The question they replied to was where the pro 2A people were. The point of 2A is that the armed populace meets or exceeds the armed tyrants. One person with a gun can’t stop hundreds of cops with battle gear, that’s the point of everyone having a right to be armed.

I would hazard a guess that in this context their answer is probably yes, they expect to need to protest with other pro gun (armed) protesters if they were going to be armed.

Ask the Black Panthers how well only one or two people being armed in a protest worked against the cops, compared to everyone being armed. There is a reason Reagan started gun control, and it wasn’t because his supporters were the ones that were armed.

Certainly, it is perfectly valid to just want ideal outcomes for all individuals regardless of the system. You are also not required in any way to discuss your viewpoints with anyone. I will thank you for your time up to this point, and wish you a wonderful day.

That makes the conservative talking point of anchor babies a real thing. Make your way onto US soil to give birth by any means necessary, and suddenly you are granted a pathway to citizenship and a guaranteed legal status from day one?

That kind of massive shortcut of the immigration system would break the system. Birth tourism would skyrocket along with all other forms of illegal immigration. There is a reason no country on earth allows that.

Do you not think that doing so would be a huge incentive driving illegal border crossings or visa overstays to take such a shortcut? Do you think that creating a parallel alternative immigration pathway such as that is a good thing?

I certainly disagree with how the trump administration is operating, and fuck anyone who says non-citizens don’t have a right to a day in court, but how can carving out loopholes and shortcuts be good for the long term health of the system? Unless crippling the system to the point of implosion to cause a reform is the goal, but I find that to be too close to the conservatives crippling other public sector programs to cause private sector reform to profit off it.

This is a bit of a catch 22, the child wasn’t deported her parents were. I don’t even doubt that ICE was lazy and didn’t make sure the mother knew what was happening and every option available to their child. This is a shit show how Trump is handling mass deportation instead of expanding the immigration courts to process the backlogs and get everyone their constitutionally protected day in court. ICE has been done a disservice by Trump and deserves a lot of the shit the department is getting.

The child is a US citizen, 100%, but that doesn’t offer protection from prosecution to their parents. A 2 year old who’s US citizen parent or parents commit a crime will have their parent/parents taken away when put in jail, and then be given into the custody of a relative or taken into foster care. This is not unique to immigration.

Would you rather the child have been unilaterally taken from their mother and placed into US foster care when no family was identified that could take them in the US? Then we are separating children from their families, which is fucked up.

There historically have been limited stays of deportation available for illegal immigrant parents of US citizen children, but this administration is obviously being extremely tough on those. If you want to give automatic deportation immunity to anyone who has a child on US soil until those children are legally adults, you turn “anchor babies” from being basically a myth into an actual reality.

There is no perfect solution for any of this.

I hate shopping at Lowe’s now because they physically removed the regular checkouts and only have a square of self checkouts. They did this so one “cashier” can watch over everything, saving labor on multiple cashiers. They also paired down every other department so it’s just as hard (or possibly harder) to get assistance in a department as at Home Depot. Feels like I’m watch the death spiral in full swing.

Less shoppers means less staff. Less staff means service suffers. Poor service means less shoppers. Rinse and repeat. This is happening at almost every brick and mortar retail business though, not just Lowe’s. It’s like the entire economy has turned into Circuit City trying to keep the lights on.

I totally misread ‘good viable’ as good vibes, and immediately agreed despite having no substantive idea what that would be. Fleet of Magic School buses driven by assorted Ms. Frizzle’s? Cheech and Chong’s Uber service? Limo service where you get to answer suggestive Family Feud surveys with Steve Harvey? I don’t know, but I’m totally down for good vibes alternatives to driving.

This is why I have stopped buying anything Blizzard. They removed the Warcraft 3 I payed for and replaced it with a completely unplayable something I didn’t want. Ubisoft has been on my shit list for a while for unrelated reasons too, but now they are on my never again list. And I never even played The Crew. Bad business is bad business even if it doesn’t directly impact me.

That’s close, but it really belongs painted on the side of a '70s panel van instead of a wizard with a unicorn, with shag carpet, a crushed velvet bed with the frame made of ammo boxes, and bead curtains made of bullets, and living in that van is a slightly more stoned Nicholas Cage from Lord of War who smells like pachouli and expended gun powder.

And the apples are pine-apple fragmentation grenades. Just like grandma used to make

Absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. I guess it depends on the country. Here, a lot of students pirate their books anyway. Personally, I didn’t buy a single book during my bachelors/masters.

I am glad this practice apparently isn’t universal. Basically the idea is that because pirating books is possible and they don’t get paid again for used books, the publishers have created DRM through the use of web portals that are required to turn in assignments and in some cases even tests. Access to these is provided with a new copy of their books in the school book store, or for the same/more price as the book sold separately. Without the portal, you cannot pass the class because they lobbied the school to make it illegal for teachers to accept your work any other way. The school gets a kickback from the publisher and they both make tons of money

Good point out, and I should have said not unique to either conservatism or hard leftism there. The “extremities” of the spectrum really highlight it obviously, but I think almost everyone is guilty of and/or capable of the same rationalizing over anything that forms a part of core identity, consciously or not. The stakes are just higher when it comes to politics than something like an odd food preference, and thus get stronger reactions both from external observers and the person holding that viewpoint. I try to apply a “never attribute to malice that which can be explained by something else (I know incompetence usually goes here but in this context comes off maliciously)” for most people. Everyone is the hero of their own story, yada yada.

