Even down to a caveman level, the role of a strong man was to be the protector of the tribe/family. Using your strength to protect others is what makes a strong man.
Inflicting your insecurities on others and feeding your ego by attacking vulnerable people are the actions of a bully, not a strong man.
I like that Spanish has the word caudillo, which approximately means strongman and is not easily confused with anything else. It’s almost always applied to Latin American leaders (like Maduro) but it seems like exactly what Trump aspires to be.
What an absolutely fantastic example of “fuck around and find out.” Tell people to go fuck themselves, so they don’t want anything to do with you, and then you cry about it. It’s poetry.
Yes, since Musk fired his PR team in 2020, things have gone steadily downhill for him. That was probably one of his worst decisions, considering how successful his PR team was in falsly portraying him as a tech genius and progressive visionary. Well, now it is clear to everyone that this was never even remotely true.
Considering how monumentally douchey musk is… that team was probably among the best in the world. Hope whoever picked them up on the bounce is good to them. Or just good. We don’t need another musk.
I wonder if he fired them because they weren’t able to recover his image after that pedophile tweet on 2018. That’s when I realized that giving him the benefit of the doubt might be a mistake. A public temper tantrum like that didn’t just show that he wasn’t any better than other billionaires, it showed he was likely worse because most of them don’t let tirades like that show from behind closed doors, if they need them at all.
I think he fired his PR team because the image they had built up for him had gone to his head. Then there was the financial success that came with it. He probably believed that he really is a genius who is not dependent on anyone but himself - he is obviously still convinced of this abstruse idea. Yet it has always been the case that Musk was the biggest problem for his companies. It really is a PR masterstroke to hide the fact that he is actually rather incompetent for so long. This man lives exclusively from the achievements of others. This is proven by the fact that he reached a settlement with the actual founders of Tesla to allow him to call himself a Tesla co-founder - which he is not. In my eyes, Musk is the personification of the most fundamental problem that our society has: He merely takes credit for the hard work and remarkable expertise of his employees in order to present all of this to the public as the achievement of a supposedly exceptional person. This is how people like Musk and Trump, for example, see themselves. However, their miserable decisions show that they are nothing of the sort. Hubris is the term psychology uses for such inaccurate overestimation of oneself.
I hope all these sources get on the same page soon because I have some old head friends who read all this stuff and believe he was a Chinese national working for the Iranians, set up next to snipers in a building cleared by locals. They say he was then confronted after he climbed a ladder but before he bear-crawled 25 feet to aim, only to be interrupted by local cops forcing him to fire quickly but was killed by snipers who had been watching him use a range finder for hours.
Please get it together, all these 50-year-old conspiracy theorists are going to start having heart attacks lol.
Also because the heart attacks of god fearing republicans was the goal all along! The Democrats, in concert with George Soros, devised this plan in 2020. By fixing the vote, it radicalized the Trump loving shooter setting up the situation for the shooter to be the cause of the heart attacks. Its an elaborate multi-pronged plan years in the making that is only now coming to fruition…and these liburls think good republicans are stupid enough to fall for it. Pizzagate!11!1!!! /s
Oh now there old friend, I wasn’t making a generalization as to a whole ass generation. I am sure I could commiserate with you as to the fuckery boomers have shit down our backs since they traded in free love for free hate but I try real hard not to drag ass on a bitch after 5pm if you get my meaning.
Regardless, more than 5 million still alive are in nursing homes and too ill to manage to vote. 11% of the 65 and over bunch have dementia. The majority of those people won’t vote.
I’d suggest reading the article. It gives the play by play of how the events occurred. I think you’re reading headlines and then constructing your own picture of what happened.
Bless your heart, I read it right before I posted. Thank you kindly for the advice though.
At some point, everything I wrote was in an article just like this one, only citing “sources in (insert official entity here)” and always starting with “sources say.” Well, except for the Iranian one, that one was a separate incident but a buddy of mine mentioned it right before I read the post so I added it.
It isn’t though. There is maybe a 0.01% chance that this was a false flag.
I know what’s happening is hard to swallow, and the ramifications are deeply troubling, but try not to succumb to baseless conspiracy theories.
There’s plenty of motive. An attendee was killed. The shooter was killed by Secret Service. There’s not really a reason to think this didn’t actually happen, except for cognitive dissonance.
Your point is that you think you’re allowed to spread misinformation if that misinformation sounds like it maybe could be true. This is the rationale of every conspiracy theorist ever. You’re not making an intellectually honest point here.
If your point is that you’re a dishonest person who cares more about narrative than facts, point received.
I think being unsure either way makes perfect sense. You gotta admit it doesn’t really line up with Trump’s character to be posing for the cameras if he’s actually being shot at. Though tou’re not wrong to say, that that isn’t proof of anything. It’s subjective feeling.
But, I think saying it’s entirely unlikely this was orchestrated isn’t right either.
Well, a conspiracy requires evidence, and without evidence there’s no reason to treat the conspiracy theory as credible.
Saying 0% would be unrealistic because there’s always a chance, but if you actually believe that this is a 50/50 toss-up, you’re just delusional and desperate to feel some sense of enlightenment like every other conspiracy theories moron in the world.
Given that there is precisely zero evidence of what you are claiming, I’ll estimate as close to zero as I can without pretending it’s impossible.
But make no mistake, you are deliberately spreading disinformation.
I’m not claiming anything. It’s just really, really early after the event.
My choice of words was not ideal, and I apologize for that.
I’m just saying being unsure of what happened isn’t crazy so soon after the event.
You’re out here saying what is and is not likely based on your own feelings about what you feel is true.
It’s simply too early to say anything definitive about what level of conspiracy existed (in the traditional sense, of more than one person, conspiring).
I am not saying this was staged. I’m saying you’re jumping the gun, to say so confidently it wasn’t.
Q-Anon level thinking that somehow Trump is a mastermind of this. The dude who can’t hide stolen files properly, can’t lie on his taxes properly, and loses money on a casino, somehow has the ability to rig a false flag assassination attempt.
Are NeoLibs that so far into the Kool-Aid that Dipshit Trump is also a grandmaster 5D chess player of this, while not being able to string words together? It’s not like he’s even been a good actor.
It’s fun to indulge in, and it doesn’t change the fact that shit is about to hit the fan, regardless of whether the shooter was someone with a legitimate desire or a paid gunman. Trump was just given and used a golden ticket to both rally republicans to vote for him, and to incite his diehard followers into another insurrection.
Sure, but I don’t think being an ironic conspiracy theorist on the levels of Q-Anon is going to make anyone seem better.
Trump was already going to do that. Trump would do it if someone sneezed on him. They already considered him a martyr. They already wanted/have an Enabling Act. The only thing this changes is a bit less blood in him, and 3 people died. Trump already had higher polling numbers.
It won’t make anyone here seem better, I agree. But at the same time, it’s not like we’re going to have the opportunity to joke around like this after the inevitable happens.
You are comparing faking an assassination attempt, which has been done before in history already, vs a bunch of idiots believing JFK is going to revive in the middle of the street just because.
You must be a republican bot trying to divert that possibility or something, it’s wild if you’re an actual person with this 0 creativity in mind
Faking an assassination attempt doesn’t take more than 2 braincells to pull, and he most likely didn’t come up with the idea himself either.
You have to be a bot to believe no human being or person in power has pulled dumb shows like these to fake an illusion of strength, it’s incredible how gullible you are
"All right ear me big sniper guy, it’s going to be an attempted assassination, the biggest ever, you are going to shoot me close, like danger close but don’t worry I’m the best president, really I’m the best and you are the best sniper, the best sniper in the whole country. So you shoot me near the ear, near enough that blood comes out, I know scary stuff, but we are tough guys, the toughest so you do it and I resist and together we make the best attempted staged assassination ever"
“blue maga” implies that there is a cult of personality around Biden like there is around Trump. That is simple not what anyone opposed to Trump believes in or rallies around.
You mean the primarys for this election that Biden is the sitting president? Or primarys four years ago when he was the guy pushed immediately to the top before the primarys?
Are you really comparing this being possibly staged, which is very easy to do and many other presidents around the world have done it before already to “show strength”, as an equal to a bunch of maggots who believed JFK was going to revive in the middle of the street? What?
You are mocking democrats for believing a conspiracy theory that says this shooting was most likely staged.
You are putting that conspiracy theory on the same level as any Qanon theory, like the one where people believed JFK was going to resurrect in the middle of the street for no reason at all.
How the hell do those two even compare in your world?
How? What did you mean then, by democrats falling for “stupid conspiracy theories”? Which theories? And how are they more stupid than being antivax, anti face mask, believing the earth is flat, believing JFK will resurrect and go to the place to camp for hours waiting for it, the whole elites drinking adrenochrome dumbshit and such?
Elections were meant to be bloodless revolutions. Unfortunately with First Past The Post voting, the right options were not available to vote for. But we can change how we vote. We can make peaceful revolution possible with a more representative electoral system.
What’s worse is that the MAGA crowd has Trump and some other figures intentionally playing conspiracies up and adding weight to them. The guys on the left don’t even have the excuse of Biden and company bullshitting.
But why would you even think that people on the left are different from people on the right? This is why I’m not into politics myself. Because it all builds on some fake idea that one side is right about everything, even good people, while the other is wrong about everything, and probably are bad people as well.
In reality, both sides are very similar and have much more incommon with eachother than they have with the politicians they are trying to support.
My understanding is that on average there are differences in psychology between conservative and progressive people. For example, conservative people tend to be okay with unfairness, since from their point of view society is a hierarchy and of course the people at the top are better off.
Anyway, given that conservative and progressive people have a different vision of an ideal society and also different ideas about how to get there, it is reasonable to expect them at act differently. We know that most politically motivated violence is from the right.
I’m sure conservatives have the same views on the other side, something negative, based in fear. If you think about it, all of politics is fear of change in a direction we don’t want, but others do.
In a family when this happens, family members talk about it and try to understand eachother. At least in a good family. In a dysfunctional one, family members go to war with eachother. And that’s what I see in politics. There is no feeling of being humans on a ball together at all.
