In catastrophic circumstances perhaps, but the metric for actual starvation in the US is so low that finding a solid figure is difficult. Malnutrition, while higher, seems strongly correlated to child/elder abuse/neglect, and not homelessness. Street muggings for nourishment by a starving underclass is a fantastical and disingenuous narrative. And, surely, you see the dissonance in suggesting that poverty leads to crime, while also suggesting criminalizing low-wage labor?
> While this is true for you it is not true for the society as a whole...
Why isn't it? What about using the legal, practical market means at your disposal is exclusive to some privileged section of society, and why does it include me and nobody else in hard times?
Your 'rebuttal' is just a broad, dismissive gesture to theory and platitudinous insults.
Having lost a job suddenly, any employment is better than none. A perfect job that provides everything you need is pretty far detached from "this is sufficient", or even "this will slow my fall while I work something else out", and this kind of bitter resentment towards anything less than a job that pays out an idyllic American existence is what causes them to be priced out by legislative fiat like the minimum wage.
More to the point, not every skill level or job is _worth_ that kind of compensation (as uncomfortable as it might be to entertain), and attempts to circumvent market forces by making lower wages illegal at some arbitrary point have substantially more damaging externalities than 'low wages' -- which are as much a system of slavery as gravity or magnetism, and just as resilient to ideation.
> Your disagreement essentially amounts to "it's appropriate because it accomplishes my goal", or do I misunderstand? In a discussion of ethics that seems specious to me.
My disagreement is that the ongoing or imminent unlawful destruction of property should be allowed to be met with _appropriate_ deterring force, whether by law enforcement or by the property owners. I argue that because in a system of individual rights that include property ownership, the position that an impassioned crowd has more right to that property than the owner (by damaging or destroying it in this case) is morally indefensible.
> once rioters escalate against the officers themselves most people are unlikely to raise objections to targeted use of force.
That is untrue for at least the last decade or so. After the 2015 Baltimore riots, President Obama couldn't even popularly get away with referring to rioters as "thugs"[1] after ~300 businesses were damaged, 60 buildings set on fire, 113 police officers injured and 27 drugstores looted. Since then, there have been plentiful riots and mass demonstrations that either turned violent or otherwise sheltered violent activity, including the moment in 2020 that spawned the "mostly peaceful protests" meme of the reporter with a building burning down behind him because of the rose-tinted glasses public analysts used in their coverage. Mayors and governors gave lip service to violent demonstrations like CHAZ/CHOP [2] while violence was taking place, and only tepidly supported law enforcement's presence to curtail it after the fact.
_To this day_ those actions are routinely and popularly dismissed as racial outrage, justified, etc. largely along political boundaries, all to the detriment of the thousands of individuals whose livelihoods were damaged or destroyed as result. The idea that good consciences will win the day and protestors will distance themselves from n'er-do-wells among them is, as a standard, irreconcilable with the countless recorded hours of protest footage that exist.
Rights aren't trumped by implicit public vote to destroy your property, any more than two thieves can vote that they need their victim's wallet more than them, or a gang of rapists can hold a 5-1 vote for consent. QED, immediate and active threats against property should, morally and legally, warrant an appropriate amount of force to defend it.
If threat of injury is what stops someone from destroying your car, then it's appropriately leveraged.
I'm also curious, what kind of effective, 'non-violent' means are there to control the initial mob-martyrs, and ensure level-handed justice is served? Those looking to escalate will use any police activity against them or their group as justification to do so.
This reads like you suppose the only thing to do is let rioters vent their outrage against whatever objects happen to be in their way at the time, and hope that there exists some legal comeuppance after the fact.
Why can't some reasonable degree of force be used to prevent property damage? What moral dilemma exists that makes protecting property deserve a comparison to executing someone?
Are chemical irritants preferable, then? Or just LEOs in riot gear with rubber batons? There's no amount of pushback or repercussion that a rioter will feel is fair or humane, and the mindset of "I'll turn violent and/or destructive if my participation in civil unrest is punished" is a perfect justification for these systems to exist.
