Idk why communists defend China’s every move. Communism can be defended without excusing China’s authoritarian practices. I have Chinese friends living in China who tell me all kinds of horrific stories that they’ve had to deal with because of China’s mass surveillance (and more). That isn’t western propaganda, that’s people’s lived experiences. There is literally a “Great Firewall of China” lmao. China IS bad when it comes to their mass surveillance and suppression of speech. USA IS bad when it comes to their letting giant corporations have such free rein that it makes us all into serfs. Why compare to China? Because China is a great comparison.

How it is being forced on you exactly? What precisely have you seen in “almost all of the schools” you attended where anyone was forcing kids or forcing you to be LGBTQ+?

I’ve seen videos of the ventilation bs. To call it awful and disgusting is an understatement. They get slow cooked alive and take hours to die and they scream for all of it until they can’t scream anymore. And there’s hundreds of them. Hundreds of screaming voices dying in absolute agony. For hours. It’s literally the Brazen Bull. It’s torture, full stop. I can’t believe we allow this bs to be done to anything that can feel pain and suffer.

The dude who made this site believes in the “great replacement” and that the Covid vaccines were a psy-op to modify people’s dna and make the sheep slave people.

:/

Maybe due to his paranoia his privacy advice might be good lmao. But still. Wow.

Ironically, cars are stopping me. Roads used to be for walking, and now they’re for cars. They gave us sidewalks and now some places don’t have them, and are unwalkable. The bike lanes either don’t exist or are too dangerous to use. It’s all roads and stroads now, with speed limits dangerous to pedestrians, and large SUVs meaning that car crashes with a pedestrian are more likely to end in death.

The amount of people in cars has also crippled public transportation. Buses aren’t quick, and there are so few of them in general. Not to mention the lack of high speed trains, and the inefficiency of our subways.

Giant parking lots with no cars took our parks. Took our public spaces. Took our nature. And they’re everywhere. Everywhere I look is dull, grey asphalt.

It’s depressing to be outside. And where would I walk to? Everything is too far away to walk to. It used to be a 5-15 minute walk away. Now it’s more like 40 minutes to hours…

I’m tired of human interests and public transportation being overlooked so that people can drive a couple minutes faster to their destination. When people in Europe, Japan, and China can just… get on a train.

Sorry for the rant but I hate this bs

What about what I said was tenuous? Did you think I said the death penalty held no power to deter? I made no claims about that. I suggest you reread what I said, if that’s what you think.

I merely pointed out that the greatest deterrence comes from the likelihood of being caught, not from the severity of the punishment itself. This is the popular view. Here’s an article from the National Institute of Justice about it, with sources cited at the bottom: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence (Points 1, 4, and 5 may be of particular interest to you.)

This Wikipedia article may also interest you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(penology)

The reason I make no claims (and disagree with you) about the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent is because there is no body of evidence supporting either view. You seem convinced that the death penalty is an effective deterrent on your instinct alone. I am uncertain how I am the one reaching tenuous conclusions here, lol.

I disagree that the deterrence would be significant enough to justify the death penalty. But I don’t think our disagreement matters. Even assuming what you say is true, it’s not worth the lives of the innocent people who will be found guilty and executed, in my opinion. I also think it’s a bad idea to give the government the power to kill its own citizens. So even if you are correct, I have other objections that outweigh the potential deterrence factor.

It has been found that the greatest deterrent is “likelihood of getting caught”, and not the actual penalty. Think of the war on drugs. No matter how harsh they made the consequences, the drug trade continued. It’s like this: how likely are you to return a wallet you found to a lost and found if a cop was watching you, versus if you were out in the middle of the woods when you found the wallet?

It doesn’t matter if the penalty for not returning the wallet is death. If the likelihood of you getting caught is tiny enough, you will feel less terrified of playing those odds. Or at least, the average person will.

The death penalty isn’t a deterrent if you’re certain it will never apply to you.

Ok doomer.

I say the above not as an insult, but because I want to make a point.

Look up doomism. It’s a tool of climate change deniers. We are not dead yet. Nothing going on now is truly impossible to fix. It’s certainly not easy. It’s hard af. But just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean we should let ourselves give up. We shouldn’t let ourselves fall into a doomer mindset. Because the very moment we do, the moment we accept the doom, then the doom becomes our fate.

Don’t give up. Don’t encourage other people to give up. Don’t say it’s over when we’re still fighting. It’s only over when it’s over.

I bet World War II must have been psychologically devastating to witness. It must have felt like the whole world was falling apart. Like it would never bring itself back together. Can you imagine? Watching Hitler take over country after country. Watching the bombs fall in London. And the Cold War. Where people were so sure it was the end of humanity, because we were going to kill ourselves dropping nukes on each other.

There are so many moments it was horrible. So horrible that we couldn’t even imagine there would be a way out. A good future.

But there was. Things got better. Countries rebuilt. The Cold War ended. No one dropped any nukes.

See, climate change, and companies taking our data, and AI, and the rich getting richer… all that? That’s our WWII. That’s our thing causing hopelessness and devastation and fear in everyone.

The doomism is a plague we’ve been dealing with since probably the dawn of humanity.

We can get through this. Maybe we won’t. But the chance we will isn’t even that small. As long as there’s a chance: fight for it.