daltotron

because it's way more convenient

Honestly, these laws are just gonna hurt old men in Republican states.

You know I think a lot more of their politics and general life outlook makes more sense when you understand that probably a lot of these super old guys are not computer literate enough to look up their niche fetishistic porn interests, and are probably still consuming porn the old fashioned way, which is becoming increasingly nonexistent even though it's still something that actually exists. Plus the propagation of morally puritanical values means that if they kept any of that material around at all, they'd be hypocrites, so they can't have that. Probably a lot of these dudes are walking around super pent up and sexually frustrated, I'd bet.

We need to introduce local community college and library courses to teach these elderly boomers how to goon

Expanding on this, a lot of this is very consistent in the amount by which it suppresses voters, and thus, much like gerrymandering, can be designed around or intentionally enacted. I mean, that's sort of an obvious thing, but I think it's still important to take note of and point out, much like gerrymandering and every other form of voter suppression, because it makes it all the more obvious that we do not live in a democracy, even by a little bit.

I think the biggest problem I can cook up is that it's sort of hard to campaign on cardinal voting, especially at the federal level, because it's sort of an apolitical and nerdy topic that people don't know about and don't give a shit about. You'd probably have to campaign on giving people healthcare, or, responding to the economy, or any number of other issues that might come up in that particular cycle. You'd have to pass it as a total footnote to something else, which, at the federal level, probably wouldn't happen, precisely because it would threaten the power monopoly that both parties have as different sides of the same cardboard cutout. You'd get no votes congressionally to get that passed. You'd probably have to do a bunch of legislation before that, leading up to that, probably you'd have to get rid of citizen's united, yadda yadda. If you were the president theoretically you could add a lot of rhetorical pressure to specific members of congress, but that's more useful if you have like, a narrow margin, if you're outweighed by most then you'd probably ironically end up doing a lot of what trump is doing right now even though he has a majority.

It's because the movies are written by christopher nolan, and that guy does not have good politics. The other guy is right with their explanation, but the underlying message is, as you say, pretty much total nonsense.

isn’t a slur more than that?

Not really. I could provide actual specific examples, but I don't really want to start saying like, slurs, so. I think maybe if you think that you couldn't make a slur out of almost any word, then you're not being creative enough, or, you haven't acclimated to how creative some of these other guys can be.

Here, I'll come up with a theoretical example. You could probably make a slur out of, say, calling someone a banana-eater, right. I can even imagine two ways to do that.

You could have it be, okay, well, monkeys eat bananas, so, the banana eater is like a monkey, and then obviously comparing people to monkeys is gonna be a little bit of a red flag, is maybe racist, especially depending on whether or not you're using it to be racist, or applying it disproportionately to one group of people. I've seen people just throwing out, like, the specific lego number piece of the mass produced lego monkey, whenever they see a black guy online. I think, at that point, that's basically a slur, in how they're using it, and that's like, just a sequence of numbers.

Or, you could say, okay, well, bananas are kind of a phallic type of food, right, like hot dogs, or whatever, so, people eating bananas are gay, as a kind of substitute for a cock. So, it could also be a homophobic thing.

This is all dependent on the context of use, too. If you're exclusively calling one group "banana-eaters" based on their intrinsic traits, that's gonna turn that expression into a slur more. It could also be a statement of fact, right, oh, chuck over there, he's a banana-eater, he eats bananas, sure. It depends entirely on use. If you need evidence for how this shit can progress then you need only look at websites like 4chan or some other such nonsense.

On top of all this you kind of have the complications of, say, slurs only really applying to particular intrinsic traits that people have rather than others. Slurs can apply to black people, but calling someone a "cracker", despite being still based on an intrinsic trait, of white skin, isn't really a slur. Neither is, as upthread, calling someone a "boomer", because we all age over time, where it's sort of used generically just to refer to anyone older than you, or because it's usually applied as a reference to a very specific class of people that have a specific socioeconomic context, more than just being based on their age. You'll usually only hear people call, say, american boomers "boomers", in that context, but you won't hear that in, say, china, or africa, or most of south america, or whatever. It's a reference to the post-war boom years, explicitly.

There are also certain subcultures which re-appropriate slurs, which basically means that those words aren't really slurs in how they're being used in that subculture. I'm sure you can think of examples of that.

Can we find five or ten people like that amongst the American population of 330 million people?

probably not, no

A lot of ink gets spilled around this kind of bullshit, when most of communism is focused more directly around anti-capitalism and economic theory.

Effectively, the preventative mechanism against authoritarianism is just democracy, but extended towards parts of the economy which, under capitalism, are conventionally privatized, and thus, are kind of ruled in an authoritarian, "meritocratic" manner. Then this authoritarian capitalism infiltrates and rules the public, democratic portions of society, as we've literally just seen right now with the kind of, explicitly corporate-backed trump administration. I mean, as we've been seeing for maybe the last 80 or so years, right, in a slow ramp up. Which isn't to say the US really had much of a democracy to begin with, it was sort of, designed from the inception to be more of an kind of joint-corporate state ruled by landowners, so in a roundabout way we are actually making america just as it was at inception. You could maybe contrast this situation of authoritarian capitalism with co-operative corporations, which sort of exist at various levels of democratic ownership, and exist to mixed success in a capitalist market context. Or union activity, maybe.

