adderaline @ ondoyant @beehaw.org

recovering hermit, queer and anarchist of some variety, trying to be a good

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2 yr. ago

look, if the realities of a system or policy are statistically more likely to target queer people, it is a queer issue lol. restrictions on discussing sex publicly disproportionately affect those who are sexual minorities, because all "legitimate" channels for learning about sex are usually targeted for heterosexual couplings. there's a reason why queer people have a vested interest in sex education. modesty laws are also more oppressive for queer people by their nature.

anything that regulates how people dress also regulates gender expression, because clothing in most of the world is gendered. there are things that women wear that men can't, things that are "too much skin" for women and not men. if you legislate what people can wear, you have a very good tool for targeting queer folks, even if it theoretically could also be used to target other kinds of self-expression. you can't make a modesty law that isn't also anti-queer by extension, because modesty as a concept is defined by patriarchy, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity.

right, but you do understand that these things are interrelated. not all anti-LGBT policies explicitly target only LGBT people. if you restrict dressing "differently" and talking about sex, the people who dress differently or have different kinds of sex (queer people) are systemically disadvantaged when compared to straight and cis people. and if there's bigotry in your society, there's no guarantee that these restrictive policies are going to be applied to everybody equally.

like, bathroom bills don't have to mention trans people to target trans people exclusively, because very few other groups of people have the motivation to choose a bathroom that doesn't align with their assigned sex at birth. if you restrict a behavior queer people are statistically highly likely to engage in, the fact that it could also impact other groups doesn't make it not a queer issue.

Separating different things to figure out their role in an overall system is a completely normal and useful thing to do. [...]

that isn't my point. my point is that rent has always existed within unjust systems, and is itself a tool for those systems to accumulate wealth. if we're taking gears out of a meatgrinder and trying to identify just how much that gear contributes to the problem of grinding people into meat, we're missing the point. in practice, the system in which rent operates is built to deprive people of resources. but even then your framing is not agreeable to me. we aren't talking about a machine, we're talking about a complex socio-cultural phenomenon that developed organically over generational time spans. the idea that we could even rip the word "rent" out of the context it exists in and get anything worthwhile out of analyzing it like that is not reasonable to me. like, cultures and economies don't have parts like an engine do, they have trends and policies and outcomes, and those things can't reasonably be reduced to cogs in a machine.

That’s not an argument against rent, that’s an argument against students having different means and having to pay for things in general. Why do students have to pay for food themselves? Why do they have to do their own house work when others can afford to hire someone? Those are all good questions, but they only concern rent in so far as it’s also a thing people pay money for.

you're doing the thing again. separating rent out from the system its built into and analyzing it only as the act of exchanging currency for housing itself. i'm trying to engage in a systemic critique, not a stubbornly isolated look at a single piece of a larger whole. the problem of students "having different means" is not the point. you have to look at the larger picture. on a population scale, how does the requirement to pay your resources into the pockets of wealthier people for basic housing affect a society?

rent is, in the case of the university student, a material obstacle towards getting an education. those who do not have money or home ownership are more likely to be denied an education as a result, and will have less access to money making opportunities in the future. the money they could have been saving for themselves goes into the pockets of richer (whiter) people, so they are less likely to be able to pass on money they make during their lifetime onto their kids. non-white people are much more likely to be renting than white people, and that is historically because non-white people were restricted from home ownership in the past, and were not able to build the kind of generational wealth that comes from home ownership. rental arrangements reinforce existing social stratifications by providing the means by which the wealthy (and white) can continue to extract resources from the poor (and brown), as they have done for generations past.

like... sharecropping was rent, and its sole purpose was to explicitly ensure that freed slaves continued to provide wealth to their former masters. the actual observable impacts of rent are to transfer wealth from people who have no resources to those with resources to spare.

