What's your harmless/low-stakes conspiracy theory?
Narauko @ Narauko @lemmy.world Posts 0Comments 244Joined 2 yr. ago
It doesn't come across as you appreciating value in artistic expression and other intangibles when you say "suck it up and get a real job". That may not have been your intention, but it can definitely be read that way. I think that is the "boomer" people have commented on.
I don't think there are really that many people who think social media creators or better than farmers or essential services personnel, and those that do are completely out of touch, but there are plenty of people who see alternative media creators as less than any other job. I personally think A-list actors, celebrities and sports professionals are no better than grocery store worker or warehouse person, but I won't deny they work just as hard in different ways.
By that metric do authors or poets or actors create a physical product? Do computer programers? Since the death of physical media, books and art are now far more frequently digital than paper or canvas. Applications and software is 100% digital. Newspapers are dead, so journalists don't create a physical product. Is your argument that only physical labor producing physical things is "real" work?
That might be true, but it is also unnecessary to bring race into it. No war but class war is a phrase I really agree with, and making how white the 1% is part of the argument just plays into their game. Nothing would be lost in that argument if it was just happy 1% day.
Maybe guns are bad, and maybe if you bring a rifle to a high tense situation and hold it in any manner that may seem threatening, you deserve to get shot.>
Maybe guns are tools, and maybe if the majority of protesters were visibly armed then the police would not escalate tense situations to high intensity riot conditions and beat the protesters. Had the state had to hesitate to use violence on peaceful protesters, at least there would be a bunch less abuse of the media and civilians.
The Black Panthers proved this, which is why Reagan started gun control. Modern open carry armed protests have also proven it's still true. Cops are cowards, Uvalde proved that, even with superior equipment they will find a reason not to start. Getting the left to disarm and put their protection into the hands of the very governmental authority they continually protest against has got to be the biggest con job in history
The question they replied to was where the pro 2A people were. The point of 2A is that the armed populace meets or exceeds the armed tyrants. One person with a gun can't stop hundreds of cops with battle gear, that's the point of everyone having a right to be armed.
I would hazard a guess that in this context their answer is probably yes, they expect to need to protest with other pro gun (armed) protesters if they were going to be armed.
Ask the Black Panthers how well only one or two people being armed in a protest worked against the cops, compared to everyone being armed. There is a reason Reagan started gun control, and it wasn't because his supporters were the ones that were armed.
Certainly, it is perfectly valid to just want ideal outcomes for all individuals regardless of the system. You are also not required in any way to discuss your viewpoints with anyone. I will thank you for your time up to this point, and wish you a wonderful day.
I do hope the judge looked him dead in the eyes at the sentencing and said "Bad dog" before rubbing his nose in the evidence bags.
On the positive side, he should be out after 2.13 human years. Sooner with good behavior and completion of an obedience class from a licensed training academy.
That makes the conservative talking point of anchor babies a real thing. Make your way onto US soil to give birth by any means necessary, and suddenly you are granted a pathway to citizenship and a guaranteed legal status from day one?
That kind of massive shortcut of the immigration system would break the system. Birth tourism would skyrocket along with all other forms of illegal immigration. There is a reason no country on earth allows that.
Do you not think that doing so would be a huge incentive driving illegal border crossings or visa overstays to take such a shortcut? Do you think that creating a parallel alternative immigration pathway such as that is a good thing?
I certainly disagree with how the trump administration is operating, and fuck anyone who says non-citizens don't have a right to a day in court, but how can carving out loopholes and shortcuts be good for the long term health of the system? Unless crippling the system to the point of implosion to cause a reform is the goal, but I find that to be too close to the conservatives crippling other public sector programs to cause private sector reform to profit off it.
This is a bit of a catch 22, the child wasn't deported her parents were. I don't even doubt that ICE was lazy and didn't make sure the mother knew what was happening and every option available to their child. This is a shit show how Trump is handling mass deportation instead of expanding the immigration courts to process the backlogs and get everyone their constitutionally protected day in court. ICE has been done a disservice by Trump and deserves a lot of the shit the department is getting.
The child is a US citizen, 100%, but that doesn't offer protection from prosecution to their parents. A 2 year old who's US citizen parent or parents commit a crime will have their parent/parents taken away when put in jail, and then be given into the custody of a relative or taken into foster care. This is not unique to immigration.
Would you rather the child have been unilaterally taken from their mother and placed into US foster care when no family was identified that could take them in the US? Then we are separating children from their families, which is fucked up.
There historically have been limited stays of deportation available for illegal immigrant parents of US citizen children, but this administration is obviously being extremely tough on those. If you want to give automatic deportation immunity to anyone who has a child on US soil until those children are legally adults, you turn "anchor babies" from being basically a myth into an actual reality.
There is no perfect solution for any of this.
I hate shopping at Lowe's now because they physically removed the regular checkouts and only have a square of self checkouts. They did this so one "cashier" can watch over everything, saving labor on multiple cashiers. They also paired down every other department so it's just as hard (or possibly harder) to get assistance in a department as at Home Depot. Feels like I'm watch the death spiral in full swing.
