I honestly believe that the situation in Palestine has gotten to a point that if an election is held, Palestinians will vote an extremist government into power with an agenda of revenge whose policies are to wipe Israel and the people off the face of the Earth. Regardless of whether you think Israel deserved that, what will actually happen if they try is that the US will help Israel annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip and exterminate the Palestinian nation. And they will succeed.

Good does not always triumph over evil.

Of course that's true, but the rules surrounding superdelegates and other tomfoolery wasn't enough to make a difference in any recent presidential primary. 2024 was an anomaly but it seemed pretty likely Kamala would have won the nomination regardless (this is not an excuse to not hold a primary).

The rules for primaries to legislative or local offices are actually completely clean and fair, at least as far as I can tell.

I think it's important to highlight the importance of primary elections here. Unlike most other countries, the process of choosing who a party nominates to stand for election is entirely controlled by voters in the USA through primary elections.

The Democratic Party loses because the Republican Party nominates populists that people are excited to vote for. If the Democrats want to win, they need to do the same—nominate people that voters are actually enthusiastic about.

Primary elections have historically rubbish turnout. If progressives, social democrats, and socialists want their candidates to be nominated, they should be starting information campaigns to get their fellow left-wing Democrats to vote in primary elections.

Okay, you win

The goalpost remains where it was at the beginning of this conversation. I claimed, and maintain, that requisitioning vacant housing units is not a good solution to the housing shortage.

What you're describing is not the goalposts moving; it's that you are attacking very specific peripheral claims without realising that if any of them are true then the overall conclusion is true. So when you attack one and I point out that another exists, you accuse me of moving the goalpost.

In order to be useful towards alleviating a housing shortage, housing units must be habitable, located where housing is needed, legally available, and in significant quantity, among other things that I can't think of immediately. If any one of these is false, the solution doesn't work. it is absolutely not useful in the slightest to suggest that pointing out holes in a solution one at a time is "moving the goalposts" and use that as a pretext to dismiss criticism of that solution.

It should not require explanation that for a chain of reasoning to be sound, you do not need to link to someone else saying it. I can adequately use your own sources to attack your conclusion.

Vacant housing that is for let or for sale is already on the market and will eventually be let or sold. Nobody wants to have an empty house earning no money but still have to pay tax and utility bills for it. If it really is priced too high, then nobody will rent or buy it and they will decrease the price until someone does. If you want units to become cheaper, you can't do it by mandate with rent control ordinances or by requisition (at least not the US without paying compensation out the ass). This would be like trying to swim upstream. The only viable solution to bring down the price in this market is to create more supply (by building more units) or to depress demand (by driving people out of the city).

Just looking at the numbers for Los Angeles, at the top of my list, shows that I'm substantially right.

16,889 units out of a total housing stock of 3,591,981 units amounts to less than half of one per cent. That's quite literally a rounding error. That number also utterly decimated by the homeless population in Los Angeles County, which is 75,518.

I'm talking about vacant homes in the city. Where the housing supply is most desperately needed. There are no such things as habitable off-market ready-to-move-in vacant homes in the city.

Holiday homes at the beach or hunting cabins in the woods aren't useful to consider and the way your article presents it as a solution to homelessness is irresponsible clickbait. All of the jobs and economic opportunity is in the city. A house in the forest or in a beach side community of 5,000 people does nothing to alleviate the housing crisis. You would do better requisitioning hotel rooms than trying to use these buildings for housing.

It's not just the homeless in need of homes. You also have the ⅓ of people aged 18 to 34 still living with their parents, and the people who have to crowd into a 4-bedroom flat with five other people. Granted, this also includes people in school or those who just like living with their parents despite being able to afford their own place, but it still represents tens of millions of Americans.

Trust me, almost nobody purposefully keeps a house empty that they'd be able to let out. If a house is vacant, it's probably because it's subject to a legal dispute, derelict and uninhabitable, slated for demolition, for sale, or being used for short-term rentals (which should also be banned but that's only tangentially related).

