Grerkol

I mean... I wasn't trying to mock you as a person, only your politics.

I wasn't being very direct and constructive, but I was trying to address some of what you were saying, albeit in a sarcastic way. I'm sure you don't love Mark Zuckerberg and worship the free market like my caricature though. I tried to make my tone clear, but I appreciate that it's hard online, especially for autistic people.

This is just the same kind of libertarian talking points again. Good job that you don't personally like or use Twitter or Facebook, but big tech is always gonna act in the interest of capitalists and try to create monopolies that control information (at least in The West©).

Not sure what sources of information you like, but I guarantee you they're either very obscure, discredited by propaganda or have similar problems to the social media you hate so much. Social media itself also affects what ordinary people can share and what they can communicate with others around the world.

All you're really doing is responding to the guy yankin' your chain by repeating yourself and saying I misrepresent you when I troll you.

I’m not even saying that

proceeds to explain how to vote with your wallet, how monopolies wouldn't exist if people were smarter and that nobody needs these things anyway

🗽

I love how tech CEOs contribute so much. I mean, they built the internet! Their platforms got so big fair and square, and the free market never creates harmful monopolies. Just vote with your wallet. These freeloaders who think corporations that I OWN (my property) should be controlled or even stolen from me by the general public (lazy ignorant people who do NOTHING for society) piss me off so much!

Anyway, these tankies don't even understand "communism". It's supposed to be when only hard working people like Mark Zuckerberg and I have any say (I mean, I won in the free market, so that makes me the rightful authority). Don't listen to these fools, my fellow entrepeneur. I love you.

That's like saying "I'm racist"

Ok but this isn't really the same thing. A home isn't a tool you rent just to use when you need it. Everyone needs a shelter to live in.

You give two reasons it's preferable to rent rather than own your home:

1. You have to store it.

That's just ridiculous.

2. You have to maintain it.

You do realise that you're still paying to maintain it, right? The landlord is just also taking extra. Even if the landlord were charging you only what was strictly necessary for maintenance (which they aren't), they'd still have unnecessary leverage over you just for existing in a space.

Don't try to make excuses for landlords. We all know they're vermin. They're not doing you any favours by forcing you to keep paying high prices to live.

(Edit: formatting)

Well obviously the most moral thing would be to live in it themselves or give it away to someone who actually wants to live in it. I accept that practically nobody is gonna be virtuous enough to just give away a free apartment to a homeless person, but selling it for a (at least somewhat) reasonable price is probably what I'd realistically do (assuming no close friend or family member wanted it).

Renting it out is still inherently exploiting the person living there.

Also consider that no "good person" simply owns a residential property that they don't live in.

I know I'm not who you're replying to and other people might disagree with parts of this, but can anyone seriously not agree that all landlords are scum?

testing whether the testee understands their nation, its values, and the democratic principles it is founded on

It seems like you only want people with certain "values" to be able to vote. What even are a nation's "values" anyway? Most of the time I hear that it's just vague nationalist propaganda about how our nation and our people are wonderful. I will admit that's a bit of a specific nitpick though.

As for "the structure of government and the content of the constitution", I honestly don't think the details of how laws are passed or how many seats are in congress, etc, matter much when it comes to deciding which policies you support and which party you'll vote for.

By their very nature, laws like this exclude people who are less educated and have less free time and/or motivation to study for your test. These are almost always going to be also the most disadvantaged and poorly treated people in society.

It's always just

say anything even vaguely related to China without also saying how much you hate China and everything about it = tankie

Then inevitably one person will come along and say "haha tankie, opinion rejected" and another will try to change the topic entirely to why "China is bad" for some very loosely related reason.

(Edit: typo)

Basically everyone has little knowledge about the vast majority of things. People who have strong beliefs generally think they have good evidence for them (even if what they think is clearly untrue and their evidence is nonsensical).

I've heard of "appeal to authority" and such, but at the end of the day I think that it's generally sensible to just believe the mainstream expert consensus on something until you're given good evidence otherwise, especially if you're dealing with hard science.

Of course it's ideal to know more about a topic than basic things you were told and took as fact and this should be paired with some level of media literacy and critical thinking, though.

Sounds like what chuds think the world is already like