[...] If there are more houses than people wanting to live in them then houses are essentially “unlimited”, in the sense that you’d probably need to pay someone to take it off your hands. [...]

i was being facetious. my point was more that these factors you seem to think are separable are interlinked. just as a wake up call, there are currently more houses than people wanting to live in them. there are many multiples of houses left unoccupied for each homeless person in the United States, and the price of housing hasn't done the thing you're saying it would. instead, homelessness is increasing as landlords continue to raise rent, and the prospect of owning a home is becoming more and more out of reach for more and more people.

Rent doesn’t require private ownership. Property can be owned and rented out by public entities, and that’s actually pretty common.

there is a rabbit hole i could go down about this, but i don't really wanna. my position is relatively simple. housing is a human right. putting literally any barriers up that prevent people from getting a place to stay are wrong. imposing extra financial burdens onto the people who have the least money is wrong. rent is such a burden, even for public housing. nobody outside the people who live on the land should have ownership over the land, not wealthy folks, not the state. housing co-ops, self-governance, that is what we should strive for.

As an example, burglars require air to live, but the problem of burglaries cannot simply be reduced to the existence of air.

i don't really know how to respond to this. air isn't a socioeconomic phenomenon with a proven history of driving wealth inequality? it doesn't interact with race and class in ways that structurally disadvantage people who are poor and brown?

And uhm … the universe is infinite as far as we know, but that’s another discussion entirely.

lol. disagree, but fine, ill be less hyperbolic. "the parts of the universe we can build houses on currently are finite." is that better?

That might be what you’re calling personal ownership, while I’d just say that’s private ownership within healthy limits.

i'm just gonna end with this: i'm not prepared to expand upon the exact shape of why i think you're wrong, and why i think your rebuttals fail to provide a compelling challenge to the ideas i'm trying to convey. (that is not to say there aren't compelling challenges to socialist ideas, there certainly are.) i used to hold a very similar position. the idea of doing away with private property once seemed ludicrous to me. then i actually engaged with socialist and anarchist arguments for why they believe the things they believe, and i found them compelling. i'm not saying you will too, but i am saying that the reasons i believe these things are knowable and there's plenty of media out there that explains it better than i ever could.

do you genuinely think that the actions of Israel are going to actually achieve the goal of killing every single Hamas member? what the Israeli government is doing is actively building support for radical action, because the position Israel is taking, the actions they're taking, are unreasonable and abhorrent. if your goal is to kill all the insurgents, you lose. because there is no practical way to do that without victimizing the population, killing innocent people, and driving the survivors of that terror campaign into insurgency themselves. we've seen this play out before, in so many places. Israel is doing nothing but ensuring the continuation of this conflict.

Unlike those two countries Israel ACTUALLY has a proven track record of working with Palestinians on a civil and economic level and not like your crusader kings jihad DLC fantasy.

maybe there was a track record. there isn't one any more. the only record the people of Gaza care about is the death toll. how are they expected to trust a country so willing to deliver death, disease, and famine upon them? how are we, as people who care for the lives of our fellow human beings, expected to side with racists and murderers? Hamas is a blight, no doubt, but it is a response to decades of oppression and harm, harm that Israel is gleefully embracing, even as the world turns against them. the kind of dysfunction that makes a state do what Israel is doing is not worth preserving. the kind of ideology that could justify what is happening right now is not worth fighting for.

If the IDF was bombing indiscriminately, then why are they using only expensive guided ammunition in dense urban areas? Wouldn’t it be far cheaper to just lob unguided bombs randomly instead of announcing where they strike through telephone calls, messages, flyers, hacked TV stations and, most recently, an online service? How does your claim of indiscriminate bombing mesh with this extensive warning system they developed?

if they aren't bombing indiscriminately, the death toll is even more condemnable. if they are precise in their bombing, they have used that precision to butcher thousands of innocent people. in any case, saying "watch out people who have no place to go, we're about to bomb the hospital you're in!" is not the humanitarian victory you seem to think it is.

This is a completely useless stance when you want to figure out if rent itself is morally good or bad.

hard disagree. we have to examine things as they exist in the real world, not as we would like them to be. if we are only figuring out whether it would be good in principle, we're failing to recognize whether that principle is actually founded on actual observable fact. and the observable facts say that rent has always been a potent tool for capitalists to extract wealth from people.

