That's a common piece of libertarian propaganda but what happens in reality is businesses are forced to offer decent wages to attract labor and the ones that don't, perish - as they should.
407 karma · joined February 2, 2021
Your point against child labor is however complete nonsense. The fact that most so called "modern economies" are propped up by overseas labor often performed by children in the developing world is not an unfortunate accident. It's the consequence of the obvious fact that there are many jobs where businesses will happily choose low cost and high volume of labor over individual "skill, stamina, or strength".
Meanwhile, the GOP in America are trying to overturn long standing child labor laws in an attempt to battle increasing demands for higher wages by service workers so don't try to sell me the idea that it was businesses that decided to end child labor instead of the reality that it was activists and strikers - often facing heavy violence from the state in response - that ended the practice.
I think if I even started to talk about the laughable notion that slavery ended because of (instead of being massively bolstered and spread by) capitalists, I would be here all day so I'll save that diatribe for another time.
1. That is actually how "wages work". The state decides what is the minimal possible wage and then businesses will pay that amount to low status workers because businesses seek to maximize the surplus value out of their workers. Suggesting that businesses will opt into paying their workers a living wage without an external pressure is laughable and ahistoric.
2. Nobody serious is suggesting that $15 is some magical number but given political reality, it seems like an easier sell than proposing a minimum salary that dynamically adjusts based on local cost of living and inflation. It would also be a massive increase relative to the abysmal figure it is today.
"There is a very real chance that the more of those battles they win, the worse the outcome will be."
Such as the battle for minimum wage, the weekend, the 40 hour work week or the abolition of child labor?
I'm waiting for a credible example of a pro worker regulation having overall negative consequences for workers.
I wonder what represents a larger group of people: those at risk from side effects of the vaccination or every human being older than 65?
In all seriousness though, do you not see how incredibly self absorbed and outright anti-empirical this comes across as? The article briefly mentions the directly relevant and real existence of sexism in computing in the first paragraph (40 years ago mind you!) and then goes on to be almost entirely about the woman and her game, and you couldn't manage to contain your faux outrage at being reminded of uncomfortable truths.
I think the fact that you thought being a minority gives you a free pass for not reading the article and giving this nonsense sermon about wokeism tells me you don't really understand the movement you're lecturing against.
You might also have forgotten about the inconvenient fact that Tate is facing credible accusations of human trafficking which he has so far narrowly avoided facing due to being based in Romania.
Also, I'd love to see examples of the things you're talking about that are simultaneously filled with nuance and context, but also elicited an internet death penalty.
Also, nobody is being silenced here either because there is no obligation built into the first amendment or even the very concept of Free speech to provide a platform for anybody.
When an idea is transparently horrible, it's proponents are not interested in discussion except as a means to propogate their message to others. In a reasoned debate, fascists always have to work the least because it always takes more mental effort to debunk a terrible idea than stating said idea.
Meanwhile, adhering to the rules of respectability means the fascist gets to expose far more people to their message in a format where they get to express their message without interruption.
The only reason why you should ever talk to a fascist is to ridicule them. Jean Paul-Satre put it best when talking about anti-Semites (though it really applies to all strains of fascism):
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
A free society isn't something that can magically sustain itself without active effort and intolerance should not be tolerated. Sure, you can paint this as a "paradox" but aside from fascists cry bullying about being oppressed (while actively salivating about acquiring the ability to oppress everyone) and naïve liberals who can't remotely imagine the idea of bad faith actors in politics, I don't think anybody is getting oppressed here.
As far as I know, there is no violation of the First amendment here so even if you think hate speech should be protected free speech (which I don't agree with), nobody's freedoms have been breached here.
As for the 100 year view, you don't have to do anything for bigots to "build up resentment" and last time it reached boiling point, we had a civil war where we kicked their ass. The biggest reason why racism prevailed so strongly in the South (and to a lesser extent, the North) had nothing to do with resentments. It was because Lincoln deciding to play the appeasment game and picking a Confederate ex-slave owner as VP who promptly halted and reversed Reconstruction post Lincoln's assassination.
No matter what time scale you view things, reality contradicts your view.
Fascists don't need any "martyr", even leaving aside the fact that nothing being done to Andrew Tate here is worthy of that label, because fascists are perfectly capable of fabricating a strong sense of victimhood in their own heads. The antidote to fascism is overwhelming opposition, not appeasement.
They don't respond to truth, civility, or compromise - though they may on occasion weaponize such ideas when it serves their own ends - because they don't believe in either of those things. This is just liberal brainrot. It didn't work in the Weimar republic and it certainly isn't working in the USA.
In truth, not banning people like this from society just teaches others that their sick ideas must have some sort of validity to them. Otherwise, why would it be on display?
What's far more arrogant is you thinking your culture is so magically different that you're somehow immune to such criticisms. I wonder how the Koreans and Chinese would feel about that.
Also, while I'm firmly pro reproduction, this all sounds more than a little judgemental and presumptuous about the motivations of those that chose to not procreate.
Furthermore, this makes you highly suspeptible to manipulation and abuse by less successful would-be authoratarians.
Trying to paint this as "tone policing" is completely ridiculous.
I tend to use org-mode's table feature and if I need to export stuff to common formats, pandoc.