Except that mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy can be ambiguous, I definitely prefer the former if I'm not using an ISO date. But normally I just write ISO and my head translates to MMM dd,yyyy
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Let's be honest. If he comes back, doesn't that mean that book is true? We're literally acting under the presumption of the guy coming back.
Which means there would be a pissy magic man in the sky. And that means we would go to hell in a handbasket.
So I'm voting on Radio Shack.
They've always backed conservative cops enforcing conservative laws against "other people" but letting conservatives off with a warning.
But I think it is at this point where the core of our disagreement lies: you think it is a fair compromise to give up freedom and have a government solve these issues however it sees fit (as a part of a “social contract”), whereas I see it as a basic human right to be able to choose
But private property isn't a human right. Are you trying to pretend otherwise? Hell, "work begets profits" isn't a human right. It's not even a right under capitalism. You could work your ass off and get nothing. You don't have the right to the fruits of your work in the first place. If you work hard and get nothing, you don't think you're entitled to something. The government creates a framework that increases the odds you're going to get something, and you ungratefully treat their commission as theft.
You being able to get anything at all from your work is a social contract. You say taxation is theft, but here's something I bet you didn't know. "Taxation is Theft" is a newer concept, perhaps even a response to the older, more defensible concept that "Property is Theft".
And with due respect, you DO have a choice. You give consent to taxation every single day you stay in a country that charges taxes. You are consenting to a social contract. Anyone who has ever taken a loan to pay medical bills will agree that consent isn't necessarily a happy thing, or an uncoerced thing. You could always emmigrate to a country that doesn't have taxation, like Qatar. Countries that don't tax have a pretty bad track record of treating people living in them, but at leaste you don't have to pay taxes. Well, there are a few that are just havens for billionaires, but I don't think you're rich enough to go to one of those if you're arguing with me on lemmy.
Ehhhhhhhh.... I wouldn't go that far. I had a not-terrible one, who only showed bad sides when I was in my 20s. lol
I don't think taxation is theft, so I don't have to deal with any of these logical contradictions that I've directed at you.
I gain work-protection from the government. It's a social contract, and a fair one. They take my tax dollars as payment, but in return, will shoot you if you try to walk into my house. I have some ethical problems with the way some of that happens, but all-in-all it's a reasonable exchange. The biggest thing that's missing is that a critical part of the social contract is that if I can't walk into your house to take your food, the government needs to guarantee I won't starve otherwise. Guess what is necessary to close that loop? Tax money.
And no, I'm not being silly. I'm accurately calling you on defining "things I don't like" as theft and "things I do like" as not theft. "Loss of value" is an unusable metric for that, and I provided a concrete example to that effect.
Everyone said I was disadvantaged by having a single parent, but I didn't have to live through any of that shit except for 1 year my mother married (and then left the guy because he was an ass)
You are committing what is called a fallacy fallacy, and do not address how they are different
I actually did address the claim by showing how your logic doesn't work with anarchism. But if you would like a direct rebuttal, I'd be happy to provide. Here are the reasons that "taxation is theft" is bullshit propaganda.
You do not have a right to your pre-tax income, or any income for that matter. Private Property is a social contract. The money you are being taxed has no real or implied value except the value created by a single cohesive system that involves the same threat of force to reinforce. If taxation is theft, then money is not property and you don't own that house you bought with it. In fact, you trying to keep me from walking ont it and taking some food would quite literally be theft.
The only way taxation can be theft is if you reject the mercantile system. And if you reject the mercantile system, then the money being taxed cannot be seen as property (and therefore it is still also not theft).
I take it you refer to online piracy?
Yeah. Record labels started taking to call it "theft" when they wanted to ban it. They started teaching people it was theft. They got this big FBI banner on the opening of all VHS tapes.
On one hand you are not taking anything away, you are just copying. But on the other hand, to cite yourself, that is of course an oversimplification.
Thank you for explaining to the audience the exact reason I brought up piracy :)
As you are stealing potential income
So is it theft for me to install a lock on someone's door because I'm stealing another thief's potential income? I'm objecting to this ever-widening definition of theft to "whatever I think of as theft". I recently heard an interesting lie: "words don't have definitions, they have usages". The idea was to counter all these semantic-seeming battles. The problem is that words most certainly do have definitions, and if you oppose what a word means (like theft) that doesn't mean you get to oppose others' meanings of that word automatically.
Taxation is NOT theft. If you think it's wrong, find better reasons to think it's wrong than to use a word with a very clear definition that doesn't include taxation.
Here's some citations for you on the topic:
https://taxjustice.net/faq/is-taxation-theft/
https://www.fastcompany.com/90636996/taxation-isnt-theft-but-avoiding-taxes-is
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/01/why-taxation-is-neither-theft-nor-slavery
You are committing what is called an oversimplification fallacy. I'm assuming you're an anarchist? If not, how is it very different, as you are opposing government's right to run themselves just like an anarchist (do you see what an example of an oversimplification fallacy is?). If so, please understand that arguing definitions is not how you will convince the 99% of the world who think anarchism is nothing but puerile stupidity that it isn't.
That said, you seem to have ignored half my point, that piracy isn't theft. Or are you saying you think it is, as well? Was it theft before it was illegal?
Better than trying to pretend taxation is theft, you should probably just affirmatively attack taxation with real reasons.
