States rights was never really an ideal (in general, if it’s wrong to allow something in one state, it’d be wrong to allow it in the rest, after all). It was just a thing to bring out whenever the federal government disagreed with something they wanted but someone states didn’t. But now that they control the federal government, it becomes a liability, so they drop it.

The context of who does a thing and how they’d be likely to do it matters; a surgeon cutting into someone with a scalpel can help heal them, but an untrained idiot with the same scalpel is likely to make the situation even worse than if the surgery hadn’t even been tried.

Though I don’t agree with the deportation bit, I view unwilling deportation as cruel, and taking his obscene pile of wealth away would also remove most of his ability to negatively effect society anyway (and if it didn’t, then him being physically in a different country probably wouldn’t help much either, or else would be pushing the problem onto them instead of solving it.)

You could also shoehorn the American two party political system into this

Baleen whales would like a word

What I have to wonder about that, is if those genes are actually connected to behavior, or if humans just perceive animals with floppy ears and curly tails as friendlier and accidentally select for that as well

Naruto is a ninja despite wearing bright orange and acting as unsubtle as possible in the same way that James Bond is a secret agent despite the people he’s spying on knowing who and what he is already.

Is this what health insurance CEOs do in their spare time these days?

Or radiation perhaps?

Handedness

Youtubepoop. A genre of YouTube videos, I’m not entirely sure how to properly describe what qualifies something as one, it’s sort of like shitposting memes I guess but full of bizzare in-jokes.

Ironically, the closest thing I can think of to this concept actually applying in humans would be “free” internet stuff that is actually funded by advertising and personal data harvesting, which is unrelated to socialism but does describe the place that original post looks to have come from.

“Entering Space: Creating a Spacefairing Civilization” by Robert Zubrin. My mother’s work when I was growing up had a “free book shelf” that someone had put it on and she’d brought it home because I liked sciency stuff, and I’ve been extremely interested in space development and futurism ever since.

I’ve heard the name but don’t know what it is, other than that I think it’s something fermented?

Either he’s vomiting beans into that can or those beans have been congealed into a single semisolid mass that sticks together.

I mean, it could technically be valid, if someone had a medical emergency involving it, though it might not be the best phrasing.

With the caveat that this was about a month before I quit, so I can’t say for sure that the kid didn’t eventually get fired, just that if he did it took longer than that: I was working in a grocery store on a closing shift, and one of the high school kids that worked there after school brings in one of those “illegal” (I think they’re only illegal to sell and not to own or something like that, but you can get them on Amazon easily anyway) extra bright green laser pointers, and starts randomly waving the thing around, to include right next to my face as I was stocking shelves and around corners a customer could walk around without warning.

Only time I’ve ever had to make a complaint about someone to my supervisor, I’m not someone to complain about people easily but to my understanding you can blind people with those things. I even mentioned that to the kid and he just laughed and told me “duh that’s the point”.

All I heard about the complaint later was “Oh yeah he’s been told not to bring it in again”. This was right in the middle of that point around COVID where it was hard to find retail workers and you got all those memes of “nobody wants to work anymore”, so my suspicion is they might have just been worried about replacing him.

About a week later, he also waited till the supervisor was away from the front of store for awhile and connected his phone to this tv display that normally was for the in-store bank displaying ads, to make it play ytp videos at high volume (or whatever the modern term for that kind of thing is, I’m not sure if they’re still called that).

Doc Hopper’s ice cream business looks even more dubious than his restaurant.

The whole two party system thing in general isn’t really a rule per se, you’re allowed to run as part of some other party or independent of one, for any office that I know of. In smaller local elections like town councils and such you can even be competitive that way. It’s just that the way we do voting, most of the time, means that for any election in which a reasonable number of voters participate, only two parties can be competitive and any more would actually make their side less likely to win. It’s a not originally intended side effect of the rules we use, that now serves to keep the existing parties’ monopoly on most higher offices.

The toddler thing wasn’t a red herring at all. It was extreme case reasoning. I didn’t even suggest the toddler was Russian or that the line or reasoning I was using only applies to certain places, so unless you think that I wish to infantilize literally every person in existence, using that example wasn’t that either.

The point I was trying to make with it was simply that societies (as a whole), are fundamentally, definitionally I’d even say, incapable of making choices. This is because societies are not people. They are made up of people, but a society is not a person unto itself.

A society isn’t even really an organization, because it has no mechanism for collective decision making. There are often organizations associated with a society, such as governments, but these do not have perfect overlap as not everyone in a societypeople generally be subject to the one associated with that society, nor do their decisions often align perfectly with those of many of the people within that society, nor do all societies even have one (if you wish to use Russia as the example, there are Russians that live outside the jurisdiction of the Russian state, Russians that disagree with, actively fight against, or simply do not know about that state, and for that matter people from other societies that do live within the jurisdiction of that state.)

