You don’t seem to understand the history you’re referencing. Slavery and mass displacement / ethnic cleansing aren’t mutually exclusive, they are mutually interdependent. Empires engaging in settler-colonialism didn’t choose one or the other, they did both, always. Even if they outlawed slavery domestically, they still participated in the trade internationally or in their colonies. Settler-colonial empires still engage in slavery to this day, they’re just better at hiding and justifying it. See: the US prison system and abuse of migrant workers, and the kafala system in the middle east (called the “binding system” in Israel until it was de jure abolished in 2006, but de facto continues to this day in a sort of legal gray area). These days the word slavery makes people squeamish, so we call it things like human trafficking, prison labor, migrant labor, and all sorts of other more polite euphemisms to lull us into the false notion that slavery is a thing of the past - or at the least relegated to a tiny secretive black market.

Just picking a random region of the world and looking at Wikipedia’s list of conflicts in Asia, you can try counting the years in the gaps between conflicts and comparing them to the duration of the conflicts themselves. I would bet good money that the average duration of periods of peace in any given region is greater than the average duration of conflicts, and that cumulatively years spent peacefully coexisting far exceed the years spent in conflict.

Notice also that the bias towards violence being mentionable and peace being less so is evident in the fact that I had to do this by finding a list of conflicts rather than a list of peaceful periods.

I disagree that it’s rare. In fact, peaceful coexistence is the norm and violent displacement is the anomaly. It only seems like that’s not the case because peace is delicate and unmentionable (what’s there to say in history books about nothing happening?) while violence is sudden and has permanent consequences. A peace lasting centuries can be ended by a single violent event, and that single event will be written about in greater detail than the centuries of peace that preceded it. Our perception of human nature is also skewed by the fact that we’re currently living in a global order dominated by violent settler-colonial factions who have created a system of extraction based fundamentally on theft.

I reject the premise that there must be some magical land where people have lived undisturbed since the beginning of time for you to even consider that it’s possible to peacefully coexist. There are plenty of places and times where people have settled an inhabited area and did not displace the natives, but no land where no one was displaced for all of human history, and that’s an unreasonable thing to demand I give an example of.

That you don’t even consider coexistence before immediately jumping to slavery as the only alternative says a lot about you.

I am a Jellyfin server guy, and I Iet family and friends use it for free. I also am not shy about telling people that I do this, as I don’t see any moral issue with it and will happily defend piracy as not only completely fine, but a net moral good. I see it as a tiny bit of anarchist calisthenics.

I think it’s because people are no longer in a mood to laugh at anything Trump does. We already know that nothing he could do will shame him or his base, so Trump shitting himself on live TV feels more like a sick joke at our expense meant to humiliate us.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

• Frank Wilhoit

The main contention for calling land stolen is if the people settling it displaced other people to do so. It’s possible to settle land without displacing its current inhabitants, and I wouldn’t consider that stealing.

This is just a roundabout way of subsidizing the health insurance industry while making his base think he actually did something for them.

You literally shifted the goalpost from “Hasan shocked his dog” to “Hasan uses his dog as set dressing by preventing her from moving,” and you’re putting it on me because I shifted in response. Also, what lie? Nothing in my comments contradict one another, they’re just talking about different parts of the clip because I was following your own goalposts.

Compare it to free speech. Saying you don’t need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t need free speech because you have nothing to say. Eventually, through no fault of your own, there will come a time when you have something worth saying or hiding, and you will regret having surrendered your right to do so.

Another way to put it is: I don’t need privacy because my judgment and intentions are shady, but because the authorities’ judgment and intentions are, or one day will be. Allowing the authorities to invade your privacy and suppress your speech diminishes your ability to hold them accountable.

He keeps her as fucking set dressing behind him and yells when she moves.

You saw him do something once in a clip (yelling the ‘place’ command at Kaya when she gets up), didn’t understand why, and assumed he does that every time she moves without bothering to check yourself despite there being hundreds of hours of footage of him not doing that.

He is making her lay on the elevated bed instead of the hardwood floor so she doesn’t develop hip problems, which are common in large dog breeds. He’s fine with her getting up and leaving, and she often does (again, hundreds of hours of footage), just not with her laying down on the hardwood floor, which is what he probably thought she was doing in that clip.

I’ve looked through the whole thread again and I don’t know where you’re getting the idea anyone’s accusing tankies of being sellouts. Best I can guess is that you misinterpreted the comment immediately above yours as saying tankies are secretly supporting the current fascist regime, is that it?

That’s not what they’re saying, they meant that tankies (I would clarify that it’s the chronically online tankies that are like this) want other people to fight the revolution for them, and won’t lift a single finger themselves until they can be sure that victory is inevitable. This is because they see themselves as the vanguard that tells everyone else what to do and how to do it, and will be put in charge after the revolution. That’s why people call them red fascists (though I don’t like that term myself as I don’t think they should be conflated with actual fascists, it hinders understanding), they want to be in the fascists’ place so they can use the systems of power and control that they built towards a different end (changing the economic system).

A previous person I talked to on lemmy.ml not long ago illustrated this mindset well, saying that authoritarianism is only a buzzword made up by the west to demonize their enemies, that it’s just people exercising power, and that it’s good when communists do it. Here’s what I see wrong with this: the tools of a fascist state are purpose-built for oppression, and trying to use them for anything else is futile. You will be corrupted by their power. We should not be trying to take and use these tools, but dismantling them and creating our own which are purpose-built for liberation.

They don’t like electoralism, prefer to LARP revolution while doing nothing to actually lay the groundwork for one.

I would prefer not to have to talk about this, but this is part of how the alt-right has gained cultural hegemony in the US (at least on the internet). I’m not going to spend all my time arguing about it, but when I see someone repeating disinformation about a high-profile leftist commentator I’m going to challenge it because it harms the ability of the left to organize.

I watched the video of the abuse happening on stream.

You watched a clip of Hasan’s dog catching her dewclaw on the edge of her bed and yelping, and Hasan being kind of rude about it because he was in the middle of a heated rant. You only think he used a shock collar because a bunch of drama slop-tubers made ‘analysis’ videos claiming to prove that he did with about the same rigor as right-wing ‘transvestigators’ claiming every school shooter is trans.

He lived in a very large clay jar, which is actually not that uncommon in the Roman empire during the time that he lived. Almost everyone in the metropolitan areas of the Roman empire owned at least one such jar, and so homeless people would live in them in much the same way homeless people today might live in their cars or a tent. The reason it’s significant that Diogenes lived in one is that he did so by choice, as he had the wealth and social status to live quite comfortably if he wanted to.

Their concern about optics is the reason they want agents to stop shooting white people.

Good riddance.