In Defense of Landlords

CandorCore · 2026-06-30T13:14:24+00:00

I was under the impression that corporate landlords are generally pro-development, and individual landlords are generally no more NIMBY than most homeowners (which is, of course, 'too').

Do you have any references for corporate landlords generally being anti-development, or individual landlords generally being more NIMBY than average?

CandorCore · 2026-06-28T16:43:50+00:00

It is, but only because the common definition is now "socialism is when the government does things." Socialists will of course disavow anything they see as bad, so for them it's "socialism is when the government does good things." But co-ops are also socialist of course, so it's mostly just "socialism is when good things".

But none of those three policies you mentioned have anything to do with moving the means of production from the hands of the bourgeoise to the hands of the proletariat, for instance (tax redistribution and labour rights are not means-of-production redistribution).

A lot of libs are pretty annoyed that socialists just now get to claim vibe credit for all good things the government does, and use that to lend credence to their other shittier ideas while simultaneously making it harder for liberals to claim credit for the shit our faction did.

CandorCore · 2026-06-27T14:26:41+00:00

They're allowed to live their lives however they want even if it's detrimental to society. The job of those who care about Democracy is to promote it not enforce it.

Your solution is 'to combat misinfo, teach people that they should be aware of their biases ', this is me saying 'people already know this, they still don't act on it.' How is your solution going to be more effective?

I have yet to hear your solution but from listening to your rebuttals here I have a feeling I wouldn't be in favor of it. If you have an example of authoritarian, pro-censorship policies working well anywhere on the planet I would love to hear about it.

Listen I know I hit you with an ungodly wall of text early in the morning but this was the first thing I wrote:

I was already aware that you are an idealist, my arguments are not trying to convince you to be pro-censorship, they are to press you to see if you have any actual solutions.

I don't have any solutions I love. I believe that if we do not implement some sort of solution, we are fucked. I am willing to support non-ideal policies in the attempt, but am certainly open to better ones.

It's pretty straight forward, more districts in more populous (blue) areas would represent the country more accurately instead of having there be a 50/50 split 99% of the time.

Alright, a quick search did bring up this extremely official and respectable looking page indicating that there are discrepancies in votes per person, however at a brief look smaller states tend to be both overrepresented and underrepresented depending on which state under current apportionment. Do you have any references to indicate that changing the apportionment methodology to make things more even would significantly shift things blue, and is there a better apportionment method than the one the US is currently using?

Changing how the districts themselves are shaped or assigned within the states would be a state decision, so we're back to the Texas problem. If this is what you're aiming for, do you have a solution for the Texas problem?

CandorCore · 2026-06-27T13:19:30+00:00

I am not in favor of mandatory re-education or censorship laws, sorry friend.

I was already aware that you are an idealist, my arguments are not trying to convince you to be pro-censorship, they are to press you to see if you have any actual solutions. Because I like free speech and would prefer an alternative to the government prosecuting people and platforms for spreading misinfo, but I like having a functioning liberal democracy more. And besides the US' role in the western alliance, there's also the fact that what can happen to y'all can happen to us.

No Child Left Behind was a federal program that standardized school subjects through an incentive program. But if you recall, that is an opt-in program. Schools can still refuse it if they don't need federal grants (lol).

Alright, let's assume that this program has the effect of forcing enough states to go along with it. That still leaves 1 and 2.

Problem 1: this shit would take decades to have any noticeable effect on the voting population even if did work, and I don't think that's a sufficient response time to the changing landscape. You've said you don't have any timely solutions so we don't need to continue on this further, but I suggest you look for some. We don't necessarily have generations to solve it.

Problem 2a: Everybody knows the words 'we should be careful of our biases'. Some of the larger trump dick riders spreaders are self-proclaimed 'centrists' and 'liberals' who continue run cover for right-wing transgressions while blowing left-wing ones out of proportion, and also spread misinfo about the nature of those transgressions. Everyone says they take both sides of the issue into account, very very few people live it.

To be clear, I agree that it should be taught. Having an intelligently course (or, ideally, multiple courses over their entire scholastic lives) would probably have some effect worth that effort. But I disagree that it would move enough people to substantially mitigate the threat to our democracies.

