Terminal Marvelbrain

Give zoomers a break. Most people have terminal baby duck syndrome and will sacrifice anything for convenience, regardless of age.

You're no longer saying "owner", we're making progress.

Now do tell us : if the combined revenue and appreciation of assets are not greater in value than the expenses (eg mortgages, services, taxes, opportunity cost), what point is there to being a landlord?

(This is a trick question, by the way)

The point is that renters pay for home equity. They just don't earn home equity. Landlords retain 100% of that and 100% of the value gained by the asset. You are catastrophically wrong about that.

Whether or not you think that's ethical, it's still a fact.

The money does not disappear when it changes hands, nor is it laundered. Most landlords cannot afford any of these things if the houses that they own are not occupied by paying tenants.

I could give you the benefice of the doubt. However, this is the calibre of argument you're throwing at us :

Did you pay half the down payment? Did you pay half the mortgage and interest to the bank? Did you pay half the property taxes? Did you pay half the maintenance?

The obvious answer is that yes, the tenant pays for all these things, because that's why the landlord charges rent to begin with. This is such an obvious thing, irrespective of any political beliefs, that the mere fact of you having asked it makes you suspect. I'm not even trying to be mean to you here, I'm just describing the situation as I see it.

Well, we either ignore deaths or we don't. The United States of America ran the largest slave trade in history and nearly wiped out the native population of an entire continent, nuked two cities, overthrew countless democracies, and bankrolled/trained fascist and/or religious fundamentalist militias all over the world. This is all historical fact.

But it also represents one of the strongest cultures in history, as well historical advancements in science, technology, civics, etc. Just like the USSR. Whereas the Nazis only represent industrialized genocide, eugenics and fascist oppression, the Soviet Union and the USA represent both the good and bad of humanity in extreme amounts. Their evils can be denounced just as much as their successes can be celebrated, and more usefully both can and should be studied and not completely discarded on weak ideological grounds. That's why they're both admissible in civil discussion.

Hexbear is very into counter-narrative, and I'm guessing a lot of them would disagree with my take here, but I think that if liberals and communists can't find middle ground in that then liberals are simply not representing themselves honestly.

This is a good post, but I think the person you're replying to is trying to bait a ton of belief statements out of you so that they can then piss you off by contradicting each one with effortless status-quo normalizing, and use that as a justification to defederate Hexbear. That, or they're just going to dig their heels in and you'll have wasted your time.

Iraq which, famously, possessed no actual WMDs. But this time around western media can totally be trusted to report on US state enemies reliably, even though absolutely nobody was held accountable and nothing has changed.

Props for staying calm throughout all this. The initial rush of excitement seems to be pretty much over, which means things ought to mellow down on the timeline. I'm sure Hexbear can coexist with the fediverse the same way /r/cth coexisted with reddit, which is to say by showing up and ballin' for Marx and pushing the boundaries of acceptability. Except this time there are no ad revenue sources to placate by banning anything outside of the Overton window.

I can totally understand your strong feelings towards the USSR. I understand you've conceded that the hammer and sickle isn't strictly soviet symbology and can represent other things, but I would like to ask you whether or not you would think of the "stars and stripes" or the "union jack" (or really most western iconography) as hate speech given the centuries of pillaging, rape, genocide and dehumanization that they represent in many parts of the world.

You don't need to go super far left to find convincing arguments against US foreign policy. Noam Chomsky is a mainstream intellectual after all, and he coined the phrase "consent manufacturing".

The idea that the US acts in total self interest should be presumed true in all cases, but that doesn't on its own defeat the idea that its intervention in Ukraine is good. The logical next step is to ask ourselves whether this intervention ever had any chance of changing the outcome of the conflict at all. If it didn't, and most people here would agree that it didn't, then the US' involvement amounts to wartime profiteering at the cost of human lives.

edit: I should also add, there's good reason to believe that NATO expansion is what caused the conflict, and that the west did this in spite of clear and explicit warnings from Russia

Because the reasons to support Ukraine are supposed to be noble and not completely self-interested. That's why there is popular support for it. McConnell admitting that it's about funneling money into the military industrial complex, at least in part, ought to make at least some people reconsider their assumptions