Also the parties realign during this period with conservative southern Democrats going to the Republican party and fully embracing the idea that government is the enemy rather than a potential force for good in people’s lives. The subtext being that if you’re poor, it’s your fault and rich white men should be left alone to run big businesses however they want.

The mistake here is in assuming that it’s either all or nothing; that self checkouts are either great, or some kind of disaster.

The reality is that they’re great for some applications, but suck ass for others.

Here’s the deal; if it’s just me with a few items, yeah, the self-checkout is awesome, but if it’s me and my wife and we have a shitload of groceries for the entire family, guess what? Self-checkout sucks ass and it’s way easier to go through a regular checkout stand where there won’t be a hundred little different ways for the system to get jammed up and require an employee intervention.

What part about this do people not understand?

I have to think that a lot of the hostility to regular checkout stands comes from relatively young Lemmy users who don’t actually have to shop for families of their own.

Or, you know, not the party that is openly authoritarian and anti-democracy. We don’t have to like Kinzinger’s politics, but let’s not be fucking morons and misrepresent the reasons why he’s turned against his own party. That’s good for no one.

I don’t think that’s what is being said at all. I think what’s being said is that if the future belongs to the next generation, it’s in all of our interests that intelligent and responsible people do not simply give up and allow the idiots to dominate the future. In other words, we all have a stake in the coming generations and simply opting out because we find it somehow inconvenient is not a moral decision.

This is not to say that we all need to have kids, but rather, is to say that we shouldn’t necessarily fault those who do choose to have them. Again, if the children are our future, it would be nice if at least some of them were raised by responsible, intelligent and well-educated parents.

That’s a default vote for Trump then.

It’s the final refuge for tankies. That and the old “social democracy only works by exploiting the global south” canard.

It’s a problem because people don’t feel like stakeholders when they don’t have a say and can’t participate in their system of governance. This in turn means that they aren’t incentivized to willingly participate and have to be forced or indoctrinated, both of which are violations of human rights.

Wikipedia is kind of wrong in the sense that there’s always been Palestinian Jews.

The issue is that due to Zionism, a ton of European Jews moved into the region starting at the turn of the last century and accelerating following the Holocaust.

Said Jews then set about building a thriving western-style industrialized democracy that was opposed at every turn by an Arab and Islamic population that opposed its very existence on what can only be thought of as religious grounds.

All of which can only be taken as an indication of how deeply corrupting and counter-progressive are virtually all forms of institutionalized organized religion.

Fuck all of them. Organized religion sucks ass and should rightly be seen as a vestige of the past.

That’s something to worry about in every arena that involves money, not just unions. It’s just a fact of life that there are crooks and liars in the world.