Why aren’t these guys in jail? Seriously. I mean, I know the theory of the rule of law and all, but even our widely-acclaimed greatest president suspended habeas corpus when insurgent seditionists tried to overthrow the Union.
it’s still unfathomable that trump was “allowed” (I know it was “legal”, don’t point that out) to pardon his literal partners-in-crime. He basically has already self-pardoned himself by proxy by allowing these traitors to walk free.
The only restrictions on presidential pardons are on convicted impeachment and the requirement that it must be a federal crime. Yes, Trump can even pardon himself from the federal documents, insurrection, and election fraud cases if he takes office again.
We messed up when we allowed Ford’s pardon of Nixon before he was convicted. We should only allow pardons after the person was convicted. That created all kinds of paradoxes:
creating a blanket pardon "from any crime that we don’t know yet about"
possible pocket pardon, where a president could pardon themselves secretly
hiring thugs on president benefit and giving pardon right before leaving office. They know they can do anything and will receive a blanket pardon. If president had to wait for conviction then there was no guarantee he would be there to pardon them. So it would make whole escapade more risky
total immunity which trump is arguing about would be even less likely if there was no blanket and pocket pardon and he had to wait until being convicted before being able to be pardoned
I’m not sure if I’m joking. In any case, the writ of habeas corpus is the legal tool that a court can theoretically use to compel the appearance of a prisoner before it. It is the legal doctrine that underlies the right to trial, and I say “theoretically” because courts rarely need to issue one; it’s just standard procedure to bring people to court to face charges.
By suspending it, Abraham Lincoln could detain those people he deemed dangerous seditionists indefinitely, because the detainees would have to go to court to challenge their detention, and there was no way to get to court. The effect of suspending it again is that it wouldn’t matter that Baboon (autocorrect and I’m leaving it) and Stone were pardoned, or that there were even criminal charges.
Lincoln did it, George W. Bush did it. Barack Obama did it. The Constitution contains a clause which allows it to be suspended due to rebellion or threats to public safety. It’s a dangerous thing to allow a president to do, but the MAGA danger might be greater.
Worth noting that, historically speaking, if a state official wanted to punish someone without going through the court system he could always just turn the prisoner over to a lynch mob.
So while suspending habeaus corpus is a danger to democracy, it is not a singular method by which mayors, governors, or Presidents have disposed of political opponents.
Emergency powers are in most constitutions because people generally understand that during war things have to operate a little differently. You can’t allow the enemy, who is attacking you physically, to go and publish propaganda that attacks you rhetorically and turns the populace’s loyalty towards the other side. The problem we have now is the constant use of emergency powers. That needs to be shut down. Emergency powers should be limited to a certain timeframe, and reviewed by congress after that. Not these multi decade states of emergency.
As in my other reply, the Constitution allows the suspension of habeas corpus in cases of rebellion or threats to public safety, and without that writ, charges and sentences are irrelevant.
The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution contains a right to habeas corpus in Boumedine v. Bush. The Lincoln thing was never fully litigated and was probably unconstitutional.
Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that established the principle of judicial review, meaning that American courts have the power to strike down laws and statutes they find to violate the Constitution of the United States. Decided in 1803, Marbury is regarded as the single most important decision in American constitutional law.
Throughout human history, laws have never stopped conservatism. Jails have never stopped conservatism. Pacifism has never stopped conservatism. Only force has ever stopped conservatism. Only force.
Tankies are literal authoritarians. People say they’re “authoritarian communists,” which ignores they’re mostly Maoists or Stalinists, both of whom were closer to fascism than the left. It sort of ignores the basic premise of communism or even socialism to have a single authoritarian ruler. Kind of like how the Nazis called themselves socialists. I guess they were a workers’ party to start, but I don’t think you can reasonably conflate their ideology with the tenets of socialism.
The Nazis only used the label socialists to deceive the working class. They said so plenty of times when meeting with the industrialists whose bidding they were doing. They never were a workers party and they knew that it was only in name to be more palatable. This deception now has been replaced with “owning the libs” and whatever the local version of neoliberal, conservative or fascist ideology you have around the world.
No, you don’t understand. The problem is that those people haven’t had enough time to bring upon real communism. Real communism hasn’t been reached yet. They want to let the Maos and Stalins of the world have enough time to reach communism. Things will surely be different with the next guy.
If you’re upset about being called a tankie, you could cross-reference what you are urging people to do with what the Republican party wants people to do. And then stop that.
In general I would recommend being antifascist in a way that isn’t the exact same actions as overt fascism with the only difference being the rhetoric justifying the actions.
Fuck if I know. You’re whining about being called a tankie. I can explain why that happens in general. You’ll have to figure the rest out on your own. Maybe if you do some reading and educate yourself you can get there.
Tankie is the pro-authoritarian left. The Stalinists essentially. The ones who think it’s appropriate to send in the tanks to quell a socialist or communist uprising because it has a tint of democracy in it, which may cause their strong leader to lose dictatorial power.
Tankies these days are conservatives wrapped in an authoritarian shell. Instead of just being supportive of their own authoritarian government they try to destabilize other governments for their gain.
Roger Stone’s been to jail a number of times. He really doesn’t care because he knows he’ll get pardoned. Also he’s basically a mafia don, so I imagine he gets a lot of respect in prison from republicans.
In what capacity does he resemble the mafia? He’s a snake. These guys want to desperately be associated with the mafia but they’re just con men. The Mafia were intelligent criminals.
Everyone needs to remember this guy shaking hands with world leaders during his years in office. In every single picture he is smiling like a pig in shit. It is only after the indictment photo he is attempting to rebrand himself as some sort of tough guy criminal instead of a slimy, smug con artist.
I have a real problem with this, and I’ve been on both sides of it. It really doesn’t do anything to help your cause by having people stuck in traffic. There are many reasons that someone could be in their car at that moment, not just commuting to or from a job. They could be on their way to a court appointment, they could have dinner in the car, they could be going to pick their child up from school, they could be on their way to a doctor’s appointment, or any of a million other reasons that make this not just an inconvenience, but a complete shithead thing for someone to put someone else through. Protestors aren’t making their case against the war by pissing off every person stuck in traffic, they are just being dickheads. If you want to protest a war, go hang out outside of a government building, or in front of an elected official’s house. Make them feel uncomfortable, not some poor schmuck who has somewhere else to be at the moment.
Edit: Ok, I guess I need to give a peaceful example. You want to block traffic? Block the exits to the parking garage where the elected officials park downtown. Do that for a week and see how much of an impact you make. Blocking commuters is a waste of energy.
I fully support the cause, but this just ain’t the way to effectively protest the system. I feel the same way about the climate activists throwing soup on art instalation (yes I know they are all protected, but to the average person you still look like an ignorant fucking asshole).
If you want to spur change, then you need to make it uncomfortable for your representatives to take a public position than conflicts with your ethics. Do so peacefully, but forcefully and as often as is feasible. You are much more likely to garner public support that way, and normies generally love anything that make politicians look bad.
As a way to garner media exposure, sure. But not as a way to galvanize public support, which is what actually matters unless you are just interested in performative virtue signaling.
Also love the protests interrupting plays. Meet complacent liberals at their stomping grounds.
You seem like you care more about generalizing people, and antagonizing them than actually changing their minds. So, thank you for further reinforcing OP’s initial point I guess…
Another way of saying bullying. There is a reason why the protestors aren’t blocking Sturgis.
Every bully is smart enough to punch down. So they go to places full of people who basically agree with them and wreck their day instead of doing the hard thing and dealing with people who don’t agree with them. You think you are being clever but it is just being cowardly.
Yeah, I kinda thought that the backlash to those ones was mostly from people who weren’t going to give a fuck anyways. If throwing soup on the glass that protects the mona lisa, or interrupting a play, is higher on tje chopping block than the actual issue at hand, then that’s not the kind of person that was generally going to help anyways. Didn’t understand the scale of the problem, might have agreed with you in principle or in spirit but realistically was going to do jack shit all to advance your cause, etc. Oh no! Whatever will they do next? Walk around naked? Put hot sauce packets underneath the toilet seats of city hall? Anybody seriously outraged at what is basically just some light politically-motivated ribbing needs their priorities rearranged, because shit is going to/needs to change much more for, you know, change to occur.
Yup, exactly. If you’re more pissed off at your play being disrupted than you are at an ongoing genocide, your priorities are fucked and you deserve to be inconvenienced until you finally come to Jesus (metaphorically) and take action. The people going to art museums and plays, drivers coming from Marin county … these people generally are from a high socioeconomic class and absolutely have power to speak up and make change.
Why peacefully? Just today the IDF attacked a playground with an airstrike killing a group of children playing in broad daylight. It would be unbelievable if there wasn’t clear footage of it and numerous similar attacks. US supplied weapons, funded by our taxes, cheered on by our political establishment. Stopping traffic isn’t going nearly far enough.
Not sure if you are agreeing with me or not, but that is exactly what I’m saying. Right now, blocking traffic is about as easy for the “king” to ignore as anything else.
peasant (n.): a poor farmer of low social status who owns or rents a small piece of land for cultivation (chiefly in historical use or with reference to subsistence farming in poorer countries).
I’d assume they just aren’t familiar with how you’re using it
That’s a personal problem. The demographics and political power of Marin county residents are public knowledge. I live/work in Marin county and the vast majority of residents are extremely wealthy. There are exceptions, but, as one of those exceptions, I can understand why they are blocking the golden gate bridge and won’t get pissy at a group of people who have made national news with their courageous protest against genocide.
They arnt the ruling class, they are peasants and you are just angry at someone with a different outlook at you, assigning them ruling class because they dont have the exact same problems you do. this is exactly what they want you to do, attack and hate on your countrymen instead of the ruling class.
Yes, look at the demographics. it is not senators and billionaires, just because these people are better off than you are I does not make them the enemy. This is the entire gameplan, you hating on people who make more than you instead of the people who are in control.
They are billionaires and multimillionaires, owners of huge corporations. It’s one of the wealthiest counties in one of the wealthiest states. Not sure if any in particular are senators, but there are powerful people.
I don’t think the goal is to convince the people stuck in the artificially created traffic about Gaza. I think it’s to get news coverage from sites like nbcnews.com so as to raise the profile of the Gaza war so that politicians must address it. You are welcome to argue whether that’s an effective strategy, but I think that’s the intent.
