If I say “god doesn’t exist,” then what does “god” mean in that sentence if not “your god” or “somebody else’s god?” Is there some sort of “objective” god that I have to accept before I can voice my disbelief in it? It’s all just people’s interpretations.

That’s not true at all. If “god” is defined to contain mutually exclusive qualities or assumptions then you can say, positively and with confidence, that such a god does not exist.

OK have a nice day. Obviously no point in talking to you.

They’re obviously correlated, and the number of members is obviously the more important stat.

I’m trying to explain our conditions to you but you’re just choosing to be stubborn and refusing to listen.

Because you need coordination and organization. If you don’t reach a critical mass of participation then the handful of people involved will just be handled as if they were skipping work for any other reason. And if it only lasts a day it can simply be waited out.

Strikes require funds, funds require dues, dues require unions. You have to ensure that striking workers will have some form of security in order to reach a critical mass. People have families to feed. Striking without funds or organization could only work if everyone was really dedicated to the cause, and if that was the case, then what’s stopping them from forming a union and collecting dues in order to do it right?

You can’t lay down the sort of moral “line in the sand” that you need if participating means, “I didn’t show up to work, all of my coworkers did, and now I’m unemployed and will be on the streets if I can’t find a way to make rent soon.” These “General Strike Now!” calls happen basically every other week, with no coordination or thought of strategy.

Strikes involve inherent individual risk for a collective benefit. It’s a collective action problem, which can only be overcome by an organized structure mitigating the risks and inspiring confidence in the outcome. A “wildcat general strike” isn’t really a thing.

Where on earth did you hear that?

If only. You’re overestimating the level of solidarity and political development of American workers and underestimating the effectiveness of strike-breaking tactics. If every location did it, they can’t shut them all down, but if only one other location does it, they can, and the threat of that makes it all the more difficult to organize.

You have to understand the history of how unions were dismantled.

Stage 1 was the New Deal era, when the government was cooperative and played nice - just so long as you kick out any Reds. And what’s a “Red?” A “Red” is someone who has a broader political consciousness, who sees common cause with workers of other industries, who will support striking in solidarity or cooperating with a general strike. But, so long as the union is just about narrowly advancing the interests of their specific members, that’s fine. Better than fine, actually. You can get some real carrots to go this route, not just sticks.

Stage 2 was the Reagan era. At this point, because the unions have no solidarity with each other, because they kicked out all the “Reds,” they are now more or less powerless to act as a collective group, as a conscious political entity. Furthermore, there’s now divisions between workers. The unions are more about protecting the senior employees than about helping everyone, and people see it. Now that they’ve kicked out the “Reds,” the government starts labelling them all as “Reds,” or they deploy all sorts of other propaganda about how they’re corrupt or lazy or whatever. Union protections get rolled back (along with social programs), the carrots start to disappear, now it’s just sticks, and the organization to resist doesn’t exist anymore.

Stage 3 is where we’re at now. Unions have been almost entirely dissolved. People have all sorts of brainworms about them, and when workers start to organize they get fired, the company makes everyone attend meetings with anti-union propaganda, protections are more or less non-existent. The handful that do exist are narrowly self-interested. People are not only divided but atomized. Unions have become lost, broken, and scattered to the wind.

So it’s not that simple. It is not an easy task to undo all the effort that the rich and powerful have done to keep us from organizing.

That’s not a strike, that’s just called being unemployed.

How many of those countries have been subject to neocolonialism and CIA coups? Lots of people support politicians who want to continue stealing from and exploiting countries in Africa and elsewhere, so by that logic it seems to me that the chances are pretty high, actually.

I don’t think enough people are being born in Palestine to accommodate all the American souls who karmically ought to be reborn there.

I knew about MK ULTRA from that time but hadn’t heard about this one. I know about so much fucked up shit the US has done, but it seems like there’s always more out there.

Maybe the real problem was that there weren’t enough civilian jobs that could make use of the valuable skills they were taught, like, “how to get shoved into the line of fire while the rest of us run away.”

I would brush the shit out of an alpaca.

No, at this job I would only be brushing the horses’ manes. Someone else would be in charge of shoveling the poop.

(I actually have worked with horses before, I’m just being silly)

Jesus Christ I’m so tired of this shit. “What if climate change is actually good because you can grow food in colder climates? Then we wouldn’t have to change anything, which I really don’t want to anyway.” “What if masks actually make you more likely to contract COVID? Then I wouldn’t have to wear one, which I really don’t want to anyway.” And now, “What if exposing yourself to radiation is actually good for you?”

This is absolute nonsense. The Wikipedia article is full of “[unreliable source?]” and “highly controversial,” and the video starts out with stuff like, “Actually, all the experts agree with me, they’re just afraid of speaking up,” which instantly destroyed any willingness to suspend my disbelief on this nonsense.

Yes, there is a tiny amount of radiation in a banana that isn’t enough to cause harm. But that has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear reactors. The difference between “harmless” and “extremely lethal” with radiation can change drastically depending on factors like distance, in ways that are not intuitive to most people. Treating radioactive material and radiation produced by a reactor with extreme caution is the best practice regardless, because if things go wrong, they can go very, very wrong. You cannot mishandle a banana in such a way that it destroys a city, which is a something I never thought I would have to explain.

Furthermore, your dismissal of other forms of green energy is outdated, it may have been true 20-30 years ago but the technology has advanced and will keep advancing and with the massive upfront cost of reactors it doesn’t usually make sense to build new ones (although keeping existing ones running is often reasonable imo).

If you’re gonna push this then at least present actual evidence.

This conversation is about whether eating meat is unethical, if you’re saying “I don’t wanna” then what you’re saying is that it doesn’t matter whether it’s ethical or not, because even if it were shown to be unethical and against your principles, you wouldn’t care, because “I don’t wanna.” Because your treats are more important to you than beliefs or principles.

Do beliefs and principles even matter if, whenever they’re inconvenient, you ignore them and do whatever you were going to do anyway?

Also I don’t want to be fed on plant based protein.

At the core of literally every anti-vegan argument is, "but I don’t wanna!"

“Your strategy, eating less red meat, pales in effectiveness to my strategy, blowing up Jeff Bezos’ private jet” alright, go blow up Jeff Bezos’ private jet then.