That’s a tough standard. Does that apply to everyone or just jews?

There is no gray area or in between. You are either 100 percent innocent or 100 percent bad.

Yeah i suppose it is technically authoritarian, but society is overwhelmingly ok with it since it is indisputably a good idea. Covid restrictions did not have universal agreement, weren’t as obviously effective and common sense, were unconstitutional in some cases, but most of all too new to have trust from everyone, particularly when messaging was inconsistent or logically flawed.

Yeah but I was talking about covid restrictions in general. Maybe that’s where the confusion came.

Public masking and vaccine mandates didn’t stop until September 2022.

Every article i can find discusses New Zealand having the longest-running and toughest covid restrictions in the world, pretty far from normal life. I remember them briefly easing restrictions in 2020, and it was widely celebrated as some kind of victory over covid, but it was short lived, and restrictions and mandates came right back stronger than ever.

Everyone wants to talk about fascism these days, but give covid restrictions a complete pass. I’ve never seen anything like that in my lifetime, where you actually couldn’t go to restaurants without a pass, and had to have papers in order to justify being out in public. Even if you think it was justified, you have to acknowledge that it was extreme authoritarianism.

Are you saying that New Zealand returned to normal before the rest of the world? Because that’s not how I remember it at all.

I bet the party has sufficient power to restrict access to birth control. Seems crazy to consider, but if things got serious enough, I feel like they are capable of doing it.

I know who my wife is voting for, but even if she voted differently, I would love her the same. It would hurt if she lied about it though, because it would imply a lack of trust.

Illegal immigrants are being paid outside of the system and raising minimum wage only increases demand for employing more of them, continuing exploitation of them. You can make an argument for minimum wage increases, but it doesn’t benefit illegal immigrants.

Conservatives are trying to deport illegal immigrants and stop allowing them in, which may have a motive, but exploitation is not it.

Our economy depends on a base of low cost labor that used to be from kids or young people. It’s almost like Democrats have decided to fill that void with immigrants while Republicans are trying to get back to the low cost labor being from having more kids. It makes sense if your goal is to keep the machine running the way it was designed, or at least how it evolved to operate. Social security, insurance, fast food, service industries, construction would all need overhaul to function without low cost labor being their base. Seems like you could reduce consumerism in general to compensate for the reduced low income work force, but that would hurt the economic numbers and cause an overall contraction in the stock market. Tough pills to swallow for everyone who has accumulated any significant amount of wealth in this system.

Makes sense. Like fast food, it’s a job that doesn’t require experience or any particular skill set.

Who even gets paid minimum wage? My kids started at fast food for several dollars above minimum, to where I’m not even sure what the point is.

Uhh… Terrorism where innocent citizens are targeted is worse than specific targeting of terrorists themselves.

Do you mean that housing should be provided by the government? By the tax payers? And what about maintenance? Is that also provided by the taxpayers? So they would pay people to come fix up the house you live in for free? I guess I’m just not quite sure how you think it all works.

They tried that with me once, but I showed them and got a different job.

Government can throw you in jail.

Yeah it’s more the idea, the potential for abuse or use of this as a strategy.