It’s pretty easy to believably say that the Swedish government supports Quran burning when they keep issuing permits for it.
If you wanna get a little background, they keep letting this Rasmussen guy burn em as a demonstration. What is he demonstrating? Why his legitimate ethnio-nationalist political beliefs which hold that there is no place in Sweden for Muslims. If that makes you wanna vote for him, he’s got his own political party (far right, naturally).
An easy parallel is calling the government that issues the kkk a permit to march in robes racist.
It would be real simple for the swedish government to put an end to this kind of talk, they’d just have to stop issuing protest permits and police escorts to people burning Qurans.
If you don’t want your enemies to be able to say you condone hate speech, stop condoning it.
You don’t, but if you want the cops to be there to protect you from the crowd you enraged by telling them for weeks that you’re gonna burn a Quran you gotta file for that permit.
Yeah… not sure you quite understand that goes against free speech by removing their right to speak about it if a permit is required but the government isn’t granting it… much less that a permit be required for “free speech.”
I am seeing you make a distinction but I am not seeing you list a difference. There is no point to protesting anything if you don’t have people see it.
Permitless speech is still possible, the speaker just won’t have the backing of the state in making it.
If the state denied a permit for this kind of demonstration the speaker could still up and decide to burn a Quran or make any other speech they see fit, they just wouldn’t have police protection and crowd control.
Given how unpopular this sentiment is in general and the various speakers’ choices of venue (Muslim neighborhoods, mosques, embassies of Muslim nations), I doubt they’d continue burning Qurans.
That’s why I phrased my initial response the way I did. The Swedish state should stop condoning that kind of speech if it doesn’t want it’s enemies to be able to accuse it of condoning that kind of speech.
Stop issuing permits, stop protecting hate speech.
It’s cool, I can burn the Quran, I don’t hate Muslims, I just hate Islam, the religion and history of all Muslims. Where am I gonna burn the Quran you ask? Why, in front of a mosque, in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood or in front of the embassy of a Muslim nation. Don’t worry though, I’m doing it to show that I hate Islam, not Muslims. Pay no attention to my extensive history of speaking in racial epithets toward muslim people, my association with far right anti Muslim groups or my political party that explicitly opposes allowing muslims to live in the country. Now please provide me a police escort so I’m not torn limb from limb in the process. Why no, I certainly did not intend to incite, what ever could have given you that idea?
This is like saying people should be able to burn crosses because theyre doing it to show that they hate Christianity (or in the case of a kkk offshoot that really existed: that it’s part of their Christian worship service). No one is out here burning crosses for any reason other than to signal hate. No one is burning Qurans for any reason other than to signal hate.
We can easily prove this by looking for someone burning a Quran who isn’t aligned with a far right party that has anti Muslim ideology, hasn’t spoken out against muslims and isn’t funded by groups that are.
There of course are none, because everyone burning Qurans is doing it as a form of hate speech.
<span style="color:#323232;">Welcome to the FAANG-Club: Campus Googleplex.
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This is the another consequence of the 1950’s version of the American dream. Single income family brought home by the husband where the wife stayed home to raise children. Husband needed someone to tend to the house and the wife needed someone to support her. Marriage was imperative for both sexes to participate within society even if you hated your spouse. Kids grow up and move out and then BOOM(er) divorce.
Now that a single income household for a family is almost unheard of people don’t get married just for the money so later divorce is much less likely
Tahoe resident reporting in. Hank the tank was a controversial figure up here. Her territory was primarily the Tahoe Keys gated community and she only developed her bad habits because people in that neighborhood couldn’t bring themselves to practice sensible bear etiquette with their trash management like most other neighborhoods in the basin.
Keys residents largely wanted her gone and most other Tahoe residents were indifferent or wanted her to be left alone and for the keys neighborhood to instead make a concerted effort to cut off her food sources so she’d go back to more normal bear behavior.
I’m just glad she is being relocated instead of euthanized.
These kinds of “rogue groups” are everywhere and it’s terrifying. This kind of stuff should be unacceptable, but cops somehow almost always get away with it. Even if they don’t, they simply change to another city.
Every time I see a cop, it makes me a bit worried about what they might do. I move away from them as quick, but as inconspicuously as possible. Cops aren’t there to protect us. They’re there to punish whomever they deem fit.
You can’t sprawl your way out of this problem, despite Texas’ best efforts. All you do there is create traffic.
The answer is simple. Legalize housing. More triplexes, more quadplexes, more ADUs, 5 over 1s, more of everything. Developers want to fill this demand. They can’t. They’re hamstrung by city ordnances and state laws that often only allow apartments or single family housing. Not everyone wants or needs a separate house. Make rent boring again and the corporations will lose interest.
This. I own my home and could probably fit at least two ADUs on my property but the permitting fees alone exceed the cost of construction. Not to mention the cost and hassle of obtaining a permit.
Eh, I mean there is a record number of vacant homes at the moment. The investor class owns a fuck load of housing that could be actually be used to ya know, house people. I’d bet If a large tax was placed on 2nd homes /income property, there’d be no supply shortage. So many people bought homes for AirBNB, and rent seeking in the last decade that in years past would be being bought by families. I know in my town they’ve been putting up high rise after high rise. Rent still goes up because of (imo) artificial scarcity. Landlords are using software to fix price on rent, banks intentionally trickle out foreclosures to not flood the market, companies with vacant units are not allowed to drop price of rent and keep pricing high because of financing agreements made when the building was built. Most of the luxury apartments that have been built are maybe 30% full. No one wants to live in a duplex/ triplex /multiplex. People want houses, and there are none because companies like Blackstone backed Invitation homes and Chinese companies/ citizens buy them all to rent seek.
