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Joined
3 yr. ago

Cripple. History Major. Irritable and in constant pain. Vaguely Left-Wing.

  • I was promised eternal life, not consciousness. That's cryosleep conditions right there.

  • As they vote for repealing Obamacare.

  • I remember a lot after the age of 7.

  • She got started late smh we were all playing GBA on the bus back in the day.

  • GRAB YOUR SWORD, AND FIGHT THE HORDE! UNCLE LOTHAR WANTS YOU!

  • My grandparents remembered playing Pong.

  • you shut your mouth right now

  • I'd never actually seen the original before XD

  • I'm holding you to that, I expect to see some more badly remade ancient vines in two-and-a-half hours.

    11 has passed, and no badly remade ancient vines. I've been tricked, I've been backstabbed, and I've been, quite possibly, bamboozled.

  • Yeah supporting IRA (sympatizers) is based /s

    Supporting Sinn Fein is absolutely based, I love a good DemSoc party. As for the IRA, Republican paramilitaries were the least civilian-murder-happy of the sides in the Troubles, so while I wouldn't express support for them, I'm also not going to automatically reach for condemnation for a paramilitary group that began in legitimate oppression and ended with good-faith peace negotiations.

  • In Northern Ireland he supported "mixed" (i.e., Catholic and Protestant) child education. In 1991, he gave £8m to the Integrated Education Fund,[20] a grant-making charitable body which aims "to make integration, not separation, the norm in our education system".[21] Queens University Belfast also received grants of more than £100m,[20] for capital projects, child education and medical research.[22]

    More controversially, Feeney gave substantial personal donations to Sinn Féin, a left-wing Irish nationalist party that has been historically associated with the IRA.[14] Following the IRA ceasefire in 1994, he funded the party's office in Washington D.C.[20]

    Feeney supported the modernization of public-health structures in Vietnam,[18] AIDS clinics in South Africa, Operation Smile's free surgeries for children with cleft lips and palates, earthquake relief in Haiti, and the UCSF Medical Center at the University of California at San Francisco.[8]

    Jim Dwyer wrote in The New York Times that none of the one thousand buildings on five continents that were built with Feeney's gifts of $2.7 billion bear his name.[1]

    On September 14, 2020, Feeney closed down the Atlantic Philanthropies after the non-profit accomplished its mission of giving away all of its money by 2020.[25]

    Immensely based

  • I mean, if memory serves the staff she actually employs herself is pretty well-compensated. The issue is that the industry as a whole is borked, and paying the staff of other fuckwads in the industry just means that those fuckwads start planning to stiff their employees by planning around the gratuity of successful artists.

    Nothing less than structural reform will even dent the injustice of it.

  • Sounds an awful lot like work.

  • It's something that always hits me acutely. I grew up in a poor area, with a family from a different but equally poor area. The total net worth of the past three generations of my family, combined, at their peak and adjusted for inflation just for fun, from grandparents and great-uncles down to me, wouldn't break a mil. Yet I also recognize that people can own a house worth a million or even two without being absurdly wealthy, or even more than just middle-class.

    On one hand, when people start wringing hands and crying about their taxes going up on their million-dollar house, I get the emotional urge to sneer and spit at their feet. Poor babies! On the other hand, I do try to recognize also that all wealth is relative, and that we, as human beings, should not and cannot be judged solely on how we try to make our own way in this miserable world, but rather on how we interact with others. Even I am extraordinarily wealthy, as a disabled man who ekes out a below-poverty line existence in the US doing clerical work, compared to someone doing back-breaking labor to provide for their family in Mali.

    The condemnation should not be when we buy a nice meal for ourselves, but when we refuse a loaf of bread to a beggar, sort of thinking. And above all, most non-ultra-wealthy people are not making decisions that explicitly hurt others for their own gain, nor even that deny help to others for their own convenience, but simply buying themselves little luxuries to forget the misery of existence. That's... just how human beings work. And the solution is in structural reform, not condemnation of people for trying not to go crazy in a universe whose laws were not constructed to suit thinking beings.

    Should billionaires exist? No, fuck no. But of the people who are billionaires, "I lucked out in a field I'm legitimately talented in, and it scaled to the tune of billions instead of the normal artist existence of 'barely surviving'" is probably one of the least objectionable. In Swift's place, most of us probably wouldn't be much different. One can argue, and not incorrectly, that the activities of billionaires is disproportionately more damaging than us lowly thousandaires with a PC and a bicycle, but the fundamental principle of selfishness behind taking an uber for non-essential round-town travel and taking a private plane when a few well-planned train tickets would've done just fine is the same. We differ from THOSE billionaires not in nature, but in scale. It's a scale that MUST be reduced for the survival of both the planet and the polity, but it doesn't spring from some essential evil in the individual - unlike, say, some cunt jacking up the price of life-saving medication so they can buy a third yacht.

    Ultimately, a billionaire like Swift is the rare creature who DOES perform legitimate labor, whose actions do not fundamentally come at an increased cost to people just trying to survive, and largely no more exploitative than any other musician or participant in the industry or wider economy (which is a condemnation of the industry and our economy, arguably, but neither here nor there), just one who has managed success on a more massive scale than her peers. She SHOULD be brought down to a reasonable level of wealth - but she's not some demon who deserves the guillotine. Just massive asset seizure. She's probably a pretty ordinary human being, as far as human beings go.

  • Found the cat's account.

  • I have a confession to make.

    It was me, Barry.

  • Lack of recognition is the only payment I need. No need to thank me.

    On the ultra-rare occasion when I see a meme I actually made and not just reposted getting passed around, it's such a warm fuzzy feeling. I only wish I could get a notification every time it happens.

  • Heyyyy, you’re starting to get it!

    Careful, the middle-class socialists on Lemmy who dream of owning a nice house will get mad.

    But more pertinently, the argument can be applied to anyone as long as there is suffering in the world and unnecessary luxuries. And while I think most of us here agree that there is a structural issue with that, I'm far less fond of the idea that Joe Schmoe working a soul-crushing minimum-wage job should never do anything other than work, sleep, and donate every spare penny to charity because keeping or using wealth while others are suffering would make him a bad person.