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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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    1. “Incitement” is a long-standing, widely-accepted exception to the first amendment not mentioned in the amendment itself. Just because the literal text of the document does not include an exception does not mean our legal system can not invent one. While I generally agree that speech should not be regulated outside of extreme circumstance, this is a very common human thing to want.

    2. No argument on the second amendment. I do believe that more needs to be done here, but banning firearms - effectively or otherwise - is simply not an option in the States.

    3. Your freedoms stop where another’s begin. I don’t see this as a reduction in freedom, it’s a protection of the freedoms of those who are being protested against. Defending against violence is not, strictly, an attack on freedoms.

    4. See previous point. Religious freedom must end where another’s life and liberty begin. While I generally agree that individuals and religious institutions should be allowed to freely practice their religion, this must be tempered by the individual rights of others. With specific respect to the LGBTQ+ community, many religious groups actively dehumanize and some actively promote violence against them.

    I would argue that this situation ultimately boils down to a lack of understanding of authoritarian rule and the damage that can occur because of it. The American education system is largely gutted when it comes to history - our own and otherwise - and I believe this trend toward authoritarianism is largely due to that - and persistent class warfare by the Capitalist class, but that’s a different conversation, I think.

    People don’t really learn about what happened in Nazi Germany, or Fascist Italy, or Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union, or Communist China, or British India, or probably dozens of other examples I can’t think of off the top of my head.








  • No, this is actually a dichotomy. First Past the Post mathematically trends towards a two candidate system as its stable state. This isn’t some psychological bullshit, it’s math. The way our system works you never vote for the thing you like; you vote against the thing you don’t. Doing anything else is literally handing the election to the side you don’t like. It’s called the Spoiler Effect and it happens basically everywhere in the US where FPtP is used.

    The place you vote for who you want is in the primaries (or their equivalent in your state), not elections. If you’re not participating in those, you get no say in who gets run and bitching about it does nothing. Hell, even then you barely get any say since, as far as I’m aware, both the DNC and RNC actually select their candidate based on a vote of some inner circle bigwigs, not the actual results of any of the state-by-state pageant shows.


  • In this thread, everyone getting caught up on the first toot and not the second where he clarifies his point.

    If you step past the initial investment of buying a house, the analogy makes perfect sense. When you rent an apartment, your landlord (the provider) takes care of all the maintenance; you just live there and you get what you get. When you own a home, you take care of all of the maintenance, but you get to set the place up however you like. This isn’t that different from a lot of FOSS out there.