UnderpantsWeevil
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
- Comment on 9 hours ago:
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- Comment on Nice Going Buddy 14 hours ago:
Rape, murder, war, horrific disease, and all the other “adversity”
I mean, you’re talking about this as though some Divine Agent actively is making one person sexually assault another. Or kill another. Or cough on one another.
If you don’t want to live in a world full of rape, I would suggest you start by not raping anyone. Grabbing someone by the hair, pulling them into the ally, violently forcing yourself on them, and then saying “God made me do it!” is the most cynical shit imaginable.
“What you’re asking for isn’t a Utopia, it’s the heat death of the universe.” I dunno about you but all I’m looking for is a little less genocide, maybe a bit fewer hungry children, maybe some consequences for well-known pedophiles.
I mean, good news? We’ve been emerging from a state of nature for thousands of years and we are absolutely reaching an apex of civilization such that genocide and famine are at an all time low. Meanwhile, pedophilia and rape and murder are increasingly reviled rather than celebrated or tolerated.
But, again, your parents’ generation watched a thirty-year-old Prince of Wales become betrothed to a 16-year-old girl and clapped like seals. God didn’t make the English Monarchy do that.
God didn’t set up Little Saint James and stuff the Lolita Express full of post-Soviet block easily exploitable teenage refugees.
God didn’t initiate the Nakba or perpetuate a running genocide against the Palestinian people for the next 80 years. Neither did he kick off the German Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide. He didn’t spread the Spanish Flu during WW1 or factory farm in such dense conditions that COVID erupted onto the public in 2020.
All this shit is the direct result of human activity. Human ingenuity. Human passions. Human biases. Human politics.
I guess if there is no horrific suffering in the world we won’t evolve.
You can wave your hands and bemoan the existence of heat waves and hurricanes, then blame The Divine for building a universe in which some bad things happen to some living beings some of the time. But then you’re obligated to posit a world without heat waves and without hurricanes. And good fucking luck. That’s one hell of a balancing act.
You can posit a world in which bad things happen but we just don’t notice or care. But where does that end? Is suffering better if we’re blind to it? Not to get too Biblical, but you eat from the Tree of Knowledge and you begin to see the world more clearly. Language, society, historical memory, the capacity for science and engineering - they’re all double-edged swords.
You could be a microbe right now, with absolutely no conceptualization of who you are or why you’re here or what the universe outside a few centimeters looks like. And would that make you happier? Is that your Utopia? A few hours or days of existence mostly eating until you’re fat enough for mitosis. Is that your idea of a good time?
At least then you wouldn’t know enough to blame God for anything, right?
- Comment on Disgusted 14 hours ago:
Right, but I’m not asking about their democratic structures. I’m saying with all the open, and open-ish borders, what actually happens? Do people from Peru and Ecuador typically go to Brazil for work? OK, well, so is that constant draining of talent good for Peru and Ecuador? Economic migration is usually a one-way street for decades at a time.
Really depends on economic conditions in the various territories. If you look at the US-Mexico border between the 20th and 21st centuries, a lot of the migration was entirely seasonal at first. Mexican laborers would move north during the planting and harvesting seasons, then go back down south during the winter. Only after restrictions on cross border travel tightened did we see people permanently relocating. And that was largely because every attempt to cross the border carried an increased cost and a host of new bureaucratic difficulties.
I don’t know a ton about the Argentinian economy relative to its neighboring states, so I can’t speak to the long term economic impact of loose immigration policy. But it has historically been one of the stronger South American state economies - second only to Brazil - with a GDP/capita third in line behind Chile and Uruguay. Hard to say they’re suffering because of dramatic inflows or outflows of people, at least relative to their neighbors. But obviously there’s a lot more at play than just immigration.
Peru and Ecuador aren’t nearly as rich as Argentina, so - if anything - people are migrating into Argentina rather than out.
Another good example is Bulgaria and Croatia joining the EU. There’s already a lot of migration from the Balkans into western Europe, and as soon as free movement was allowed, both places saw huge migrations of young people. Bulgaria is genuinely having a demographics crisis right now, and because it’s only a bunch of old Boomers left, they’re doing a bunch of typical Boomer things, like being extra conservative.