Also, side note… Social progress rarely comes from rule following.
Is the profile not high enough? I’m pretty sure everyone knows about it who needs to know about it. Blocking traffic isn’t going to make a ceasefire happen across the world. Annoying your fellow citizens and ruining their day isn’t getting any politicians to act. It’s pointless. Actions must be taken against those in charge if we want to see any forward progress. Blocking traffic to protest a war is like yelling at a frycook because you want the McRib back. The actions are being aimed at the wrong people.
counterpoint: the people who would enact this change are far beyond our reach as citizens so there is no way to target them with effective protests.
Besides, some of the best way to affect policy is to A. Cost large businesses money or B. To cause general unrest over an issue. Both of these things will piss your fellow American off but this is how protests work nowadays.
I think most protestors don’t want to block cars of normal people or throw paint onto paintings or whatever. But they have to because if you look at the laws, organized protest has no bite anymore. Go ahead, annoy the politicians, they’ll just arrest your outside of their house and no one will hear about your issue.
That’s the problem. No one is actually doing anything worthwhile. You are right, standing outside the mayors house will get you arrested. Do it anyway. Get arrested. You want to make big moves for your cause, do something worth being arrested over. Imagine if all of those people on the bridge yesterday had been blocking traffic to the mayors neighborhood instead. What are they gonna do, arrest a thousand people in a suburb street? That’s a fucking news story. Blocking a bridge is bullshit, it carries no weight because there is nothing on the line. Congrats, you fucked up a half million people’s day, I guess someone should call the genocide off, now.
What do you mean it carries no weight? That was my entire point. Make the public mad, the angry public starts yelling at the mayor. The business owners whose workers can’t get to the office start getting rather upset. Whereas if a minority inconvenience a politician, cool, but they don’t care. They will just find ways to avoid it. And in this case, you don’t have access to politicians that hold weight in regard to Gaza.
Go ahead, egg your senators house, they don’t live there most of the time. Threaten to vote them out, they run unopposed. The ways in which to express political efforts is now so narrow that stuff like blocking a bridge has become almost inevitable.
They won’t do that because they can and will get an armed response from three-letter agencies and LEOs. It’s the same reason these absolute clowns never protest where the weapons are made and shipped from, they’ll get beaten and shot, and they know it, so instead they harass everyone else.
Seriously! Protesting has never accomplished anything ever and is totally useless unless it’s done explicitly for politicians that are totally receptive and eager to assist their constituents!
It’s about the public discourse. If an issue (e.g. the U.S. giving Israel weapons and enabling their war) disappears from the headlines, it’s much easier for politicians to ignore it. But if the issue keeps coming up, politicians feel pressure to act–or they risk getting voted out of office. Especially during an election year.
I feel bad for the people in traffic but the protestors only get to this state because of repeatedly being ignored by the government. If normal protests aren’t cutting it anymore and you don’t want to be violent then what options do you really have? They (gov) just don’t listen.
Protest where it is effective, not where it gets you the most social media clout. Blocking traffic is the protesting equivalent of a selfie. Make some noise near an elected official, and often. See how quickly they change their attitude when they are the ones being fucked with.
I would love to know what Universe you live in where quiet polite demos in out of the way places get reported on the news and come to the attention of all the other 334,912,895 people in the US that didn’t see it personally.
Oh, you’re right. I forgot the real point of protesting. I’ve been living my life thinking it’s a public demonstration designed to let those in power know you are dissatisfied with how things are happening. Now I understand, though. It’s performance art for the last stay at home mom in Michigan who hasn’t heard about the war. We gotta get her to stop making that mayonnaise salad and start an aluminum drive for the war effort. Thanks for clearing it up. If I ever have a problem with anything in the future I’ll know not to go to the person in charge, I’ll just run into traffic and shake my ass at onlookers until the world changes for me. That’s gonna make things a lot easier from here on out.
Because only somebody born yesterday would believe those in power in a trully Democratic nation (much less America, which is a Power Duopoly system, not a genuine Democracy) would care in any way form or shape with the concerns expressed by a few thousand people demonstrating politelly in an out of way place where their polite “expression of concern” did not even made the News.
If you’re lucky (in the US, you have to be very, very, VERY lucky), they might care about not losing the votes needed to keep on being elected, which in a country of more than 300 million people means caring about Public Opinion, not about politelly expressed concerns of a few thousand demonstrators that the rest of Americans aren’t even aware off and who clearly if their concerns aren’t addressed won’t do anything more than politelly demonstrate in a way that the politicians can carry on safelly ignoring forever.
Are you even old enough to understand that mere Passive Agressiveness doesn’t actually work as a means to get your way with people who have way more power than you do and don’t know you well enough to empathise with your (or who are just sociopaths, so wouldn’t care even if they did know you)?!
It’s quite extraordinary how when it comes to Politics in America there is this abundance of brainwashed unthinking drones spreading the idea that the only way to improve America is to keep on pulling your pants down and saying “Give it to me big boy!” whenever an American politician does something people disagree with, or maybe bark loudly but never bite, just like puny dogs like chiwuawas do.
Are you even old enough to understand that mere Passive Agressiveness doesn’t actually work as a means to get your way with people who have way more power than you do and don’t know you well enough to empathise with your (or who are just sociopaths, so wouldn’t care even if they did know you)?!
you definitely arnt old enough to know that it actually has gotten results. Worldwide. Mahatma Gandhi? segregation sit ins? white feather movement of the UK? and these are only off the top of my head.
Its quite extraordinary how when it comes to Politics in America, there is this abundance of brainwashed unthinking drones spreading the idea that the only way to improve America is to keep on dragging down others and saying “Why arnt you fixing this for me?” whenever an American politician does something people disagree with, or maybe bark loudly but never bite, just like puny dogs like chihuahuas***** do.
lol, Revolution. good job moving goal posts. apparently blocking traffic is now the first step to a violent overthrow of the sitting government.
Sure, tell me all about Gandhi and how he drug down those around him like a crab in a bucket, i’ll read your sources since you thats your cherry picking.
You should read some history and stop acting so juvenile. Peaceful non disruptive protests never accomplished shit. People died for women’s right to vote, they died for civil rights, and they died for the five day work week. A one day shutdown of a bridge is fucking nothing compared to what went down with those movements.
This is democracy at work. Liberals are all the same, pro-democracy until it gets in their way or upsets them. You don’t change power structures by asking politely.
Find an elected official. Follow them to where they are meeting their mistress for a meal before heading to a hotel to fuck. Call the boys. Protest outside of the restaurant so the news is sure to catch the congressman running around on his wife. Make it inconvenient to be a lawmaker. Is that specific enough for you?
These clowns didn’t even try a normal protest at city hall or to bother the government, the first thing they did was screw up the days of working class citizens, as usual, because they only ever take the easy way and not the way that involves any personal risk.
It’s not going to get the government to listen by doing this either. It’s completely ineffective and just pisses people off and actively stops them from supporting a cause.
Yeah. I saw some of the posts across Lemmy trying to organize this.
There it was presented as blocking shipping ports. I thought that was odd. Wasn’t sure how that was going to affect Israel, but whatever.
Then the day comes and they’re doing this low effort reposting-of-a-meme-everyone-has-seen-already version of protest and I just rolled my eyes.
“Innocent people are being murdered in Palestine, so I’m going to go prevent someone that also hates what is happening from visiting their dying grandmother! That’ll show 'em!”
Cool story bro!! So cool that the anti-protestor commenter is actually probably some amazing anti-genocide-in-gaza activist!!! I’m sure they have made national news with their protests!
I’m out here supporting and sharing the actions of people doing protesting the ongoing genocide, not putting them down like you. Not pretending I could do something better. I think they did a great job.
Educate yourself on what’s happening! Israel has concentration camps and they are routinely amputating the prisoners due to shackling-related injuries.
Protesters were blocking ships that were sending weapons to Israel.
Link? Because that would be a high quality protest I could get behind.
That’s not what the posted article is about, though. The posted article Is about protesters just blocking traffic. That’s what I was commenting on.
Any small group of dingbats can block traffic for a while. What they never seem to understand is that this kind of low effort protest doesn’t help their cause.
When you’re disproportionately affecting innocent people, many of whom may actually agree with your broader message, all you do is piss people off.
Blocking innocent people from getting where they’re going to protest something they had nothing to do with is just a kinder gentler version of bombing an apartment building and killing innocent people just because some militants are allegedly also in the building. They’re both great ways to convince people that you’re a shitty human being, but that’s about it.
This comment is so meta. You’re literally engaging in the conversation about it right now. This means it worked… How does no one understand this? The fact of the matter is it makes the issue relevant so that it shows up on people’s screens and they’re forced to confront the issue and debate the protest and it becomes topical. No one wants to be stuck in traffic. I sympathize with those who were affected. But I’ll give you one guess who I sympathize with more right now.
The objective is to appear in the News, which will result in way more people becoming aware of just how many people are against what Israel is doing in Gaza and the US Administration’s support of it, which in turn will lead others to become more open about they themselves being against it since they will feel that “we are many” rather than “it’s just me” - grassroots movements independent of established politicial and media networks, no matter how many potential supporters they have, must be seen in order to grow otherwise they’ll just fizzle away and nothing will change.
That usually means some kind of stunt in an important and highly public place which is almost certain to affect lots of members of the public.
Barelly disturbing a handful of politicians as you suggest would not make the News unless the Press was already there for some other reason and it would still have to be some kind of stunt (think the Iraqi guy that threw his shoe at George Bush) for the Press to even mention it in the news.
Unfortunatelly in the World we live in people have to use marketing strategies to merelly be seen, more so to have soap box to be heard by the rest of the nation, especially in Theatre Of Democracy countries were the “choice” is either pre-selected A or pre-selected B, and were the Press is not at all a Pillar Of Democracy independent of the Political Pillar but is pretty much joined at the hip with Political and/or Wealth Powers.
If it had the kind of Political and Press environment were those things could just be done the way you naivelly (or maybe misleadingly) suggest, the US would be quite a different place in terms of Power, Voice and Representativeness and not one where the only electoral “choice” is between two genocide-loving presidential candidates.
