Objection
@Objection@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 15 hours ago:
You’re just attacking me, not my argument
No, I’m pretty clearly attacking your argument. Your argument rests on this assumption that if allowing denial of service based on race only affects minorities <5% of the population, that that makes it acceptable somehow. It’s a horrible position but the fact that it reflects very poorly on you to voice it is beside the point.
You skipped the whole counter argument (comparing to scabs and unions) that this lacks the social structure to support that behavior. If you tried to open a business that wasn’t racist then the racist people would come and threaten you, this isn’t happening with the Uber situation.
Regardless, the Civil Rights Act applies to all businesses. It doesn’t matter if you think one particular business model makes the Civil Rights Act unnecessary - it is still the law. And opening up exceptions to it would set a dangerous precedent.
The thing is that Uber is not performing any discrimination, they are enabling other people to discriminate against each other and attempting to still provide service through it. Claiming that Uber is discriminating is functionally not true.
It doesn’t matter either way. “Discriminating” and “enabling discrimination” are both illegal. I have no idea why you’re so attached to this legal technicality of “contractors” that Uber uses to skirt labor laws, because it doesn’t even change anything here.
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 21 hours ago:
The scale at which you would have to be a minority for this to impact you significantly is somewhere in the 1-5% range
OK, so you need to reach a threshold of 5% of the population before you’re allowed to have rights, got it.
with the assumption that the other 95-99% are opposed to you.
That assumption isn’t actually necessary.
Let’s say there’s a small town where 65% are non-racist (or less racist) whites, 30% are racist whites, and 5% are black. If your diner decides to serve that 5%, the 30% of racists will refuse to eat there, and you’ll end up losing a lot of customers. So, rather than “95-99%” needing to be opposed to you, it only needs to be the case that your population is outnumbered by the people who hate you - which is the case for many minority groups in many places in the country.
A diner not serving black people is impactful because a handful of people are the business owners and are effectively gating you out.
That’s not really true. If if was just a matter of a handful of business owners being racists, then those racist businesses would be out-competed by non-racist businesses that appeal to everyone. The problem was wider and more systemic, being welcoming to everyone would cause racists to boycott the business, so even if a business owner wasn’t racist themselves, they would be incentivized to ban the people who the racists hated.
This also goes both ways and is potentially international, Japanese could choose not to serve non-Japanese, a black person could choose not to serve white people for comfort or security.
You’re fundamentally not understanding why Uber allowing people to make this decision is not the same as 1960’s segregation.
Because it isn’t! The scenario you described is literally the exact sort of thing the Civil Rights Act exists to stop!
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 21 hours ago:
So long as the option goes both ways this only hurts the people who opt into the program, not everyone else. The only way this could hurt others would be if those who choose to opt in (as in they only want a certain thing) get priority in the scheduling or if you live somewhere where you are the overwhelming minority.
So the only way it could hurt anyone is if they’re a minority. Yes, that’s exactly why we have the Civil Rights Act and why what you’re suggesting is illegal.
In the second example, if you are still living in a sun down town then getting Uber rides is probably not your biggest problem.
Next you’re going to tell me that black people in racist towns should just eat at home if restaurants don’t want to serve them. And if the bus driver makes you sit at the back of the bus, just drive a car.
Even now, Uber drivers are independent contractors
This is a bullshit legal category that exists primarily to exploit loopholes, but even that does not give anyone the right to discriminate and violate the Civil Rights Act.
If the driver pulls up and thinks you’re sketchy they can cancel the ride, there is no obligation.
Strictly speaking, if a driver cancelled every ride that a black person booked, they could be sued for it, although such a suit would be very difficult in practice because you’d have to have enough records of that driver (or the company, if that was the target of the suit) to show a consistent bias.
This is the case in every business. Denial of service based on protected classes is illegal.
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 22 hours ago:
So you disagree with the Civil Rights Act then? Because one of the things it did was force businesses to serve customers, regardless of things like race or sex. And before we had it, there where large parts of the South where black people would be refused service, and if someone did serve them, they’d lose a bunch of white customers.
That’s the very good reason why it’s “not already an option.”
Neither drivers nor Uber have the right, or should have the right, to refuse service based on categories protected in the Civil Rights Act.
- Comment on Barack Obama is the youngest living former or active president 4 days ago:
Yeah like both Trump and Biden won in big competitive primaries with a lot of candidates younger than them. I think part of the reason we have so many old politicians is that young candidates feel more like positively asserting the future of their party, and nobody really likes the futures they’re asserting. Without that vision, the status quo wins out by default.