What you’re describing is mass displacement due to a stark shift in economic policy brought on by the post-Soviet Shock Doctrine. FFS, Bulgaria went from the 16th strongest economy in the world to the mid-50s practically overnight.
I don’t consider this exodus of young people a bad thing. It was a pressure release valve. A large number of young people kettled into a country with a collapsing economy could have just as easily ended up like Serbia and Bosnia, with an endless series of retaliatory genocides as rival ethnic groups play tug-of-war over scarce resources. Or like Turkiye, which has become a bottleneck in between Europe and the Middle East, where refugees simply pile up in camps and die by the hundreds. Or any of the North African countries, like Libya or Tunisia or Syria, where people in tiny boats attempt to (illegally) paddle their way across the Mediterranean and drown.
The prospect of a Bulgarian family legally and safely picking up, moving to Greece or Romania, finding a stable job, and reestablishing their fortunes doesn’t seem frightening by comparison. Not even if it means the country’s interior is hollowed out for a time. Bulgarians may return, as the state of affairs in Bulgaria adjusts and the political climate moderates. Or they may not, as they re-identify with their new home countries.
I might argue that the Shock Doctrine of the 90s/00s was horrible policy. And stripping the wiring out of the old Soviet Republics to prove, once and for all, that communism doesn’t work was a bad long-term economic plan for Europe. But I consider the freedom of movement afforded by the EU to be the least-bad thing that came out of their induction into the bloc.
And Lea Ypi is a great example, ironically, of someone who is brilliant having opportunity to move to study in Italy and sort of proving her own point wrong in a sense that she’s not some Albanian drug dealer.
I don’t recall anything in Ypi’s works suggesting that people who move out of Albania are all drug dealers. She strongly critiques the Cold War Soviet Policy of strict immigration controls, state censorship, and over-policing. And she uses the recollections of herself, her family, and her neighbors to argue the virtues of a free and open society, unconstrained by rigid ideological constraints or militarized borders.
That’s full consistent with her own life story. I’m not sure how you could argue otherwise.
And I wasn’t saying that companies would be gatekeepers, I mean abusers. Unfettered abusers.
Power corrupts. As soon as you establish gates, you need gatekeepers. And who else is going to man these gates if not the agents of the socio-economic elites?
In the US, that’s the Waltons (among others). They have a significant financial interest in constraining immigration - both internationally and domestically - in order to put downward wage pressure on workers and control capital flows.
The Waltons abuse border controls and the criminal justice system that surrounds it more than any coyote or drug smuggler.
- Comment on Disgusted 16 hours ago:
I’m asking why a not real place that actually does democracy well and isn’t dragging a legacy of being shitty behind it
A number of Latin American countries have very loose and friendly immigration policies. Argentina and Paraguay are the most notable. Idk if you’d say they “do democracy well”. That’s a real subjective criteria.
why does someone being a human give them a right to go anywhere and do anything?
We’ve got a wealth of political philosophy and ethics debates that help answer that question, from John Stuart Mill to Lea Ypi who can answer that question better than I can.
But a better question might be, why wouldn’t they?
Holy shit, you really trust social media and advertising to be left unchecked? A lot of peple would 100% move to the Wal-Mart corporate town and condos.
Why would I trust the owners of social media and advertising companies to be the gatekeepers?
People already move to the Walmart Corporate Towns, in large part because Walmart dictates what criticism it will tolerate and what opposition it will face.
People screaming about corporate fascism today wanted to put Walmart Board Member Hillary Clinton in charge of the whole country not ten years ago.
- Comment on Nice Going Buddy 1 day ago:
You’ll never escape the Cycle of Samsara with that attitude.
- Comment on Nice Going Buddy 1 day ago:
Have a meaningful conversation of how an all-powerful, good God can allow so much suffering.
Evolution is driven by adversity. Organisms experience stress, seek to relieve themselves of that stress, and improve upon their function iteratively over billions of years.
Pain is a form of information which gives an organism an imperative to change. And with a great number of organisms, you will necessarily have a great deal of suffering. But without that pain, you lose the incentive to change. The end result is stagnation and decay. A lack of pain isn’t joy, it’s numbness. A lack of adversity does not imply triumph but inertia. What you’re asking for isn’t a Utopia, it’s the heat death of the universe.
