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.

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.

Because for the majority of the world, the average American is a selfish bourgeois with a big house and two cars, who thinks oppression is when the gas price rise.

I mean I fucking live here and that’s pretty much my assessment as well to be honest. Maybe not your average american if we’re working on like, who’s right just based on home ownership statistics, but certainly, that’s not really an invalid perception.

this also, yeah, there’s plenty of people china could drop bombs on, or, opposition groups they could fund in proxy wars or civil wars, probably to their strategic advantage, and they mostly don’t do it. they’ve taken a much softer strain in terms of geopolitics, I think.

I don’t think China would drop bombs as soon as possible. I think they’ll start dropping bombs as soon as that is the best or easiest way of achieving some goal.

See, now that’s totally different, as a claim, slightly more reasonable, glad you clarified.

I also, I dunno, I think I just dispute that the disposition of the US empire would immediately lead to some sort of mass arms race, or struggle. I think at most you’d expect to see some more minor movement on china’s other political objectives, like just, taking control of taiwan, which I imagine would be a pretty much instantaneous and relatively bloodless kind of move, since they’re most of the way there already. But militaries, and military spending, isn’t infinite, it’s a direct drain on the economy in real terms, especially with modern warfare, as we’ve seen with ukraine, and especially with the threat of nukes.

We’re able to produce all that military shit because we just dump a frankly massive and insane portion of our economy (and especially our extractive economy) into it, in a kind of constant feedback loop where people in power pay themselves. People who work at lockheed martin get hired from positions as US military personnel, where the FAANG is a revolving door with the CIA, that sort of shit. All as sort of a massive sunk cost, that would be pretty hard to disentangle from while maintaining the US economy, since the US economy is so tied to the US empire. We can look at the sort of, landscape that emerged out of the slow dissolution of the new deal, and post new deal government projects, as being less a sort of desert where everything just fell into ruins, and more being a morph kind of slow and incestuous merge between government organizations and private companies, since the “necessity” of those organizations still existed.

I think there’s also definitely some extent to which we’re getting cooked by china more than we realize with this kind of stuff because our economic metrics are so fucked as to be almost certainly useless.

If you can get your objective without draining massive portions of your economy, then there’s really no reason to, and I don’t think china would have many problems taking really any soft power objective they set their eyes on. Obviously I’m not a soothsayer, so I can’t say what the landscape would form into given this hypothetical, but I don’t see a whole lot of geopolitical conflicts of interest, or uncrossable roads, so far as china is concerned in terms of their longer term economic growth or outlook.

I think there’s also something to note there about how like, I dunno. I think it’s naive to think that military conflicts purely arise out of a latent cultural xenophobia. I think it would be naive to say that plays no role, either, but I don’t think it’s as nearly shaping a factor as people make it out to be. Certainly, if your nation’s finding itself in such a position where someone so idealistic and delusional is making your higher level decisions, and especially your military decisions, as the US currently finds themselves in, you’d probably be cooked like, whatever that person’s position is. Probably there’s some sort of back and forth here also about china’s interactions with their uyghur population, perhaps, as an example of how they’ve responded to that kinda stuff, and I don’t think they have a bad track record.

Why are you proposing that human nature is fundamentally different now?

Because I don’t think it’s human nature that people just inevitably drop bombs on on another as soon as they’re given the opportunity to do so, and I think that’s an extremely oversimplified view of both human nature and history, to think that’s the case. I think, broadly, it depends on a lot of factors. Economic factors, normal economic realities, and the ability of the economic systems to self-regulate and feed information from the bottom to the top, and vice versa, as a result of their political structures. Cultural factors, like the base level of xenophobia present in a culture for other cultures, you know, to what degree that xenophobia shapes the economic realities or is shaped by the economic reality.

I think saying, oh, well, if china was the world hegemon tomorrow, they’d drop bombs as soon as they could, I don’t even really think that passes the smell test. They’d still have to deal with the EU, with Russia, with the militaries of basically every force they’d want to contend with, and with their lack of as nearly of a well-funded military industrial complex. They’ve shown a much higher tendency to approach geopolitical situations with their huge amounts of economic leverage as a result of their manufacturing base rather than just using a big stick to get everything they want.

