instead of using his seemingly infinite wealth to engage in any real systemic change, he puts on a fucking bat costume and prances at night to beat the shit out of low level goons

Some of the better Batman comics introduce him as skilled detective, rather than a superhero whose power is infinite money.

Like any good crime thriller, his work starts with some innocuous crime or tragedy that gets swiftly covered up by corrupt police. Batman steps in as a noir vigilante, listening to the witnesses everyone else ignored and tracing the crime back to the low-level thugs who serve as pawns in a much bigger game. He extorts them for information in order to move on to bigger fish - the crime boss who runs the docks or the sleazy businessman who thought he could pay to make a problem go away - and uncovers a deeper systematic corruption. He runs into various freaks and geeks - your two-faced DA or your web-fingered club owner - who facilitate the city-spanning crime. And, in the climax, he discovers the whole system is rotten, even to the point where his own Wayne Enterprises is complicit in these cruelties.

He discovers the limits of vigilantism, its not just a question of biting into a few bad apples, but tearing the rotten tree out of the earth root-and-branch. And he realizes its too much for one man to change. So he goes back to that first original witness/victim, and he brings him back to his cave. And he sets himself to training this survivor of a broken system how to fight crime like he does.

The best Batman stories aren’t the ones where he punches a Clown Prince out of a factory window. Its ones in which he pulls another scared child out of the wreckage of his parents’ home and gives him a second chance at life.

Were you get your info from Facebook?

Huh?

Wages need to be increased and the best way to do that is to stop businesses undercutting wages by hiring cheap foreign labour.

Urban density increases the efficiency of public services. Wage rates do not.

Trying to keep populations small and fragmented does nothing to improve domestic quality of life. And rising domestic populations don’t hurt overall household incomes. Cartelized labor markets are what do that.

Inflation is largely a global issue.

Prices vary enormously by local regions. And price gouging is increasingly difficult over large distances.

Inflation is most commonly a consequence of local commodity monopolization, not global price trends.

tax cuts on the poorest people in society

Are functionally no different than higher wages. But without public infrastructure - housing, education, health care, etc - what does an extra couple grand actually buy?

We’ve seen this in the US for decades. A pittance of tax cuts pitched as a percentage of income is presented as this enormous boon. But then wages stagnate, prices skyrocket, and debts soar in the face of new privatization.

And then we’re worse of than when we started.

The tax cut doesn’t buy anything in an inflationary economy

I think helping everyday working class people is a good thing

Just cut taxes bro. Just one more time dawg. I promise it’ll work this time, dude. Just one more tax cut. One more time bro I promise. It’s going to stimulate the economy homey. This time we swear.

It’s called a Maginot Line and you build it on the German border

It’s foxes all the way down. Just a question whether Russians or Americans get their slice.

Removed by mod

“Accused” by whom?

The British, by the look of it

Kelvin Bares the Cross

Re: Righteous Gemstones

Ah yes, the comparable states of Hawaii, Quebec and Crimea which famously issue their own passports, have their own heads of state, pass their own laws and are not subject to the laws of parent states.

Each of these regions has its own governor and its own municipal laws.

Taiwanese residents who regularly travel to China carry a distinct Chinese passport precisely because the Taiwanese passport isn’t recognized. In fact the Taiwanese passport is notorious for how many problems it causes with international travel.

And thanks to the US defense pact, Taiwan is heavily beholden to US sanctions, trade restrictions, and travel embargoes. Taiwan isn’t independent, it is occupied territory. Much the same way as Crimea is occupied by Russia.

you’ve wandered much to far from your safe space

Its always fun to see people encounter some facts they haven’t seen before and conclude “These facts have simply been misplaced! I’m not supposed to be hearing them. They belong in somewhere else.”

someone could come up with a meaningful definition of a country that would exclude Taiwan, but include all other countries

The classical definition of sovereignty doesn’t apply to Taiwan, no matter how you slice it. They’re not a country in the same way that Palestine and Hawaii and Quebec and Crimea aren’t countries.

its historic debt to Jewish people

One would assume this debt would be repaid with German lands and monies, rather than land and money looted from Arabs a continent away.

Honestly, when it comes to Israel/Palestine, the German state should just do what their other genocide victim, Namibia, told them to do and Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

Yeah, crazy how the Germans are full throated supporters of Israel, but you never see them waving big Nambia flags and asserting the rights of African state sovereignty. I’m forced to wonder why, as I flip through my history book of “German Prime Ministers After 1949”.

Granting Israelis the right to Lebensraum.

They deny your citizenship on the grounds that you are a member of Hamas.

I’ll notify Julian Assange.

Taiwan is already independent.

Its territorial waters are absolutely swarming with US and Chinese warships. Its economy is fully dependent on exports to its major trade partners. Its currency is in an inflationary spiral as it becomes increasingly beholden to foreign reserves to do business. The Taiwanese Diaspora is the same size as the island population, with most of the local developed property owned by these Overseas Taiwanese expats.

They don’t control their borders or territorial waters. They don’t have meaningful sovereignty. They aren’t agriculturally or economically self-reliant. They’re just a spot on the board for the superpowers to fight over.

Because South Koreans don’t have ambitions of building up a large militant ex-pat community to try a Bay of Pigs on Pyongyang.

non-teacher, government official

Do Principals count? How about Superintendents? State legislators who pass these pledge mandates? What about the school cop who comes to get you after the teacher writes you up? Or the cop in the ISS classroom who holds you until your parents pick you up? Or the school administrator who processes your expulsion?

Oh wait, I forgot, China bad.

Our Patriotic Anthem

Their Nefarious Brainwashing