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[–] 50 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

We discussed those green skyscrapers in university environment class, and as far as I know they didn't work that well. It was hard to keep the plants alive and when they did grow, they became a breeding ground for pest insects that got into the units where people were living. It's very much prioritizing looking green over being green.

IMO it's better to just have efficient but visually boring skyscrapers, and then have dedicated green space around clusters of density (which is what China is mostly doing nowadays). Separating housing and green space make both more effective, easier to manage, and more resiliant.

Also, in case you're wondering, most Western environment profs are very impressed by what China has done, at least in the university I went to.

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago* (3 children)

    Skyscrapers seem a waste and vulnerability compared to the traditional 10 story style brick, or preferably stone, buildings typical in cities before skyscrapers. Some are bigger than 10 stories, and they can be built earthquake safe same as skyscrapers, the first earthquake safe designs of which that I'm aware of happened after the San Francisco area earthquake some time around the turn of the 20th century that leveled the large buildings. But I'm sure there were prior methods probably dating to antiquity in the middle east and elsewhere.

    One method was to build a sort of pool over the build area, a solid container, with sand and the like inside, and building on top of that, vibrations would be absorbed by the sand. There are other methods too but they can be employed by both skyscrapers and masonary buildings.

    As to size, the city hall building in philadelphia is the larges I believe, a magnificent building, with statues at levels going up with William Penn at the top. Ornate and decorative too, very unlike the brutalist architecture of today's city leaders. Compare the subway of any european capital city, from moscow to paris, to new york or DC's subway. Our leaders have no style, all the money for overinflated contrancts, and more money than any, but none for style or art built into it.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

    I agree, I didn't want to change the premise too much in my original comment, but ideally you'd do some complicated math to determine the optimal height for your location, building materials, and population density.

    I don't know what that calculation would look like in China because I don't live there (I'm sure the Chinese engineers are well aware of those calculations though) but in my country it would definitely be a lot closer to the 10 story range, maybe even lower.

    Either way, something us in the West absolutely NEED to get used to is prefab buildings that all look the same. A bunch of prefab skyscrapers like China has is still worlds ahead of the logistical nightmare of demanding every single building be custom designed like is so common here. You call it boring, I call it efficient. Having a few reusable designs (usually different heights) to choose from and copy paste building housing, like what China does, is what we need first, IMO, and then we can talk about the optimal heights for those prefab buildings.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, functionality comes first and we've a lack of housing. But we should add some art to that functionality as we go as we are able, but a solid structure reproduced a million times comes first. Waiting on private interests to do it is a fool's errand it appears. Capital has colluded to keep the housing stock overpriced, with hedge funds and private equity buying a significant percent of all consumer housing, 15 percent just as of 2018, likely higher now.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    I'm partial to leaving decorating buildings to the residents who live there. Something like community murals and art projects on the prefab blank canvas that reflect the people and community those buildings foster. IDK, something about a lot of modern ornamentation commercial developers create feel even colder than no ornamentation at all, but that's just a personal opinion.

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  • [–] 37 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    Eh… I’m not sold by this. For me the “punk” aspect is about people taking hopeful actions that go against the grain. Focusing on the authority of any government is a pretty weak sell. Let’s cultivate hope in people!

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  • [+] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)
  • [–] 16 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)

    Its insane how Liberals will see a well functioning society and decide they would rather live under the dictatorship of capital

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  • [–] 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Love how this has 15 downvotes but not a single reply 💀

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  • [–] 21 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    I just banned like 6 of them, dead or no-content accounts.

    Liberals using bot accounts to try to manipulate public opinion (as they do on reddit and the rest of the western internet), is gonna be one of the bigger problems in the fediverse for the foreseeable future, so we have to stay ahead of it.

    At this point they're just targeting specific ppl like @Cowbee@lemmy.ml, but they'll eventually start doing it en masse.

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    [–] -3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Solar punk or solar authoritarianism?

    Solar punk is "real" as in, plenty people living off grid on solar, catchment, whatever. China does seem to be making whatever theyre doing become a thing. And its great. Cheap energy probably the most effective path to world peace. If we can get the price to "effectively 0" we can solve just about everything.

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  • [–] 12 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    How would you produce solar panels when living "off grid"? You need a large, integrated economy to be able to produce such complicated hardware. This is why solar punk is fundamentally an elitist ideology. You look down your nose on "authoritarians", and have a holier-than-thou attitude toward them, but the society you envision is impossible without them.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (12 children)

    Solarpunk is the fiction, the ideal. What China is doing in this regard is 1 version of an attempt to achieve it, and that's great! Its not the only path forward and there is room for critique of every attempt.

