Narauko @ Narauko @lemmy.world

Posts

0

Comments

244

Joined

2 yr. ago

I want limited government focused only on common defense, common good, and keeping the markets free. I feel this is best accomplished through a simple and loophole free tax codes that ensures the wealthy pay their fair share and that all wealth levels are engaged with skin in the game. I believe that this should include a land tax, and that a consumption/sales tax works better than income or wealth tax. These taxes should fund a UBI for all and centralized healthcare, replacing the bureaucratic tangle of our various social safety nets and welfare programs. All monopolies, duopolies, and oligarchies need to be crushed to keep markets free, because the invisible hand needs a paired visible hand to prevent regulatory capture by capital. Drugs should be decriminalized, 2nd amendment rights should be respected, reproductive control should be respected, the government has no business in who married who, religion should be kept to one's self, and environmental regulation should just ensure clean water, clean air, and long term watershed protection. The market should drive pretty much everything else, with the understanding that unlimited growth is as bullshit as assuming a frictionless sphere in physics. All of these "socialist" programs actually result in functional limited government and maximum individual freedom. It's not a communist utopia, but I consider it functional Utilitarian Georgist Libertarianism.

I intend no disrespect or hurtfulness, nor would I mean to suggest the Jewish people would be a monolith. I do not believe that even most pro-Israel supporters want or advocate for an pure ethnostate outside of the extreme religious rightwing. I may also be wrong, but I believe that most regular Israelis would happily welcome peaceful and equal relations with Palestine. My understanding of Zionism is also that it is similarly quite diverse in meaning an intention for each individual. If you do feel like letting me know anything specifically that I said that is being received as hurtful, I am happy to review and learn more.

I did take some time to review some publications by the Jewish Voice for Peace as suggested, and do fine a rather hard line extreme left slant. It appears that JVP is advocating for the dissolution of the Israeli state and repatriation of the land to Palestinians, but it is not clear how this is recommended in relation with the existing population. I also feel that the JVP's apparent stance that anyone advocating for a right for Israel's existence is advocating for a Jewish ethno-supremasist state is reductive in an "if you're not with us your against us" or an "anyone to the right of us may as well be alt right" format. It is definitely worth engaging with their material even if I may not agree with everything though. It has given me further insight on a facet I never would have thought about from the original "death to Israel" comment that started my inquiry. If you have any other recommendations for more insight I am open to it. I may support the existence of both Israel and Palestine in the long run, but I am always happy to expand my scope of understanding.

1. taking this logic at face value, no one can colonize specific areas of Africa where humans are from. So it is obviously wrong. Do you mean what you said or are you trying to say something else?
2. If Celtics colonized London and started doing apartheid that would also be unjustifiable.

To clarify 1) That would be abstracting it further than I'd intended with my point, though there is merit in the view that humans is humans. I was arguing from a more narrow ethnicity band such as Jewish or Palestinian or Celtic. The British aren't generally called colonizers on the English Isles, but when they left Europe they became colonizers on those new lands.

2. I once again would like to reiterate, an apartheid is unjust whether Israel has a right to be a country or not. If England was somehow defeated in a war, dissolved, and the UN recognized Wales as an independent country with split control of London with the Britons, no one would call the Welsh colonizers, even if they made an apartheid government. The same goes for Serbia and Kosovo, or Turkey and the Kurdistan. Lots of ethnic violence and cleansing attempts, but Israel seems to be labeled colonizers because it's an extra layer of bad while also implying they just showed up from somewhere else to steal land they were never involved with.

This relies on the reader buying into the assumption that territorial claims last forever.

The only reason I ask about territorial claims and their duration is because the argument for the creation of Palestine as a country comes from this historical territory claim just as much as Israel. When the Ottoman Empire was defeated and broken up, the two groups with the greatest historical claim in the region (Palestinians and Jews) both wanted independent states.

Also buying into a notion of a homeland needing to be a settler colonial state.

That is a bit of soft logic, ethnic groups by and large prefer to be self governed. By your same logic, the Kurds should be happy to stay under Turkish rule, since otherwise they would need to "colonize" territory from Turkey. The Irish shouldn't have recolonized part of their island after the British solidified their territory. Oppressed peoples tend to want to have a sovereign country. That does not then in turn excuse the oppressed from becoming oppressors themselves, but that doesn't just completely invalidate a right to exist

You could have a secular Palestine where immigrant Jewish people could live in peace as equals alongside Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians, who had a long period of relative peace before the founding of the settler colonial project.

