If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.
Just over half of U.S. adults (52%) say they favor allowing public school teachers to lead their classes in prayers that refer to Jesus
Nationwide, a slightly larger share of Americans say they favor allowing teacher-led prayers referencing God (57%)
It’s right there in OP.
I grew up in one of those states and it’s part of why I’m a certified America Hater today. I genuinely don’t think people who haven’t been exposed to it, even within the country, but especially outside of it, really have a grasp on how prominent and powerful religion is in the US. Hell, I didn’t fully understand it myself until I lived outside of the country for a time and saw what normal is like. This country is a madhouse.
Usually you don’t go, “You forgot to respond to this” if you don’t actually have anything there you want the other person to respond to. If you do not know how to have a conversation with another person go learn how to do that and get back to me.
What’s there to address? You’re just asserting what you personally like.
The more the capitalists are able to gain power (through making a bunch of money), the more they’ll push the government to cut those social services and to remove regulations. The system you describe is viable only to the extent that the capitalists can be kept in check.
Many existing socialist countries (Vietnam, China, etc) have implemented a market economy, as it’s necessary to participate in the global economy, and it can be useful for economic development, at least to a point.
I’m not really sure what you want me to answer here.
Ignoring the core principle of Capitalism, free markets, makes it impossible to actually talk about Capitalism in theory or in practice.
The confusion comes from the fact that the word capitalism has two meanings. The original meaning, which the other person and myself are using, has nothing to do with free markets:
1854, “condition of having capital;” from capital (n.1) + -ism. The meaning “political/economic system which encourages capitalists” is recorded from 1872 and originally was used disparagingly by socialists. The meaning “concentration of capital in the hands of a few; the power or influence of large capital” is from 1877.
It was only later, in reaction to socialism, that capitalism began to take on this meaning you’re using, where it’s supposedly disconnected from class interests and is just about some abstract economic principle. But using the second definition, it’s impossible to talk about capitalism in practice because, as I said, such a system has never existed and will never exist.
Your argument against can be used for every other economic system as well, so it becomes a matter of pros and cons which will never declare a clear winner and always demonstrate a mixed economy is best for everyone involved.
Huh? Economic systems where the interests of capitalists are prioritized are best for the capitalists, economic systems where the interests of workers are prioritized are the best for workers. Also, aren’t you declaring a clear winner when you say you can, “always demonstrate a mixed economy is best for everyone involved?”
They’re talking about capitalism in practice. In practice, economic policy is shaped less by ideology and more by they relative power of economic classes. When the rich have power, they get policies that favor themselves enacted, and vice versa. It’s only in theory that capitalism is about “free markets,” in practice, the rich support free markets if they alternative is something that’s more harmful to themselves (like taxes and nationalization) and oppose them when the alternative is beneficial to themselves (subsidies).
“Free market capitalism” is a purely theoretical idea that has never existed, and will never exist, because someone’s always going to have enough power to get the government to intervene in the economy to promote their own interests. Generally, left-wing people talking about capitalism mean capitalism in practice, not the theoretical idea.
Yeah, the way we can show all minorities that we’re in this together, that we’ll stand by each other even when it’s unpopular and inconvenient, to stop the state from splitting off groups and trampling them underfoot… is to split off Palestinians and support candidates who want to trample them underfoot because standing up for them is too inconvenient.
Historically, you’re completely wrong.
Hitler came to power with the support of capitalists (here meaning “people who own substantial capital” rather than “ideological supporters of capitalism”). They saw him as a way to maintain order against socialism and to break the power of unions. A similar story happened in Italy, and in other fascist countries.
Many capitalists did in fact benefit from fascism. There’s some confusion about fascist economic policies, but you should know that the term “privatization” was first coined to describe the economic policy of Nazi Germany. When they nationalized companies, it was because they were minority owned, and often they were redistributed upwards to the capitalists.
Labor rights suffered tremendously under fascism, with labor organizations exterminated, allowing capitalists to impose much worse conditions, lower pay, and longer hours on the workers, as well as using prisoners for slave labor. Any attempt to challenge these conditions would be considered treasonous, undermining the war effort.
