It’s not about the sweets and cigarettes it’s just about the wealth acquisition. Same then as it is now. Companies are still using slave and otherwise coerced labor to extract all kinds of wealth from foreign countries.
If any countries try to take control over their own economy by closing it to Western “investment” they get wrecked by the world bank and invaded or sanctioned by the US and/or its allies.
Global capitalism is neo-colonialism.
oh competely agreed, I’m just pointing out the dishonest framing by politicians and pundits
but how will we pay for <anything that’s not increased military spending>???
talk about social services and taxes are like a bake sale, talk about funding war and it’s what you describe
The firetrucks were allowed through but Haitian immigrants ate them!
You expect too much from these people, and an increasing share of them aren’t genuine people at all.
Government spending doesn’t work like your bank account. Instead of just letting banks invent money through fractional reserve banking the government can pay for these kinds of essential services with new money. Taxation isn’t like having a bake sale so you can afford to buy things, it’s one way for money to be drawn out of the economy so that inflation is controlled.
Yes some taxes raise money proportional to some other spending and are ear-marked for that, but notice how no new taxes had to be introduced to give tens of billions to Ukraine and Israel?
The government can pay for public services.
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that solves the paywall issue but the poor guy still can’t read
There’s a difference between punching up and punching down, there’s a difference between critique of the ruling class that’s doing the oppressing and the marginalized classes that are being oppressed. The fact that there is nuance doesn’t mean that no true statements can be made.
You’re not going to change your mind and I don’t care what you think, but believe it or not your kneejerk elementary school level reasoning isn’t the gotcha you think it is… People study, philosophize, and debate these things all the time, and surprisingly the prevailing argument isn’t that we need to have some kind of libertarian shithole existence.
You could try educating yourself about these topics, but SOMEHOW I think you’re more likely to be on the side trying to ban these topics from schools.
I haven’t been following this and didn’t see any mention in the article, what makes you say it can control your body? The only applications I’ve seen mentioned read from the body to control external devices, and manipulating the brain/body (with precision) would be a much harder problem I’d think.
hmmm yes it’s impossible to tell when speech is harmful to oppressed groups the only option is to pretend all speech is the same
No, that’s not what that means at all. Tyranny of the majority is exactly what you have now where it’s ok to speak hate towards minority groups. What Orwellian shit is this conversation?
I’m telling you that the freedom from oppression and well-being of everyone needs to be guaranteed, and that means resisting hate and fascists with censorship and violence if needed. The freedom to oppress isn’t freedom.
Censorship isn’t policing people’s feelings, you’re allowed to hate. Why should you be allowed to express hate, and make those people feel unwelcome?
Your questions are also not as morally grey as you think. Manchester United isn’t hated for a core part of their being, they’re not victims of violence, they’re not a class of person who has been enslaved or erased or mistreated throughout their existence.
Individual freedom needs to take a back seat to collective freedom, and the freedom to self expression, identity, and well being for all. Freedom to oppress isn’t freedom. Nobody is free unless we’re all free.
Freedom to use hate speech to harm minorities isn’t the kind of freedom I’m after. How about freedom for everyone to be themselves without being marginalized?
Liberal ideology is full of these freedoms to oppress. Capitalists dictatorially control workers and the economy, hate speech is kosher, everyone has the freedom to try to find a job that can allow them to afford shelter.
How about people are guaranteed a basic standard of life? How about oppression is opposed?
Collective freedom is more important than individual freedom.
This is one of the many ways liberalism leads to fascism
Like most things, this kind of thing works at scale. You’re not going to have a shootout with police and FBI and drive away like GTA, but we’ve seen time and again from both sides of the political spectrum that police will change their behavior when a community or protest is full of guns.
No matter what the action is it needs to be collective action. This is why organizing is the most important thing, more than guns, more than theory, more than protest.
“Do things the way they do” like accept people’s right to exist and be themselves. You’re the ones enforcing things on people, your revulsion at seeing a black person isn’t equal to that person’s suffering under a racist system.
You entitled piece of shit.
Supposing your team had won, these people would go back to only paying lip service. Better, no doubt, but not a solution. How long did fascists and racists and misogynists lay dormant in US culture before seizing control now?
You need cleansing and systemic change. People need to internalize “no one is free until everyone is free.” Fascists and ethno-nationalists need to be afraid and culturally eliminated over generations.
Fascism is enabled by liberalism, and its capitalist ideology, and it’s promoted by capitalists when capital is threatened. Capitalism is the underlying force here, and capitalists are behaving in exactly the same way they’ve done at similar points in history and as described and predicted by leftists.
Yes Democrats losing the vote sucks and we’re all paying for it, globally, but their win would have been a delay at best. That doesn’t mean winning votes isn’t important, but it means that it can’t be your one and only political action once every 4 years. It’s time to get serious.
The political binary has rotted your brain. There’s a whole spectrum outside of red and blue if you care to look