That buys into the notion that Palestine has greater claim to exist than Israel. It also glosses over that the Jewish people had been persecuted and killed for centuries that culminated in the Holocaust, which should be an obvious zeitgeist for not wanting to be immigrants again just in a new place. This is again not permission for Israel to commit their own atrocities. Palestine was also never going to be secular even under Mandatory Palestine, but that is a helluva quagmire to try and wade through and I am not a scholar of the Levant region.

You could argue that there isn't, there is only a moral mandate to end the current systems of violence and take proactive measures to produce equity in material conditions.

That is more or less my general stance: humans have fought for most of the planet for millennia, genociding the losers for most of that history, and have only tried to be "better" when at war for less than 100 years. The only constant is change, and humans is humans. Someday hopefully we get over the whole war thing altogether, which will probably require widespread fusion energy to fuel a post scarcity society globally, and probably will still need a global existential threat to unite everyone. It would be great if both sides would agree to return to the '67 borders and stop attacking each other, but the leadership of both sides doesn't want that. The only way the cycle of violence stops is for one side to essentially surrender at this point, but the unelected Hamas leadership only has incentive to keep attacking and hurt Israel's international support and Israel is unlikely to be the first country on earth to voluntarily dissolve and invite their war opponent to take them over.

As a reminder, my whole section of this thread was for those who want Israel destroyed and a one state Palestine, as I don't understand not seeing both ethnic group's claims on the region as more or less equal on the whole. I don't see any reason a two state solution can't work except for certain people's refusal to see the other side as equal, and those certain people managing to be the ones in charge.

First, your username finally clicked and I feel slow for missing it for so long. I actually love it.

Nextly, to also be fair, the existence of a difference between private and personal property isn't widely known, and China's implementations of these concepts are even less well known unless someone has been more than toes deep into communist/socialist discussion. Even a lot of "communist" posters don't have a good grasp on it and can't really articulate the original intent behind "abolish private property".

I would like to point out that there are currently enough homes in the US for everyone, and far more vacant homes than our entire homeless population right now. We have major density problems and collusery artificial scarcity that has long crossed over into being illegal and immoral, so we need to be building homes on the scale we did in the post war period. Houses should be much further down the commodity end of the commodity/investment scale, but until we reach a true post scarcity environment (Star Trek levels of post scarcity), I don't foresee full decommoditization of housing working sustainably.

Lastly, while the communist state really isn't coming for your toothbrush, obstensively communist countries have overshot going after the landlords and replaced most residential personal property with government landlords. Soviet khrushchevka blocks are a trope for a reason, even if overused.

And thank you for the actual engagement and conversation on this, I appreciate your insights.

On that we are agreed. Should your statement be taken as the Jews being settler colonizers though? I would argue that an ethnicity cannot truly be a colonizer on the land they originated from. For that to be true, we have to acknowledge an absolute right of conquest for territory after a certain amount of time has elapsed. I believe a peaceful and fully autonomous two state solution is the most logically fair outcome, but am not holding my breath for that.

If the argument is that they are colonizers now, would the same be true in the extremely unlikely hypothetical that the United States was forced to return a state to the native tribes that were originally there? Would we call the returning native tribes settler colonizers if the current inhabitants had to leave the new tribal lands? The land has belonged to the current inhabitants for over 200 years after all, and if not, how long is the cutoff?

This mostly boils down to the question: if you can't have a permanent loss of claim to a historical homeland through conquest, then why would there be an exception to this rule for the Jewish ethnicity? And if you can lose claim to a historical homeland if conquered well enough, why would there be any substance to return native lands anywhere else?

Not to be pedantic, but you did write just the broader enforcement of property rights and not private property rights, and I approached it from that broader perspective. Under your clarification, your house does not cease to be your personal property when you leave it for work, but only if the government uses their monopoly of violence to enforce it. And yes, it was a stretch of rhetoric, but not made dishonestly.