    As an anarchist, I would like less authoritarianism actually. But, as a solarpunk enthusiast and environmentalist, im in favor of this action by China. I believe that actions towards solarpunk and actions against government systems i dont like should be handled separately

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  • [+] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (12 children)
  • [–] -1 points 9 months ago (11 children)

    Im not a scholar on china. I dont know a ton, and I dont know anything with a great degree of confidence. My understanding is that to some degree, they do human rights abuses much like the USA, Russia, UK, India etc. To my understanding, that's just kind of a thing superpower countries do. I have enough on my hands dealing with the USA and all its problems. I value human dignity as the focal point of what a government should embody. If you can think of things they are doing thay go against that, that's probably what id starr with. If you think that china is sufficiently defending human dignity without exception, id love to hear about that

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  • [+] 11 points 9 months ago (11 children)
  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (10 children)

    Forgive me if this is a confused question, I'm still learning my dialectics, but how does China's concept of democratic centrism and its insistence that the CCP be the sole governing body mesh with this understanding of contradictions and their resolution? Is the existence of absolute power itself not a restriction that prevents (or could very well prevent) the movement and change that would otherwise happen to resolve the contradictions you mention? Like, fundamentally I just don't see how dialectical materialism is consistent with unchallenged and unjustified power.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)

    Is the existence of absolute power itself not a restriction
    I just don’t see how dialectical materialism is consistent with unchallenged and unjustified power.

    Well there's your problem. Did you even read the rest of what Cowbee said in this thread, explaining much of how governance in China actually works? You come here basing your questions around this false assumption of "the existence of absolute power," when no one in China has absolute power, rather power is vastly more evenly distributed there than in liberal "democracies."

    The fact that there is a single party is not (as western propaganda would have you believe) evidence of "dictatorship," but instead functions as a bulwark preventing reaction and the destruction of the revolution by capital - something I would hope you would be able to recognize even with a very basic understanding of dialectics. There is no reason the will of the people can't be enacted via a single party that exists to ensure it is their will and not that of capital that rules, indeed it makes more sense to have a single party when the rule of the people is the goal.

    Consider how the approval rating for their government across the population of China, well over a billion people, is above 90%! And now consider the U.S. with it's "two party" system, where both parties represent the interests only of the political donor class (capital) and the government is largely despised by the population. The power there is concentrated in a small number of ultrawealthy bourgeoisie and it is continuously getting worse, more and more concentrated, while the people of the US are losing more and more of their so-called rights every day.

    Yet you frame your questions under this base (and false) assumption of "unchallenged and unjustified power" in China without even considering how power is constantly challenged there (see Cowbee's explanation further up of the many direct elections in China) and through that challenge, its justification is consistently being reestablished.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago

    Yep, I read the rest. Your comment clarifies some confusion I had about how China is being understood through a dialectical material lens, so thank you for that.

    I do feel like you're missing how a one-party socialist state is still inherently an instance of unjustified power, even if it's "self-correcting" like China seems to be. Institutional power gives default material, ideological, and epistemological authority to whoever occupies that institution. That authority can be good if it's truly the will of the proletariat, but the paradox is that because there is default authority given to certain ways of thinking about the world, the peoples' ability to know whether it is indeed the will of the proletariat is distorted. If, for example, party leadership were to come out and say "accumulation of capital is compatible with socialism, actually", then even though there would be mechanisms for people to come in and be like "no the fuck it isn't", because party leadership occupies a platform of default authority, their statement would be taken as true until challenged otherwise. That is unjustified power.

    Epistemologically the only thing we can be sure of with any authoritarian socialist state is that (a) the party occupying the institutional power structure is claiming to represent the will of the proletariat, and (b) there are mechanisms for people to "correct" the institution to better represent the proletariat. Neither of these things are enough to justify the general default authority given to an authoritarian state, imo. Power needs to always be exercised from a place of epistemological humility and with the understanding that you or your organization could very well not be fit to wield it. Institutional power structures are fundamentally just not compatible with this.

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  • [+] 4 points 9 months ago (8 children)
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (7 children)

    See my comment above for my thoughts on the first point, and re the second, you're right- I think I was just confused there lol

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  • [+] 4 points 9 months ago (7 children)
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (6 children)

    To clarify, I'm an anarchist. I don't think the state should exist, period, and I think it's self-defeating to try to impose communism via the state.

