Spyke

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Is Ben Shapiro a good person?

The answer is probably "no", but let's show the work, just in case.

He has been caught, multiple times, disingenuously embracing positions and politicians that contradict his own prior supposed "strongly held beliefs", only ever really strongly condemns his own side if it benefits him, or at least if not doing so would harm him, his show is boring as shit and his streaming service a transparent propaganda vehicle devoid of artistry or craft.

He may be a good husband and father behind closed doors, we have no way to verify that at this time.

Yeah I'd say he's morally absolutely mercenary and spineless which makes him a pretty worthless person, in a "banal evil" kind of way.

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Why do people say "my taxes"

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But I don’t appreciate your tired arguments that privatization of public utilities is a necessary good

Fucking hell man, are you absolutely sure you're not American? Your reading comprehension is on par with their shittier states.

Where have I argued for privatization? Logistic concerns apply regardless of who is providing a service, even the state still needs employees to provide a service with their fucking work.

In fact, I'm from Italy, our healthcare system is public and subisidised, and I used that as an example because the state struggles to fill positions in rural and mountainous areas even though it has a mandate to fill them and no profit motive. At some point, if people are not willing to relocate to the middle of nowhere, they just aren't gonna.

So that's strike 1.

I don’t appreciate the reality of millions of hands that extend to reach safe borders to be told “no, we have too many workers already” when the issue isn’t “enough work” but private profit and governments colluding around the gold pile they’ve built.

AAAH I see the problem, you are arguing with your imaginary friend who is some insane neocon, and not someone with a basic grasp of liberal economics who defended the concept that richer people should pay more taxes than poorer people with an economically sound argument.

Gotcha. Say hi for me.

There is no societal burden except the ones we create for ourselves.

Right.

Infrastructure needs no maintenance, logistics aren't real, people don't spend their time and energy to make the things you consume!

Food materializes out of nowhere, no labour is involved in maintaining power plants, roads, bridges, hospitals, all the things that apparently come for fucking free.

And certainly not through paying fucking taxes.

I am not allowed to use words that better describe you on this site, so I will use what I can: American lefty in spirit.

Arrogant, self assured, catastrophically wrong, and you will never need to pay the price because you are surrounded, undeservedly, by people who know better and will prevent your cancerous ideas from being implemented.

Better lucky than smart.

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Why do people say "my taxes"

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do you really think that’s healthy?

Yes? My labour, my earnings, my debt to society for what society does for me. Hence why my taxes include infrastructure costs that may be different from yours, since we live in different places.

Seems perfectly fair to me. I do more than a lot of people, so I earn more, and, as a result, the aid society gives me that allows me to work and earn is also more valuable to me.

I would incur more of a loss than someone who earns less, if I suddenly could not access my job which I go to with public transit, for instance, so reasonably I also pay a somewhat higher (but not proportionally higher) share of my income.

How about the alternative where everyone has the same investment and therefore the same access to public goods and services?

Ah you mean la-la land where logistics don't exist and everything is equally accessible to everyone without coercion or forced labour?

I come from a country with very uneven, complex terrain to navigate.

The towns on the mountains are small, hard to reach, even with modern technology.

Do you think they will magically have equal access to hospitals, when there is physically less space for them to be built? When there is less room for people to live, and fewer people to begin with, how are they supposed to have equal access to services that require people to deliver them?

It's a nice fantasy, but the reality is that equal theoretical access means jack shit. I know you're probably american and your big issue is now people don't even have theoretical equal access but, trust me, once you get past that barrier people don't suddenly magically get everything they need. People need to be there to provide services and, short of enslaving them, they won't necessarily be there, and if they're there they will be more or less competent.

people arguing the necessity to own debts incurred on them from a structurally unsound social and economic system.

There are a lot of ways society may be unsound depending on who you ask, taxes being tailored to the income of people is the one thing even commies like you should be in agreement, since it's literally "from everyone according to their ability, to everyone according to their needs", as long as there is a functional safety net.

In fact, big safety net neoliberal countries like most of northern Europe have done more measurable good to help raise the floor of quality of life in their own borders than socialism ever did, thanks in no small part to the understanding that society's job is indeed to help fill the gaps where markets are inefficient, and not simply to go "ew, markets" and proceed to fuck up their own economies for fun and lack of profits.

