Here's an example (first in Haskell then in Go), lets say you have some types/functions:

• type Possible a = Either String a
• data User = User { name :: String, age :: Int }
• validateName :: String -> Possible String
• validateAge :: Int -> Possible Int

then you can make

mkValidUser :: String -> Int -> Possible User
mkValidUser name age = do
  validatedName ← validateName name
  validatedAge  ← validateAge age
  pure $ User validatedName validatedAge

for some reason <- in lemmy shows up as <- inside code blocks, so I used the left arrow unicode in the above instead

in Go you'd have these

• (no Possible type alias, Go can't do generic type aliases yet, there's an open issue for it)
• type User struct { Name string; Age int }
• func validateName(name string) (string, error)
• func validateAge(age int) (int, error)

and with them you'd make:

func mkValidUser(name string, age int) (*User, error) {
  validatedName, err = validateName(name)
  if err != nil {
    return nil, err
  }

  validatedAge, err = validateAge(age)
  if err != nil {
    return nil, err
  }

  return User(Name: validatedName, Age: validatedAge), nil
}

In the Haskell, the fact that Either is a monad is saving you from a lot of boilerplate. You don't have to explicitly handle the Left/error case, if any of the Eithers end up being a Left value then it'll correctly "short-circuit" and the function will evaluate to that Left value.

Without using the fact that it's a functor/monad (e.g you have no access to fmap/>>=/do syntax), you'd end up with code that has a similar amount of boilerplate to the Go code (notice we have to handle each Left case now):

mkValidUser :: String -> Int -> Possible User
mkValidUser name age =
  case (validatedName name, validateAge age) of
    (Left nameErr, _) => Left nameErr
    (_, Left ageErr)  => Left ageErr
    (Right validatedName, Right validatedAge) => 
      Right $ User validatedName validatedAge

Agree on majority of the post, except for "make the choices you feel are right". Hard disagree on this normatively. If you're saying it descriptively, sure, but it's essentially tautological at that point.

We shouldn't advocate that people just act in whatever way feels correct to them. Sociopaths feel like it's okay to do things that are not okay. So do bigots, racists, speciesists, sexists, etc.

We should instead do what you're doing with the majority of your post, advocate for correct positions and then come to a rational conclusion with the people we are talking to. Giving them a get out of jail free card, permitting them to do literally anything, is unnecessary.

Saying the word "Nazi" or "slave" or whatever doesn't automatically make someone incorrect. Even if this were another Godwin's law that doesn't make the comparison invalid.

There's a subset of people that anytime a comparison is made, where one situation is worse than the other, something happens where they become unable to understand the concept of a principle.

It's like you recognize "hey, chattel slavery is worse than wage slavery!" (which is correct), and therefore there can be no principle applicable to both situations (incorrect).

I assume it's that you're offended by the comparison, and the emotion gets the better of you, disallowing you from thinking clearly about it. I don't know what else it would be.

Yeah I do, just on the principle that an environment that retaliates against worker solidarity is an oppressive environment.

It's similar to someone saying "can slaves be well taken care of by their owners?" Many people would say yes, but I would say no on principle. No matter how short the work day, no matter the benefits, months off every year, etc. I would say on principle that being owned means you're not well taken care of.

The principle here being that sometimes "one" negative can be enough to mean you're not "well-taken care of".

Whether or not it's helpful is orthogonal to whether it's true, which is more what I'm concerned with. Maybe there's a point to be had about effectively trying to convince people, but I don't have an obligation to be the most effective conversationalist or converter.

However I'd happily support systemic approaches to reducing the effectiveness of housing scalpers. Calling them immoral is not mutually exclusive with supporting legislation against them. I'd even say those things are usually aligned.

Is calling me insane an "actual thought"? You expect more from me than from yourself.

Just because you don't understand what I'm saying doesn't mean I'm not saying anything. Not to say it's not my fault, language is a two way street. But similarly, it's not only my fault, you shouldn't just assume that your misunderstanding necessarily means I don't have a position. Maybe you think you're infallible and incapable of misunderstanding, but I assure you you're not, and I hope you understand that.

When you scalp land, you're reducing the supply of land. I assume you have an at least rudimentary understanding of supply/demand, so you know that reducing supply increases cost with no changes in demand (fun sidenote, demand for housing is actually increasing as population increases, so this effect is even more pronounced).

This increased cost in housing/land will be felt by the working class. So as an externality of your profitting off increases in land value (caused in part by this scalping), the working class will have to spend more on housing.

So owners get more money and workers get less money.

What we see in societies that don't have this gross feedback loop is housing costs that remain healthily at 5-10% of median income. Our society is instead at 30-80%, and it's growing relative to wages (not just inflation).

The reasoning (as I've clearly outlined several times) is that restricting access to land/shelter in the name of extracting money from the working class is a bad societal outcome. I would imagine you agree with that, but if you don't we're having the wrong conversation.

