“Jeff, the Blackbird doesn’t go to the moon.”

“Moon’s haunted”

Because that’s a conservative response to the problem. I’m not about to further normalize their death cult any more than they already have. They also have human dignity, they’ve just forfeited their right to remain free among the general population.

Also, executions cost more than life imprisonment. This is known. Your argument is just as spurious as when the fash makes it.

Pay off a bunch of debt. Invest the rest.

It’s a boring answer, but it’s true. I’ve had a stable financial situation rug-pulled from under me three or four times already in my adult life. I’m sick of it.

I don’t even want to be financially stable for my own sake. I want to be able to tell my kids yes when they ask to eat at McDonald’s more than once a week. I want to be able to help everyone I know who needs it. I want to be able to pay for my wife to fly back home to her grandma’s funeral without worrying about if I need to sell a car to pay for it.

I assume it’s got a pretty small capacity. Bigger capacity washers and dryers take about the same amount of time to wash four times as many clothes, but they take the same amount of time to dry as three or four loads–you just get them all during the same cycle, without having to move anything over.

A washer that takes that long would be kind of insane, but a drying time in the 4+ hour range isn’t that wild, in my experience.

Fair point. Though it’s also betting that the better parts of our society can outlive all of that, so I think my point still stands.

That kind of species-level nihilism (annihilism? Suicidalism?) is always scary to me. I don’t like thinking about it, so I didn’t consider it.

A whole lot of people die in a total collapse, and there’s no guarantee that what comes after would be better (in fact, odds are it’d be significantly worse). Accelerationism is betting that you can outlive mass famine, street gangs, and water insecurity long enough to get to the military juntas and opportunistic invading forces. All while the biggest stockpile of weapons and military hardware in history is just sitting around for anyone to walk off with, and any country that might be inclined to help altruistically is also collapsing because the world’s largest economic driver just went belly-up, or being attacked by the opportunists who got in and stole the keys to the nukes early.

Total collapse is a worst case scenario; not just for Americans, but for the world as a whole, and for multiple generations.

Always vote for not-collapse if you’re given a choice.

You’re saying “we shouldn’t do it because the government would ruin it.” I’m saying “the government shouldn’t ruin it.” To which you responded, “yeah but what if they do tho?”

I know all of that, and I’m not saying that this is the easy way out. But UBI is a much more effective and stress-tested way to introduce an effective social safety net to a capitalist society when done right. So I think we should do it right.

“common sense” how? I don’t even know what you’re talking about. How did communism do anything to help the people in the countries I mentioned? How did it do anything to help me, who lived in a deteriorating capitalist country?

What in the world do you have in your mind, because you’re not even making an assertion here. Does it make you feel smart in some twisted, idiotic way? “Ooh, I’m so smart, you’re so dumb, you have no idea what random nonsense is in my brain because I won’t share! Ha ha!”

It’s not a flex.

True UBI should replace those other services, because it should be a basic income that allows people to survive without a job. You shouldn’t need additional health care because we should have medicare for all. You shouldn’t need low income housing because your UBI should be enough to pay for a modest home. You shouldn’t need food stamps because UBI should cover it.

The fact that it’s always framed as “$600 bribe!!!” is infuriating and absolutely wrong, because that’s far from “basic.” “Basic” would mean enough to live on, without requirement.

I didn’t call it that. It was a peaceful transfer of power driven by civil disobedience, protest, and voting, and a dictator was deposed. No one was killed, and the dictator in question was brought up on charges of human rights abuses (though he died before the proceedings could be completed).

Does your definition of a revolution require a French Revolution-style Reign of Terror? Because that is bleak.

The other stuff you mentioned are insignificant. No one have heard of them.

Well, let me educate you then!

The 1974 Carnation Revolution took down the fascist Marcello Caetano, the second dictator of Portugal. It was a fascist authoritarian state which had existed for 41 years, and its end was almost entirely bloodless; six people lay dead afterward, four killed by the fascist government, and the other two killed accidentally by the “revolutionaries.” The dictator and most of his enablers were exiled. It was the first in a wave of democratic “revolutions” that would see more than twenty fascist regimes defeated in Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Pacific Rim in Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa before the end of the 2000s.

And the February Revolution in 1986 was the end of Ferdinand Marcos’ brutal 20-year reign as dictator of the Philippines. He had been responsible for multiple massacres and human rights abuses during his time in power. But two million Filipinos protested between February 22-25 of 1986, a substantial percentage of the entire country’s population. The government killed between 13-18 members of the opposition; the opposition killed 2. In the end, the protests forced the government to respect the results of the election that they had tried to rig, and Marcos fled to Hawaii.

These were two nonviolent shifts in rule, in two prominent countries on the world stage, affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people (many of whom are still alive today!). And the fact that you’d call this “insignificant” just because huge swaths of people weren’t guillotined is not only insanely ignorant, but also super bleak and potentially kinda racist.

Edit: forgot to respond to this:

Communism was the reason life actually felt good till 90s. No matter how much you cope that will remain truth.

Well, given you’ve provided no evidence for this claim at all and it makes absolutely no sense on the face of it, what choice do I have but to agree?

Nah. The Carnation Revolution in Portugal had nothing to do with communism. Neither did the February Revolution in the Philippines. And Die Wende of East Germany happened after the most prominent communist state in history had just fallen.

To be clear, I’m not saying that voting by itself is ever enough; in the examples above, civil disobedience and protest accompanied participation in elections. But to say that we have to jump straight to a Red Terror or install a Mao to have any hope at all is not borne out by history.

I ain’t got nothing but love, babe.

4-day workweek and UBI, please.

Incorrect. Voting has worked in several cases in the 20th century alone. The problem is, that voting has to be followed by imprisonment of the fascists and all of their supporters, and it seems like nobody is willing to do that.

(In fairness to Brazil, they at least got this half right)

Well, true. But it sounds like the library didn’t own the book either, all things considered.

Exhibit A for “If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.”

I feel like, back in the day, they used to say “in theaters September 9th,” which basically meant “[this movie will be] in theaters [starting on] September 9th.” But then with the rise of streaming they wanted to make clear that the movie would not be released on streaming initially, so they awkwardly tagged an “only” to the beginning of the statement. You’re right that the “only” was meant to modify “in theaters,” and not the date, but I don’t remember that construction independently before streaming.

Re-watch it if you don’t believe me.

Why on earth would I not believe you? Nobody legitimately makes the distinction unless it’s ambiguous, and to Trump’s tapioca pudding brain, it’s far from ambiguous because the US dollar is the only dollar that exists.

This is a weird attempt at a gotcha, when the reality is that he has no intention of fulfilling this promise and no intention of justifying his failure to do so. If the GOP retains control of the legislative branch, the checks will never be mentioned again.