Yes western armaments have been key. I still think it’s telling that Russia cannot dominate a much smaller foe that’s working with an on-again / off-again pastiche of foreign armaments they aren’t always trained for.

Yeah this war has revealed just how strong Russia is not. They thought they would take Kiev in 3 days and have still not done so after 3 years. Ukraine + Syrian Rebels = too much for them, let alone 3 European nations.

My favorite thing is getting downvotes with no reply. It’s like “you’re wrong! but I can’t say why!”

As long as it’s someone else. Religion provides the ultimate in shirking of responsibility. Oh well: god. They literally train you to believe that you have no control and to submit utterly - to a thing that does not even exist.

The entire thing is so preposterous. I’ll never stop being flabbergasted that otherwise credible adults admit, right under the public eye, that they believe in magic.

I know right? If there is a god, certainly he’s busy making sure that one player scores a touchdown.

Anyway it’s lunchtime and I need to go be objectively extorted out of the fruits of my labor by some parasite wielding a license to withhold food from me and the credible threat of starvation.

Just because we’re living in a simulation doesn’t mean we are simulated. So perhaps the architects of the simulation can’t simply program our questions away.

I’m not having trouble. You have yet to make any case whatsoever.

Your “explanation” is nothing but a string of pejoratives. Here’s how you describe someone offering the use of an object they own, for a price:

the license to withhold or take away housing from people.

They capture it and extort people for temporary permission to live in it.

In other words they offer the use of something for a price. Oh but they’re not offering it! They’re holding a license to take it away! LOL

A landlord owns a home, an object of great value, and they choose not to use it or sell it, but to sell the use of it. A tenant needs a home but has neither the resources to build or buy one. There is an exchange of value between these parties. That’s renting.

You do nothing to argue that this is parasitic except to slather it with pejoratives. Your list of anecdotal bad experiences people have had with landlords is utterly immaterial to the discussion of whether landlording is definitionally unethical.

I believe you exposed the core of your beliefs here:

The rental income that a landlord collects is not a wage based on any labor that they do.

First of all, how is that true? I purchased my home with money I earned from my labor. Am I not permitted to now own it? And am I not permitted to offer the use of the thing I own? Why? And while we’re at it, who says that all renters pay rent from labor wages? Some of them may pay with dividends from their investments.

To the core, though, the argument seems to be that labor is the only value that exists. Which is bad news for anyone past working age, I guess.

You need to establish some foundations like you think property ownership itself is unethical and labor is the only value before your case even begins to appear on stage.

Instead of this, you’re claiming that your string of pejoratives is an argument which I simply fail to understand. Which is, again, just a pejorative characterization. You’ve offered nothing but here.

Throwing it back at me to disprove your claim is a declaration of bankruptcy.

Clearly you don’t have a solution for bringing housing into being except an utterly dangling magical notion that “workers will create it” with no answers to where, out of what, and while eating what.

You just keep calling different economic actors “parasites” without describing exactly what it is you think they are feeding on which could stand on its own.

You can smear paid employment, land ownership, and property ownership all you want but these are pretty big features in our economy and unless you have something better to answer with, sweeping them away does nothing.

So try replying in an affirmative mode where you don’t just call something parasitic but describe how you really think it will work, and be a little more thorough than just one microscopic part of it. Because my dude, workers create housing today.

Who pays the workers and buys the materials? Whose land does this happen on?

No one said they were.

You’re 100% correct. I mean… Mideast policy hypocrisy like this has been the norm all the decades I’ve been alive.

“We’re not trying to steal land, just to create a buffer around land we already stole.”

I answered you, mate. These parties DO exist in the US they are just really small, and this is why.

Now you’re making faces and trying to discredit the most important question so you can avoid answering it. It won’t work.

And now they say Obamacare didn’t go far enough and is kinda weak. I could strangle them.

Blue Shield of California is a “big corporation” that employers here often contract with for health insurance, and it is a non-profit. Somehow this doesn’t really result in a dramatically different experience.

I guess people are saying that they believe there is such a thing as an ethical murder in the streets. Of course in any form of ethics vacuum chamber this can’t stand. But in the real world where children are bombed for the sake of some asshole’s religion, where the president boasts he could get away with murder in the street and courts confirm this, in a world where sick people are left to suffer to boost a share price, then, THEN an act like this becomes a reasonable response to an unreasonable world.

Maybe someone better educated can tell me what ethics scholars have to say about how an ethical actor should behave in a system where ethics have utterly broken down. Right now, the crowd is saying “like that guy.”

I’m ill-disposed to wag my finger at them, and think the only ethical course is to address the corrupt environment in which this act occurred, because that environment undermines any one-dimensional ethical evaluation of this murder in the street, and that makes me deeply uncomfortable.

You skipped the most important question, as all anti-landlord idealists do.