That's a naive way to see it. People vote _against_ the other candidate, against what they fear is worse. And, if the theory that the frontrunner is the best representation of the party holds true, it speaks quite poorly for the Democrats appointing Harris despite Biden winning the vote of his party, no?
And, again, tu quoque; even if the GOP was exhaustively comprised of reality-evading lunatics, voters and all, it wouldn't excuse stooping to their level -- the DNC's _explicit_ support of racial identitarianism, benevolent racism, and biological denialism run in direct opposition to this supposed moral high ground they tacitly hold.
So biological denialism is a morally superior position to hold, then? Democratic leaders can't ever seem to acknowledge biological differences between the sexes, certainly not with regards to competitive advantages.
As for it being "core policy", I'd need to a see a citation, otherwise it's conjecture. The 2024 GOP platform [1] doesn't mention climate change, global warming, IPCC, et al. once, whereas the DNC's platform [2] discusses it at length.
Tu quoque; Republicans harboring fringe beliefs in some cases isn't a response to Democrats' mainstream acceptance of beliefs that the scientific method doesn't accurately reflect reality.
Journalists always overlap their coverage. Even 'exclusive' stories will get articles describing the exclusive coverage. A story/theme being covered from multiple sources is hardly evidence of conspiracy in a vacuum.
"Antisemitism" could be replaced with "racism", "transphobia", "homophobia", etc. and your point would hold true. At some point popular discourse became such that escalating disagreements to accusations of tangible transgressions was fashionable.
I don't think a _job_ is the quintessential experience so much as _productive value,_ doing something that brings you joy from the act of creating, whether it's making music or art, assembling Lego kits, antique engine restoration, etc. Getting that satisfaction from your job is totally possible, so perhaps to some people it is!
As far as crafting a post-scarcity economic model goes, it's not the problem of dreaming one up, it's the pervasiveness of scarcity. Even if all of humanity's basic necessities are one day a given, scarcity won't disappear, just shift around (maybe as transportation for the otherwise-infinite supply of consumer goods? Or living space away from dense urban centers? Maybe even the kind of heuristic analysis abilities humans are unmatched in to keep the matter replicators functioning?)
More to the point, saying that this kind of luxury will exist in a thousand years doesn't nullify the concerns of the present, and probably wouldn't convince most people to forfeit their employment to machines likely owned by the uppermost classes.
It's not a narrative so much as a leftover from what I was originally going to post, in that the creative/expressive/stimulating work is what's being touted as the first thing to be eliminated by AI.
That aside, what exactly is suspect about finding meaning or joy in work? Is the quintessential experience meant to be soulless and grating?
They make the cynical case that automation is coming for us all, and it will eventually replace every ounce of fun or meaning in gainful employment, but that it's okay because of some nebulous societal good. It's not a convincing argument.
> Social-capitalist economies (the “social democracies” and adjacent) tend to do better job at this particular thing.
Can you point to a social capitalist country that does a demonstrably better job as a direct result of being a social-capitalist/social democratic/democratic socialist policies? From a cursory search, the US shares in wage theft being a problem with the UK, Australia, Germany and Sweden (granted to a lesser extent for the last two), and I have no doubt a slew of others as well.
It's hard to interpret "We basically put a big flashing sign right out front saying whose interests are the top priority" as anything but distaste, just as it's hard to parse "the name “capitalism” states whose interests are favored in our system" as anything but a favorable verisimilitude. Whose capital? Construction contractors? Service industry bosses? How exactly are they favored? Clearly wage theft is a well-understood phenomenon, so wouldn't it be a greater indictment of the legal system backing the law than the system that rests on top of it? How is any of this unique to a capitalist system and prevented in, say, command economies?
That's such a yellow-press non-answer. Annoyed interpretations of the name of something doesn't offer any insight into, or affect the reality of, the thing.
> While this is true for you it is not true for the society as a whole...
Why isn't it? What about using the legal, practical market means at your disposal is exclusive to some privileged section of society, and why does it include me and nobody else in hard times?
Your 'rebuttal' is just a broad, dismissive gesture to theory and platitudinous insults.