Schmoo

No

I believe there are a lot of government orgs that could be forces for good if they weren't completely at the mercy of powerful corporations.

It points out the contradiction of being in a supposedly free Western Democracy but still being totally at the mercy of others. It isn't necessarily that Western Democracy is the cause, but that it fails to address these problems.

My paychecks from the CCP must be getting lost in the mail.

That's some pretty wild conspiratorial thinking, do you actually have proof or just some anecdotes about people disagreeing with you?

Oops, wrong arachnid. You are indeed correct.

I'm not saying Israelis are guilty or deserved the attack on civilians, but Israel is a settler-colonial state. So is the US, but I'm not going to call for every US citizen with colonial roots to be forced off the continent (especially since that would include myself, my ancestors - including recent ones - were awful people who did awful things).

You can acknowledge that the state of Israel is an illegal settlement without calling for genocide, just as you can acknowledge that the US is founded on stolen land without calling for death to all Americans.

I wish for once I could just have a civil conversation about my views without people immediately jumping down my throat and accusing me of being a CCP or Russian shill, or a dirty liberal, or a filthy communist. This is what I'm talking about when I say I just end up getting shit on from all sides. Every unsavory label in the book gets stuck to me before I even get a chance to clarify my views.

The problem I see here is that you perceive this as being anti-democracy when it really isn't. Criticism of western democracy isn't equivalent to a total rejection of democracy in general. Capitalism renders democracies ineffectual, which is what I perceived this meme to be pointing out.

My pet theory for these is that they're like a test of skill for metalworkers, and that they would be put on display as proof of their capabilities. They were often found in safes with coins, which I think supports this theory. You wouldn't want some rival metalworkers stealing your skills display and making it so nobody trusts them anymore.

Care to elaborate on that?

I don't reject relationships with other people, but I think they should be between independent individuals who associate with each other only because they both want to. (Violating this principle is sometimes necessary but always undesirable.) You appear to think otherwise, and I suppose that's a fundamental value difference that can't be resolved through debate

I also believe in autonomy, but everyone has relationships with people they did not choose to associate with due entirely to unavoidable circumstance. This doesn't just apply to family, but to everyone on earth to varying degrees. You are just as dependent on community as you are dependent on nature, a complex web of relationships of which you are a small part. Refusing to acknowledge that these relationships exist because you did not choose to enter them is childish, and it enables you to behave selfishly because you do not take responsibility for your externalities. This is the same pitfall that capitalists dive into to justify pollution and all manner of horrible things.