The proposal states that in each city, we will identify and blockade major choke points in the economy, focusing on points of production and circulation with the aim of causing the most economic impact, as did the port shutdowns in recent months in Oakland, California and Melbourne, Australia, as just a few examples.
Hurting the rich’s pocket books is the only language they respect. Now I’m not sure blocking roads is the most effective form of this tactic. Usually you use labor unions. But they’re probably just working with what they have.
Media attention is a consequence of success that activists mistake for success itself. If you start seeking it out you’ll get caught in the trap of trying to control how the networks present you when you can’t control the networks at all. Pretty soon you’re doing useless shit like trying to levitate the Pentagon. Or worse, volunteering to get arrested en-masse.
Those poor schmucks also have a voice and have political power. And you can’t deny the optics of the Golden Gate Bridge being closed, it’s an iconic throughway. I’m not sure if there are any instantly recognizable parking garages.
So, some single mother in the Midwest is now going to do something about Gaza now? That’s what we needed? Optics? Fuck. We should put up some billboards along the interstate next, that’ll bring all this kids back from the dead
You all are missing then ENTIRE FUCKING POINT of a protest. It isn’t to block traffic, it’s to force action to be taken where none is, and no one capable of taking that action gives two squirts of chipotle if some people stood on a bridge yesterday. Fuck with the establishment, make some cunt in his comfortable office sweat.
If you knew anything about the SF Bay area, you would understand who this protest is targeting. Those people absolutely have power to influence change.
I actually wrote a very long reply to this, but then I checked your comment history, and I thought I’d be more supportive.
Look, one day, everything is going to change. Maybe not all in one day but it’ll be quick. Something will happen, and you’ll have to re-evaluate the way you look at the world. When that happens, take three deep breaths. Hold them. Eventually you’ll pass out, and you’ll be doing everyone around you a favor by not talking for however long you are unconscious for. Hopefully you’ll drop your phone and it’ll break, and you can take a break from social media, too.
Ahh yes, I believe the old saying goes something like, “Always take the moral high ground, no matter how many people you have to step on to get there.”
Pretty much yes? If you were in Nazi Germany you’d have to step on a lot of complacent liberals to stay morally conscious. Same thing going on here, with you.
The comparison is apt due to the ongoing genocide. He is the one saying that a stance against genocide is some sort of unwanted moral high ground. Not sure how being committed to morality is a bad thing.
Completely agree. Blocking the average Joe driving home will get attention, but potentially for the wrong reason. I think your edit is perfect. Inconvenience those in power that can do something about it now, not someone who can really only do something when voting.
I’m also funding public roads and schools and cancer research and fire departments. If you care that much, go to DC and protest. They obviously are able to take time off of work as it is.
I dunno I mean I would normally oppose this on principle, but I do kind of agree. This does stop all local traffic at the golden gate bridge, but it doesn’t really do anything to incentivize that politicians controlling the funding of israel at (mostly) the federal level to change course. Unless we maybe saw floyd-level protests happening across the nation, or something. This specific kind of protest is most effective when addressing local or state level problems, because local or state level leaders are more easily strongarmed, especially as they’re about to pass bad legislation. The threat of further property damage can be used as leverage which can influence local decisions. Local protests are better used against local targets, and target selection is crucial, basically, though that applies more to mass protests, this seems more like a smaller group.
It probably would’ve been better to go after a lockheed martin facility, or something to that effect, but obviously that comes with a much, much greater deal of risk. Probably the softest points to push on would be something like a higher-up, or the infrastructure going into and immediately around a facility, especially with such a small group. It’s not as though the locations of weapons manufacturers aren’t publically known, or accessible, or that there aren’t many different, small, critical pieces, including people, that go into the manufacture of advanced weaponry.
a pro-Donald Trump chant broke out during a fire department ceremony last week
Donald Trump was on TV bragging about “owning the tallest building in downtown Manhattan now” while 343 of your colleagues were lying dead under the rubble of the twin towers on the morning of 9/11. He does not give a single shit about any of you.
I doubt most of those ones chanting were even there or were more than children when this all happened. They never got to feel the pain, but they’ve enjoyed the hero worship that NY put on firefighters after 9/11.
There’s no pattern of firefighters getting away with shooting anyone. Hell, even with the police having that pattern, it took a long-ass time for them to lose their “hero” status.
Far as I know it's just the one song by Vincent E.L. And it's, uh, not serious. But kinda fun.
Fuck the fire department
Dropping by unannounced just to fry your apartment
If they can't find a fire they’re like "Why don't we start them?"
I'm tired of arson
Fuck the fire department
I cry out in bargaining, eyes to the garden
Begging release from the fire department
I might get a pardon if I do what they ask of me
Act passively
And don't do anything drastically
Clap at their pageantry, bow and scrape
Say it's sour grapes from people out of shape
You're here for our sake
And we're grateful for all you do
You're still gonna burn my house down, aren't you?
I'm out of house, home, and every single possession
Out of the frying pan and into depression
Escaped physical aggression
Into fiscal oppression
Still don't know what they meant by
"Let this be a lesson!"
We're living in an infernocracy
Things are not how we
Think they ought to be
It's a mockery but I ain't laughing
My world's on fire and I'm dying gasping
Trump was a Democrat back then, but his personality has never changed. As you said, he does not give a shit about anyone. Left or right politics, it’s just who he is.
Trump has never “been” anything. He appears as what he thinks benefits him the most. He wanted to rub elbows with the city’s elite, and that meant pretending to be a Democrat.
ETA: I’m not saying that he’s always been a Republican either. His entire existence is a self-serving sham. He is and always has been a Trumper. Citation: His current hijacking of the RNC to pilfer their funds and line his own pockets.
The last time USA had extended deflation, the Great Depression happened. When people stop consuming, retailers fire their workers. Then fewer people can consume, so more people get fired. This goes on enough, then its not just stores who fire workers, but it trickles to factories, R&D, office workers, etc. etc. The longer deflation happens, the further it spreads and the more people lose their jobs.
Ever since the Great Depression happened, US Policy has been strongly anti-deflation. Our policy is to “err” on the side of slight inflation.
Prices drop, causing more people to get fired. IE: The Great Depression. Or if you want a modern economy that’s undergoing this shift, just look at China right now.
If people can’t afford things, your only choice is to fire workers and drop prices further. That’s just economics. (Why do you need workers? No one is buying anything, so fire your workers. Duh). The more people realize that this is the only strategy to survive, the lower prices get, the more people get fired, and the less that people can consume. It gets worse and worse until economists change policy and pull you out of this.
This is why we have large pseudo-government central banks keeping watch over our economy. Deflation cannot be tolerated. Yes, inflation sucks, but at least people still have jobs and livelyhoods in times of inflation or hyperinflation even. That’s actually survivable. Deflation is NOT survivable, it sucks so much worse. Deflation is all-hands-on-deck we need to work together kind of situation. We never want to push the economy to that direction.
China isn’t doomed btw. China’s plan is to exports goods to Europe and hope that Europe buys enough Chinese crap that they can kickstart demand again. And as prices drop further and further, Chinese goods will get cheaper, and crap like Temu will pop up to sell these cheaper goods to everyone. Now there’s geopolitical repercussions to this (not everyone will want to support such “dumping” of goods into our countries), so there’s no guarantee that China will be successful on this front.
Oh, so in times of deflation you want minimum wages to drop automatically? Deflation is “negative inflation”. I’m talking about the inverse scenario compared to what you’re talking about. Sorry, that sounds like a terrible idea.
And unfortunately for your argument… despite the high amount of inflation in 2022 and 2023, consuming rose dramatically. Or did you forget how ridiculously overpriced everything got, all those shoes / collectables people bought and the stock market skyrocketing as too much money was flooding the markets?
That’s called an “overheated economy”, too many people did too well during the times of inflation. That’s… kind of the problem. Inflation happens when lots of people make more money.
IE: Emperically speaking, we can just look at the results of the last ~3 years of the USA’s economy. Consuming went up with inflation, just as expected. There’s no need to “encourage” consuming during inflationary bubbles.
In fact, what got inflation under control was the huge amounts of +Interest Rates encouraged by the FFR. Did you not notice the dramatically higher credit card rates that are cutting into people’s budgets? That’s almost by design, increasing the FFR increases all loan costs (house mortgages, credit card bills, and car loans). That’s how we fix inflation, by kind of destroying money / taking money away from people.
We should have increased taxes instead IMO, so that our budget could have been managed better. But whatever, inflationary-bubbles are caused by over-consumption. The goal when inflation/hyperinflation is occurring is to cut back on consuming, and you discourage that by doing policies that are deflationary in nature.
IE: The Fed is currently slamming on the brakes (ie: doing policies that risk a deflation right now), to cut back on the chances of inflation. That’s why retailers are scared, they’re worried that the Fed is pumping the brakes too hard / increasing interest rates too much right now.
One issue with raising taxes as a tactic for slowing money supply growth is that it is not very agile. Once inflation gets back under control, Congress is not automatically going to lower the tax rate. I do agree that we should raise taxes but that’s more for four the budget deficit and the high wealth inequality.
So should wages for poor people ever go up, in your opinion?
What’s your opinion on legislation that would tie wages to their ROI for the business?
Edit: Why not force large corporations to pay their CEOs less so they can raise wages for their employees while keeping prices the same? It seems like you/economists realize corporations will let the country go to shit while stealing as much of the profit as possible and prefer that average workers deal with the detrimental impacts.
So should wages for poor people ever go up, in your opinion?
More like wages are kind of irrelevant from a macroeconomic perspective. Money doesn’t matter. We can double our money supply tomorrow and it won’t make anyone’s lives easier.
See Argentina’s minimum wage, and tell me if that solved any problem at all.
But… if increasing the minimum wage makes you feel better I’m not against it. I just don’t think its the right focus to have on a policy front.
What’s your opinion on legislation that would tie wages to their ROI for the business?
That sounds like a good way to kill innovation, as most companies that innovate lose money year-over-year for long periods of time.
The entire damn point of the stock market is to take people who like to take risks with their money (ie: investors), give them a story about how money line goes up, and “trick” investors into shoveling money into money-losing businesses until those businesses catch a good wind and make money.
