Socialists use work and labor to describe different things. Work is the set of actions a worker is coerced to participate in by capitalists to align with the interests of capital. Labor can be something you engage in as part of work, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes people have jobs that are so inefficient or bullshit that they literally don’t labor at all at work (read Bullshit Jobs).

Labor is necessary (currently), work is not. Aligning with the interests of capital is not synonymous with the interests of humanity (think ad work, literally encouraging greater consumption, especially around harmful products like tobacco/alcohol/sugar. Most western countries now have bans on tobacco advertising, but still let advertising in general flourish).

On the topic of feeding everyone, it would be very logistically difficult in the 1600s no doubt. Now we have a massive international trade system, I can easily get massive amounts of goods shipped from the other side of the world in weeks or maybe months at the worst. We also produce enough food currently to feed 12 billion people, and that’s with our incredibly inefficient system of converting edible plant matter (mostly soy) to animals.

The issue is, under capitalism, poor people don’t deserve to eat. If they lack money, they’re better off dead than alive and consuming resources without paying for them, so that’s what the global international capitalist system does, it moves more than enough food great enough distances to feed everyone as it is. It just moves it to the rich countries where obesity has been a massive issue instead of the global south, because people in rich countries have the money to pay for food, and so they deserve to live (and overeat/waste food) but people born in Africa deserve death.

Capitalists often lose sight of what an economy is for. An economy isn’t something of value in and of itself, it’s about setting up incentives and systems to benefit humanity. Capitalism fails to do this in everyway that is uniquely capitalist. Anything it does right is attributed to the general functioning of markets, which existed before capitalism and can exist after capitalism (market socialism is a real thing). There are problems with markets no doubt, but capitalism really has no redeeming qualities when compared to market socialism. If you compare it to feudalism, it does do better at mobilizing productive forces, of course at the massive detriment to workers.

Yes but in different ways depending on the country. The U.S has a pretty clear analogue, the Native American genocide.

The main difference between Israel/Palestine and the U.S/Native Americans is the former is happening currently, the U.S has already successfully completed the genocide on their natives, while Israel is in the middle of its extermination.

Germany also clearly has the Jewish Holocaust, but they weren’t successful in WW2, so that genocide didn’t get white-washed and instead was shamed to paint a clear good guy/bad guy narrative, despite the Nazis open praise of the U.S for our successful extermination of the natives, U.S business interests aligning with Nazis before and during the war, and the U.S trying to stay neutral between the Allies and Axis powers until Japan forced the U.S into action.

This is the natural order, yet paraplegics live, why? Because we live in a society that attempts to circumvent the natural order in many ways, for the good of all.

You should take a broader materialistic look on society, who does the work (the working class), who benefits from the work (the owner class), and instead of focusing on amping up people to devote their lives to serve the interests of capital, instead focus to reframe the goals of society to serve the interests of workers, which includes working less, or even not at all. Work is not labor.

we have to take Trump at his word

No we don’t, I’ve never done this and I’m not going to start now. He’s already tried and failed to seize power as a sitting president. He’s proven he’s too incompetent to become a fascist dictator.

I won’t go as far to say as it’s literally impossible, but the fact that so many liberals now believe in Trump’s ability to overthrow the government just as much as his own supporters is baffling. He’s not a reliable source of information. He’s not intelligent, and he’s not capable. He’s an old, pathetic moron that is on the verge of dying due to age, not some capable fascist mastermind.

If the Democrats have any self-interest in holding power, they’ll actually try strategies to regain power. If they lose in 2024 by a percentage that is covered by the green party, they could conclude it’s easier to go left and get Green members rather than pull people from the Trump cult. I’d agree with these future Democrats, I think you’d have very, very little success pulling people from the Trump cult.

Especially if the people who voted green in 2024 have previously voted Democrat, it showcases that these people are willing to go Democrat if certain material concessions are made.

To continue on this, the spoiler effect is a shorterm strategic problem, not necessarily a long term one.

There absolutely is a strategic difference between

• 52% Republican

• 48% Democrat

and

• 47% Republican

• 43% Democrat

• 10% Green

The former tells Democrats their only option is to move right to resecure some Republican voters. The latter tells Democrats that they have the ability to also resecure votes from the left by making concessions that to Green Party politics.

People who say these two situations are literally identical are being disingenuous or ignorant. Even if the same number of Democrats/Republicans voted in both, and the only difference is people who didn’t vote instead voted green, this results in actual differences in signals and potential future policies.

tldr: voting third party is not identical to not voting, even strategically.

There are absolutely scalpers that reduce total supply. They’ll only list a couple of consoles that they scalp at a time even if they buy in massive bulk, and it’s all done on the pretense of a limited supply from the original seller that they’re artificially limiting past what the market would naturally do (by buying a ton of them up). Given a literally infinite supply, scalpers lack an ability to do anything. Put another way, when they can’t restrict supply, it’s not a viable strategy.

It’s not that they refuse to sell some of their supply, it’s a temporary restriction (all supply restrictions can be viewed as temporary because we don’t have total knowledge of future supply). The temporary restriction benefits them because they can start bidding wars over the reduced supply, and get a higher price per unit at the cost of getting the money over a longer period of time.

