adderaline

“extra rights” being what? the right to immigrate? people should be allowed to live where they choose. you almost certainly could live and work in a European nation without being forced to leave in the way these people are. just because you don’t think of that as a right doesn’t mean it isn’t one.

there isn’t a problem to solve. the fact legislators want to do this is the problem. quibbling about how exactly they’re gonna implement the torment nexus is secondary to the goal of resisting the torment nexus.

like, if your whole thing is “this is happening, its self-evidently about surveillance, and we can do nothing to stop it” and you start proposing ways for us to be surveilled “safely, securely, and privately”, you are pro-surveillance. you are supporting the bills, right now, with the rhetoric you’re using. like, imagine doing this about any other political issue.

“i don’t support the death penalty, but we can’t stop the government from implementing it, so here’s the way I’d murder prisoners.”

“we can’t stop them from banning abortion, and I hate that, but I’ll suggest we put the limit at 10 weeks. that seems reasonable, right?”

your idea for “solving the problem” involves doing the thing that both restricts what information people can access, and tracks their legal identity, but in a way that is maybe marginally less stupid than tech illiterate legislators can manage. the fact that you would be fine with the bills if the intent was just to ensure kids can’t access “pornography” in a private way kind of reveals your biases here. it would not be a good idea even then.

what counts as pornography is socially defined. a tool which allows the selective restriction of pornography is also by definition a tool that encourages the redefinition of pornography to encompass whatever it is governments don’t want people to learn about. especially in the US, it would become a tool for the censorship of minorities, the banning of books, and the removal of queer people from the internet. that’s why these laws are being proposed. its not ambiguous at all. like, even if it is inevitable it will pass, the priority doesn’t then become “how do we make this bad idea more efficient?”, it becomes “how do we subvert this unethical restriction on our communications?”. assuming that we can do nothing to stop this ensures that we won’t. its a good thing nobody’s buying your bullshit.

if you think bills like this aren’t at their core designed to erode user privacy, you’re fooling yourself. there is no “privacy based approach” to destroying user privacy, and the ultimatum you’re proposing is not real. stupid laws fail all the time. the fact that people are trying to make ID verification a thing doesn’t make it inevitable it will become a thing, and in fact, opposing it is the best chance we have at making it fail.

your argument to the inevitability of shit-eating just makes you an advocate for the legislators who want us to eat shit.

no, its to achieve your goals. this is fundamental to the idea of direct action. you’re doing stuff. you aren’t trying to build support for helping homeless people, you’re going out there and feeding them. you aren’t waiting for people to legalize desegregation, you’re defying segregated public space. you aren’t begging public officials not to build an oil pipeline in your home, you’re chaining yourself to equipment.

if you confine protesting only to convincing bystanders to be on your side, you’re just saying the only way to win a just future is to be popular. what consolation is that to the marginalized? to those who have never enjoyed widespread public support, and can’t expect it to solve their problems?

if you think protests are only to alter public opinion? you don’t know very much about protesting. direct action has been part of protests since the beginning.

i’m not really seeing any claim that “any protest anywhere is just as valid”. they’re talking about educating people on the strategic value of civil disobedience and direct action. that is important for any social movement that wants to succeed.

Blocking random roads does nothing but turn people who just want to get to work against you.

this isn’t true. it can turn people against you, for sure. that isn’t the only thing it does though. it can delay the construction of an oil pipeline. it can disrupt the logistics of an industry. like, the activist’s dilemma is important, taking care to recognize the PR of what you do is important, but direct action is about doing the thing you want done, rather than waiting for public opinion to turn.

if you are an indigenous activist trying to keep an oil pipeline from poisoning your water, or the government from leasing your land to corporate agriculture, it doesn’t matter if people are “on your side” or not. you need to stop the fully legal process that is guaranteed to make your people suffer, knowing that nobody but you and your people are historically likely to defend your home. there are so many situations where just waiting for public opinion to turn isn’t gonna stop the thing you want to stop.

i’m sorry, but you really aren’t in a position to be saying anything about how effective these strategies are. direct action continues to be a huge part of basically every modern social movement up to and including the largest protests in history. if you aren’t open to learning those reasons, you have no grounds to contest their efficacy.