In many cases (ie: MoviePass), everything collapses and everything sucks afterwards. In other cases (ie: Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple), life gets better in the long term. Its near impossible to tell the difference (do you think Uber is going to collapse? Or do you think Uber will become another major player of our economy? Do you think NVDA deserves all the extra money they got last week? Or is that a bubble?). But the important thing is that the USA has a large group of shareholders and investors who like making such risks, and who take the responsibility (ex: lose tons of money) if these bets go sour.
The goal is for us as an overall economy to make new things, and improve the lives of everyone. Money strangely enough, doesn’t do that. We improve the lives of everyone by producing more, thereby giving everyone more dishwashers, homes, cars or whatever they need.
The big problem with the current “economy” isn’t anything in general. USA’s general economy is actually very good and people should be proud of what USA has accomplished in the past 3 years. The reasons why life sucks are outside of what economic forces can do. Ex: Housing prices skyrocket because we’ve been building fewer and fewer houses each year for the last 20 years.
So guess what happens when housing supply drops while population increases? No one can afford a house, and there’s no economic policy you can do to force people into buying houses (ex: increasing wages) because there’s simply not enough houses in our country.
Until we build more houses, we ain’t gonna get more affordable houses (at any wage). The focus on money is counter-productive. The focus needs to be on houses or other goods/services in the economy. (Ex: not enough nurses, not enough doctors, not enough etc. etc. etc.)
Investors/shareholders risking their own money to make new services, new goods, new technologies is fine. That’s the part of our economy that works. The problem is that we’ve got a $HundredBillion plowing into crap companies that won’t do anything ever… but somehow somewhere our economy has forgotten the basics like housing starts. Maybe its regulatory (too many NIMBY laws that outlaw cheap housing), or something. But we have the investor-money, we have the culture, we have the materials. We just need to actually build the damn houses.
China is doomed for a number of other economic factors, deflation is just the symptom.
China’s housing crisis is the primary driver. The Chinese saw land as the primary means of savings and investment for the last twenty years. Much of the economy and state funding was driven by a demand for investment housing. Now that that has stalled many people’s savings have been wiped out.
Couple that with trade wars brought in by an aggressive foreign policy and it makes for a very challenged economic environment. China’s very centralized top down decision making process is great for directing growth but it struggles to address a number of issues at the same time to the point of paralysis.
China is facing an existential crises that is only starting to unfold.
China has a lead on US manufacturing in a number of areas. I mean beyond just labor.
Apple iPhone motherboards and assembly is in China and I think everyone agrees its a very high quality phone. Its no cheap PCB either, but a relatively advanced 10+ layer board with a huge number of chips, components. With volumes that no US company can sustain.
We need to learn from China, but we also need to avoid the absolute crap / bullshit / economic failures of China while doing so.
There’s nothing to learn from China. They “learned” their manufacturing base from the US, when the wealthy leveraged trade deals to make production as cheap as possible. China has no equivalent to OSHA, doesn’t value human life or safety standards, and has weak environmental regulations in comparison to the US. The US has incredible potential especially as automation gets leveraged but we’re forever hamstrung by our bullshit economics and “line go up for shareholders” system thanks to our corrupt politicians. We have nothing to learn from China except that totalitarian states are worse than our oligarchs.
In fairness, the reason garbage comes from China’s factories is the US corporations that place orders for consumerist trash. My subtle point was, imagine if China’s “customers” valued quality over cheap production. Ever heard of Chinesium?
You think China doesn’t know how to use machines to automatically make pcb boards? Do you think a human actually was placing every single component in an iPhone?
The reason why Shenzen can create items cheaper than USA is because they have a larger volume, larger scale, more automation and superior logistics. Its time for us to learn the basics from China again. Even in China, you ain’t gonna get technicians or electrical engineers who can use these manufacturing lines at minimum wage. These are highly skilled workers, in a city full of EEs sharing knowledge and working together.
Apple chose China as a manufacturing site not because it was cheaper, but because it was higher quality and more flexible than the USA supply lines. That was over 15 years ago. People need to wake up to the manufacturing beast that China has become.
That being said, Chinese economic policy remains utter shit. So we still can pull ahead of them. But China’s out-automating us and has cheaper labor. Legions of pick-and-place machines, CNC Mills, 3d printers, pcb soldering… (enough to mass produce the iPhone) all exists in China.
Automation? China’s got more pick-and-place machines, they got more soldering ovens, they got more stencil masks than us. We need to start catching up to them.
USA has the advantage in energy though. So whatever automation we make here in the USA will be cheaper due to our cheaper energy. China still relies upon importing from Russia and other countries, while USA is largely self-sufficient for energy.
Seriously I don’t know much about Shenzhen but damn it has to be one of the most unique places on earth in terms of having such a nexus of skilled engineers, technicians and production chains for computer chips.
Yeah it is a tragedy people aren’t paid a living wage :( but if tomorrow Shenzhen just abruptly disappeared from the earth we would be in big trouble as there isn’t really “just somewhere else” where what happens at Shenzhen can happen in terms of the global production of sophisticated electronics.
China / Shenzhen is more of assembly. PCB boards and the like. Very important to the computer process. China is trying to crack the chip problem as well, but they’re not quite there yet. (Taiwan, Korea, and USA are all ahead of China when it comes to chips specifically).
But chips are useless without a PCB, and China is incredibly good at PCBs / assembly. To the point where no one else aside from China can seemingly compete at this.
We currently have a high base interest rate set by the fed. The country can fight deflation easily by cutting the rate from its 5 base points, which will increase lending and spending
I’m against it. But people are rightfully worried about deflation. Its a terrifying situation from an economic point of view.
But you’re right. There’s very little sign of deflation (yet). We can hold rates higher, and maybe even go another +.25% up. Inflation is at a safe level right now, not too high and not too low, but we need to stay on guard to make sure it stays in this golden zone, and move as appropriate.
There were too many new jobs (too little unemployment) again in January. So we might still have rates too low IMO.
We are not at risk for any sort of sustained deflation. Inflation is currently over 3% (higher than the Fed’s target of 2%) and interest rates are very high. We have a lot of wiggle room if inflation starts dropping.
We’re only at risk for people stopping food consumption if prices don’t fuckin fix themselves, and I’m serious about that. People are gonna eat if they can eat.
COVID19 saw massive declines in food consumption, to the point where milk was dumped, pigs were slaughtered, chickens were culled.
US Policy under such times is to keep producing high amounts of food to ensure our food security and fund the dumping of milk, pigs, chickens, etc. etc. It takes years to grow an animal for slaughter, if we didn’t do that we would have had not enough meat as we came out of COVID19.
So much of our economy worked because we have policies and watchdogs thinking about economic policies. This sort of shit is invisible to the typical citizen, but is key to why our country came out on top, while others did not.
We still had a big blip in egg prices on the reverse end as we came out of COVID19 and people wanted fancier foods again. But we normalized pretty quickly in the great scheme of things, and our policy to explicitly waste food during recessionary times / deflationary times (like COVID19) was key to making sure our production pipeline remained full, and that our food supply remained secure.
These are dark days on many American pig farms. Coronavirus outbreaks at meatpacking plants across the Midwest have created a backlog of pigs that are ready for slaughter but have nowhere to go. Hundreds of thousands of pigs have grown too large to be slaughtered commercially, forcing farmers to kill them and dispose of their carcasses without processing them into food.
People will stop consuming meat if I dunno… meatpacking plants are full of COVID19 sickness and no one packs any meat. The pigs get shot / burried instead and the end-consumer goes without pork for a bit. This literally just happened a few years ago, so I’m surprised people don’t remember this…
We literally staved off an apocalyptic economic event through shear determination. We should be more proud of our accomplishment.
We shot those pigs and then buried them and left them to rot. No one got that meat.
Then a bunch of idiots who can’t read basic statistics complain about inflation and the rising cost of meat a few months / years later.
That’s the ‘Transitory’ argument to inflation. That the meat was a temporary blip. Fortunately (???) I think it turns out that other bits of inflation ended up being real so the 5.25% rate hike remained a good idea. But the meat and eggs inflation was likely a direct result of our COVID-19 emergency plans.
The cause of the great depression was overextended credit and stock market gambling. Deflation was present because people didn’t have as much money (or credit) to spend, but it was merely a symptom of an economic downturn, not the cause.
The cause of the great depression was overextended credit and stock market gambling
If the Great Depression happened during COVID19 (2020), then we’d still be in the middle of it today (2024) and wouldn’t really be out of it until 2028.
The Great Depression started in 1929. It was exacerbated by terrible economic policies and continued to get worse until 8 years better, when finally new policies kicked in and brought us out of it.
The Deflationary spiral was a big part of the extended depression and the multi-year effects. This deflationary spiral was stopped by making gold illegal, allowing the USA to float its currency more arbitrarily (ie: forcibly cause inflationary effects to counter-act the deflationary spiral).
Between 1930 and 1933, 30% of money was wiped out. That’s a deflationary spiral by any measure. As money became more expensive, everyone in debt (ie: credit cards today) would be worse.
If you owed $100 in 1930, you effectively owed $130 in 1933, because all money got more valuable ($100 in 1933 was like having $130 in 1930). Imagine if that happened today: that everyone’s student loan debts, mortgages, and other debts just suddenly became more valuable nominally. It’d be horrific and extend the problem.
We only got out of the great depression because of world war 2. Any policy pales in comparison. It was a huge government spending program that employed many. It also meant a lot of working age men died, shrinking the labor pool, thus putting upward pressure on wages. The generous social programs helped, as did the fact that US infrastructure wasn’t destroyed like it was in Europe.
You’d think it would help consumers consume, but if deflation is too steep and too extended people start rationing as much as they can because they don’t want to look like an idiot for buying that gallon of milk this week instead of next when it’ll cost half as much.
Traditional economic theory- yes. Hence why deflation can cause such issues.
However, there is also a significant part of consumption that you will make regardless of price, because the alternative is death. (C0 and C1 for anyone who took first year).
The problem is prices grew soo much our entire spending is now limited to essentials (c0), and even if I knew it would be cheaper next week im only getting it because I need it now.
No really food is not a good example. People will always need to eat so you’re presenting a scenario where everyone has so much access to food and money that they can choose to forego some of it to enrich themselves. It will take a lot more than that to scare people. The idea that everyone will suddenly turn their backs on this consumer culture we’re living in is not keeping me up at night either.
