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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Norway is actually a good example of this – where pro-social regulatory policies (i.e. beneficial not from the perspective of capital, but from the perspective of actual societal conditions) are used to help mitigate some of the BS that capitalism produces.

    Regardless… Yeah, it’s a problem with capitalism. It’s a problem that stems from the literal core of the ‘system’: utilizing ‘capital’ to find opportunities for the creation and extraction of ‘surplus’ from labor and its products.

    It’s great that regulation is able to reign in, in some cases, the deeply criminal BS that such a system naturally produces… But it seems like a huge overreach to assume this is possible “globally” (as it would need to be for a blanket statement like that to be true).


  • Also, Chicago like NYC has become a lot “safer” in many areas due to cameras, “proactive” policing, etc. Come to Detroit sometime, we don’t have money yet for “cool” stuff like that. See what kind of a difference it makes lol. Even back in the day, Chicago and Detroit went back and forth as the murder capitals of the US (NYC got in there too a lot). Those numbers weren’t just relatively high, they were absolutely just high on their own. Just because you never had trouble yourself, doesn’t mean… Blah blah blah. Happy New Year btw


  • Yeah, not proud of the snarky finish, but I think we’re definitely talking past each other a bit either way.

    Side note: even without guns, China has a surprisingly high incidence of mass attacks at primary schools – with weapons other than guns. Knives are the most common, ppl on a rampage don’t mind putting in the extra work if they have to I guess… But yeah. Primary schools.

    Its cool to be a contrarian on the internet, but I’ve got two young children too, and tbf any violence in schools is too much. Honestly don’t give a shit if even 99% of “shootings” were just that (they’re not, but still), that 1% is no less serious of a problem than if it was 99%.

    Especially since, again, we’re somehow the only country in the world that has such a problem keeping kids from getting murdered at school.


  • Depends on where you go; some places its easy to end up finding yourself in the wrong place, especially if you are unfamiliar with the area…

    But yeah, school shootings?? it’s not just some d-bags having target practice at night on the football field (unfortunately, rather than a pitch – different story tho), kids die in school shootings here like every other week bud. It really does happen, like a lot, which is actually a pretty uniquely shitty thing in the world today (outside of e.g. the Congo, Chinese elementary schools, …)

    Pretty well thought-out hot take, though, cheers for the high-brow write-up.













  • Yeah, this does seem like a kind of inaccurate generalization.

    Does this mean you honestly wouldn’t have a preference if you were dropped into a random “place” in one of these countries’ societies and had to live the rest of your life there?

    It’s easy to say “Hey, plus a few ethnic cleansings, minus an intentional lack of economic development in favor of political corruption, plus a couple of highly extractive, insecure, and immoral sets of socio-economic conditions… and I mean we’re all basically the same, amirite??”… But while each country’s civil society is kinda fucked in some fundamental ways, they seem like unique ways that are hard to compare “apples to apples”.

    EDIT: Having said that, the issues in each country strongly depend on dividing lines between various “peoples”, and a manufactured assurance that your conditions are the best that they could possibly be, so…


  • Allow me to offer a different perspective from the previous reply: holy frickin shit, I honestly never noticed this before. Tbh I’m not sure about the intentionality behind it though.

    I mean, who exactly is intentionally doing this? Intent is important here; if it’s not individually-assignable, and say emerges from a complex series of interactions between various other policies, or instances of individual decision-making - for example - then it seems hard to reasonably place “blame” like that.

    This doesn’t preclude taking action against the companies which will be salient for them (e.g. puts financial viability in question, rather than BS fines that amount to parking tickets)… I mean corporations are people too, now, right? Just a thought on how to argue/clarify the premise.

    Because otherwise… Yeah, wtf. A lot of dividing lines, a lot of material insecurity, and so on, and nobody has the time - let alone the resources AND perspective simultaneously - to challenge the real dynamic. One which arguably IS being perpetrated with individual intent at multiple scales, and with cancerous impacts (figuratively and literally) on the societies which enable and tolerate them.


  • Actually, to be fair, because it might matter for future reference. If someone doesn’t “know about” Al Jazeera, but they see this piece and get an impression of journalistic integrity… it tells them almost nothing at all about whether or not they can be “trusted” in other areas of their reporting.

    This person shared a simple fact that helps address this for people clearly, and without bias. Because there’s literally no way that this isn’t relevant to their reporting - or what they choose to report on - for literally any issue or area at all.

    Doesn’t matter at all if it’s directly relevant to this post or not - and I don’t know international politics well enough to say that it doesn’t matter here, actually, do you?