While companies are bad, that doesn't automatically make things a company produces bad even if the company is trying to price-gouge or otherwise make the most profit out of it. You can oppose the latter while not pushing bullshit about the former.
In this regard, I'm referring to things that people generally try to push anti-science views on and use "company bad" as their purposefully bad argument to conflate the two things.
So, medicine and pharmaceuticals are not bad, even if the companies are bad.
Same goes with vaccines, obviously.
Biotech crops are not bad (and people really need to learn about how all crop cultivars have patents, including heirloom and organic cultivars).
Ironically I foreshadowed one of these on one of my recently previous comments. The Greeks/Spartans are wayyyy overrated as far as history goes, as in I couldn't not understate how overrated they are. None of their claims to fame are wholly true in the least. For example, they were said to have invented democracy, but every two rulers was a tyrant who justified their tyranny with the fact Zeus himself was a tyrant. He and the other gods were always justified in that "they're the gods, they can do what they want", which would make sense if they were creator gods, but legend has it Zeus fought the creator god... and ate him... for power, and then presided over the gods for eternity, because apparently the democratic process (which didn't include women, immigrants, or non-home-owners anyways) does not befit the gods and so you have a mentally ill, Typhon-obsessed role model at the helm. They spend their days indulging themselves at the expense of others in such an extreme way that they make it sound like asexuality didn't exist, because it was the Greek view that human nature was the same for everyone. And this tyranny they tried spreading all over the world because they thought it was what democracy was, which brings us to Alexander the Great, the world's most undeserving "great" conqueror. Imagine trying to enact revenge for a conquest on your land that happened more than two hundred years ago, having the historical records lie to inflate you, and once you get even with your enemies, decide that while you're at it you should conquer people further East, all while being unable to actually properly care for the lands you conquered.
I am currently taking history and get tired of seeing people say "the Greeks were the best". When the Ottomans invaded Greece, the love was so great that people volunteered from random nations to travel to Greece to fight the Ottomans. I don't care for the Ottomans, but where was this love for, say, Iceland, who had a better democracy? Or the Iroquois who also had an actual democracy? Online and in movies, Greece gets all the exposure.
Hamas is a a fascist regime. As long as they remain in power, peace is not possible. Can't negotiate with them because they're fascist. Negotiating with fascists has been tried in the past, it didn't go well.
As a fascist state, Gaza should be placed under sanctions similar to the ones we've placed on Russia. Except we don't have to because Israel and Egypt are blockading Gaza. Which is exactly what they should be doing.
Palestinians put fascists into power, it's their responsibility to remove them from power. Until that happens, Gaza should be treated similarly to any fascist state that fires rockets at a neighbouring democracy.
Whatever criticism is made of Israel (there are many) should be made within the context of there being a fascist state on their border that routinely targets their civilians and calls for ethnic cleansing. Trying to pretend that this isn't the most important aspect of the whole Israel and Palestine situation is just dishonesty and propaganda.
Right, so you're for ethnic cleansing then? That is removing people from a territory under threat of violence based solely on their ethnicity. That's what you think is a solution?
So yeah, I'm not going to be agreeing with what you have to say.
"This" comments (on Reddit and Lemmy) are not a bad thing. An upvote is supposed to promote valuable content, not necessarily stuff you agree with. A "this" shows agreement. These are different things, and hunting down the "this" promotes the "upvote to agree, downvote to disagree" mentality.
(For example I said "this" to one comment on this thread, which was an unpopular opinion I agreed with. I upvoted plenty of other opinions I found interesting (and actually unpopular) while not necessarily agreeing with them.)
the world is overpopulated and everyone who wants to have children should require a license to do so (and it should cost a lot - like, a mid-tier job's annual salary).
This would only deter people who would otherwise plan a child. Those people tend to have fewer children in the first place and are more likely to take good care of them. I actually think the best approach to reducing the world's population increase is a heavy investment in education including reproductive education, especially in poorer countries which are the ones still actually growing fast.
I have a similar one for our country - we were occupied by Soviets and to this day I fucking hate that the communist party wasn't outlawed after revolution. They tortured people for fuck's sake. And the even sadder part is that it took 30 years after revolution for the communist party to not have any presence in the parliament - the last elections were the first where they didn't gain any seat.
Cool. I used to live in Brno (although I am Norwegian). I had a coworker from Praha who used to curse commies on a daily basis when we worked offshore together. "What kind of asshole party man designed this commie piece of shit??!". He grew up in the 80's.
