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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

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  • I live in a country where every citizen automatically receives a government id at the age of 12. We have to bring that id when we go to vote, but even if I were to lose the card at the worst possible time, there are contingency measures to allow me to still cast my vote. The idea is to get as many people as possible to vote, the id card greatly facilitates this process, but it’s not used as a tool to keep people from voting.

    In the usa (and the uk, and maybe other countries as well), citizens are not automatically granted an id card. Instead they have to acquire + maintain some accepted means of identifying themselves if they want to vote. And there some Americans saw a great opportunity: what if they made it so that certain minority groups would have a statistically harder time acquiring and maintaining identification that was deemed acceptable? And what if the state government could arbitrarily purge voter lists based on data mined information? The voter id requirements are used not only for facilitating the voting process, but also for suppressing undesired votes.

    If you want some examples of usa voter suppression: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States





  • Your description fits Bangladesh, except for the location. If you’ve seen news reports about major disasters in exploitative clothing factories, then those were probably about factories in Bangladesh.

    Myanmar is majority Buddhist. No outsiders, except international criminals (scammers, drugs) set up any factories in Myanmar, because of the civil war and political instability.


  • So they basically want to bring back the company towns from the gilded age, but more dystopian thanks to the possibilities of modern technology. Characteristics of company towns often were: “controlling and/or exploitative”.

    Control: If your employer does something unethical, will you dare go against it, if it means that not only will you lose your job, but you and your family will be also be kicked out of your house, school, town, … Very few would.

    Exploitative: where can the company town residents shop and find services? In the company shops of course. This constrained supply also leads to subpar service for high prices. And if company sales are down, the company will spend less on wages, but keep the company shop prices the same since the shoppers have no alternative anyhow.

    Add in modern technology, and some of those towns will be like Brave New World, while others will evolve into 1984. Dystopian.



  • If you try to take too many eggs out of 1 basket, the person carrying that basket is likely to try and run away. So it’s easier and less disruptive to take a few eggs out of lots of different baskets.

    Taxing accumulated capital without exceptions is also guaranteed to screw people over. The man in the OP is a good example: he’s a modest man who many years ago bought a modest house for a modest sum of money. Due to circumstances, that house has now increased in value, making him a wealthy man on paper. But he’s deriving no income from that wealth, since he can’t rent it out because he lives in it himself. So now he’s a modest man, who is rich on paper, who is expected to pay high taxes on his paper wealth, turning him into a poor man who is barely scraping by.





  • What those statistics do not take into account is the different incidence rates of men/women being out alone at night.

    Because women feel more afraid going out into the dark alone, they’re less likely to do so, creating less opportunities for them to be robbed/raped/killed.

    To make an analogy:
    What are my chances to drown in the sea if I never go swimming in the sea? 0% chance.
    What if I go swimming once a week, with a risk of drowning of 0.5% each time I do so: then there’s ~23% chance that I’ll drown by the end of the year.
    What if go swimming twice a year, but because I’m such an amateur the chance that I drown is 5%: there is ~10% chance that I drown by the end of the year.

    Conclusion: even though it is 10x more dangerous for the inexperienced swimmer to go swimming in the sea, in a given year the experienced swimmer is still 2.3 times more likely to drown in the sea than the inexperienced one.


  • Animal Farm is the allegoric tale about communism in Russia.

    1984 is more general about totalitarianism, still based on stuff that went on in Nazi Germany + Soviet union + wartime England, but it wasn’t a full allegory of things that had already happened. It was more like a science-fiction prediction of the bad things that could happen in any nation if democracy and human rights were not protected.







  • RunawayFixer@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldWhat is hexbear?
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    3 months ago

    Someone else already commented how tankies got their name.

    Tankies in the comments can generally be recognized by:

    • Anything that a liberal democratic country does is bad.
    • Authoritarian regimes such as China, Venezuela, Russia, North-Korea, … are somehow the good guys, no matter how well documented their transgressions against human rights are. Tankies defend Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for example.
    • Because tankies want to present some atrocious regimes and people as the good guys, they have to twist the truth a lot. So they constantly lie and misrepresent/omit facts to push their false narrative.
    • Since they’re not interested in an actual discussion or non tankie viewpoints, they employ non-constructive discussion techniques to score points and “win” arguments. And this last bullet point is mostly why everyone else hates them.