▪️Almost everyone (including many libertarians) approaches the Israeli/Palestinian conflict wrong. They view it as a disagreement over tribal, collective “rights” to the land. The Jews have historical claim, Palestinian land was stolen, blah blah. There is no such thing as collective, tribal rights to land, that thinking is what has led to most wars throughout history. There’s only a right to the land particular individuals own, or have cultivated.
▪️Very few Palestinians living today have any legitimate property rights claim to land in Israel. More importantly, that’s not what they’re fighting for. #FreePalestine is not a movement to protect the individual rights of Palestinians (or anyone), it’s a movement to install a dictatorship, a theocracy that controls “Palestinian land.” Not only is there no right for such a dictatorship to exist, any movement which seeks to implement one is not in any way associated with freedom.
▪️Every single time Palestinians have been given autonomy and the ability to self rule they have chosen dictatorships and authoritarianism. There are no rights of any kind in Gaza. No freedom of speech, religion, or property rights. If they controlled more land, it would mean more oppression, not only for Israelis but for Palestinians.
▪️Israel, meanwhile, is a crappy government like the US is a crappy government. It does all sorts of awful things, but it protects basic freedoms. You can be gay in Israel, be a Muslim, be an entrepreneur, be critical of the govt, etc. You can pursue your dreams for the most part. In fact, Arabs living in Israel are far freer (and better off) than those in Gaza or most anywhere else in the Middle East.
▪️No state who violates any of the rights of its citizens deserves to exist, but in reality this only applies if the alternative is more freedom. Freedom movements are only moral or justified if they call for and actually bring more freedom to an area. The Palestinian cause does not, it only brings tribal rule with a genocidal desire to erase Israel.
▪️It doesn’t matter what the historical claims of the Jewish or Palestinian people are (although the Jews have a better claim even there imo). It matters what government is better at protecting its citizens’ rights. In that regard, it’s not even close in who to support. It’s night and day morally. It takes brainwashing or a college degree to rationalize supporting “Palestinian freedom” in the current context.
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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