The concern is that under this ideal scenario, what happens if you leave you house for a longer term? How does this take temporary moving into account? Examples: I get temporarily transferred for a year to a new city by my job and I fully intend to return to my home after this assignment. Rental homes/apartments aren't a thing, so I must either buy a dwelling there for a year, or stay in a hotel for a year. If I buy a dwelling, I now own two properties as long as I can afford to pay both mortgages. More likely, I am forced to sell my long term home because I cannot rent it out for that year I am gone. If I do keep it, can I own two separate pieces of personal property or does one become private property because it is not in habitation? I have deprived someone of buying one of them by owning both, and ownership of empty dwellings is usually complained about just as much as renting them. Will my personal property rights be enforced on my vacant home for that year? Should the government allow someone to move in and use my house for that year without my permission or compensation, and only resume enforcing my rights when I move back in? Am I forced to sell and hope that I can rebuy my home when I return? A similar dwelling in an adjacent area may not factor against the sentimental value of a family or generational home. Are any of these parts different if I become temporarily disabled and move in to another person's home for care. What about a year in the hospital or rehabilitation facility? I don't think any of these concerns are all that absurd, even if they would affect a small percentage of the population.

You were also seemingly arguing that allowing non-residential private property rights would/should still be enforced so that the capitalist class gets to keep commercial property, unless you are classifying personal, private, and capital property as three distinct categories. Since generally the argument is that private residential property is being used as a rung of capital, I was viewing these as similar enough to be lumped together. It does seem that maybe you were hinting at this being a first step, keep the capital class from revolting while we take out the rentier class, and then move on the remaining private property in swallowable chunks as power is consolidated, which is another reason to view it at a somewhat extreme angle.

The premise that the Jewish people might deserve a country is nonsense? If it is, I am asking why do they not deserve one while other ethnicities do? Obviously an individuals views on whether Israel is running an apartheid state fall under the biases I mentioned, because some people do not recognize it as such, and I was not addressing the anti-apartheid movement. That definitely deserves its own discussion, but is layers above my question. South Africa is also different in that the apartheid government was formed from outside colonial settlers who had zero historic roots in the area. Israel/Palestine is closer to the bloody formations of India and Pakistan or the many other African wars caused by departing colonial powers arbitrarily redrawing maps on their way out, than South Africa's white apartheid government in underpinning if not human cost.

I am asking what the people calling for Israel to cease existing and be replaced in it's entirety by Palestine believe the Jewish people should do? If the region should be Palestine because of Palestinian genealogical roots, why do the Jews not get any claim in the region for the same reason? Is it because they were conquered and removed from the region in the past and the Palestinians weren't? Mainly, if a two state solution isn't desirable, it seems to be either because the Jewish people have insufficient or lacking genealogical claim in the region, or because they don't deserve the same "rights" as the Palestinians for a myriad of other reasons.

Why would anyone pay property tax if property rights stop being enforced? Unless you are actually just giving only the government property rights, allowing the writing and enforcement of evictions, which just makes the government the sole owner of all land the thus the new landlord. Even then, why pay tax when I can just go squat in anyone's house or building while they aren't home and it comes down to whoever is stronger getting to stay. Also no point paying tax if someone can just come take it from me. Unless you mean the police actually will enforce property rights for some people but just not others, which just means only those who can afford to employ the police have secure property while the poors just get to duke it out. Unless what you are actually saying is only don't enforce property rights on secondary building ownership, and then only if that secondary building is not owned by a business that is not providing residential living space. Or are we also breaking up all multi-locatiln businesses the same way?

If everyone risks losing their home every time they leave for work or to get groceries, and only the strongest get to keep the best shelters, the social compact is broken and forming warring territorial clans and insular communities is the end result. Property rights are kind of a keystone for a functional society operating at a size larger than a rural village. It would cause less damage to just make owning more than a single family dwelling illegal, and force everyone to acquire a mortgage to wherever they currently live. This may partially lock your population to wherever they happen to live without finding someone to swap similarly valued dwelling units wherever you want to move to, but there are ways to lessen that impact. Alternatively, the government just seizes all property and doles it out according to whatever the government's desires are for an area.

So here's my honest question, why are the Jewish people relatively singled out as excluded from being allowed to desire a state/homeland? Is there an argument that the Jewish people did not originate from that area of the world, and if so, where is the actual Jewish homeland? Did the Jewish people spring forth fully developed from Zeus's forehead? The argument seems to be that all indigenous peoples should have at least parts of their lands and autonomy restored to them all over the world; except for the Jews, because fuck them they don't deserve a country for non-antisemetic reasons and they should have integrated into a new Arabic country of Palestine instead of splitting the land.