The ripple effect from these rate hikes might help drop rents because a lot of commercial loans are ARMs, and when that rate adjusts, landlords are going to feel pain, but they may just pass it on to their tenants and make housing affordability even worse. We’ve allowed too many people to commodify what was once viewed as a necessity, and the single family home is now an investment vehicle for big business.
The real estate market as a whole feels like a giant game of hot potato at the moment. Something has got to give. The America of today is so much worse than the one I grew up in as a result of all the BS we’ve allowed the investor class to do. It needs to get reigned in somehow because imo the American dream is dead as a result.
A vacant home doesn’t mean affordable or accessible. Single family homes are stupidly inefficient and expensive or in middle of nowhere. Dense cities are the only solution.
there is a record number of vacant homes at the moment.
We’re currently close to the record for all time lowest vacancy rates. We’re at 6.3%. The highest (over the past 70 years) was in 2009, at 11.1%. It got down as far as 5% a few times. I downloaded the raw data and it says the average is 7.28%
There’s a popular image of a bunch of Scrooge McDucks sitting on giant inventories of housing but the evidence doesn’t support that. Someone saying, “I saw a bunch of empty houses.” is exactly as logical an argument as a climate denier saying, “It’s been cold all week.” That’s just an anecdote.
The data is very clear on the matter. We don’t have enough housing.
The core problem, which causes that shortage, is that we have conflicting views on what housing is for.
On one hand, we want housing to be a right. On the other hand we want our houses to be good investments.
Those are conflicting goals. We need to pick one and be ready to sacrifice the other.
If you want your house to be a good investment, it needs to appreciate in value at a rate higher than inflation. The only way for that to happen is if housing keeps getting more expensive on a real money basis. That’s a fancy way of saying that housing will be a bigger and bigger chunk of income.
Every single policy that reduces the cost of housing also degrades its effectiveness as an investment. If people can get housing any time they want, they have no incentive to pay somebody a bunch of money to someone hoping to fund their retirement by downsizing.
Your suggesting to legalize more housing will destroy the ability of homeowners to make a profit off their homes. Even though I stand to earn huge amounts of money from the appreciation of my own house I would support that, but I’m afraid I’m in the minority. The US has a 65.9% home ownership rate and for most people their home is their single biggest asset. If we address the housing shortage those people will all see their single biggest investment asset drop in value.
On the other hand we want our houses to be good investments.
I don’t.
I understand you’re speaking in general terms here but no, i think having housing being tied to investments at all is a terrible idea we’ve just normalized.
The flip side of course we’ve experienced, like 2008 when the market went sour, putting people out of home and destroying retirement funds
I don’t think it’s a good idea either but we live in a society that effectively decided that we do want houses to be investments decades ago. That’s entrenched now and many people bet their life savings on the promise that their house would be a good investment.
If we change that without taking those people into account they’re all screwed. While some rich people would get screwed in that process a whole lot of poor people would get screwed too.
I bought a house, not because I wanted an investment, but I wanted a place to live. Fuck the CCP, but man were they on the money saying “Houses are for living in,” their current, ironic, housing bubble aside. Houses are homes. You want an investment vehicle, buy stocks or bonds.
If the people who see housing as an investment are outweighed by the people who simply want an affordable home as a right, it’s become an unsustainable and unjust privilege and needs to be rectified.
Also, I think this ignores the larger factors of: poor zoning due to NIMBY-friendly policies at the local level, and corporate greed as companies, not people, buy up supply. Solve these two problems and we don’t have to pick between housing as a right and housing as an investment.
The problem with this plan is that it assumes that we’re only hurting some cigar puffing Wall Street fat cats but, in reality, the pain would be felt much more broadly.
Those super wealthy people that we’re happy to throw under the bus don’t have their wealth tied up in their homes. Their real estate investments tend to be small fractions of their portfolios. The ones that would get hit the hardest are the ones with less than $100k. I’m glad that you’re in a position where you can survive a large financial loss on your house but a lot of people don’t have that luxury.
Any plan that just kills their investments without some way to take care of those people will create a disaster. Maybe we could bump up Social Security somehow? That would involve significant tax increases but it could plug the gap.
Huge swaths of our economy are set up to assume that houses are financial assets. NIMBY policies are largely about maintaining or increasing the financial value of the real estate. The corporations buying up all the housing are kind of a red herring. The US has one of the highest owner occupancy rates in the world. There has been a slight (about 1.6%) in non-own occupied housing and only a fraction of those 1.6% are corporations. So it’s technically true that corporations hold more residential real estate but they hold so little of it that it’s unlikely to be a primary factor in home pricing or availability.
As I said elsewhere, the data is very clear on the matter. We don’t have a lot of empty housing inventory being horded by greedy investors. By any reasonable measure, we have a housing shortage.
As someone who worked on multi family property development for fifteen years–for the love of God, force the developers to build to a standard. Simply requiring that the landlords pay all utilities would go a long way toward this, since it would incentavise building a better structure.
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