I'm not sure what you mean by "it's called an economy". That phrase might sound all edumacated in your head, but my point was that privatised debt on public services like education, healthcare, or infrastructure represent a "bleed" on that economy. And a bleed has exactly the same effect as it has on a human body. It might play out over a far longer period of time, but the effect is the same: A slow an eventual deterioration of health and if not stopped, eventual death. The debt servicing load on the collective OECD countries now exceeds even optimistic growth forecasts. In other words, blood is being extracted faster than the body can produce it.

But whatever. History will show which one of us is right. Let's talk in 20 years. If the OECD has emerged into bountiful prosperity, you were right. If it has shrunken or worse, I was.

Just because student loans are discounted does not mean that they cannot be packaged and resold to the private sector. Look up SLABs:
https://www.investopedia.com/a...

No. Grow or die is a false dichotomy and it's why we're about to grow ourselves out of our planet.

That's true if you look one level deep. Dig deeper.

The government sells bonds against those debts which essentially transfers all of the profit on those student loans to the private sector.

Of for fuck's sake it's a MacBook Air not a supercomputer you fucking wanker. If the 8 picoseconds difference in ram latency is a problem for you then you should not be using consumer laptops.

As a long time Android user, no, I do not recall that.

I guess my joke was not obvious enough.

Well to be fair, those are kept secret. Police officers can't have random members of the public calling them disrupting their consumption of donuts and coffee.

Ah yes. Ghandi. White people love to point to him despite knowing diddly squat about him. My great-grandfather was a close friend of his, and travelled with him to Britain when he was petitioning for India's independence.

Firstly, disrupting traffic is not "mayhem", it would absolutely fit in with Ghandi's MO of non-violent protest. Ghandi was not a "sit in the corner, beg the King to give up his power over you, and hope he does despite having no reason to". But status quo bootlickers do try to paint that picture because it suits them.

Secondly, as a South African from a family of civil rights activists, and as someone with decades spent as an activist and advocate of civil rights movements, I can tell you that you know SHIT about the Rodney King riots. Of course, there were a lot of own goals scored, and much of the rioting was self-defeating. But it has been completely re-cast in the decades since and portrayed as a mindless mob achieving nothing. That's not at all true. The violence of '92 was absolutely responsible for moving the civil rights movement forward, as the incumbent old white men were fighting tooth and nail to keep it at bay. Peaceful protests by African Americans had yielded no results. MLK and Malcolm X were mostly peaceful in their MOs but that didn't work out for them. The COINTELPRO program which pretty much proves that attempts at peaceful resistance will be met with military level opposition.

But anyway. I can see we won't agree. Let's part ways here.

Just to be a pedant, a retaliation is by definition a consequence. Everything else you said is correct, other than that.

The word retaliation does not imply invalidity or injustice. Just that an action was taken as a response to another action. That's it. That's all it means.

Well, that's not really as hard a line as you think.
If I believe (and I do) that public apathy towards the climate crisis is going to get us all killed, what do you propose I do?
If I believe that commercial interests have hijacked our politics, what do you propose I do?

Some issues, by their very nature, require disruptive attention gaining action. Now, whether or not that's effective is a different question, but the idea that people are bound to sit along for the ride while the inert masses drag their country off a cliff because disruptive protests are an invalid form of expression just doesn't sit with me.

I know this is a grey area and I'm open to alternative views. But as it stands, I don't know how to get the public to pay attention to, for example, the climate crisis without disrupting the public. Any other ideas?

lol

Listen jackass, the burden of proof doesn't work that way. Consider: I can claim that I know that you are a kitten raping, puppy eating lizard from Mars, and then demand that you provide evidence that I'm wrong. Given that you don't even know how the burden of proof works, I would suggest that not even are you not smarter than me, you're not even smarter than my dog.

Israel made the claim that rape was used in a massive and systemic way. No evidence was provided. Not a single case of rape was actually found to be verifiable. The one case where a name was put forward, the family of the supposed victim came forward and specifically said that they knew that she was not raped.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/01...

That is not to say that there wasn't a single case of rape on Oct 7. But no evidence has been provided to support even a single instance of it and that is odd. I mean, if there were supposedly hundreds of incidents, then surely a victim or witness could be found. There were after all a LOT of survivors. But apparently victims and witnesses are nowhere to be found:
"The police are having difficulty locating victims of sexual assault from the Hamas attack, or people who witnessed such attacks, and decided to appeal to the public to encourage those who have information on the matter to come forward and give testimony. Even in the few cases in which the organization collected testimony about sexual offenses committed on October 7, it failed to connect the acts with the victims who were harmed by them."
https://www.haaretz.co.il/news...
In other words, the IDF reports were unverifiable despite huge police effort, and the stories appeared made up.

The one making the claim bears the burden of proving it. The media has repeated the IDF line again and again, but the total absence of evidence has quietly been acknowledged in backroom circles. There have been attempts to gather evidence of what actually happened on Oct 7, but Israel doesn't want that:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/0...

Given that Israel has lied about more or less every one of it's claims, such as the beheaded babies thing and the burned women thing, it's pretty reasonable to conclude that without actual evidence, they are not to be believed. And when they actively impede the collection of evidence, well, believing them despite that is just fucking stupid.

I don't think you even understand what you just said.
Please point to an assumption that I made and how it's baseless.

Touché. I'll do better.