Ignoring the history of Jewish treatment in other countries around the globe for centuries, I don't understand how, for a land that is the historical birthplace of several peoples, it is considered good for one of those peoples to fight for it and bad for another of those peoples to do the same. It all seems to come down to where anyone's specific biases fall, while everyone claims to not have any biases.

Careful now, your about to say the quiet part (we think certain people are too deficient to think for themselves, so we enlightened should do their thinking for them) out loud. Humans don't have a great track record of dragging the "unenlightened savages" out of their ignorance, kicking and screaming if needs be, and North Americans in particular.

So what you are saying is that everything apparently boils down to two sides wanting nothing more than genocide, as Hamas' goal since their founding has been the elimination of Israel and the Jews from the middle east. Under that reduction, we just need to choose whether we support a flawed but still functional democracy or another conservative theocracy under Iran in the region. Third option being to pull all support for both sides and just let them destroy each other with a statistically significant possibility of nuclear exchange in the end.

I also would like to know of any other country on earth that would allow a neighboring country to continually launch rockets at it for decades and take no retaliatory action whatsoever, like Israel is somehow an outlier. Is there honestly a realistic expectation that this time would be different if Palestine was given the full Two State system under the original borders? 5th or 6th times the charm on that one? Maybe this time there wouldn't be another full scale war from all surrounding neighbors, but does anyone actually expect Iran to stop funding or conducting terror attacks on Israel through Palestine, Syria, or Lebanon?

Those are all very complicated questions. The Israelis being closer to the afore mentioned American and Australian natives than their European settlers, having historical roots in the Levant since well into the BC's being one of them. Further complicated by the fact that Palestine lost that land after going to war to reject the two state system, multiple times. The only acceptable option according to Palestinian governments (leaving intentions of the civilians out of it for the obvious reasons that their individual preferences can't be known) up until recently was the complete destruction of Israel, and no country is going to just roll over and cease to exist because their neighbors want them to.

This is not to justify a might makes right viewpoint, or to give a pass for war crimes on either side. The years of heavy handed treatment definitely exacerbates this. I honestly don't know of any country that would handle the situation better in the same circumstances, so it's hard to find a good path forward. The closest situation I can think of is Britain and Ireland, and I don't think there would be a Repulic of Ireland if their only stated objective had the complete annihilation of the British from the isles instead of just independence of the island.

Ah, yes, I understand. I did sadly expect there to be nothing articulable backing up this nebulous land back idea beyond apparently a general "US (or maybe just people of European descent in general) bad, and so we must somehow undo centuries of colonization by just giving some undefined land back to undefined people, which is totally possible because sovereign countries voluntarily give up their territory all the time". I thank you for the enlightening discourse on this topic.

Not sure where you get genocide denial out of what amounts to "humans have been genociding each other since the Homo genus common ancestor split off". I am asking if anyone actually expects any country on earth to decide that decades, or more likely centuries, in their past they conquered the land they now claim from another people group and now we feel bad about what our ancestors did so we are giving the country back to the most direct descendants of that group.

Are there actual expectations that the US is actually going to give everything or anything east of the Mississippi back to the native tribes, and/or Texas back to Mexico? Do we expect Canada to give BC back to their indigenous tribes? Obviously current relations with both groups need to be fixed because there are ongoing issues, nor should we celebrate the atrocities that happened during any of the colonial movements.

The Americas are also different from the colonialization of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East because the colonists moved there and stayed there instead of setting up exploitation of resources to send back, thus allowing "decolonizing" of those places to happen. And then decolonizing caused further problems by the colonizers drawing borders on their way out. This isn't to advocate that they stayed colonies, nor do I think these places would have peacefully self-assembled into their own countries if Europe had just dropped everything and left. Human nature would have still had different land and resource wars happen as the native populations filled back in the power gaps.

Genocide is still as bad now as it was then, and even less acceptable because of our modern and "enlightened" morals. This applies to all ongoing genocides and ethnic cleansing attempts. I'm saying the cat is out of the bag on this though, and no government realistically fears any land back movement causing them to support any other country's existence.

Every square inch of land on earth has "changed hands" so to speak, multiple times by multiple peoples, mostly non-peacfully. How far back does a "land back movement" plan to go? The only fair option would be to DNA test bones from before the last glacial maximum and find descendents with the highest genome similarly and reshuffle all existing populations back based on their earliest ancestors. Or move all humans back to Africa and leave the rest of the world to the native wildlife. Or is it just the US and Canada because they were the most recent? Will we include Mexico and make them give the country back to the Aztec, or do they get a pass because Spain isn't considered as bad as those pesky Brits? Do we try and find populations of tribes conquered and replaced by the Aztec?