Heh, lived there as well for a while! Yep, commie hatred is huge here. Especially because they fucked up so much for us. Throughout centuries we were part of the west, one of the most innovative countries in the world and one of the richest! Then decades of occupation by those fuckers (the previous occupation by Nazi Germany didn't help as well, thank you all the countries who sold us over because that would definitely stop Hitler from going further!) and suddenly everyone calls us eastern, we're far from our former prosperity and have basically become a factory for Germany. I'm a little salty about that.
Mate, you're looking for approval from westerners by kicking down east. You internalized the whole racial hierarchy some imperial fucks invented with them on top, and you're trying to climb it.
It's not a made up hierarchy and I didn't internalize anything - I agree with the hierarchy! Soviets were in the wrong, they illegally occupied many, many countries. If we disagree on this simple fact, we have nothing further to discuss. If we agree, then there is a logical conclusion: everyone, who supported them was in the wrong as well.
And as much as I hate to admit it, they would've never been so successful here if we didn't welcome them. I think it's kinda understandable - we were torn by war and our western allies has fucked us over to save their asses (which they didn't in the end and honestly that, for me, is the only good thing about the war) and suddenly a big Slavic country comes and says they will help us, unlike those big bad guys that fucked us. While I personally would be looking for the catch were I alive back then, I understand that people just wanted peace.
Anyway, that was kinda detour, the fact remains that we welcomed them, so we we're correctly labeled as the "eastern bloc" for that. What pisses me off about it is that we were part of the western culture with western values for centuries, while we were part of the eastern bloc for measly 23 years (and most of the time it was involuntary when people found out that there indeed was a catch with the "brotherly help").
We were fucked by west and then fucked by east, truly a wonderful country to live in.
"We should have systemically hunted down and killed every member of a political party" is unpopular, not because of the sentiment, but because actually doing so generally goes against the foundational beliefs of most modern societies.
Then comes the question who was a nazi? And who just feard them and not spoke up? Look at Russia or China, propaganda is also very much a problem, would you kill a 19 year old because he was in SS after all his life he was told thats a good thing?
I agree that Nazis are absolute garbage, but you can't justify a genocide with a genocide, same with Japan after WW2 (and they did worse stuff)
Also, whats with the "Commies" from USSR? They where basically the same level of evil. (and yes the Holodomor was a genocide and not the only thing they did)
Well, killing all Nazis isn't genocide, it's just mass murder.
And it isn't about a scale of how bad various regimes have been before or since.
And yes, that's the entire thing. They should have killed every last SS, Gestapo, every brown shirt and soldier, no matter how young. The motivation of the victims of killing every nazi wouldn't matter because the point is to eradicate every last one of them, and there's no way to prove they didn't believe in what they were doing other than their actions. There weren't very many Schindlers that showed by their actions that they actively resisted from the inside. And if it took their deaths to achieve the goal, then it was a mistake to not do it then.
TBH, despite being against the death penalty for several reasons, I'm worried we might be faced with such a decision again in my lifetime because they didn't do it then.
Obviously, eradicating the nazis wouldn't prevent the kind of insanity and hatred that exists as part of the human mind. It would have changed the face of that hatred though, and it would have sent the message that some things will not be forgiven or forgotten. It would have meant less rallying points, less bullshit. And it would have set the precedent that if humans behave like that, they can be put down like a rabid animal to protect the rest of us.
Again, I'm aware of exactly how ugly this opinion is. I do not like looking at the world and thinking that there wasn't enough death done back then. I do not like looking at the world now and wondering when it is going to happen again. But it's an ugly fucking world, and they're coming back. They're coming back exactly the same way they did before because they were allowed to survive.
At the end of the war literal children were being drafted. Are you seriously arguing that we should kill a 13 year old because he got a threatening letter and followed it's instructions?
Ahh, I'm not arguing we, as in humanity today, should do anything yet.
I'm saying that the people alive and in charge at the time made a mistake in not wiping out every nazi they could find.
Age is no barrier to such things at all. A 13 year old can be tried as an adult in many places for extreme crimes. Child soldiers have been sent to war for millennia, and still are today. Children are quite capable of committing atrocities. I wouldn't want to do it, I wouldn't want to see it get that far. But it was a mistake not to go as far as necessary to eradicate anyone that served the nazis because there's absolutely no way other than actions to prove what the individuals believed, and even that has flaws.
