• 6 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m not having trouble. You have yet to make any case whatsoever.

    Your “explanation” is nothing but a string of pejoratives. Here’s how you describe someone offering the use of an object they own, for a price:

    the license to withhold or take away housing from people.

    They capture it and extort people for temporary permission to live in it.

    In other words they offer the use of something for a price. Oh but they’re not offering it! They’re holding a license to take it away! LOL

    A landlord owns a home, an object of great value, and they choose not to use it or sell it, but to sell the use of it. A tenant needs a home but has neither the resources to build or buy one. There is an exchange of value between these parties. That’s renting.

    You do nothing to argue that this is parasitic except to slather it with pejoratives. Your list of anecdotal bad experiences people have had with landlords is utterly immaterial to the discussion of whether landlording is definitionally unethical.

    I believe you exposed the core of your beliefs here:

    The rental income that a landlord collects is not a wage based on any labor that they do.

    First of all, how is that true? I purchased my home with money I earned from my labor. Am I not permitted to now own it? And am I not permitted to offer the use of the thing I own? Why? And while we’re at it, who says that all renters pay rent from labor wages? Some of them may pay with dividends from their investments.

    To the core, though, the argument seems to be that labor is the only value that exists. Which is bad news for anyone past working age, I guess.

    You need to establish some foundations like you think property ownership itself is unethical and labor is the only value before your case even begins to appear on stage.

    Instead of this, you’re claiming that your string of pejoratives is an argument which I simply fail to understand. Which is, again, just a pejorative characterization. You’ve offered nothing but here.








  • Not exactly. In theory corporations need workers so they should benefit from a healthy public.

    In reality, they don’t need everybody healthy - just enough to meet their needs. And their needs for workers are met. They’ve been exporting and automating jobs for decades. So even with the system leaving lots of folks behind, enough are left over to occupy the jobs that are needed. If anything, we have more healthy people than corporations need - what is lacking are skills.

    And so in a very American sense of “business first,” the current system is operating just fine. People and their health have no intrinsic value here.




  • I guess people are saying that they believe there is such a thing as an ethical murder in the streets. Of course in any form of ethics vacuum chamber this can’t stand. But in the real world where children are bombed for the sake of some asshole’s religion, where the president boasts he could get away with murder in the street and courts confirm this, in a world where sick people are left to suffer to boost a share price, then, THEN an act like this becomes a reasonable response to an unreasonable world.

    Maybe someone better educated can tell me what ethics scholars have to say about how an ethical actor should behave in a system where ethics have utterly broken down. Right now, the crowd is saying “like that guy.”

    I’m ill-disposed to wag my finger at them, and think the only ethical course is to address the corrupt environment in which this act occurred, because that environment undermines any one-dimensional ethical evaluation of this murder in the street, and that makes me deeply uncomfortable.



  • This video gives a great visual explanation of why third parties in US politics can only be spoilers. They cannot build anything.

    https://youtu.be/qf7ws2DF-zk?si=WRctK96W6GrJJO2S

    America already has “real left” parties like the Peace & Freedom party and the Green party. Starting yet another tiny party to occupy the left will add nothing. And trying to grow any of these third parties can only do one thing: take votes from Democrats, thereby helping Republicans.

    It’s easy to say “US doesn’t have a real left party” but most people who care about that would rather not hurt Democrats and help Republicans, because Democrats are at least closer to the left out of the two major parties, even if neither is as far left as we would like.

    The only option is to join the Democratic party and attempt to shift it left. This is exactly what America’s most prominent 3 leftists have done: AOC, Dennis Kucinich, and Bernie Sanders. They know that 3rd parties are a death wish. This is an objective fact. Everyone who cares about the left needs to grow up, accept this, and move on. Just like Bernie has. You don’t see him calling for a 3rd party. And he’s clearly a “real leftist” by any measure.