I don’t see any reason why that would majorly change if the US were gone. If they were to pivot to military industrial capacity, there’s a certain cost-opportunity there in terms of what it would take out of their economic capacity, and it wouldn’t really be the same cost-opportunity that we have (or, mostly, used to have histrorically) in the US, since their public and private sectors are more fused than ours, so they’re not benefiting from the natural efficiency of a large government organization in terms of overall savings, when that’s basically what every corporation over there is, or, is more than over here. Why would they risk their position bombing the shit out of other nations when they could basically just not?

The belt and road initiative has already showcased their geopolitical approach. It’s still something they use a military to protect in terms of infrastructural investments, but those infrastructural investments seem to me to be more significant than those of most western occupying forces, and seem to take a different fundamental stance in terms of technology. China’s economy doesn’t revolve, to the same extent as the US, around the extraction, control, and importation of cheap, sour, heavy, crude oil, from other nations, which can then be refined into much more valuable petroleum products in terms of shipping while the US positions itself as a middle-man between this extractive base and the rest of the world’s energy market. China’s built like 50 nuclear plants since like 2014-ish, we’ve built 2 new plants since the year 2000. That’s obviously shaped by necessity, but that’s also just a vastly different approach.

China is just like any other country comprised of humans that has existed ever, and would do the same things the US is doing now if they could.

Yeah, except they’re different countries, made up of different people, with a different culture, with a pretty much fundamentally different kind of organizational structure governing them. I don’t think “well, they’d probably do it too, if the US were gone” is a super convincing argument in favor of the US dropping bombs on people.

yerp, I partially think that was necessary for this route (which probably would’ve happened agnostic to either party), since central california does a shit ton of agriculture.

do you not think, that potentially, they just go the indentured servitude route, after holding people for the “crime” of illegal immigration?

Of course, this raises the related question that if people are considering getting themselves thrown in prison for the food and housing, that says a lot about the state of social services in that country and maybe something else needs fixing more badly.

Generally that’s where I would peg that as a train of thought, yeah. I don’t think you need an incentive to keep people from going to prison. People don’t want to go to prison, generally, it’s not a good thing even in, say, Finland, or whatever other example people want to use. People sticking up a bank for one dollar to get healthcare isn’t a state of affairs that you have if you already have free healthcare. Trying to get arrested to avoid homelessness isn’t a problem if you can already avoid homelessness through normal social institutions. In fact, I’d say that avoiding homelessness through conventional means is greatly idealm considering a shit ton of homeless people interface with the law, and are arrested and processed regularly, and lots of inmates are homeless immediately upon getting out. It’s a whole system, not just in one part, which is what makes it so hard to get rid of or reform away, and perhaps even impossible.

The State should not force the prisoners to work, but it also shouldn’t be the State’s responsibility to provide janitors or cooks to look after them.

You should understand that this represents a logistical problem for the prison. Now they have to ensure that prisoners are certified and trained to handle food, no small feat, and you also have to be conscious of the idea that prisoners could pretty easily stop doing dishes, making food, eating food, as a form of hunger strike, in order to protest the very fact that they’re being made to make food, on top of the fact that they’re being extricated from society, deprived of the right to be a productive member of society, deprived of the ability to socialize with other people that aren’t criminals, deprived of free access to information, really, any freedom whatsoever.

That’s along with the argument the other commenter brought up, about prisoners just organizing themselves into a de-facto government where the most shat on prisoners will have to do everything. If you decide to come up with a constant rotation, a chore wheel, then at a certain level this just devolves into massive levels of prison corruption, where a couple bribes to a couple prisoner guards can change around some labor forms and then suddenly, again, the most shat upon prisoners are doing all the labor.

You don’t eliminate these inefficiencies at any point, either, these inefficiencies rear their heads more the more people you arrest and put into the prison, the more things you criminalize, the higher the recidivism rates. None of these issues resolve magically, they get worse.

