@surreality said in Covid-19 Gallows Humor:
@Aria I actually can't even articulate the level of <internal screaming> that first half pic inspires.
I don't know about you, but I want to toss them a pair of scissors and tell them to get to fuckin work if they want their hair cut so bad.
@Ganymede said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
So long as we understand what normal people consider to be an acceptable definition, why does it matter that unreasonable people will attempt to subvert its meaning?
It's important to acknowledge that certain terms can be poisoned by their use as dogwhistles. Yes, people can innocently describe someone as sleepy-eyed or well-spoken or whatever, but I will not assume a person who says such things isn't being racist without evidence, nor ask anyone to assume the same of me. If I do not want to be lumped in with those people, then I have a responsibility to not adopt their language; a much greater responsibility than my audience has to guess at my intent.
@Rinel said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Atheist internet leftists seem to think they're the majority of the movement, which is kind of adorable in that exasperating, "you've never actually done anything outside of Twitter, have you" sort of way.
It's a natural result of insular community, I think. Like, take Star Wars fans. Most people who say they're fans mean they like the bits with the laser swords and the acrobatics but they call the cloners Q-tip Aliens because they don't care to learn whatever made-up word the aliens are called; but True Fans(c) who read the EU stuff and who learn Max Rebo's backstory and shit get together in groups and reinforce their fandom to the point of obsession, until they forget that it is possible to like Star Wars without getting mad about whether we'll ever see Hugo Weaving play Talon Karrde.
@Admiral said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@TNP I don't consider the Catholic Church a hategroup. But that's just me.
Maybe I'm a one-issue voter for thinking so, but as far as I'm concerned, nothing the Catholic Church has ever accomplished will ever matter in the face of their continued and willful coverup of serial pedophilia. If they ever decide 'hey, maybe priests who rape children should not continue to be priests and should go to jail or something,' then I will revise my opinion of their contributions to society; but I do not expect them to ever meet that condition.
@Kestrel said in Dead Celebrities 2020:
Sam Lloyd, AKA Ted, the sad-sack lawyer from Scrubs. Also a really good singer.
Died of an inoperable brain tumour, not coronavirus.
No! Absolutely not! He is not allowed to die or be ill or ever have bad things happen to him!
@Kestrel said in Covid-19 Gallows Humor:
It wasn't even very good gaslighting. He can surely come up with better lies than that.
The lies aren't for us. They're not really even for his base. They're for himself, so they don't need to be good.
@Quinn Terribly sorry for your loss. If it's not prying to ask, do you feel someone around him wasn't taking it seriously, or that he wasn't? I wonder because I live in a town not taking it seriously at all, and it scares the hell out of me.
@egg said in General Video Game Thread:
@Derp Man, people are beating this game so fast! I got it on release day and I'm still only about halfway through. Is it absurd to be worried about spoilers for a game I have played countless times since 1998? Lol.
Uh, if you're talking about FF7R, then let's just say yes, be very worried about spoilers.
I'm... I don't know, probably eleven. It's summer vacation and we're at Big Surf, the (nearest) local water park. Entire geological eras have passed in the time I've been waiting in line to go down the big corkscrew slide. I still remember the dinosaurs, but not how they sounded.
But it's my turn, finally. I'm sitting on the little platform you launch yourself from, and I'm doing a thing I saw the big kids doing, where you grip the sides of the platform with your hands and slide your body back and forth. I don't know why they do it, but it reminds me of lining up a pool cue, so I think maybe it's to make you go faster down the slide or something. That sounds scary and fun, so I mimic it.
I mimic it too enthusiastically. I shoot myself down the wet, slippery, plastic canal at least two seconds sooner than I should have, and the lifeguard squawks an indignant, "Hey!" Mortified, I piston my arms out to the sides to catch the sides of the slide and I do, arresting my motion immediately. Wanting to make my mistake right, I plant my heels against the sides of the slide and start chimney-rock climbing my way back up it. The lifeguard, exasperated, yells, "Don't climb back up, just go!"
The speed and the spiral are no longer fun. The water does not cool my scorching cheeks. I spend the entire slide down thinking, "Please don't let the lifeguard at the bottom yell at me."
I could have saved that prayer.
But I'm eleven (or however young I actually was), so I bounce back. I don't ride the corkscrew slide again, though.
@Jennkryst said in Crossing Animals!:
Still trying to get my character JUUUUUUUST RIGHT before I start playing...
But that's not a mummy.
@Auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
I think the unfortunate thing is that quarantine is still 'novel' to a lot of people and seen as a fun-thing-to-do.
I don't drink, but I'm learning a lot of recipes for quarantinis.
@RightMeow said in Crossing Animals!:
What is animal crossing?
It's a text-based puzzle game where you try to figure out why animals other than chickens were on one side of the road but are now on the other. The answers are randomized each playthrough, so it's not as easy to cheat as you might think.
@RightMeow said in Post-Covid 19 world:
I'm not going to talk on the society/political systems. I am curious about the movie industry though, specifically movie theaters. With movies going straight to streaming for $20 (approximately) a pop. It shows releases can come to the person's home. People now can purchase surround sound that is as good (or better) than theaters. They can order big screen tvs. They have their own snacks. --- My family and I were talking about this the other day. - What kind of (if any) impact you think this is going to hit in that industry?
Movie theaters are already on the way out, at least in my town. I don't think they'll survive this.
@Jennkryst said in General Video Game Thread:
Outsourcing the name of my Animal Crossing island, halp.
Irem, obviously.
@Ganymede said in Landlord Bitching:
I can appreciate a spot of idealism, but I draw the line with unsupported suppositions. I am willing to go out on a limb and say that you, like the vast majority of people here, have no idea of what it is like to live in a non-capitalist country. We should talk a little about places like China.
Then don't do it the way China does. Do I really need to say that? Do I really need to say that if there already exists a shittier alternative to a bad system, then don't emulate the shittier alternative?
Below security needs are physiological needs.
Shelter from the elements is a physiological need.
I presume you do not oppose the idea that someone's income must go to farmers.
Directly? Yeah, I do. I think food, water, housing, and medicine should all be guaranteed by the government. I suppose we can quibble about whether paying taxes counts as giving income to farmers if you think that's a useful conversation to have, but for-profit production of food is just as bad as for-profit rental of homes.
Joe Murphy is probably going to die homeless, but it isn't because people have not tried to give him free housing.
I don't know who Joe Murphy is and cannot comment.
I know several people without homes at the moment, and while I might want to open my house to them my partner would likely object because she doesn't know them and may be concerned for our kids' safety.
I am confused to why you bring this up. Do you think I can't tell the difference between protecting your family from people who are apparently dangerous versus just not letting people live because they don't give you enough money? If that's the case, please let me know, so I can stop wasting my time having a good faith conversation with someone who apparently thinks I'm an imbecile.
But she's a landlord, right? So she has to be a piece of shit, if you are to be believed.
I don't care about the color of your client's soul or whether she is presumably going to Heaven when she dies. I care about her participation in an inherently predatory system. If she's doing the best she can within that system, then sure, laud her for her accomplishments, but she still bears responsibility for being part of a system that holds people hostage, demanding their income under threat of death.
There is literally nothing in the world stopping us from giving every living human the relative comfort and dignity of a home except for the murderous greed that tells us our landlords should have the power of life and death over us unless we tithe to their coffers.
Actually, there is something that stops the people from doing this in the United States: the U.S. Constitution. Incorporated into that document is the Bill of Rights, which guarantees certain fundamental rights against encroachment by the federal government. The Fourteenth Amendment extends those rights to the states, if those states did not already incorporate similar rights into their state constitution. Ultimately, the people through their government cannot simply take someone else's property and give it to another; not without just compensation, at least.
There is no difference between what I said and what you just said. You just reframed it so it sounds like murderous greed is okay as long as we build a government around murderous greed, which is not a great argument.
In order to pay that compensation, a government needs money. Presumably, it gets that money through taxes; however, the federal government could feasibly just print more and more until it has enough to buy up every parcel of vacant land and every empty residence in the country. One would simply have to convince the Federal Reserve and the other members of Congress of the wisdom of the solution.
Or the government could exercise eminent domain, seize all the land currently being denied to the people on the basis of profit, and dole it out. The existing American government has that power, never mind the utopian government I imagine. It does not exercise that power because it thinks money is better than people.
My mouth drops a little because of your presumption that millions of people die of exposure every year because of landlords in the United States. It isn't because of systemic racism, sexism, or genderism; it isn't because of familial or collective hatred for the mentally ill or non-dangerous deviance; and it isn't because of political cowardice, misguided priorities in governance, or simply societal indifference to the plight of others.
bear_necessities asked me why I said "Fuck landlords." They did not ask me about the general evils of racism, misogyny, ableism, and capitalism.
