pluralismnow.bsky.social
Celebrating all of America's diversity - from Evangelicals to Communists. Let's build a better world before a worse world builds itself. Disagreement makes us stronger, not weaker. Power is constrained by the little piece of us in consensus.
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I just don't think that health insurance CEOs are particularly responsible for murdering anyone
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So how is it artificial then? This feels like a definition debate that doesn't really matter - we seem to agree on the core issues here
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I mean...yeah, and then you look at the real dollar costs of various products over time and they've just gone down over the long run, from clothing to food to medicines to gas to diamonds
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How is that insurance companies' fault?
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Scarcity will always exist, so yes. But with a profit margin of 3.3% - how much profit-seeking scarcity is there, and how much is 'natural', in your eyes?
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To the tune of...3.3%
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Why? If your thesis were true, then wouldn't profit margins be significantly higher than e.g. grocery stores or construction?
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3.3% profit margins.
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And if you think 3.3% profit and 11% administrative overhead is murder, wait until you see how much university revenue is spent on instruction...
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bsky.app/profile/plur...
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How do we tell if scarcity is being 'manufactured' vs whether or not? Looking at e.g. health insurance profit margins over time, they're at a low ebb - and even at their peak it was only at 5.5%
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So tired of leftists blaming centrists for Republicans winning elections
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Because we have to find a way to rebuild civil society and democrats happen to be the more ethically privledged party at the current time
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I certianly don't make that argument, and I think it comes from a place of good faith when people do make it.
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I'm not really concerned with excusing behavior, just understanding the role that people individually played as accurately as possible.
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To matter to whom? As long as there are still Palestinians and Ukrainians and Taiwanese and South Koreans there is still time.
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That's what the liberal international order is - a concensus with the EU, NAFTA, South America (minus venezuela and cuba), Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, the Phillipines, Vietnam, and many other nations that is protected by the US defense umbrella.
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It gets really complicated when geopolitical trust is on the line in Europe and Taiwan. I agree that is what the moral thing for the US to do is, but I'm not sure if the geopolitical risks of abandoning a treaty ally over a minority position domestically is worth it.
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Yet genocides still happen with disturbing regularity, and oftentimes multiple forces in the world at a time require the same resources to stop from committing atrocities.
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Blocking people doesn't achieve anything. We need to actually engage in good faith realizing that everyone has as rich an understanding of the world as we do.
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This isn't fair - Biden absolutely could have done more to pressure Israel if he believed it was in the best interests of America and had a broader concensus to act.
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This is not to say that doing so isn't worth it in and of itself - it's that as president you have a lot of different interests pulling you different directions.
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Beyond that, there is a broader context which has to be accepted - a rise of challenges to the American alliance structure for which America isunderz-prepared and barely trusted to maintain treaty obligations. Israel is a treaty ally. Abandoning them would have downstream effects!
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I don't think the president of the united states has the practical ability to do that without more societal support than Biden had and without a broader concensus in the foreign policy establishment than existed. Yes, Biden could have moved the ball in the right direction. But he isn't a King.
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I think the Israelis are absolutely committing a genocide in Gaza, though it's a fairly decentralized genocide where there is internal disagreement within the IDF and various institutions about how far to go. Biden has some moral complicity in this, but far less than total responsibility.
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I think that the nazis acted very differently than other socialists, but so did the khmer rouge - I think the ideology of the nazis is a direct descendant of Marx and Engels.
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Hi! Liberal here! I'd love to engage with anyone about my ideology/beliefs - I think they're quite thought through!