Less shoppers means less staff. Less staff means service suffers. Poor service means less shoppers. Rinse and repeat. This is happening at almost every brick and mortar retail business though, not just Lowe's. It's like the entire economy has turned into Circuit City trying to keep the lights on.
I was very concerned scrolling the comments that it looked like no one was going to mentioned Margaret Weis. She is an amazing author stand alone, and Dragon Lance was one of the first big Fantasy series I really cut my teeth on.
I totally misread 'good viable' as good vibes, and immediately agreed despite having no substantive idea what that would be. Fleet of Magic School buses driven by assorted Ms. Frizzle's? Cheech and Chong's Uber service? Limo service where you get to answer suggestive Family Feud surveys with Steve Harvey? I don't know, but I'm totally down for good vibes alternatives to driving.
This is why I have stopped buying anything Blizzard. They removed the Warcraft 3 I payed for and replaced it with a completely unplayable something I didn't want. Ubisoft has been on my shit list for a while for unrelated reasons too, but now they are on my never again list. And I never even played The Crew. Bad business is bad business even if it doesn't directly impact me.
That's close, but it really belongs painted on the side of a '70s panel van instead of a wizard with a unicorn, with shag carpet, a crushed velvet bed with the frame made of ammo boxes, and bead curtains made of bullets, and living in that van is a slightly more stoned Nicholas Cage from Lord of War who smells like pachouli and expended gun powder.
And the apples are pine-apple fragmentation grenades. Just like grandma used to make
Absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I guess it depends on the country. Here, a lot of students pirate their books anyway. Personally, I didn't buy a single book during my bachelors/masters.
I am glad this practice apparently isn't universal. Basically the idea is that because pirating books is possible and they don't get paid again for used books, the publishers have created DRM through the use of web portals that are required to turn in assignments and in some cases even tests. Access to these is provided with a new copy of their books in the school book store, or for the same/more price as the book sold separately. Without the portal, you cannot pass the class because they lobbied the school to make it illegal for teachers to accept your work any other way. The school gets a kickback from the publisher and they both make tons of money
Good point out, and I should have said not unique to either conservatism or hard leftism there. The "extremities" of the spectrum really highlight it obviously, but I think almost everyone is guilty of and/or capable of the same rationalizing over anything that forms a part of core identity, consciously or not. The stakes are just higher when it comes to politics than something like an odd food preference, and thus get stronger reactions both from external observers and the person holding that viewpoint. I try to apply a "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by something else (I know incompetence usually goes here but in this context comes off maliciously)" for most people. Everyone is the hero of their own story, yada yada.
I fall into the same trap advocating for left leaning libertarianism never being implemented with the correct mix of government guardrails (both from and against the government), and it will be funny when we all surprised Pikachu face when it turns out 500 years from now it was the Anarcho-syndicalists who were right all along ala South Park Mormonism.
Also I haven't heard the Professional Left Podcast before but I'm definitely going to check it out, thank you for mentioning it.
I very much appreciate your input and point of view, it is very enlightening. I will fully admit that academia is notoriously cutthroat for funding and I was definitely not trying to say it even comes close to anything like a UBI, just that the publishing portion is a necessary secondary to the primary job of research. Publishing helps secure grants and funding, and is very important, just not the end-all be-all like a literary author. Holding IP/patents is also still a huge draw/money maker for those at the "top" of academia, and there are plenty who advocate for the current IP-based model because it is their primary form of income. I am not saying this is right or wrong, just that academia is not as altruistic as a whole as you appear to be making it out to be
I am also not sure how you can look at the deals publishers and journals make with colleges to ecosystem lock students with things like portal codes you can only get by buying the textbook/resources new from the school and think that the loss of IP protection would do anything to the publishers besides remove the cost they pay the authors. It's already a scam/racket, and that won't change without legislation making that illegal.
I also believe that scientific discovery from research universities and any institution getting Federal or State funding should be public domain anyway, both because we the people are paying for it (all or in part), and there is a vested interest in furthering mankind through scientific knowledge and achievement. This is different than entertainment, and even philosophy to a degree.
I think we need to do away with our current system of social support/welfare systems and implement a UBI to offset automation and the changing economy anyway so 100% on board there, and grants for the arts would be great. Crowdsourcing would also be great, and universal healthcare would allow crowd funding to pivot from medical bankruptcy prevention to the intended use of financing creators. I just don't see IP abolition working without major steps into post-scarcity first.
I think I found the disconnect between your argument and the other person's. You are not paid as an author, you are paid as an academic or researcher who also writes. Your creation is contractual, like the Disney artist animating the movie and not the author of the fairytale Disney got the idea from.
An author who's income solely comes from their writing having their work stolen by a company like the academic publishing companies do right now would starve in those conditions, and thus have to find other work instead of writing. A UBI or equivalent is required to support an IP-less state.
The scientific journal industry currently acts as if they exist in an IP free world, and take all the profit from other people's work. They then enforce IP on others to monopolize that profit, but in a IP-less world they would still act the same and use their size to capture the lion's share of the market.
Their singing ability was definitely a cost, never let one pick any Bard or Bard adjacent class.