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Why do people say "my taxes"

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If we had a mandated wage that everyone got, regardless of job, that would mean a flat tax makes sense, in his defense.

Why would you pay tax at all in that scenario? For all salaries to be equal they basically must be doled out by the state, otherwise it implies employment, competition, markets, etc. so why would you need taxes as a system to begin with?

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Would you say my conservative dad has at least revatively gotten the point?

Sounds like he's done a lot of research and has kept an open mind. He's also wise in suggesting to go into therapy and see if there may be other causes/co-causes.

Anecdotal, but a friend of mine has ADHD and once she started treatment for that she also lost like 95% of her feelings of dysphoria and decided to postpone transitioning until she could figure her shit out a bit more.

Years later she's decided she's fine as she is and saved herself shittons of money and physical suffering with no real drawback.

It's important not to be emotionally attached to a diagnosis.

games

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Steam is 'an unsafe place for teens and young adults': US senator warns Gabe Newell of 'more intense scrutiny' from the government if Valve doesn't take action against extremist content

Worth mentioning that the main US senator supporting this, Mark Warner, received substantial donations from Disney, which also poured 1.5 billion (with a B) dollars into Epic Games.

Wouldn't be surprised if some bigwig at Disney pushed for this investigation, too, especially given how fucking flimsy the results were (55% of all hate symbols were fucking pepe the frog).

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relatable meme

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No, they read the meme and interpreted it correctly, that the pathologization of not wanting to be opposed is bad (You know, as displayed by the obviously evil look on the doctor wojak and the giant syringe), thus they wouldn't need to raise that objection.

memes

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I wish there were more like him in the industry

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who eventually got fired for sexual harassment stuff

The source you linked as well as the screenshot you posted of the quote both say HR complaints.

You can get complaints for all sorts of things, such as being uncooperative and that being read as disrespectful to a superior or a colleague, for instance, or going behind a superior's or colleague's back, which sounds like exactly what was going on, and since they could not touch the literal star of the show they canned his only ally instead.

Since you said you thought this was blown out of proportion, don't contribute to blowing shit out of proportion.

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And even if it weren't, jokes are allowed to be edgy.

You can say fuck on the internet, as they say.

And I for one lived through enough of the 90s (all of 'em) that I don't care for this "must sanitize everything, think of the children" attitude just because it's suddenly coming from the left.

So yeah, fuck'em, communities are accountable to their members, not random mouthbreathers barging in demanding to be accommodated.

You wouldn't do it at your clubhouse and you shouldn't do it here, either.

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Why do companies always need to grow?

It's not "companies", it'spublicly traded companies.

And the answer is quite simple really: the moment you become publicly traded your stock becomes your product, and everything else becomes a means to deliver better stock prices to your investors.

Not all companies are publicly traded, I patronise privately held companies wherever possible because as a client I'm still at the core of their business strategy, and I'm wary of the alternative.

At the end of the day, bad strategies result in bad products and services. Vote with your wallet, it's very possible.

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Cause one of the two is fucking stupid.

The word "Master" isn't exclusively tied to slavery and to deem it offensive on those grounds pretty much guarantees you're American and have an understanding of history that makes any actually educated person want to vomit.

A Master branch, like a master copy of a recording, is the reference copy against which others are measured, it's not a master in the sense of ownership but in the sense of benchmarking, like a master of a craft.

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Lemmy suffers from the "alt-tech curse" in that since there is perfectly serviceable, normie friendly tech, for someone to come to the alternative you have to be not so normie.

Gab, Parler, Voat back in the day, Mastodon and Lemmy, bluesky, etc are all part of the same phenomenon of micro-exodi from established sites due to fitting poorly with existing moderation which, given the fact normies still use the sites, means we're always looking at extremists of some kind.

Whether it's the tankies on lemmy.ml, or the progs on bluesky, or the tradcons on parler and gab, it's always some group being told "if you don't like it here go make your own" and them doing it.

The problem is this makes these environments extremely off-putting to normies as every single motherfucker on each of these platforms has at least a Bachelor's degree in scaring the hoes.

The reality is, if you want normie content, you're gonna find it on platforms used by normies.

Lemmy is too niche to have karma farming bots reposting the same shit every hour, so cat videos etc are in short supply, and most of the people who do participate here have scary levels of politics brainrot.