- Comment on Nice Going Buddy 1 day ago:
Look at our world. Look at the bad things. Look at the horrific things. God lets all those things happen
Old Satanists jumping in the New Satanists say this while giving them swirlies.
Go to hell. Be a rebel. Be proud of it.
I would simply break the Cycle of Samsara and rejoin the Cosmic Singularity by freeing myself from materialistic desire.
- Comment on Nice Going Buddy 1 day ago:
New Atheist: “God isn’t real!”
God: “Oh yeah, real original. Like I haven’t heard that one a zillion times before.” slumps into Angelic throne, full of ennui
- Comment on Nice Going Buddy 1 day ago:
Love how this is getting downvoted. Like there isn’t a rich and storied history of Satanic Panic in this country or an active community of Epstein-brained conservatives who are doing blood libel on anyone who fails the Paper Bag Test.
- Comment on Disgusted 1 day ago:
if their government doesn’t like you, the border then binds you but does not protect you.
Okay, but that’s just why this is the most important election of our lives and you need to turn out to vote or we’ll be under the boot of the vile fascist-communist government of the Other Party That Doesn’t Like Me.
Borders exist because it projects power onto people within
I mean, that’s a very narrow perspective. Borders exist as a compromise between neighboring governments, indicating where one set of legal codes ends and another begins.
If you want truly free movement, you can’t have projections of power
Free movement is power projection. It’s just projection by the people (and their attendant organizations and ideologies) doing the moving.
The whole neoliberal One Big Global Market wet dream was about projecting the power of Western financial and regulatory authorities around the globe. Open Borders can be as much about projecting power as closed ones. And whether you believe that’s good or bad really hinges on whether you believe you’re aligned with the people doing the power projection.
You absolutely could describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine (or the US invasion of Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya/Syria) as a kind-of Open Borders policy under the Bush Doctrine. The borders are simply open to those with a big enough battering ram to kick through the door.
- Comment on Disgusted 1 day ago:
Most people I know that want an end to borders also want the end of government.
Idk about that. The line I’ve always seen is that most people want a system which protects-but-does-not-bind. And what they recoil at is a system that binds-but-does-not-protect.
I want the border to be frictionless for me. But I don’t want the border to be frictionless for people I don’t like.
- Comment on Disgusted 1 day ago:
As if a democratically elected government representing people in a certain place should have no right to its own sovereignty
I mean, “democratically elected” does a lot of heavy lifting in countries that are choked out by fascist governance and fear-mongering media. “Sovereignty” also has a weird way of being used to weaponize self-determination into surveillance-state policing and xenophobic policy.
But then when it comes to countries that struggle to find work for their own people, they also get flooded by people from places where no government functions at all. Specifically Nigerians in South Africa and Ghana. Legally present, and subject to xenophobic attacks because there no hope for them in Nigeria because it’s a hot mess.
Why is it that a French citizen traveling to Germany or Spain is considered benign, but a Libyan citizen traveling to Germany or Spain is considered part of a “flood” that has some kind of existential threat to the locals? Why does Libya’s dogshit government get raised as a reason why this Libyan visitor can’t stay at my hotel or eat at my restaurant or work in my office?
Does being born in Country A stain someone’s soul in a way that makes them incompatible with Country B?
how is it supposed to work without literally magic being involved?
You don’t need magic to not have borders. If anything, you need a certain degree of magic to rigidly enforce borders. You need mass surveillance to track the identities of everyone entering and leaving your country. You need to engineer increasingly complex systems of identification, digital fingerprinting, financial controls, regulation on business and social activities, and prohibitions enforcement pursuant to a constantly shifting web of sanctions. You need an enormous body of labor to manage these rules and enforce them. You need prisons to hold all the trespassers. You sprawling bureaucracies to figure out who is “legal” and to change the legal status in a timely manner.
None of this shit works as intended. Legal residents routinely get harassed because records aren’t properly maintained and distributed. Illegal residents slip through blind spots in the system. Black market trade grows faster than the regulated trade, because there’s a larger profit margin in it. Legal business activity suffocates under the higher costs of compliance.
You ask how no-borders are supposed to work? I’d say, incredibly easily! Do nothing. Boom! You’ve achieved your goal.
