It’s not hard to clock a thesis as wrong and ignore the rest of the essay. Pretty arrogant of you to assume the problem is me.

Either way, have fun yelling at people on the internet how wrong they are about something abstract and purely theoretical.

^ did not read past the question. Guarantee it’s alarmist garbage about how we’re definitely going to die because of some imaginary numbers were living fine with.

Hey man, get off your high horse a little and I might start taking you seriously.

You really like the black and white arguments, don’t you?

Controlling a source of money doesn’t mean the only option is to print so much of it that inflation eats the whole economy.

Let me ask you this: if the US is so bad at managing the debt it owes to its people, how come we have functioned as an economy under that debt for the last several decades?

That’s the point. It’s entitlement when poor people do it. It’s “the fair share that they deserve” when they do it. If conservatives didn’t have double standards they wouldn’t have standards at all.

Not for the corporations that make money off of extorting a basic necessity from poor people! Won’t someone think of the corporations?

The guy who makes these lives in Italy or Greece or something. It’s been awhile since I saw the bio, but he’s definitely not American. He’s either a wannabe alt-righter cosplaying an American MAGA hat or he’s a genius troll poking at the American right. Either way, don’t take these comics as anything but heavy satire.

There is a voice I consciously control, and there is one that I don’t. They kind of intermingle into a single monologue, but I can still hear the one I don’t control when I consciously turn off my monologue. It’s still a quiet presence almost in the back of my mind.

One way I’ve rationalized it, it’s like when you meditate and your thoughts still flow over you. You don’t actively control those thoughts, that’s kind of the point. I’m finding that those thoughts have a coherent voice for me. They speak through my monologue, but they are still there when I shut my monologue off. Under the surface, quieter, with the rest of the thoughts I don’t control.

One of the “constantly” group here. It’s a bit more like having someone to talk to all the time who is also me. I can turn it off, but it has to be a concentrated effort and as soon as I’m not concentrated on keeping it silent it comes back.

I’ve spent many years wondering at the nature of the little voice, especially after I learned that not everyone has it. It’s not controlling or contradictory, it’s a bit more like a narrator for my feelings and a driving point for logic.

I’ve come to the conclusion that what it actually is is my subconscious manifesting as a conversational partner. Kind of like an avatar that represents the part of me that isn’t the literal point of consciousness inside my head. Make of that what you will.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think in pictures and non-verbal inclinations. That doesn’t really go away either. But it’s like having a narrator alongside it that also speaks in the first person.

Notice what the girl in the picture and snow white has in common that Mulan does not? Same reason you won’t see them post about Princess Tatiana open carrying either…

My argument was that you can’t claim the moral high ground based on legality alone. I understand that nuance exists in the context, but moral high ground does not come from whether or not it’s legal.

I see what you’re getting at, but I think ‘moral high ground’ might not be the phrase you’re looking for.

Laws and morals are explicitly different. That’s why juries exist, so that a law may be put against the morals of a situation and the morals may prevail if need be.

Breaking the law isn’t necessarily immoral. It’s just illegal. So it isn’t like someone breaking the law is seeking to take the moral high ground in the first place, nor does that mean that someone who only ever follows the law always has the moral high ground. Lawful-evil does exist.

Forced labor and slavery aren’t really different in the context of the state owning people. That’s why it’s phrased like that in the constitution. Once you are found guilty of a crime in the US, you lose many of your rights and are considered a prisoner of the state or federal government.

It’s actually a hot topic in the US anyway, because the government very often assigns its prisoners it privately owned, for-profit prisons, where those prisoners labor for pennies and have no choice. Here’s an example for you.

Is it involuntary servitude or slavery when the state hands you off to a private prison to make them money?

Couple that with the fact that the US coincidentally has the highest incarceration rate in the world (not crime, just the act of putting people in prison) and the fact that private prisons very often sign contracts with the states for a minimum number of prisoners a year, and you can see that it might be argued that private prisons collaborate with the government as an institutional system to keep certain Americans in prisons.

And then there’s the fact that poor and non-white people are disproportionately preyed on by police, maybe you could say that modern day slavery still exists.

Involuntary servitude might be morally ok, but there’s still a line where it crosses into slavery and we’ve been on the slavery side for a long time now.

To expand for a non-American who still may not understand the context:

The 13th amendment abolishes slavery in the US, where slavery at the time (prior to 1865) was based on the notion in the southern states that you could and should be owned as a slave if you were black. That included lifelong servitude of you and your children, any punishment deemed appropriate including severe physical punishments, and murder without consequence. Even if you were a free black man, and not shipped in from Africa like the majority of slaves, you could be captured by police and auctioned to someone to work on their plantation.

The 14th amendment establishes primarily that all persons in the US are equal regardless of the color of their skin. The bloodiest war in US history (Civil War, 1861-1865) was fought over the right for the southern states to declare it legal to own slaves, vs the northern states wanting slavery abolished federally. These amendments were ratified after the north won. Even after the war, it took another hundred years before Americans as a whole saw non-white people as equal. This and the next amendment were very much necessary to protect the newly found rights of former slaves.

The 15th, at least, is self explanatory.

The point of this meme is literally positing that it’s ok to make black people slaves again if other parts of the constitution can change, because they’re pretty boldly racist. There’s not much else to it.

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Maybe that’s the point. Unity caves immediately to the big lawyers and says “Sorry guys, we tried. Looks like all you little studios will have to pay up after all. Blame Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft”

Let’s go a step further and analyze exactly what this graph is saying:

There’s only about a 20% distribution difference in the “never” sections between Christians and atheists. So on average, 4/5 atheists would answer the exact same as Christians. All this graph says is that Christians are barely more tolerant than people who identify as atheist. Barely is the key word. If anything, this graph proves that tolerance levels don’t fluctuate that much for the individual between differing religions.

But Bible thumpers need any win they can get, so they don’t read the data for what it is, they just see one bar longer than the other and declare victory.

I bought my oneplus 10 pro for sub $500 during a sale, and it has usb3.1. It’s last year’s model. You can get a pixel 6 with usb3.1 for less than $400. A Galaxy S21 has usb3.2, less than $500.

That’s almost every major android brand for $500 or less with 3.1 or better. The cheapest you can buy an iPhone 15, the one with usb2.0, is $800. What are you on about?

And soon, the carrier pigeon breeders will start tagging them with tracking chips…

Maybe I framed that statement wrong. Of course they are the ones that say it the loudest. But it’s not them who introduced that mindset into conservative crowds. Just like the recent flare up of transphobia. They hear it from the top that trans folk are molesting children, or that immigrants are taking jobs, or whatever the thing is that keeps their ire off of the rich, and they spread it around their own circles because they need an out group to villify.

You haven’t noticed that hatred for these groups tend to be a conveniently-timed deflection from actual problems?

You’re describing the average conservative. The people who push the view that immigration is ruining the US aren’t average conservatives. They’re the ones who lie to conservatives to spin them into a rage in order to manipulate their vote. Those people are not themselves conservatives, but figureheads that collect a nice pretty penny from the rich folk to make sure the anger of their base never turns against the class whose fault everything actually is.

In short, as long as conservatives keep letting their talking heads tell them who to be mad at, they never will be furious at the ultra wealthy. And that’s by design.