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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: May 29th, 2024

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  • To my knowledge absolutely no one saying “Ban landlords” is also saying “Don’t build any more housing.”

    There are plenty of people (EDIT: some of whom are in this very thread) who like to site that there are more vacant houses in the country than there are homeless people, as if to imply we already have all the housing we need.

    But the fact of the matter is that US and Canadian cities have increased in population without a proportional increase in housing stock. The difference is mostly made up by more people living with their parents into adulthood, people living with more roommates to make rent, and multiple families living in “single family” houses.

    We don’t do anything about it because home owners treat housing as an investment and expect its price to keep going up forever. Also because people hate multi-unit residential buildings for all sorts of nonsensical and racist reasons.

    To be clear I am an advocate for the Vienna model of public housing and programs that temporarily repossess and rent out vacant properties, but I am first and foremost an advocate for housing abundance.


  • There’s little to be gained in trying to make current-day nations pay reparations for things that their ancestors did.

    “We will not blame [King George] for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.”.
    -James Connolly

    How about we look forwards, instead?

    How about we look at the present? Because colonialism isn’t over. People are still suffering from it right now. The global south is still actively being colonized and exploited right now.

    You can’t drive a knife into someone’s ribs then say “what’s in the past is in the past, we need to look forward instead” when your hand is still holding the blade. How can you hope to start the process of healing if you haven’t even taken the knife out all the way?

    Now, I don’t have all the answers for how that healing process is going to work for the world, but I’m pretty sure a billionaire dancing around in a golden hat and velvet robes with a title that says “God made my bloodline special so I can stab whoever I want” isn’t a part of it.



  • Back then adding a word to a search query also made it more specific. You could easily narrow a search down to just a few results, or no result at all if that specific combination of words had never been written. Now adding another search term just makes the search less specific.

    You can try to approximate the old behavior by wrapping every single word in quote marks but it’s not the same.



  • It’s the combination of FPTP voting and the presidential government structure.

    In a parliamentary system third parties are more viable because they can act as “king maker” to one of the two larger parties.

    Of course a proportional voting system like STV is even better for party diversity.