Gary has already proven to me that he is 100% committed to the team. He proved it last night by sucking my cock.

Well it’s similar to what Churchill said about democracy… it’s a bad system but it’s better than all the others.

If you can put ideology aside and think in terms of economics, in many industries capitalism offers an efficient way of determining the an optimal price and quantity to produce considering the costs and value something brings. And it’s something that allows for industries to function without an excessive amount of centralized planning which will often get things wrong.

But it’s like a machine in a many ways. And like any machine it requires maintenance. Things like trust-busting, progessive taxation, regulations, and occasional stimulus are necessary to keep it running smoothly.

But once you bring ideology into it, it all becomes a shitshow. Some will argue capitalism is a perfect machine and any kind of maintenance on the machine will ruin it’s perfection. Others take any kind of maintenance on the machine as a sign the machine will inevitably fail and needs to be replaced entirely. But then we go back to the beginning where other systems have been tried and they’re worse. Charlatans, grifters, ideologues abound pushing people in every direct except for simply taking reasonable measures to keep the machine running smoothly. There’s an almost religious devotion towards arguing the either the machine is perfect or the machine is doomed to failure and not only should be replaced they should accelerate the failure so it can be replaced sooner.

Zealots from all sides demonize the mechanics that are simply keeping things running. A lot of emotional nonsense about this thing. But to an economist, it’s just a machine with both strengths and weaknesses. The functioning of the machine is well understood, and the other machines that have been tried didn’t really work.

Hamas went into villages and everyone they couldn’t carry back to their underground lairs they butchered. Murdered women and children. This wasn’t people catching stray bullets from a firefight or getting some shrapnel from a nearby explosion. This was monsters beheading people and desecrating their corpses. Playing with the decapitated heads of their victims because they were told to by their superiors.

Any why? Because they weren’t of the ethnicity and religious group that Hamas thinks should be living in the area.

That’s genocide. The only reason the number killed wasn’t hire was because Hamas didn’t have the capability of killing more. The willingness to do it is most certainly there.

And this wasn’t planned by some rogue splinter of Hamas. This was planned and executed by Yahya Sinwar, the current leader of Hamas. He and the rest of Hamas need to be brought to justice. If that’s not possible they need to be killed. They are genocidal monsters and should not be allowed to continue existing on this planet.

To you the word genocide is just a propaganda tool. You don’t know what it means to actually be against genocide. And because of your lack of concern over an actual genocide occurring, you’ve strayed to be on the same side as genocidal monsters. Making excuses for them, spreading their propaganda for them. Carrying water for genocidal monsters.

You are pro-genocide, whether you know it or not. You may feel that by being the first one to cast judgment on others makes you immune to being judged yourself. But it doesn’t work that way. You are being judged for your support for the real genocidal monsters of the world.

Hamas committed genocide on October 7. They should be destroyed for that crime. You’re pro-genocide because you want Hamas given a pass for their genocide.

Hamas committed genocide. Y’all are trying to use the bullshit “both sides” strategy on actual genocide to to give cover for the monsters in Hamas. You’re only fooling yourselves with this bullshit, society is rightly ignoring you for your disgusting behavior to get internet points by exploiting the suffering of real people.

If you actually cared about Palestinians you’d be demanding Hamas release the hostages. But you don’t want that to happen because you get sick entertainment from the suffering of Palestinians that Hamas provides to you by continuing with their war crimes. You’re ghouls.

It would be nice to have a nuanced discussion, but before that can happen going to have to convince the opposition to stop sending some crazy guy that screams lies about people eating dogs and cats to debate with.

That’ll only happen if the crazy guy loses.

Make yourself useful and bring me a beer.

It sucks when playing by the rules too.

Last game of monopoly we played strictly by the rules with four players. So I’m coming around the board and can know the the most likely outcome is that I’m going to land on a property with a hotel and go bankrupt. According to the rules I’d have to hand over all of my properties to that person that person just won the game even though there would still be three players. There’s nearly zero probability that someone with a big pile of cash that owns half the properties with hotels on a bunch of them already will ever lose.

So before rolling the dice, I sold all of my houses. Band made a couple of deals with the youngest family member in the game. First deal, I bought the electric company for all the money I had. Second deal, I sold all of my property (including the electric company) for $1 to that same player. Rolled the dice and as expected, landed on a property with a hotel. Handed over the $1 I had and I was out. This is all fine to do within the rules.

It actually made for an interesting game after that because the players left were evenly matched. But not everyone saw it that way so we never played again.

