Veraxus

There is definitely a giant radioactive lizard emerging at that location.

Not everything should be a contract. Make the benchmark for contracts to be much higher, such as requiring two notary public or lawyer signatures for it to be binding. Casual contracts in “terms of service” should not only not be binding, but illegal with stiff penalties for trying to sneak in such terms.

ESH, and it’s the ordinary, innocent people caught in the middle who pay the most greatest price.

I haven’t been back. I also blocked it on PiHole and Kagi, so they don’t even show up in my search results. Reddit is dead to me.

There are rumors that Prigozhin ordered them to move on Moscow in the event of his untimely death.

I’d take that with a heaping pinch of salt, though… and even if true, it doesn’t mean they’ll comply.

Me too!

I’ve been 29 for over a decade.

Thank you for that. Keep this in mind though: I’m just saying the same thing over and over in different ways each time.

“Auth-left” is just another kind of “both-siding”. It’s rightists claiming that other rightists are actually leftists so that the masses will be too afraid to consider actual leftist proposals seriously.

Leftist/egalitarian systems tend to be inherently unstable because of the existence of human greed. Greed will always lead to certain people trying, and succeeding, to hoard wealth and power for themselves. I refer to this as “rightward pressure”. The trick is pushing the dial as far left as possible while ensuring it remains stable and preventing rightward drift.

Lenin and other revolutionaries recognized this catch a long time ago, and so tried to justify “temporary tyranny” as a means to establish a leftist ends. Lenin didn’t have a lot of success with that in life; then upon Lenin’s death, Stalin seized power and never let it go… meaning that for all the suffering and bloodshed, Lenin and his Bolsheviks merely traded one right wing dictator/Tzar for another. Same story in China… And North Korea… And Cuba…

On the flip-side you have liberalism; which are leftist means that deliberately ignores “rightward pressure”, eventually resulting in rightist ends… as wealth and power accumulate and snowball for a few at the expense of the many (e.g. “late stage capitalism”).

So the question is: given that people are selfish and greedy, and any rightward movement cannot be safely considered temporary; how do we reach leftist ends while using only leftist means?

My personal stance? Democracy. We use Democracy to bolster Democracy a bit at a time… and the first thing we need to do to make that possible in implement a very aggressive progressive taxation system that caps how much wealth (and therefore power) any one individual or entity can control. Until we can fix that one thing, the politicians will continue to control the public instead of the other way around. That is the essence of leftism.

Once you’ve read some Marx, Engels, and maybe even Lenin - you can come back here and criticize the actual ideas and arguments behind Communism rather than the completely imaginary ones you’ve blindly accepted from others.

Until then, we really have nothing more to talk about.

Other than not understanding how logical fallacies work, you’ve almost got it. Keep at it and I’m sure you’ll get there, eventually.

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Ok, let me spell this out…

1. Marx and Engels created the concept of Communism. They carefully defined it.

2. No nation in the history of the world has come close to meeting the criteria/definition of Communism.

3. You cannot pick a Communist nation because not one has ever existed. Literally. By definition.

A dictator who lies about their dictatorship is still a dictator, just as a wolf in sheep’s clothing is still a wolf.

I didn’t say anything about Marx or Engels. I talked about communism.

Oh dear. 🤦🏽

I see you moved the goal post to a different field.

If you want to criticize the specifics of Marx/Engels proposals, that is very different than - whether by ignorance or malice - outright lying about them.

Not a Marxist, but I won’t tolerate deliberately lying about terminology or muddying language. That’s a bad faith authoritarian/rightist tactic and I won’t let it slide.

Are you actually suggesting that True Anarchy is the only leftist organizational structure that can fit the definition of “Leftist”?

I provided specific examples, as well as clear, concise definitions.

Also, you absolutely did not provide the “definitions of left and right”. These definitions aren’t even universally agreed upon.

