UnderpantsWeevil

joined 1 year ago
[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 38 minutes ago* (last edited 38 minutes ago)

The thing about taxes is it only works when you're a big fish in a small pond. Amazon Fulfillment Center doesn't have to pay taxes to the small Arkansas municipal government they functionally own. But you can be fucking sure that the extremely white sheriff and his Good'ole'Boy deputies won't tolerate a tax payment showing up late when it's the low-income black neighborhood Amazon Fulfillment Center workers who are on the hook.

That is, after all, the agreement between the city and the business. The city budget doesn't come from the company coffers, it comes from the salaries of the employees' paychecks. Rents are for Little People.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 41 minutes ago

It teaches the younger and weaker kids that they cannot expect administrators to act in their interests.

It teaches the older and meaner kids that they can act with impunity, safe in the assumption that administrators will look the other way.

The lesson is two-fold, and the end result is a cycle of bullying as the younger kids grow up knowing they can punch down without consequences.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 44 minutes ago* (last edited 43 minutes ago)

Back in the 90s, my middle school had a policy of punishing any students involved in a fight. If you threw a punch, you were in trouble. If you got hit, you were in trouble. The official line being that it would be unfair to punish two students brawling simply because the teacher didn't arrive until the last punch was thrown. But in practical terms, it meant you had a huge disincentive to report being attacked because it would amount to a confession of guilt.

Found this out very personally when a kid in a foul mood decided to start marching through the hallway and swinging at anyone standing in his way. He struck three kids on his way out of the building (including myself). When this got up to the principal's office, the principal was forced to explain to three different sets of parents why their children were in trouble because one (older, btw) child went on a rampage.

In that particular incident, the offending kid was suspended and ultimately moved to a disciplinary school. But the policy wasn't changed, just exempted in this particular instance.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 50 minutes ago

Eh. They've been on the decline. Enshittification comes for us all.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 50 minutes ago

But the Gulf War from the US position was less about Kuwait and more about securing oil for import to the US.

I mean, that's one and the same. Saddam was responding to slant drilling from Kuwait into oil rich southern Iraqi oil fields. That's why he burned the Kuwait wells on his way out. It was retaliation for what he claimed was a violation of Iraq's sovereignty.

The Kuwaiti wells, and the slant drilled wells into Iraqi territory, were operated by American petroleum companies and their affiliates. And the US incursion into Iraq, with the intention of destroying the Iraqi offensive capacity, was about restoring the ability of Kuwaiti drillers to access Iraqi fields. 2003 made that redundant. But the initial Desert Storm was intended to prevent Saddam from threatening cross-border drilling operations into the future.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Unfortunately, the solution to the paradox boils down to "Might Makes Right". The bounds of tolerance aren't set by a consensus, but by whomever has the Power to Yeet.

And while this game seems satisfying early on (Yeet the Nazis! Yeet the Tankies! Yeet the Radical Centrists!) you do get into a cycle of purity where you're yeeting anyone who questions whether the last guy who got yeeted deserved it.

That leaves us with the age-old Martin Niemöller verse:

"And then they came to Yeet me - and there was no one left to Yeet back on my behalf".

What is the appropriate degree of tolerance? How do you prevent it from expanding to include people who would dissolve the institution? How do you prevent it from collapsing into a state of cult-like obedience to authority? It's a balancing act and one that the individuals with the power to silence fringe communities rarely have an interest in performing.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago

This is, unfortunately, much bigger than one guy one the internet in the last week. We've been hapless bystanders in the Culture War for... centuries.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

You’re going to need to provide some citation on that one

I linked to the podcast which has citations to the research in the show notes.

All of the above you would know if you weren’t intent on being a disingenuous twit.

Take it up with the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Decay Theory of Immediate Memory. You're trying to turn a human into a Ship of Theseus, but at best all you're doing is imperfectly copying and replicating the information therein. We run into the same problems with computer memory, and the only real working solution is to make multiple perfect copies at discrete intervals as backup.

That's simply not possible at the cellular level at this time. Nor would backup/restore of cellular data be a practical solution, particularly as it regards the human brain, any time in the foreseeable future.

You're doomed to die, just like everything else that's existed to date.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

It's much bigger than "Republican voters". You'll find plenty of blue states with students drowning in debt and "business-friendly" politicians espousing the exact same "it wouldn't be fair" anti-debt relief rhetoric.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (2 children)

These people are against their money going to other people

It's more strategic. Student loan debt is a mechanism for controlling the employment prospects of college grads.

