"Vote blue no matter who" means that liberals and more progressive people are supposed to support the Dems even if the party is entirely incompetent and outright harmful to the causes people support. Because the Republicans will fuck everything up even more. Harm reduction, right? So I am explaining that the recent decisions of the democrats were finally the opposite of that.

Tim Walz and his Democratic-Farmer-Labor party's record in one session:

• Statewide paid family and medical leave for all workers
• Child tax credits
• Child care assistance
• Free school breakfast and lunch for all students
• Free public college for lower-income families
• Codified Roe v. Wade
• Extensive legislation on protecting trans people
• Banned conversion therapy
• Labor protections for nurses, teachers and school workers, Uber and Lyft drivers, Amazon workers
• Banned non-compete agreements
• Put over a billion into the housing budget. Ten times more than the previous one
• Background checks and red-flag laws for gun purchases
• Banned no-knock warrants and white supremacists from pig forces
• Additional billions in public transit and infrastructure investments, environmental programs
• Right to repair law

Each of those issues is widely popular among voters, and are objectively progressive policies. So the Democrats are doing a smart thing by campaigning on them.

Now on the Palestine issues Kamala is currently doing the exact opposite. Morals aside, since we're talking about the materialist side of politics, this is an incredibly popular issue with Americans, 70% of whom are in support of a permanent ceasefire. The uncommitted movement is going to play a significant role in this election. And if she doesn't present a strong stance on this very soon, she might undo all the good decisions that the Dems made in the past month, like dropping Biden, supporting Kamala, and picking a progressive VP.

On one hand you have this fake progressive guy:

https://x.com/prem_thakker/status/1820824112165429293

https://x.com/prem_thakker/status/1820833101200699409

And the other option was this:

During the wave of campus protests against the war this spring, Shapiro compared protesters to white supremacists and the KKK, contributing to rhetoric that led to state and vigilante violence against protesters across the country. He applauded the decision to send police to disband a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of Pennsylvania, even though the school’s own faculty members condemned the “arrests and suppression of non-violent, anti-war protests” after riot gear-clad forces cleared and arrested students.

I stg whenever positive American politics or policies come up, this community throws out the dialectics and defaults to "america bad". Tim Walz is better for the country than every other option that was on the table, all the Newsoms and Buttigieges of the dem party. This is not a point of contention, this is the material conditions that we're under.

What alternative would you prefer?

As far as the real options go, you literally couldn't have had better? Yeah he's not a MLM, what a surprise. But I'll take a governor who has a record of directly improving people's lives - school breakfast and lunch, Pre-K, time off for parents, abortion/trans/IVF rights, gun regulations, ecological legislation, etc. To say that it's a "fake progressive" by the standards of the democratic party is insane, who the fuck isn't then? Even on Palestine he's the "stop the fighting, two-state solution", which is as radical as a politician can possibly get regarding US foreign policy.

Your response and the amount of likes you got shows me that people here still believe that America is not as racist as it actually is

I don't think it's about people not believing in the all-encompassing systemic institutional racism. That's kinda impossible if you look at literally any statistic with racial distribution.

This type of stuff is deranged by any standards. With how extremely individualistic the people, especially the conservatives are, you normally expect the hatred to be projected outwards, not inwards. That's the whole point of in-circles. So I'd expect to hear something like "I will take my second amendment and actually murder this person for standing near my white child". And the "You're no longer my kid" - "K" is definitely not a typical interaction.

From a social investigation by kites in 2021, Chronicles of the struggling and dispossessed

Our caravan managed to interview a home-owner named Marie from Lillooet, a small town an hour up the road from Lytton. Marie was a healthcare worker, and the Federal government had just offered to rent or buy out her house so that emergency crew workers could be stationed in the region to battle the proliferating fires. Cheekily, comrades asked why she decided to buy a house in a region on fire:

Well it wasn't always on fire! But yeah, when we put an offer on the house, we did have friends say, "Are you worried about the fire zone?" I said "No, I mean, I know there's been forest fires, but nothing was that bad." My understanding was that the wildfire forest service comes in and they build a guard for protection and to protect the town, right? There've been histories of evacuations, but it didn't really cross my mind that a town could burn to the ground. That seemed like some spectacular event.

Comrades asked Marie if she thought this was creating a shift in people's perspective around the urgency of climate change:

I think people are still dealing with things in the day to day. I know in Lillooet there's still fires on each side: one in Lytton, one in McKay Creek. There's like 200 fire fighters within 80km of our town. Wait... no, more than that because Ashcroft is on evacuation notice as well, and so is 100 Mile House. Like, there's 125 fire fighters just in Mckay Creek, so there's encampments of forest firefighters because there's nowhere to house them. We actually had the federal government call and ask to rent out our house because there's nowhere for them...

And it never even crossed my mind: Where do all the people go? You evacuate 1,500 people from a town, where the fuck are they supposed to go?.. I think a lot of people still don't know if or what they're going back too.

What 80 years of peace at home does to a mf.

Predictive policing. At this point we will soon consider Minority Report a documentary.

So you're saying America bad? Even though they didn't nuke anybody for 80 years? Curious.

