FunkyStuff [he/him]

No Republican had to give anything up to achieve this, this is literally just the Democrats doing exactly what they want to do because they want to do it.

They have a journalistic responsibility to include relevant information and seek comment from relevant groups. The article doesn’t include any comment from healthcare professionals or advocacy groups, nor does it contain any information about potential consequences of the surgeries being banned. It fails to actually inform the public on the issue at hand, and the auxiliary information that is brought up just puts the medical procedure into question by positing it as controversial (yeah, controversial because of transphobes) and questionable. Presenting only a limited section of the issue, but making it seem like it encompasses its entirety, makes this article functionally the same as transphobic propaganda.

Stalin Putin shouldn’t have stopped at Berlin Bakhmut.

There is absolutely reason to capitulate: the fact that the Ukrainian Armed Forces have an average age above 40 and are absolutely scraping the barrel by conscripting any poor man they find. There is no universe where Ukraine pushes back the front to recover any substantial amount of territory. They have already attempted to launch counteroffensives in better conditions, and all they’ve achieved is to slow down Russia, never actually regaining any territory. The only reason they’re even in the war still is because NATO wants to sacrifice Ukrainian lives to weaken Russia, and corrupt Ukrainian politicians are making a quick buck by privatizing they country in the meantime. This is obviously not sustainable long term; in another year or two they won’t be able to recruit more people, or they’ll run out of artillery shlels.

The proof is the article, the burden of proof to provide a comparable case of someone who happened to be doing the most suspicious thing possible and was crucified by the media, yet turned out to be innocent, is on you.

If I had to pick which person is exhibiting behavior in a discussion where one side is playing devil’s advocate for a dude who had 2 small children in his hotel room in an area known for kidnapping and child sex abuse, and another is saying the obvious despite not technically having strong evidence beyond the previously stated, my finger’s on the guy that doesn’t understand burden of proof.

Can you elaborate on how modern sanctions have materially changed from how they were pre-Iraq?

If Libya didn’t want us to drag their popular leader through the streets and humiliate him before assassinating him, completely destabilizing the country and establishing open air slave markets, they should’ve thought twice before supporting a misogynist.

Yeah we talk about it all the time! And it’s ok to be skeptical. All this stuff is just a model to see the world through and no model is perfect. Sometimes models are very good at making predictions though, and it’s worth trying to understand the logic behind something different so you spot concepts and functions that you hadn’t considered.

I’m not the other poster, but there’s at least 3 reasons.

1. Competition doesn’t just happen for consumer goods, it happens for every single commodity traded on the market. Labor is a commodity. Because of the immense supply of labor, and the capitalist class’ deliberate decision to maintain an unemployed section of the population which deflates wages by adding more desperate people willing to work for less. Generally, you can think of a market as a battle between 2 armies who also have internal battles. If the attacking army is better at organizing itself and doesn’t get mired in the internal conflict, while the defending army is divided and has constant mutinies, the attacking army is bound to have a better chance in the battle. The capitalist class is smaller and has a much easier time coordinating, most workers don’t have large enough unions to contend with that.

2. Competition only goes on for so long, and eventually the whole point of a competition is that someone wins. If you have several companies competing to set the price of a commodity in a market, odds are one of them has enough capital to starve out the other ones. That happens in the real world all the time. What’s worse, the more times you capture parts of the market, the easier it is to capture more. That’s one of the fundamental tendencies in capitalism, the centralization of capital under fewer and fewer hands. Of course, once this process has run its course the result is monopoly, but even if the companies step short of monopolizing the market entirely to avoid anti trust regulations they are still likely to draw agreements between themselves to keep prices at a certain level to maintain profits. Recall the armies analogy above.

3. Even if nobody won in a competition and there was some permanent state of lowering the price of goods, while this is “good” for consumers, it’s still bad for the workers producing the goods, which most consumers are. Capitalists have no problem investing more fixed costs in the process of production if it leads to larger profits in the short term, but the issue comes down to the way profit is made in the first place. In a capitalist system, a cycle of production takes place when a capitalist exchanges money for commodities, pays a wage to workers who improve the commodities through their labor, then sells the commodities for more money than they spent during the cycle. The difference in the selling price and the fixed cost (capital) plus the variable cost (wages) is profit. Since the fixed cost is paid for at the same rate everywhere, i.e. no one should be buying the same commodities for significantly different prices at least locally, the only place where the difference could come from is the wages being smaller than the value added to the commodities through labor. Therefore, profit comes as a result of using labor that the capitalist bought at a discount. That discount we call exploitation. Now consider what happens if more capital is invested: the fixed costs grow in relation to the variable costs, but profit only grows if more labor is exploited. That means that the only way to keep commodities cheaper and cheaper still, while generating more profit relative to investment, is to ramp up exploitation. Practically we see this in reality in the way the production of some goods take place once competition runs its course; factories close down and capital moves abroad to where there are fewer regulations, sweatshops replace the factories and production can keep taking place because exploitation was increased.