As badly described as possible, what is your favorite video game?
abraxas @ abraxas @lemmy.ml Posts 1Comments 387Joined 2 yr. ago
abraxas @ abraxas @lemmy.ml
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Nope. I too know nothing about Disco Elysium.
Nope! Though I can see why someone would guess that. Haven't played Postal in decades... These reasons for dying are fairly specific, though.
It's kinda tongue in cheek, but that's how we say things in my part of the US. "Fourth of July" is spoken of exactly as if it were the name of the day, like "Thanksgiving" or "Christmas". Just like we still refer to "Cinco de Mayo" even though we don't speak Spanish.
Obviously it's not really called "Fourth of July", but nobody ever says "Nth of Month" here otherwise. And I'm kinda grateful as I like "bigger to smaller" notation. Yeah, mm/dd/yyyy sucks, but saying it that way is pretty expressive because the year rarely matters. So it's like "Hours and minutes" or (yeah, sorry Europeans) Feet and inches. Bigger before smaller quickly expresses precise information to our caveman brains. At least to my caveman brain.
Also, the movie really wasn't that good in retrospect, but we had some sort of fever about it because it was expensive with lots of explosions, and good music licensing. And both patriots and antipatriots had something to get out of it because aliens blew up the White House.
My recent favorite here. This one might be a stumper for people trying to solve it.
You get shot for getting too handsy, especially with the sensitive fat guy. Or just looking at the art. Or, hell, when someone asks you to get them a drink from the bar. But then you get to try to shoot people for returning the wrong book. So it's all good.
Except that mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy can be ambiguous, I definitely prefer the former if I'm not using an ISO date. But normally I just write ISO and my head translates to MMM dd,yyyy
"Fourth of July" is the name of the holiday. It happens on "July 4th".
"Independence Day" was a movie in the 90's. We never say "Independence Day" around here unless the topic is Will Smith or REM.
Let's be honest. If he comes back, doesn't that mean that book is true? We're literally acting under the presumption of the guy coming back.
Which means there would be a pissy magic man in the sky. And that means we would go to hell in a handbasket.
So I'm voting on Radio Shack.
They've always backed conservative cops enforcing conservative laws against "other people" but letting conservatives off with a warning.
They also said something about community points being usable for moderation/governance. Does that mean people can come in and save/buy enough Community Points to enact a coup?
Like, Atheists could get enough Christianity sub credits and ban all the Christians? Or bigots could seize an LGBTQ+ sub? It seems kinda like a nightmare waiting to happen if so.
It is not legal where I live
Does where you live also restrict emmigration? If so, you're not in a free country in the first place. It's 100% legal where I live.
Let’s try not talking about the binary situation of refusing a government or taxes altogether. I can agree that certain things can be handled by a state (although not in the most efficient way imo). There are still a shit ton of things that governements spend money on that I might not want
So? Independent will is not the be-all end-all. If you want to kill people, you don't get to do that. Not paying taxes is not a victimless act, either. That's part of the societal agreement. You don't always get what you want. But you do get to do things that many people think you shouldn't get to do. As I mentioned "property is theft" to many people. And I reject their opinion the same as yours.
For example, where I live a significant portion of my obligatory tax goes to state run “public service”, i.e. state run entertainment
Are you a democracy? If you're a free country, at least some percent of society wants to use tax dollars to that. If you're not a in free country, well, taxes is a weird hill to die on.
And our process for public procurement is a mess, where things cost insane amounts of money, and most of the time don’t even lead to any actual executed projects. How are such things defensible with an obligatory tax design?
Private sector inefficiency is pretty horrible in most of the world... and most of the world thinks it's ok to have private sector inefficiency (aka, profit margins). I tend to fight FOR regulated efficiency in both the private and public sectors... so you have my sympathy, just disagreement that it means taxation is actual theft.
What I’m trying to say is that yes in a perfect world taxes are fine and dandy, and we get nice roads and healthcare, but in the reality that at least I live in it is just an expensive mess of things that I mostly don’t want, but am forced to pay for.
I don't know where you live or the details, but it seems you agree taxation isn't theft :). But more importantly, I'm sorry to hear your government is wasteful (or that you think it is. Though I can't really guess where you're from, I find the most effective governments often have the most complaints of government waste).
