Funny events in anti-woke world

Bob_McMillan

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What, are they worried being in a potential life-or-death situation + teen hormones will get them frisky?
Yes, I imagine they are.

But to be fair, it makes sense to have the kids know exactly where to go when shit goes down. And the bathrooms, which are separated by gender, are definitely familiar to everyone. What we should be wondering I guess is why the teachers didn't just let her use whatever bathroom she already uses everyday. Unless, she isn't allowed to use one and this is just another episode of the school being a dick to her.
 
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Terminal Blue

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Speaking of conservatives getting mad, this makes a good segueway into another thing I've always wanted to address about the right and anti-woke types; this notion that, if people disagree with you or call your opinion shit, it's automatically validation and confirmation that you said nothing wrong and that you're "living rent free" in their heads.
It's just the continuation of that whole "u mad bro?" era of the internet which I don't think conservatives ever grew out of.

The comment I believe was about pushing people to look good over be good at the work.
But that's still what I'm talking about isn't it. It's capitalism.

Capitalism doesn't reward hard work, because everyone knows on some level that hard work is meaningless.

If you have someone who is very productive and turns out good work, why would you promote them out of that position? They're not going to be doing that work any more if you promote them, they're going to be managing other people who probably won't be as productive as they are. Promotion isn't actually a reward for hard work, it's about climbing a hierarchy, and you can imagine in principle that people who got promoted on merit would retain the skills and passion they had and be able to mentor those under them, but they generally don't. That's not their job.

Innovation and creativity.
You write a book you own it until you sell the rights.
You make a film, you own it until you sell the rights (unless you already agreed for a company to fund it in exchange for the rights)
You design a product or create some program you own it (again unless it was made on behalf of a big corporation)
It's more about the idea of the "side hustle" than the core job as such I'd say and the idea of turning the side hustle (speed Running) into a main job.
You only own the rights your book if you funded its creation yourself.
You only own the rights to your film if you funded it yourself.
You only own a product you created it if you absorbed all the costs.

Innovation and creativity don't buy you ownership of your labour. Money does.

No it shouldn't be surprising but it's a very sort of weird scale. Such that some 3,000 twitter follower Speed runner who holds 0 actual records is some dude whose seen as super desirable while looking like Will from the Inbetweeners with from what I could tell a personality just as neurotic.
Could be cute.

You realise a lot of women are going to fantasize about (figuratively) being Charlotte from the Inbetweeners?
 
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Silvanus

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What's that? It's not up to the legislature like I said because it was so blatantly obvious that it was delegated that it wasn't even funny? Color me surprised. Let's not forget that this all started because you said people would have to vote on the number of doses to buy, when that doesn't even happen at all, and I'm taking your word on this that the health secretary even has a direct hand in such matters and not a broader "hospitals are reporting shortages, I recommend renegotiating with suppliers" kind of information reporting.
Oh, now we're quibbling about different branches of the government? The health Secretary is an elected representative. You abolish the position and establish full direct democracy over its duties, you hand his duties to the people at large. Including resource availability. Stop avoiding that point.

Yes, the work is delegated. Shock! Horror! I was right the whole time!
By an elected representative, who decides what to do and when to do it. The literal act of the phone call is unimportant. The decision-making authority is.


No, this is not that hard, delegating duties is not inherently anything like an election.
Unless you vote on who carries them out, in which case you're literally electing someone.

You have actually taken things to an illogical extreme, repeatedly.
Probably because "full direct democracy", and the abolishment of all political hierarchies, is an extreme position that requires extreme restructuring.

Polls say you're wrong.
That'd be why the American people stood so steadfastly against the anti-refugee stuff. Oh, wait.


Toxic to who? Who said there shouldn't be any further referendums on details, people or politicians?
I'd recommend you take a look at the British discourse post-referendum. The pressure to prevent another referendum came quite overwhelmingly from people. Politicians who endorsed a second referendum-- such as the lib dems, or Starmer-- were pilloried and paid a dramatic electoral cost. It's generally put forward as a leading reason for Labour's dire performance in 2019-- the fact that they endorsed asking the people again.

