stabby_cicada @ stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net

Posts

10

Comments

56

Joined

2 yr. ago

You know, if Fox News is agreeing with you, maybe you should stop and consider whether you're on the right side.

Sideshows are not "reckless driving". They're community events. But the community they come from is poor and black so the Nextdoor scolds work themselves into a panic and put up barricades to block roads.

To be fair, Oakland's government is corrupt bottom to top. If these streets were blocked with trash instead of barricades they wouldn't do shit. But that's not the problem here.

Perhaps we're talking past each other. Human rights are not defined by laws. Human rights come before laws. Laws, in decent nations, are written in such a way as to protect human rights.

The text of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, enacted by the UN in the hope that never again would the world see such widespread and horrific violations of human rights as it did during World War II, is an excellent starting point to understand how the modern world sees human rights. It is linked in the post I linked above.

And, just to circle back around to the topic, the laws of the United States are clearly failing to protect the fundamental human right to adequate housing for all persons resident in the United States.

Maybe your opinion is that housing is a human right but I’m not sure where you are drawing that definitive conclusion from. Are you saying it’s a legal right somewhere or that it’s your emotional stance?

The right to housing is a fundamental human right, according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many international treaties and agreements since. As the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights puts it:

Adequate housing was recognized as part of the right to an adequate standard of living in article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in article 11.1 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Other international human rights treaties have since recognized or referred to the right to adequate housing or some elements of it, such as the protection of one’s home and privacy.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-housing/human-right-adequate-housing

Your personal experience has given you an incorrect belief regarding the human right to housing. I'm sorry to call you out so directly, but sometimes people need to hear hard truths. Facts don't care about your feelings.

And what's the problem? So what if a whole bunch of single people moved into tiny government houses? Housing is a human right. And it sure would bring rents down.

San Francisco infuriates me. There are activist groups that are made of actual literal unhoused people telling the city what they need and what they want. And the city could just give people the money they need for a fraction of the administrative costs it spins on its non-profits and its government agencies.

But the city says homeless people are drug addicts and criminals and can't be trusted to use money responsibly.

So they funnel millions of dollars to corrupt non-profits and government agencies who promise to use the money responsibly for the benefit of the homeless and they fucking don't. There was a $350K program run by the Salvation Army in partnership with the local public transit agency. One homeless person used their services.. One.

At least government agencies are, at some remove, responsible to the taxpayers and the voters. Non-profits dedicated to "helping" the homeless have a very strong incentive to make the problem worse. Because the worse the homelessness crisis becomes, the more money goes to the nonprofits. So they take government money, give it to their employees, make some sort of pathetic token effort to help unhoused people, and as the crisis worsens they go back to the government and say "the crisis is worse, we need more money".

And civilians look at the amount of money being poured into assistance to unhoused people, and look at the crisis getting worse, and say "more money and services won't help these people, we need to criminalize them". And fucking Newsom is all over that because he's angling for the Presidency and military style crackdowns impress the fascists in red states.

There's a homelessness crisis because of government corruption and incompetence. And the majority of Americans think the solution is to give the government more military power, more police power, and let those same corrupt agencies brutalize the homeless more. It's sickening.

I appreciate the link!

The article, I think, is very clear on how those dollar amounts were measured, and I don't think they're bullshit at all, but everybody here can read the article and decide for themselves.

The obvious question to me is, what did he do with his money?

He sold his house for $300k when he moved into the governor's mansion four yars ago, but he didn't keep the money from the sale? He has an upper middle class salary, but no savings?

Either he's got a bunch of credit card debt to pay off or a drug habit, or he keeps his savings in cash under his mattress. But money doesn't just vanish like that.

Food Not Bombs has a cookbook with a similar style of "protest food" recipes.

Sounds like an excuse.

What I mean is: it sounds like his handlers kept making excuses and you kept accepting them because you wanted to believe them.

I know, I'm frustrated too. I dismissed the Alex Jones Fox News crowd because they were known liars, they'd lied to us for decades, and this really did seem like standard conservative projection to deflect from their candidates' obvious mental issues.

Hate to admit it. But the conservatives were right and we were wrong.

Same as when one of the big name hosting companies takes a site down. You hope it's archived, and if it was important enough to you, hopefully you saved it to your personal server.

What you're describing is a major benefit of federation. Any site can be taken down. But when a federated server goes down it's because the site owner exercised their control over their own data. If Google or Amazon takes a site down, you lose your data, but they keep copies to use however they want.

