It could have been a pun. Dying / Diane, but she wasn’t killed until a year after the song released.

Marky got with Sharon, Sharon got Cherese

She was sharing Sharon’s outlook on the topic of disease

Mikey had a facial scar and Bobby was a racist

They were all in love with dyin’, they were doing it in Texas

It’s just headline gore. Typical “View From Nowhere” style writing that tries to displace the perspective of the journalist onto a third party.

It’s popular among news venues that are terrified of appearing biased.

The experience with job sites and the experience with dating sites have entirely too many similarities.

He’s absolutely wrong

Trump’s fully primed to be at the center of a Messianic Cult once he’s kicked it. People are going to be talking about the Second Coming of Trump for the next fifty years.

What argument, precisely, are you making?

Bitch, learn to read. Go to school. Figure out the basics of the natural world.

I’m not going to explain the explanation. Especially not when you’ve confused organic chemistry with Newtonian physics.

You made an argument that this all-powerful God was constrained by physics.

I did not make that argument

this all powerful God isn’t smart or powerful

You don’t have to be that smart or that powerful for humans to worship you as a God. Humans have worshipped their richest local neighbors. They’ve worshipped big animals. They’ve worshipped rocks.

Do you also make justifications for billionaires that destroy the world?

Justify what?

I’ll blame Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg for a big new Data Center sucking up my neighborhood’s utilities.

I won’t blame them for the existence of malaria or the eccentricities of particle physics.

you’re putting quite a bit of energy in to justifying

Am I? It seems like you want a Magic Rock to blame for all your problems.

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Rape, murder, war, horrific disease, and all the other “adversity”

I mean, you’re talking about this as though some Divine Agent actively is making one person sexually assault another. Or kill another. Or cough on one another.

If you don’t want to live in a world full of rape, I would suggest you start by not raping anyone. Grabbing someone by the hair, pulling them into the ally, violently forcing yourself on them, and then saying “God made me do it!” is the most cynical shit imaginable.

“What you’re asking for isn’t a Utopia, it’s the heat death of the universe.” I dunno about you but all I’m looking for is a little less genocide, maybe a bit fewer hungry children, maybe some consequences for well-known pedophiles.

I mean, good news? We’ve been emerging from a state of nature for thousands of years and we are absolutely reaching an apex of civilization such that genocide and famine are at an all time low. Meanwhile, pedophilia and rape and murder are increasingly reviled rather than celebrated or tolerated.

But, again, your parents’ generation watched a thirty-year-old Prince of Wales become betrothed to a 16-year-old girl and clapped like seals. God didn’t make the English Monarchy do that.

God didn’t set up Little Saint James and stuff the Lolita Express full of post-Soviet block easily exploitable teenage refugees.

God didn’t initiate the Nakba or perpetuate a running genocide against the Palestinian people for the next 80 years. Neither did he kick off the German Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide. He didn’t spread the Spanish Flu during WW1 or factory farm in such dense conditions that COVID erupted onto the public in 2020.

All this shit is the direct result of human activity. Human ingenuity. Human passions. Human biases. Human politics.

I guess if there is no horrific suffering in the world we won’t evolve.

You can wave your hands and bemoan the existence of heat waves and hurricanes, then blame The Divine for building a universe in which some bad things happen to some living beings some of the time. But then you’re obligated to posit a world without heat waves and without hurricanes. And good fucking luck. That’s one hell of a balancing act.

You can posit a world in which bad things happen but we just don’t notice or care. But where does that end? Is suffering better if we’re blind to it? Not to get too Biblical, but you eat from the Tree of Knowledge and you begin to see the world more clearly. Language, society, historical memory, the capacity for science and engineering - they’re all double-edged swords.

You could be a microbe right now, with absolutely no conceptualization of who you are or why you’re here or what the universe outside a few centimeters looks like. And would that make you happier? Is that your Utopia? A few hours or days of existence mostly eating until you’re fat enough for mitosis. Is that your idea of a good time?