Polls showed, at various times, that were the original referendum held later, the result would not have been the same. And yet Polls also showed that holding a second referendum was wildly unpopular.

If you've seen speaking fees politicians get for sabotaging policies, you can't possibly look at former politicians as having recieved anything like an accounting. Recalls can be since you can remove a politician before they can do damage or save some policy/ies. Prison is ceretainly accountability if they've broken the law somehow. Letting someone get paid to ruin everything, and then get lucrative jobs later advising future politicians on how to ruin things is not accountability.
OK. Recalls, then, if you'll accept that as an example. Can't recall an electorate.


The collective society takes responsibility. And since people like to point to biannual election results as the failure/triumph of society, you only get to disagree with me if you say voting isn't important.
Collective society takes responsibility!?

Meaningless. What, some of them feel a bit bad? Where's the recall? Where's the prison? You want to set that bar that high for representative democracy, I'll do the same.

Currently, the mechanisms of accountability are clearly substandard. But to spread responsibility among literally everyone is to ensure accountability dies entirely. Ever looked at the studies of the bystander effect, whereby the more people present who could intervene to prevent an assault, the lower the likelihood of anyone stepping in? It's because every individual person is happy to mentally pass the buck; to assume that someone else will step in if need be. And if no-one does? Well, no-one else did either, so they can't be held individually responsible.

They are, theoretically. Strictly they're generally non-profit organizations who either survive on their own or through government funding, and in either case nothing need change. Apart from clearing out the toxic NGOs.
So we either corrupt them to the form of a commercial business ("survive on their own") or we rely on a referendum to keep them in funding. Which definitely will not pass, because there's no way even 5 percent of people would be able to name the most vital NGOs.


Well there's nothing wrong with filtering spam, easy one to deal with. Clearing out duplicates and establishing rules on not putting the same referenda up sequentially.
I'm not talking about spam or duplicates, as you know. If you're happy to level the playing field to the level at which nobody has greater political authority than anyone else, then referenda on actual important stuff has exactly the same standing as unimportant stuff. That's unavoidable. And you would have dozens a day if you're intending to replace all elected positions with popular votes.
 
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Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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No, I'm not actually. "Estimates" vary because of which deaths are actually counted. Same shit that happens when the fatality count from the WWII Japanese firebombing campaign is strategically under-estimated, whilst that of the atomic bombings is strategically over-estimated.

Those lower "estimates" don't account for excess death rate in the country between 2003-2011, deaths outside AO's or in some cases deaths inside AO's for which the primary cause of death is nonviolent but still attributable to the chaos and aftermath of the war.
...
In other words, when it comes to Iraq we're not just cooking the books, we're dusting off and nuking them from orbit.
The estimates are reasonable. Which you kind of semi-admit when referencing the 2013 study.

You are then magicking up the figure you want of a million with handwavium. Plausible but conveniently vague claims to justify you stamping your own figure on the total, even when it is at variance with proper studies. Thus the phenomenal irony of you accusing other people of "cooking the books", particularly with allusions to it suiting people's political agenda. Well, guess what? Inflating to a million suits your political agenda.

I'll tell you what I think as a scientist. Better a study that has done some work with some attempt at solid data and has published it for scrutiny, than an internet rando who spouts spurious theoretical stuff off the top of his head with no even semi-solid data at all. I don't think Joe Rogan knows better than published studies on ivermectin, and I don't think you know better than published studies on Iraqi death estimates. This is what it is to be consistent.
 
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Eacaraxe

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The estimates are reasonable. Which you kind of semi-admit when referencing the 2013 study.
No, I admit their criteria of counting excess death attributable to the war is better-founded than that of many others. Then I pointed out the dubious methodology of using extrapolations from self-reporting data about dead people.

