@TomSteyer Dang, is that California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer, or is it the Cast-Iron Man John Calhoun? I can’t tell the difference.
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theboldmoose
131 posts
"Wow" is right. ICE is a criminal organization. As governor, I'll prosecute them like one.
Elon Musk@elonmusk
Wow
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@TXMCtrades Taxes designed explicitly not to be progressive aren’t progressive? Wow, tell me more!
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Flat taxes are regressive because they completely ignore the share of income needed to fund basic necessities for lower wealth cohorts. It is an awful idea. But it doesn't stop people from floating it every few months as some magical solution. They are REGRESSIVE. Full stop.
Eric Matheny 🎙️@ericmmatheny
Flat tax. Whether you make $1000 or $100 million. A fixed percentage for everybody. And that’s it. A one-page tax form. No bullshit. Everybody pays a reasonable and equitable amount. Everyone - from the wealthiest to the poorest - have skin in the game.
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@imPenny2x It’s not, in face one of the most famous arguments in bioethics against euthanasia is called the slippery slope argument.
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@DropSiteNews “In this report, HRANA emphasizes that the figures presented
represent the minimum number of confirmed cases. The actual death toll may be significantly higher
than the numbers documented by this organization.”
These are just the confirmed deaths you absolute piece of shit.
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There is no credible evidence that Iranian authorities “killed at least 42,000 innocent, completely unarmed, protestors” in the riots and protests two months ago.
HRANA, a widely cited Iran rights monitor, reported on January 27 that protests had led to 42,324 arrests, not 42,000 killings.
The group, which is funded in part by the U.S. government, published on February 23 a ~1,350-page report, it’s most comprehensive account, which documented 7,007 deaths overall — broken down as 6,488 adult protesters, 236 minors, 207 security force members, and 76 non-participants. Iranian authorities have noted 3,117 deaths because of the actions of armed rioters who infiltrated the protests, and about 3,000 arrests.
Rapid Response 47@RapidResponse47
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@lionel_trolling Oh my godsh, you guys made up a whole literature!? Tell me more, I can’t wait to hear!
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Okay, so I guess Pinochet's Chile wasn't authoritarian because there was a plebiscite and then an election?
Moreover, there's a whole literature on competitive authoritarianism and hybrid regimes. Getting rid of elections entirely is very hard.
Ross Douthat@DouthatNYT
Strong political parties that bend the rules to entrench their power and succumb to corruption are a consistent feature of democracy qua democracy. And if your entrenched ruling party can lose everything in a wave election, you are not living in an authoritarian state.
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@_space_punk_ (1) is often defended via Roger Penrose’s Gödel-based argument: that human understanding exceeds formal, rule-bound systems. See also Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and related structures like Penrose tiling.
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@_space_punk_ 1.Consciousness cannot arise from purely algorithmic processes
2.LLMs are purely algorithmic processes
∴ LLMs are not conscious
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I have yet to hear a single even remotely well thought out argument for why LLMs arent consciousness. It all inevitably breaks down to "well ive defined consciousness as definitionally something a machine can't have" without any real discussion about the nature of consciousness whatsoever
Duncan Reyburn@duncanreyburn
No decent philosopher believes ‘machine consciousness’ is (or ever will be) a thing.
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@peligrietzer Idk about everywhere having the Heidegger scholar, but he’s certainly welcome in discussions no questions asked. Hegel is literal bedrock to both schools, we just don’t read the “Hegelians” as much. Easy mistake to make.
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@PatrickHeizer Your terms are acceptable for these perpetual liabilities.
The contention is that we do not accept any additional tax beyond covering these perpetual liabilities. That’s kind of the whole debate here.
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Yet another reason property taxes are the best form of taxes is because they match the perpetual liabilities of civilization (schools, courts, police, etc.) with a perpetual asset (the land).
Your obligations to your community don't stop just because you've paid off your home.
Chris Martz@ChrisMartzWX
Can anyone explain to me why we have to continue to pay property taxes on our land and motor vehicles AFTER we have paid them off? As far as I’m concerned, it is indefensible because it is theft.
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@JoePostingg I don’t know if you’re right, but I like the novel thinking
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@The_Sublimatory But they wouldn’t categorize it as theft, that’s a jump only NAP libertarians for the most part are willing to take.
They can be for taxation and against expropriation, for example, which they couldn’t be if both were just different kinds of stealing.
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Most deontologists recognize that taxes are good, because this is an obvious truth.
My point is that the way they justify it within their moral framework is convoluted and unconvincing.
“It’s wrong to steal except under the following conditions:
- .”
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The world is a confusing place for deontologists.
“If theft is wrong and taxes are theft then it’s bad to have a safety net that prevents millions of elderly people from starving.”
Taxes can *only* be justified on utilitarian grounds. But since they’re obviously good, deontologists have to wrap themselves into knots trying to explain why it’s actually ok in certain circumstances.
wanye@xwanyex
There’s a kind of person who is really taken in by the idea that they can prove morally that the property tax is the correct one. This is, by the way, why I think it’s OK to care about the motives of these people. They very clearly start from the position of being skeptical about property ownership and then set themselves to work trying to develop a moral framework that justifies their intuition. Like most cases in which the logic comes after the emotion, libertarians and LVT enthusiasts have not done a very good job of this. Their arguments are universally unconvincing, facile, or logically fallacious. If all they ever claimed is that property taxes were the most efficient, then there’d be nothing to argue about.
