SoyViking [he/him]

This is where the idea of “personal responsibility” is useful for liberals. Flatly admitting that they want a desperate underclass is too mask off for them to feel like good people so they invent a way of blaming individual victims rather than the economic system.

The poor has a theoretical opportunity to pull themselves up by the bootstraps so when they don’t do that it’s really their own fault. Of course that theoretical opportunity doesn’t translate into actual opportunity for most people but that’s fine, as there’s enough window dressing of meritocracy to make the opportunity look real if you are careful not to go into too much detail.

This is also the reason why liberals hate discussing real-world examples. Their logic only works in abstract thought experiments where they get to control the variables. Saying that everyone has the opportunity to succeed is a lot easier than saying that Bob, who has a set of very concrete and undeniable material conditions, has the opportunity succeed.

It’s so annoying that being irrationality afraid of nuclear power is simply assumed to be a leftist position where I live, by leftists and non-leftists alike. No thought goes into it, nuclear power is scary because of nuclear bombs and Chernobyl and that’s it.

I once read that when Sweden decided to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar they didn’t do it all at once, disliking the idea of jumping so many days forwards/backwards (I can’t remember which way the Julian is out of sync). Instead they opted for a plan to move their calendar one single day every year over several decades. I remember the place I read about it saying that it just confused everyone and the plan was scrapped after a few years.

If you can’t use it for porn and you can’t use it to make pictures of powerful people in unflattering situations then what is the use case for AI?

In Denmark, the social democratic Nordic welfare paradise, universal healthcare does not cover dental care for adults. If you’re really poor and have an emergency you might have some luck begging the local municipality to pay for having the offending tooth pulled out but that’s about it.

The result is a wide class disparity in dental health and even people who are not poor think twice before going to the dentist, resulting in issues growing worse than they had to be.

Some private insurance exists but they are free to reject you as a customer if your dental health is already bad.

Nobody likes the current system or want to be seen defending it. The only argument that’s given for maintaining the status quo is that doing the right thing would be too expensive.

There is a healthy and honest way to appreciate communism, Russia, the CCP and even DPRK.

Please tell us more about those healthy and honest “anti-authoritarian” non-tankie communists. Who are they and what political results have they made?