huey_m

People have a legal location of residence in the US.

In California, if you’re homeless, you typically have to set your mail up as “general delivery” to your nearest post office where you go to collect mail every few days. You probably don’t have any other address.

Not sure how this interfaces with this specific law otherwise, but using a post office isn’t a bad idea generally because it isn’t a totally unexpected thing. A homeless person would probably list that as an address.

There’s also a lot of mail services that will give you an address in that state and will open/scan received mail for you… not sure if California specifically has one, though. But yeah, this doesn’t establish legal residency at all, but many entities don’t look too closely either… might be worth a shot.

I’ll literally change banks over that kind of thing now.

Just continuing a conversation you started. It does at this point sound to me like your behavior might have played more of a role in your ban than you might be crediting.

Categorically, as you claimed before? Why not? If we can prove intent of an individual action beyond reasonable doubt, why not an action by an organization of people?

Or are you now acknowledging intent can be proven beyond reasonable doubt but that it hasn’t been in the case you were banned for arguing it?

In science, there’s absolutely a value in tribalism, i.e. respecting consensus (being a woolly “centrist") when one does not have expertise.

This isn’t analogous, though; consensus is a category reached through reason and proof. Expert consensus is by definition a reasonable position (can still be wrong, of course, but it’s a reasoned consensus).

Centrism just means a relative position between two others. It is not definitionally reasonable, so your analogy of what I’m doing doesn’t hold any water.

Do you not think this is what a flat-earther (or climate denier) would say?

But just because they say it doesn’t make it a valid argument in their case.

My point here was just categorically being a centrist doesn’t necessarily make the position reasonable enough that it should be tolerated. If you’re a centrist between a reasonable position and an unreasonable one, you might still be being unreasonable. It really depends on the specific issue. That’s really all my point was.

That seems to be just hoping for no critical mass though. If it ever grows large enough, you’ll definitely get people willing to put the time in to disrupt things for their own entertainment.

I can’t respond to such a circumspect answer.

I can only answer generally that there still sometimes not room for reasonable disagreement where intent is involved. Courts absolutely do prove intent for some crimes beyond a reasonable doubt… someone could still disagree, but by definition it isn’t necessarily a reasonable disagreement.

Murder (vs manslaughter) in most jurisdictions is a question of intent. We prove it to the point of no reasonable disagreement all the time. That’s the very standard we use.

again: I’m a frigging centrist

I’m not saying this is the case in your case at all, but depending on the issue this isn’t always an ironclad defense. We certainly have historical examples of political centrists aligning with very extreme ideologies in an attempt to cling to power.

And just logically, some issues don’t have a valid centrist position. There’s no valid centrist position between a flat earther and one who believes the earth is a planet in space. For example, in a science community, I would expect people pushing flat earth to possibly get banned and could see the logic in someone trying to find a middle between those two positions getting the same treatment. Just because there are two sides to an issue doesn’t make a moderate position between them reasonable or defensible. Sometimes one side is just wrong.

I think the merits of the situation are more important than affiliation.

But what about the problem of trolls just continuing to create new instances to circumvent bans and defederation? Is there really a solution to this beyond hoping we don’t reach a critical mass where this becomes a real problem?

Again, I do not have a personal opinion on it and never expressed one beyond refusing to endorse the progressive party line, which seems to have taken on the quality of a religious purity test.

I think it would help to know in more detail what went down here. If we’re talking about justifying, perhaps even unintentionally, genocide in either the sense of mass killing or mass removal by other means… I think it’s pretty understandable that civility starts to go out the window a bit. Arguably the position itself is uncivil, whatever words are used to support it. When your start to talk about the right to exist or not, to not be killed or forcibly removed by a state… that’s a life or death question and people will react that way. There are some issues there’s no room for reasonable disagreement on.

That said, on wider issues, as someone firmly on the left, I do completely agree that the left can get kind of ridiculously emotionally invested and toxic over even minor disagreements from other leftists that absolutely don’t meet the above threshold, even on questions as banal as pure strategy vs actual ideological disagreement. But it’s hard to say if what you experienced was the latter and not you possibly being oblivious to your part in the former without more detail.

@atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works these are both very good points, QFT.