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@The_Sublimatory It seems like you’re conflating deontology writ-large with the right-libertarian NAP. Deontologists aren’t just automatically against taxation, nor should they be. They may even go as far to view paying their taxes as a duty.
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Deontologists have to explain why taxation is not theft, which is hard to do since it involves taking someone’s money against their will by threatening violence.
These attempts always look to me like they are starting from the understanding that taxes are good, then working backwards to get at a way to consider them categorically different from theft.
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@The_Sublimatory 2) The structure utilitarianism would provide is also more demanding than what we would recognize as normal taxation.
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@The_Sublimatory 1) First off, believing in rights does not make you a deontologist. Second, deontologists don’t have a problem justifying taxation, unless they happen to be ancaps or something who think all taxation is theft
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@ErrorTheorist The author has no idea where computers came from apparently
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Here’s a paper arguing that there is no progress in philosophy. The author claims that if Aristotle visited a modern university, he would be amazed by modern physics but feel at home in the philosophy classes, since the debates haven’t fundamentally changed. What do you think?
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@jimthegiant @ani_aval US labor and welfare reforms were brought about mostly by the trade unionists and progressives like Teddy Roosevelt, not socialists. To quote our most important reformer, Samuel Gompers:
“I have no use for the Socialists. They have never done anything for labor except talk.”
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I mean brother, yes, when you look at history you have to understand context of the era
before Ford’s decision you have Pullman Strike,
Homestead Strike, Lawrence Textile Strike
Ford was seeing the pressure from rising unions, strikes, and socialist movements who were forcing concessions across industry
Do you think he was just felt nice one day?
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No… capitalism didn’t slash poverty to 10%
Socialist movements within capitalism achieved:
Minimum wage
The National Health Service
Unemployment benefits
Worker safety laws
The weekend
Pensions
Free education
Paid holidays
Sick pay
Maternity leave
Trade union rights
Child labour laws
Public housing
All of which reduced poverty that socialists had to fight tooth and nail for against the capitalist classes to achieve
𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐠@CasuallyGreg
Demanding capitalism deliver a 0% poverty rate is peak stupidity. Before markets, extreme poverty was ~90% in 1820. Capitalism slashed it to under 10% today, lifting billions. No system has done better. Zero poverty is a utopian fantasy ignoring human nature & incentives.
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@mehdirhasan Just like Joe Biden and Bill Clinton did, right?
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A reminder that this is how politics - and shame - is supposed to work. A politician is accused of major scandals, crimes!, and their party disowns them and they are forced out not just from a race from but from public life.
You’re not supposed to re-elect them to the presidency.
bryan metzger@metzgov
Over the course of just 72 hours, Swalwell went from being the frontrunner to be governor of the nation's largest state to announcing his resignation to head off a potential expulsion vote.
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@mtracey Except the consenting part, you almost got it Michael!
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Even if you despise Eric Swalwell, this warp-speed defenestration is an insane precedent. Campaign implodes, mass disavowal, criminal probe, has to resign under threat of *expulsion* -- all for what seemingly boils down to some hookups/flings/flirtations with consenting adults!
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@segyges definitely a case of right-wingers not loving the econ 101 result, lol
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It's fascinating to see someone argue against land value taxes libertarian-ly. It is essentially the most libertarian tax that is still a tax at all.
When I see people crying about anti-rentseeking measures I assume they're rent-seekers.
wanye@xwanyex
People sort of act like they live in a fairytale in which there’s a group of privileged land owners and then on the other hand the peasants who have been locked out. But in our country what happens is we buy land with money. You aren’t granted the privilege to use it. You buy it with money, like everything else. And the title transfers. You can save up some money and go buy some land yourself. High housing prices, notwithstanding, very large shares of the country are still homeowners. It’s not like this is an extreme minority group.
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@MattBruenig @Sheesh_barak @TheStalwart @xwanyex A right is an entitlement, and entitlements have to be secured somehow. The state uses force at the end of the chain, but that doesn’t mean the thing itself is just “a violence voucher.” You’re collapsing the entitlement into the enforcement.
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@Sheesh_barak @TheStalwart @xwanyex Correct. One way of putting it is that you don't actually buy land. You buy a voucher that you can redeem with the state at any time to have it violently exclude others from it. This "violence voucher" is what is valuable. The land, absent a violent voucher, would trade for ~$0.
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People sort of act like they live in a fairytale in which there’s a group of privileged land owners and then on the other hand the peasants who have been locked out.
But in our country what happens is we buy land with money. You aren’t granted the privilege to use it. You buy it with money, like everything else. And the title transfers. You can save up some money and go buy some land yourself.
High housing prices, notwithstanding, very large shares of the country are still homeowners. It’s not like this is an extreme minority group.
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