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The point was more that a community can enforce that “if they don’t get it, no one will”, which I think would put a lot of companies off from buying.

It wouldn’t help the first few people get their home back, but after a couple rounds, the big corps will see that they end up losing money when the buy properties that are sacked a short time later. If there’s one thing that will make a company change its behaviour, it’s making them lose money through that behaviour.

I thought the same thing at first. However after reading another comment here I realised that a community can essentially sack the property if a huge corp buys it. Not much you can do if everyone around wants you gone so bad they’ll commit arson rather than let you stay.

That was my initial thought as well, but after reading the other comment about how a community essentially sacked a house after the “wrong person” bought it…

The only thing that intimidates soulless corps is the threat of losing money. If it becomes clear to them that whatever they buy at auction will be burned to the ground, they probably won’t be very eager to keep buying.

Recalling the videos of a single male lion pretty much ripping apart a pack of hyenas… Tigers are even bigger and stronger than lions, and wolves don’t have anywhere near the bite force of a hyena. I think you’d need a lot more than three.

In all honesty, I love both rakfisk and lutefisk. They are fantastic and wildly underrated food. I will die on this hill.

Oh, and sursild, sennepssild, and all that other good sild stuff. That’s also awesome.

The swedes can keep the surströmning to themselves though. That shit is not fit for human consumption.

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I think you’re missing my point: I opened by saying that I definitely believe the world is deterministic. I then went on to problematise the extremely unpredictable nature of the human mind. To the point where an immeasurable amount of historical input goes into determining what number I will say if you ask me to think of one.

Then, I used the argument of a chaotic system to reconcile the determinism of the universe with the apparent impossibility of predicting another persons next thought. A highly chaotic system can be deterministic but still remain functionally unpredictable.

Finally, I floated the idea that what we interpret as free will is in fact our mind justifying the outcome of a highly chaotic process after the fact. I seem to remember there was some research on split-brain patients regarding this.

By and large, I agree with you: I cannot see how free will fits into a deterministic universe. I still want to make some points for the case that there is some form of free will.

Think about scratching your nose right now, and decide whether or not to do it. It’s banal, but I can’t help being convinced by that simple act that I do have some form of choice. I can’t fathom how someone, even given a perfect model of every cell in my body, could predict whether or not I will scratch my nose within the next minute.

This brings up the second point: We don’t need to invoke quantum mechanics to get large-scale uncertainty. It’s enough to assume that our mind is a complex, chaotic system. In that case, minute changes in initial conditions or input stimuli can massively change the state of our mind only a short time later. This allows for our mind to be deterministic but functionally impossible to predict (if immeasurably small changes in conditions can cascade to large changes in outcome).

I seem to remember reading that what we interpret as free will is usually our mind justifying our actions after the fact, which would fit well with the “chaotic but deterministic” theory.

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There’s a reasonable probability that I’ll be heavily downvoted for this, but it’s my two cents, so here I go. For clarity, I’ll in the following use “male” and “female” to refer to biological groups identified by their reproductive organs (by far most people can clearly be identified as one or the other), and “man” and “women” to refer to groups of people that identify as such.

Sex (the action) is pretty fundamentally tied to your reproductive organs. As such, I think it makes most sense to define “straight” vs. “bi” vs. “gay” in terms of sex (the attribute). I would say that a male that is exclusively attracted to females is “straight”, while a male that is exclusively attracted to women “bi with a strong preference for women”, and that a male that is exclusively attracted to males is “gay”.

My reasoning here is twofold: First, a male that is attracted to women can have a range for how “female presenting” the woman has to be before they are interested. Some will only consider women that have gone through surgery and full hormonal therapy attractive, while others will find women without any surgery or hormone therapy attractive. This brings up the second point: A lot of sexuality becomes a lot easier to talk about (and de-stigmatize) if we accept that sexuality is a continuous spectrum. If we accept that, it makes sense to me to use one word for each extreme, and a more fluid language for the bulk of the spectrum. I know plenty of bi people that have more or less strong preferences towards one side of the spectrum, and some that are completely agnostic. I think a lot of stigma can be removed if we’re more open to people being “just slightly bi”, while we can keep the language clear by reserving “straight” and “gay” for the two extremes.

Finally, if we use “straight” to refer to e.g. males that are exclusively attracted to women, we open an unnecessary can of worms regarding males that are attracted to people who identify as women, but don’t present as female. In short: Sex (act) is fundamentally tied to sex (attribute), so it makes sense to me to define sexuality in terms of sex, rather than gender.

I’m going to be honest here: I approve of your proposal. At the same time, I live in a European country with conscription that borders russia. I don’t think you understand how reliant Europe has become on the US MIC. Even in Norway, where we have Nammo and Kongsberg, we are nowhere near being able to supply a significant force with arms.

In the 90’s, Norway could mobilise and arm ≈500 000 soldiers within a couple of days. Today that number is probably < 50 000. Building production lines takes time.

In the next election (this autumn) my vote is going to the party that takes up-arming the most seriously.

China would have to do a whole lot more than just “not support russia”. As a starter, they’d need to start being transparent, honest, and not censor the ever loving shit out of all information from their country. Then they could stop genociding minorities.