At least then you wouldn’t know enough to blame God for anything, right?

Right, but I’m not asking about their democratic structures. I’m saying with all the open, and open-ish borders, what actually happens? Do people from Peru and Ecuador typically go to Brazil for work? OK, well, so is that constant draining of talent good for Peru and Ecuador? Economic migration is usually a one-way street for decades at a time.

Really depends on economic conditions in the various territories. If you look at the US-Mexico border between the 20th and 21st centuries, a lot of the migration was entirely seasonal at first. Mexican laborers would move north during the planting and harvesting seasons, then go back down south during the winter. Only after restrictions on cross border travel tightened did we see people permanently relocating. And that was largely because every attempt to cross the border carried an increased cost and a host of new bureaucratic difficulties.

I don’t know a ton about the Argentinian economy relative to its neighboring states, so I can’t speak to the long term economic impact of loose immigration policy. But it has historically been one of the stronger South American state economies - second only to Brazil - with a GDP/capita third in line behind Chile and Uruguay. Hard to say they’re suffering because of dramatic inflows or outflows of people, at least relative to their neighbors. But obviously there’s a lot more at play than just immigration.

Peru and Ecuador aren’t nearly as rich as Argentina, so - if anything - people are migrating into Argentina rather than out.

Another good example is Bulgaria and Croatia joining the EU. There’s already a lot of migration from the Balkans into western Europe, and as soon as free movement was allowed, both places saw huge migrations of young people. Bulgaria is genuinely having a demographics crisis right now, and because it’s only a bunch of old Boomers left, they’re doing a bunch of typical Boomer things, like being extra conservative.

What you’re describing is mass displacement due to a stark shift in economic policy brought on by the post-Soviet Shock Doctrine. FFS, Bulgaria went from the 16th strongest economy in the world to the mid-50s practically overnight.

I don’t consider this exodus of young people a bad thing. It was a pressure release valve. A large number of young people kettled into a country with a collapsing economy could have just as easily ended up like Serbia and Bosnia, with an endless series of retaliatory genocides as rival ethnic groups play tug-of-war over scarce resources. Or like Turkiye, which has become a bottleneck in between Europe and the Middle East, where refugees simply pile up in camps and die by the hundreds. Or any of the North African countries, like Libya or Tunisia or Syria, where people in tiny boats attempt to (illegally) paddle their way across the Mediterranean and drown.

The prospect of a Bulgarian family legally and safely picking up, moving to Greece or Romania, finding a stable job, and reestablishing their fortunes doesn’t seem frightening by comparison. Not even if it means the country’s interior is hollowed out for a time. Bulgarians may return, as the state of affairs in Bulgaria adjusts and the political climate moderates. Or they may not, as they re-identify with their new home countries.

I might argue that the Shock Doctrine of the 90s/00s was horrible policy. And stripping the wiring out of the old Soviet Republics to prove, once and for all, that communism doesn’t work was a bad long-term economic plan for Europe. But I consider the freedom of movement afforded by the EU to be the least-bad thing that came out of their induction into the bloc.

And Lea Ypi is a great example, ironically, of someone who is brilliant having opportunity to move to study in Italy and sort of proving her own point wrong in a sense that she’s not some Albanian drug dealer.

I don’t recall anything in Ypi’s works suggesting that people who move out of Albania are all drug dealers. She strongly critiques the Cold War Soviet Policy of strict immigration controls, state censorship, and over-policing. And she uses the recollections of herself, her family, and her neighbors to argue the virtues of a free and open society, unconstrained by rigid ideological constraints or militarized borders.

That’s full consistent with her own life story. I’m not sure how you could argue otherwise.

And I wasn’t saying that companies would be gatekeepers, I mean abusers. Unfettered abusers.

Power corrupts. As soon as you establish gates, you need gatekeepers. And who else is going to man these gates if not the agents of the socio-economic elites?