I ask you how closed-borders are supposed to work? You’re going to spend several lifetimes and untold fortunes trying to achieve this fantasy.
- Comment on Disgusted 1 day ago:
Grew up in Texas, and back in the 80s it was very normal for kids to just hop into a car and drive south of the border for Spring Break. This was the most normal thing in the world for hundreds of thousands of teenagers and young adults.
And then national media realized they could make a lot of cheap news coverage by scandalizing the practice. So we got a slew of news stories, which became inflated with an even more over-dramatized series of books, tv shows, and movies, showing kids going across the border for drug use and rape and animal abuse and to dispose of dead bodies for the cartels and to get eaten alive by the Chupacabra. We got bombarded by a slew of media with a flashlight under the chin whispering “Oh, you think these kids are having fun? Well, what if the news threw a red filter over the images and used graphical effects to imply everyone was murdered?!”
Both the US and the Mexican police got more and more involved. The borders became militarized. You ended up with these obnoxious traffic situations, which really killed the appeal of any kind of vacationing. Also didn’t help that a lot of the popular destinations got enclosed and privatized, for the benefit of a few insider luxury developers. The cost of a vacation exploded, as cruise lines and chain hotels and resorts took over the best spots. And now it’s been fully Disney-fied, with a heavily demarcated entry and exit for tourists who are heavily discouraged from mingling with locals.
Shit fucking sucks, man.
- Comment on Disgusted 1 day ago:
You can strive for a future
Can I? I feel like I’m going to get yelled at for striving, because I’m doing it wrong.
- Comment on Disgusted 1 day ago:
If someone I don’t like is allowed to go somewhere I don’t want them to go, they could start killing people at any moment.
Also, I am of the view that every single person south of the border that would want to cross north of Mexico is a gang-affiliated serial killer. Every single person coming from East Asia is a spy, a saboteur, or a left-wing extremist intent on destabilizing the country. Every single African coming to the US has Ebola. Every single Muslim coming to the US is going to impose Sharia Law.
We need to close our borders until I, personally, feel safe. And the TV says I’m not safe. So nobody should be allowed, unless they are white.
- Comment on Park benches don't "open" until 10am 2 days ago:
I agree that support is needed, but I can’t take this argument seriously.
The way I see it, someone at city hall went out of pocket several hundred dollars to customize those benches. And then they’re paying someone to come out every morning and unlock them (or not and just leaving benches locked indefinitely). All so life is now harder for people already sleeping rough.
Does anyone really believe the city councilor or mayor or whomever who went through that trouble is going to be releasing money to improve municipal services for homeless residents? I certainly don’t.
- Comment on Two full raccoons y'all 3 days ago:
Almost
This is where people get into trouble.
- Comment on Chinese Cars Could Be Huge in U.S., and That’s the Problem, Officials Say 3 days ago:
ALL ELECTRIC CARS could be huge in the US
Not if we refuse to build them here and refuse to let anyone else import them.
Stop making this shit about China.
Tell China to stop making shit and maybe we will.
- Comment on 2027 gonna be like... 3 days ago:
Its going to be bad enough that nobody rebuilds in that area, and we have our first refugees.
Literally what happened back during the original Katrina. A bunch of people from Louisiana picked up and moved to Houston permanently. Houston’s 2 million population grew by about 10 percent virtually overnight, straining all key city services such as schools, hospitals, emergency services and, particularly, public safety. This made a number of Houston Republicans extremely upset (Barbara Bush chief among them)
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 3 days ago:
the problem was people sticking to the existing religions
“The problem with religion is that people won’t stop being religious” is circular and thought-terminating
culture being too terrified to let go or incapable of accepting that others have moved on
How do you sooth public anxieties at a national level?
How do you foster egalitarian social habits?
Seems like you’d need some kind of broad social project or moral imperitive for a nation’s worth of people to align with.
- Comment on i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai 3 days ago:
There’s a wide number of critiques in how Wikipedia aggregates, edits, and presents information that isn’t worth going into here.
I think what has become remarkable is the number of failed attempts to outcompete Wikipedia, corrupt it’s contents, or poison people into not using/trusting it.
