OwenEverbinde

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago

Exactly this. Right wing propaganda already portrays the LGBTQ+ community as child groomers who are sexualizing minors.

Forget gasoline or lighter fluid: allowing federation with “barely 18!” content would throw a whole propane tank on that fire.

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago

Someone else here mentioned that being an LGBTQ+ instance and allowing association with porn occasionally described as “childlike” isn’t something Blahaj can afford in this political climate.

They’re already being called child groomers. You don’t want something that can be twisted into ammunition by bad actors.

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago

This commenter is weirdly passionate about what kinds of porn Blahaj federates with.

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago

Yeah! Was he Donald Trump – the person – president? Or was it “Donald Trump” the legal entity? Is his name capitalized on the documents? Was his presidency valid under maritime law?

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago

Gold fringes on the flag of the country “Donald Trump” was president of? Damn it! We’ve been bamboozled! We aren’t even living in the real United States! We were the sheeple all along, just like they were trying to tell us!

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago

Damn. Their $1.3 billion in profits was already stretched thin with these writers’ demands. How will they afford this too? One of the execs might need to take out a second mortgage on his thirteenth mansion just to make ends meet.

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago

You probably won’t see this, but I hope you will amend your definition of capitalism:

Capitalism is defined as a set of rules/regulations that allows people to own the capital that they produce.

You know this, right? We all know a trust fund baby is perfectly capable of using the wealth they were born into to buy a factory, mine, apartment complex, or shares in all of the above. (Hence profiting off of value they did NOT produce.) We all know capitalism does not distinguish in any way whatsoever between this form of capital ownership and the self-made variety.

“Capital they produce” and “capital they acquire / inherit / use stolen money to purchase” can both be wielded the exact same way. That’s the point of capitalism.

And this is only half of why, “that they produce” doesn’t work in this definition. The other half is that it contradicts the definition of “capital.”

Capital is literally “any form of property that can be used to collect the value of other people’s labor.” That is the opposite of “ownership over the things you produce.”

The exact opposite.

To “own the capital you produce” one must personally build the means of production. Otherwise, the owner is owning the capital someone else produced.

And you’ll find the vast, vast, vast majority of almost every form of capital (patents, copyrights, factories, burger machines, server computers, office buildings, mines, mine equipment, oil rigs, oil tankers, power plants, land, the list goes on) does not belong to the people who turned the screws, drew up the plans, welded the seams, mined the materials, performed the research, wrote the movie script, poured the cement, or otherwise PRODUCED the capital.

It belongs instead to the people who funded it. The people who, under capitalism, own it.

Anti-capitalists are not against people owning what they produce. In fact, in America, there is a distinctly anti-capitalist business model that thrives in numerous cities called a “cooperative” (co-op for short) that is owned by either (a) customers, or (b) workers. And a worker co-op is literally workers “owning what they produce”, but is considered market socialism by anyone who cares about using words correctly.

I would love if co-ops replaced corporations. Any anti-capitalist would. Even Maoists would tell you, “a society full of co-ops would be wonderful. The only reason I don’t find that sufficient is because capitalists would use violence to crush co-ops just as they have used violence to crush governments that didn’t favor US corporations.”

All anti-capitalists want people to be able to own what they produce. The system that robs people of their control over what they produce is exactly what anti-capitalists have been struggling to overthrow.

(Aside: many anti-capitalists support a “corporate death sentence” where any company that commits a crime causing more damage than it can afford to repair can have its assets seized and turned into a cooperative and given to its workers. This allows a company deemed “too big to fail, because too many workers would lose their jobs” to be kept running and keep its workers employed while also punishing the people whose decisions caused the damage. The investors would lose their shares, and the CEO elected by the investors would lose their job and their shares. Everyone else would be fine.)

Main point: I think before asking,

why do so many people dislike capitalism?

You need to first ask,

how do people define capitalism, and is it possible for the thing I like (people owning what they produce) to be protected in an anti-capitalist organization or system?

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

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OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago

Yeah, in modern American schools, the students are the product and billionaires are the customers.

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago

… and car manufacturers, and oil companies, and tire companies, and the fast food franchises lining every freeway exit…

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Not me. I think even on Lemmy, my neurodivergent brain will have forgotten your name by the time I’m done writing this comment. Farewell, @mayo: every one of the five seconds I knew you was a goddamn honor.