Do we have the authority to freeze all national borders as they are right now in perpetuity to preserve national and racial identities? Are you in favor of the world going to war against Russia to prevent colonial genocide against Ukraine? What do we do with the current peoples existing on their lands now? Do we break every country on earth up into ethnic tribal lands, or City-States? European colonialism of Africa and the Americas was broadly terrible at the time with many lasting issues, but it's not exactly unique in human history, so I am honestly curious what the end goals look like.

Last I checked the USA wasn't on any country's immigration blacklist. You still need to have some kind of useful skill for a work visa, and there are unique costs to international moves, but it's far from illegal to move away from the US. Additional costs if you want to renounce your US citizenship instead of holding dual citizenship wherever you move to, but that's a personal decision there unless you move to a place that requires renouncing citizenship as part of gaining it like the US does. Unless you were conflating free as is freedom for free as in no cost, but that would be silly given the context where this entire discussion thread is about freedom.

To quote Benjamin Franklin here, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Anyone is free to relocate to those other developed countries you mentioned if they do not want the burden of their own personal liberties and rights, but stripping those rights from everyone else in the USA doesn't fly well here.

Some of us have completely dumped ActiBliz permanently. The existence of Overwatch 2 was my final straw as it turned out Bungie was the bad guy behind the Activision mask all along with Destiny 2's bullshit. Never even looked at Diablo Immortal or 4, and never will. Blizzard joined the shambling horde of zombie companies that effectively died years ago. Damned AAA necromancers just out to pump and dump any remaining customers.

Indeed, we should eliminate all landlords and then everyone who wants to not live with family or friends who already own a house should obviously just get a 15 or 30 year mortgage. I'm sure you qualified for one at 18, or maybe 26. And it is really easy and convenient to sell your house/condo/apartment every few years if you want or need to move regularly. There is never a viable condition for renting. But if somehow there were to be a magical condition where one would rent, then clearly the trading of goods and services for money only works if each transaction is specifically priced to only and exactly cover the input costs. Making profit is immoral after all. You know what they say, people and businesses only exist because of the joy derived from watching others consume the products of their labor. Has this comment gotten annoyingly snarky yet?

Now we as a society should start treating housing as a commodity and produce it in vast numbers so that supply continuously meets or exceeds demands. We should also implement a Georgist land use tax to prevent mass corporate ownership of housing so that housing prices fall comparably to what they were in the 50s and 60s. We probably want to slowly phase that change in though, because housing as an investment is the only thing propping up the middle class currently, and if every primary residence home owner was suddenly under water by double or tripple or more of their existing mortgages then bad things happen. Tenent owned cooperative housing complexes might even be cool too.

Thank you for even objectively considering my perspective. The 2nd amendment has a metric shitload of strong feelings surrounding it, which makes it an outlier from all the other rights in the constitution currently. I personally believe every right needs to be defended equally zealously, because there is always a tendency towards erroding them. I wouldn't even put it past some politicians to actually try my ludicrous voter suppression parts by offering monetary incentives to not vote in districts that aren't already gerrymandered to hell. Or the same for 4th amendment rights. Looking at you, fascist wing of the GOP.

The constitution is intended to grow and evolve with the country, which is why we have ways to do this. It's not easy though, by design. Obviously SOMETHING needs to change, be it guns, mental health, policing, wealth equality, or personal security. I, once again personally, think that the root cause of violent crime lies under wealth inequality, lack of feeling secure and productive in society/their community, and physical/mental health rather than just access to firearms. I also think it is easier to get a simple majority of the country to agree to fixing our broken healthcare system, and make substantive steps to curb wealth inequality than it is to get 75% of both houses of Congress and then 75% of State Governments to agree to reduce or eliminate gun rights. But I know I'm an outlier here myself, and there are better minds than mine out there.

I'd love to have a viable candidate to vote for that wants to keep individual gun rights, implement a UBI in place of the rats nest of gutted social services, offer universal healthcare to include mental health, fix the tax code, close loopholes, tax automation, and codify abortion, gay marriage, and LGBTQ rights. But since that wouldn't rile up the extreme ends of the voter bases, I won't be holding my breath.