How many children had already been killed? I'm not even talking about by the nazis. Look up the Dresden fire bombing. Plenty of children were burnt to ash there. Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The are just the famous ones. The allies had already killed children of all ages by the end of the war. Pretending that there's a moral difference between that and executing them is not useful. Executions would even be arguably less horrible since it would only target those that were in the armed forces.
Well, this discussion has been less contentious than in the past, so I've actually had a chance to cover this.
Before I go copy/pasting things already covered, would it be too much to ask that you give a quick scroll through the thread and see if any of that changes your question, or if there's follow ups that you might have? It would help streamline the thread overall if there's not a lot of repeats.
I read the whole thread and didn’t see a single argument about what good would have come from that. I think you’re looking at this from a very removed point of view that lets you forget the actual individuals involved. I’m German. Let me introduce you to my grandparents and let’s see how they would’ve fared under your proposed processing:
Grandpa A was drafted at the end of the war, he was 13. He didn’t want to be there and plotted a “genius” plan with his two buddies two lie to his general about a super important mission from the general next town and run off. He probably only survived that because his general wasn’t in the mood to shoot him on the spot.
Grandma B wasn’t drafted obviously, she worked in (basically) social services while WWII because she actually was a supporter of the Nazi party and felt like that’s how she could do her part. She didn’t commit any atrocities, probably simply because as a woman she never got anywhere close to the front.
Grandpa C was a party member. He didn’t want to join at first – we still own a news paper page where he (and a few others) were openly shamed for refusing to join party and front. After his brother, who had turned down an SS position, was transferred to an extra risky combat unit as cannon fodder and died on his second day, he caved. I can only assume that, as a soldier, he actively participated in the fighting. He tried to disobey where easily possible, but he didn’t desert. When his general told him to “take care” of a woman he abused, he brought her away from the front, pointed her to the nearest town and told her to flee.
Grandma D didn’t do any of that, but she was proudly engaged to a Hitler Youth leader (who thankfully died, so she met my grandpa after the war). While WWII she absolutely was a Nazi, but she didn’t actively do anything that would mark her as such. She got into a personal crisis after the war when she stopped lying to herself about this horrible system she had supported. Until the day she died she was convinced she would go to hell.
Killing every active supporter, as you suggested, would have both my grandpas executed, although they both condemned what was happening and, limited by their sparce abilities to do so, tried to disobey. My grandmas would’ve ironically been spared, even though they were (when it comes to their attitude) more Nazis than my grandpas. Neither of the four were Nazis at later points in their life, I’d like to add. And the generation after them would have never existed - an anti-nationalistic, anti-patriotic, highly political, highly critical and socially active family, influenced by traumatized men and rueful women.
So it would have achieved nothing. I'd argue the world would be even worse if that would have been humanity's answer to WWII back then.
I think you are kinda insane, at the wars end most German soldiers where literally underage, there is no justice in killing them, not the smallest bit.
Not all migrants are good for the country. Many come with views incompatble with western culture. Stuff like homophobia, transohobia, mysogyny. And they are often brought over as cheap labor, undercutting local labor.
The right to keep and bear arms is an inalienable right. We should be able to carry on all public lands, and other places open to the public.
It is hilarious that that timidly suggests that it might be possible that 100% of people brought into the US from wildly incompatible cultures might be an issue is considered so unpopular it's being downvoted in an unpopular opinion thread.
What are you talking about, a ton of people do. "No human is illegal " is an overused, shitty slogan that is constantly everywhere, even though it doesn't nake sense.
Those are two different things. One is acknowledging uncontrolled inmigration is a negative thing for a country. The other one is not giving a shit because it's more important to help people fleeing life threatening situations, even at the expense of one's own privileged quality of life. At this point it's important to note that rich countries' quality of life is only made possible by unfair distribution of planetary resources and human exploitation of the same people being denied entry.
I don't care about data privacy. I care about consent and freedom of choice, so I care if someone else cares about privacy for whatever reason and cannot get it, but me personally, I care very little if at all. I personally do not feel a sense of "creepiness" or whatever from knowing that companies or the state know stuff about me. So I don't see much value in my personal privacy. On the other hand, we're barring ourselves from great technical advancements. I'm saying this because it feels like Germany is 10y behind other countries in digitization solely because regulators think I'm too stupid to give me the agency to opt in to sell my soul to our digital overlords.