Metaphysical Boundaries

1 quastion

President Donald Trump reportedly invited a German delegation to take various items from a room in the White House, saying they could be sold for "thousands of dollars."

In a piece published by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, the paper described a previously unreported meeting of European heads of government back in January, after Trump reiterated his desire to acquire Greenland, the autonomous North Atlantic and Arctic Circle territory from Denmark.

"Just pirate it!" Nope! Piracy still helps JK Rowling!

"But I'm autistic and it's my fixation!" I'm also autistic and once upon a time it was also my fixation. I have some advice for that here and over here.

"I like the aesthetic!" Go watch the works of Guillermo del Toro, or go read my post on copying HP's aesthetic.

In my area I know of at least two places that had to institute rules against anyone under 18 being unaccompanied by a parent. one is a mall. large groups of kids were harassing shoppers, some were shoplifting. even the teens who worked at the mall complained about them. for several years, there was a "tradition" where kids would go to the mall cinema on christmas day to take part in pre-arranged fights with kids from other schools.

the other case is a supermarket with a community room on its second floor. people go there to eat, to chill, to play games like MTG, there's even a big shelf of free books you can keep if you want. they had to ban kids under 18 because they were vandalizing the space.

is it the parents' fault? yeah, in part. young kids are often allowed to run wild in public; although i think by the time you're a teen you ought to have some idea of how to behave in public spaces, but here's the real point: These places do not want the liability if someone gets hurt. some of them operate on a narrow profit margin and don't want to keep paying to have broken things replaced. they don't want to be sued by parents when their kid gets hurt on their property. they don't want their insurance payments to skyrocket when multiple kids get hurt fighting or whatever. the community room I mentioned above didn't start out with a kid ban, but they had little choice once damage started to happen. places that start out boasting about being family-friendly end up having to enact age bans because of bad behavior.

Democratic Socialism is a term that often gets confused and misused in everyday political conversation. Countries like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are often incorrectly called Democratic Socialist countries and praised for being a “mix of socialism and capitalism,” when actually they are Social Democracies. These two terms sound similar but their meanings are very different. —source

Many Americans confuse Democratic Socialism with Social Democracy. In fact, a number of US politicians who call themselves Democratic Socialists (including Bernie Sanders and AOC) are more aptly described as Social Democrats in that they are primarily reformers.* *

Below is a chart that explains some basic distinctions between these two political movements. Under the chart are some of the reasons I DON'T agree with everything in the chart.

Chart source [reformatted to increase reading legibility]

Although I think that a lot of the above chart accurately describes some differences between Social Democrats and Democratic Socialists, I disagree with the unknown author's position that "Social Democracy is just capitalism with regulations," and that capitalism and socialism are not viewed as being able to co-exist** in either of these political-economic systems.

Social Democrats believe that essential social services (like healthcare, public education, public libraries, elderly services & income, police & fire departments, natural disaster emergency services, welfare programs, public transportation, the military, etc.) and many utilities and infrastructure (like electrical grids, dams, waste disposal, water reserves, public highways and bridges, wireless/ broadband technology, etc.) should be (and in many countries ARE) socialized, and that they can (and DO) coexist with a free market that promotes small businesses and a well-regulated capitalism that discourages monopolies and prevents excessive exploitation of labor and the environment.

The Scandinavian countries (and to a lesser extent the US) already have socialized services, utilities and infrastructure that exist in addition to a free market/ capitalist economy. However, to my knowledge, the Scandinavian countries have more socialized services, utilities and infrastructure than the US, and a more highly-regulated capitalist economy. Consequently, those countries do not have the level of income inequality and exploitation of labor and resources that one can find here in the US.

Meanwhile Trump is busy dismantling many of our labor and environmental regulations and weakening our social safety net here in the US. And it is MAGA's ignorance of what it means to have a social democracy that keeps them cheering Trump on as he destroys the very institutions that make life better for the average working American.

[Below the cut, you can see some footnotes that further explain some concepts discussed above, including Marx's definitions of socialism and communism, and why things went wrong with these systems in the 20th and early 21st centuries because some of these movements' leaders didn't let these systems evolve naturally as a mass reaction to late stage capitalism, but prematurely imposed them on populations.]

[edited]