I fall into the same trap advocating for left leaning libertarianism never being implemented with the correct mix of government guardrails (both from and against the government), and it will be funny when we all surprised Pikachu face when it turns out 500 years from now it was the Anarcho-syndicalists who were right all along ala South Park Mormonism.

Also I haven’t heard the Professional Left Podcast before but I’m definitely going to check it out, thank you for mentioning it.

I very much appreciate your input and point of view, it is very enlightening. I will fully admit that academia is notoriously cutthroat for funding and I was definitely not trying to say it even comes close to anything like a UBI, just that the publishing portion is a necessary secondary to the primary job of research. Publishing helps secure grants and funding, and is very important, just not the end-all be-all like a literary author. Holding IP/patents is also still a huge draw/money maker for those at the “top” of academia, and there are plenty who advocate for the current IP-based model because it is their primary form of income. I am not saying this is right or wrong, just that academia is not as altruistic as a whole as you appear to be making it out to be

I am also not sure how you can look at the deals publishers and journals make with colleges to ecosystem lock students with things like portal codes you can only get by buying the textbook/resources new from the school and think that the loss of IP protection would do anything to the publishers besides remove the cost they pay the authors. It’s already a scam/racket, and that won’t change without legislation making that illegal.

I also believe that scientific discovery from research universities and any institution getting Federal or State funding should be public domain anyway, both because we the people are paying for it (all or in part), and there is a vested interest in furthering mankind through scientific knowledge and achievement. This is different than entertainment, and even philosophy to a degree.

I think we need to do away with our current system of social support/welfare systems and implement a UBI to offset automation and the changing economy anyway so 100% on board there, and grants for the arts would be great. Crowdsourcing would also be great, and universal healthcare would allow crowd funding to pivot from medical bankruptcy prevention to the intended use of financing creators. I just don’t see IP abolition working without major steps into post-scarcity first.

I think I found the disconnect between your argument and the other person’s. You are not paid as an author, you are paid as an academic or researcher who also writes. Your creation is contractual, like the Disney artist animating the movie and not the author of the fairytale Disney got the idea from.

An author who’s income solely comes from their writing having their work stolen by a company like the academic publishing companies do right now would starve in those conditions, and thus have to find other work instead of writing. A UBI or equivalent is required to support an IP-less state.

The scientific journal industry currently acts as if they exist in an IP free world, and take all the profit from other people’s work. They then enforce IP on others to monopolize that profit, but in a IP-less world they would still act the same and use their size to capture the lion’s share of the market.

Left when 3rd party apps were killed, stayed because I believe in the concept of the fediverse.

Still have my Reddit accounts, but just hardly use them. There is still a much larger active user base there for a bunch of stuff so I haven’t gone scorched earth yet, but Lemmy is my social media home now.

This is a holdover from Reagan, and the boom times through the 80s and into the 90s. Deregulation works… until everything implodes/explodes. Revenue was up alongside the tax cuts because of the huge gains across the board, it just wasn’t sustainable.

The economy is like an engine, you can squeeze massive horsepower out of it for a few races or regulate it to run for millions miles. There is a happy spot that produces the highest output with acceptable longevity, but since Reagan the Republican strategy has been to crank it to the max.

The Democrats also continued the deregulation and government has abdicated it’s duty to enforce anti-trust laws, protect the commons, and ensure level playing fields. Add to that the lag time between government action and results, and you have the “Republicans do economy good”.

We have been a runaway diesel for decades, and the engine is close to detonation.

True, but sadly not unique to conservatism. It’s a human condition, lots of psychology involved with self-identity and worldview. See “communism just hasn’t been actually implemented properly yet, and the Soviet Union and China were/are actually capitalists pretending to be socialists/communists” for examples on the “opposing” spectrum.

If this doesn’t belong here, nothing does.

This very much annoys me. I am a left leaning libertarian (so probably considered Center Right), and this is stupid. Waste of money and labor. I am not really for the EV mandates because I respect a free market. But oil is heavily subsidized and thus not a free market, so charging infrastructure should get the same benefit to allow consumers to decide what works best for them. If low energy prices are a priority as their lip service indicates, then all forms should be treated equally. Government doesn’t get decide winners and losers. Lobbying is corruption.

I love my plug in hybrid. I would love to be able to charge at work. I also love gas and diesel, but I want to see where hydrogen and other cleaner combustion options can go for environmental reasons. Level playing fields is the main reason for Governments to exist.

The Juke is the perfect amount of hideous that it flips the bit back to being great. Even the Cube is the right kind of quirky.

Good, I was worried for a minute there. You don’t even have to like or even tolerate country music, Dolly is a national treasure and a lodestone of the soul of America. With the Right being historically the home of country and wholesome hospitality, it’s triply as bad.

The litmus test has failed, and apparently we need a new Committee on Un-American Activities investigating the powers that be. Who would have thought the parts would be so dramatically reversed this time around.

We lost Betty White, we cannot let the nation turn from Dolly and complete its fall to the dark side.