The exact same thing works for housing, when you have the same company renting out tons of units but also keeping tons of units in the same area off the market. It means the bidding wars for the smaller supply of units results in more money per unit (lower supply, same demand, means higher costs).

The concept of a prisoners dilemma here only works if houses are fungible, but they’re not. There are sometimes very similar units or even houses in a neighborhood in the same location, and these are almost fungible, but even in these contexts those nearly identical units in nearly identical locations are usually owned by a single entity (corporate or otherwise), so again there’s no prisoner’s dillema, they can restrict supply effectively to increase yield.

The time vs value calculation is different for housing too compared to smaller things like groceries. If you’re a grocery store, and your local distributor of apples lowers the price of apples, some of that will likely go to the customer because of local competition pushing prices down, and you have a constant supply tied to a constant demand of these (from a buyer’s perspective) essentially fungible things.

Houses are different because if you see the price of houses in your neighborhood drop by some significant amount, individual actors who may otherwise want to sell will actively choose to not list their house because they know the value will go back up, and so these actors are all incentivized to vastly limit supply if something in some area cuts the prices of houses (like a huge influx of new homes for example). These individual actors could be literal individuals or corporations.

Look to other forms of scalping to see how this works at a smaller scale. Scalping isn’t done through conspiracy, but a bunch of small, self-interested actors reducing supply in the market to inflate prices.

On top of that there are actors that are more coordinated and not as small, like corporations that own hundreds of thousands of homes. These corporations can just coordinate internally (not conspiracy, business) and reduce supply to increase their own returns.

This works for smaller actors too though. As long as the number of houses owned is more than a couple, then it’s likely they’d profit from temporarily restricting supply, and locking in renters to leases for more money. They’ll try to slowly sell off their supply without “flooding” the market and hurting the value of their own supply, just like other scalpers.

Python’s disdain for the industry standard is wild. Every other language made in the last 20 years has proper filtering that doesn’t require collecting the results back into a list after filtering like Java (granted it’s even more verbose in Java but that’s a low bar).

If Python had modern lambdas and filter was written in an inclusion or parametric polymorphic way, then you could write:

new_results = results.filter(x -> x)

Many languages have shorthands to refer to variables too, so it wouldn’t be impossible to see:

new_results = results.filter(_)

Of course in actual Python you’d instead see:

new_results = list(filter(lambda x: x, results))

which is arguably worse than

new_results = [x for x in results if x]

Normative truths are just as foundational as descriptive truths. You use the same logic to get there. I hope you’re intelligent enough to be an epistemological nihilist, so hopefully you know the basis for all scientific and descriptive understanding of the universe is self-evident axioms. The same is true for moral truths. Harm is axiomatically bad in the same way that our senses are accurately able to translate information of an external universe into our brains.

If you disagree with the former, we can’t have moral discussions, and if you disagree with the latter we can’t have scientific discussions. This is how the whole of epistemology functions.

You’re also strawmanning me. Ought implies can, so an animal without an ability to act morally obviously has no moral obligations. I hope you somehow just severely misunderstand the vegan position, and you’re not intentionally spreading misinformation.

Factory farms aren’t us allowing them to sort out their own problems. We spawn billions of sentient creatures into torture boxes every year just to slaughter them when they’re a few months old in brutal and terrifically painful ways.

If you think that’s awesome, keep buying meat, more power to you, you’re just probably a psychopath (though I obviously can’t give you an official diagnosis).

This is gish-galloping, to properly address your points, every paragraph would require 3ish paragraphs, so I’d have to spend the better part of 2 hours responding, which is totally unreasonable to expect in a forum like this with a stranger you have no personal attachment to.

From what I gather, your main issues are social ostracization and false equivalencies. Using social norms to drive your moral decisions is obviously problematic, you can think of a ton of atrocities committed by humans when those atrocities were socially normalized. People aren’t born evil, with an intent to cause harm. They’re taught to be ambivalent, and can perpetuate atrocities through apathy.

As for the idea that there’s some false equivalence, you’re misunderstanding the thought experiment. Yes, eating humans is more dangerous than eating chickens or dogs, but that’s a happenstance of nature. It’s possible we could figure out a way to eliminate prion diseases and other harmful effects of cannibalism, and then farming disabled humans who process information at the same level of a cow would be morally permissible to a logically consistent non-vegan.

Of course, essentially no carnists are logically consistent. They use emotion and preference towards certain species to guide their decision instead of rationally considering when it’s okay to harm something (taste pleasure isn’t a high enough bar to inflict pain and death, obviously).

Autonomy and choice is important, do you think less intelligent humans also deserve a right to autonomy? What about less intelligent animals? If you answered differently to these two questions, why?

Humans generally understand restricting choice is a good thing if the choice in question is committing harm. We don’t let people choose to rape, murder, etc. We don’t let people farm mentally disabled humans for their skin and meat. We don’t let people farm dogs and cats for their skin and meat. We do let people farm cows and pigs for their skin and meat.