The 2006 Lancet study, and the 2013 ORB study, committed the same error -- and you'll notice I cited neither. Despite the former having the strongest-possible methodology, it also had a possible range of estimated deaths from 300,000-900,000 and was published in 2006. And despite the latter having weak and highly criticized methodology, it had a range of approximately 700,000-1,400,000.

Which, the Lancet study alone blows out this notion that "only" a half-million died because of the war. Its 600,000 estimate was halfway through the war, and therefore only accounted for the early insurgency and civil conflict in Iraq, not "the surge" or emergence of ISI.

You are then magicking up the figure you want of a million with handwavium.
Sure, multiple NGO's, human rights groups, anti-war organizations, and research institutes ran by academics is "handwavium".

Thus the phenomenal irony of you accusing other people of "cooking the books", particularly with allusions to it suiting people's political agenda. Well, guess what? Inflating to a million suits your political agenda.
So which is a more accurate fatality count of a major disaster, deaths for which the primary cause was that disaster or excess death rate associated with the occurrence of that disaster? I have yet to actually see you address this point.

I'll tell you what I think as a scientist...and I don't think you know better than published studies on Iraqi death estimates.
Yeah, my degrees are in history and political science, dude. I've been following the money and reading the small print for two decades since my formal postsecondary education began, especially since I started college in the aftermath of 9/11 and prior to the start of the Iraq war. And I know, due to my formal education, how studies -- even published and nominally peer reviewed ones -- can be manipulated unethically to support false conclusions, how they can be manipulated to that end, and most importantly, why.

Give me fifteen minutes unfettered access to EBSCO or JSTOR (which I don't have at the moment), and I'll likely be able to produce for you multiple scientific and peer-reviewed studies between seventy to ninety years old, that show how lead is a natural part of Earth's ecosphere and poses no outstanding health risk to human populations. I'd be able to do this because Robert Kehoe's name is on them, and while he was a well-known and respected medical researcher who worked and lectured out of University of Cincinnati whose influence extended to Senators and Surgeon-Generals, he was also getting paid off by GM, DuPont, and the Ethyl Corporation to produce bunk research about the prevalence and health risk of lead.
 
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Satinavian

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Just some nitpicking :
You only own the rights your book if you funded its creation yourself.
You only own the rights to your film if you funded it yourself.
You only own a product you created it if you absorbed all the costs.
Incredibly dependend on the law of the country.

There are some quite capitalist ones (like Germany) that make it impossible for an author or artist to lose or sell the rights to his work under any circumstances. Only limited use rights/licences can be transferred.

It does not make much difference in practice and there is quite some bit of handwaving and equivalency juggling when trading with common law countries but your statement is less universal than you presumably think.
 
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XsjadoBlayde

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Let's not forget the poor widdle nazis don't like being misidentified too 🙄




A less than unrelated note...


In her office in Freiburg im Breisgau, a town in the sunny southwestern corner of Germany at the foot of the Black Forest, Sarah Pohl is overwhelmed. A woman has called in distress after her husband said he would divorce her if she got vaccinated. A man has lamented that his wife refused to send the kids to school, fearing that wearing masks would damage their brains. Another woman was alarmed after her partner insisted that they migrate to Paraíso Verde, a Paraguayan community offering newcomers a life “outside of the ‘matrix’ ” without 5G, chemtrails, and mandatory vaccinations.

Tending to such calls is Pohl’s job. A blond-haired, soft-spoken therapist in her 40s, she holds what must be one of Germany’s most peculiar taxpayer-funded jobs: She’s a counselor on cult duty.

