The fact that the council won’t likely be swayed by her alone isn’t her problem. Her wit and the virality can bring other pressure beyond her own delivery.
And the pacing is likely attributable to the fact that public commentary is limited to a time constraint in these meetings. She had a lot to say and not a lot of time to say it in.
Yeah, but that doesn’t apply here since he was drinking Miller Lite, not beer.
Thatcher was being disingenuous because socialism involves “our money,” in which everyone works together for mutual benefit. Capitalism can’t function without other people’s labor being exploited and under-compensated. I want my taxes to help pay for a portion of things I couldn’t afford by myself and for it to benefit others because then I’m not being price gouged by others who are only demanding more because more is being demanded of them by the greediest among us.
Apparently even actual war crimes aren’t war crimes if you just call it a military operation. We’ve always never been at war with the genetic cilantro soapers.
When asked about the concerns by KOIN reporters, PBOT spokesperson Dylan Rivera acknowledged the shortage of parking in the Goose Hollow area. “That’s why we need to get more people biking and walking, as much as possible. And that’s what a project like this is part of,” he said.
The problem with this approach is the assumption that everyone can just switch to biking and walking. The city makes decisions that functionally encourage alternative transportation by making driving more difficult. It’s like a vice tax except with physical frustrations rather than added financial costs. But some people have to drive for work. And some people can’t walk or bike long distances. And as the article points out, some people are caring for elderly relatives who can’t walk or bike. And some buildings aren’t close enough to grocery stores and shopping centers. And some people who walk or bike will still also drive cars that will need parking. And not everyone has the extra hours in the day to take longer to get everywhere.
It’s fair to say that not all theocratic systems are fascist, but they’re also not mutually exclusive. A particular theocratic system can also be fascist in nature.
Some common points:
It wasn’t just “don’t bow to a king” but also “taxes are a legitimate method of funding the public welfare,” which directly contradicts the right wing libertarian ethos. It was also saying that more permanent safety was an achievable goal without having to give up freedom. He wasn’t saying that freedom (to regulate and tax as a representative body) and safety were always mutually exclusive. So to use such an example to say that people need the freedom to endanger multiple lives even though the safety provided by the regulation isn’t just temporary is an absurd misappropriation. Dying in a car accident because a selfish asshole decides not to wear a seatbelt or removes the seatbelts from his vehicle isn’t very free.
It’s not an interpretation. You’re ignoring the verifiable context of the quote and the speaker. You’re actively choosing to misrepresent it for your propaganda. This undermines your narrative and marks you as transparently untrustworthy. If you don’t care about that, then nothing you say has value.
The irony is that you don’t need to be dishonest to undermine your propaganda. You’ve already been doing that with your honest enthusiasm for deregulation as if everyone thinks seatbelt laws are oppressive government overreach.
Except it’s not a subjective topic like which flavor of ice cream is better. We can actually see whether the speaker of the quote would agree with your positions. You’re not agreeing to disagree. You’re saying you don’t care about verifiable facts because you’re not interested in intellectual honesty. You’re saying you don’t care what he actually thought and just want to use him to push your propaganda.
And that doesn’t contradict the fact that the quote was used to support the right of the legislature to tax the wealthy and property owners for the greater good of all citizens, including their long term (not short term) safety. The point still stands. The quote is not in defense of right wing libertarian philosophy and is being used out of context.
If you’re just going to transparently use unrelated quotes for your propaganda, you might as well just make up the quotes.
I love it when libertarians quote this out of context, not realizing that it often contradicts their positions.
The quote is backing the right of the state legislature to levy taxes on wealthy assholes who want the benefit of property ownership and political power but who don’t want to contribute to the welfare of society.
Maybe use image editing software instead?
So a bad parent tells the story of how his child was innocently engaging his creativity with a tool his father provided and then the father taught the child in a potentially traumatizing way that there’s wrongthink possible when some wealthy people have decided they need to collect rent from everyone for engaging with culture. And dad blames the tool rather than the IP laws he supports that actually created the problem he now punished his child for unwittingly encountering with natural human behaviors such as curiosity and imagination.
