queermunist
/u/outwrangle before everything went to shit in 2020, /u/emma_lazarus for a while after that, now I’m all queermunist!
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Personal property is for personal use. That’s it.
Once you start to accumulate surplus property then its very obviously not personal anymore. A person that doesn’t want a garden won’t have one to sell you, because they wouldn’t have one in the first place.
Don’t think in terms of “right” and “wrong”. Think materially.
Except for the Black protesters that keep turning up “”“mysteriously”“” murdered.
This country has a long history of silencing people who speak frankly and critically of the government, especially (but not limited to) when minorities speak out against systemic oppression. They’re banning books that talk about those struggles! Surely you see it?
Not really, some groups get banned for being anti-Chinese (and usually fronts for US imperialism lol), but I’ll grant that the current state of queer rights and acceptance is behind the West. It’s mostly kneejerk anti-Western culture war bullshit (that is being inflamed by the US using us as political pawns), but there have been recent moves towards acceptance that I’m hoping lead to more progress on the issue. There are reasons to be optimistic about China’s future.
Are there reasons to be optimistic about America at this point?
Biden had a majority in the House and Senate and he didn’t do anything with it to mandate vaccines or masks or social distancing or remote work or anything - worse, he didn’t even try. He just continued the same Trump-era policies and waited for the vaccine to fix everything.
I can certainly say it’s not all his fault! America is becoming ungovernable and essentially Balkanizing, with fascists passing all sorts of laws to force minorities to flee to other states. Biden isn’t superhuman and there’s no way he could force this shithole country to stop killing itself.
I’m only saying China is the lesser evil. How can you uncritically bring up Hong Kong protests and not the BLM uprising? Or the fact that America’s prison population is comparable to China’s despite being dwarfed in size?! America oppresses its own people, think critically!
EDIT Like, fuck, I’m trans in a red state. Am I going to end up in a fucking camp after Trump steals the election?
We got lucky with COVID being something we can make a vaccine for - it could have been a lot worse!
I brush off China lying because they definitely, unarguably had a lower infection rate. We know the surplus death rate because they can’t hide that, and that’s literally the worst the COVID death rate could possibly be. In all likelihood there are other factors that account for surplus deaths during the pandemic, so assuming literally every excess death was from COVID isn’t even correct! The numbers are in fact probably better than my rough math, because I was just assuming the worst case scenario for the sake of argument.
China’s COVID response was absolutely stellar and saved millions of lives and they should be praised for it. They probably lied (to maintain social cohesion and keep up public support for the extremely effective zero COVID policy) and I don’t agree with that choice, but I recognize that they blew everyone else on the fucking planet out of the water even though they were literally ground zero! That’s amazing!
Meanwhile, the West sacrificed us all for the money line and also lied. Objectively worse.
Even if you don’t think China is good, it’s pretty clear they are a lesser evil.
I’ll preface this with saying I understand China probably lied about its numbers. There’s no way the zero COVID policy actually resulted in zero COVID.
According to that article, COVID may have resulted in a million deaths in China above the long-term trend line in the last 3 years. This is known as the excess mortality rate, which we can directly compare to other countries even if China lied about COVID mortality (and hey, maybe they did - it would be in their own interests so it’s plausible)
According to this article, since the pandemic began the US’s excess deaths have also sparked sharply even as the COVID mortality rate falls in official government data (sound familiar?) FTA: Since the pandemic began, excess deaths are up by more than 1.25 million in the U.S., about 15% higher than in the pre-pandemic years. That’s worse even when you don’t take populations into account!
Now we can do excess deaths per capita to compare these two policies:
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China’s population is notoriously huge, with currently 1.412 billion people living in China. 1 million excess deaths among 1.412 billion people gives us an excess death rate of ~0.07%
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America is a much smaller country, with 331.9 million people. 1.25 million excess deaths among 331.9 million gives us an excess death rate of ~0.38%
That means America’s policies were 5x worse on a per capita basis. The zero COVID policy wasn’t perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than the Let 'er Rip! policy of the rest of the West.
If China had responded as badly as the US and had an excess death rate of ~0.38% then over 5 million people would have died. Zero COVID saved so many lives that Chinese life expectancy actually rose above American life expectancy!
America is the worst of its cohorts, but the rest of the West failed too!
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France had 151,000 excess deaths. At that rate China would have lost over 3 million
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Germany had 254,000 excess deaths . At that rate China would have lost over 4 million
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Britain had 237,000 excess deaths. At that rate China would have lost just under 5 million.
In fairness, China only barely outcompeted South Korea at 42,000 excess deaths - at that rate China would have lost 1.14 million instead of a measly 1 million. That’s still 140,000 lives that were saved because of zero COVID that would have died with the extremely effective South Korean policies.
In conclusion, China is a positive force in the world and I know which side I’m on in the next Cold War.
Pick a side liberals. 😘
If OP can’t afford a house or dental then the meme is accurate to them and millions like them. Dental insurance isn’t guaranteed, after all. Capitalism requires winners and losers, and losers don’t get houses or dental insurance.
Like, my dude, there are Americans that can’t afford to take $20 off every paycheck (and that shit only covers cleanings, hope you don’t get a chipped tooth!)
You’re talking about using your personal connections within the community to slowly assemble a farm from small acquisitions like their deceased father’s garden and then leveraging those connections to find people to help you work the land. People that don’t need to give you their land and don’t need to work your land, they’re actually choosing to do it freely. That’d actually be amazing if it ever happened.
That basically has zero relation with how farms work under capitalism.