I think the housing market plan doesn't seem likely to work. The real issue is not that current landlords are exceptionally greedy (the rules of capitalism assume and encourage everyone to be as greedy as possible), it's that there isn't enough housing stock to give everyone who wants one a unit. In economics, housing is more or less a commodity like everything else and thus follows the usual rule of supply and demand, i.e. insufficient supply drives up price until demand tapers down to meet it. If you buy up the city's housing supply and then price them below the equilibrium price, the result will just be that far more people want a place than you will ever have supply for, since you are not actually creating any new housing supply, just buying existing supply from other people.

I would think you'd have more success getting into the property development and construction business, buying up vacant or derelict lots in the city, building them into blocks of flats, and then letting them out on the cheap. You'd also have to hire lobbyists to prod the council to change zoning laws to allow for this development and obtain planning permission. It takes a lot of political maneuvering to make a housing project successful, not only because of legal restrictions, but also because you'll need amenities for your new development. Parking is a big one in the US unless you build a dense mixed-use development which is bureaucratically difficult to get planning permission for, but there's also considerations like whether the nearby bus line can handle the influx of passengers, whether the neighbourhood school can handle a hundred more pupils, whether there's a grocery store nearby, whether the area "feels safe", and so on.

Kind of the reason why State-run public housing schemes are so successful is because they are a government agency that has the power to brute-force the solutions to these problems. Zoning codes? Overruled. Public transit? Ordered. Schools? Built. Private developers don't have the power to do these things and have to beg the council for them instead.

Au contraire, mon amis.

From an American perspective, Reddit is split between liberals and progressives with a minority of socialists and conservatives.

It depends on what changes they made. Reddit is fairly left-leaning so if they start seeing more right-wing content or racist crap being allowed on the site, it might happen.

People quit X because it allowed notorious racists and neo-Nazis back on the site, and also did dumb stuff like not allowing people to unfollow Elon Musk (it will automatically re-follow him after some time). It also prioritised and propagated right-wing content which, shockingly, left-wing users didn't like.

From a formal logic perspective, your statement is true. But in real life, the more important distinction is not between "true" and "false", but between "purposefully deceptive and ungenuine disinformation" versus "outspoken dissenting viewpoint". And that is one that people are really bad at telling the difference between, especially if the viewpoint in particular is one that they hold very strongly.

!asklemmy@lemmy.world has over 70 times as many subscribers as the other two asklemmy communities combined.

Windows has a package manager. Two, actually. There's the Microsoft Store, the shitty one, and Winget, the decent one.

It's not wrong, but I don't regard Lemmy.ml as being problematic enough to defederate from. Their moderation practices are questionable and their user base is annoying but it's otherwise generally tolerable. People can block the instance if they don't want to see content from it.

There's too much content on lemmy.ml to defederate. We'd lose like a quarter of all the content.

Just so people can understand why the ICC claims jurisdiction, it is because the Palestinian Authority acting as the State of Palestine acceded to the Rome Statute of the ICC and thus became a state party in 2015. They pretty much did this with the express intention to give the ICC jurisdiction over alleged Israeli war crimes in occupied Palestinian territories. In 2019, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda requested a ruling on the question of ICC jurisdiction in Palestine. In 2021 the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber ruled that Palestine's accession to the Rome Statute gave it jurisdiction over Palestinian territories occupied by Israeli forces (a.k.a. the West Bank and Gaza Strip).

Lebanon is not and has never been a state party or signatory, for those curious. Israel and the US are signatories but refused to ratify the treaty, and thus aren't state parties. Nonetheless, the ICC had decided that crimes committed in countries who have acceded or ratified its statute, or accepted its jurisdiction, are subject to ICC regardless of the citizenship or residency of the alleged perpetrators. This is also why it issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin despite neither Russia nor Ukraine being state parties; Ukraine accepted ICC jurisdiction on an ad hoc basis for crimes committed during the Russian invasion.

Chinese law does not recognise the concept of paying someone compensation for suffering trauma.

This is not the right way to put it. She won 60,000 CNY, not 8,000 USD. A "low-wage" worker at a fast food restaurant or a coffee shop in the city earns 20-30 CNY per hour.

This is a pretty substantial payout by Chinese standards. At the same time, China doesn't recognise "punitive" damages or "emotional damages" as a thing. The response to the notion of "punitive damages" is "don't you mean a fine?", and that to "emotional damages" is that "there is no such thing, you can just get over it".

I'm sure the Democratic Party of the 1960s would surely agree with this graphic.