can’t just put your own positions into his mouth and write off everything he ever said to the contrary to Huntington’s. It’s both demonstrably false and also not really cool for you to do, like, he’s entitled to having his own views regardless of losing his mind to illness later on.

Woody Guthrie was ditched by his deadbeat, KKK member dad at 14, and grew up into the Great Depression. Those circumstances don’t tend to produce moderate politics. Everything I’ve seen about him suggests he saw things in very black and white terms, with the communists (including the USSR and Stalin) being the only real alternative to the racism and poverty he saw under capitalism and fascism. You can say that wasn’t the right perspective but that was his perspective.

You are, of course, right about Korea, but I brought it up because at the time it was a pretty controversial and fringe view, that he was willing to standby even under threat of persecution.

This was before Stalinism and a lot of the bad connotations given to communism since - I doubt he would have embraced much of what have happened in the name of communism.

Well, Guthrie was actually alive at the same time as Stalin so we don’t actually have to speculate on that. In reality, Guthrie praised Stalin, even going so far as praising the Soviet invasion of Poland, and criticizing the US for providing supplies to Finland during the Winter War. It actually wasn’t that uncommon for left-wing people in the West to support Stalin at the time, though some, for example, Pete Seeger, later changed their views. Guthrie never did, even during the height of the Cold War, when McCarthyism meant he got blacklisted, he was still saying stuff like, he hoped the communists won in the Korean War, and he never apologized for or recanted his views on Stalin.

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.

Which one??

I mean, ideally they ought to address the economic issues, but that’s a nonstarter because of their donors’ interests. They’re abandoning the stuff that they’re actually somewhat decent on to make the areas where they suck the focus of their messaging.

I’m more than happy to support progressive democrats, and I voted democrat downballot. But “limiting the damage that Republicans do in the meantime,” while a valid goal, is not worth sacrificing efforts to replace the duopoly. Time is not on our side, and as conditions decline, it is inevitable that the Republicans will gain strength because Democrats are associated with the establishment and the failing system.

We should not “be doing our best to help the Republicans win.” That would mean voting Republican, which would make no sense whatsoever. What we should be doing is building up an alternative party. Had more people who stayed home come out to voice their support of a left wing third party, it would serve the dual purposes of affecting the narrative by making it harder to pretend the problem was the Democrats weren’t far enough right, while also paving the way for the replacement if they continue to stick their heads in the sand.

The idea that a third party could never be viable or replace an existing party is a self-fulfilling prophesy. But in my mind, it’s a simple fact that organizations either adapt or die, and so if the Democratic party cannot be made to adapt, it is doomed and the focus should be on preparing to take advantage of their eventual collapse. Yeah, it might be a longshot, but to me, “keep voting forever for people who are fundamentally incapable of listening to you,” is an even clearer dead end.

This is why I don’t understand the attitude that the way to progress is to keep punishing the Democrats until they figure it out on their own. The ones who haven’t figured it out, which is most of them, aren’t going to figure it out, any more than Google is going to realize that ruining search was a bad idea and they need to start making products people like again. It’s just not in their DNA to think that way.

If the Democrats are fundamentally unable to respond or adapt to what people want, then they are doomed to fail and become irrelevant, and the only way forward is by abandoning them and building a different party. I would prefer it if they just learned their lesson, or if they could just be reasoned with at all, but if not then I don’t see a reason to bother with them in the first place.

Getting my predictions in now: the 2028 Democratic nominee will be running on a platform of making the extermination of trans people 10% more efficient, people will say that you have to vote for them because at least they don’t also want to exterminate gay people, the Republicans will flip New Jersey, and the DNC will conclude that they should’ve run on exterminating the gays too.

These people have completely lost the plot. Being progressive on social issues is the only thing they have to offer, because they can’t be progressive on economic issues because of their donors. If you’re not going to adopt an economic platform that would actually address people’s needs, and you’re also abandoning us queer “freaks,” then what are you even going to run on? Fucking NAFTA? What, are you running a campaign to try to get elected president or to try to get appointed a mod on r/neoliberal?

I’d ask how people with such terrible political instincts are even relevant to making these decisions, but I already know the answer is money.

The US pulling out of the UN would allow them to pass all sorts of cool stuff, like recognizing and admitting Palestine and calling for a ceasefire, recognizing the universal rights of children, and condemning the far-right, all of which the US used its veto power to stop against overwhelming support on the other side.

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.

For one thing, virtually every country on earth claims to be democratic, whereas only some claim to be socialist. There are many countries that claim the label of democratic that don’t consider the DPRK to be a democracy, but the countries that claim the label of socialist, such as Cuba, generally recognize the DPRK as socialist. If would be strange to refer to a group of countries as socialist and then exclude a country that those countries recognize as being socialist.

It’s worth noting that one of the main reasons the DPRK is not considered democratic is not because of the way the government and elections are structured, but because it doesn’t allow its elections to be monitored by international observers.