they’re kinda right though. the things this person is saying aren’t new. the principles of direct action were instrumental in the success of the Civil rights movement, and many other activist movements throughout modern history. i’m really not sure where you think this person is coming from, though, with the whole “spoon-fed hate” thing. they’re a leftist. a socialist or an anarchist, something of that flavor. the action they’re demanding is action against climate change, against bigotry, against capitalism. or at least, i don’t really see many people who aren’t somewhere around that headspace talking about “praxis” and “direct action”. they kinda come off like a smartass to me, but the point they’re getting to is something pretty fundamental to organizing effective movements, and they’re talking about it because tons of people aren’t aware of the theory and politics that has grown up around making changes in society.

like, just for history’s sake, in the SCLC, the org MLK lead during the civil rights movement, Selma, among many other things, was organized by James Luther Bevel, the SCLC’s Director of Direct Action and Nonviolent Education. he turned out to have sexually abused his daughters, so uhhh… not a great dude , but if you look at his wikipedia you can see how instrumental he was to the civil rights movement as it is known today, and how the idea of direct action was foundational to that movement and its success.

because not fighting means getting killed, being marginalized, getting the groundwater poisoned, losing rights, getting put into concentration camps, etc? its not complicated. lots of people don’t have the luxury to just not “bother”. they aren’t blocking roads cuz they like it, people who do direct action can get put in fucking prison. they’re doing it because they don’t have the choice to sit on the sidelines and whine about how annoying protests are.

like, for real, do you think the people who built the civil rights movement didn’t hold meetings on this exact thing? that they didn’t talk about blocking roads and airports? that they didn’t do sit-ins and other kinds of direct action? like, if you think this is stupid as fuck, you must think a great deal of the people who built and participated in the civil rights movement were pretty fucking stupid, because they were doing this shit, and it was against the law, and it was the law that broke first.

Separating different things to figure out their role in an overall system is a completely normal and useful thing to do. […]

that isn’t my point. my point is that rent has always existed within unjust systems, and is itself a tool for those systems to accumulate wealth. if we’re taking gears out of a meatgrinder and trying to identify just how much that gear contributes to the problem of grinding people into meat, we’re missing the point. in practice, the system in which rent operates is built to deprive people of resources. but even then your framing is not agreeable to me. we aren’t talking about a machine, we’re talking about a complex socio-cultural phenomenon that developed organically over generational time spans. the idea that we could even rip the word “rent” out of the context it exists in and get anything worthwhile out of analyzing it like that is not reasonable to me. like, cultures and economies don’t have parts like an engine do, they have trends and policies and outcomes, and those things can’t reasonably be reduced to cogs in a machine.

That’s not an argument against rent, that’s an argument against students having different means and having to pay for things in general. Why do students have to pay for food themselves? Why do they have to do their own house work when others can afford to hire someone? Those are all good questions, but they only concern rent in so far as it’s also a thing people pay money for.

you’re doing the thing again. separating rent out from the system its built into and analyzing it only as the act of exchanging currency for housing itself. i’m trying to engage in a systemic critique, not a stubbornly isolated look at a single piece of a larger whole. the problem of students “having different means” is not the point. you have to look at the larger picture. on a population scale, how does the requirement to pay your resources into the pockets of wealthier people for basic housing affect a society?

rent is, in the case of the university student, a material obstacle towards getting an education. those who do not have money or home ownership are more likely to be denied an education as a result, and will have less access to money making opportunities in the future. the money they could have been saving for themselves goes into the pockets of richer (whiter) people, so they are less likely to be able to pass on money they make during their lifetime onto their kids. non-white people are much more likely to be renting than white people, and that is historically because non-white people were restricted from home ownership in the past, and were not able to build the kind of generational wealth that comes from home ownership. rental arrangements reinforce existing social stratifications by providing the means by which the wealthy (and white) can continue to extract resources from the poor (and brown), as they have done for generations past.

like… sharecropping was rent, and its sole purpose was to explicitly ensure that freed slaves continued to provide wealth to their former masters. the actual observable impacts of rent are to transfer wealth from people who have no resources to those with resources to spare.

[…] If there are more houses than people wanting to live in them then houses are essentially “unlimited”, in the sense that you’d probably need to pay someone to take it off your hands. […]

i was being facetious. my point was more that these factors you seem to think are separable are interlinked. just as a wake up call, there are currently more houses than people wanting to live in them. there are many multiples of houses left unoccupied for each homeless person in the United States, and the price of housing hasn’t done the thing you’re saying it would. instead, homelessness is increasing as landlords continue to raise rent, and the prospect of owning a home is becoming more and more out of reach for more and more people.

