Philip Scheffers retweeted
Women invent bullshit terms like “emotional labor” and “mental load” to guilt trip others into feeling like they’re doing more than their share of empathising or thinking, both of which are non-zero sum, unquantifiable, inexhaustible goods that everyone engages in.
Philip Scheffers retweeted
Capitalism didn't create your need to work to survive. Nature did.
An employer doesn't impose that necessity upon you. He offers you an opportunity to satisfy it through voluntary exchange.
Socialism doesn't eliminate the necessity of work. It merely transfers authority over production to politicians or the collective.
Under capitalism, you're free to change employers, negotiate wages, work for yourself, or establish a cooperative. None guarantees success, but the freedom exists.
And here's where your moral superiority becomes particularly ridiculous.
You condemn people for offering employment on terms others are free to reject, yet consider yourself morally entitled to dictate how they must use their property, run their businesses, and compensate others.
You call voluntary agreements exploitation while presenting coercion as compassion.
Your objection isn't that people are being forced to serve others. It's that they aren't being forced to serve others on your terms.
And somehow, you've convinced yourself that makes you the moral one.
After reading the replies to my original post, I've learned that some libertarians have a much bigger problem than their understanding of economics. Their complete lack of empathy is fucking astonishing.
I suggested that paying half your income in rent because the alternative is sleeping in a freezing car isn't exactly a wonderful example of economic freedom. The responses were an extraordinary collection of lectures about voluntary exchange, personal responsibility, property rights, and why homelessness is apparently just another consumer preference.
Here are the five most common arguments.
1. It's voluntary because nobody is forcing you.
Apparently, choosing between unaffordable rent and sleeping in your car is the expression of liberty. Sure, nobody is holding a gun to your head. But someone with $500 in the bank doesn't have the same bargaining power as someone with $10 million in property. A decision made under financial desperation is still a decision. That doesn't mean the person has meaningful economic freedom. If your definition of liberty includes celebrating someone's choice to freeze in their car, perhaps your philosophy needs some fucking work.
2. Just move, get roommates, buy a house, or sleep in your car.
This was my favorite. One person suggested getting a gym membership so you could sleep in your car and still shower. Others recommended second jobs, roommates, or simply buying a house. Fucking brilliant. But what happens when millions of households simultaneously move somewhere cheaper? Demand increases, and those locations become less affordable unless housing supply expands. What works for one individual doesn't necessarily work for everyone. It's called the fallacy of composition. An entire housing crisis cannot be solved by giving millions of people individual financial advice. Yet apparently, sleeping in a Toyota Corolla now constitutes a comprehensive economic policy.
3. Government regulations and central banks caused expensive housing.
This was actually a reasonable argument, at least initially. Restrictive zoning and excessive development regulations absolutely can contribute to expensive housing. But blaming government for every undesirable market outcome is just ideological laziness. Housing prices also depend on incomes, credit conditions, construction costs, land values, population growth, speculation, and investment expectations. Developers build when they expect sufficient profits, not simply because people need somewhere to live. Removing bad regulations can improve housing supply. It doesn't magically eliminate every other economic problem. An economy is an interconnected system, not a fucking supply-and-demand diagram.
4. The landlord provides a mutually beneficial service.
Several people argued that rental transactions must benefit both parties because otherwise they wouldn't happen. Yes, someone facing homelessness might prefer paying half their income in rent to sleeping outside. Congratulations. You've established that people prefer shelter to freezing. But that doesn't prove the housing market is competitive, affordable, or producing desirable outcomes. People routinely accept terrible arrangements because their alternatives are worse. Individual rationality doesn't guarantee desirable outcomes for society. The existence of a transaction isn't proof that the economic system is working particularly well.
5. You aren't entitled to someone else's property or labor.
And naturally, someone had to start screaming about communism. Apparently, suggesting that people shouldn't have to sleep in freezing cars is now revolutionary Marxism. I support private property, competitive markets, and private enterprise. But supporting capitalism doesn't require celebrating every outcome it produces. Property rights don't automatically guarantee affordable housing, economic efficiency, or an equitable distribution of resources. You can defend private property without treating human suffering as an acceptable demonstration of economic liberty.
Now, here's what genuinely disturbed me.
I expected arguments about economics. What I didn't expect was how enthusiastically some people recommended homelessness. Sleep in your car. Get a gym membership. Work three jobs. Move away. Stop complaining. These weren't hypothetical responses. People actually suggested these things. Imagine seeing someone struggling to afford shelter and immediately explaining why they should be grateful to their landlord. What kind of fucking worldview produces that reaction?
Markets are supposed to serve human beings. Human beings aren't supposed to suffer simply to validate someone's economic philosophy. I'm a supporter of free markets, but I don't believe that requires abandoning basic human empathy. The irony is that people who constantly preach individual liberty seem perfectly comfortable dismissing the economic circumstances that restrict it.
If your response to someone facing homelessness is to congratulate them on having the freedom to sleep in their fucking car, perhaps you've spent too much time defending capitalism and not enough time interacting with actual human beings.
Philip Scheffers retweeted
BioWare is not, like, a guy. BioWare closing is not like Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino getting fired or cancelled.
BioWare is a business entity that existed for 30 years. During that time people — including lead creatives who were responsible for the great games — came and went.