Why would the price of milk drop by half? I’ve seen the price of eggs drop by half, but only after they rapidly jacked it up 6x and the price drop didn’t only take a week to happen. Regardless, if people are not going to be kicking themselves because they could’ve saved $2 if they bought a week later. It’s the collective raising of prices of almost everything altogether that is destructive.
This is an over-simplification, but consider this:
A farm has to sell their produce/livestock below their cost-price, because demand has dropped and the resulting over-supply has caused a race to the bottom as producers try to recoup as must value as possible.
This leads to less funds available to produce the next round of crops (further negatively impacted by economies of scale), cover operating expenses and pay staff wages.
People lose their jobs and livelihoods, causing a negative feedback loop resulting in less demand overall… repeating the cycle. The Great Depression of a century ago was an example of a similar scenario.
I get that it’s popular to blame an entire generation for the current troubles in the world, but the ones facing poverty after retirement aren’t the rich assholes who ransacked the economy and set everyone else after them up to fail. And, believe it or not, not every one of them votes for conservatives against their best interests. Show some empathy.
So because some members of a group were unkind or showed you discourtesy, you condemn them all? I’d love to hear your thoughts on other ethnic groups. Anyone from India ever give you a hard time? I bet that makes you think less of all Indians. Y’know a lot of Russians support Putin and the war in Ukraine. Do you also think all Russians deserve to be punished as a result?
I hope you don’t consider yourself socially progressive because your attitude is part of the problem.
While my boomer parents have obviously participated in the system and profited from it, they have never voted for a party that lead us down this path. Are they also to blame?
I’m not the other comment, I’m just extending the example.
It’s basic critical thinking to take one situation and compare it to another.
It could be any very large group, indians are a group of 1.4 billion and I found it applicable to extend the example. The point is anecdotal observation cannot ever form accurate assumption for a large group.
Okay, fuck YOUR boomers then. I’m sorry you descend from such assholes. And while we’re at it, fuck the wealthy and super wealthy who don’t give their money to do good in the world. And okay let’s fuck those non-wealthy who wasted what money they earned on selfish shit.
But there’s a lot of old people who’ve never become wealthy because they were fair and kind and helpful to others instead. They still vote for government policies that benefit people worse off than they, and they make a good effort to embrace diversity, fight climate change, promote truth and science and peace. They didn’t die of COVID because they masked up and got the vaccines and rejected ivermectin. They may not be a majority but there’s still a lot because the whole is so large. They don’t deserve extra special treats but they don’t deserve to die homeless either.
This is my boomer MIL. She is honestly one of the kindest people I know. . She votes pro-environment/pro-social issues and has given (almost beyond her means) everything she can to virtually anyone who needs it. She has almost nothing left, and is a stones throw from couch surfing. I have no idea what’ll happen when her health starts to fail. As frustrated as I am with boomers, I try to remember her and the good she has tried to bring about in the world.
Bigger picture is eat the rich, don’t let them divide us. Age and generation isn’t the problem. It’s a side effect of the income gap. It doesn’t take a saint to empathize, it takes a human. If you spit the same shit back at them, you’re as bad as they are and the next generation will look at us the same way.
Income gap is and always has been the problem. Eat the rich.
By a majority, the poorer demographic of boomers voted for them, though. That trend increased as they continued to age.
If we get their voting records and fund only the ones who voted with any empathy for their fellow humans, maybe we can talk.
On a tangent: While we are at it, let’s not allow healthcare for the ones that rejected science and vocally supported those who supported violence against healthcare workers. Maybe some consequences for the Me Generation for once?
Yup, even if you’re a poor retiring boomer you don’t deserve a social safety net if you spent your whole life committed to destroying it. Conservative boomers who are the large majority of boomers voted in the conservative assholes explicitly to gut the “new deal” that their parents put in place for them. “I got mine” was their motto, well now live in it.
You should get the retirement you voted for all your life. Show me your blue voting record and you can have a social safety net.
Nice attempt to redirect the conversation, but that didn’t work. Boomers as a rule voted for Reagan and his platform of hate. They voted for his made up “Welfare Queen”. They voted to get rid of pensions. They voted to get rid of unions. They did all these things because THEY didn’t think that THEY needed them anymore. An entire generation of narcissists ruined and continues to ruin the world.
You don’t have to believe me, but my boomer parents agree. To quote my Baby Boomer father, “Boomers destroyed the world”.
If you look at the demographics of both elections, voters under 45 (i.e. the boomers at the time, since Gen X was too young to vote in '80 and the oldest were just turning 19 in '84) were much less likely to vote for Reagan.
But go on about how boomers voted for him “as a rule” even though about 40-50% voted against him, you absolute tool.
I’m convinced ageism (and to a lesser extent religious discrimination) is the last true bastion of bigotry. You’re not allowed to be homophobic, transphobic, or racist on the internet anymore. But if you call someone evil for the crime of being of voting age when Reagan got elected? No problemo.
It’s frustrating seeing people my age or younger than me (36) who think they’re fighting for progress but are just perpetuating the same cycle of hatred and dehumanization that they think they’re opposing. They’re closer to the fascists they decry than they’ll ever admit by picking an arbitrary group of people and ascribing all their problems to it.
If I were like the people I’ve been arguing with here, I’d assume we’re all lost, but I know there are plenty of gen x, millennials, gen z, gen alpha and, yes, boomers, who are ACTUALLY opposed to this kind of crap so that the world will keep chugging along. I’ll just remain perpetually annoyed the whole time.
Mostly to me it’s just really funny. Like it’s also really sad, that’s true, but it’s also funny, because of almost how incredibly stupid and shortsighted it is. Like, what does everyone think is gonna happen in 50 or 60 years? All the zoomers and millenials perpetuating this shit are just gonna get blamed equally by all of gen alpha and beta for deflecting all the blame onto boomers, and having done nothing to prevent, or even turn back, say, climate change. Or microplastics, or maybe like, if they’re really on the level, all of gen alpha will really get on their parents case for being absentee parents that abandoned them to a horrible digital wasteland via ipad.
Like unless we gain empathy, and, beyond that, understanding, as to why each generation acted the way they did, unless we gain that insight and historical context, we’re just gonna keep treading water, as every new generation has to figure out everything by themselves, and can never learn from the mistakes of their progenitors. You don’t even need to like boomers, or boomer culture, or really even like, morally approve of why they did the things they did, you just need to understand how they justified it, and what they were thinking at the time. But people don’t wanna do that, instead it’s just easier to blame the olds.
I think one of the things you’re saying, and which I might rephrase, is the idea that a generational cohort and the political landscape of a nation during a period of time, is the byproduct of a truly incomprehensible number of factors beyond any one person’s or any one group’s control. Also, no one group of people is a monolith. There are plenty of conservative millennials, and it looks like Gen Z is going to be more conservative than Millennials in a number of ways. As one person online I saw put it “the kids are puritan pilled.” And of course even that’s not true for all of them. We’re all products of the world in which we live and it’s easy to judge people harshly who came before you because the world as it is now seems to be worse than the world as you imagine it was. But our perception of time and history is also imperfect, and we selectively forget and remember the past.
You know what? Fuck 'em. I don’t know what she was expecting other than chalky, chocolate-scented paste that only vaguely resembles the already cheerless designs on the packaging. But if she wants to wring some money out of the behemoth that’s hoovering up cocoa beans from half of Africa for pennies, grown by people who’ve never tasted chocolate in their lives, and use it to buy herself a boat, I say go for it. Fuck 'em up, petty chocolate woman. From the photos it kind of looks like you have a point.
They’d be advertising how their packaging is the best because it’s made from asbestos if we had consumer protection laws that didn’t allow these pririvate lawsuits.
Why not? Wanting accurate photos on my products, while outsourcing a big chunk of monitoring and enforcement to private individuals and providing them an incentive if they do a good job at it, is a bad thing now?
Punishing any company for bad behavior can, in some theoretical sense, get “passed on to consumers.” I’m having trouble seeing how that makes it a bad thing. In practice, I think the cost is much more likely to get passed on to the shareholders, since Hershey’s is already selling their little turd bars for whatever price maximizes their undeserved profits.
Accurate product description enforced by law is a win for consumers. This lady suing for $5 million because the face wasn’t on the chocolate is not a win for consumers. She’s engaging in the same opportunistic behaviour that we so often condemn corporations for doing. The penalty being sought is not in line with the harm suffered. If the judge doesnt throw it out, and for some reason that amount, is decided, none of the corporate management will lose a dime of their fat salaries, bonuses, or golden parachutes. If anyone suffers at all it would be the lower employees getting lower raises or bonuses, or the public upon which the cost will be levied. Holding corporations to account for their advertising and actions is a good and necessary thing. But in this particular case, it wont be a big win for anyone and should be construed as such.
Honestly? I don’t agree. Yeah, it’s way too much. But on the other hand, whoever benefits from Hershey doing well, fuck 'em. Give the money to this random lady instead. If you can’t see that’s justice, I have nothing more to say to you about it.
Sure, Hershey’s broke the one rule of advertising, but god forbid we do anything about it, right? What ever would the consumer do without the bare necessity that is… weirdly-shaped Reese’s cups?
I say this as someone who loves Reese’s, too. A reckoning in marketing law is long overdue. IMO it shouldn’t be legal to use anything other than unadulterated photos of your product as it appears off the production line.
I mean all they have to do is write “serving suggestion” on the front. It’s how the various oodles of noodles companies get away with showing meat and vegetables on the packages of their carbohydrate and salt rations.
I don’t think that would fly. Sure you can make a “serving suggestion” picture of spaghetti with some photogenic sauce and on a box of spaghetti that’s perfectly adequate but if you put the same picture on a pack of Farfalle you deserve to be in trouble. Who the hell ever wants Farfalle they cook unevenly.
“Serving suggestion” is “product and other stuff”, not “random shit”.
I hate this “don’t bite the hand that feeds” attitude of capitalism. Everyone waxes poetic about the free market and then when a company gets their comeuppance there’s all this “nooo they will punish the consumers” crying.
Well which is it? Does a free market exist or do consumers have no power?