Vegans have rectified this inconsistency, non-vegans haven’t. If you told me that you were fine with farming disabled humans, dogs, cats, etc. I’d at least applaud your consistency, but I have yet to meet a single non-vegan who is this consistent.

I don’t know if your second to last paragraph is a meme, but all humans reject immoral behaviors that occur in the wild, not just vegans. Lions also commit infanticide so their genetics carry on and competing male lions don’t, it makes sense biologically. Yet humans don’t commit this behavior because we know it’s wrong. Dolphins rape other dolphins, which again for the furthering of your own genetics makes sense. You should implant your seed in as many helpless victims as you can, and yet again, humans don’t do this because we know it’s wrong.

Pretending like vegans are the weird ones because we’re simply consistent about our morality is wild. Non-vegans even get upset at the idea of eating dogs or cats, so it’s not even like they’re universally in favor of torturing and slaughtering helpless animals, only the ones that have been objectified by whatever culture they live in.

I was part of the vegan cult for years until I read this comment, thank you for saving me.

I was a wimp. I didn’t enjoy the idea of harming and killing animals, I had watched videos of animals being gutted alive and having their throats cut and squirming for literal minutes afterwards. This was uncomfortable, but only because I was a wimp.

After reading your comment I manned up and took my dog and 2 cats, strung them up while they were whimpering (which was hilarious), and slit their throats, cooked their delicious innards, and am finally able to walk again (I was only able to crawl because I had been nutrient deficient for so long despite what my libtard doctors told me).

I’m happy to live in a free country where I can do whatever I want with my property. In China I bet you can’t cook a dog because the government is just a bunch of moralizing leftists. God gave us domain over animals, and so I get to choose what I want to do with the animals I purchase.

GPT 4 says:

That quote is from Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”. Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher known for his writings on nature and his advocacy for civil disobedience against unjust laws. In “Civil Disobedience”, he discusses the individual’s responsibility to prioritize conscience over the dictates of laws and the role of the state in relation to the individual. The quote reflects his belief in the rights of the individual and his skepticism about the finality of democratic governance as we know it.

“post-scarcity” in this context doesn’t mean “everyone gets everything they want whenever they want it”. Maybe I want to own a planet, but there aren’t enough planets to go around, and nobody actually believes in a future where everyone can get their own planet.

When talking about these things, it’s best not to assume the most ridiculous interpretation of what the other person is saying. e.g instead of reading “post-scarcity” to mean “everyone gets everything all the time no matter what”, read it to mean “everyone gets what they need”.

also for what it’s worth, I’ve been an ethical vegan for several years after being a die-hard meat eater and literally convincing people close to me to move away from veganism/vegetarianism exactly for health reasons (I had the same misconception you did about veganism). After actually going vegan, doing absolutely no meal planning, no exercise, no calorie counting, still eating mostly frozen food and pickup, my blood pressure as a lean 6’1 mid 20s male has gone from pre-hypertension to normal levels. I get my blood checked regularly and I’m far healthier than I was when I was downing popeyes, jersey mikes, and five guys several times a week. And I’m not just eating salads or whatever, I’m usually having vegan buffalo “chicken” or beyond burgers.

I don’t advocate veganism based on health benefits (veganism is an ethical philosophy), but vegan diets are baseline much healthier than the baseline for non-vegan diets. You can’t go as wrong with them as the vast majority of Americans do with their diets.

As an extension to this comment, digital media is a perfect example of pure artificial scarcity. You can at least imagine a world where food or homes are scarce, it’s not our world, but it can be imagined. The same is not true of distributing digital media, and yet it’s still artificially scarce.

Without scarcity in capitalism things lack value. That is extremely problematic.

Within the context of one person’s career, socialism on its own can do quite a bit to transform people’s relationship to their workplace. No longer would your job be at risk because you’ve all done too well and it’s to “cut labor costs” while profits soar. No longer would you be worried about automating away your job, instead you’d gladly automate your job away and then the whole organization could lower how much work needs to be done as things get more and more automated.

Democracy would massively improve work-life balance.

Of course this comes with problems, all of which exist in capitalism (how do we care for people outside of these organizations who won’t have access to work, for example). But if I had to choose between market socialism and capitalism, the choice is pretty clear, and it’s something much easier for liberals to stomach.

I’ve seen people get pulled over for doing 60 in a 65 on a highway where everyone is doing 70-85, because it’s dangerously slow with only 2 lanes.

And it’s 6 lanes because of how much traffic there is, forcing people to weave around someone going 10-30mph below the flow of traffic is dangerous.

Surprised this is getting as many upvotes as it is. It totally depends on context. I’ve seen posted 35 mph speed limits on 6 lane roads where every is going minimum 50mph, even with cops in the flow of traffic. I’ve also been on 2 lane roads (e.g opposing traffic is directly next to you) and the posted speed limit is 55mph.

If you’re doing the speed limit in the second one, well done. If you’re going 15-25mph below the flow of traffic in the middle or fast lane, because of a posted speed limit, that’s a problem.