In my city there are a lot of bicycle lanes but practically no bike racks near any businesses - and the lanes themselves avoid the main commercial streets and wind through residential neighborhoods instead.

It's painfully obvious the bicycle infrastructure is designed for rich yuppies exercising and not commuting or shopping. Because fuck the poors.

I agree with you. I think property is theft; in an ideal world everyone would have the right to shelter and no one would own land privately. And I also think fear of housing insecurity - including the fear of a landlord extorting or evicting you - is the biggest reason America is obsessed with home ownership and I can't criticize anybody for pursuing it. The only way to have secure housing in the US today is to own your home, and everyone has a right to secure housing.

You spelled "pay bribes and walk free" wrong. Tate set up shop in one of the most corrupt countries in the world for a reason.

not give him credit for anything other than putting on his pants each morning

Conservative media doesn't even give him credit for that much. Or haven't you heard the rumors Biden has advanced dementia and his team of handlers have to dress him before leading him to public appearances?

I mean, given how the White House handled Reagan's Alzheimer's symptoms in the last years of his presidency, it wouldn't be outside the bounds of possibility. But still...

I think the center right is more like "Don't say it out loud yet, we don't have enough public support."

When it comes to Republicans, I don't think there's actually a divide between moderates and radicals. There are the people who want to impose a Handmaid's Tale authoritarian theocracy right away. Then there are the people who also want a Handmaid's Tale authoritarian theocracy but think they don't have enough public support for revolution and want to gradually move America further to the right by taking over school boards and sabotaging liberal public institutions and so on. The destination is the same, only the strategy differs.

Yes. In Republican eyes what you said is literally correct.

The long-term goal of Republican leadership is to ban all abortion from the moment of conception, ban all hormonal birth control (because it can prevent implantation of a fertilized embryo and therefore cause abortion), and return the question of whether to ban condoms and other barrier methods to the states.

Republican leadership realizes the American people don't support a complete abortion ban.

Republican leadership believes the American people are wrong and it's their responsibility, as Christian leaders, to protect the innocent children of America and impose a complete abortion ban anyway.

And Republican leaders know if they go hood off and call for a complete abortion ban they'll lose power in the backlash and abortion will become even more normalized.

So they're gradually restricting abortion rights while heavily pushing right-wing propaganda to children and teenagers - fucking PragerU is partnering with the Florida and Oklahoma Departments of Education to produce videos for school children, did you know that? - in order to shift the cultural consensus away from abortion is a right and towards abortion is a sin so that future generations of Republican leaders can complete their work and impose a total abortion ban.

So, yes, the Republican leadership is very much aware that what they need is marketing. They know abortion bans are unpopular. They're walking a fine line, trying to work towards a highly unpopular policy goal while still protecting their legislative control of Congress and the states, knowing their control of government would be at risk if the American people realized their actual policy goal.

And so you have Republicans talking about "pro-baby policies" now. Because who doesn't love babies? That sounds like WIC and infant nutrition programs and daycare and better neonatal care and all those good things that Democrats support. Hard to tell that the Republican is actually talking about forcing women to give birth to babies dead in the womb and babies with fetal defects incompatible with life, but that's the state of the national dialogue in the year of our Lord 2023.

Selective enforcement is the core of conservative law making.

What I'm getting from that is:

(1) Wikipedias editors don't want to use racists as sources for articles.

(2) The author thinks refusing to give equal time to fringe arguments that link genetics and intelligence is a surrender to "woke ideology" that will kill Wikipedia in the long run.

Yawn.

Really emphasizes how vital "right to repair" is. If a Tesla didn't have proprietary software and centralized control over its cars it wouldn't matter how irrational Musk was. But Tesla owners have to trust Tesla to maintain both the hardware and software in their cars, which means buying a Tesla is a long-term commited relationship with that company. And same with Ford, GMC, every car company whose software is a black box - if you can't repair your own vehicle, you have to trust the management of the car company won't screw you over for fun and profit.

White paint gets covered with grime and turns dark. It also flakes off and degrades into microplastics and toxic crud. Either way it requires ongoing maintenance and regular repainting.

Leaves, otoh, are self-healing and 100% biodegradable.

Sure, if you have to paint something anyway, you may as well use reflective paint. But wherever you can put a tree you should.