Rent doesn’t require private ownership. Property can be owned and rented out by public entities, and that’s actually pretty common.

there is a rabbit hole i could go down about this, but i don’t really wanna. my position is relatively simple. housing is a human right. putting literally any barriers up that prevent people from getting a place to stay are wrong. imposing extra financial burdens onto the people who have the least money is wrong. rent is such a burden, even for public housing. nobody outside the people who live on the land should have ownership over the land, not wealthy folks, not the state. housing co-ops, self-governance, that is what we should strive for.

As an example, burglars require air to live, but the problem of burglaries cannot simply be reduced to the existence of air.

i don’t really know how to respond to this. air isn’t a socioeconomic phenomenon with a proven history of driving wealth inequality? it doesn’t interact with race and class in ways that structurally disadvantage people who are poor and brown?

And uhm … the universe is infinite as far as we know, but that’s another discussion entirely.

lol. disagree, but fine, ill be less hyperbolic. “the parts of the universe we can build houses on currently are finite.” is that better?

That might be what you’re calling personal ownership, while I’d just say that’s private ownership within healthy limits.

i’m just gonna end with this: i’m not prepared to expand upon the exact shape of why i think you’re wrong, and why i think your rebuttals fail to provide a compelling challenge to the ideas i’m trying to convey. (that is not to say there aren’t compelling challenges to socialist ideas, there certainly are.) i used to hold a very similar position. the idea of doing away with private property once seemed ludicrous to me. then i actually engaged with socialist and anarchist arguments for why they believe the things they believe, and i found them compelling. i’m not saying you will too, but i am saying that the reasons i believe these things are knowable and there’s plenty of media out there that explains it better than i ever could.

This is a completely useless stance when you want to figure out if rent itself is morally good or bad.

hard disagree. we have to examine things as they exist in the real world, not as we would like them to be. if we are only figuring out whether it would be good in principle, we’re failing to recognize whether that principle is actually founded on actual observable fact. and the observable facts say that rent has always been a potent tool for capitalists to extract wealth from people.

There is absolutely nothing wrong about this form of rent.

also disagree. why are these university students renting? schools could be providing housing to students if we invested public funds into that kind of project. what does the necessity of rent for students do in practice? well, the extra costs involved in having to rent space on the market in order to go to school structurally disadvantages marginalized students. students whose parents can cover the rent are able to maximize their time learning, take advantage of more extracurriculars, or save the money they make from a job for themselves, while students who can’t have to live in their cars, take jobs to cover costs, or just not get the education they want. the scale of the problem is smaller, but the nature of the problem is the same. those who have not must give their money to those who have in order to have a place to live.

rent + limited supply + capitalistic profit maximation + corruption

lets just go through this. the supply of available property will always be limited. capitalism is defined by the private ownership of the means of production. corruption implies a system not working as intended. capitalism is intended to maximize profit, capitalism requires private ownership, resources are always limited, and rent requires private ownership. you might as well just say “private property + the limitations of a finite universe + private property + the incentives of private property is a problem”. i’m kinda joking, but not really.

And I would definitely not go as far as saying that private property in general is bad, expecially not very limited private ownership like a person owning the house they live in or part of the company they work for. Too much concentration of ownership is a problem, not the concept of ownership itself.

this is a problem of terminology. generally when socialists or other lefties are talking about private property, they’re talking about land and the economic abstractions of land ownership. socialist politics makes explicit distinctions between personal property and private property. i hear this argument alot, honestly, and if you find yourself making it as an argument against criticisms of private property more than once, i’d just recommend learning a bit more about what socialists believe, because its kind of just talking past what we think the problem is, and how we propose to solve it (democratically, instead of at the whims of rich folks).

you’ve talked about corporations a couple times, so i do wanna just say that those aren’t necessarily reasonable structures in and of themselves. it isn’t a given that the owners of a corporation should earn a profit, or that owning shares in a company is something beyond critique. there are more democratic organizational structures that don’t concentrate power towards those who have the most stuff.

rent doesn’t exist in principle, it exists in practice. and in practice, the history of rent is a history of wealth extraction. if its “perverted” today, it definitely was 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. if you aren’t aware, this is a pretty basic leftist thing. if property can be held privately, those who own the property can use that ownership to extract wealth from people who need water, food, and shelter, but do not themselves own property. they can use that extracted wealth to buy more property, depriving ever more people of places in which to live their lives without paying somebody else for the privilege. and so on. thus “private property is theft”.

in any case, rent isn’t an uncontroversial example of how to fairly pay people who do things. rent is deeply political, and has been for most of modern history. it isn’t just common sense that we ought to allow people who own things to make money off that ownership, that’s a political statement, and one that should require some justification, considering its material impact on poverty, homelessness, and the accumulation of wealth.