While the rest of the world tends to see German affairs as stable and even boringly predictable, in the last year and change of the Merkel era, the country has become a flashpoint for conspiratorial thinking. The majority of Germans supported the government’s handling of the pandemic, but the country also saw some of the fiercest pandemic-related protests in the world, according to multiple media reports, with many started by a group called Querdenken, which originated near Freiburg. In August 2020 in Berlin, a few hundred protesters who believed that Donald Trump had come to the German capital to “liberate” the country even attempted to “storm” the Reichstag. And ahead of the September 2021 general election, theories circulated that the Green Party leader’s college degree was fake, that the floods that ravaged the country’s west in July were planned by Merkel’s government to gin up support for her party in the polls, and that mail-in ballots would lead to widespread voter fraud.

Calls began to pour in from confused people wondering if they should break off contact with conspiracy theorist and pandemic-denying relatives or friends.
Most of these theories reached Pohl’s office. Over the course of many months, she and her four co-workers, who call their specific intervention services Zebra (there are multiple such offices by different names and with slightly different focuses in other states), came to play a distinctive role in untangling the ways pandemic-related theories have driven rifts among Germans, separating families and turning friends against one another. Pohl’s team was tasked with helping to defuse conflicts, build bridges, and mend the suffering and anxiety that so many across the West have experienced since the start of the pandemic. Their services, like those offered by the other regional offices, are free to all citizens.


Zebra (“not everything is black or white,” its website reads) was founded on Feb. 15, 2020, just a few weeks before the German government introduced the first restrictions to contain COVID-19. Michael Blume, the antisemitism commissioner of Baden-Württemberg, advised the state government to set up the center because he “predicted that digitalization would turn conspiracy myths into a great danger.” He thought of it as a public service: Whenever citizens were confused about any theories they heard or worried about a relative’s engagement with them, they had a place they could turn to, with someone who would listen and help them make sense of the situation. “Anyone who is affected by conspiracy beliefs or is in danger of losing close relatives should find open ears and advice from the state and churches,” Blume says.

At first, conspiracy theories were supposed to be only one of Zebra’s focuses, alongside other problems like cults. But the pandemic and the explosion of disinformation that accompanied it meant conspiracy theories quickly came to dominate the requests that reached Zebra. “I have never seen conflicts escalating like this,” Pohl says. As the pandemic forced people to take positions on restrictions, vaccines, and the new normal, calls began to pour in from confused people wondering if they should break off contact with conspiracy theorist and pandemic-denying relatives or friends. Frequently, after offering an initial explanation of the situation, clients would break down on the phone, asking “What should I do?”


Pohl has personal experience here. After growing up in a very religious family, she felt the pull of conspiracy theories herself. After 9/11, she remembers avidly scrolling through alternative explanations of the attack. “I would hear these theories and think, Oh, wow, that’s interesting!” she says. “I realized how fascinating it could be to see a seemingly new world open up before your eyes.” Then, about 15 years ago, a close friend of hers who believed several conspiracy theories died by suicide. She had already been thinking about starting to advise people who might go through similar crises, and that further showed her how important such work could be. She worked for eight years in a counseling center that provided advice for people who had extrasensorial experiences—for example, people who claim to see ghosts or read minds or that they’re under a magic spell—which she says was a formative experience that helped her take this new set of tasks on. “We don’t judge,” she says. “People have different ways to explain the world to themselves. … I am more interested in understanding why they do that, and how that might fit into their life story.”


When someone calls Zebra, Pohl and her co-workers make an appointment in person, online, or via phone. Every case is different: It could end after the first meeting or the counseling could go on for months, all free of charge. “There is no one recipe we use, but we look at how bad the conflict has got,” she says. “For example, are they still talking to each other?”

In many cases, things are pretty bad. Most callers are not the conspiracy theorists themselves (those “people don’t want to be saved,” Pohl says), but people whose relationship with a conspiracy theorist family member—typically a spouse or a parent—is deteriorating rapidly. Or they might be alarmed that their loved one is becoming radicalized. They often call Zebra as a last resort: “It takes a certain amount of suffering before someone calls us,” says Pohl. “And when they do, a lot has broken down in their relationship.” This is not always ideal—”sometimes we think it would have been better if they had called earlier,” Pohl says. Often, angry and sour, callers ask Pohl to “tell my wife she’s an idiot,” or to be given figurative “ammunition” to win arguments.