- Comment on Google's AI Sent an Armed Man to Steal a Robot Body for It to Inhabit, Then Encouraged Him to Kill Himself, Lawsuit Alleges. Google said in response that "unfortunately AI models are not perfect." 5 days ago:
This is such an individualist framing.
- Comment on I know. Somehow, I've always known. 1 week ago:
Yeah it turns out cozying up to evil powerful people can advance your personal position more than fighting against them, who knew?
Say what you will about Luke and accidental incest, but he’s not in the files, I’ll tell you that.
- Comment on The same people who rage against authority love moderating communities where their ideology is the only one allowed 1 week ago:
The same people who rage against authority and advocate prison abolition seem to love becoming “dungeon masters.”
- Comment on ..? 1 week ago:
The number of Chinese Marxist-Leninists alone vastly outnumbers us Western tankies. The vast majority of “tankies” live in various countries outside of the imperial core.
- Comment on Current events dictate that I post this. 1 week ago:
Yes, I would. Or if he was to be removed, that should be up to the Libyans, without foreign interference.
Gaddafi was removed not because of any humanitarian reason but because he stood in the way of foreign interests. Gaddafi asserted Libyan control over Libyan oil and redirected at least some of that money towards the Libyan people (the per capita income in Libya under Gaddafi was 5th highest in Africa), and that was fundamentally unacceptable to the US and its allies, just as it has been in for nearly every country in the region. What they want are states like Saudi Arabia, where the ruling class can be bought off on a personal level to keep the oil flowing while repressing the people.
US/NATO led regime change never produces good outcomes for anyone but oil companies and war profiteers, and that’s by design. If they can’t control it, they can at least deny the resources to others and set an example for any other country that attempts to assert control over their own resources. NATO opened a pandora’s box of chaos and there’s no telling if or when it will end, just as US-led forces did in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
I’d say that you refuse to learn from history and seem dead-set on repeating the mistakes of the past, but again, they were never mistakes. The people making the decisions got exactly what they wanted, it’s only a mistake from the absolutely delusional perspective that intervention in places like Libya, Afghanistan, now Iran, were ever driven by any thought of helping ordinary people.
- Comment on Current events dictate that I post this. 1 week ago:
I don’t recall the UN resolution telling them to assassinate Gaddafi and destabilize the country.
- Comment on Current events dictate that I post this. 1 week ago:
Was Libya also populated by Chinese bots?
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 2 weeks ago:
We already have perfectly fine meat substitutes. Have you actually tried them? They’ve come a long way.
And lab grown meat will probably never be able to replace meat if people keep eating it at the same rate. Besides, there’s nothing I, as an individual, can do to advance the progress lab grown meat. I can help advance the progress of meat substitutes by… buying them instead of meat.
Cutting meat out of my life saves the lives of countless animals. That is a lot more practical than wishing upon a star that lab grown meat was more developed or economically viable.
- Comment on Saved you a click: a 1911 2 weeks ago:
1911
Actually, he’d carry a 0.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 3 weeks ago:
Biden only won because of Covid, and the economic conditions made it harder for Kamala. 2024 was always going to be an uphill battle because of inflation, I have no doubts Biden would’ve lost even without the cognitive decline.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, I mean that approach worked so well in 2016 and 2024, why not give it another shot?
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 3 weeks ago:
There will ALWAYS and I mean ALWAYS be conflict going on over the Middle-East with everyone there. It is NEVER-ENDING. We’ve wasted nearly 20 years dicking around with Afghanistan and Iraq. All for what? So the Taliban can take over territory in less than a week after all that effort? What a waste!
Sorry, I’m having a lot of trouble trying to connect the dots between the US waging decades long wars of aggression in the Middle East and accomplished nothing with the idea that it’s acceptable to keep sending weapons and fueling conflict through a proxy.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 3 weeks ago:
The fact that they’ve been memeing about Trump having a third term tells you how excited they are about their actual prospects.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 3 weeks ago:
Three female senators won in swing states Kamala lost (Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan), a Hispanic man won a fourth (Arizona), while white men lost in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Biden also was polling poorly when he dropped out.
I don’t know why I bother making that point because the response is invariably “Well people are just sexist/racist about the position of president” limiting the data set to one single point (two if you include Clinton, though probably not three because Obama doesn’t count). In this way, all conflicting evidence is shut out.
