#famously quite difficult but i'm sure gonna try!!

[deathbydarkelves]

I just came up with the hardest fucking Third War animatic while listening to Tenet by Heilung. An old scarred druid recounting his experience to enthralled children who never knew a world before the conflict, close-ups of Sentinels young and old, some stern and scowling, others barely hiding their fear, faces flickering in firelight, funeral rites, and exhaustion and solemnity and hope intertwined when it's all over.

[woolandcoffee]

You know, I'm seeing a lot of stuff about that new law that passed a vote in Berlin okaying the government to seize a landlord's property after they own a certain amount of buildings, and people are talking a lot about how it's a win for the people and about how they're seizing the property. And like, yes, I do think on the whole it sounds like a very positive thing. However, with the caveat that I don't have any idea how German government works, I'm not so sure it's tremendously revolutionary? Maybe it is? From what I can tell, the law allows government to seize property and redistribute it by turning it into low income housing which is certainly a good thing and not anything we'd see in the US (more on that in a second), but its still all being done through the machinations of government. Maybe if the government was seizing property and handing it directly over to handing it directly over to houseless and working class people? But at the end of the day, the vote isn't legally binding anyway so it really may not matter. From what I can tell it's more a poll of how people feel and the City of Berlin now has to decide what to do. Which is why on the whole, I feel like a more revolutionary tact would be if people just took the property without asking for government permission first.

But the other thing I've been seeing is some people in the US suggest we do that here and let me tell you, unless you wanna also see landlords maintain or potentially even increase their wealth, that won't work. Part of the US Constitution says that if the government takes your property (by which they mean land) they have to provide just compensation, typically the market value of the property. Famously, it can be very difficult to prove that the government has made a "taking" against you because people try to bring takings claims not only when the government has physically seized their property, but also when the government has passed a law or regulation that prevents you from using your property in some way. If some city or state in the US voted to allow the government to confiscate landlord property, that would very clearly be a taking where the government has physically seized private property. A physical taking like that is one of the easiest to prove, and I have a hard time imagining that a court wouldn't find a taking had occurred. In which case, the government would likely be ordered to pay the landlords for the property.

Now, again, I'm not saying that some government re-distribution of property in the US would be a bad thing. What I am saying is that doing it through legal means very likely would do nothing to make wealthy landlords less wealthy (y'all they're gonna take that money and just go buy property elsewhere and/or get the law divesting them of physical property declared unconstitutional), and again, its not anywhere near as revolutionary as just taking shit for ourselves. Idk, I guess at the end of the day, I'm not saying that the vote in Berlin (can you even call it a law if its not legally binding? Dk how shit works in Germany) is a bad thing, but maybe it's not quite as wholly positive as people are making it out to be.