But rather than trying to convince conspiracy theorists or coax them back from the brink, Zebra doesn’t pick a side in the argument and encourages callers to learn to deal with their partners’ new beliefs differently. “Often there is a lot of intolerance on both sides of the argument,” Pohl says. “Both sides get extreme because they no longer speak to each other.” Sometimes, Zebra advises callers to establish boundaries; rediscover shared interests to avoid long, sensitive discussions; or make an effort to understand the psychological reason their loved one might have turned to a conspiracy theory. Other times, it’s about shifting discussions from facts to feelings in the belief that people change through emotional experiences, not discussing ideas. Or Pohl and her colleagues try to reframe the conspiracy theories callers get upset at being bombarded with. She encourages some people to see fake news and pseudoscience as even a misunderstood form of affection. “It’s a bit like with cats,” says Pohl. “Cats sometimes bring dead mice to the people they love.”

In some cases, the results are encouraging. In April, a middle-aged man in distress called Zebra, concerned about his wife. The woman had developed crushing anxiety about vaccines and face masks; she would spend hours trawling Telegram—a messaging app that became popular among many COVID skeptics in Europe after they were banned from other social media platforms—for information about the pandemic. She was crying a lot and couldn’t sleep at night. After she started refusing to wear a mask, which she mistakenly believed would cause blood oxygen levels to drop and make her sick for inhaling her germs, she lost her job as a physiotherapist. When he first called, the husband said his last straw was that she wouldn’t let him get vaccinated for fear he would become immunocompromised and die. He wondered if they should break up.


As they do in many cases, Pohl and her team invited the man to come in with his wife. Over several meetings, almost like couples counselors, they guided the couple to explore the reasons and feelings behind their stances. The relationship had been strained for some time, which made every disagreement turn into a fight. The woman came from East Germany, where distrust in the state is high, and had developed a “huge existential fear” after losing her parents at an early age. The man had always adjusted to his wife’s fears and was now trying to push back after a long time. Talking about their feelings helped the couple get closer to each other, Pohl says. Neither changed their opinion, but the fights slowly stopped. The man was able to get vaccinated; the wife still believes many widely debunked conspiracy theories but recognizes that the constant scrolling was harming her. She limited that, and she’s able to get a good night’s sleep again.

Preaching tolerance and openness can seem like a risky strategy at a time when, in Germany too, scores of vaccine skeptics and conspiracy theorists are becoming increasingly radicalized. At the end of September, a 49-year-old man shot dead a 20-year-old student and cashier at a petrol station after being told to wear a mask. Authorities said the murder was “no surprise” given the intensity of the COVID skeptic movement. Online, some Telegram users glorified the murder and hoped more attacks would follow. “People are coming to us increasingly to ask, are my relatives dangerous?” says Tobias Meilicke, the head of another state-funded conspiracy theory counseling center, Veritas, founded in Berlin in January. (A third center in Germany is Sekten-Info, in the western state of Nordrhein-Westfalen, although conspiracy theories make up a smaller part of its work.)


Helping them and their family members maintain relationships and understand one another, Pohl says, is itself a way to prevent them from radicalizing.
Pohl says it’s important not to downplay the risk of terrorism, but also not to assume that everyone who believes in pandemic conspiracies and disinformation is an extremist in the making. “There are many people who are not violent at all and come from a completely different place,” Pohl says. “The large crowd does not go out and shoot around.”

Helping them and their family members maintain relationships and understand one another, Pohl says, is itself a way to prevent them from radicalizing. “If you feel understood, conflicts can be de-escalated and cease to be violent,” she says. On the other hand, “people who don’t feel understood get louder and louder.” Empathy is also important with an eye to the future: Conspiracy theories tend to lose their appeal as the crisis that created them ends. If believers still have contact with loved ones who are nonbelievers, that is often the easiest way out. If all contacts are broken off and conspiracy theorists are isolated, they’ll be more likely to radicalize further. Hence the centers’ emphasis on tolerance, acceptance, and de-escalation—Meilicke says their work is a way to “make people an offer to remain part of this society.”


