391–400 of 409 posts
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Empathy is for persons, not for legal entities.
Corporations are legally recognized to have personhood in the USA. They are also legal entities. Anyway is a "person" not also a legal entity in some way? In short, I understand what you are saying but I don't think it is precise enough.
But to be pedantic, empathy is for those who are capable of expressing empathy in return.
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The problem is that most large left-wing movements tend to be about highly centralized socialism that is at best soft authoritarian (and in practice tends to quickly devolve into something much worse). I understand why - once you take away the cudgel from the people who currently have it, using it yourself to quickly solve problems is just too tempting. But it does mean that many (most?) of those parties are not a vi…
Class struggle doesn’t end in one stroke. When the working class wins state power over the capitalist class, the former doesn’t stop existing. The cudgel is to keep internal and external capitalists from counter revolution. Ultimately, results matter. My country started semi feudal and it was under socialism that it industrialised, electrified, developed universal health care, built homes for every working family, et…
FWIW I don't even think USSR and its satellite states were socialist in any meaningful sense. Socialism, after all, is the common ownership of the means of production. But most of the populace on all those states were excluded from governance, and thus from any effective ownership. So, in practice, it was collective exploitation of the workers by the elites under threat of direct physical force - strictly worse than wage slavery. Some orthodox opposition Marxists in USSR even claimed that it was the perfect example of what Marx originally called the "Asiatic mode of production".
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There are plenty of federal drug laws that are actively enforced in states where that stuff is otherwise legal. People mostly think about basic use & possession in this context, but there's so much else. E.g. buying a gun as a medical marijuana user is a risky proposition.
> basic use & possession in this context Try openly producing and selling. Multi-million dollar businesses operating in open plain view of the public and any federal agent. States legalize cannabis and the federal government in turn stops enforcing their laws against cannabis in those states, demonstrating that the states have de facto sovereignty to legalize drugs. They didn't just stop prosecution for "basic use" a…
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I read somewhere that more than 50% of London population is immigrants. The immigrants bear no guilt for what English people did in the past, if they live in a house built with money coming from colonialism, they paid money for that, did not get it for free.
English people shouldn't bear guilt for it either. They should learn about it for sure, it's history. But why people think it's okay to hold the current generation responsible for things previous generations (in this case quite far back) did is just juvenile.
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> basic use & possession in this context Try openly producing and selling. Multi-million dollar businesses operating in open plain view of the public and any federal agent. States legalize cannabis and the federal government in turn stops enforcing their laws against cannabis in those states, demonstrating that the states have de facto sovereignty to legalize drugs. They didn't just stop prosecution for "basic use" a…
I'm specifically referring to gun laws that pertain to "illegal drugs", so you can't really decouple the two like that. Not only the feds actively enforce these in all states, but even their forms that you have to fill explicitly state that cannabis is an illegal drug even if legalized in your state of residence. So, in effect, the states do not have full sovereignty even wrt drug legalization in all contexts.
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I'm specifically referring to gun laws that pertain to "illegal drugs", so you can't really decouple the two like that. Not only the feds actively enforce these in all states, but even their forms that you have to fill explicitly state that cannabis is an illegal drug even if legalized in your state of residence. So, in effect, the states do not have full sovereignty even wrt drug legalization in all contexts.
The federal gov has no power to declare drugs illegal. It is not within their enumerated powers: Article 1 Section 8.
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> 99.99% of us exist to feed the capitalists I'm honestly curious why you wrote this and if you can explain what it means, because to me it means 'people who labor for others are wasting their lives as slaves and we need to remedy this'. What have I misread?
The desire to survive is a fundamental instinct of all animals, and thus you'd do almost anything to survive. Effectively we are slaves of our own biology and wiring. Thus, due to resource allocation, most of us have to or had to work in order just to survive. Our utility and thus QoL is measured in how the surrounding system values us. In a capitalist society that is visible through our salaries and our income as pr…
So the solution is to steal from those that have. How is working for capitalists different than working for those that don't want to work? In the former, everyone has a shot at winning. In the latter, nobody does.
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From work, but I hope at some point it switches around. So I'll be a good person until then, and after that I'll become a bad person it sounds like
You could already be a bad person, but for now, you're being taken advantage of about as much as you're taking advantage of others. I think squatting land to make people rent from you to be able to live is already pretty bad, so you could easily already be a bad person, but the concepts of individual ownership over public goods is the really problem,
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It’s imaginary in the sense that no matter who wins an election, you’re going to end up with substantially the same government every time. If you’re so concerned with political tribalism that you can’t see how utterly corrupt your own team is, then you’ve simply fallen for the distraction.
In some ways yes, in other ways no. If Hillary had won in 2016 the USA would still be a capitalist dystopia, but it would be a capitalist dystopia where women and transgender people had rights, and inflation would be slightly lower as most capitalists aren't as brazen as Trump when he publicly threatened to fire the Fed chair if interest rates didn't come down. If Trump won in 2020 most of the bad political things ha…
What rights do these people not have that others do? Rights belong to all individuals.
> and inflation would be slightly lower as most capitalists aren't as brazen as Trump when he publicly threatened to fire the Fed chair if interest rates didn't come down. If Trump won in 2020 most of the bad political things happening in Florida would be happening to the whole country.
It's hard to say. Tump loved to sirens, and I am no fan of that, but inflation has been coming since Clinton left office. I find it unlikely that Hilary would have reduced the deficit, especially given the unconstitutional business closure orders that many states enacted, which PPP and enhanced unemployment sought to make condition via addressing 5A, but which utterly failed at doing so imo.
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I agree with you on all points. I was straining to think of a good example of the 'left-wing authoritarian' but I have definitely experienced it, and apart the location of birth they are the same exact people who are just as intolerant on right. On aggregate all humans operate pretty much the same everywhere in the way they think and operate -- the only difference is experiences and culture. That was the the point I…
The example of "left-wing authoritarian" is all the so-called "communist" countries of the past century. USSR, China, North Korea. The problem, of course, is that none of them were actually left-wing. They were all just bog-standard dictatorships, using left-wing-ism as their excuse to maintain power, but not actually doing left-wing-ism.