• 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 27th, 2023

help-circle


  • This is funny when you just look at your profile’s first page and see you’ve made comments like these:

    I hate this rhetoric. It implies that this a refular occurence. It is just a man hating comment. If this is happening to you frequently, maybe you are the problem. I am tired of being assumed an asshole just because I am a man. It is sexist. Plain and simple.

    So you deny “unproblematic” women regularly experiencing unsafe behavior from men who are entitled and you’re also denying people’s gender identity - otherwise, why would it be a waste of time for a woman’s fight for her right to access women’s spaces? So you’re hateful towards people you perceive to be “men” while complaining about “man haters” elsewhere. Logical inconsistencies in favor of hate is a hallmark sign of right wing extremist views.


  • With this context, it gets more interesting:

    On 6 December 2022, the Parliament of Indonesia passed the country’s new criminal code (NCC), outlawing sex and cohabitation outside of marriage. Under the new law, extramarital sex carries a jail sentence of one year, while cohabitation of unmarried couples carries a jail term of six months. In a statement given to Reuters, a spokesperson for the Indonesian justice ministry justified the law on the grounds that it aimed to “protect the institution of marriage and Indonesian values.”

    Well, it doesn’t seem to have worked – at least not in the short term. So now they can’t have sex and they’re not marrying either, worst of both worlds. Maybe they also wouldn’t have a prison overcrowding problem if they stopped jailing people for things like these.


  • This world’s pretty fucked up. I remember being disillusioned of socialism back in the day (still am) but shit like this makes me wish there was some magical better system than our shitty capitalism.

    I mean there is something better than “shitty capitalism”. You can call it what you want, market socialism, social democracy, cool capitalism, but look to Norway for a pretty good example of what we could have:

    2/3rd of Norway’s GDP is driven by the public sector, most of the hydropower is owned socially, trains are socially owned, 20% of housing is socially owned through housing coops, gigantic social wealth fund that could singlehandedly fund UBI from like half the returns it makes every year, they have almost 60% union density without a Ghent system like Sweden and Finland, very low income inequality, low on the hours worked per week by country list, high GDP per hour worked… I could go on.

    And there’s more cool stuff like that in other countries around Europe too, Vienna’s approach to social housing, Italian and Spanish worker cooperatives, most of the electricity companies in Denmark being socially owned through cooperatives, 90% of Finland being a member in their grocery coops… like, there are so many examples of good things spread out everywhere - we just need the political will to do them more.



  • (the UK hasn’t got free speech as an enshrined right)

    In practice, does the US?

    Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also a category which is not protected as free speech.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions

    It seems to me there are a lot of exceptions to free speech in the land of free speech. I wouldn’t see any harm in adding hate speech to the list given how large it already is.

    e.g. passing a nearly-identical law copying Thailand about the royal family and putting in prison anyone who calls Prince Andrew a pedophile.

    That seems more of a problem with flawed democracy or autocracies, than to do with free speech. Any awful thing could become law under a flawed democracy/autocracy. The UK has plenty of undemocratic elements and they’re abused to pass horrible laws right now, and we need to fix those elements - the laws are just the end result.





  • Reminder that US state agencies helped Bolsonaro

    In March 2020, the Intercept reported that Brazilian prosecutors had secretly collaborated with the US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation in a manner “that may have violated international legal treaties and Brazilian law”. The Brazilian Ministry of Justice had not been informed; making this collaboration illegal. They also found that money paid by Brazilian companies in the US were funnelled back into Brazil; chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol said he would use part of this sum to set up an “independent fund to fight corruption”. This attempt was then deemed unconstitutional by Brazil’s Supreme Court. It was reported that Mr. Dallagnol had called Lula da Silva’s arrest “a gift from the CIA”. Leslie Backschies, the head of the US FBI’s international corruption unit, alluded to this incident when discussing the sensitivity of anti-corruption investigations in a 2019 interview with AP news saying “We saw presidents toppled in Brazil”.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Car_Wash#Leaked_conversations



  • There hasn’t been any scientific consensus change on whether porn is actually harmful to view for underage viewers, much less how much harm at various ages (i.e. should we lower it from 18, or raise it). Meaning, anyone who outright claims it is, is likely falling for populist rhetoric feeding off our cultural aversion to nudity and sex, not scientific truth.