Excuse you? This was in response to "it's easy to conclude what you're shoving down your throat". What exactly should a person respond in that case? I gave you the facts, precisely.
I feel the moral case for veganism colors every other argument, so I cut that one out at the pass.
Also, true colors showed; first ad hominem came out. Reported and blocked
Dead cow, from a local farm, fed local waste grains. Dead chicken, grown by my neighbor, allowed to eat grass feed would otherwise get burned. I'd eat eggs galore, but I'm allergic. As much seafood as I can handle because it's plentiful around here. Overflow venison when I can because it absolutely has to die whether it's eaten or not.
Also, the best local produce money can by, fertilized buy their manure. Yes, I eat vegetables that are grown with the help of animal shit. Lovely, smelly, animal shit.
Oh I know exactly what I'm shoving down my throat, and have no weird queasy fear about talking about where it came from or what it took to get there. More importantly, I know what I'm eating is good for me and good for the environment.
If you had to choose between being vegan and the environment going to shit, or eating meat and the environment getting figured out, which would you pick?
I find a lot of vegans have a really inaccurate view of non-vegans wrt eating meat. It's not that we selfishly choose to eat meat despite feeling animals dying is a bad thing. It's that we don't think it's a bad thing that animals die in a farm for food.
And if you realize that, you might find you have things in common with non-vegans. I fight for free-range laws, anti-farm-cruelty laws, etc. I just think you're morally in the wrong about everyone stopping eating meat. Oddly, a lot of us non-vegans see vegans to be selfish. But we try not to use that to be uncivil towards them.
One thing many vegans don't get about non-vegans is that we're frustrated at veganism for the same "reasonable if not valid" reasons. I've had some vegan family/friends have serious health issues directly related to their refusal to eat meat. Yes, there's a lot to that, and it usually spawns from people easily prone to PTSD being made to watch some disgusting documentary about the meat packing industry and going full starvation on and off until all their hair fell out.
It's kinda like the Catholic Church. There's SO FEW pedophiles in the Catholic Church, but for anyone who has been touched by that, the Church itself is tainted far worse than the facts allow.
Is that how you respond to a good-faith conversation by someone who has researched this?
Those independent experts corroborate my own experience, the environmental exports I've had the opportunity to befriend, etc. Further, if you look carefully, the environmental numbers that some vegans like to use actually work against them if taken in an unbiased light.
But that's ok, you won because you drew a picture with me having a silly face and you having a chad face :)
EDIT: Flummery to lemmy's recent context BS. I realized that you replied to one of my only comments that didn't include citations, so I backed off on the "how you respond to facts and evidence".
EDIT2: Is anyone else experiencing what I am? When you look at a context, you can't see its parent post anymore. When you reply to something, the link for the original post seems to be overwritten by the link to your reply (with no context of the previous post). I end up having to load the post and ctrl-f search for the damn comment I intended to reply to
If you're using definitions of a word that can not effectively differentiate between two very distinct things, you're using the wrong definition or the wrong word.
Taxation is not theft. Piracy is not theft. Using definitions of theft that include them triggers George Orwell alarms in anyone who knows better.
You do realizing that explaining why will not cause them to let you keep the $100k. They WILL seize it, regardless of your reasons. They take note of those reasons you give so they can use that against you in a court of law, however.
The possession of the money is treated as probable cause. The police are not tasked with finding the ultimate truth of things, just acting on probable cause.
So you're on the road with $10,000 in cash. The police find out. You tell them the true reason. They write it down, then seize the money because it was suspicious to you to carry $10,000 in cash.
Then, of course, you can go petition to get the money back. At which time, you have to prove by a preponderance of evidence (the same bar as if you were suing them for damages) to get the money back.
The point is, that's not enough. You have to prove it in a court of law. Which, for $100,000, might cost most of that $100,000 and years of time.
There have been some clear-cut seizure cases where the legitimacy of the money was obvious and it was either not worth the legal fees to clear up or simply insane to clear up. We are a "reasonable doubt" country for a reason, and if you can't prove someone came about their money illegally, you shouldn't be stealing it from them.
1/6
If you're interested, please read my reply to someone else here. Subsidies are not direct to ranchers or meat costs, and applying them to meat retail prices is disingenuous. Many subsidies are actually paid by the farm industry, even ranchers (only benefitting Big Ag), and so actually increase meat prices
I buy meat from a butcher, from a ranch that provides most of its own feed in grass and buys the rest cash (I use feed for my example because feed subsidies are one of the biggest... unfortunately, those go to a small number of megacorporations only). They benefit from zero subsidies, but have to pay for some of those subsidies whenever they sell beef. I pay within $1/lb of Grocery Store prices.
Of course money is ultimately zero sum in its way, but it's arguably grains and vegetables that might take some of the heat if those subsidies were removed. Why? 44% of farmer income is feed subsidies: the government buying grain that is often grown in fields that won't grow anything else anyway. This keeps grain costs down (for obvious reasons) but also fills farmer margins so they aren't forced to raise prices on other crops.
So yeah, 1/6 is true, and 100% unusable data.
My recent favorite here. This one might be a stumper for people trying to solve it.
You get shot for getting too handsy, especially with the sensitive fat guy. Or just looking at the art. Or, hell, when someone asks you to get them a drink from the bar. But then you get to try to shoot people for returning the wrong book. So it's all good.