Her argument is that they aren’t the same as the packaging. The Halloween shapes show a jack o lantern or a face on a bat. Open the candy, it’s not there. The lawsuit is to stop printing the packages with faces that aren’t on the candy.
Oh, I agree, it looks from the photos like she’s got a point. Without knowing much more than the photos in her filing, my first reaction is that she should get paid for a couple different reasons. I’m just saying Hershey’s is overall so shitty that the lies on the packaging should be the least of her worries about it.
While it’s wonderful she finally started questioning things, she deserves to feel way more than embarrassed for all the time she wasted and all the lies she repeated while believing it was a hoax.
Especially considering she was a science teacher before she finally changed her mind. Think of how many years she spent teaching misinformation. Is an “I’m sorry” and being embarrassed enough to make up for that, really?
It took her until well after “Climategate” to begin questioning it, and it seems like she listened to Rush Limbaugh religiously.
I’m glad she changed her mind, but this story is not inspiring to me. It’s anger-inducing that we have to fucking free these people from the mental fucking cages they built for themselves. Her being an absolute fucking disgrace to science education who woke up and was like “Oh shit, I don’t want to be an absolute fucking disgrace anymore” isn’t fucking newsworthy or inspiring. It’s bare minimum expectations of a decent fucking human being.
No amount of apologies will be enough from people who spread this religiously-backed bullshit misinformation. It has held back human society for fucking hundreds of years now.
People should have woken the fuck up when Galileo was punished by the church for promoting Heliocentrism. The Inquisition basically threatened him with death for telling the truth. Why the fuck people still follow this religious horseshit is a mystery to me other than people like this chucklefuck parrot it half her life.
Yes. There is no excuse for someone with the science training to believe these things. She was either a very weak person or the program she studied in wasn’t very strong. Either way, although it’s good to model perspective change, this isn’t the example we need.
TBF there are a lot of unintuitive things going on with the science of climate change, such as the precise role of greenhouse gas absorption/emission spectra in trapping heat, that even with a strong general science background it’s not immediately obvious what the driving factors are.
Add to that the (deliberate) but plausible sounding misinformation and you have a deadly cocktail of not quite correct pseudoscience to drown in.
I understand being a climate skeptic, up until a certain point in time. There were still a lot of things that were unclear and the reporting was muddled and there was lots of conflicting information floating and even in supposedly well informed publications. But there really is no excuse after 2004 or so.
I agree with you. In fact we had important data about this going back to the early 1900s.
But convincing people of it back then was tough going. Even scientists. It only really started being obviously undeniable (which is a higher bar than merely very likely) in the early 1990s. And we didn’t always do a very good job selling it to be honest.
They were publishing and discussing these things in the 70’s. Not big oil secret memos - published articles, tv shows, magazines, all that media could carry had it consistently represented over fifty years ago all the way through to today.
Tree huggers. Disgusting hippies. Loonies. That’s all the thanks these people could muster. Yeah, some people are not going to accept a “whoopsie. Gosh i was wrong” and just forget it. With good reason.
Also, we are talking about brainwashing. Aum Shinrikyo successfully turned medical doctors from the best university in Japan into cult religion leaders to join the leadership that killed, injured and disabled subway passengers with sarin, among others murdered in different ways.
Why is this an excuse? I don’t even know what my grandparents did for a living. Just because they may have been tailors doesn’t mean I would have any special knowledge passion or feeling on fashion or the clothing industry.
I don’t even know what my grandparents did for a living.
I mean, if it was your great grandparents that’s different, but your grandparents?
Honestly that’s a little bit sad that you don’t even know that much about them.
Also, you not knowing or caring doesn’t mean that’s the case for everyone…though it does shed light on why you may not understand the significance of coal mining on the coal region of the US.
lol, no. Continuing to not support actual science because of some bullshit reason like my grandparents had a job like 70 years ago is ignorant plain and simple. There is no amount of culture or tradition that can justify that.
To move away from those people meant leaving behind an entire community at a time when I didn’t have many friends.
I agree we should just be mean to these people. They clearly are using logic to reach their conclusions and not just going with it because they feel the need to belong in a community . And knowing that they will 100% be mocked for life for changing definitely doesn’t make leaving harder.
While true, the fact is that we’re in immediate danger from the effects of climate change, and if we push away those willing to change by shaming their past rather than celebrating their willingness to change we’re probably just hurting our cause.
For as much as some of us want to emphasize the logic and practicality of their position on the issue, it sure is strange when they want more people to see things their way, yet also want to reject them when they do.
From that point, it's like I've started a new life. I learned about a non-partisan group called Citizens' Climate Lobby, which advocates for climate solutions. I led their North Georgia chapter for a while, and I still volunteer and lobby with them.
I'm also part of the National Center for Science Education, using physical science concepts to teach climate change to my teenage students.
Always worth reading the article before writing a comment.
Yeah this is what gets me about the young turks guy that wants to run for office. Its like its great you came to the light in the last decade or so but you spend a goodly amount of time shilling for the other side. Its fine for you to shill for us but that is as far as I trust your judgement.
not just conservative but ultraconservative libertarian with aweful views on women. He did not go straight to ultra liberal. He went indenpendent for awhile and then eventually way left. I more jaded person than I might suppose he saw no future for a person of his background on the right but saw lots of opportunity on the left.
Fucking seriously… This kid has future murderer written all over him… I get that your brain isn’t fully developed yet, but I don’t think kids like him go from “literally a psychopath” to “normal adult”
A normal kid might do something crazy in a fit of rage or emotion, but then regret what they did when they see the fallout from it. This little psycho boasted about it…
but I don’t think kids like him go from “literally a psychopath” to “normal adult”
Not with that attitude they don’t. Do you really think a 6 year old is beyond help?
They need to be removed from the parents, given proper psychiatric help and support, and placed with a loving family that can help them manage whatever issues they have.
I have a feeling that won’t happen though and part of the reason for this is because people believe that small children cannot be helped.
I absolutely agree, I didn’t really say he can’t be helped, I was responding to a comment about him belonging in a home where they would help him. It was more about the fact that he will absolutely get worse if left to his parents.
Definitely betting one life vs. maybe betting several. It’s a version of the trolley problem. There isn’t a right answer, unfortunately - though I personally would move the kid to professional full time psychiatric care in a “hope for the best, plan for the worst” sort of thing. Especially since I don’t think kids are inherently more valuable than adults.
There are 6 year olds that are psychopaths and this is likely one of them.
The worst part is treatment is not a guarantee they can be integrated into society.
It’s tragic for everyone involved but it is true, some people are just missing certain wiring, and being placed in a “loving home” can just mean more bodies and a confused 6 year old not understanding why it’s bad that they killed their parents because they got sent to timeout.
Absolutely. I don’t feel like commenting this whole comment section because this is a hard subject, but “psychopathy” is not a learned trait, and childs can absolutely do some very dark things. I think most people just can’t believe that a human, let alone such a young one, could be so fucking detached and “appear” evil, but yeah, there are humans out there that are like lizards, they just don’t adverse it.
This is wrong, most likely they were a normal baby who got fucked up by his fucked up parents. Is it possible they were a born psychopath? Of course it’s possible, but statistically speaking they were born fine. All we know is a kid with exceptionally shitty parents did something exceptionally shitty. No reason to speculate they were born evil or whatever.
Are kids autistic because of shitty parents? This isn’t about the kid being evil, this is about the high chance, given the kids history, that the child does not have a typical neurological makeup.
A lot of focus is being justifiably placed on the mom, but the kid’s actions very closely mirror allegations against his father, Malik Ellison.
The [father’s girlfriend] said she backed away to create space, but Ellison followed her, pushed her onto the bed, put his hand around her neck, and threatened to kill her, according to court records.
That attack wasn’t the only time the woman claimed Ellison was violent toward her, court records show. The woman called Newport News police again on Sept. 21, 2021 and told investigators that Ellison held a gun to her head and threatened to kill her, according to court records.
It’s always interesting whether people consider getting offended vs allowing offense as being a strong-man attribute depending on the situation. Like, he’s defending JK for being offended at other people living their lives, but people standing up for the oppressed makes them weak.
Maybe defending people is strong and getting offended by other people existing is weak.
It’s worth mentioning that article is from 2020, around the time she had started pivoting from TERF-lite to TERF-MAX. It was…reasonably possible to assume at the time, for someone who wasn’t paying close attention, that her opinions were still rooted in misguided concern rather than open bigotry.
She had only just posted her manifesto a few months earlier, according to Vox’s helpful timeline, which reads reasonably if you’re unaware of the multitude of false and misleading claims she parrots.
The core theme of Harry Potter is about the power of love; and yet now she is being an insufferable, bigoted bitch. Wasn’t she also for accepting refugees but then when right-wingers told her to allow refugees to stay in her house, she went silent?
She ruined her IP, I used to look at death eaters as fascists and the good guys as people who were kind, welcoming, wacky, they transfigured, they were free to be whatever they wanted without having to prove their purity, now I’m not sure what she thinks death eaters are…and have to look at all the hidden stereotypes in the book in a different light.
Not to shit on one of your favorite works of fiction but this is exactly why it’s a book for kids/teenagers. There are VERY FEW cases were the bad vs good is so black and white. Life is made up of shades of grey and as I’ve gotten older I’ve lost respect for writing that paints such a simple view of right and wrong. Without nuance either side can look at themselves as the good guy and the other as pure evil.
But that nuance exists in the books, there are family ties that cut across faction allegiances, double agents, traitors, misunderstood people, ambiguous characters. However, faction construction and ideology is very reminiscent of 20th century european history, so there is a grounded sense of black and white, unless you consider elitism, classism, racism and gratuitous violence to subjugate others as something that can be seen in a good light, somehow.
But that nuance exists in the books, there are family ties that cut across faction allegiances, double agents, traitors, misunderstood people, ambiguous characters
So there’s nuance in everything but the plot?
So there is a grounded sense of black and white, unless you consider elitism, classism, racism and gratuitous violence to subjugate others as something that can be seen in a good light, somehow.
Theres nothing grounded about magic Hitler. Hitler himself and the rise of nazi German had more nuance other than they were all just _pure evvviiiillll _. Works of fiction that have these black and white struggles between the knight in shining armor and the devil incarnate who wants to destroy the world lack depth. It’s easy to make yourself the good guys in Harry Potter when all you have to do is not be the devil. It’s like the old school Disney formula of pretty white and charming is good. Ugly, vaguely ethnic, and awkward is bad.