    It gets even worse when you consider how instrumental porn is to us queer folks who often learn more about their sexuality through the medium, esp. when you consider consumption rates of queer folks vs straight folks. Or when you consider the queer folks who use sex work to earn money because they’re treated worse in other jobs simply for being queer.

    Let this sink in for a second: it took us less than a decade of anti-porn laws being proposed to being implemented without scientific consensus (in the UK, Germany, the EU now, Canada is currently doing the same…). Meanwhile we dragged our feet for decades on climate change and still are. That alone should make this whole trend smell fishy, like it’s being done with ulterior motives.


  • There are also valid reasons for disabled people to be against SUVs, and the abundance of cars in general: pollution creates disabilities, and so much pollution comes from car tyres. I know, because I have a disability that’s associated with said pollution, and I wouldn’t wish this on anyone else so I really hope we can replace car use with less polluting methods as soon as possible. And then there’s the more physical way: cars crashing into people also creates disabilities. If you’re disabled, you’re probably more likely to have sympathy for all the other disabilities that cars contribute to creating, and would prefer if SUVs and cars were replaced by other methods.



  • How do you define ‘corporate’ ownership? If you can own 100 properties as an individual, does that count as ‘corporate’? If it doesn’t, that seems like an easy loophole. If the intent is to ban large quantities of homes owned by single entities, then doing it by quantity sounds more sensible.

    That might redistribute old homes, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the drip feeding of new homes that we have going on right now. For example, the UK used to build 250k+ houses every year during the 1950-1980s period. 50% of that was government built council houses for those in need. It’s estimated that we need to build 250k more homes than we currently do in the UK, and the private housing industry has not done its part.




  • NL is one of the best countries in the world.

    That can change. Norway is also one of the best countries in the world, but they’ve been doing the same thing I see happening in the UK: not funding health care adequately, police corruption scandals, refusing to decriminalise and legalise drugs, not really using the oil fund money enough (unlike Alaska (US) which pays dividends to its citizens from its oil fund, not exactly a left-wing US state compared to Norway), welfare benefits being reduced, the Norwegian state used to fund housing coop development which led to 20% of our population living in democratic housing but isn’t doing that anymore and now we’re in a housing crisis, inequality has grown over the last 50 years, union density has reduced over the last 50 years, …

    When we’re talking about things going to shit we mean relative to where we were before. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot I wish we had in the UK that Norway has, but the trajectory looks oddly similar to what happened and is happening in the UK. We’re currently boiling frogs and because things are going to shit so slowly it’s harder to notice. Like, so much counter evidence to what we’re doing exists around the world if we simply look at how other areas are solving problems. For example, Finland is the only country in the EU where homelessness isn’t increasing and housing prices have actually decreased* - wanna guess how they did that? (hint: the state gave people free housing)

    * at least until recently, housing markets are weird now because of the inflation, but theirs were falling before that


  • You might be confusing debt issuance with money issuance.

    Nope. Let me quote Joeri from his second video (19 minutes in):

    Let’s tackle the one that the internet loves the most first: money printing. To view money printing as the source of all price inflation actually has a very long tradition in economics. The most prominent economist to support this idea was Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman (11:49) who said that. […]

    Crucially, Friedman inspired economists often assume that velocity and production are roughly constant. Remember that clip from Peter Schiff arguing that stimulus checks for people at home would be inflationary? Crucially, he made the implicit assumption there that this didn’t prevent a further collapse of production.

    “Everything is getting more expensive. And if people think that is transitory, it is because they don’t understand the problem. In fact, they don’t even understand inflation or where it comes from because inflation is about money. You are inflating the money supply. That’s what’s being expanded and none of this is transitory because these deficits aren’t transitory. The money printing isn’t transitory. It’s here to stay. — and that means prices are going to continue to go up because we continue to destroy the value of the dollar as we expand the supply”

    Sounds pretty convincing right? However, the monetary theory of inflation has almost completely disappeared from universities. Why? Well, because the data doesn’t support this simple explanation in most economies. For example, check out this graph of the CPI for Europe and compare it to the graph of central bank printed M1 money supply… You can clearly see that the money supply has accelerated while price growth has slowed. To a less extend this disconnect also exists for the USA. But, if you really want to see this simple theory fail, you only need to look at Japan. Even if we take into account the more expansive M3 money supply measure, which include money created by private banks, and compare it to the CPI. You can clearly see that while M3 kept going up, the CPI had its ups and downs. What can explain this disconnect?