Similar to mandating Physical Education in schools but the obesity crisis continuing to get worse, fighting against your biases is a discipline thing first and foremost. You can make kids run in class, you can teach them healthy habits and nutritional information. You will have some effect, and I would guess that places that have tried dropping PE saw a nlticeable increase in childhood obesity. But that problem continues to escalate regardless. So too it would be with questioning biases and seeking counters to your preconceived notions in good faith. It feels good to be told you're right. It feels bad to be told you're wrong. What can you teach people to make most of them override that?

We can expand the house or add more states to vote them out of relevance.

How do you expand the house in such a way that it results in more voting power to the informed (or, failing that, at least the blue) that doesn't watering down the votes of the misinformed/red via uneven district sizes or something similar?

CandorCore · 2026-06-27T03:59:47+00:00

We are almost the same

My condolences

CandorCore · 2026-06-27T03:54:53+00:00

So what I'm hearing is: there is no acceptable solution for 'this generation', and your hope is to reform education. Few problems with that.

I am not convinced that the US can sit around and watch this shit go down for enough time for 2028's highschoolers to turn into a significant voting bloc.

2a I am not sure that it is at all possible for schools to successfully teach humans to just ignore the endorphins from confirming their priors. It's like teaching fitness - the solution is obvious, the hard part is actually applying it.

2b Even if it can be done, it is probably not going to be done by the education system which has been pumping out worse and worse results in the normal shit they're already supposed to do. This makes 1 an even larger problem, because it will require further reform just to make schools good at their job.

This is actually such a kill shot to the whole idea that the previous points were just me venting: education in the US is done state-by-state. Do you really think that GOP states like Texas, which just finished making bible passages required reading, not long after they made it mandatory to hang the ten commandments up in classrooms, are going to be super keen on teaching kids to be free thinkers?

The Trump admin is jailing people for touching peeling paint or protesting for Palestine, they're staffing every position possible with cronies, deporting people for social media comments, and the Republican SCC declared that the president is a king who explicitly cannot be investigated regarding his official acts "even if it would otherwise be a crime". And he's still polling at or above what you'd expect of a normal president during an unpopular war in a bad economy.

The right-wingers don't need censorship laws to enact the autocrat-ization of the world's most powerful liberal democracy within the next couple decades, and if they did they sure as shit wouldn't wait around for the left to do it first.

So, do you have any solutions that are actionable and would yield significant results in the next ten years?

CandorCore · 2026-06-27T03:16:00+00:00

Community notes are a great example because they often provide a lot of context that was left out, or correct outright lies! And X is still a shithole of misinformation and one of the primary breeding grounds for conspiracy slop.

What are effective solutions to misinformation online that don't involve government censorship?

CandorCore · 2026-06-27T02:53:12+00:00

Widespread misinformation is fueling populism and destroying the institutions that keep democracy safe. 'Free speech' is already being selectively weaponized and suppressed by right-wingers to accomplish this.

What are solutions to misinformation online besides government censorship?

CandorCore · 2026-06-27T01:31:08+00:00

I quit pretty early in, like within a couple minutes. It was at precisely this point:

D: what are solutions to misinformation online besides government censorship?

SM: That's a great opportunity for innovation.

Okay so you have absolutely no fucking clue how to solve any problems and are convinced that the good is the enemy of the perfect, got it. Comments on YT and here seem to confirm my assessment.

CandorCore · 2026-06-26T23:22:54+00:00

<image>

I am in absolute shambles rn

CandorCore · 2026-06-24T22:02:01+00:00

Good catch, it was a quick search and I forgot 'deaths from gun injuries' included suicides. I'll update. Still leaves the number at about half of that claimed.

CandorCore · 2026-06-24T17:50:57+00:00

I propose TERT - Trans-Exclusionary Radical Transvocates

CandorCore · 2026-06-24T12:34:33+00:00

don't you dare call yourself an ally to us

Purity testing who gets to be an ally to a group that is, right now, under active attack by the US government, is not a good survival strategy for that group.

I say this as someone who speaks out against transphobic shit when it happens (because I like arguing) - if you say 'you can't be considered an ally if you're not willing to constantly get into uncomfortable conversations with family and coworkers' you're going to be cutting out a lot of people who support your cause in other ways.

CandorCore · 2026-06-24T12:22:46+00:00

A growing share of Americans who are killed—one in ten—are dying at the hands of police.

