I could go without for a day… but if I had dependents, I’d be worried for not just the day, but every day after that too

No. Rent and mortgage are two different things. One is a fee for service and one is a loan.

If your home that you own doubles in market value and you decide to sell it, you pay off the mortgage (loan) and keep the profit (capital gain). If you are renting and the home is sold, you gain nothing.

If your home that you own burns down, you still owe the bank the money you borrowed for purchase (mortgage). If you are renting the home that burned down, you don’t owe anybody money. There is to service to pay a fee for anymore.

Like sure, fuck capitalism. But we don’t need to misrepresent how these systems work.

I’m not sure how much the kingdom was involved in Al Qaeda’s early years, unless you count American-Saudi-British funding of MAK/other Mujahideen during the soviet-afghan war. However, it’s clear Al Qaeda was already declaring against the kingdom a couple years before the USS Cole in '98. But sure I’d see Al Qaeda being a child of SA in a way similar to the KKK being a child of the US

You forgot the part where Saudi Arabia started courting American aid and literally expelled Bin Laden for being anti-American. That doesn’t make SA “the good guys” but it makes a huge difference in how your framing paints SA’s position and involvement with Al Qaeda during the 2000s. Their history is long and complicated, but during the war on terror, SA was much more aligned with the US against Al Qaeda and Bin Laden

You forgot the part where Saudi Arabia started courting American aid and literally expelled Bin Laden for being anti-American. That doesn’t make SA “the good guys” but it makes a huge difference in how your framing paints SA’s position and involvement with Al Qaeda during the 2000s. Their history is long and complicated, but during the war on terror, SA was much more aligned with the US against Al Qaeda and Bin Laden

Once upon a time they had mirrors. But with the rise of political extremism and divisiveness, they replaced all mirrors with camera-based digital displays so they could flip the image and see their true selves represented, not some distorted atrocity.

You could curve the proportion to income to scale impact to something more equitable. How you decide what’s equitable would be another problem to solve, but I imagine it would involve benchmarking around the middle class and poverty line. Right now fine rates are okay for the middle class, so keep the proportion similar, fine rates really fuck up poor people, and fine rates mean nothing to the upper class. So imagine you you feel would be a fair impact for a fine and scale it accordingly.

China’s EV’s putting brakes on oil demand

Ukraine is doing fine building their own drones. They seem to have a fast iteration cycle with their growing drone industry. Their priority for foreign aid is artillery shells, missile systems, and vehicles/planes which is harder for them to produce en mass

Looking at it a different way, that would be like a photographer taking a photo of the sandwich and proclaiming “I’m an artist” or a director telling a chef what to make, telling a cinematographer/camera operator how to shoot it, and an editor how to cut it to create a short film of a sandwich and proclaiming “I’m an artist”. Art can be made from a series of creative and purposeful decisions that result in a piece of expression. It might not be good art, it might not be effortful art, it might even be unethically made art, but it’s not not-art.

Again, if we read it as he literally said that, then sure I’d agree the behaviour is not okay. Given the context of the quote, I’d want more evidence to take that quote literally.

It just reeks to me of him being jealous of people who don’t have kids and/or him regretting being a parent?

Perhaps. I don’t think there’s much here to substantiate that reading though, even with the context. I’d want a bit more evidence if I were to incorporate that into my appraisal of him.

You can judge someone to be morally repugnant without interpreting everything they say/do as an extension of the things that make them repugnant. It doesn’t lessen the repugnance.

This has nothing to do with going easy on JD. It has to do with the things we chose to criticize on principle. It’s about who we choose to be. You gave two great examples of things we should judge him for. I’m happy to focus on those and the next oppressive thing he says. If you want to be someone who criticizes parents for getting exasperated by their kids, that’s your perogative, but that’s not me and I don’t think people should.

Might be an unpopular opinion While JD has said plenty of horrible things, this reads more like someone relating how they felt in the moment than reciting what was actually said. I’m sure most parents have felt this way at some point. We don’t need to make this mole hill into a mountain. There’s already a whole mountain range of his shit that’s actually egregious.

You’re literally advocating for stereotyping people according to those immutable characteristics. Disgusting.

Nice try, but no. That’s really not what I was saying. The conversation is about how environmental context (culture, history, positionality) influences experiences and how individuals with different experiences can contribute uniquely.

I thought diversity was strength. Guess it’s instead “diversity specifically of the types I define is strength, provided it’s my unique definition of strength (read: intellectual homogeneity)”.

Diversity has its strengths and weaknesses depending on context. For example ethno nationalism can lead to powerful states of a kind, but as an ideology it is inherently oppressive and dehumanizing, so I’d argue it’s ethically wrong. Being a particular race or gender is never ethically wrong, but ideologies certainly can be.

More thinly-veiled bigotry, essentially saying that race and gender determine ideology. Gross.

Again, deliberately misinterpreting the statement. Nobody is talking about race/sex being deterministic of ideology and your little trap conflating social groups and individual identity is transparent and silly.

You fail troll.

1. Differences like race/sex being only “superficial” and therefore unimportant is a disingenuous strawman. These attributes are also associated with substantial differences in experience, epistemologies, and even ideologies (white feminists can differ in ideology from black and Asian feminists), all of which can productively contribute to more and better solutions than if those diversities were not present.

2. Ideological diversity while certainly beneficial, can also hamper collaboration. Especially when one ideology dehumanized or embodies an existential threat to other members of the team. Some shared ideology around shared humanity and collaboration is needed right. Relatedly, a single ideology amongst one group can also be a point of productive focus. For example anti-abortion movements or abolishing slavery.

3. The makeup of the best team for the best jobs depends on the project as well, whether it’s a political science textbook, a cross-cultural advertising campaign, or a piece of universal design. A team with some diversity along ideological, cultural, gendered lines while also sharing commonalities can be better equipped to tackle a range of problems by mitigating glaring gaps

4. I don’t know why you’re drawing this line between ideology, race, and gender. Shit is intersectional.

Here is your example. We have whole institutions dedicated to diversity of ideology. It’s called Academia. Diversity of ideology is the OG diversity. It’s the vanilla default status quo of diversity.

I don’t believe you.

“Don’t we try to categorize everything though”

That sounds like a you problem :P

Enter constructivist relativism

That’s a fair point on item selection. You get the major brands that are better about getting their supply chains. So the overall proportion is different, though still a significant problem.

My point was more about buying the same cheap jacket on Amazon as you’d find on Temu or AliExpress, which is what I see most of on Amazon.

Ah, I see. I haven’t paid much attention to Temu ads, my perception of it from the website was just AliExpress with fewer options but faster shipping.