Or, you know, the spaceship that is actually crew-rated and that has been around the moon?

The nice thing about peers is that you can pick them. Don’t mistake you not qualifying as a friend for us not getting to have good friends.

Oh no

anyway…

I don’t know if there’s a bigger egg sign than reacting to a possible egg sign with “oh fuck”.

Look at the right wing of your country and tell me again if it’s in the past.

If you think that’s bad, you should see the UK in 1943. Or France in 1930. Or the US in 1850. Or the Netherlands in 1947. Or ancient Athens in 420 BCE.

Democracies have regularly committed genocide of non-citizen subjects who made up a majority of the territory they claim.

By those criteria, many western countries only became democracies in the mid-20th century. Insititutional discrimination and disenfranchisement of groups is common in what is commonly called “democracies”.

From ancient Athens to western countries without women’s suffrage, even up to pre-civil rights USA, “democracy” has rarely required the fair and equal participation of all citizens, and only radical leftists take it to require fair and equal participation of all residents.

Israel is not special. They are a forward base of white supremacy. Look at any predominantly white nation and how xenophobic they get because some of the organised crime is done by brown people now. Put any western European nation under the same kinds of pressures as Israel and they’d fire up the gas chambers.

I say this not to excuse genocide or discrimination, but to advise you to pull the weed out by the root. Israel is a liberal democracy just like your country, and what does that say about your country?

You can clearly see the blades are bolted on, not (just) welded.

Unironically, yes. Shape the tools of violence for the situation, keep them in the hands of those they are meant to defend, and suddenly it’s a lot less evil.

It’s the same way your grandma knitting you a scarf is less evil than a sweatshop knitting you one.

Sure. Let yourself become “internal” and then assassinate and terror-bomb and sabotage them. I wasn’t suggesting pacifism, I was suggesting not outsourcing your “self-defense” to a state.

Militaries can never give you self-defense, they can only give self-defense to themselves, more specifically military high command. Or the military-industrial complex if you’re feeling fancy. You are a source of taxes, morale, and manpower.

One thing to remember is that the alternative to a military is being able to spend all the money and resources and labor and life that was going to the military on other projects. Even spending it all on self-defense if need be.

Haiti’s independence war, the October revolution, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Irish independence movement, the French revolution, India’s independence guerillas, Indonesia’s independence guerillas, women’s rights movements (including suffragette terrorism), the Black Panthers, Christians in the Roman empire, Al Qaeda fighting off NATO, …

I’m not suggesting pacifism, I’m suggesting decentralized violence that isn’t at the command of a state.

If only we had countless examples from history of people successfully defending themselves without a military…

the subway’s perspective. The subway is focused on creating a safe and clean commuter environment

Well there’s your problem. Your subway organisation is myopically focused on making its own little corner as “well-functioning” as possible even at the cost of the rest of the city. It ignores the social harm it causes to whatever the next place is that homeless people decide to congregate instead (and the additional harm it causes to homeless people by forcing them to stay in less hospitable locations, and the additional harm it causes everyone in those homeless people’s vicinity because they are more desperate on account of staying in less hospitable environments and thus more likely to resort to crime).

The subway should be suitable for disabled people to use. If that makes the subway a home for the homeless, that isn’t the fault of the choice to make the subway suitable for disabled people.

Homeless people will find some place to stay. If you make places more unpleasant until homeless people find somewhere else to stay, and then you make that place unpleasant until they move away from there, etc., then all you’re doing is spending massive amounts of money to make the entire city unpleasant and still end up with homeless people in the least unpleasant spots.

I hate in courtrooms when the prosecutor produces a witness and everyone has to wait nine months.

That’s because its housing and other infrastructure was built by colonists who care more about conformity to the colonial culture than actual habitability.

Natural cooling? Withstanding floods? Fuck that noise, let’s build flat-roofed structures directly onto the soil surrounded by open grass out of materials that are both expensive to replace and too weak to survive high wind speeds. Oh no why is it so hot all the time and why does every hurricane/storm surge cause so much property damage? Better keep rebuilding the same way.

Yeah, let’s turn our time itself into a capitalist currency, how can this go wrong?

The problem with monetary systems is that they fundamentally do not distinguish between ill-gotten gains and mutual aid. Someone who leverages their power over someone to take all their money will have all their money, and unless that form of leverage was a crime, the economic system rewards that behavior and empowers them to exploit more people.

If you let your time become capital, you will either spend most of that time working for rich bastards that gamed the system, or you will selective break the promise made by the currency and they will become untrustworthy as a means of exchange.

The proposal described in the article requires a massive amount of infrastructure coordinating who is able to provide what and who needs what. That’s the valuable part. The money is just a terrible way of determining who gets priority.

Cities are hostile to humans for the same reason barns are hostile to cattle. As long as we’re willing to treat sentient beings as livestock, why would we expect ourselves to be treated any differently?

I keep saying that Lemmy needs normies for longevity,

Because if there’s anything the left should learn from the past 60 years, it’s to cater more to the normies…

I mean, we kind of did. Humans are good at three things: Hand-eye coordination, mastering the use of arbitrary technological tools, and social politics.

Using your hands to precisely operate a chunk of rock that has been carved so it can do arbitrary mathematical operations so that the operation it does is show you political propaganda made by another human so you can do your own social-political maneuvering in response is the epitome of what it means to be human.