Interesting! Thanks for the fact check. I always assumed giving money away would at best just be a temporary bandaid solution since you need a stable income to actually get out of poverty.

Of course, this isn’t a problem with a stable UBI, I imagine.

The reality though is that most millionaires and really rich families and people aren’t really the main problem with our current system.

Even if your family had tens of millions of dollars available while you were growing up, you’re many orders of magnitude closer to a minimum wage worker than to any billionaire.

The reality is that if most societies redistributed a fraction of the wealth of their top 30 wealthiest individuals, almost no one would be harmed and thousands of people could benefit significantly.

Now, of course, if you just give money away, that’s no good at improving people’s lives, so it makes sense to use the money to fund hospitals and schools, to provide adequate conditions to the disabled, the elderly, single parents, the homeless and our most vulnerable. And oh, would you look at that, that’s just a tax reform.

I’m from a middle upper class family, so, I never lacked any necessities but I also couldn’t afford luxuries every day. But I hold no contempt for people who got to grow up living in wealth and luxury beyond what my family could afford. I hold contempt for people who could dramatically improve their entire communities’ conditions and choose to evade their only tax obligations and only invest their wealth to accumulate more and more.

I think societies should at some point put a cap on wealth. No human being should be as rich as Elon Musk.

Yeah, I think that managed to put my feeling into more concise words. Russian socialism cost many many lives, but at its core the principles it was trying to champion seem correct: it proposes fairness and dignity through the active improvement of people’s education and lives. Whereas fascist movements (Hitler, Mussolini, Trump) are actively destructive. They thrive off of people’s hatred and fear of “the other”.

I guess my main question would be… If the Soviet Union was truly raising thinking, critical workers that would one day not become slaves, then how is it possible that immediately after its collapse, Russia became almost immediately a fascist state that indeed allowed only slaves and never masters to exist beyond its oligarchy?

Something seems amiss in the proposition there. It seems to me like fascism is almost an unavoidable illness that comes to all societies sooner or later, and the only thing we can do is find ways to weaken it before it leads to catastrophic results.

MAGA will be a good example of how fascism comes to its end within societies that cannot be militarily opposed.

What is the reasoning behind that conclusion? I can see how comparing the two simply because they’re totalitarian would be superficial (there are many structural differences between both). And to me, what the Nazis did, the rhetoric they used and their rise to power has always felt much more ominous and foreboding than even Stalin’s.

But I can’t put it into words and I see no real reason why Stalin’s crimes and death camps would in any way be less evil than the Nazis’. To me it feels like Nazis went beyond just political power straight into core beliefs and ideology, whereas Stalin’s crimes were just your typical tyrant authoritarian maneuvering, but I don’t know if that really makes an ethical difference.

I mean to be fair I haven’t met the first Venezuelan (I’m literally constantly interacting with all types of Venezuelans day to day) that didn’t want Maduro gone and behind bars, so what happened there is slightly less pure evil and more of a deal with the devil type of situation.

We just have the rule that whoever cooks doesn’t wash. I hate cooking because I hate getting my hands sticky, my wife hates washing the dishes because she always forgets the corners and we end up rewashing anyway.

It’s perfect harmony. Whenever she doesn’t want to cook, I cook, and she then procrastinates washing as long as she wants because it is her responsibility and we both know it.

We basically never fight, but cooking and washing has never been a point of tension in this household lol.

So from themselves?

To be fair, I would very much encourage people to use knives or even guns for self defence before flamethrowers that can cause tons of collateral damage. Fire isn’t exactly something you can direct super clinically at someone without it also spreading everywhere.

Alright. Let’s do this. I’ll bite.

So first thing’s first, this article is clearly click bait and no, the Chinese government isn’t going to start encouraging or even allowing women to simply carry flamethrowers and open fire on any threat like it’s nothing. So let’s start by establishing that we are arguing hypotheticals here over a clearly click bait article.

However, the point of self defence isn’t to provide an equivalent punishment to the crime committed, but to allow someone to use violence preemptively against an aggressor to stay safe. You don’t practice self defense after you get raped, but hopefully before you do.

This opens the door to many difficult and vague situations where it’s hard to tell whether an act was justified or not, but that doesn’t mean that burning someone is necessarily in any way less justifiable than shooting them or stabbing them etc.

So in this hypothetical scenario, the question isn’t whether burning someone is equivalent to being sexually harassed, because that’s not the type of situation that self defence is meant to be used in. It’s not equivalent but rather preemptive.

So we are now asking the question: are women entitled to self defence against sexual harassment? And I’d guess the answer probably lies in the middle of “yes every time” and “never” because no one should get raped for lack of self defence avenues, but also I don’t think someone should get burnt to death for cat calling someone else, no matter how inappropriate I may think it is.

