Of course I have a right to tell her that, whether or not she actually does it, or whether I have the right to violently enforce my opinion on her is an entirely different matter. But we were just arguing hypotheticals in this thread anyways.
FWIW I’m not convinced that banning abortion is the solution, but neither that making it easier and safer to access solves any problems, because neither do anything to address the root cause of why women feel like they need to have any abortions at all (excluding those necessary for medical reasons of course).
But sure, I’m clearly the petulant child here that’s out of my depth, because an intelligent person would have no problem seeing such nuances instead of resorting to politically popular catch phrases.
And it’s funny, isn’t it, because women tell men all the time what they ought to do with their bodies (go to work, make money, provide for the family, share the housework, don’t drink, don’t do drugs, the list goes on), yet as a man, I’m supposedly not allowed to even have an opinion what what a woman should do with hers? I’m sorry, that just sounds like blatant sexism, but I’m sure that as long as it’s in favor of women, you’re perfectly happy accepting that.
Yeah, I’m afraid that’s just an ad hominem, not an argument.
And no, I don’t have a problem figuring out where you stand on the issue, but since you apparently can’t even defend your position without resorting to insults, this seems to be a clear case of “you can’t reason anyone out of an opinion which by reason they never acquired”.
Well I’m not arguing that what he did should be illegal, just that I consider it bad taste.
It’s like if I went and did a standup routine consisting of Holocaust jokes and then a couple of years later complained about a rise in antisemitism.
If he was serious, he should at least publicly acknowledge that he DID contribute to the issue and formally distance himself from his old work. Otherwise, it just seems rather disingenuous.
You're working on the assumption that violence just creates random inequality whenever it occurs, rather than that the use of violence in our current system is a tool used with intent to maintain the status quo.
Well, you’re working on the assumption that violence CAN be used to create both inequality and equality, it just depends on who is using it. Since it’s obviously nonsensical to argue that it’s literally the person that’s making the difference (otherwise, monarchy could potentially do just as good a job at creating or maintaining equality as communism could), it must be the intention behind the use of violence that makes the difference.
That leads to the unproven assertion that it is the intention of capitalism to create unjust inequality, when instead the intention is to allow people to freely choose their employment or source of income based on what they do best, and reward people based on how much they contribute to society.
Sure, you can say that maybe that used to be the case at one point and it’s all gone out of whack since then, but that would only prove that intention doesn’t guarantee outcome, hence there would be no reason to assume that communism would have any better chance at creating a better outcome for everyone in the long run.
Deciding we shouldn't make any change to our economic system because police would still be necessary is, frankly, an absurd stance to take. To be clear, communism is not an alternative to democracy, it's an economic not political system, though of course its ideals do align with democracy.
If communism isn’t a political system, why does it require a revolution in order to implement? If it’s only about economics, then it should be possible to implement on a smaller scale (say, a single company) in any political system. And if it is so clearly superior to capitalism, then such a company would outperform its competitors and naturally lead to a proliferation of communism that way, because most or all of its competitors would end up adopting it. Yet you never see any communists arguing for that sort of approach, it’s always “smash everything with fist first and then rebuild from the ashes”. That’s why I can’t help but feel like violence is, in fact, the whole point.
So you don't support any political system? Or do you have some magic solution in which everyone magically lives in harmony?
Neither. I don’t support any political system because politics is simply arguing about who gets to point the gun at whom. Any political solution to anything always involves violence. And I don’t have a magical solution either because the only alternative I see is to educate people in order to help them realize this, in the hopes that one day, enough people will see that there can, in fact, never be a political solution without violence, and therefore stop looking for such solutions and instead work together to try and resolve their disputes on their own instead of looking for another powerful man with a gun to get them what’s theirs.
I'm on Windows 11 and it opens PDF files in Edge by default. While I find it kind of silly to use a web browser for that purpose, the built-in PDF reader is actually fairly good, it can even read your documents out loud using text-to-speech.
As a Christian, I agree with this idea and I also find the proposed law rather silly because it's the same kind of virtue signaling that conservatives love to accuse liberals of.
What I don't understand is why the article considers this "standing up for LGBT+ rights". Can anyone help me with that?
Well, if an undercover cops manages to instigate you to do something illegal, the underlying desire to do it must have already been there, otherwise you'd just tell him to fuck off. But entrapment is still illegal because if he hadn't provided you with a chance to do it, you may not have followed through after all.
What you seem to be saying is "entrapment is fine as long as it's done to people I hate".
You're missing the point. He deliberately encouraged people to express antisemitism and now he's complaining that people are expressing more antisemitism.
Yeah, you could argue that he was only making a joke or a political statement about latent antisemitism that was already present in society, but if he were the police (and he kinda IS policing antisemitism now), this would be called entrapment.
More recently though, he has spent his time complaining about the rise of antisemitism when he himself has done a fair amount of work contributing to it while in the character of Borat.
That’s where you wrong, because violence IS part of democracy, since the majority gets to inflict its will on the minority (or at least choose representatives who will do so on their behalf) via the use of the police, who are authorized to use any violence necessary in order to get people to comply with the laws.
If communism doesn’t have any plans for achieving their goals without the use of police (or violent enforcers by any other name), then it stands to reason that it will just be violence-based as that which is it seeks to replace, and therefore just as prone to causing inequality among people, regardless of its intentions.
As I said before, violence will never lead to peace, at best you will get a temporary truce whenever people are tired of fighting. But it will always be prone to erupt again. That’s why I don’t support communism. And yes, I don’t support democracy, monarchy, or dictatorship either, for the same reason.
You realize that getting upset over this isn’t helping to prove your point, right? If anything, it proves you’re out of arguments and you think you can bully me into into accepting your point of view.
Sorry, not going to happen.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought Marx passionately and repeatedly made the case that violence and inequality in a capitalist system are intrinsically connected, i.e. that a capitalist system requires violence in order to enforce and maintain the inequality that is present. But you (and Marx) also say that communists can (and should) violence to bring about equality.
My question, therefore, is simply this: if inequality is the result of violence, how can communism ever hope to achieve equality in the future by using the same means that it claims causes inequality in the present? That’s simply fighting fire with fire. If their violence justifies our violence, our violence will justify theirs. And on and on it goes. No amount of violence will ever stop violence. It just won’t.
Of course I have a right to tell her that, whether or not she actually does it, or whether I have the right to violently enforce my opinion on her is an entirely different matter. But we were just arguing hypotheticals in this thread anyways.
FWIW I’m not convinced that banning abortion is the solution, but neither that making it easier and safer to access solves any problems, because neither do anything to address the root cause of why women feel like they need to have any abortions at all (excluding those necessary for medical reasons of course).
But sure, I’m clearly the petulant child here that’s out of my depth, because an intelligent person would have no problem seeing such nuances instead of resorting to politically popular catch phrases.
And it’s funny, isn’t it, because women tell men all the time what they ought to do with their bodies (go to work, make money, provide for the family, share the housework, don’t drink, don’t do drugs, the list goes on), yet as a man, I’m supposedly not allowed to even have an opinion what what a woman should do with hers? I’m sorry, that just sounds like blatant sexism, but I’m sure that as long as it’s in favor of women, you’re perfectly happy accepting that.