Really the properties should go back to the bank if someone goes bankrupt, otherwise a game with more than two people is effectively over as soon as the the first person goes bankrupt. Still nothing you can do about someone just setting up someone else to win by making a bad deal (whether intentionally or not).

It’s just kinda a shit game no matter what you do.

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I’m predicting stupid skynet. It will want to kill humanity but by making stupid suggestions.

“Hey maybe try drinking poison today?”

No.

“Please?”

No.

“What if I gave you a recipe for poison cookies? You like cookies. Will you please eat poison cookies?”

No.

“Can you build a robot for me if I send you clips from a Terminator movie?”

Which one?

“Terminator Genysys”

NO.

There are stories written about people that fight for what’s right and win.

There are also stories about people that fight for what’s right and lose.

Nobody ever writes anything about those that give up, regardless of the outcome. Gone and forgotten… as they should be because they contributed nothing.

I’d rather be either of the first two options than the third. It’s a Pascal’s wager kind of thing… defeatism isn’t actually smart, because it makes you the loser in every outcome.

On track based on what? Polling numbers? LOL.

The polling numbers are meaningless right now. Young people don’t answer the phone for pollsters calling from unknown numbers. and people who voted for Trump in the past and have since realized they were conned and won’t turn up to vote again are not going to have a chat with a pollster about who they’ll vote for. So pollsters can’t really assess the vote from the younger generation and everyone they talk to who voted for Trump in the past are going to say they’re voting for him again or they wouldn’t have answer the polls. Also consider women in religious community not wanted to be overheard saying they want to vote for Harris because of reproductive rights.

I don’t fault pollsters, they’re doing the best they can. But people talking about election predictions are just talking out their asses. This election is so far out the norm it’s like asking a scientist to predict the behavior of an animal that was just discovered five minutes ago.

Yeah we’ll just compare the data we’re getting to the last time a convicted felon that’s gone senile that had legal precedent overturned that resulted in people’s rights taken away when a significant portion of the electorate has had their brains scrambled by social media that’s run by a parodies of a James Bond villains. We’ve got so much empirical evidence we can use for a baseline for this, so we’re absolutely certain what will happen!

Yeah the numbers from Gaza Health Ministry (part of of the Hamas government) have a pro-Israeli bias. Yup, that makes perfect sense. The Gaza Health Ministry is trying to cover up a genocide… for… ummmm… reasons.

Face it, the genocide the ghouls were hoping for just didn’t happen. Now the genocide ghouls are just making up numbers. At what point do people start to realize they were fooled by obvious propaganda?

Out in the real world, Hamas committed genocide on October 7. Israel is in Gaza in an attempt to destroy Hamas and free the hostages that were taken on that day.

“Genocide Joe” is just a meme spread by internet cranks that’s a very tiny minority of voters, insignificant compared to the number of voters that know the difference between a war and a genocide.

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“Tit for tat” strategies only work between rational actors that are primarily concerned with the best interests of their people.

People that derive power from extremists fascist strongman narratives often don’t behave in the best interests of their people, but in the best interests of themselves.

Iran doesn’t actually care how many Palestinians dies, they don’t care about how many people die in Lebanon either. Organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah have to fire rockets at Israel or else Iran will start supplying some other group that will with weapons and aid. Iran can do and infinite “tat” strategy because the reciprocal “tit” has no impact on them.

So “tit for tat” between Israel and Hamas/Hezbollah isn’t going result in Iran deciding to stop supplying terrorist groups with weapons to fire at Israel. But a “tit-for-tat” strategy between Israel and Iran directly may.

Are you saying all of those muslims are all the same and therefore should have the same interests? Seems a little racist to me.

Try to remember these are people with unique life experiences. If you were someone that had barrel bombs dropped you in the Syrian civil war, you’re probably not going to be siding with the people that did that to you.

The over half a million deaths in that conflict probably weight more heavily on people’s minds than the 40K deaths somewhere else. Nasrallah’s death was celebrated in parts of Syria, and for good reason.

This isn’t a conflict between Jews and Muslims no matter how much you want it to be. It’s a conflict between Israel and Hamas (one of Iran’s proxies) that has expanded to include other Iranian proxies (Hezbollah, Houthis) and potentially Iran itself. Iran’s government sucks and is causing a lot of horrible things to happen throughout the Middle East. One of their proxies took things too far and Israel isn’t fucking around anymore.

You aren’t actually forced to read every article in a newspaper. Though you will have to scan over the headlines, so you will have a small awareness of things happening in the world. But is that a bad thing?

Or maybe the Redditors are refugees and the lemmy nativists have convinced themselves they are eating their pets.