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago

I don’t think anyone is going to create a coding language called Green Copper Patina.

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Maybe we’ll finally be cool enough to get banned - Klanned Karenhood

Oh, you could have been that cool already. Just do as Ijeoma Oluo did.

1. Provoke the racists. They will come flooding into your inbox with death threats and hate speech.
2. Report the messages to Meta so they can say, “doesn’t violate our community standards.”
3. Screenshot the messages and Meta’s enabling response, and post them publicly on your Facebook page to show how seriously Meta takes right-wing death threats.

Done. Banned. You could have been cool all along, Klanned Karenhood. You just have to go after the right people.

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago

I don’t know if this counts, since it’s only a “true fact” if you are fine with carefully chosen words and the omission of crucial information…

But the 13-50 stat is dangerously misleading.

You know,

Black people make up 13% of the population, but 50% of the violent crime.

Black people in America do, in fact, make up 50% of the murder arrests according to FBI crime statistics

That much is true.

But certain people tend to use this fact to assert that police officers are far more likely to be killed by black people than by white people. Therefore, the stats that show them brutalizing black people at a higher rate – since they fall short of that 50% number – are evidence that they hold back around black people to avoid appearing racist.

The users of this stat heavily imply black people are more violent and murder-prone, and hence a greater threat. The argument also carries with it an implied benefit to eugenics or a return to slavery (to anyone paying attention.)

But no one using this stat ever explores potential causes for the arrest rate disparity, instead letting their viewers assume it comes from “black culture” (if they are closeted racists) or “bad genes” (if they are open racists).

There’s no attention paid to the fact that black people make up over half of overturned wrongful convictions

There’s no attention paid to the stats further down in that same FBI crime stats table that make it clear that black people make up 25% of the nation’s drug arrests, despite making up close to 13% of the US’s total drug users. (Their population’s rate of drug use is within a margin of error of white people’s rate of drug use). It should be strange that a small portion of the perpetrators of drug crimes make up such an outsized portion of the total drug arrests in this country. But the disparity doesn’t even get a mention.

There’s no attention paid to the fact that more than half of US murders go unsolved, meaning even assuming impartial sentencing and prosecution, we would only know black people committed 50% OF 50% of the murders – 25%. And in a country where 98% of the land is owned by white people and the public defender system is in shambles? Which demographic do you think would be able to afford the best defense, avoiding conviction even when guilty, and ending up overrepresented in the “unsolved murder” category? If only 50% of murders end in a conviction, that means every murderer who walks into a courtroom has a solid chance at getting away with it. Even more solid if the murderer belongs to the richest race. The murder arrest rate by race winds up just being a measure of which demographics can afford the best lawyers, rather than any proportional representation of each demographic’s tendencies.

They mention none of that. The people hawking this statistic intentionally lead their viewers to assume, “arrested for murder” is equivalent to “guilty of murder.” And that 50% of the murder arrests is equivalent to 50% of the total murders. The entire demographic is assumed to be more dangerous.

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago

Yeah… that’s a pretty reasonable conclusion. It’s hard to just state outright though, when I live with the exact sort of person described in your comment.

It’s interesting: the people who are fine with calling an entire race murderous seem to take great umbrage at being considered “racist.”

It’s the r-word to them – a slur used to invalidate their concerns and diminish the importance of their well-being.

That their concerns ought to be invalidated – since they are the racist result of racist fear-mongering – is never well-received.

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago

Oh 100% this. The main accomplishment of Tulsa and Auburn was keeping black people impoverished, and…

“About 60 [academic] papers show that a very common result of greater inequality is more violence, usually measured by homicide rates,” says Richard Wilkinson, author of The Spirit Level and co-founder of the Equality Trust. - source

For as long as society insists on high inequality with one race forcefully held at the bottom, no rational person can expect that race to be peaceful.

It’s just… I have a hard time bringing this concept to the table in a debate with people who believe “personal responsibility” can somehow magically indemnify society against its impact on people.

In fact, I am generally speechless when debating such people. It’s such an alien worldview to me. How can personal responsibility actually make society irrelevant? And since when?

The kinds of people who spout the 13-50 argument basically believe NOTHING society does can increase or decrease murder (except, when convenient, being “too soft on children” or “soft on crime.”)

OwenEverbinde , 11 months ago

Damn you’re good