I really am tired of people pretending like this kind of thing is purely an American problem and that Europe has no issues with authoritarianism. coughHungarycough (might be coming to an end, (maybe not, we’ll see) but living in 16 years of it… some stuff here would make Republicans blush). Incidents in the UK with pro Palestinian movements are similarly discouraging…

I did not use insults. I said your behavior is pedantic, misplaced, and obnoxious, which it is, and that you were being dishonest by pretending the communist world did not refer to themselves as communist (even though they were actually socialist), which you were and are continuing to do so while projecting your bad faith onto me. I’ve not made any criticisms beyond that narrow point, and it’s the one you refuse to engage with, I can only assume because you know it’s wrong. Maybe you should care a little more about how actual communist states referred to themselves before claiming using “communist” in lieu of “socialist” was western propaganda?

That being said, one thing I do agree with is it’s time for me to fuck off (you can say it) if you’re becoming this upset over so little. I’ll do you one better and block you and suggest you make better use of the feature yourself if you get this emotional so easily. Have a good one.

Addressing the point or not isn’t what’s obnoxious; pretending not to understand what is meant by a common, widely accepted usage of a word to shift a discussion towards semantics is. It’s similar to people correcting common use of “theory” to “hypothesis”; these also have distinct meanings, but the common use of “theory” doesn’t really get in the way of discussion… providing people don’t feign not knowing what’s meant when the person has made which they’re using clear. It’s the same here: you knew very well he’s not referring to a stateless, classless society, but rather the communist states of the world.

Again, using “communism” in this way is not purely a polemic and it’s dishonest to characterize it as such. Even here behind the old iron curtain, “communism” as shorthand for “aspirational communism under a vanguard socialist state” is and was extremely common use of the word. Members of the communist parties would refer to themselves and their states as communist all the time. It isn’t “adhering to US propaganda”… all sides used this. It’s really only young, contemporary communists causing a stink over this, honestly.

That I do agree with you on. For Trump criticisms and attacks… well, there’s plenty of meat on that bone that we don’t need to go gnawing for scraps, as it were.

Communism is a stateless society, where the economic basis of class differences has been overcome.

True in an academic sense, but his clarification makes it pretty obvious he’s referring to the Marxism-Leninism of the USSR since he referenced that directly. Using “communism” as a shorthand for that has been common in both western and eastern media and news since the Cold War. I live in a former satellite state of the USSR, and adherents here would use the same language, it’s not just an outside polemic.

Not really looking to debate the merits of it, but I think pretending not to understand what someone means when they use a very wide and commonly accepted usage of a word and instead pedantically clinging to only an academic definition rather than addressing the actual point is a little obnoxious.

More to the point though, what you call an obvious conclusion is nothing more than speculation fueled by hatred.

Mostly with you, but this, I think, is overplaying your point and just isn’t true. This makes it sound like something just made up because you don’t like someone, like Obama not being an American citizen or something. There is certainly circumstantial evidence that Trump has indeed had sex with minors. His role and behavior in underage beauty pageants, frequent trips to the island we know these things happened on, etc.

Not enough to convict someone, yes, but enough that even someone with no opinion at all of Trump (impossible, but hypothetically), if told of this circumstantial evidence, probably wouldn’t trust their daughter to be alone with him.

I think the point that there’s enough to tar him with that’s completely proven and on the record there’s no need to venture into such circumstantial accusations is well taken, but let’s also not pretend those accusations are baseless and purely from hatred. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that would lead even a pretty impartial observer to at least consider it.

Lower earners do get pretty good care in states like California with MediCal. The problem is a) it isn’t federal, so some states they don’t invest get worse care and b) you can fall onto a band of making too much for public health care and too little for real insurance.

Nothing I’ve written should be taken as an endorsement. Medicare should be extended to all. With no means testing.

Eh, that’s overstating it. It still is a stupidly rich country and professional working Americans tend to make more money than their European counterparts, even considering healthcare.

But yes, tying healthcare to employment comes with all sorts of problems and lets too many people not “poor enough” for Medicare to slip through the cracks. In my experience with a state Medicare system that gets good funding, the public system actually holds up quite well when looking at many of the European systems, at least here in central Europe where I live now… simply extending that to everyone would basically fix the problem. I’ve had good dental work, a fantastic pre natal and birth experience along with mending broken bones and such under a public system with no cost to me and honestly my experience was great.