Public debt forgiveness becomes a method for funneling students into low paying, morally hazardous jobs (prosecutors, police, the public side of the MIC, education in underfunded neighborhoods, bureaucrat in a corrupt or underfunded agency) where you've got an incentive to keep your head down and do the work rather than organize your office or resist deplorable government policies.

Private industries, similarly, offer the better salaries doing the more morally repugnant work - mining and chemical manufacturing, big finance and HFT, pharma, automotive, credit and collections - which draws in the most talented people to apply their talents in the worst ways.

You're constantly asked to sell out your principles for a paycheck/debt relief, or the most invasive and obnoxious applications of technology. You're never going into business for yourself to challenge a corporate behemoth or pursuing public work that both benefits people and pays well. You're never going into activism or politics without a corporate paymaster.

Ever notice how many SCOTUS judges and Senators are in the Federalist Society or from the Heritage Foundation relative to the Sierra Club or the ACLU? A big part of that is simply about the money.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 18 points 4 hours ago

He's a cat's paw for conservative activists. Specifically, he's close friends with Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager with too much free time and a chip on his shoulder, who has made "anti-DEI" a focus of his investment strategy.

Robby whines about DEI, Ackman starts moving money to put downward pressure on the stock, people get scared, and Ackman looks like an investment guru for effectively manipulating the price of securities.

 

Toyota Motor Corp., will refocus DEI programs and halt sponsorship of LGBTQ events, citing “a highly politicized discussion” around corporate commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion.

The Japanese carmaker told employees it will also end participation in notable rankings by LGBTQ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign and other corporate culture surveys. The company will “narrow our community activities to align with STEM education and workforce readiness,” it said in a memo Thursday to its 50,000 US employees and 1,500 dealers.

The note comes a week after anti-DEI activist Robby Starbuck started a social media campaign against the company, calling for customer boycotts because of its support for LGBTQ events and other initiatives. Toyota said at the time that the LGBTQ programs targeted were led by employee groups, not the company directly.

 

Thanks to the efforts of conservative lawmakers, a recently passed funding bill did not allocate additional funds to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) despite knowing that the agency’s funds had run low before the peak of hurricane season. Congress is now in recess until November 12, and while Biden had considered calling Congress back into session early to approve more FEMA funding, there has been no progress.

Yet, somehow, conservative leaders and media are attempting to pin the blame of lack of FEMA funding on migrants crossing the US-Mexico border to seek asylum. “Feds say there’s no money left to respond to hurricanes — after FEMA spent $640M on migrants,” read a headline in conservative paper the New York Post following Mayorkas’ announcement.

Communities in the southeast of the country, across the Gulf Coast and from Florida all the way to Virginia, have been forced to fend for themselves with grassroots and mutual aid organizations filling in for the state in terms of relief and aid efforts.

 

A bipartisan forum in a small Latah County community took a turn when Republican Senate incumbent Dan Foreman stormed out of the event, following a racist outburst directed at a Native American candidate.

On Tuesday, local Democrat and Republican representatives organized a “Meet your candidates” forum in the northern Idaho town of Kendrick.

...

In a statement released Wednesday, Democratic candidate for House Seat A and member of the Nez Perce tribe Trish Carter-Goodheart said she pushed back on that idea that discrimination existed in Idaho when it was her turn to speak, pointing to her own experience and the history of white supremacy groups in Northern Idaho.

...

Foreman stood up and angrily interjected, using an expletive to criticize what he cast as the liberal bent of the response, according to the release and people present at the forum.

Carter-Goodheart said he then told her she should go back to where she came from, and heatedly stormed off. One event organizer and two other panelists confirmed Carter-Goodheart’s account, adding Foreman appeared very agitated.

 

For much of the Biden administration’s first three years in office, migration surged at the Mexican border. Administration officials frequently argued that the problem was beyond their control — a reflection not of U.S. policy but of global forces pushing people toward the border.

Then, starting in December, when the issue threatened President Biden’s re-election, he began a crackdown. The traffic of people crossing the border plummeted. Today, it remains near the lowest point since 2020 and not so different from levels during parts of the Trump and Obama administrations. This week, the Biden administration imposed tough new rules to keep it that way.