There is absolutely nothing wrong about this form of rent.

also disagree. why are these university students renting? schools could be providing housing to students if we invested public funds into that kind of project. what does the necessity of rent for students do in practice? well, the extra costs involved in having to rent space on the market in order to go to school structurally disadvantages marginalized students. students whose parents can cover the rent are able to maximize their time learning, take advantage of more extracurriculars, or save the money they make from a job for themselves, while students who can't have to live in their cars, take jobs to cover costs, or just not get the education they want. the scale of the problem is smaller, but the nature of the problem is the same. those who have not must give their money to those who have in order to have a place to live.

rent + limited supply + capitalistic profit maximation + corruption

lets just go through this. the supply of available property will always be limited. capitalism is defined by the private ownership of the means of production. corruption implies a system not working as intended. capitalism is intended to maximize profit, capitalism requires private ownership, resources are always limited, and rent requires private ownership. you might as well just say "private property + the limitations of a finite universe + private property + the incentives of private property is a problem". i'm kinda joking, but not really.

And I would definitely not go as far as saying that private property in general is bad, expecially not very limited private ownership like a person owning the house they live in or part of the company they work for. Too much concentration of ownership is a problem, not the concept of ownership itself.

this is a problem of terminology. generally when socialists or other lefties are talking about private property, they're talking about land and the economic abstractions of land ownership. socialist politics makes explicit distinctions between personal property and private property. i hear this argument alot, honestly, and if you find yourself making it as an argument against criticisms of private property more than once, i'd just recommend learning a bit more about what socialists believe, because its kind of just talking past what we think the problem is, and how we propose to solve it (democratically, instead of at the whims of rich folks).

you've talked about corporations a couple times, so i do wanna just say that those aren't necessarily reasonable structures in and of themselves. it isn't a given that the owners of a corporation should earn a profit, or that owning shares in a company is something beyond critique. there are more democratic organizational structures that don't concentrate power towards those who have the most stuff.

they didn't die "because of the October 7 attack". they died because the IDF has been indiscriminately bombing civilians after the attack. nothing about the actions of Israel are an inevitable consequence of October 7. they are the deliberate actions of a far-right government. i am not ill informed, i know the facts of the situation, i have family in israel, i am a jew. your failure to recognize forced migration and mass killing of palestinian civilians as fundamentally the same as what the jewish people were subjected to is appalling. never again for anyone.

or maybe not all jewish people think ethnic cleansing is acceptable? thousands of children have died.

rent doesn't exist in principle, it exists in practice. and in practice, the history of rent is a history of wealth extraction. if its "perverted" today, it definitely was 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. if you aren't aware, this is a pretty basic leftist thing. if property can be held privately, those who own the property can use that ownership to extract wealth from people who need water, food, and shelter, but do not themselves own property. they can use that extracted wealth to buy more property, depriving ever more people of places in which to live their lives without paying somebody else for the privilege. and so on. thus "private property is theft".

in any case, rent isn't an uncontroversial example of how to fairly pay people who do things. rent is deeply political, and has been for most of modern history. it isn't just common sense that we ought to allow people who own things to make money off that ownership, that's a political statement, and one that should require some justification, considering its material impact on poverty, homelessness, and the accumulation of wealth.

if you feel like rent as it currently exists even vaguely approximates the kind of model you claim you haven't been paying attention. rent is, at its core, having other people pay for something because you own it. landlords are infamous for not paying for upkeep and repairs. the incentives behind owning property that other people live in lead to bad outcomes for people who can't afford to own.

ugh. you've pressed enough of my buttons to warrant a response.

We’ve come a long way from cave drawings and hieroglyphics

the idea that hieroglyphs are in some way inferior to modern writing systems in an objective way is flawed. hieroglyphs were a diverse writing system comprised of phonograms, logograms, and ideograms, and they could be used contextually to record a rich and complex language as fully featured as our own. the ancient Egyptians wrote their dreams, legends, and histories in this text for over 4000 years. the idea that our modern languages are somehow "better" than ancient languages is to misunderstand what language is.