None of these things you replied with have anything to do with the topic at hand, and I understand. It's easy to come up with some fancy catch-phrase and just hold to it in the face of rational thought. It's what governments do all the time.
You have not and will not convince me that a government will ever be more competent and efficient at solving these issues than alternatives
This is a topic change and gishgallop. I have opinions on that topic, but why would I pivot to it with how bent out of shape you're getting over this one?
And, I repeat, it is not voluntary
It is "not voluntary" only the same way contracts are "not voluntary" or work is "not voluntary". It's hard to get by without those things because the entire world disagrees with you on them. But it's possible.
If private property is not a right, what gives the government right to dictate my life because I happened to be born on this particular plot of land?
They don't dictate your life. They dictate that a percent of the private property they amplify for you go back to them. If you choose not to take their protection on a piece of property, or use their infrastructure in any way, they can ask nothing of you. With very few exceptions, if you work any job or any land at all, you use government infrastructure in 100 different ways. It is perfectly legal in many countries (including the US) to live in the wilderness and sustain yourself on your own efforts. In such a case, you use no infrastructure and pay no taxes. Win/win. What you seem to want is all the entitlement you already have, but the government providing it to you free of charge. Good fucking luck.
But I think it is at this point where the core of our disagreement lies: you think it is a fair compromise to give up freedom and have a government solve these issues however it sees fit (as a part of a “social contract”), whereas I see it as a basic human right to be able to choose
But private property isn't a human right. Are you trying to pretend otherwise? Hell, "work begets profits" isn't a human right. It's not even a right under capitalism. You could work your ass off and get nothing. You don't have the right to the fruits of your work in the first place. If you work hard and get nothing, you don't think you're entitled to something. The government creates a framework that increases the odds you're going to get something, and you ungratefully treat their commission as theft.
You being able to get anything at all from your work is a social contract. You say taxation is theft, but here's something I bet you didn't know. "Taxation is Theft" is a newer concept, perhaps even a response to the older, more defensible concept that "Property is Theft".
And with due respect, you DO have a choice. You give consent to taxation every single day you stay in a country that charges taxes. You are consenting to a social contract. Anyone who has ever taken a loan to pay medical bills will agree that consent isn't necessarily a happy thing, or an uncoerced thing. You could always emmigrate to a country that doesn't have taxation, like Qatar. Countries that don't tax have a pretty bad track record of treating people living in them, but at leaste you don't have to pay taxes. Well, there are a few that are just havens for billionaires, but I don't think you're rich enough to go to one of those if you're arguing with me on lemmy.
Ehhhhhhhh.... I wouldn't go that far. I had a not-terrible one, who only showed bad sides when I was in my 20s. lol
I think that's a fair point, but a tough one. Here's my problem with it. I've watched a lot of his stuff, and his videos on meat/vegan seem to be by far the most impactful. In fact, I have noticed an incredibly high impact rate on otherwise obscure people who publish content anywhere on the spectrum of that particular topic.
Maybe there is a prejudicial bias, but it seems at least as likely to me that he just started posting more content on that same topic as made him money/viewers. Note, I didn't say "conclusions that made money" because I think he'd have succeeded equally if his videos concluded the opposite.
But I also have a problem with likening high protein stuff with "meat lifestyle". Ketogenic diets are the single biggest explosion in health these days. I have a close friend who is a nutritionist who is obsessed with it. I had family go to dietary counselling and it's the first item on their list. You can't walk 5 feet without people talking about how it is salvation or suicide. But despite the fact that meat is almost a critical necessity to make it work, it's not a diet about meat. Further, I'd like to remind you that ketogenics (and not anti-veganism) are even more of an obsession with fitness/health extremists. I'm sure I totally telegraphed my next point. If you look at the other 50% of his content, a lot of it is exactly that.
I will say, if I had any red flags about him, they would come from his interviews with conservative personalities. I've noticed, unfortunately often, an uncomfortable correlation between conservativism and anti-veganism (I have become opposed to veganism, but am as far from a conservative as you can get). But I also try to keep political views, even ones I disagree with strongly, out of topics that don't directly seem related to them.