More specifically and directly to answer your question, you'd probably wanna use a Condorcet method, I'm partial to the Schulze method, and you'd maybe wanna set up certain factions of the economy to be voted on by those with domain-specific knowledge so as to not be overly politicized, weaponized, or met with undue interference by other portions of society. You want your railroad guys to be in control of the railroads, basically, rather than having to frame everything for the perhaps relatively uninformed general public. You want to avoid just using the public as a kind of rubber stamp where their approval of your program is contingent on how well you've phrased your proposal, because it just sort of meaninglessly increases costs for no reason. You want engagement to be legitimate rather than taken advantage of by cynical forces. Hopefully, by breaking up these specific sections of society, and giving them agency over their specific domain and nothing else, you can prevent a massive overly centralized and thus more authoritarian hierarchy from arising.

The other criticisms, say, of democracy itself, socialism doesn't quite do as well with. Say, with majoritarian rule slowly shrinking over time, or, the lines and borders that you draw up around particular domains creating a kind of insular and exclusive self-interest of a given class. Which conflicts explicitly with the previous idea, right, of splitting the economy into more and more factions so you can have each of them operate in their domain more efficiently. These would sort of be, more anarchist criticisms of socialism. Communism is sort of, depending on who you ask, some theoretical end state of all this which puts all of these questions out of mind, where everything is as flat as possible.

Realistically, these all tend to be kind of overblown as criticisms anyways, and the much bigger problems stem from the real world circumstances of trying to establish a communist state in a global capitalist hegemony, which is an inherently isolating, hostile, and cruel context. It's hard to do effective democracy in such a context, for the same reason that it's hard to have democracy on a pirate ship when you're getting shot full of holes, while, in other times, the ship would actually be ruled democratically.

hey look, it's all understandable given the current state of the world, ey?

I mean, yeah, you're right, feeding the troll is kind of a classic blunder, but I still think it makes sense not to go out of your way to give them any ammunition. Maybe I come off as a little victim blamey, but I don't think it's that serious

My point is only that bull bars sort of, have a different cultural association and collective cost-benefit than, say, cowcatchers on rural freight rail, and my only point in pointing that out, is really just to sort of, educate people about a series of fun facts, or things they may not have previously considered very much. i.e. if you live in suburbia, or if you find yourself driving to walmart once or twice a week, you should maybe not have bull bars on your car. Sort of also plays into the idea of like, larger cars, or even lifted cars, being overly tall in their hood height, meaning they'll dump most pedestrians face flat onto the ground and potentially under the car, rather than tipping them onto the hood of the vehicle, and bull bars can serve to potentially exacerbate that problem. Which also ties into the jeeps and SUVs thing. I dunno.

Ranchers were sort of who I was thinking of when I was thinking of someone who would be extremely rural, and who on occasion will commute into a probably very small town with only one or two big box stores, gas stations, maybe a motel 6, and other highway-exit popups. There's not much out in the boonies outside of agriculture, and like, maybe forestry or things of that nature.

There's sort of, a weird kind of stereotyping around rurality on the internet, where it's all seen as being sort of, extreme poverty, or, people living entirely disconnected from society, maybe working occasionally for some soulless big corporate farm that has no local upper management, and so everything there is sort of, supposed to be put upon, but also be noble in poverty, and be authentic, agreeable, and agree with me in all the ways that matter, especially politically. That's the sort of like, idiot stereotype of rurality. That wealth gap is real, sure, you'll drive through and see a bunch of millionaire plots of land flanked by like, random trailers that haven't really been updated or maintained since the 70's, that part is true enough. But basically, the idea that small trucks are the true sign of the working class ranchhand, and the large truck is always, always, some sort of like, pavement princess owned by an IT worker in san-francisco, that's obviously false, and people don't think about it at all. Obviously things aren't as clear cut, plenty of people working what are otherwise blue collar jobs have big trucks, live in actual rurality, and have an at least somewhat justified reason for owning the kinds of vehicles they own.

I dunno, I'm just, making a lot of conversation, you know? I saw bull bars brought up and I decided to bring up more shit about them. Cultural context, pedestrian safety, shit like that.

I dunno, I tend to see that shit way more often on lifted pavement princess f-150's and dodge rams than on, say, your classic rural 1990's nissan shitbox truck, or your classic ford ranger. Though the lines do become blurred, when your private ranchers are naturally also multi-millionaires. In any case, bullbars are somewhat sensible maybe for encountering, say, a bull, or if you're a police vehicle with a specific application, but more generally they're horrible for ensuring pedestrian safety, ensuring crash safety when met with a stationary barrier like a bollard or a tree or a concrete barricade, or a storefront, and they're obviously much worse in a crash with any other car. There are bullbars which try to get around these issues with more thoughtful integration with the frame of the car or the choice of material, but the vast majority I've seen are just tube steel.