if you feel like rent as it currently exists even vaguely approximates the kind of model you claim you haven’t been paying attention. rent is, at its core, having other people pay for something because you own it. landlords are infamous for not paying for upkeep and repairs. the incentives behind owning property that other people live in lead to bad outcomes for people who can’t afford to own.

appealing to existing harms being done in the world to justify more harms is not really a compelling argument. we have done a lot to mitigate the risk of car travel, and there are plenty of people who see the damage cars do to people and our environment and advocate for better transit solutions that are less likely to harm people. the reality is they could have done more, saved lives, by limiting the spread of the disease more than they did. they didn’t, and their failure to act responsibly can and should be criticized.

that’s such a wild thing to say lol. if you’re looking at the world and it seems self-evidently simple, you are missing something.

i don’t know why they need to be mutually exclusive. individuals in communities with other individuals are what comprise a system. its all built from people.

that’s far from what the study says. there is no research on the effects of plastic chemicals in human beings cited in the study, the vast majority of the data is in rats and mice. saying that its responsible for trans people requires some very large leaps of logic that aren’t supported by the data or the conclusion of the study.

we have a great deal of anthropological evidence that other cultures conceive of sex and gender in wildly differing ways, both through history and in the modern era. gender identity is a complex social and cultural phenomenon, not some essential trait of the human body with a basis in endocrine function. maybe i’m just sensitive to this shit, but i can’t see somebody making a claim like this without just fundamentally misunderstanding what being trans is.

i don’t know what to tell you man. not everybody who develops open source projects for a living does it in their free time. for a lot of projects, particularly the big ones, there is full time development staff.

but i’m sorry, the thing you’re describing, music performance being out of reach for everybody but the rich? uhh… that is how things are right now. lots of musicians are struggling to afford touring, even the very wealthy ones, and tours often don’t do much more than break even. its gotten worse in recent years, too, as large corporations monopolize venue spaces and independent artists are pushed further and further into the margins. musicians have been talking about how much the live-music industry is fucked for a long time. its almost like the problems you’re imagining would occur under a different system are exactly how it works under this one.

Call me cynical, but good things don’t last if we even get them at all.

i am gonna call you cynical, at least a little bit. the reality is, we are today far closer to the kind of utopia i’m describing than in any other point in human history. access to knowledge has improved massively in only the span of a couple of decades, and even with how much things suck right now, its still like the best time to be alive. most of human history has been pretty miserable for most people.

climate change spooks me real bad, and i have felt the way you do. i have never lived in a country where we had the things you’re describing you have lost. it doesn’t matter. it doesn’t even matter if we are going to kill the planet and everything’s gonna die and things will just get worse and worse.

the reality is, our bodies have less than a hundred years, maybe even significantly less, before we become nothing, and in the long run, humanity and everything we’ve ever created will also become nothing. with that perspective, at least for me, the problem of what to do about the various injustices of the modern world becomes fairly simple. imma do what i can until i’m dead in the ground, then i won’t care if we’re in an anarcho-communist solar punk utopia or a nuclear wasteland.

its not necessarily common, but its weird to make this kind of point while using a platform that works by the exact principles i’m describing lol. open source projects are very frequently built from community support and public funding alone, and the people building them seem to be fine with their jobs.

However, the fact that you don’t care about how business works means you ignore the root of the problem - how business works.

i can see how you might read that as me not understanding or otherwise being ignorant to how business functions, but its more that from the foundation upwards the way that we conceive of ownership and property is objectionable to me. the specific ways and methods by which capital is used to deprive people of resources and exploit their labor for profit are secondary to the problem of them doing the deprivation of resources and exploitation. i don’t believe there is some sort of mechanistic solution that will give us good or fair capitalism, so all my solutions to the problem involve to the greatest extent possible providing all resources we can to everybody who needs them, and doing away with institutions that prevent us from doing that.

I’m not going to argue for communism

then we’re definitely not on the same page lol.

according to Larry Lessig, i would be an extremist. i can admit that. i am. i am proudly pro-piracy. i would download a car, and i want everybody to have unfettered access to the sum total of human knowledge. i have negative respect for the intellectual property of corporations. i think generally looking to legal frameworks as a tool to prevent the exploitation of artists is kind of just a half step. we should be imagining a world where our ability to create, share, modify, and collaborate is unrestricted. that, to my mind, implies a world that does not have corporations owning our art, music, and technology.