Even when their countries were defeated militarily, many capitalists got off scot-free. For example, the pharmaceutical company Bayer (which merged with Monsanto in 2016) was once a part of IG Farben, which manufactured Zyklon B for the gas chambers. After the war, Bayer rehired Nazis to high level positions, including for example Fritz ter Meer, who had been on IG Farben’s board of directors and became chairman of Bayer, despite being a convicted Nazi war criminal.
The problem I’ve always had with the term is that you can’t really define a term by pointing to a comic and going like, “It’s like when someone does this sort of thing.” Like there’s a bunch of things the sea lion is doing, one is:
pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence
Like if you get a grudge against a user and constantly hound them in every thread about a topic they don’t want to discuss, that’s pretty rude (and if you do this offline like in the comic, it’s straight-up harassment). That’s bad regardless of what form it takes. On the other hand, if it’s just a regular conversation and not following from thread to thread, you have every right to expect people to provide evidence for their claims. Another is:
maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity (“I’m just trying to have a debate”), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter
“Feigning ignorance of the subject matter,” is also part of the Socratic Method, isn’t it? I don’t think it’s inherently bad to be like, “What specifically does this term mean, and why do you think this specific case meets the criteria?” If you believe something, you ought to be able to state things in clear terms, and that’s an important part of a healthy debate, it helps the other side to identify the point of disagreement where they break with your line of reasoning. Otherwise, how do you even go about having a productive conversation with someone you disagree with at all?
In my opinion, these sorts of internet neologisms are dangerous even if they are addressing a legitimate thing, because once it’s out there, you can’t control who’s going to use it. For example, “mansplaining” was intended to refer to a specific type of thing where a man assumes he’s an expert on a subject and explains in a paternalistic way, while often being ignorant of the subject matter, like random guys on Twitter trying to lecture a female astronaut about how space works. But there are also people who use it/interpret it to mean, “Whenever a man explains something” - even if he is actually qualified to speak on the subject, which provokes a backlash (and obviously the problem is made worse by people trying to exacerbate the backlash, including through sockpuppets).
The ambiguity of the term “sealioning” allows it to be used to shut down good faith questions and discussion, while leaving the accused without a lot of options to defend themself. “What do you mean by ‘sealioning?’ What specifically did I do or say that meets that definition, and why should that be grounds to dismiss what I’m saying, or to conclude I’m acting in bad faith?” is generally going to be met with, “That’s more sealioning.” If critically examining the concept of sealioining is sealioning, then I’m just inclined to dismiss the term entirely.
A couple kilobites, minimum.
Alright, you know, if you won’t use reason, then whatever your faith tells you I guess.
OK, so returning to the original point, if you agree that our senses our subjective, then the difference between a scientist reading a scale and me remembering whether I turned the oven on is just a matter of the degree of reliability, and both are evidence-based.
When you say I believe I turned off the oven, you are subjectively recalling something. You aren’t looking at the oven, you’re remembering it.
You’re also relying on your subjective memory when you look away from the scale to write down the number you read.
There is an accepted protocol on how to read a meniscus in a graduated cylinder for this reason or any scale for that matter.
Oh, now this is fascinating. Tell me, does this “accepted protocol” mean that you don’t have to rely on your subjective senses at all? If so, then how, exactly, does the information end up reaching your brain? I would love to know.
This is essentially just, “When someone wears a lab coat, that means it’s objective.” Even within “accepted protocols” there is still plenty of room for human error.
You are completely wrong about basically everything you’ve said, and your wrong ideas seem to be a product of the disdain you seem to have for the humanities - a common ailment of people with just enough knowledge of science to be very confidently wrong about things.
That’s incredibly dumb.
My observations about turning off the oven are just as objective and evidence-based as any other observations. I saw whether I did it or not very clearly with my own two eyes. If you want to get into, “Senses are inherently subjective,” fine, but that includes using your eyes to read a scale during an experiment. You’re trying to draw an insane distinction between reading a scale and reading a dial on an oven, it makes absolutely zero sense, and you don’t understand anything about science, epistemology, or philosophy in general. You’re going full Dunning-Kruger here.