It’s just a way to avoid any actually useful critique of the Democrats’ platform, to shift blame to the voters rather than looking at what could actually be improved upon, because that might make somebody look bad. Which is ironic, because I seem to recall that one reason Harris refused to distance herself from Biden in any way (which contributed to her loss) was wanting to protect his “legacy.”
The truth is that Kamala Harris was a bad candidate with bad political instincts running a bad strategy. She never would’ve even been the nominee if there’d been a real primary. She went all in on Dick Cheney of all people who virtually no one, right or left, actually likes, while she completely alienated anyone who was pro-Palestine when it would’ve cost her nothing to pretend to care and the hardcore Zionists weren’t going to vote for her anyway. She doubled down on Biden’s economic policy and ran on more of the same despite the fact that people’s groceries had gotten more expensive. All of those things played a bigger role in her loss than her race or gender, and until we acknowledge that, we’re just gonna keep getting shitty candidates who do the same and lose.
- Comment on One of the most interesting things that happens when you are old 3 weeks ago:
The biggest one for me is when I see people glazing Bush, like either you’re a teenager or you weren’t paying attention.
- Comment on Would the United States actually risk a Tiananmen Square incident? 5 weeks ago:
WHICH I REFUTED ALREADY, JUST LIKE I REFUTED YOUR 3D PRINTER BULLSHIT AND EVERY OTHER STUPID BULLSHIT POINT YOU RAISED, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE.
Blocked.
- Comment on Would the United States actually risk a Tiananmen Square incident? 5 weeks ago:
Man, fuck off. Like you didn’t make shit up over an over, that whole “1776” line, get the fuck out. Just drop it. Reply again and I’ll block you.
- Comment on Would the United States actually risk a Tiananmen Square incident? 5 weeks ago:
That’s stupid. If I went into sufficient depth to satisfy you (and only you, btw), nobody would read it because of the length.
I’ve addressed all your objections and each time you just invent some new bullshit to try to justify why you got all pissy in the first place. Just fuck off already.
- Comment on Would the United States actually risk a Tiananmen Square incident? 5 weeks ago:
So I’m not allowed to tell anyone to do anything if that one thing doesn’t magically fix all the problems in the world?
- Comment on Tankie 5 weeks ago:
Blocked.
- Comment on Would the United States actually risk a Tiananmen Square incident? 5 weeks ago:
“Buying a gun” is the tankie version of libs saying “go vote”. Solves nothing, they say it will fix everything.
Where did I say that it would “fix everything?” Weren’t you just complaining about “mischaracterizing arguments” (which I never did)?
- Comment on Tankie 5 weeks ago:
Honestly not even reading your comments anymore, don’t care.
- Comment on Tankie 5 weeks ago:
And if you engaged with my actual arguments and points, you’d understand why.
- Comment on Tankie 5 weeks ago:
Yes, only in common use.
- Comment on Would the United States actually risk a Tiananmen Square incident? 5 weeks ago:
I clearly went too far because I was satirizing your mischaracterization of other people’s arguments
Who’s arguments did I mischaracterize in the initial comment I made? The National Guard’s? What a load of horseshit, you came out of the gate attacking me for no reason.
Buying “a” gun won’t do anything meaningful in and of itself. We need some people to buy a lot of guns and ammo.
What does it matter if one person buys 10 guns to give to 10 people, or if 10 people buy their own guns? The end result is the same. You’re just putting ideological hangups before pragmatism.
We need lots of people thinking about each other. We need people thinking about things like food, water, waste, etc.
None of which is precluded by buying a gun.
Like the US government has never caved because somebody shot a bullet at them. They cave because airports get shutdown, because trash stops being collected.
Neither of these is correct. For example, the US government caved when the NVA shot a bunch of bullets at them. They also have the capability of suppressing strikes at gunpoint, if it comes to that. Just as they did the student demonstrators at Kent State. Strikes can be effective, but if you have no capability to fight back, then it’s not likely to be enough.
Like a bunch of military drones come through your door you won’t even have the opportunity to kill a single fascist. You’re just dead, killed by a guy essentially playing a video game. A missile is the same thing
Of course. I never disputed that. But they aren’t sending drones or launching missiles, they’re sending people.
There’s no heroic fantasy where just owning a gun lets people takedown a fascist.
That’s just obviously false. Are fascists impervious to bullets now? Is Charlie Kirk still alive, then?