Nationalist Socialism, specifically, yeah. “We can’t give you nice state-sponsored amenities because the evil migrants and foreigners took them from you” is a classic Nazi propaganda strategy and one popular all over Western and Southern Europe right now.

You’re coming at this from the perspective of “Nazi Bad”. It’s only harsh and broad if your opinion of fascism is harsh and unequivocal.

But you need to recognize that public opinion is turning. Fascism is regaining popularity globally, with Germany being one hot spot of many - from the UK to the Philippines to Argentina. Fascism isn’t some kind of hollow slur anymore. It’s popular public policy.

Nazism isn’t an inherited trait, it is a tool of social control.

private media and business continue to see Nazism as a means of pitting the working class against itself, its neighbors, and geopolitical its rivals

Some of them are, certainly.

Inspections have been ordered at every German army barracks, after Nazi-era memorabilia was found at two of them. The move follows a growing scandal over far-right extremism within the army, with an officer accused of plotting an attack disguised as a Syrian refugee.

Germans are Nazis because de-Nazification never really happened and high ranking members of the fascist government continued to occupy key rolls in government and industry long after the military’s collapse in 1945. Nazis were used as a bullwark against Soviet Communists in the 50s and 60s. Then they became pivotal as expendable Cold War mercenary units during the 70s and 80s, particularly in Latin America and Southern and Western Africa. Finally, the xenophobic rhetoric of the AfD has been instrumental in radicalizing Germans against Southern Europeans during the '00s European economic downturn and against war refugees following the invasion of Iraq and the bombings across North Africa, Syria/Lebanon, the border wars with Turkyie, and now the Russia/Ukraine conflict.

Nazism isn’t an inherited trait, it is a tool of social control. German private media and business continue to see Nazism as a means of pitting the German working class against itself, its neighbors, and geopolitical its rivals. So Nazism continues to thrive within the German state, long after the tanks that rampaged across Europe in the 30s and 40s had ground to a halt.

CS:GO, which is the most predatory

Plenty of Gacha Games are more predatory than CS:GO. Valve is happy to host them all. CS:GO is a big money maker precisely because it has a large and enduring user base that isn’t fixated on Pay2Win game mechanics. Compare that to SummonerWars or Diablo Immortal or even just Candy Crush. There’s no contest.

casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law

They don’t “find new loopholes”, they explicitly lobby/capture the agencies/courts that write/interpret the rules and carve out loopholes.

Might as well say “You can’t keep money in a bank, the robbers will just find a way in” while a guy in a ski-mask walks through the front door, hands the teller a $20, and is lead directly into the vault with a complementary tot bag.

Crackdowns won’t stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won’t change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling

There are countries that impose limits on what tech companies are allowed to advertise, distribute, and collect revenues on outside of the US. These countries don’t have President-elects who are joined at the hip with their country’s most wealth individuals, bending over backwards to make the billionaires happy.

Valve running an illegal underage casino

Valve doesn’t run the casino. Valve owns the real estate under the casino and collects a rent. The casino is run by a kaleidoscope of fly-by-night marketing firms after being constructed with sweatshop labor from development studios in countries with abysmal labor laws.

Turns out, it takes very few employees to be the landlord of a casino. But the casino can’t make money without a battalion of scammy sales shits and a legion of cheap construction workers. Valve can’t make money without these workers. But because it collects rents on the real estate rather than revenues on the casino itself, it doesn’t need to include these staffers in its accounting books.

Lots of good cinema and books in Mandarin. And you don’t need to dig through all the AI Slop filling up the English language outlets.

Bill Gates about to get extremely friendly with the Trump Administration.

Unfortunately, RSS doesn’t do anything for the links to the NYT in my Lemmy feed.

I can’t be bothered to visit any mainstream news site anymore. They’ve made the process of accessing the content so adversarial that there’s no point.

I’d say it’s less about imagination than gameplay. I’m reminded of old action figures. Some of them were articulated at the knees, elbows, feet, wrists, and head. Very posable, but you could see all the joints. Then you had the bigger and more detailed figures, but they were barely more than statues. Looked great but you couldn’t really do anything with them.

And then you had themed Lego sets. Only a vague passing resemblance to the IP, but your imagination is the limit on what you do with them.

But for most people, sex stuff feels bad in a way that rent-seeking doesn’t. You could make as many points as you want with irrefutable logic, flow charts, and diagrams, and it won’t get through the skittering heartbeat of “BUT IT FEELS BAD”

I wouldn’t sell logic, flow-charts, and diagrams short. But its worth considering how much sex-negativity pervades Abrahamic Western culture up front. It isn’t that we’re devoid of logic when it comes to sex and business, its that we’ve been sold a bill of goods at a very early age. It feels bad because its been drummed into us as bad.

I don’t really know how to fix this.

It’s difficult to balance, because the defensive social posture around sex is itself a social counterbalance to the aggressive instinctual impulse people can feel naturally. Leaving people to go full Lord of the Flies on their sexual urges leads to violence and fear and resentment. What we want is a more nuanced understanding of the sexual drive. But that’s harder to achieve than blanket permission or blanket sanction. You want some kind of bureaucratic convention to apply, which gets you to institutions like marriage, but that gets you to the commodification of virginity which is its own can of worms.