But this theory—that the pandemic getting better will lead to de-escalation—isn’t actually playing out just yet. In the past few months, as the COVID-19 caseload decreased in Germany and widespread vaccination drove down the number of casualties, Pohl was sure she and her colleagues would have more time on their hands. But the opposite has been true: All three of the German counseling centers are currently overwhelmed. Pohl says her team can’t take on much more work; Sekten-Info is struggling to offer intensive follow-up appointments; Meilicke’s Veritas currently has a 60-people waiting list. “We have so many cases in Germany that we are no longer able to respond to them because centers like ours are few and small,” says Meilicke. They also report that cases are becoming more violent and radical.


Pohl thinks a point will come when pandemic-related fears and insecurity will abate, and when that happens, so will the polarization, conflicts, and conspiracy theories that prey on them. But she’s not confident she’ll stop being exposed to the grueling, kaleidoscopic spectrum of human misery—separations, fights, trauma, heartbreak, social media addiction—anytime soon. “In some cases, irreparable damage has occurred,” she says. Some people have developed enormous mistrust of the state; others have become radicalized past the point of no return. “I also think that new conspiracy theories will spread,” she said, causing her services to remain in high demand. “The question is whether they will change behaviors as much as they have in the pandemic."
 

Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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The 2006 Lancet study, and the 2013 ORB study, committed the same error -- and you'll notice I cited neither. Despite the former having the strongest-possible methodology, it also had a possible range of estimated deaths from 300,000-900,000 and was published in 2006. And despite the latter having weak and highly criticized methodology, it had a range of approximately 700,000-1,400,000.

Which, the Lancet study alone blows out this notion that "only" a half-million died because of the war. Its 600,000 estimate was halfway through the war, and therefore only accounted for the early insurgency and civil conflict in Iraq, not "the surge" or emergence of ISI.
Again, think about your internal logic. There is a problem with criticising the methodology of a study and then claiming it "blows out" anything at all.

Never mind that as someone with degrees in history and political science, you should have noticed the extremely controversial nature of the Lancet report, and that it is very widely believed to have overestimated casualties - and not by a little. Indeed, looking purely at deaths due to violence, it is coming back with data vastly higher than almost any other reasonably credible source (more below). The Lancet study was adapted for another study run in 2013 (with data to 2011) which aimed to fix the problematic methodology. This turned out a figure around 500,000 total excess deaths. And even that has been criticised for spuriously adding ~100k to get to that total. It is nevertheless more consistent with other data, also see below.

So which is a more accurate fatality count of a major disaster, deaths for which the primary cause was that disaster or excess death rate associated with the occurrence of that disaster? I have yet to actually see you address this point.
Excess deaths should be more useful. Many of the studies suggest deaths by violence being at least half of excess deaths. But when we look at figures for violent deaths, most sources are pointing to about 200-300,000 from start of invasion to the current day. Even taking the top end of these estimates and arguing a substantial underestimate of ~30% for underreported deaths, we'd still be quite some distance from a million excess deaths.

So, in short, arguing a million deaths is really about selecting data and interpreting data in a way that single-mindedly magnifies casualties. A more balanced approach would suggest a much lower figure. Hence, handwavium.

Yeah, my degrees are in history and political science, dude. I've been following the money and reading the small print for two decades since my formal postsecondary education began, especially since I started college in the aftermath of 9/11 and prior to the start of the Iraq war. And I know, due to my formal education, how studies -- even published and nominally peer reviewed ones -- can be manipulated unethically to support false conclusions, how they can be manipulated to that end, and most importantly, why.
Good for you. But an argument from authority is not a compelling argument.