You can brush up on the origins and meaning of the left-right spectrum here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right_political_spectrum

I am assuming you mean “Liberalism and Conservatism” when you say “left and right”

I do not, because those are not the same thing in the same way buttered toast is not a pizza. Liberalism is “centrist”. It appears egalitarian at first glance, but if focuses heavily (if not entirely) on means rather than ends, allowing for (and even encouraging) consolidation of wealth & power; that is: rightward drift. “Conservatism” is a relative term, not an absolute.

Libertarianism is a patently right-leaning ideology that completely rejects authoritarianism.

Libertarianism’s origins are leftist/anarchist, but the term itself has recently been co-opted by rightists and liberals the same way authoritarians always always co-opt leftist terms.

communism is state-imposed redistribution of economic means; that is 100% undeniably a left-leaning ideology that accepts and implements authoritarianism.

That is not the definition of communism. Regardless of what you think about Marxist concepts themselves (or their feasibility) Marxism/Communism requires the “withering away of the state.” So long as there is entrenched leadership, that society is not leftist in the same way the Nazis were not socialist, and Republicans are not “pro-life”. And yes, that means the USSR was right wing, not left. At no point did the USSR meet the criteria or definition of communism. The definitions lead to the label, not the other way around.

Communism literally - by Marx and Engel’s own definition - requires the “withering away of the state”. As the creators and originators of the very concept of “communism”, can you name one society that has met their criteria or achieved the goals laid out in their definition?

This is very easy. I provided the definitions of left and right.

Think about what you mean by “the state”. Which definition does it fit?

So close. You are soooo close to getting it. Just a little further…

Left is literally the opposite of authoritarian. You seem to be conflating a whole lot of ideas and terminology here. You sound like an ideological leftist who has been confused by the right’s deliberate language-muddying.

Left is egalitarian. That takes many different forms: socialism, communism, direct democracy, anarchism, etc.
Right is authoritarian. That also takes many different forms: monarchy, feudalism, oligarchy, corporatism, etc.

Authoritarianism (or vertical/hierarchical power structure) is THE defining characteristic of the right. “Auth-left” is Doublethink; an oxymoron meant to distract from the fact that wealth and power are one and the same.

This is pretty basic math. Just think about Monopoly (yes, the board game).

Housing is a finite resource. You can buy it or you can rent it. When you buy, you build equity. When you rent, it’s pure expenditure.

So what happens when nobody can buy? They are forced to rent. Demand for rentals rises, which allows landlords to raise their rents.

So how does someone with very deep pockets turn this to their advantage?

First, starting one metropolitan area at a time, you buy up everything you can. If you coordinate with other investors, all the better. The goal is to strangle supply for buyers and prevent anyone who can’t pay cash upfront from making a purchase. When people are unable to buy, they are forced to rent. So for buyers supply is down and costs are WAY up, and being locked out of buying means demand is up for rentals.

Now, renters also aren’t building equity; when means it is perpetually more difficult for them to buy in the future as long as they kept away from that equity-building opportunity.

So as an “investor” you can now have a lot of different levers for manipulating both the supply and demand sides of the housing market. For example… what happens if you have more rental property than people willing to pay your asking price? Won’t you be forced to lower your prices? First of all, that rarely happens - because as an investor, you target places that already have reliable, consistent demand (e.g. big cities and metropolitan areas). If you have to occasionally let a property go unoccupied for a few months, it’s still no biggie… you keep those prices high and do not, under any circumstances, devalue the market (for your own sake as well as your investment cronies). Now, if there were competition, prices might be driven down… so how do you avoid competition? You collude. But that’s illegal… so to avoid accusations of collusion and price fixing, you farm out your rates to a third party service that all your cronies also use: RealPage. It’s not collusion or price fixing if you use a middleman. So now you are making bank on rental rates that will see a full return on your (higher than the properties value) investment in 15 years or less.

This has been going on for well over a decade, and these “investors” are now printing money on some of their earliest purchases, with no intention of EVER putting anything back on the market.

TL;DR; Buy all the supply, force plebes to rent, control the prices, profit. Just like Monopoly.