I don't think taxation is theft, so I don't have to deal with any of these logical contradictions that I've directed at you.
I gain work-protection from the government. It's a social contract, and a fair one. They take my tax dollars as payment, but in return, will shoot you if you try to walk into my house. I have some ethical problems with the way some of that happens, but all-in-all it's a reasonable exchange. The biggest thing that's missing is that a critical part of the social contract is that if I can't walk into your house to take your food, the government needs to guarantee I won't starve otherwise. Guess what is necessary to close that loop? Tax money.
And no, I'm not being silly. I'm accurately calling you on defining "things I don't like" as theft and "things I do like" as not theft. "Loss of value" is an unusable metric for that, and I provided a concrete example to that effect.
Everyone said I was disadvantaged by having a single parent, but I didn't have to live through any of that shit except for 1 year my mother married (and then left the guy because he was an ass)
You are committing what is called a fallacy fallacy, and do not address how they are different
I actually did address the claim by showing how your logic doesn't work with anarchism. But if you would like a direct rebuttal, I'd be happy to provide. Here are the reasons that "taxation is theft" is bullshit propaganda.
You do not have a right to your pre-tax income, or any income for that matter. Private Property is a social contract. The money you are being taxed has no real or implied value except the value created by a single cohesive system that involves the same threat of force to reinforce. If taxation is theft, then money is not property and you don't own that house you bought with it. In fact, you trying to keep me from walking ont it and taking some food would quite literally be theft.
The only way taxation can be theft is if you reject the mercantile system. And if you reject the mercantile system, then the money being taxed cannot be seen as property (and therefore it is still also not theft).
I take it you refer to online piracy?
Yeah. Record labels started taking to call it "theft" when they wanted to ban it. They started teaching people it was theft. They got this big FBI banner on the opening of all VHS tapes.
On one hand you are not taking anything away, you are just copying. But on the other hand, to cite yourself, that is of course an oversimplification.
Thank you for explaining to the audience the exact reason I brought up piracy :)
As you are stealing potential income
So is it theft for me to install a lock on someone's door because I'm stealing another thief's potential income? I'm objecting to this ever-widening definition of theft to "whatever I think of as theft". I recently heard an interesting lie: "words don't have definitions, they have usages". The idea was to counter all these semantic-seeming battles. The problem is that words most certainly do have definitions, and if you oppose what a word means (like theft) that doesn't mean you get to oppose others' meanings of that word automatically.
Taxation is NOT theft. If you think it's wrong, find better reasons to think it's wrong than to use a word with a very clear definition that doesn't include taxation.
Here's some citations for you on the topic:
https://taxjustice.net/faq/is-taxation-theft/
https://www.fastcompany.com/90636996/taxation-isnt-theft-but-avoiding-taxes-is
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/01/why-taxation-is-neither-theft-nor-slavery
Is it really bias you would rather show, than inaccuracy? You sorta just pointed out from your source that bias should not entirely matter in the context of accuracy. But Ok, let me think.
Bias implies/requires prejudice or compromise. Obviously, if you could show me he is compromised and being paid for his videos by Big Ag, that would be an easy win. Otherwise, I think you'd need to show me that he is prejudiced against veganism (which, if I had to guess, probably needs to be from content outside of the video itself). I would take an argument that all his sources are biased, similarly. It might not show he himself is willfully biased, but that he "fell in with the wrong crowd" by picking sources that steered him in a biased way.
Absolutely worth research. It's also worth research (before action) to try drastic countermeasures that don't involve reverting the earth to an earlier state. For example, animal methane production in the US is not much higher than it ever was. If a "vegan revolution" happens, the animal methane production in the US will be dramatically lower than pre-civilized homeostasis. Probably not a big deal (since it's such a tiny percent of GHGs anyway).
Similarly, I agree we could find a way to reduce cow methane production that could be given to the actual countries (potentially) contributing to global warming with their livestock... And also similarly, we should take each step with some care so as not to worsen the situation.
We think we know a lot about carbon and global warming, and we do. But we need to remember as we look at this stuff that we don't know everything.
Nope. But guesses are getting a bit closer.