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825
Joined
4 yr. ago

  • I care more about where they are spent. My local government is spending it far better than my federal government. If it was half my income and was spent in ways that lower the cost of living and improve quality of life, then I'd have no problem with that.

    If I get a tax cut, I think, cool, at least I choose where this money goes, because I actually do give some to non-profits that benefit society. Tax amounts are not something which determines how I vote, I gloss over it in the news, it's just incidental that the anti-worker parties want to raise my taxes and spend them in worse ways.

  • What are the most important differences?

  • There are many, many systems of governance out there and plenty of democratic systems are wildly different from the 'liberal democracy' we're familiar with. Cheran in Mexico is an interesting example, five minute documentary.

  • Nationalism also works the other way. The wins of the privileged are framed as 'WE'RE winning!!'. Big companies exploit you more and profit? It's spun as The Economy is going well. GDP went up. That sounds good for you, doesn't it?

  • It's a common practice, a problem with authentic child actors is they generally change once the original actor hits puberty, so higher pitched adult voices are common.

    One of the behind-the-scenes videos on a Ed Edd n Eddy disc had some funny stories of the voice actors meeting fans (e.g. Ed's VA spotting some kid watching the show on a TV while on vacation in Jamaica and throwing in a "huh huah, thut guy is funneh..") and Kevin's VA had to keep doing their voice since kids didn't believe her whenever she mentioned it.

  • well then i guess it’s dependent on your environment and who you spend your time with

    It definitely is! I didn't mean it to dismiss or anything, I know there are people out there who would say that, I just haven't heard it said around me.

  • What do you mean by boosting 'the economy'? GDP (PPP) per capita? Median wages? Labor productivity? A nebulous all-encompasing concept of a country's production, distribution and trade? It's not a meaningful term on its own, it's usually just a rhetorical trick in mass media to make it sound like shareholders making more money is somehow good for the country.

    I was not talking about the abstract grand scheme of things, like benefits from their diverse experiences and overall population benefits, I'm talking about the direct immediate effects on worker wages. Due to social circumstances, companies can, and often do, save wage costs by replacing local labor with immigrant labor they can underpay, and with the special case of illegal immigrants, even pay illegally small amounts. Immigration increases the reserve army of labor that compete for lower wages. This is happening in my workplace, actually, not with immigration but with outsourcing, the human resources department are replacing trained capable local workers with undertrained workers in countries with lower labor costs and regulations (e.g. India) purely to cut wage costs. But the principle is the same, outsourcing like this only applies to work capable of being done remotely (e.g. call centers, graphic design, tech work), for manual labor then immigration has a similar benefit to a business owner.

    Once again, I'm not talking about whether immigration is beneficial, (and like I said, I believe it is) I'm talking about how immigration is used by the owning class to reduce wages and enrich themselves.

  • "I am unburdened by ideology."

    Ahh, you gotta love this line. It's akin to a person here saying they're unburdened by language because they only speak English, 'the default'.

    "Apolitical" people are not neutral or outside of politics, they preserve the status quo. Which, looking around the place, is not a good position. "Centrist" can mean wildly different things in different countries, but it's essentially just conservatism (as in, conserving, avoiding strong changes in either direction) - the center in Nepal^[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Parliament_of_Nepal] ^[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastriya_Swatantra_Party#Ideology] is wildly different to the center in the US because their status quo is different.

  • “men are the root of all evil”

    I've never heard this claim, only "money is the root of all evil".

    Patriarchal society is profoundly harmful, but that's not an issue that divides sex or gender - patriarchal culture also directly hurts men. Men aren't immune from its problems simply because patriarchy systematically positions them above others. We can generalize this false-attribution error to other identity conflicts like sexuality, race, ethnicity, appearance, etc., it's easier to notice and then blame the tangible benefactor rather than identify the underlying system and its roots.

  • I am not anti-immigration because I prioritize social factors in my country's situation, but that is a real position that people make valid arguments for.

    Immigration is a real economic factor used by the owning class to lower wages. It exploits both local and immigrant workers. Look at Trump voters complaining in the news about how anti-immigration has ruined their workforce - they were exploiting immigrants to save money instead of paying local workers a (...relatively) reasonable wage.

  • leftism

    What does this mean? It sounds like you've described utopian egalitarianism, which is certainly not common in all 'left-wing' ideologies.

  • Can you believe— he's running the biggest air system in the world, and he takes a bicycle to work.

    Ah, clearly Pete should be taking a helicopter.

  • Putting resources into things simply because someone is willing to pay money for it is a huge problem in our world. Once we put a dent in poverty and other existential crises, then let's consider paying people millions and billions for simply entertaining people with skills and talent. Entertainment, arts and culture are certainly important, but their industrialization and overemphasis under capitalism comes at a very real cost, both to their art and entertainment itself, and to the rest of society.

    Here's a related hill: I am for the abolition of the professional sports industry. Focus on local competitions, actual participation and sports that encourage socially-useful skills, like the Firemen's Olympics and its modern siblings.

  • Good point.

  • I thought it was because he's about to move to Mexico.

  • I'm clicking all the "read my other comment" links until I've basically read Capital Vol. 1 in its entirety through Lemmy posts.

  • There are at least six feuding Marxist orgs where I live, I don't think this is a valid critique of anarchism.