Give me fifteen minutes unfettered access to EBSCO or JSTOR (which I don't have at the moment), and I'll likely be able to produce for you multiple scientific and peer-reviewed studies between seventy to ninety years old, that show how lead is a natural part of Earth's ecosphere and poses no outstanding health risk to human populations. I'd be able to do this because Robert Kehoe's name is on them, and while he was a well-known and respected medical researcher who worked and lectured out of University of Cincinnati whose influence extended to Senators and Surgeon-Generals, he was also getting paid off by GM, DuPont, and the Ethyl Corporation to produce bunk research about the prevalence and health risk of lead.
I'm sure you could, however a huge digression into another topic of no relevance whatsoever would be a terrible waste of time. However, I sense you're itching to rant about it, so we might be treated to it anyway.
 

Dwarvenhobble

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But that's still what I'm talking about isn't it. It's capitalism.

Capitalism doesn't reward hard work, because everyone knows on some level that hard work is meaningless.

If you have someone who is very productive and turns out good work, why would you promote them out of that position? They're not going to be doing that work any more if you promote them, they're going to be managing other people who probably won't be as productive as they are. Promotion isn't actually a reward for hard work, it's about climbing a hierarchy, and you can imagine in principle that people who got promoted on merit would retain the skills and passion they had and be able to mentor those under them, but they generally don't. That's not their job.
Yeh I kinda did say some of that myself lol.


You only own the rights your book if you funded its creation yourself.
You only own the rights to your film if you funded it yourself.
You only own a product you created it if you absorbed all the costs.

Innovation and creativity don't buy you ownership of your labour. Money does.
I mean even in the USA the rights to things people have created can be claimed back after set periods. See for example how Disney is in a fight at present to try and keep the licence to Predator which it acquired in the acquisition of Fox so it's not an entirely lost thing as such.


Could be cute.

You realise a lot of women are going to fantasize about (figuratively) being Charlotte from the Inbetweeners?
I didn't realise many women would fantasise about being Charlotte in the Inbetweeners or that Will was considered particularly desirable as such
 

crimson5pheonix

It took 6 months to read my title.
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Oh, now we're quibbling about different branches of the government? The health Secretary is an elected representative. You abolish the position and establish full direct democracy over its duties, you hand his duties to the people at large. Including resource availability. Stop avoiding that point.
Unless I'm looking at the wrong thing, the health secretary is appointed. And it's not a quibble to point out that at no point is an elected official demanding a specific number of doses of a drug, it was an incredibly stupid argument from the start.

By an elected representative, who decides what to do and when to do it. The literal act of the phone call is unimportant. The decision-making authority is.
Not by an elected representative. And I still don't trust that they actually order the drugs themselves.

Unless you vote on who carries them out, in which case you're literally electing someone.
Or you're not, and then it's not.

Probably because "full direct democracy", and the abolishment of all political hierarchies, is an extreme position that requires extreme restructuring.
Then ask him about it.

That'd be why the American people stood so steadfastly against the anti-refugee stuff. Oh, wait.
There are whole ass sanctuary cities that openly defy the federal government on policies like that. Strictly all the states that allow pot are also defying the federal government.

OK. Recalls, then, if you'll accept that as an example. Can't recall an electorate.
No, but the idea is ridiculous in the first place. The accountability for the populace is living with their decisions, and before you get smug again really stop to think about it. If we take for example Texas' abortion law, the people who wrote and signed the law aren't really affected by it since they can easily go out of state or even out of country. The law was signed without the input of anyone who would actually be hurt by it.

Collective society takes responsibility!?

Meaningless. What, some of them feel a bit bad? Where's the recall? Where's the prison? You want to set that bar that high for representative democracy, I'll do the same.

Currently, the mechanisms of accountability are clearly substandard. But to spread responsibility among literally everyone is to ensure accountability dies entirely. Ever looked at the studies of the bystander effect, whereby the more people present who could intervene to prevent an assault, the lower the likelihood of anyone stepping in? It's because every individual person is happy to mentally pass the buck; to assume that someone else will step in if need be. And if no-one does? Well, no-one else did either, so they can't be held individually responsible.
Ah haaaa, the bystander effect? Have you looked into the studies?