This is effectively just the same as advocating for the status quo as it currently exists, with the only minor difference between, say, making license plates or fighting fires, being that instead, they’re just doing domestic labor which is much closer to them in proximity, and easier for you to think of as their personal responsibility to handle. That doesn’t matter so much, what matters in reality here are the numbers.

The idea is that you’re trying to recoup the costs immediately through something like a labor camp, which is what this still is. That’s sort of an option of last resort, or an option that is used, in most circumstances, as it is right now, for members of political opposition or other kinds of outright status-quo threats. You instead should make the calculation in the broad strokes, years down the line. Can these murderers, thieves, and perhaps even, gasp, loiterers, be taught to be functioning members of society? Can they give back more than they have taken from the taxpayer over the course of their life? More than just for the individuals, but can these prisoners do this on the whole?

That’s the way you should be thinking about this, not “Can we save 15 bucks here and there by not paying someone to clean up or cook for the prisoners?”. By framing it like that, you’ve bought into the argument that supports the status quo organization, here.

I would like to point out that this is just what robin hood is

basically, the US is a one party system, but it has two parties

some of us make good pets, some of us make good masters, the main problem I’m having right now is that it lacks the kind of erotic kind of framing that I tend to prefer

Use illogical, bad faith arguments to trick them into believing that the sky is blue, of course. People fall for horrible stupid dumb propaganda, it’s the nature of humanity. Only like 5% of people are really gonna bother to go actually read studies and shit, I don’t even really do that, I just look at the abstracts and then hope that the scientists didn’t fuck up and run the study wrong or engage in p-hacking or something. I couldn’t afford to go to college and take a statistics course, and my only form of education beyond that is watching 3brown1blue videos at 2x speed interspersed with useless escapist brainrot.

Everyone wants to believe that humans are some highly logical computer creatures that can just be convinced if we get hit with enough rigorous logical argumentation. We’re really not. You can make something much more convincing to someone if you validate their ego, or if you incentivize someone into believing a certain kind of truth as a result of their survival in a certain context, right. Even if we were purely logical beings, that wouldn’t even really solve the problem, because we’re all exposed to vastly different information landscapes, i.e. every MAGA guy you run into has probably be tweaking out to AM radio for 8 contiguous hours at their job, or socializing with a bunch of insularly sexist, homophobic, or racist good old boys in an echo chamber for most hours of the day, or whatever else, right. So, what hope can you have to change their minds over the course of a 1 or 2 hour conversation? If even that. And double this for everyone out there that spends their time listening to NPR, or has milder takes about things, or even just spends their time passively absorbing whatever propaganda floats at them through pop culture and escapist media consumption.

Well that’s why the point of arguing with other people isn’t really to convince them, but just to make yourself smarter and more informed by reading 200,000 pages of government legislation for fun, like it’s just another tuesday. Light work for a person like you

This is false actually. Any claim can be dismissed and evidence doesn’t matter because nobody cares. The best way to convince people of things is with cheap psychological parlor tricks

I just mean that I don’t think they were a good faith interlocutor. Probably if I were to put a specific explanation on it, I’d say that they are probably tired of having the same argument over and over again and being corrected repetitively, to the point where they’re not genuinely engaging anymore, I’ve seen that a lot. Especially with how quickly they backed out but also still left a comment. I dunno if that level of bad faith would be considered trolling in the strictest sense, but I would probably still classify it as such.

I mean arguably we could’ve done all of that with nasa if nasa had received a similar level of funding to SpaceX, but that’s kind of getting into alt-history.

Depends on the writer. You get a superman DC writer, homelander probably gets treated like every other fascist superman beats up. If it’s a “the boys” writer, homelander probably uses kryptonite to rip superman in half in a graphic full-page spread or some shit. You’re also gonna be dealing with, are we dropping superman into the relatively hopeless universe of the boys, are we dropping homelander into the DC universe, where he’ll probably be right st home with like 30 different characters almost exactly like him, will we come up with some portal stuff, what’s going on there

So I dunno, depends on the writer. Ke personally I’d prefer if superman won, cause it’s more hopeful and less garth ennis-y.