I’m not going out in cloaks and masks killing minorities so I can’t be the bad guy. Making it harder for them to vote is no big deal. The death eaters go around killing unwarranted. There’s no way they’re pro-life like me. Clearly they’d love abortions! The Trans community is trying to corrupt and covert our kids just like voldemort! It’s literally that easy
Looks like you feel stronger about this than I do, buddy. I’m not close enough to being a fan to reply to all that :D Yeah, I guess abortion is a moral grey area…I don’t remember if that was in the book, but it would certainly have added some depth to it.
Harry Potter is racist AF. Rowling named the black guy Kingsley Shacklebolt and the Asian girl Cho Chang. The books are pro-slavery too, and argue that if you free slaves they’ll turn to alcoholism. Rowling has always been a white supremacist.
There are a lot of layers of arbitrary interpretation here. Can’t we just stick to criticize opinions JKR actually expressed and is known to support, without having to make shit up? There are plenty of them anyway.
P.s. Even in the worst case scenario, not every book is a manifest for what the author thinks. People are able to write stories that do not reflect their worldviews.
What JK Rowling has actually expressed is that when a black woman wins a medal for boxing, she is obviously a male, regardless of genetics, anatomy, endocrinology, the law, or her own personal history. Rowling thinks black women are below womanhood, and are only granted it by the grace of “real women” such as herself. She’s a white supremacist.
It doesn’t bother me, it seems just a silly and far fetched way to retrofit opinions on her, using an invalid methodology (I.e., you don’t have to agree with every detail you write about in a fictional book - I don’t think the books are a good argument to show she thinks school should start at 11 and last 7 years, for example).
On a greater scale, IMHO it makes the arguments against her less compelling, as I can’t honestly take seriously an argument that is based on choosing a name for a character or something like this, or a person who unironically uses this argument.
So you believe that a writer can somehow completely remove their opinions, morals, and political leanings from their writing? I mean we literally go through books in high school English and pick a part their themes in relation to their lives, beliefs, etc.
But I’m sure Lovecraft kept his fear of foreigners and contempt for minorities out of his writings tho
No, I believe that not everything an author writes is a political manifesto for their ideas. I believe some is, and in fiction this could be a very variable amount. The chance of minor plot or character features being such a clear representation of the author’s views is even smaller, compared to general and major plot dynamics or characteristics of main characters. Your Lovecraft example I think is very fitting, as even I (who studied few of his works) know a bunch of short stories entirely focused on the issue of “others”. It’s way more reasonable to infer the views of the author when this is a recurring theme, core to some works etc.
BTW from a logical standpoint, the negation of “everything” is not “nothing”. Me saying that I don’t think every element in a book is a manifesto doesn’t mean no element is.
So you believe that a writer can somehow completely remove their opinions, morals, and political leanings from their writing?
I do believe that is possible and I can tell you why- Roald Dahl was an unapologetic bigot. He absolutely loathed Jews. Even the museum devoted to him talks about it quite openly. But he never put any hint of that into his children’s books. To the point that my (Jewish) father, who was aware of it and very sensitive to antisemitism, still bought me Roald Dahl books.
I’ve read a fair amount of his adult fiction and don’t remember any antisemitism there either.
I don’t think that is the case for Rowling, however. I think her books, from what I have seen, are pretty openly bigoted.
She invented a world with race based slavery and only addressed it by normalizing the slavery whenever an outside took issue with it. It would have been easy to have the Weasleys be opposed to House Elves, but they also wanted one and the reader is suppose to feel pity that our poor, loving, relatable family can’t have a house slave.
See, it’s little things like that, building up over time, while I quit half way though. Way too many “that was weird” moments for me.
People are able to write stories that do not reflect their worldviews.
Are you sure? Like, regardless of JK’s politics, where else is an author going to get ideas from? People are able to write characters that don’t reflect their world view, but the thesis of a story is going to reflect the writer’s beliefs and morals.
She invented a world with race based slavery and only addressed it by normalizing the slavery whenever an outside took issue with it. It would have been easy to have the Weasleys be opposed to House Elves, but they also wanted one and the reader is suppose to feel pity that our poor, loving, relatable family can’t have a house slave.
This discussion is the kind of stuff I really don’t care about. I read the book when I was a kid and I remember clearly feeling for the injustice of elves being slave, cheering when Dobby was freed and for Hermione and her movement (she started one, I believe). So I am not sure what’s the point to discuss what the author “could have written” or what you think she meant you to feel when writing. These are both assumptions that I can’t even relate to, so they fit perfectly into what I was talking about: starting from “she is racist” and then trying to find bits and pieces in the books that can be used to support the claim.
but the thesis of a story is going to reflect the writer’s beliefs and morals.
Assuming this is true in every case, which is debatable, none of the stuff mentioned is the thesis of the book. In fact, I answered to a comment that was claiming she was a white suprematist based on character names and stuff like this. On the other hand, a HUGE role in the story is taken by the opposition to the “pure blood” movement (embodied by the main villain), and basically every positive character is or supports mixed-bloods (in English they are called mud-bloods? Not sure). To me this in complete anthitesis with white suprematism, but I would use neither to try to infer what JKR views are on race/society.
My point is that in 7 books and thousands of pages you will find details that you can use to suggest her views are anything you want. The main plot of HP is generally a positive story, nothing that can be linked to racism, white suprematism etc. and so are the main characters. So why picking minor details or creative interpretations of the books instead of her actual words as JKR? Like yes, a transphobic, racist, whatever wrote a nice book series, possibly before becoming transphobia, racist etc.
You’re misremembering how the slavery plot goes, for what it’s worth. In Chamber of Secrets, yes, Dobby is meant to be a sympathetic figure who we’re happy is freed. However, following her pattern of “returning to a plot point that got pushback two books ago to justify it”, in Goblet we learn that Dobby is a little sicko for wanting freedom and payment, and Hermione’s efforts with SPEW (btw that’s slang for vomit in the UK} are consistently portrayed as misguided and naive.
I think it’s incredibly silly to suggest that you can’t make some judgements about an author based on literally a million words that they pulled directly out of their psyche. Another classic example is Joanne’s portrayal of women. If a woman is evil, she’s fat, mannish, and ugly. If a woman is good, she’s motherly and, in the case of Hermione, Luna, and Ginny, not like other girls. Nobody is really saying she was a hateful bigot while writing those books, but the seeds were certainly there.
I will leave out interpretations of stuff in the book. You can interpret it in multiple ways, the author might have meant it in multiple ways, plus there are probably way more facts to keep into consideration that revolve around a character in the book that is pivotal for the whole plot.
I think it’s incredibly silly to suggest that you can’t make some judgements about an author
You can make some judgements, of course. But there
Nobody is really saying she was a hateful bigot while writing those books
The first comment in this chain, which is the reason why I am discussing at all…:
Harry Potter is racist AF. Rowling named the black guy Kingsley Shacklebolt and the Asian girl Cho Chang. The books are pro-slavery too, and argue that if you free slaves they’ll turn to alcoholism. Rowling has always been a white supremacist.
So, the nuance of the characterization of women, whatever that actually means in practice, sounds already more reasonable. Stuff like this quote are completely insane IMHO.
Fair enough, that person is definitely engaging in hyperbolic rhetoric, but I don’t think their point is entirely wrong. This feels like a classic case of racism and bigotry being seen as all-or-nothing situations. Those character names are obviously not coming from a place of cultural sensitivity (it’s been pointed out that Cho and Chang are both family names from entirely different cultures), and while you refuse to engage with the point, portraying slavery as anything other than abominable is just a terrible decision. I would not agree with the comment OP that Rowling has always been a white supremacist, but I would say that she is/was a rather thoughtless liberal, in the centrist definition of that word.
it’s been pointed out that Cho and Chang are both family names from entirely different cultures
Just for fun I opened LinkedIn, and I have found 2 pages of people called Cho Chang. This doesn’t say anything, of course, and I know nothing about Asian names and cultures, but I still found it interesting.
Fucking seriously. Like I get that people have nostalgia for the children’s books they read when they were younger, but most of us moved on and grew out of it.
Adult Harry Potter fans are worse than Disney adults. It’s like they found a series of (again, children’s) books and decided they never had to read anything else.
I remember seeing a tweet of hers where she doubled down on this by linking to some right-wing blog that claimed Khelif has XY chromosomes. Not sure if she’s changed course ever since the lawsuit or if she decided to triple down.
Edit: Looks like she was still tweeting about Khelif 6 days ago, but hasn’t tweeted since.
These people never walk back their bullshit. When called out on it, they will double down. When proven wrong, they will change the topic. But they need to be seen as strong, and right. Admitting that you’re wrong or even apologising is neither - it’s weak, and it can create doubt. If they were wrong about this, then what else are they wrong about?
They radicalise their followers with lies and falsehoods, and they can only keep that up if they are not seen as being wrong about what they say. They spread their lies with confidence and zeal, and if reality disagrees, then reality is wrong.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said while addressing the group’s annual convention.
What an utter waste of DNA. And that was only the start of all the racist shit he said.
If Trump thinks that Kamala Harris should claim she’s Indian because she has an Indian mother, then Barack Obama should claim he’s white for the same reason.
Too bad no one in the press will bring that up to him.
I heard that at Jessica’s party, while everyone was playing 7 Minutes in Heaven, we were making out in her mom’s car and that our mustaches got tangled.
I also heard that we put gerbils in each other’s butts, which is ridiculous since we only used hamsters.
I’m going to start using mayonnaise treatments on my mustache, but I need a shower all the time. I guess I can get a mustache hairnet and line it with plastic wrap.
You ain’t wrong, but the bars there are exactly my kind of fun. That’s why we play there. It reminds me a lot of my ex, actually. Dirty, loud, a little dangerous, and open to the public.
I think there is a difference, but I’ve seen your arguments with people on here and know I’m far outmatched! I’m gonna be like Trump debating Kamala and chicken out.
This also feels like it’s implying some transphobic stuff, while also trying to paint the dems as mentally ill. “They don’t know what gender they are, now I guess they don’t know what race they are either!”
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