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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Hey, I appreciate your response! I totally understand that people want to have their feelings confirmed in such a space, but that’s also why I am critical in it. In this sort of environment the discussion is almost as much emotion and feeling as it is the words actually used. A sort of slang can develop where we can understand what each other means without the words we use being truly accurate. The problem with that is that this environment is also an echo chamber, we put meaning onto things that we want it to mean because it also confirms our beliefs.

    This leads to situations where it’s impossible to differentiate between radical statements and reasonable statements. A good example is the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” When both extremists and normies use the saying it becomes hard to differentiate them. Another example is the Gadsden flag, on it’s own there is nothing wrong with the flag with a deep historical heritage, but when the far right started using it as a symbol any rational centrist or leftist immediately stopped using it for fear of association. Back in school I had a friend who had the flag hanging on their wall, but around 2012 they specifically stated that they had taken it down because it had been co-opted by the far right.


  • I don’t really like the use of the word colonizer in this context, it just doesn’t fit right with me. The definition technically fits, but colonization to me is more like an invasive species moving in and slowly overwhelming the native population. This is more akin to what we were seeing with settlers moving into the West Bank.

    What’s going on in Gaza is more akin to straight up scorched earth takeover and land theft. Hell, calling it an invasion and genocide feels more accurate.

    I never said I was ok with what Israel is doing, my argument was on the meaning of words. Leftists in general are really terrible about saying what they mean, because they don’t seem to know the meaning of the words they use.

    The cycle seems to go like this:

    • make a statement
    • realize the statement doesn’t mean what they wanted to say
    • double down and try to change the meaning of the words they used

  • I know I said we need to be clear in our language, but since we were talking about a “regime” from the beginning I didn’t think I had to continuously spell it out throughout the discussion. Yes, we’re talking about whatever regime is being referenced, but again the last guy said it wasn’t Israel.

    Regime Noun

    a particular government or a system or method of government:

    Your comparison between China and Israel is really terrible. If we’re being super duper clear on what a regime is, it’s the system of government. Israel is a parliamentary democracy, all citizens over the age of 18 can vote. Since the regime is democratically elected it’s kinda hard to differentiate the Israeli people from their Regime. China on the other hand is a unitary one-party state, if you’re not in the party and at the right level of the party then you don’t have any voice. It’s a lot easier to separate the people of China from their government.


  • Well that can’t be what he thinks, I listed that as an option in my original response

    Except this guy specifically said he hopes the current Israel is dismantled. At best they could be hoping that Israel changes into a better government, but I don’t think that’s their meaning.

    But he clearly said

    No where does that say dismantling Israel.

    So what entity which has colonized Palestine for 76 years, but isn’t the current Israel does he mean?

    EDIT: Words have meaning, if the words you use don’t mean what you mean, then admit that you used the wrong words and be more clear or else people must assume you mean what you say. Coming in after the OP and attributing meaning that they didn’t give doesn’t suddenly change what they said. A reminder, the original post was;

    Hopefully this is a step toward dismantling the brutal apartheid regime that has colonised Palestine for 76 years."




  • Eh, a quick Google search said that Tesla wasn’t profitable for 17 years and survived due to government subsidies and investor funding. After that they’ve been making ~$15 billion per year and sold around 1.3 million cars worldwide per year.

    In contrast Toyota sold 10.3 million vehicles and made $61 billion in profit.

    As with their 17 years of unprofitable business they are currently more proportionally profitable, but a big portion of that is Musk fanboys and limited supply. If they actually started selling more cars they probably wouldn’t be as proportionally profitable.

    Additionally, Tesla is supposedly becoming less profitable due to several factors including not making a new model in 10 years, reports that they fraudulently marketed features (being sneaky with how range is calculated so that the true range is way less than advertised), and Elon’s antics hurting sales. Elon’s antics are a big deal, some people who wanted Teslas before don’t want them anymore because they don’t want to be associated with him (like flying a Gadsden Flag in the mid 2000s vs now).

    Elon’s antics don’t stop there, he’s also hurt the investor’s opinion as well. A big reason Tesla’s stock was so high is because people were buying them and not selling them. This caused their price to stay super high, but when Elon bought Twitter he sold a ton of stock. The price was at an all time high over $400 per share, his selling cratered it to ~$115, and is currently around $165. Investors don’t like it when the owner of a company single handedly tanks their investment so the owner can make a bad investment, even more so when the writing on the wall says he’ll sell even more of the stock to fund the bad investment.











  • Yeah and I saw a recent post saying that roughly 66% of Millennials would like to buy if it were affordable for them.

    Rental experiences all come down to the details, how expensive is it, what extra costs (can you have pets) and benefits (do you have laundry in the rental or is it a shared space), is public transportation more accessible, etc.

    Back when I rented my washing machine broke and the rental company had a new one installed the same day, the bus route went right up to my building, and the Greenway trail was adjacent to the complex. They decided to increase rent by $100 so I looked at buying a house and found a condo I could afford. The condo was $300 cheaper (including the HOA fee) than the new rent, but the bus didn’t come to where my condo was, the Greenway trail was 10 min road biking away, and when the HOA decided we had to install new lights and doors I had to pay for that (luckily I was able to do the labor myself, but a lot of people couldn’t). Before I sold and moved the HOA was about to replace the roof on my building and we would have all had to pay out of pocket our portion (which equated to approximately 3.75x what I paid for the mortgage and HOA fee, so an extra 3.75 months worth of payments).

    Also, a lot of places have more or less protections for renters which can impact things.