No sufficiently sophisticated political ideology is against labor (capitalist work is not synonymous with labor). On the contrary, most anti-capitalist ideologies are extremely pro-labor.

The question isn't whether we need labor, that's reductive and (currently) we obviously do. The question is how should labor be treated. Right now labor is a commodity to be bought and sold by capitalists. If we instead setup a system that decommodified labor, outlawing renting of humans (just as we have with buying humans), then even in a market-based economy you have far better compensation for labor.

Market-value for labor in a capitalist society is done as a commodity as I've previously said, so the goal is to reduce the price of the commodity as far as allowable for the business owners. This means a viable path towards profitability is reducing the labor force, or cutting compensation. This is why layoffs happen when companies are doing incredibly well, to increase immediate profits.

If instead there was a democratic assembly of workers that held their interests in common, there'd be no reason to just layoff a bunch of great workers during times of good business.

In short, we don't need two different classes with two different relationships to capital. Instead of allowing one class to rent the other, compensate them as little as possible, and pocket the surplus value, outlaw that commodification of humans and allow the market to properly compensate workers.

This isn't an end all solution, but market socialism is a massive improvement over capitalism, and once we dismantle the parasitic owner class (capitalists, landleeches, cops, etc.) we can focus on more interesting discussions about the merits of markets in certain situations (e.g they're good at reacting to consumer desires, they're bad at accounting for externalized costs like climate change, etc.)

It sounds like the market socialists you've been talking to haven't been socialists if they're in favor of private property, that's strictly a capitalist position. They're probably just welfare capitalists.

An actual market socialist is against private entities owning the means of production, they're owned communally by some mechanism (be it some democratically run cooperative, the state, etc .) It wouldn't be a group of stakeholders that are a separate, private entity disconnected from the workers (though the state arguably is an entity like that, and that's where the line between state socialism and state capitalism gets blurry).

I didn't equate them all to Nazis, you have an incredibly simplistic black/white view of the world.

The people who voted for Nazis weren't a uniform mass of people. Some voted for them on promised economic reforms, some voted on the basis of making Germany great again, some voted for them because they disliked the Lügenpresse (lying press), which the Nazis talked about all the time. The thing all Nazi voters shared was that the anti-Jewish/anti-communist rhetoric didn't turn them off to voting for the party.

Similarly, there are a ton of Republicans who vote Republican for many reasons; promised economic reforms, making America great again, a dislike for "fake news", etc. The thing all Republican voters share is that the anti-Mexican/anti-trans rhetoric doesn't turn them off to voting for the party.

They're fine with the promise of building a wall to keep the Mexicans out. They're fine with legislating against trans people. They're fine with the rhetoric many southern Republicans are using about "solving the trans problem", similar to the final solution rhetoric Nazis used.

Republicans in 2023 are about as bad as Nazis were in 1930. That is to say, they've only done very lightweight rounding up of minorities and haven't started killing them en masse. Whether or not the fascist wing of the Republican party wins out and successfully genocides minorities is anyone's guess, but ignoring the similarities and history here is incredibly foolish.

Not all people who voted Republican are horrible. Not all people who voted Nazi were horrible either. The platform can get better or worse, we've seen a history where it can get worse, but it's also been shutdown before.

Either way, having spaces online that disallow protofascist or fascist parties is fine and not "unhealthy". Not every part of the internet has to allow for hateful rhetoric, it's fine to have spaces geared towards gaming, community, or just people in agreement that people supporting a bigoted party shouldn't be there.

There are a number of different branches I can go on here, but I'll just post high level thoughts to start.

The issue with trying to define these lines in a capitalist society is they'll always be blown past when any leeway is given. If you say "eggs can be harvested ethically", what you'll end up with necessarily is the egg industry we have today, where we macerate 10s of millions of baby male chicks a day because they're not profitable.

If it's done outside of a capitalist system, then you still have to contend with the idea that permitting these types of exploitation will mean that the people who want the things (eggs/wool/etc.) will do the exploitation on the grounds that they want those products, not because they want to take care of these animals and they have some byproduct you happen to use. The "caretakers" will be focused on their productive output instead of caring for them as pets. This is bad.

More abstractly, utilitarianism has some issues. Approaching morality as a simple math equation can lead to justifying atrocities much easier. When you can just say "the pleasure I get from this is more good than the pain you get is bad", then you can justify exploitation from a utilitarian perspective. If you take a step back though, it should be obvious that the idea of justifying suffering with pleasure is horrendous, yet this is the core calculus of utilitarianism.

A focus on rights and their violations leads to a moral view that doesn't allow you to use your own pleasure, or pleasure more generally, to justify inflicting harm. It's a better system for the oppressed, while utilitarianism is better for the oppressors.