And yet there is a whole new wave of people unable to use those languages correctly or even rudimentarily who drag civilization backwards by returning to hieroglyphics

the idea that there is a """correct""" way to use language is flawed. the field of linguistics recognizes a vast diversity of languages, dialects, sociolects, and even idiolects that vary from each other in many interesting ways. collapsing that diversity into a single "correct" way to use language is nonsense, and has historically served to exclude those whose dialect is not supported by powerful institutions. just because people aren't speaking like you are doesn't mean they're speaking wrong, or "rudimentarily".

instead of catastrophizing about how new ways of communicating might end the world, as people have done literally since we started to write down things, linguists have studied how and why emojis exist, and, unsurprisingly, its not because people are getting stupider or something like that. its because they're useful for conveying non-linguistic social information in informal written communication. without the non-verbal queues, vocal tone, and other contextual information that exists in spoken language, emojis are one of many ways to add context that can't be represented through text alone. tone indicators and emoticons serve similar roles.

And things like emojis are leading the charge.

this is cringe. small changes in the structure of our informal written communication are never going to be the big, important thing you seem to think they are. if you're this passionate about language that you think it can be ruined by funny little pictures, learn some linguistics. nobody who knows anything substantive about language shares your concerns, because they're too busy studying the interesting new cultural phenomenon and what it might mean for our understanding of human communication.

i mean, at the state level blue states are both not trying to get queer people killed, and are expanding access to resources. blue senators aren't voting with the anti-queer positions on the federal level. they aren't safe, but complacency and support are not the same thing, and the outcomes for actual people are materially worse in places where republicans have control.

that's such a wild thing to say lol. if you're looking at the world and it seems self-evidently simple, you are missing something.

that isn't what the linked article says lol.

you know, i've felt a similar way before. i thought that i had discovered some terrible truth, that everything is meaningless and its not worth it to try pursuing something that's ultimately without purpose. then i got treatment for depression, and i can scarcely imagine living that way now. i still fundamentally believe that its basically all meaningless, but it turned out that my lack of drive and passion for life was far more related to the concentration of neurotransmitters in my brain and harmful patterns of thinking that it was to any coherent belief about the nature of the world, and that there is quite a lot to enjoy about being fated to die and become nothing. i'm not saying you necessarily have depression or something like that, i just remember feeling the way you describe, feeling absolutely convinced that it was the only rational way to feel about living in a world like this, and being proven wrong. with the right treatment, i found that i was unable stop myself from feeling motivated to do the things i wanted to, unable to stop myself from finding joy and fascination in the small moments of my days.

somebody talking about their IQ would be a major red flag for me lol

this is just not a well founded assumption. humanitarian aid was going into Gaza, and was being distributed to the people there before Israel cut off the supply. you're trying to engineer a false dichotomy, where the only solution to the ongoing humanitarian crisis caused in part by the denial of necessary resources is more denial of necessary resources. like, just think for like a moment. Hamas has a surplus of resources to supply their own forces. they aren't reliant on humanitarian aid. not allowing food and other resources to get into Gaza only negatively affects the civilian population, and does very little to harm the supposed actual target of this indiscriminate violence. like, even if nearly all of it was just taken by Hamas, the quantity that remained would almost certainly still help innocent people survive this conflict, and that's a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself.

but whatever, i bet you'll just move the goalpost again. we cannot act based on what Hamas "should" be doing if they were acting responsibly. Hamas isn't taking responsibility for the death and destruction being waged against the Palestinian people, they aren't providing the resources they have, they aren't distributing them to those who need them. and seeing that situation, we should act to prevent the suffering of these people who are not being served by the government that is supposed to represent them, instead of actively preventing aid from reaching into the region.

i wish i didn't have to see dudes who wanna legislate me out of existence in prominent government positions. it fucking bums me out.

i don't think anyone should have a war at all. there, are you happy? i'm frankly uninterested in litigating what hypothetical circumstances under which it might be okay to kill a civilian.