611–620 of 918 posts
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> Giving out free food might make people feel entitled and less likely to learn to be self sufficient To be clear, the subject is still children, right? Refusing to feed children to "teach" them self-sufficiency is, IMO, right up there with a non-ironic "the children yearn for the mines". What could a self-sufficient 6th-grader even do for money? Steal baby food and small electronics from Target for fencing?
Well, I learnt a new Americanism today. Fence, verb, meaning to shift stolen goods. Upon first read I thought they would be sword fighting with stolen bluetooth speakers.
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I hope so. I'm favor of us dramatically scaling back our military commitments, including pulling out of NATO.
Yet America elected a president who doesn't want to cut a cent of defence spending, just redirect it to his mates.
"Trump wants U.S., China and Russia to cut military spending in half"
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/13/trump-china-russia-military...
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That's akin to a straw man, as shown by the quotes above. You clearly claimed that contemporary genocidal processes are "highly inappropriate" to compare to the Holocaust. This in response to someone using the Nuremberg trials as a frame of reference for suggesting that contemporary exterminationist criminals should be held accountable. But it's great that you've changed your mind since then.
You are full of confidence while i am unhappy that my writings didn't rule out such an garbage interpretation.
Maybe that unhappiness leads to you managing to better keep "garbage interpretations" at bay the next time you engage with a topic that touches on atrocities.
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This is why the wealthy should be required to use public schools.
People who send kids to private schools pay taxes (which fund schools) but don’t take resources from public schools. Forcing them to use the public schools would further divide the tax funding across more kids, reducing the funds available per kid. This suggestion is reminiscent of California trying to reduce educational inequality by eliminating advanced math classes and putting everyone together. It was a terrible…
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> And "n*gro" is the Spanish, non-slur word for "black" but yet we can't use it because US people dislike it. Slavery and such. Cultural sensitivity goes both ways. Webster's dictionary: plural Negroes 1 dated, often offensive : a person of Black African ancestry 2 dated, often offensive : a member of a group of people formerly considered to constitute a race (see race entry 1 sense 1a) of humans having African ances…
Like you, probably, I got a very systemizing brain and had trouble understanding this for decades. What the dictionaries say about the words does not matter - what is offensive to other people does not follow any system, but their feelings. And that means its arbitrary and you have probably no chance to know it ahead of time. I feel your pain, tho.
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Free education means no one will value it. Education should not be free, just cheap. However there should be help and assistance to people who wants to get an education but cannot afford it. Same with food. Subsidize it for everyone. Cannot pay? Serve few hours to the local community and get a meal. There should be no starving people anywhere in the world.
"Free education means no one will value it" Ridiculous. Of course, if it's free, then it's just the default, and some people will strive to be better than 'the masses' and pay for private education. But in any case, your whole society gets decently educated, which makes everyone richer, in every way.
1. Students usually are not interested in attending classes, like at the middle school. 2. Bachelor/masters degrees means nothing as everyone has one.
On the off chance you're interested in school lunches I highly recommend watching videos of Japanese school lunches on YouTube. There's a bunch out there now and if you were raised in the American system it will probably blow your mind. The idea that lunches can be freshly made, on site, out of healthy ingredients and children are active participants in serving and cleaning up is just crazy. When I encountered it for…
> The idea that lunches can be freshly made, on site, out of healthy ingredients and children Excellent garden path sentence.
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I felt like a big part of my childhood had been sold to the lowest bidder. It was. Most local procurement laws enforce this.
It wasn't just sold to the lowest bidder, the subsidized lunch program is specifically not to subsidize the kids, but to bail out farmers growing crap nobody wants.
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> And then, why stop at lunches? Why not give all children breakfast and dinner too, and buy them good clothes to wear? Indeed: Why not? Certainly a better investment than yet another round of tax cuts for billionaires.
How about this: we give all people all meals, clothes, housing, heating (all essentials) and spending money so that they can explore their interests, travel, etc?