CascadeOfLight [he/him]

Their “determined to dominate”

Our “determined to ensure we lead the world”

What if an ambulance gets stuck in traffic? What if a road’s blocked by an accident? Or because it’s being repaired or relaid because of all the car traffic over it?

What if all the ambulances are occupied tending to one of the ~2,500,000 people injured in car accidents each year?

If you need to go to the hospital, you can call an ambulance that will be able to quickly and easily reach you due to there not being any car traffic. (The utterly ludicrous cost of US healthcare is its own separate problem)

Going to the countryside? Take a bus to the outskirts, or even out into the country itself, and cycle to a particular spot. Going to or from a club? Take the metro, take the bus, maybe even (depending no the strictness of ‘no cars’) a taxi, which you can afford on special occasions with the literally tens of thousands of dollars you’ll have saved by not needing to buy, insure, repair and fuel a car.

You have to also understand that for a car-free society to even be on the table, a number of other social changes will have to have been made too. So just arguing that going without cars is impossible due to the limitations of the car-centric society that currently exists is just circular reasoning. There SHOULD be ways to do the things you’ve listed without using a car, and the reason there aren’t is BECAUSE of cars.

Not quite, MMT states that money is just a unit of accounting and the government can print as much money as it wants as long as it’s used to mobilize workers and resources that are currently underutilized - likewise the government doesn’t need to tax in order to amass ‘enough money’ to pay for things, only to regulate the amount of currency in circulation and ensure a demand for currency that will mean their ‘orders’ are carried out.

Under neoliberalism, money is seen as a magic substance that cannot be fully controlled or understood and so it has to be left to the invisible hand of the market. Money printing in the US is controlled by the Federal Reserve, a private entity directed by a board of governors appointed by the President for 14 year (!) terms, but with no oversight beyond that - the Fed can print money, but ONLY to lend it to private banks, who then lend it on again. (Except that, thanks to the wonderful innovation of “fractional reserve banking”, those banks don’t even need enough money to cover the total loans they give out, only a certain fraction of those loans, so the private banks get to effectively print money as well!) This money is then lent out however the bank managers decree, which as it turns out is about 80% real estate loans, 15% financing hostile corporate takeovers, and less than 5% investment in actual business loans that might develop the means of production.

The result of this privatization of money creation and its funnelling into the financial sector is exactly the cause of economic crashes like 2008, as this huge influx of money inflates the price of financial assets - most importantly real estate - far beyond the prices of real economic commodities. This is a huge problem because paying the interest payments on the enormous loans needed to buy real estate to e.g. live in or run your business from, drains money out of circulation in the real economy and into circulation in the mumbo-jumbo financial economy, weakening the real economy’s ability to pay further interest. The bankers who made these loans then sell them on to others, with the ‘price’ of the loan - theoretically determined by its value when paid back in full plus interest - also being wildly inflated due to how much money the financial markets have swilling around them!

Of course, eventually, these untenably large loans are defaulted on by the businesses and homeowners that took them out, in no small part because of the economic slowdown caused by making interest payments, and it’s revealed that huge swathes of the portfolios of certain investment banks, in which they were ‘saving’ their customers’ money, are actually worthless. At this point there are two options - write the debts down to levels that can actually be paid (or even write them off entirely) and watch the price of real estate and ‘financial instruments’ plummet OR print an enormous amount of money, give it directly to the banks who ‘lost’ their gambles, and maintain the debts at exactly the level they were before, and if the debtors default on their mortgage: tough, the bank owns your house now. The latter is what the Obama administration did - gave Wall Street trillions of dollars and oversaw the largest wave of evictions and home repossessions in US history.

Meanwhile, a government running on MMT (aside from not being in this situation in the first place) would have let the lenders get owned, written the debts down (or off) and pumped money into the real economy to mobilize the unemployed, perhaps through a federal jobs program of some sort or by hiring into nationalized industries.

Well I was gonna bother responding, then I noticed your account was created five days ago and has done nothing but both-sides this conflict

Have a very shitty rest of your shift officer

The argument for it being Israel:

• Israel has complete air superiority
• Israel is conducting a bombing campaign against Gaza
• Israel has threatened to attack hospitals
• Israel has previously bombed hospitals
• Israel has previously bombed this exact hospital
• The audio and visual characteristics of the bomb and the damage caused (captured by multiple, independent observers) match with a JDAM guided bomb, which Israel has already used
• Israeli sources first claimed the hospital was a Hamas base or had Hamas tunnels or arms caches, before rapidly rolling back their position to “we didn’t do it”
• It is clearly in Israel’s interest to kill Palestinians and destroy Palestinian infrastructure, especially medical services and supplies, because they are conducting a genocide

The argument for it being Hamas:

• Israel says it was

Reddit, or rather , is controlled by the US security state, so r/combatfootage - which banned all combat footage from Palestinian viewpoints - is not a reliable source. The idea that a ‘rocket piece’ could accidentally fall on a hospital and kill 500 people (a number reported by a first-hand MSF witness) is laughably absurd. If a Hamas rocket could cause this kind of damage, Tel Aviv would look like the surface of the fucking moon. It was OBVIOUSLY another genocidal act by the entity continuously and overtly engaged in genocidal acts. To think otherwise requires you to want to fall for their propaganda. No one in full possession of their faculties looking at the facts dispassionately could possibly conclude it was anything else.

Banned for being factually incorrect in a blindingly obvious way

My retirement plan is for a NATO-backed fascist paramilitary death squad to gun me down for harboring trans people