 

South Western’s elected school board is making some strange decisions.

For the last two years, they’ve fixated on which bathrooms LGBTQ+ kids use. In 2023, officials in this Hanover-area district played musical chairs with school bathrooms in a misguided attempt to appease the loudest bigots among them — ending up with five different types of bathrooms.

After a low-turnout school board election in which several far-right members joined their ranks, they hired a Christian law firm, decided to begin banning books and reopened the bathroom issue. Board President Matthew Gelazela, who was elevated to his post after previously serving as the board’s most vocal bomb-thrower, pointed to Red Lion’s discriminatory policies as something to aspire to.

Now, upon the advice of that law firm — the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center — the board approved spending $8,700 to cut windows so passersby can look into the so-called “gender-identity” student bathrooms.

 

Donald Trump is escalating his threats to increase tariffs on imports if he wins a second term in the White House, reviving fears of renewed trade wars that hit the global economy during his presidency.

The Republican candidate, seeking to win blue-collar votes in swing states pivotal to November’s presidential election, has doubled down on his protectionist rhetoric, delivering blunt warnings of tariffs to US trading partners including the EU.

On Saturday, Trump went further, promising tariffs of 100 per cent on imports from countries that were moving away from using the dollar — a threat that could engulf many developing economies too.

“I’ll say, ‘you leave the dollar, you’re not doing business with the United States. Because we’re going to put a 100 per cent tariff on your goods,’” he said at a rally in Wisconsin.

“If we lost the dollar as the world currency, I think that would be the equivalent of losing a war,” he told the Economic Club of New York on Thursday.

https://archive.ph/2b2zp

 

“Right now, I’m thinking more about how to save my people,” says Mykhailo Temper. “It’s quite hard to imagine we will be able to move the enemy back to the borders of 1991,” he adds, referring to his country’s aim of restoring its full territorial integrity.

Once buoyed by hopes of liberating their lands, even soldiers at the front now voice a desire for negotiations with Russia to end the war. Yuriy, another commander on the eastern front who gave only his first name, says he fears the prospect of a “forever war”.

“I am for negotiations now,” he adds, expressing his concern that his son — also a soldier — could spend much of his life fighting and that his grandson might one day inherit an endless conflict. “If the US turns off the spigot, we’re finished,” says another officer, a member of the 72nd Mechanised Brigade, in nearby Kurakhove.

Ukraine is heading into what may be its darkest moment of the war so far. It is losing on the battlefield in the east of the country, with Russian forces advancing relentlessly — albeit at immense cost in men and equipment.

 
 

There has been a shift towards minimizing visible harm to civilian populations since the sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, which resulted in widespread malnutrition and epidemics. “There’s a strategy of trying to offload the enforcement to the private sector,” she said. “U.S. policy has created conditions that make it commercially compelling for the private sector to withdraw from whole markets, resulting in severe and widespread economic harm, but in a form that is not directly attributable to US policymakers.”

The Helms-Burton Act is a good example. In 2019, Trump implemented Title III of the law, which allows Americans to sue companies doing business with Cuba, which every previous president had waived. Cruise liners that took American tourists to Havana during the Obama years have since been sued for hundreds of millions of dollars in a Florida federal court for docking at Havana’s main port. The effect has been to deter multinationals from investing in the island.

But perhaps the best example of an almost invisible but insidious sanction is designating Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism”. Presented as a benign policy tool to make the world a safer place rather than an arm of economic warfare, it has contaminated the word “Cuba” more than ever in the global economy. Almost overnight the label provoked both global banks and vital exporters to pull out of the Cuban market, according to diplomats and businesspeople on the island.

 

Senior White House figures privately told Israel that the U.S. would support its decision to ramp up military pressure against Hezbollah — even as the Biden administration publicly urged the Israeli government in recent weeks to curtail its strikes, according to American and Israeli officials.

Presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, told top Israeli officials in recent weeks that the U.S. agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad strategy to shift Israel’s military focus to the north against Hezbollah in order to convince the group to engage in diplomatic talks to end the conflict, the officials told POLITICO.

 

The complaint says he sped past the traffic point, disobeyed commands by officers to stop and, when he finally stopped after being chased by police, “removed bags of fertilizer from his vehicle and threw them on the ground to make it appear that they were explosives.”

Nauta told law enforcement, the complaint says, that “he intended to make officers, and others, believe that he had explosives.”

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