That's what peak revolutionary performance looks like.

My brother in christ, what is this reactionary leftism. NATO bad, so every single thing they report is a lie and propaganda actually, even when it comes from "your side"? Without so much as to bother to look at the pictures, because they are actually photoshop and ai?

You're looking at a piece of an engine 50cm wide and confidently go "actually this is clearly from a rocket that's 15cm in diameter". Like fuck, man, why is it the same shit on both sides.

Kh-101

Dimensions

Sidewinder AIM-9

Dimensions

Ngl I've been getting the same weird vibe from them for a while. Particularly when the questions are framed as "is this thing that we generally support actually bad, or maybe not?"

Crazy suggestion, but how about we don't do the Israeli "this blown up hospital is definitely not what it looks like" thing? The rocket used was the Russian-made Kh-101.

Talk to them about good political news as well. When all you hear is "everything everywhere is terrible" it's easy to just tune it out. Successful unionization efforts, protests, progressive legislature.

I prefer mocking them and making them invoke death threats towards me

This sounds extremely unhealthy.

While we're here, what is your opinion on the movie Resident Evil: Extinction (part 3)? When it came out, the mainstream opinion basically was that it had ruined the whole franchise, poopoo dogwater. I personally quite liked it as a standalone movie, fun action film.

Edit: just rewatched it, still a banger. It's surprisingly woke. And big queen energy all around, women get it done.

::: spoiler spoiler Evil guy: "They're animals, essentially. We can domesticate them if we can take away their baser instincts. They would provide a basis for a docile workforce" :::

::: spoiler spoiler Leader of the convoy to the people she picked up: "We have a decision to make. And it's too big and important for me to make for you" :::

::: spoiler spoiler "Climbing the Eiffel Tower with a high-powered rifle. A few years ago that would've caused a stir" :::

If it makes you happy. I was just thinking that it's not a good way to change anything, so I don't see the point in bothering beyond "nazi detected, opinion rejected".

Don't take it the wrong way, but the op in the screenshots could definitely chill a bit. That type of venting would never make anybody go "you know what, you're right actually".

Actually, hard agree. Can we make filth a thing instead?

It's the curse of being a leftist. I walk past a coffee shop and think about how there are no third spaces left to hang out for free. Because they were systematically destroyed, in order to separate the people into individuals, and at the same time commodify their leisure at ever growing costs. How there are so many people working miserable jobs in those coffee shops, jobs that we don't need in the first place. About the chains that have swallowed all the individual businesses that could've been of higher quality, had better working conditions and pay. About the bench outside with extra railings, so that the unhoused people couldn't sleep on it. They're forced to sleep in designated "bad hoods", from where they will eventually be kicked out by pigs filth so that their hoods can be gentrified. And all those freshly gentrified hoods will have tons of empty condos that would never house even one of those displaced people...

Then I smoke a joint, watch some cute animal videos, and forget about it until the next time I walk past a coffee shop.

The funniest part was when he called the book "neo-communist". Gotta go get ready 4 Ze New World Order.

Look if there's any help needed in your local soup kitchens, mutual support orgs, homeless and animal shelters, orphanages, community centers, refugee service providers. Activism is about being active, not labels. And you are very likely to meet like-minded people there, who might introduce you to more politically oriented causes if that's more your vibe.

I mean, this is much more about the conservatives rather than the anarchists. Trans people? Women's intelligence and bodily autonomy? Minorities' humanity? Poor people's right to exist? No thanks, we'll work on it not being a thing, even if the woke fake news are trying to persuade us differently. Anarchists, on the other hand, just deny the existence of showers.

Apparently this is a controversial opinion, but I fuck with most anarchists. Obviously, there are plenty of reactionaries under their umbrella, not unlike communist/socialist one. But overall our goals align so much more than they diverge, and in the immediate future they're almost one-to-one. Once we get to the stateless (or near-) society with no policing, jails, and capitalist ownership of the means of production, we can bicker with them and assert our vision. But today it's mostly counterproductive leftist infighting.

The Y-axis is the reconciliation.

And in the US since 2020 it's up 88%.

We have currently had 12 consecutive months of record breaking global temperatures, with an average of 1.63°C above the pre-industrial levels. Good times.

Trickle-down socialism.

Ooh baby, this is just a tiny part in how terrifying they actually are for the open web. Their implementation of manifest V3, platform for browser extensions (that they basically force every other browser to use), along with the deprecation of V2-based extensions (starting this month) is straight up authoritarian. In short, they entirely remove blocking of webRequest and Event pages (user-side background scripts), among other things. This will essentially kill open ad blockers (like uBlock origin) and let them control the supported ones (like AdBlock), meaning we will have ads from advertisers who pay the fee purposely let through.

We have known about this coming change and its implications for 5+ years.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#issuecomment-496009417

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to-mv3/

Meanwhile Firefox, who would also have to implement it for cross-compatibility, will not remove those critical features, as well as will keep support for V2 extensions. This is only one aspect in which Firefox is committed to user privacy, security, and control. I would highly recommend Firefox to everyone, including the Android version.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manifest-v2-march-2024-update/

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

I gave a number of real life use cases where it would solve real problems. There are so many more, especially "boring" ones like official documents, research, and medical records that would benefit from it tremendously. Blockchain does not equal crypto, but they complement each other really well.