    But more to the point, my original comment was in response to your analysis of OP's questioning of China's alleged human rights abuses. I was interested in your dialectical thinking because I hadn't seen it applied so clearly before and I wanted to use it as a learning opportunity. I'm coming away feeling more educated, which I'm grateful for. But I'm also not convinced your analysis allays worries about potential abuses mentioned in the OP, and I wanted to say as much. So ultimately, I'm not really arguing for anything specific, mainly because I don't pretend to have concrete answers. If anything, I'm arguing for greater political imagination. Liberal democracy is obviously not the answer, but I'm not convinced an authoritarian socialist state is either. So how could we build on the works of Marx and other communist thinkers to come up with a way to implement communism that avoids the pitfalls you yourself have admitted are potential problems with a communist-party-controlled state?

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  • [+] 4 points 9 months ago (6 children)
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (5 children)

    I understand what you mean I think, and I want to be clear that I'm not some utopian anarchist who thinks we can just magically become communist overnight. As you said, class struggle will continue. My point isn't that we should try to avoid the contradiction, it's that a socialist state is not a great way to navigate its resolution and that we should try to imagine other ways of doing so that don't run the real risk of becoming abusive and/or failing to adhere to the will and needs of the people. It's hard to write out a concrete idea here because it's not something we've collectively spent a ton of resources trying to imagine. But people are wildly creative, and I think it'd be a disservice to us to not at least try to imagine something better.

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  • [+] 3 points 9 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (4 children)

    Imagine a community of workers who, through ground-up organizing (say, through unions or mutual aid networks), collectively overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize the means of production. The bourgeoisie need to be prevented from taking the means of production back while the workers implement communism, so the workers organize a militant force that, through consensus, can be temporarily spun up to defend the revolution--but only for as long as everyone agrees the defense is necessary. Then the reactionaries are kept in check, but the power to perform this subjugation is firmly rooted in the will of the people, without the risk of the power becoming disembodied or consolidated in the hands of the few.

    Obviously there are lots of immediate concerns about this (how do you ensure reactionaries don't throw a wrench into the whole thing, etc.). But this is where I think more imagination is needed. Surely it's possible to solve these issues without giving up on the idea that power should be fully in the hands of the proletariat and not a disembodied structure?

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  • [+] 3 points 9 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (3 children)

    Let me ask you a different question because I feel like we're talking past each other on this: what do you mean exactly when you talk about "dominating the bourgeoisie"?

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  • [+] 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    So, it seems like you're saying two separate things here: (1) class struggle inherently involves a monopoly on violence, and (2) a monopoly on violence is strategically necessary for the proletariat in order to build a classless, stateless society. Can you clarify which one you mean, or if you mean both?

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  • [+] 2 points 9 months ago* (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    Ok, so this is where I'm lost. I can understand why one would find a monopoly on violence to be strategically necessary to achieve the goals of the revolution (though I disagree). I don't understand how you can argue class struggle inherently involves a monopoly on violence, unless you are just defining class by who happens to have a monopoly on violence (which would defeat the whole point of class struggle). The entire concept of "a monopoly on violence" is a product of bourgeois society--they are the ones who built the structures that legitimized certain types of violence while restricting and punishing other types. So to negate the existence of the bourgeoisie, we negate the existence of those structures. Which fundamentally means tearing down mechanisms by which anyone can wield a monopoly on violence.

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  • [+] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    Fuck, I'm tired. I was thinking "upper class" but said "bourgeoisie"--you're totally right on that lol.

    Nonetheless, my point still stands, and your second paragraph feels spiritually on the level of a democrat giving an ultimatum about voting for the "lesser of two evils". You're taking a really complex problem that has plagued us for thousands of years and claiming that the only solutions are either (a) undo all of civilization, or (b) do what this German guy suggested a century ago. That is a lack of political imagination.

    To your point, the state was constructed over the centuries via class (and gender and ethnic and neurotype and ) struggle between the subjugating and the subjugated. It continues to exist because those contradictions still exist. Even after centuries of revolutions of various kinds, all with the goal of leveling inequalities and boosting the position of the subjugated, we still have this same state of affairs--just with a rotating class of subjugators. How's this one going to be different? Because this time the subjugated are using dialectics? Because we want to eliminate class? I don't find that convincing. The only way we're ever going to eliminate class and other categories of subjugation is by eliminating the mechanisms by which they exist. The fact that you can't think of any way to do this that isn't reverting to anarcho-primitivism is not a valid reason to reject the premise.

