Not exactly John Wick, is he.

Trump safe

That’s unfortunate.

I’m gonna buy a bottle of nice champagne for the day when Trump finally kicks it.

Racism is so stupid. I’m not even talking about the immorality of it, but just the fact that it’s complete bunk. Race isn’t a thing. Ethnicity is a thing, and we often use the two words interchangeably, but they’re not the same. Race is a pseudoscientific concept that has no basis in reality. You could argue that there is an ethnic group in the US called ‘White’ or an ethnic group called ‘Black,’ but the idea that all people who have a similarly low level of melanin in their skin are a single race, or that all people who have a relatively high level of melanin in their skin are a single race, is straight up nonsense.

Late stage capitalism runs on addiction.

Complete with fold down basketball hoops.

Is that crab a fire starta?

“If you’re an American, you don’t want to see your president having a feud with the pope,” said Taylor Marshall, an outspoken Catholic conservative with a considerable YouTube following. “And if you’re Catholic, it’s kind of hard. If you voted for Trump three times and you want to be a Catholic and you want to be faithful and submit to the Holy Father, the bishop of Rome, the pope, the vicar of Christ, it’s kind of a tough situation to see the leader of your nation feuding with the leader on Earth of the Catholic church. It is for me.”

These people need to be isolated and studied, because what the fuck.

I don’t really get what libertarian socialists and libertarian anarchists are.

I’m not sure I understand it myself. There’s a lot about libertarianism, both left and right that I don’t fully understand or agree with.

Ok, look, I’m really not interested in getting into these weeds. My point was just that human rights, whether one believes they are divinely given or inherent to some part of our being, are, for all practical purposes, useless without some means of enforcement. Do you dispute that?

Philosophy can be tested

Like, through repeatable experimentation and observation and study of natural phenomena?

It’s not supernatural, it’s philosophical.

What’s the difference?

And it’s the foundation for most, if not all, liberal democracies.

I’m aware. That doesn’t mean it’s above reproach or critical examination/reexamination.

I don’t see any material difference between divine rights and “natural” rights. Both seem to be supernatural or metaphysical, to me, so I don’t think it matters if you believe that these rights come from a god or something else. Either way they are meaningless without some means of enforcement.

You can certainly say that you have rights and that those rights emanate from some inherent part of your human being, but without a means of enforcement, it’s immaterial.

“[Progressivism] holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government,” he said.

Because it’s unequivocally true. Even if you believe your rights originate from God, unless or until God comes down and forms a state capable of enforcing those rights, they’re meaningless.

“It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.”

What a stupid thing to say. He’s the one advocating for subservience, that is subservience to the supposed God who is supposedly the originator of our supposed rights.

That being said, I agree that we should not be subservient to the government. The government should be subservient to we, the people.

I think many of them are left libertarians, like libertarian socialists and anarchists. It seems to me that libertarianism, whether left or right, is just liberalism taken to its logical extreme. Libertarians do seem to be focused primarily on individual rights, liberties and freedoms. I think that focus on individual freedom can impede their ability to really organize with a lot of other working class people, because it seems to me that often working class people tend to be more “conservative,” as in they have a less, let’s say, permissive attitude about individual expression.

So, what, if we’re all going to be assholes, some of us should at least be rich? Ok, well, chances are it ain’t gonna be you or me who are the rich assholes, so what’s the point? For everyone to be miserable, but a few people get to be rich and miserable?

No.

You’re better off. Rich kids grow up to be assholes.

Edit:

Everybody thinks becoming rich will solve all of their problems. But even if it does solve some of your problems, it’ll just create new ones. Money is not a panacea that fixes everything. I mean, you look at the richest people and they’re not just assholes, their fucking psychopaths. That’s what you want? You wanna be a fucking psychopath? Oh, but, I know, it won’t be you. You won’t fall into the same trap as them. You’ll be one of the good ones. Money won’t corrupt you like it has them. Bullshit.

And what about everyone else? Not everyone can get rich. There are only so many resources on the planet and the more you have the less everyone else can have. It’s a zero sum arrangement. But, who cares about them, I got mine. Right? Congratulations, you’re well on your way to being a rich psychopath.

A monument to stupidity.

“It’s breaking me. And there’s nothing that can be done for it, unless the president does something,”

This is a huge part of our problems right now. A lot of people look to the president to fix everything. The president is powerful, but they’re not that powerful. And thank god for that. If the entire US relied on just one person to fix everything, that would be absolutely terrible, and that’s even if that person were super smart and ethical, which of course our current president is not.

The people we should be looking to, at the Federal level, are Congress. But of course we all know how ineffectual they are. Feels like they might as well not even exist, sometimes. Though, there are some real structural reasons for their ineffectiveness: the incredible influence is moneyed interests in our politics, for instance, and the fact that a representative in the House represents over 700,000 people! For comparison, each member of the Canadian parliament represents about 120,000. Even that’s high compared to a lot of European democracies. Each seat in Norway’s parliament represents about 33,000 people.

But, the people of West Virginia have another representative body they can look to: their state legislature. Each seat in West Virginia’s House of Delegates represents about 17,000 people. You don’t have much of a voice at the Federal level, but you have much, much more of a voice at the state level. The people who can best help West Virginia are West Virginians.