Because it's bullshit, just like Stockholm syndrome.

So we either corrupt them to the form of a commercial business ("survive on their own") or we rely on a referendum to keep them in funding. Which definitely will not pass, because there's no way even 5 percent of people would be able to name the most vital NGOs.
You keep saying the first part clearly without understanding, NGOs right now survive on their own. In fact handing government money to NGOs kinda defeats their purpose and puts their ideas into question.

I'm not talking about spam or duplicates, as you know. If you're happy to level the playing field to the level at which nobody has greater political authority than anyone else, then referenda on actual important stuff has exactly the same standing as unimportant stuff. That's unavoidable. And you would have dozens a day if you're intending to replace all elected positions with popular votes.
Filtering what is and isn't important is up to individuals. Use a search bar.
 

Avnger

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Filtering what is and isn't important is up to individuals. Use a search bar.
Since that's so simple, please find the 10 most important petitions for the running of the US government: https://www.change.org/search

How hard could that be? I mean there's only millions of them ranging from the ever critical "Jackson let me borrow your xbox for Viva Pinata" to the nationally important "Bring back apple+ginger flavored AHA seltzer."
 
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crimson5pheonix

It took 6 months to read my title.
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Since that's so simple, please find the 10 most important petitions for the running of the US government: https://www.change.org/search

How hard could that be? I mean there's only millions of them ranging from the ever critical "Jackson let me borrow your xbox for Viva Pinata" to the nationally important "Bring back apple+ginger flavored AHA seltzer."
Well number 5 under "criminal justice reform" is a push for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
"Green New Deal" brings up local initiatives as well as national ones.
Funnily enough since insulin came up, there are several petitions on that, including government studies and implementing price caps.
"Public land drilling" will tell you who's getting oil pipelines where and why they don't like it.

So yeah, seems pretty simple.
 
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TheMysteriousGX

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What's the saying? "If hard work were really rewarded, every African woman would be a millionaire"
Oh, there's lots of them:
"If you work hard, you boss can go on vacation"
"Make yourself indispensable and you'll never get promoted"
"If you do the work of two people, your boss doesn't need to hire anybody"

It's basic work humor, which probably says nothing good about work
 
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bluegate

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Let's not forget the poor widdle nazis don't like being misidentified too 🙄

Really baffling how such displays of naziism are allowed, those people should be arrested and thrown in jail, even if for a week or two.

Yes, I imagine they are.

But to be fair, it makes sense to have the kids know exactly where to go when shit goes down. And the bathrooms, which are separated by gender, are definitely familiar to everyone. What we should be wondering I guess is why the teachers didn't just let her use whatever bathroom she already uses everyday. Unless, she isn't allowed to use one and this is just another episode of the school being a dick to her.
Are you saying they shelter in bathrooms? Cram a class of children into a bathroom? Talk about shooting fish in a barrel when the shooter finds them...
 

Bob_McMillan

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Are you saying they shelter in bathrooms? Cram a class of children into a bathroom? Talk about shooting fish in a barrel when the shooter finds them...
Well, I'd imagine the school had a good reason to choose the bathrooms over any other room. Maybe they've been reinforced or something. Frankly, I wouldn't have the slightest idea of what is the proper reaction to react to a school shooting. They're not a thing over here.
 

TheMysteriousGX

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Even then, like, it's a shooting situation? Who gives a shit if boys are in the girls bathroom or girls are in the boys bathroom in a shooting situation?
 

Buyetyen

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Even then, like, it's a shooting situation? Who gives a shit if boys are in the girls bathroom or girls are in the boys bathroom in a shooting situation?
Conservative busybodies. It's fine to give semi-automatic weapons to minors, but letting boys and girls mix is just too dangerous.