Proof of stake could make the thing not too environmentally damaging but it's been years that major blockchains are saying they will implement it the next year

What do you mean, Ethereum is pos.

I AM NOT SHILLING CRYPTO IN ANY WAY OKAY THANK YOU

With that out of the way, those are not intrinsic qualities of either. The fundamentals on which every shitcoin and the bored ape garbage were sold to the public are still very strong. This is like saying "online shopping is horrible" in 2004 - technically not incorrect, but very shortsighted. While the proof of work protocol (mining for it to function and who mines more is the truth) is unsustainable, proof of stake (who holds more is the truth) and mixed ones are fundamentally amazing. Imagine stablecoins pegged to indexes of international currencies. BRICS coin, for example. With smart contracts (rules built into the transaction itself) and being practically legitimate international currencies it opens up so many possibilities. Transparency and easy comparisons in payments - salaries, rents, goods and services. Immutability - you can't just whack a person and steal the deed to their house. The "chain" part of blockchain - clear history of ownership of assets, no more "I accidentally bought a stolen car/house". And eventually the contracts can be made complex enough to cover most interpersonal transactions.

And the same thing for nfts. Especially now, in the rapidly exploding era of unethical AI art, music, etc. Artists could easily sell/lease rights for their work, including for it to be a basis for generative models. It's not limited to digital products - whatever you want to to confirm ownership of can be tagged with one-way encrypted signatures baked into nfts.

So both are great technologies that can still be improved on a lot. But it's just that the ways in which they're used today are almost exclusively rugpull bubble dogshit.

That's neat and all, but especially considering the eventual outcome this has nothing on the legendary Soviet faceted glass. Autogenerated auto translated subs on the video are pretty good.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Technically they operate with the same model of taking a profit from others' activity.

People use them regardless, for many different types of content, they're primary platforms. Patreon is a secondary one, pretty much nobody would just go to Patreon and pay for a random subscription to discover someone's content. But with the primary ones if a certain person was banned from there, subscribers would still keep using them for all the other ones.

Anyway, I'm not really disagreeing, and it's speculation either way. For all we know, States might straight up illegalize commie content online, moving all of it, including payments, underground.

The idea that corporations will allow free speech because it's in their financial interest to do so just doesn't conform with what we observe happening in reality.

There is a fundamental difference between a business selling a product and one that simply takes a part of profits from others' activity. Creators don't have to take money through Patreon, they can choose any other platform, and for the subscribers it doesn't make a real difference. Quite the opposite, if a different service was to take a lower fee (and put more money in the pocket of creators), or be more explicitly in line with their content, then people would be even more eager to support them there instead.

And how long before those corporations drop them?

Do you mean Patreon and Substack? That's almost definitely not happening. These platforms exist because they, to a good extent, allow for freedom of expression. Technologically they're nothing to write home about (and Patreon video player is actual dogshit) and could easily be replicated and replaced. So it would be huge for them to lose chunks of creators' revenues if those were to leave over political differences.

I can only say from the experience of my centrist liberal friend who was getting a PhD in math in Western Europe, the people there were very very conservative, both socially and academically, to a point where he quit it a year or two in and went for an entirely different career.

Crowds gathered on the square in front of the 14-story hotel to celebrate the fall of the Soviet Union. Now, Hotel Ukraine is up for auction as part of an effort to sell off some large state assets to help fund the military and bolster an economy

Fucking hell man. If this was a movie, you'd call it lazy writing. Literally 90s 2.0, and they're even making communism the bad guy again somehow.

And a third woman alleged that Musk asked her several times to have his children; she refused. He then denied her a raise and complained about her performance.

A 2022 story reported that a flight attendant on Musk’s private jet said he exposed himself and offered “to buy her a horse in exchange for an erotic massage,”

Actually, this is pretty much verbatim what I expected, what a clickbait title smh.

I'm saying this as someone who went (and is still going) through the same experience of not fitting anywhere, including my own head, incapable of hard labor, and for the longest time unable to land a spot to work with my brains. The only thing that really matters is that you do well by yourself. If you're not okay, you're definitely not freeing the colonies, not helping Palestinians or bringing about the revolution.

There is nothing fundamentally broken in you. People are very different, but the conditions of the world force everyone to be the same, and then shame you for not trying hard enough if you're not. There absolutely is a place for you in the world and lives of others. I can't give you a solution, but my advice is to be more open, with yourself and others, and to learn to ask for and accept help. Coworkers, family, friends, government, mutual support orgs, whomever. It might be extremely difficult. But you're not alone in any of this, and people are built to work together. You've done a good job getting this far.

Within about a week of an event occurring, climate scientists can now describe the role that human-caused climate change played in making a recent heat event more likely or intense.

Scientists: yep, this was anthropogenic. This one as well. Ooh, dang, this one too and it was a biggie. And this one is not! Oh, wait, on second look... At least the system works, eh.