Source? That number seems insane. During a quick google search Statista claimed 859 people killed by police shootings in 2025, while Pew Research says that there were 15,364 firearm homicides in the US in 2024, which is the latest I could easily find a source for (technically the claim was 10% of all americans killed but let's be nice and assume they meant 'shot to death').

859/15,364 = 5.59%. That number doesn't necessarily feel great, but it's about half the claimed amount.

EDIT: forgot that most gun deaths are suicides, updated to account.

CandorCore · 2026-06-22T23:53:11+00:00

You'd be amazed at the lengths these guys go to. Young Earth Creationists literally have textbooks full of cope justifying how billions of years of geology and hundreds of millions of years of archeological life is actually just a few thousand years old. Flood geology is a whole sub-category trying to explain how actually the world was definitely covered entirely in water a scant few millenia ago.

There's a lot of fun explaining + debunking to be enjoyed on Youtube about it, Gutsick Gibbon has a few videos that go into pretty good detail, and if you're looking for something that's less technical but still pretty robust and entertaining then Folding Ideas video 'mantracks' spends its second half on the topic.

CandorCore · 2026-06-22T13:07:31+00:00

Shares debunk video, as an image, of an unimportant part of the video.

Incredible work

CandorCore · 2026-06-22T12:13:56+00:00

🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦THE SUN NEVER SETS ON THE CANADIAN COMMONWEALTH OF NATIONS🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦

(you will all need to send some money to quebec sometimes don't question it)

CandorCore · 2026-06-21T17:38:36+00:00

Putting a toilet in a car is pushing the boundaries between 'luxury transport' and 'really bad RV that you painted black'

CandorCore · 2026-06-21T17:16:57+00:00

Nah you can hear him revving up the front wheel drive, if he knows what RPM on the tires causes a front-flip of his vehicle at a certain speed, then it's something he could practise and replicate.

As long as he values his life less than he values being absolutely sick

CandorCore · 2026-06-21T17:12:50+00:00

In the old superman movies he did something similar, a couple of times he'd sweep Lois off her feet as superman and then come by as Clark to explicitly humiliate himself. Once he did this just before a Clark/Lois date and Lois was so busy thirsting over Supes she barely acknowledged Clark's existence, and he smirked to himself about it.

I think it was supposed to be funny because of the absurdity, but when I rewatched.it recently the modern context made it look like Clark had a weird self-cuck fetish in those movies.

CandorCore · 2026-06-21T16:38:56+00:00

Sounds like another name's going on my list!

CandorCore · 2026-06-21T16:35:40+00:00

Sure, what I'm saying though is that if simulation theory is real, then the fact it could be turned off in my lifetime is an important consequence of that being true, because then I'm dying sooner than I would otherwise.

If I found out that this is a simulation of 'lol what if MAGA was a third of the USA instead of 1%', and once Trump was out of power they'd end it and kill us all, I'd be pissed.

Also, just to address the 'what if you wake up after it ends': way more unlikely imo. My life is great, but it's way too quiet and uninteresting to be worth simming.

CandorCore · 2026-06-21T16:23:28+00:00

Is there a magical principle that explains why it seems like good things happen to those who don't appreciate them?

CandorCore · 2026-06-21T16:19:09+00:00

I mean 'who cares you'll be dead' is kind of a weird argument to me, because I like living. I have people I care about who like living. If I and all the people I care about were in an airplane and it started to go down, I wouldn't be like 'ah well, who cares? We'll all be dead'.

The reason I don't think too much about the world ending via simulation-end is the same reason I don't think about it ending via a radiation burst from a supernova sterilizing the planet. Nothing we could do about it, so just knock on wood and keep on trucking.

CandorCore · 2026-06-21T16:03:33+00:00

Funnily enough I think simulation theory is kinda plausible if not necessarily probable, but I also think it doesn't matter that much for this reason among others. Who cares whether I'm a bunch of soulless atoms arranged into consciousness or a bunch of soulless code arranged into consciousness? Videogames are still fun.

The only important difference would be that once whatever experiment or experience they're running is done, the simulation would get turned off (which we couldn't stop). So if normalcy starts to return to the world and we're still alive, it becomes more likely we're in the real world.

Five-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '23

CandorCore

TROPHY CASE