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    [+] -5 points 9 months ago (5 children)
  • [+] 9 points 9 months ago* (3 children)
  • [+] -7 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    "Re-education", that's one way to describe what they do in these camps. And please stop deflecting with "the West did way worse" arguments. To me, China is just as bad as the West.

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  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago*

    stop deflecting with “the West did way worse” arguments.

    It's not deflection dipshit. Why is the US arming ETIM separatist terrorists? What is the PRC supposed to do when you have radicalized islamists running around killing people in your opinion? Bomb a random country like the US did amrite?

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  • [+] -7 points 9 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago

    meanwhile in the real world

    typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9

    90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes

    Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j

    The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf

    From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China%E2%80%99s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4

    Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI

    Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience

    None of these things would be happening in China if it was doing capitalism. It would look the way other capitalist shitholes look like today.

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    [–] 0 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Why not just say you're against solarpunk? Why try to twist solarpunk to be something it's not?

    Have you forgotten all about me:

    cmnd-marcos-pog

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  • [+] 21 points 9 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)
  • [+] 17 points 9 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (1 child)
  • [+] 18 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism

    Romanticism emerged as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution raised productivity, but with a cost in culture and closeness-to-nature.

    Where things scale and become automated, it is natural for a counter-movement to yearn for a bucolic life close to nature. Solarpunk expresses the same yearning: a desire for a rich local culture close to nature in the modern technological level.

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    [+] -4 points 9 months ago (24 children)
  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (23 children)

    In the most abstract sense: Is organisation without authority possible?

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  • [–] -2 points 9 months ago (22 children)
  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago (21 children)
  • [–] -1 points 9 months ago (20 children)

    What appeals to you about that text?

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago (19 children)

    How authority is defined and how Engels actually logically provides an answer to the question whether organization without authority is possible

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  • [+] -6 points 9 months ago (18 children)

    A short 'logical' essay can give any answer in an abstract sense, but that doesn't discount empirical examples.

    Always seemed to me like Engels begs the question, takes "anarchy = chaos" as a starting assumption.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (17 children)

    Empirical examples... that you have not provided?

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  • [+] -6 points 9 months ago (16 children)

    It's trivially easy to think of examples of "organisation without authority" in nature, in history, in software.

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  • [–] 12 points 9 months ago (14 children)

    Provide a trivially easy example that you can think of (in the concrete sense) and let's examine it together

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  • [+] -10 points 9 months ago (13 children)

    You provide one, you have a brain, you don't need me to spoonfeed you.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago* (11 children)

    I provided you not only one, but two (cotton spinning wheel and railway example), assuming you're familiar with Engels text.

    I see you're either scared to be challenged ideologically or it's not as trivially easy as you make it seem to be.

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  • [+] -8 points 9 months ago (10 children)

    No, those aren't examples of "organisation without authority"; they're the opposite.

    I only see two possibilities –

    • You need to spoonfeed you examples of "organisation without authority" because you have excessive respect for my opinion, lack of independent thought
    • You're playing the role of 'hostile skeptic on the internet'
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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago* (9 children)

    No, those aren’t examples of “organisation without authority”; they’re the opposite.

    Brother in Christ if this is your reading comprehension I'm not sure how to help you. I'm arguing with Engels here: Meaning organization without authority isn't possible. How the fuck do you expect me to provide an example of organization without authority if it's not something I believe in dipshit?

    Provides no examples

    Ok bye

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  • [+] -7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (8 children)

    How the fuck do you expect me to provide an example of organization without authority if it’s not something I believe in dipshit?

    "How the fuck do you expect me to use my brain when my beliefs are in the way?!?"

    I expected exactly this tbh. You even admit that it's your "beliefs" that blind you to the examples we see all around us. No point talking to a hostile deadminded Believer.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (7 children)

    Im too afraid to make my own argument and will claim it's trivially easy to do so. You make my argument for me instead

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  • [–] -1 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    I don't have any ownership of the point, it's not mine, it's common-sense.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    If it's common sense and trivially easy to understand why can't you just explain it to us?

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (4 children)

    Youse have already answered that: because Beliefs stop you from seeing.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (3 children)

    Sounds like it's not trivially easy to understand OR common sense.

    It sounds more like your beliefs prevent you from engaging in good faith.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    You're welcome!

    Also gotta say your performance in this thread was like watching a 13 year old squirm getting caught lying about their report card.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Don't see how you got that. I would rather not spend my time on 'please argue with me on the internet' people, especially when their starting point is mental incapacity ("I am unable to think of [easy to think of thing]!"). That's all I have said. Why would I wish to argue with them?

    Hope you're having a great day.

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