And dad writes about it like he wants a cookie from the other IP profiteers since he was willing to throw his son under the bus to make a bad and misdirected point.
Good bedtime story. And the dragon slept happily on his hoard of IP forever knowing that the guards would stop even their own children from trying to “steal” it. The end.
I stopped biting my fingernails in high school when I viewed one under a microscope in science class. Washing your hands likely won’t get rid of all the gross stuff on your nail that you won’t want in your mouth, especially your gums, which are especially susceptible to bacteria and infection. You might need to gross yourself out with the reality of that to get yourself to stop using a fingernail.
If you can’t stop the desire to “floss” that much, maybe at least carry disposable floss around with you and use that instead.
There might be a different, less dangerous sensation you can find instead. Chewing gum?
This might not be a philosophical issue for you. You seem to be having an emotional response to your dilemma, which means the solution may not be to find belief, but to find hope or solace or even just a temporary distraction (and distractions can be productive). If the cognitive process doesn’t yield desirable results, maybe look at the issue from a different angle. If you can imagine this state of disbelief mixed with desire for belief never going away, what circumstances might make the dilemma less distressing? If it might be around for a while, you can always come back to it later when you’ve had new experiences that may change your perspective.
Something I experienced when I was younger was my certainty about what was wrong with the world and I felt righteous in raging against it as if being angry at it was a worthy excuse not to have to put effort into improving things. The older I got, the more I saw that it was “yes, and…” in that I wasn’t wrong, but there was a bigger picture I just couldn’t see at the time. I was hyper focused in pointing out what was wrong as if I was the only one who could see it, but then I realized I could be doing something about it, even if the world was never going to be a sane or just place or my efforts weren’t going to be highly impactful.
But your stated wish for believing in a benevolent deity is functionally like optimistic nihilism. Existence appears to lack inherent meaning from a creator deity, so you get to decide what is meaningful to you.
It’s not really “nihilism” because it specifically finds something worth valuing in life. And being a nihilist isn’t functionally incompatible with being a practicing Christian either, so they’re not really mutually exclusive.
The thing is, you can believe in a deity without having to accept a specific deity. Being an anti-theistic atheist or a Christian aren’t the only two possible scenarios. You don’t have to be an atheist in the sense that you actively don’t believe in a god. You can be agnostic and accept that you don’t know for certain and you may just not have enough information to draw a conclusion either way.
If you’re comfortable with believing something primarily based on your desire for it to be true, then you’re free to believe anything you want. You don’t have to pick a specific cosmology. Believe in ghosts and faeries and the hidden folk and kobolds and dragons or whatever. Believing in Christianity because some non-Christians are obnoxious just doesn’t make a lot of logical sense.
What I’m saying is it seems like you’re concerned too much with outspoken atheists and you’re letting your experience with them cloud your perspective. You shouldn’t believe or want to believe anything other than because you have reason to consider it believable. There are cringy atheists and cringy theists. That’s just people. It’ll be true of any association.
Believing something just because you want it to be true, or worse, believing something out of spite just because you don’t like some people, is not an authentic approach to matters of belief.
You can block a subreddit. You can ignore people you don’t like. Don’t let them define you. They don’t represent the concept of atheism. They are just prominent voices on the topic in one particular place. There are significantly more you never hear from because regular people don’t make it their identity and they don’t look to talk about it all the time.
I don’t agree that there’s only a single prescribed method that everyone should attempt to emulate. This method was incisive and memorable. It drove the point home very effectively. She brought real world examples instead of just hypothetical fears. Her sarcastic delivery implied that the council’s position was gleefully evil and comfortable with authoritarian abuses, which should give them pause and make them consider at least how they’re being perceived, much less what their actual motivations are. And she offered real world consequences by mentioning their reelection. Greta can do it her way. This woman should continue being herself.