However, if a woman (honestly, any SA victim, not just women) gets touched inappropriately and feels threatened, I think it’s fair to allow her to preemptively attack. So I’d say you can’t argue self defence without the presence of a physical threat. And even then, self defence obviously needs to be clearly outlined to minimise the likelihood of unjustified attacks.

That being said, this is both obviously clickbait and also a terrible idea simply because of how much uncontrolled collateral damage a flamethrower can do to others, structures and even first responders. So yeah, it’s a dumb idea. But I don’t think that’s because sexual assault is not a basis for self defence, rather because flamethrowers are extraordinarily unsafe weapons for everyone involved.

Even in Latin American countries where protections are weaker, this would be considered wildly unacceptable. Only Americans would do this

To be fair, that’s in a completely different ballpark from it being a genocide.

And honestly, I don’t know enough about this to make a claim either way

I don’t think it’s a matter of “accepting” but rather it being mostly community maintained, and so languages with minimal communities get no moderation.

Other than very minor characters and the schools in the tournament, did we ever even see anything significant about other real world countries?

Fantastic Beasts doesn’t count, that’s a separate thing.

I’m mostly fine with OTCs being advertised. Like idk Tylenol double mega effectiveness or whatever.

But every country I’ve ever visited or lived in heavily restricts ads for more serious medical stuff, except for some reason the US.

I guess if your scale goes from 11 to 11.5, then the former is still closer to -11

Ah yes, the infamous MAGA face

Which tbf is more of an American dumb psyop than anything logical.

People in Japan only get orthodontics when they need them and they have the longest life expectancy in the world. No one cares if your teeth are a little crooked. But as always, the US is obsessed with the most plastic and unnecessarily expensive version of yourself you can aspire to be.

Wonderfully put. If people really want to make MAGA go away, they need to first understand the underlying structure.

90% of MAGAts aren’t taking RFK seriously. But he’s there to appeal to the 10% that want him there. Now who’s that group? Mostly the people that opposed the health measures put forth during the pandemic. Remember that anti-health and even anti-vax groups were extremely small and irrelevant before the pandemic. The (in my opinion) justifiably tough measures we had to endure unfortunately created disenfranchised individuals who felt attacked and wanted revenge on the system afterwards. MAGA offered a place for them to go to. Some of them aren’t actively anti-LGBT or anti-immigration, but they thought the other side tried to poison them and their kids, therefore they’re bad, therefore let’s vote Republican.

That’s how everything works. The anti-immigrant crowd doesn’t really care about vaccines for the most part. But they’ve seen too many tiktoks of brown people shoplifting or doing X or Y bad thing. So now they feel the country has been taken over by a hostile mob of aliens. ICE and Kristy Noem appeal to that crowd.

Meanwhile, Technofascists probably aren’t anti-health and also probably don’t care too much about immigration, but they absolutely hate regulations, taxes for the wealthy and want to make as much money in digital grifting as possible. So they ally with the religious nuts, the anti-vax nuts and the racists because they can make more money.

The incels and contrarians are mostly internet edgelords who saw far too many blue-haired libs and women trying to ruin video games for them, so they grouped together to bring down wokeness. Because to them, wokeness ruined fun, ruined Star Wars and Ghostbusters and a bunch of other things they feel were ruined by Hollywood. This was the main group in charge of radicalising younger people.

And the Christian right is a mix of all of the above, but take the hardcore churchgoers from every group.

There are others. Anti-trans, anti-LGBT, etc. Each group has actually little to do with the other. Like the anti-Hollywood incel crowd is extremely antisemitic, while the Technofascist crowd claims to be super pro-Jewish (they’re only pro-Israel). In theory they should be opposed to each other. But MAGA is the temporary truce between them to fight this hypothetical common enemy.

That’s why they’ve fabricated this idea of the Antifa domestic terrorist in kahoots with the immigrant criminal gangster. They need to idealize these two groups as part of the larger problem because if they don’t, the entire MAGA movement collapses.

Therefore, fascism in the US can realistically only be stopped by:

• The internal collapse of MAGA: Infighting or a big enough issue to make the gap between them insurmountable.

• Military intervention: the armed forces or other groups with enough control of violence and weapons overthrow the government.

• A civil war: the country reaches a breaking point and devolves into full on insurrection movements, separationist movements, and renders MAGA useless as it becomes the only allowed ideology in one of the two (or more) combatants.

I know people on Lemmy love the idea of insurrections and revolutions. But if someone doesn’t want to see a lot of bloodshed in the next few years, then they’d be hoping for one of the first two options.

Lol, is that sarcasm (it’s hard to tell online sometimes)

Despacito is absolutely not Bad Bunny. That’s Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee

To be fair, a lot of his last album is way more interesting than what he’s known for in Spanish speaking countries.

Like Turista or Lo que le pasó a Hawaii are actually pretty good and the lyrics aren’t just horny bait either. The man has grown into a voice for more than just sex, booze and party.