In the US, that’s the Waltons (among others). They have a significant financial interest in constraining immigration - both internationally and domestically - in order to put downward wage pressure on workers and control capital flows.

The Waltons abuse border controls and the criminal justice system that surrounds it more than any coyote or drug smuggler.

Suddenly

Didn’t we already hit $100/bbl back in April? And we’ve been flirting at above $85 since July. Like, this has been an ongoing price crisis since at least February.

I’m asking why a not real place that actually does democracy well and isn’t dragging a legacy of being shitty behind it

A number of Latin American countries have very loose and friendly immigration policies. Argentina and Paraguay are the most notable. Idk if you’d say they “do democracy well”. That’s a real subjective criteria.

why does someone being a human give them a right to go anywhere and do anything?

We’ve got a wealth of political philosophy and ethics debates that help answer that question, from John Stuart Mill to Lea Ypi who can answer that question better than I can.

But a better question might be, why wouldn’t they?

Holy shit, you really trust social media and advertising to be left unchecked? A lot of peple would 100% move to the Wal-Mart corporate town and condos.

Why would I trust the owners of social media and advertising companies to be the gatekeepers?

People already move to the Walmart Corporate Towns, in large part because Walmart dictates what criticism it will tolerate and what opposition it will face.

People screaming about corporate fascism today wanted to put Walmart Board Member Hillary Clinton in charge of the whole country not ten years ago.

You’ll never escape the Cycle of Samsara with that attitude.

Have a meaningful conversation of how an all-powerful, good God can allow so much suffering.

Evolution is driven by adversity. Organisms experience stress, seek to relieve themselves of that stress, and improve upon their function iteratively over billions of years.

Pain is a form of information which gives an organism an imperative to change. And with a great number of organisms, you will necessarily have a great deal of suffering. But without that pain, you lose the incentive to change. The end result is stagnation and decay. A lack of pain isn’t joy, it’s numbness. A lack of adversity does not imply triumph but inertia. What you’re asking for isn’t a Utopia, it’s the heat death of the universe.

Look at our world. Look at the bad things. Look at the horrific things. God lets all those things happen

Literally the Al Pacino line while he’s trying to convince his son to fuck his sister.

Go to hell. Be a rebel. Be proud of it.

I would simply break the Cycle of Samsara and rejoin the Cosmic Singularity by freeing myself from materialistic desire.

New Atheist: “God isn’t real!”

God: “Oh yeah, real original. Like I haven’t heard that one a zillion times before.” slumps into Angelic throne, full of ennui

Love how this is getting downvoted. Like there isn’t a rich and storied history of Satanic Panic in the West. Or an active community of Epstein-brained conservatives who are doing blood libel on anyone who fails the Paper Bag Test.

if their government doesn’t like you, the border then binds you but does not protect you.

Okay, but that’s just why this is the most important election of our lives and you need to turn out to vote or we’ll be under the boot of the vile fascist-communist government of the Other Party That Doesn’t Like Me.

Borders exist because it projects power onto people within

I mean, that’s a very narrow perspective. Borders exist as a compromise between neighboring governments, indicating where one set of legal codes ends and another begins.

If you want truly free movement, you can’t have projections of power

Free movement is power projection. It’s just projection by the people (and their attendant organizations and ideologies) doing the moving.

The whole neoliberal One Big Global Market wet dream was about projecting the power of Western financial and regulatory authorities around the globe. Open Borders can be as much about projecting power as closed ones. And whether you believe that’s good or bad really hinges on whether you believe you’re aligned with the people doing the power projection.

You absolutely could describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine (or the US invasion of Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya/Syria) as a kind-of Open Borders policy under the Bush Doctrine. The borders are simply open to those with a big enough battering ram to kick through the door.

Most people I know that want an end to borders also want the end of government.

Idk about that. The line I’ve always seen is that most people want a system which protects-but-does-not-bind. And what they recoil at is a system that binds-but-does-not-protect.

I want the border to be frictionless for me. But I don’t want the border to be frictionless for people I don’t like.