Some video game studios manage to maintain a culture and a sensibility around excellence and the key creatives either stick around for a long time or pass the reins to handpicked successors who share their values and preserve the culture and standards of the studios.
What has happened in the game industry over the last 15 years is that there came to be a widespread belief that the cultures that incubated excellent games were exclusionary racist, sexist, homophobic boys clubs that needed to change in order to welcome in different kinds of people.
Instead of hiring people who shared their values and sensibilities, the people at these game studios were pressured to push their workforces toward being 50% female while achieving racial equity. The staff of the studios changed dramatically, the cultures of the workplaces changed dramatically and the games changed dramatically.
The pandemic sent a lot of people into their homes to play video games, which seemed like it was going to drive an era of growth for the industry. At the same time, the new generation of gaming hardware required more detailed assets, more animation, and therefore more people to make these massive games.
So there was a huge hiring boom at the precise moment that there was an overarching focus of the demographics of the industry, which means that nearly every Western game studio’s workforce was completely transformed. Over 40% of games industry workers under the age of 25 identified as LGBT or nonbinary on recent surveys.
Additionally, some studios have had unique pressures that have driven a lot of turnover. At Rocksteady Games, for example, a lot of the people who made the Batman: Arkham trilogy were not interested in building the live service game Warner wanted, so most of the principals on those games left the studio during the production of “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”
The studio cannot pivot back to what used to be its strength at making single player titles after that failure because all the people who are responsible for the classic games are gone. They no longer have that strength. They no longer have the institutional capacity to make great games because great games are made by great people and the great people are gone. A similar thing happened to BioWare during “Anthem.”
They couldn’t just pivot back to making great “Dragon Age” or “Mass Effect” games after the failure of “Anthem” because too many people were gone and the culture had changed. They weren’t the same studio and they weren’t a great studio anymore.
The BioWare that was shuttered today is not the studio that made “Mass Effect 2” or “Knights of the Old Republic.” That studio hasn’t existed for many years. It was just the “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” studio.
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Philip Scheffers retweeted
Feminists claim that feminism gave women the right to speak. The claim is inaccurate and I will explain in this article. Enjoy!
It's funny how women can simultaneously tell us that they're irrationally violent and lack impulse control and then complain male violence.
A man doing what this foid boasts of would quickly find himself in jail or missing his teeth.
and yeah, asshole, obviously yeah, if my boyfriend tells me "what nice tits" it's fucking great, and if a gross fat guy says it to me on the street I slap him because it's called consent!!!!!!! it can't be that hard for you to get it
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"I spent days finger-wagging men because a guy said a naughty word on TV, and then they called me the naughty word!!"
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The most reasonable take.
As sad as it is, the morally correct thing to do is to shoot the tiger to save a human life, even if the person being saved put themselves in that position and the tiger is just being a tiger.
However, it would make no sense to kill the tiger once the person is already dead.
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Philip Scheffers retweeted
Congratulations. You've discovered how everyone can retire at 50 by giving them approximately $2,420.
According to Forbes, the world's 3,428 billionaires possess a combined $20.1 trillion. Confiscate every penny, divide it among 8.3 billion people, and that's your one-time payout. And that's assuming you could liquidate everything without destroying its value.
For this magnificent achievement, you'd violate property rights, undermine investment, disrupt production, and slaughter the golden goose that generated the wealth in the first place.
And here's the part you haven't considered: that golden goose may take generations to reproduce, assuming anyone would even attempt it under a regime that confiscates the rewards.
The communist mentality resembles a cancer: consume the wealth of the host, demand more as the host weakens, and continue until there's nothing left to consume.
You've traded generations of potential prosperity for a few weeks of spending money, destroyed the incentives to rebuild, and called it liberation.
All because you confused possessing wealth with stealing it, and consuming wealth with creating it.
It's always amazing when people try smearing someone with the laziest strawman attempt possible.
As if they are unaware everyone can read the original.
Women: if you choose to date an asshole like this and you find yourself on the receiving end of this sort of bullshit kindly quit blaming your poor mate selection on "men" and don't expect sympathy for choosing a snake and being surprised when it behaves like one.
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Philip Scheffers retweeted
You need an immersion in feminist theology to understand this special logic.
"I genuinely believe that every person who defends witches publicly should be tried as witches under the full penalty of law"
- Some asshole at Salem, probably.
I genuinely believe that every man who defends gang rapists publicly on twitter should be tried as sexual predators under the full penalty of law
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It's always nice when women say the quiet part out loud.
No sense of justice beyond self interest.
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Philip Scheffers retweeted
Woman fuck 7 guys, regret it, you blame the men.
Lindsay murdered 3 kids. You blame the husband.
This lady murdered another woman, broke her skull, took part of her skull home and kept it as a trophy. Who did you blame? Men.
And y'all wonder why women were burned as witches in the past. If what you said isn't the definition of witchcraft, then I don't know what else to call it. You are sick.
Christa Pike made a mistake as a child after a life of trauma caused by toxic masculine figures in her life. Now at age 50 their killing her for it.
This is the patriarchy at work. A woman is not a monster. The system and men are. The patriarchy continues to murder women!
She is INNOCENT. Full stop.