No, people are dying because of landlords, folks.
Yes. Systems of power can only hurt you when human agents of those systems of power participate in and enforce them, because without those human agents, a system of power is just an idea in someone's head. Landlords are accountable for their actions, just as we all are.
@bear_necessities said in Landlord Bitching:
That is not what I asked. I asked what is the alternative to renting (and/or buying) a home.
That question does not make sense to me except in the context of accepting that the default is sacrificing the value of your labor to be able to live, which I do not accept. That is an artificial construct society put in place. It can be taken out of place and thrown on the scrap heap where it belongs.
What you envision is basically a utopia.
Yes. And if the option is to envision a society where we kill people for not being financially lucrative enough to our corporate overlords, then I will continue to defend utopia over the murderous regime currently in place.
I have a home that I rent to a military veteran.
Snipping most of this because everything I said about Ganymede's client applies here too.
He's a good person and has a family and deserves a place to live that isn't going to cost him an arm and a leg.
Quibble: He deserves a place to live without any cost at all, and he deserves that whether he's a good or bad person.
His rent pays the mortgage and I'm building equity in a house that I hope will someday pay for my children's education.
And equity is why I have little to no patience for people who claim being a landlord is so onerous, since even in your case which you seem to believe undercuts my point, you can simultaneously operate at a financial loss while generating hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit.
So while it would be nice and wonderful and indeed idealistic if everyone in America could be freely given a home, it is not realistic.
If you want to cleave to the reality of the situation, then you bear even more responsibility for your participation in the exploitative system of land rental than I assign you, because that is the reality of the situation.
Saying "fuck landlords" as a blanket statement is misguided, it discounts people who are trying their best and who are trying to do a decent job.
No, it refuses to let people present passive violence as somehow not being a form of violence from which people die regardless of the intentions of people who are trying their best.
Finding humor in people who's livelihoods are being destroyed by this because they are landlords sucks and I honestly don't know what was funny about the original post.
I'm uncertain whether this is addressed to me specifically or the conversation in general, so just in case, let me assure you I find nothing funny about any of this, and I hope the anger in my language makes it clear that I don't think any of this is funny. None of it is.
These are actual serious problems that can't be fixed by saying "fuck landlords, everyone deserves a house for free".
For the record, I never said my angry post on a tiny internet forum is a solution. It is an expression of my anger, nothing more. I wonder if I should even bother explaining what my solutions would be, since I get a powerful feeling that my attitude of "human life > money" is already too radical for the prevailing environment, which means my solutions to support that attitude would probably be heresy dismissed with even more bitter sarcasm.
@bear_necessities said in Covid-19 Gallows Humor:
@GreenFlashlight why fuck landlords?
I oppose the idea that anyone's income must go to someone who provides me something you will die without, something literally forming the foundation of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. I think it is outright criminal that there are more empty houses in America than there are homeless people (and this might be true worldwide as well; I forget), because it means that the body count of every person in this country who has ever died of exposure is less horrific to landlords than the idea of people not paying them for the privilege of not dying. Every person who dies homeless was murdered by the people who put profit over the sanctity of human life.
Less pressingly but just as infuriatingly, I do not believe landlords actually provide a good or service in return for the rent they are paid, because the costs of business are funded one hundred percent by the rent tenants pay, which means the only thing a landlord does to earn a check is come unclog your sink as part of you paying I'm guessing a thousand bucks a month, or maybe picks up a phone to call someone else to fix your problem and act as a middleman who for some reason deserves half your income in perpetuity.
What exactly is the alternative?
Guaranteed housing. Just give people houses. I know that's hard to imagine under capitalism, but seriously, the only thing stopping us from letting people live in houses is the fact that we want our fellows to die if they don't make enough money to please our overlords. There is literally nothing in the world stopping us from giving every living human the relative comfort and dignity of a home except for the murderous greed that tells us our landlords should have the power of life and death over us unless we tithe to their coffers.
You ask what the alternative is to letting millions of people die of exposure every year, and my mouth drops open a little bit because I can't for my life imagine why you think that is an unavoidable outcome rather than one cultivated by greedy fuckwits who think that owning land is more important than human life.
EDIT: I just noticed the above complaint, and begrudgingly agree that this is not the thread to discuss landlords. I don't know how to spoiler tag this post, so I will leave it here as my answer, but I will not reply further in this thread to questions about my stance on landlords.
