silent_water [she/her]

  • 0 Posts
  • 304 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: October 26th, 2021

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  • yup, you got it. comms are communities, which is why it’s /c/comm_name on lemmy. an unfederated/local-only comm is only visible through the instance that hosts it. you can access it without logging in but only via the hosting instance.

    e.g. people from other instances don’t need access to the instance feedback comm and shouldn’t be able to participate in internal discussions about instance policies.



  • So, would official acts as president be legal by definition?

    yes, and further that any exercise of constitutional authority is an official act.

    Would there be such a thing as an official act as president that may otherwise be criminal?

    in the prosecutable sense? no. the president is no longer bound by congressional authority.

    And how does the ruling protect against treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors (specifically, the past part)?

    courts won’t do shit about it, congress will have to (lmao)

    How is this ruling not in direct contrast to the constitution?

    the constitution is toilet paper and always has been. scotus just wiped some diarrhea with it.


  • yes, this is true. no, this isn’t why wages haven’t kept up with productivity growth or why you must work 40 hours to sustain yourself. you have to work because profit earned must increase and paying you even one iota more than you need to be able to show up to work again tomorrow is a loss of profit. if they could make you work 80 hours a week or 160, they would in heartbeat.

    thankfully, this is outlawed because labor movements of the past fought to enshrine in law a limit on how much you can be forced to work and set a minimum bar for how much they can pay you. these laws are under fire - I explore why in the rest of this reply - and will be repealed eventually if labor does not resist collectively.

    however, the rate of profit always decreases on a long enough timescale because of dead labor (technology, machines, etc), inter-capitalist competition - capitalists will steal profit from each other if there’s more to be had - and because infinite growth is impossible so eventually externalities will always overcome the creation of new capital.

    consequently, capital accumulates in the hands of the capital-owning class - an ever-shrinking group of them, at that - and this continues until you, the worker, make so little that you cannot actually show up to work the next day - the loss of social reproduction. reproduction here doesn’t only refer to progeny but also feeding, clothing, housing, etc. yourself and your family, the meeting of the basic necessities that allow you to continue working, including your health - physical and mental. capital eternally strives to reduce what it must subsidize on your behalf as ensuring you can take better care of yourself reduces profits. a capitalist that makes more profit outcompetes and drives out of business all others who choose to make less profit, eventually.

    this is also why capitalism has cyclical recessions, a fact predicted in the 1870s and termed crises of capitalism, when capital has accumulated in too few hands, profit can no longer be made, and workers struggle to feed themselves. you’re just noticing Marx’s second law - the law of capital accumulation.







  • the British took over Palestine from the Ottomans, suppressed decolonization movements, then partitioned it to form Israel. during the formation of the Israeli state, Palestinians were slaughtered and driven out of their homes in an event known as the Nakba - which translates as “The Catastrophe”. since then, there have been a series of wars resulting in the slow but steady encroachment of the Israeli state - look ip maps of the region over the decades - and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. in such an atmosphere, nothing but mutual hate is possible.










  • a functioning public transit system covers the whole city, nearly point to point, and it runs on a regular schedule with buses and trains arriving every few minutes.

    but who’s going to pay for it???

    it’s really a good thing no one has ever run the numbers on this and there’s absolutely no literature analyzing the costs of various forms of public infrastructure to determine which is the most cost effective. there’s no way at all anyone has ever done that.


  • have you ever been to an American city? everything is at the service of roads, cars, and space to park the cars. we have thoroughfares through residential neighborhoods, monstrous intersections that are unsafe to cross by foot, infrastructure that’s unsafe to use by any mode of transportation that isn’t a car – because the cars will run you over – and it’s all wildly more expensive and less efficient than a functioning public transportation system. think of it like this – if more people can get where they need to go by public transit, the roads won’t be so congested.