Like, it’s less that Jimmy Wales landed on the secret sauce his first try and more that nobody (in any Western nation anyway) seems capable of marshalling the resources or labor necessary to cobble together a project that’s functioned half as well over as long a time period.
- Comment on i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai 3 days ago:
goes to Google
searches Google
gets the results from Google
becomes angry at the results in Google
Why do you not simply go to Wikipedia and search directly on Wikipedia?
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 4 days ago:
Love me some quality David Wong.
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 4 days ago:
You just do, Freddy.
A lot of people don’t.
There’s a whole superstructure to religion - culture, ethics, public infrastructure, social networks, financial networks, a common history and language - that you need to supplement as you dispose of the older system.
What the European socialists discovered at the turn of the 20th century was that you can’t just burn down all the churches and start over from scratch. Anarchism without some new common social foundation just ends in civil war and foreign occupation.
Subsequent generations still need a scaffolding to cling to as they mature. And if that scaffold isn’t rooted in some new existential or moral foundation (or if it’s rooted in a rotten one) you end up with ultra-nationalism, or Victorian mysticism, or whatever paint Ayn Rand was huffing.
- Comment on Evil Bisexuals 4 days ago:
This is why the distinction matters. AOC isn’t a traditional socialist. She doesn’t espouse Leninist or Stalinist ideology.
The field of socialist political theory doesn’t begin with Lenin and end with Mao. You have plenty of rival and parallel traditions, from Eugene Debbs to Peter Kropotkin to Murray Bookchin to Richard Wolff.
Lenin got the (relative) benefit of a very specific moment in a very specific region. Russia was on the cusp of the industrial revolution just as its aristocratic government had overcommitted to a horrifying military campaign that hollowed out its national leadership. This, in a country where a couple of super-cities dictated the political fortunes of the largest contiguous sovereign landmass on earth.
No shit AOC isn’t Lenin. We’re never going to get another Lenin, because we’re never going to see a mass labor movement catch on at the tail end of WW1 in Petrograd just as the diesel engine is becoming popular. This isn’t even about ideology, it’s about material conditions.
And this isn’t directed towards you. It’s just frustrating.
I mean, I agree, but for slightly different reasons. People keep casting back 100 years and saying “Ah, but you’re not trying to unionize the steelworkers from inside a sealed boxcar, so you’re not doing socialism correctly”.
But when you crack the hood on AOC’s Green New Deal and peak inside, that’s exactly the sort of shit Lenin would have championed. Massive economic modernizations that accrue wealth directly to the working class as social unit? A sprawling state-directed bureaucracy to manage the industrial reforms? Decoupling a critical domestic utility from the private sector while drastically increasing productivity to make the commodity virtually free at point of use?
That’s So Lenin!
I’ll spot you that AOC’s aged like milk. She came into office leading a parade of angry activists to Nancy Pelosi’s front door and came an inch shy of nailing 99 Leftist Theses to her front door. Now she just blows up my phone with annoying donation requests and does stupid Twitch streams repeating hashed over health care talking points for the 90th time.
But slapping the “DemSuc” label on her, because she’s not chanting chapter and verse out of the Little Red Book while wearing a Mao Suit is just getting hung up on bullshit aesthetics. The least Lenin thing she’s done is lose. But its not for lack of trying. It’s certainly not for lack of ideology.
- Comment on Evil Bisexuals 4 days ago:
You may not like it, but…
- Comment on Don't Worry About Retirement, Millennials 4 days ago:
Idk, I think there’s a real demographic of Divorced Dads who could qualify.
- Comment on Evil Bisexuals 4 days ago:
She can’t be viewed in a positive light, because she’s an Evil Icky Socialist.
- Comment on Almost 38 & This Is Where I'm At Now 4 days ago:
I’ve been lobbying my office for a person with a Library Sciences degree to help manage our massive archive of Sharepoint files.
“Haha, how hard could it be?” is the sort of thing that gets you stuck with a multi-year long stint in Library Hell. I can say this from personal experience.
- Comment on Don't Worry About Retirement, Millennials 4 days ago:
what concerns everyone must be approved by everyone
Democracies don’t function this way. Majoritarian rule regionally occurs in defiance of some portion of the public citizenry.
Depending on how the Democracy is organized bureaucratically, it may even be the majority of the citizenry.