It records vernacular.
And vernacular is how people understand each other. When you say, “Science has nothing to do with belief,” then most people are going to interpret that according to the common-use meaning. If I say, “I believe I turned off the oven,” I’m not expressing a faith-based conviction to the idea that I turned it off, I’m saying that based on my best recollection of the evidence, I did turn it off.
If you want to communicate in a way that people will understand, then I don’t think you should going around using the word “belief” to mean this nonstandard, technical definition without qualifications or explanation. And I definitely don’t think that you should assume that anyone who disagrees with statements made with that nonstandard definition is simply committed to rejecting reason and evidence, as opposed to the much more obvious and reasonable interpretation that they’re simply interpreting the word in the standard, common use way.
I can understand that perspective, but I’m looking at things from more of a class based and realpolitik perspective. The international order, I would say even now, but especially at that time of peak colonialism, was pretty much like this.
The Allied powers dominated the world, and they achieved that through force, brazen, unapologetic aggression. Germany didn’t have a problem with that, except for the part where they weren’t the ones on top, that they didn’t have colonies to exploit like everyone else.
From my perspective, the real problem is that socialists at the time didn’t follow through on the Basel declaration of 1912 where socialists of every country promised to oppose the coming war. When the war actually broke out, everyone rallied around their respective flags, the British and French socialists talked about Germany invading neutral countries and not being as democratic, but the German socialists justified it by talking about serfdom in Russia and the colonialism of Britain and France, and at the end of the day, tons of regular people got drafted to go die in the trenches over these power games.
Admittedly, I’ve never really considered it from a Belgian perspective before, but I think the bigger nations were all more motivated by power than by a genuine commitment to upholding neutrality and national sovereignty.
I think what they’re looking for in terms of methodology is what objective criteria they use to determine if a protest is violent or nonviolent, as well as what constitutes success or failure. These are not trivial questions, and there’s lots of debate surrounding virtually any given movement, so to make objective determinations about a large number of such movements raises the question of how they’re resolving all these questions and debates. Some might argue that such questions are inherently political and up to interpretation.
As another user in this thread pointed out, it may be a case of confusing correlation with causation: if a movement is popular, it may be more likely to succeed and more likely to be considered nonviolent, as compared to a less popular movement employing the exact same tactics.
The lack of distinction between strikes shutting down entire industries vs walking around for a bit with a witty sign is one of the many reasons the study is kind of silly.
Love Blackadder, especially that season ❤️
I think you’ve got it backwards. One of the lesser known, positive parts of the Cultural Revolution (which was primarily a horrible clusterfuck) was the Barefoot Doctors program, in which medical students were fast-tracked in education and sent out to the rural regions of China, which had never before had access to modern medicine. It was a very basic level of care, but it increased the number of doctors per person tenfold in the span of five years, and access to vaccines had a significant impact, increasing life-expectancy and reducing child mortality. However, because medical supplies in those regions were limited (and the scale of the program), the doctors were instructed to supplement care with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). This allowed the program to be rolled out more quickly, and the partial reliance on TCM may have helped with public acceptance (since it was what they already believed in), but it had an unfortunate side effect that it legitimized TCM.
This program was phased out in the 80’s with China’s broader economic shift, towards privatization, while also moving away from TCM. The new policies made care less accessible and focused more on curing serious ailments rather than preventative care. China has made some efforts to address these issues, though I’m not well informed enough about their current system to weigh in.
A lot of the modern popularity of TCM likely comes from the time of the Barefoot Doctors program, because people remember their quality of life improving during that time and then declining later when the focus was shifted away from TCM, incorrectly attributing it to TCM’s effectiveness rather than the accessibility of care and focus on prevention. Which is to say, many of the people who believe in TCM may actually be nostalgic for the healthcare system implemented during the Cultural Revolution.