What societies are is simply a box to sort people into, because people think in terms of labels. The nature of human psychology is such that we need to put everything, even ourselves and others, into various boxes, to understand who we are and what everyone and everything around us is. I bring up dehumanization though, because humans do not fit perfectly, into any of these, and insisting that the boxes do describe people perfectly dehumanizes them. It strips them of their individual differences and declares that anyone who can be fit in a certain box, is interchangeable with another who does. Insisting that a society can be responsible for something does just this, it ignores what any individual person has or has not done and reduces them to merely what language they speak or what culture they’re associated with or what set of arbitrary lines on a map they were born inside.

If Russia is to be the example, then I can use a personal one: I have a childhood friend from Russia. He hasn’t lived there since around elementary school age, but he was born there, has a mother who grew up there, speaks the language, used to visit family there (for obvious reasons he hasn’t been back in quite a number of years, but still). He considers himself Russian still, and ticks enough of the boxes that I’d imagine most people would accept that. Am I to go to him, ask him “Why did you invade Ukraine?” and then demand he face some kind of penalty? What was he supposed to have done differently? all, he hadn’t any say in the decision to seize Crimea and then invade the rest of Ukraine, he’s never served in Russia’s military or sent them aid, never worked their factories or even any kind of job there.

If 85 percent of Russians have done something worthy of punishment, or Israelis, or Americans, or Chinese or any other group of people you can think of, and you have the means, then by all means, punish that 85 percent. But why does the responsibility of those people transfer onto the other 15 percent? Because it is logistically easier than trying to figure out what each individual person has done?

If I can say “the people invading Ukraine are Russians, therefore Russian society is to blame and every Russian person can be punished” or “the people conducting a genocide in Gaza are Israelis, therefore Israeli society is to blame and every Israeli can be punished” (like the original post was talking about and which I disagreed with), can I also say “The people invading Ukraine are humans, therefore human society is to blame and every human person can be punished”? If not, is it because that box is too big, and includes people who are not involved? And if so, why can I not then say that about the Russian box, and insist on choosing instead the box that contains only the people actually responsible, even if the latter box should the majority of the former? If having the majority of the bigger box

I know that I’m not really very good at getting my points across, the frustration of that is why I tend to take hours responding to things, trying to phrase what I’m trying to say in different ways in the hope that at least one of them is clear to any given person, but this is one of those things that just seems so fundamental and blatantly obvious to me that I honestly struggle to understand how it is even possible to disagree with it, let alone to appear to take offense to it somehow (at least, that is the tone I get from some of your replies).

I don’t think you’ve considered all the implications of what I said. Even something like “the rest of the people in society pay taxes, which fund the government that does the crime, therefore everyone in that society is responsible”, does not work, because even that isn’t going to be true for any society in the real world. If you want an extreme case, consider a literal child, suppose it’s an Israeli toddler, for the sake of argument. It’s very clear what society this person belongs to, they’ve not had the time or knowledge or ability to move to another one. It’s also blatantly obvious that they can’t have done anything, even some indirect thing like voting for a particular politician or taking a job at an involved company, to further the genocide, since they’re quite literally incapable of being responsible for virtually anything. Any real world “people”, society, ethnic group, whatever other similar grouping is going to have such members, and if it is physically impossible for those members to be responsible for something, it naturally follows that any statement that everyone in that group is responsible for some crime, has to be wrong.

People who have personal experience with something like a genocide, or defensive war, or similar attack, are exactly the wrong sort of people to ask about this. That might sound like a strange statement, but those sorts of situations force the targeted group to fight or die, and under those circumstances it makes pragmatic sense to dehumanize one’s enemy somewhat. Violence has collateral damage, and in a fight for survival you cannot afford to hesitate to consider who exactly has done what, or linger in self doubt over if everyone your defense or counterack hits was deserving. People in such a case virtually have to adopt an attitude of guilt by default towards anyone they perceive as being on the other side, and that is understandable. However, a position being understandable or pragmatic is not the same thing as it being true, and continuing to dehumanize a group even after the fight has ended loses it’s pragmatic value and can lead to more suffering. The original context of this argument was a hypothetical expulsion of Israelis to other countries. If one was in a position to do this, one would have to first be in a position to end the genocide going on against Palestine in the first place, at which point, the reason to set aside their humanity to facilitate resisting them would be over as well, they would already be defeated.