If sex work was normalized, in a couple generations many people would probably feel fine about it.

I would argue that sex work is ultimately a negative externality of the rent-system broadly speaking. If you constantly need to generate income for basic essentials - food, shelter, energy, etc - then the people cartelizing those services become your defacto pimps. By contrast, if your basic needs are guaranteed, sex as a profession becomes something you can choose as an entrepreneurial passion rather than a lifeline for your survival.

The fixation on the sex work itself is the problem. What people need is public housing and utilities, guaranteed sustenance, and a pathway to a career of their choosing. That plus decriminalization removes the network of pimps that make sex work truly morally abhorrent.

For example, a sex worker can’t work from home if they’re a renter because leases have provisions banning illegal activity on the premises, she said. A sex worker setting up a working space for other sex workers is also illegal, so they’re not allowed to set up co-working spaces or purchase hotel rooms for one another.

The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, or Bill C-36, says that in Canada you cannot buy sex, advertise sex, make money selling sex, procure a person selling sex or talk about selling sex in public. Sex workers get an exemption for making money from and advertising sex.

This also prevents sex workers from working with third parties to help with advertising, find clients or run a business, Clamen added.

So, the sticky legal morass is the issue of the pimp (or, as it is more colloquially referred to, the Employer) who seeks to tax some or all of the sex worker’s earnings as a condition of her doing business in the area. On the one hand, criminality affords the pimp more leverage by offering “protection” as a condition of rent-seeking the worker. On the other hand, a lot of what is being described above - acquiring working space, soliciting, contracting out sex workers, and extending credit to sex workers - is exactly what a pimp does, in practice.

What we’re really getting boxed in by is the very idea of capitalist rent-seeking through the operation of a business. When you’re selling anything else, the rent-seeking is considered a value-generating profit motive of an entrepreneur. But as soon as what you’re selling involves sex worker’s services, we realize what we’re advocating is human trafficking.

The Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform’s website notes how Indigenous women, racialized immigrants and trans people, especially trans women, face disproportionately higher levels of policing regardless of their participation in sex work. “The criminalization of the sale or exchange of sexual services gravely exacerbates their stigmatization and marginalization,” the website adds.

You can trace this down a bit further and discover how many of these officers are themselves involved in the protection racket, extorting sex workers for money or outright assaulting them under cover of law by using the threat of an arrest as leverage.

Border security agents are using facial recognition software to identify sex workers and tie their online profiles or ads to their legal identification, Rothschild said. When these programs are successful at matching people’s faces to their ads, they can get banned from travelling to the United States for 10 years, or will have to pay $10,000 to be allowed to re-enter the country, they added.

The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and its regulations prohibit anyone without Canadian citizenship or permanent residence from doing sex work and presumes migrant sex workers need rescuing rather than supports that enable them to make their own work decisions, according to the Alliance for Gender Justice in Migration.

This prohibition, combined with strict bylaws like the background checks required in Richmond, means sex workers in the most precarious positions are pushed further into the margins, Rothschild said.

The end result of these rules is to limit workers’ freedom to travel, to earn income, and to accumulate property. And the goal of these policies - whether it is admitted to or not - is ultimately to compel these workers into underpaid (or outright unpaid) servitude.

The purpose of the system is its results. And modern laws around sex work are designed to compel people into unpaid labor.

The whole idea that it violates the terms of service of a company to not let them show things on my screen without my consent is insane.

Something something contract of adhesion something something. It is functionally a term of service to watch the whole body of content as a condition of watching any of it.

It’s like if every time you went to the grocery store, the employees held you down and force fed you a free sample, then banned you from the store when you started running away from them.

This effectively used to be how people would sell Time Share rentals. You would “win” a “free vacation” to a destination that hosted the time share. Then, in order to check in you needed to sit through a sales pitch that only ended when you agreed to purchase the unit you’d allegedly been awarded as a prize.

If you tried to leave the sales pitch prematurely, you were ejected from the venue.

Dragon Quest 11 has a T-for-Teen rating and it’s got a literal casino built into the game. Roulette, poker, and slot machines. This isn’t even uncommon for JRPGs. Curious how the ratings agencies just glaze over this fact when assigning their scores.

Have you tried partnering with Disney and incorporating some Marvel/Star Wars IP into the Balatro Cinematic Universe? Perhaps selling your company to Ubisoft or Sony and letting their massive legal/lobbyist team take a swing at this? Perhaps you could just take a total end-run around the problem and release an edition that uses the Minor Arcana instead of standard poker cards?

China Bad, though.

there’s no option for refusing to be born

There’s no option for volunteering to be born, either. The argument can just as easily be turn on its head.

The idea is anti-natalism is one you develop as a mature rational adult, not one you held prior to your birth.

Think of it as being in a roller coaster. Two minutes into the ride you decide “Too scary, I don’t want to be here” but also acknowledge how it is impractical to get out of your seat in the middle of a loop de loop. So you turn to your friend in the other seat and say “Past me didn’t get consent from future me to be here! That’s unfair!”

You’re asking for something nobody can provide you, even if they wanted to indulge your demands.