Socialist sales pitches like UBI always promote how you, the common plebeian, will have more money. They seldom address where that money will come from. Even when they do, it's a base appeal to envy about taking it by force from people richer than you. This is easy to sell because a smart person with the luck to be in the right place and time can make a lot of money under a capitalist system.
But it's unworkable, because under the socialist system being proposed, they never could have become that wealthy in the first place. Anyone who becomes the slightest bit wealthy will have it taken away by the system. The incentive to succeed is thus eliminated.
Therefore, the money necessary to keep the system moving - money created under capitalism - would never have been created in socialism.
Worse, what socialists never address is who will be the ones taking that money by force. All redistribution schemes require someone to do the redistributing. When pressed, the socialists will wave their hands and say "the state", but in the end, there's always a person. No matter who is selected for that job, it is human nature that the position will, given time, be filled by someone corrupt and power-mad.
@wjmaggos
> I'm not opposed to taking some of that difference
But who will do the taking, that's my point? Identify who is in charge of deciding what should be taken, and directing people to take it (by force, of course), and you have identified your despot - the one person who effectively owns everything.
> UBI might work better than min wage and social programs
Yes, and moldy bread tastes better than a turd sandwich. I'm against the other socialist programs you named as well, and for many of the same reasons.
I know I'm showing my age when I recall to younger people the bygone era, when technology was created to serve mankind, rather than the other way around.
There is nothing liberal about fascism, and I'm tired of pretending it is.
If you support authoritarian parties like Marxists, Communists, and Democrats, please stop using the word "liberal" to identify yourself. Those regimes today are as far from true liberty as it's possible to get without gas chambers and outright slavery. This level of cognitive dissonance is too 1984 even for 2024.
@wjmaggos I don't know what that means, but if you mean to say that while you agree with me deep down because you're smart enough to recognize that the party you support is being run by authoritarian fascists who would sooner see you rotting in a gulag than offer you anything resembling liberty, however your partisan programming runs so deep you are unable to admit to yourself that you're being lied to by your chosen political clique, and further that, since you are unable to articulate any reasons that "democrat" and "liberty" should appear anywhere in the same sentence, you instead opted to post a cryptic image of someone making a hand gesture in an attempt to salvage what shreds are left from your shattered sense of superiority, then yes, that's about what I expected.
The solution to spam is necessarily incentives-based; enforcement has never worked, and will never work. Spammers can say whatever they want. You are under no obligation to listen.
You may be too young to understand this (ironically, since you're only a year or two younger than me), but "Harassment" is a very recently invented category of speech, partitioned out from regular speech by people who want to censor and control speech. When I was growing up, the mantra was "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me". Now it's "Somebody retweeted me! I'm being harassed!". The solution, yet again, is incentives-based. People need to toughen the fuck up, and realize that hurt feelings aren't the life-destroying event people seem to treat it as.
> so do you use spam blocking on your email server?
Of course, but you're setting up a false dichotomy.
First of all, the problem with spam is less about what is said than about the methods used. Providing information about a mattress sale doesn't violate my rights. Abusing my resources (bandwidth, disk space, time and attention) in order to push your marketing message does.
Secondly, I'll say it again for the people in the back. You have a right to say anything you want. I do not have an obligation to listen. This seems to be the distinction you're blurring. Blocking your messages from entering my server does not violate your rights. Shadowbanning your account on your server (or on a de facto public square) does. Putting your server on a global shared blocklist does. Freezing your bank account because you said the wrong thing, or throwing you in a gulag for three years without due process because you attended the wrong political protest ... does.
@Vox This exactly. Thank you for putting words to what I was trying to say.
Perhaps it's a result of growing up before social media, but I remember what actual bullying is like. Being poked, kicked, and hit between classes. Getting penned in the locker room by four guys all bigger than you, with no physical way out. Social media has absolutely none of that. It is always possible to simply disengage. Log out. Go outside and smell the pollen.
I made a personal rule many years ago that if someone online isn't willing to have an intelligent conversation in good faith, then I simply won't interact with them. It has served me well.
For example, a couple weeks ago, I too somehow got on the bad side of a bunch of poa.st neanderthals. It went from people telling me to harm myself, all the way up to death threats. I suppose that qualifies as the "harassment" that @wjmaggos is talking about. Like you, Vox, I simply stopped having the conversation. Problem solved. (Well, then I went on my podcast and made fun of them about it, but that's just a bonus)
2024 = After multiple recounts among all 160 million ballots cast by American citizens, Biden wins by a margin of 210 million votes. Republicans wonder how this could have happened, even though nothing was done about the election fraud the first time.
2028 = Biden installed as President a third time, after nothing continues to be done about election integrity. DNC lawyers successfully argue that the 22nd amendment's prohibition on being elected more than twice shouldn't apply, because hey, he wasn't actually "elected" the last two times. Republicans are stunned.
2032 = Biden named President Forever by a unanimous count of all 650 million ballots cast. Republican leadership puts up a mild protest, but agrees that yeah, you can't argue with that kind of mandate.
2036 = United States doesn't even bother holding elections. Biden's reanimated corpse skates easily to victory in all 57 swing states. Republican party is officially renamed to Democratic Party II
Seeing a lot of anti-trans backlash in my feed.
It's an understandable response to wokeists raising up the transgender demographic like they're some sort of sacred calf. They've taken a lifestyle choice and turned it into a religious icon in their war on culture.
But: When ridiculing the ridiculous, please note the distinction between trans activists and trans LUTFAs.
All of the idiotic and culture-destroying bullshit, all of the woke DEI policies, the byzantine rules and laws about pronouns - everything that makes big news - comes from the activists. They deserve the firehose of your scorn. Please, open the taps.
Just remember that most people (transgender included) are not activists. They want no involvement in this cultural jihad being pursued by the commies and marxists. They just want to live their lives outside the limelight. Sound familiar?
No matter how much you disapprove of their appearance, or disagree with their life choices, at the end of the day, remember they're still people. At least give them the respect for that.
In other words: don't be the bigot that the activists claim you are.
When someone close to me was diagnosed with Mutliple Sclerosis, I took the time to learn everything I could about the disease. It's an autoimmune disease that has only been common in the last half century or so, and according to most official sources, "no one knows" what the cause is.
It's hard now, having just witnessed the largest propaganda psyop in human history inflicted on the public by our medical industry and government, not to ask the question: Does "no one know" what causes these now-common autoimmune diseases because they're exceptionally enigmatic? Or is it because the only thing it could be is the one thing that nobody in the medical industry is allowed to question?
If you use the word "migrants" to describe the illegal aliens overwhelmingly invading America at the behest of the Biden regime, you are giving in to the communist-left's fallacy of equivocation.
"Illegal" is a much more accurate term for how the people got here... "But SirBemrose," they say, "people aren't illegal"
Good point. People aren't illegal. They just do an illegal thing when they enter the country illegally. People who commit illegal acts are criminals. So maybe we start calling them what they are: "Criminal aliens"
Any thinking person, the world over, should hate the American government. It's being run by violent psychopathic terrorists with dreams of world domination.
But do NOT hate Americans for it. We are even bigger victims of those terrorists than you are. Not only are the DC terrorists plundering resources, runiing economies, and killing people here just as in the rest of the world, but they're making US pay for it!
