You’re welcome to come raise some hell outside the capital if you can afford that trip, though.

People don’t talk about it, but this is what jan 6th was. Not for a good cause, obviously, but basically everyone that was participating in that was either psychotic enough to willingly throw away their entire life based on a single ineffective and uncoordinated mass mob capital occupation on a single day, or they were small business owners who were able to afford to fly across the country first class and take several days off of work, and probably most of them were both of those things. A lot of these guys are getting arrested immediately after being pardoned because the prison system sucks and does not set you up for success, obviously, even for those wealthy people. There’s not an escape from the state, even for them, their lives will be irrevocably altered and made worse by their participation in a single ineffective day of high profile movement.

Obviously you could action a good amount of political change onto people by simply making them think they have nothing left to lose, as we see with that, but again, mass, uncoordinated movements are broadly ineffective. More organized and militant action is what you really only get when people start to collectively understand that the people around them, the things they actually do have left, are under immediate threat, and they need to do something to stop that. Maybe even more than that, you probably need a funding apparatus which is either gonna be foreign, or probably based on illegal domestic activities. So probably foreign.

I dunno at what point some of those criteria start to be filled. It’s not looking great.

Either get scabbers, or take advantage of increased automation, or a combination of the two. The only way to prevent those scabbers is with outright illegal militant action focused on targeting them, which would earn you the ire of the state, and which most people also don’t want to engage in due to moral qualms.

You can prevent a couple trucks from leaving an amazon warehouse for a couple days when you can organize a general strike where you’re paying everyone a full stipend after saving maybe years of union dues, and that’s the legal way to protest, which costs like, tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenditure every day, and is basically a war of wealth attrition with a huge megacorporation.

You could do that, or you could get like one or two guys to slash tires, and then set those trucks back for about the same amount of time. Or slash the tires of the individual scabber’s home cars, which is maybe gonna be easier to pull off. How much of that militant action can you engage in, as an organization, though, before the feds just decide to completely crack down on you and deem you to be domestic terrorists, along the lines of what happened to the people engaged in the “stop cop city” movement? That’s a good example of what’s even a relatively low scale and low stakes operation, that’s not very militant, and they’re still getting slapped with rico charges and domestic terrorism.

A lot of those unions are politically agnostic to partisan slant because they’re trying to navigate the current political climate, where they’re basically unilaterally hated and unprotected, but also a lot of big unions exist functionally as an extension of the HR department of these companies because of how popular support for them has been drained, membership has dwindled, labor power has dwindled amongst their lower members because of increased automation, and because they’ve just straight up slowly been dismantled over time and legally gimped.

It’s because the movies are written by christopher nolan, and that guy does not have good politics. The other guy is right with their explanation, but the underlying message is, as you say, pretty much total nonsense.

isn’t a slur more than that?

Not really. I could provide actual specific examples, but I don’t really want to start saying like, slurs, so. I think maybe if you think that you couldn’t make a slur out of almost any word, then you’re not being creative enough, or, you haven’t acclimated to how creative some of these other guys can be.

Here, I’ll come up with a theoretical example. You could probably make a slur out of, say, calling someone a banana-eater, right. I can even imagine two ways to do that.

You could have it be, okay, well, monkeys eat bananas, so, the banana eater is like a monkey, and then obviously comparing people to monkeys is gonna be a little bit of a red flag, is maybe racist, especially depending on whether or not you’re using it to be racist, or applying it disproportionately to one group of people. I’ve seen people just throwing out, like, the specific lego number piece of the mass produced lego monkey, whenever they see a black guy online. I think, at that point, that’s basically a slur, in how they’re using it, and that’s like, just a sequence of numbers.

Or, you could say, okay, well, bananas are kind of a phallic type of food, right, like hot dogs, or whatever, so, people eating bananas are gay, as a kind of substitute for a cock. So, it could also be a homophobic thing.

This is all dependent on the context of use, too. If you’re exclusively calling one group “banana-eaters” based on their intrinsic traits, that’s gonna turn that expression into a slur more. It could also be a statement of fact, right, oh, chuck over there, he’s a banana-eater, he eats bananas, sure. It depends entirely on use. If you need evidence for how this shit can progress then you need only look at websites like 4chan or some other such nonsense.

On top of all this you kind of have the complications of, say, slurs only really applying to particular intrinsic traits that people have rather than others. Slurs can apply to black people, but calling someone a “cracker”, despite being still based on an intrinsic trait, of white skin, isn’t really a slur. Neither is, as upthread, calling someone a “boomer”, because we all age over time, where it’s sort of used generically just to refer to anyone older than you, or because it’s usually applied as a reference to a very specific class of people that have a specific socioeconomic context, more than just being based on their age. You’ll usually only hear people call, say, american boomers “boomers”, in that context, but you won’t hear that in, say, china, or africa, or most of south america, or whatever. It’s a reference to the post-war boom years, explicitly.

There are also certain subcultures which re-appropriate slurs, which basically means that those words aren’t really slurs in how they’re being used in that subculture. I’m sure you can think of examples of that.

They came prepared, organised, with meticulous plans and goals.

Their plan is still basically a non-starter, though. Deporting the 11 million undocumented immigrants that live here is logistically impossible. At least, it’s impossible if you want to have a small government, which is something that they want. Even with a larger more well organized government, it’s difficult, and offers you no legitimate return financially. You’re dissecting the two-tier labor system which you already had domestically. You could conceivably have a portion of this be a privately funded and organized sector, which would be maybe slightly more capable of doing a genocide, but it would still be hilariously inefficient and unachievable and not offer you any real wins. Rinse and repeat this fundamental set of contradictions for basically every goal that they have. They want to just straight up deny the idea of gender existing at all, and that leads to absolutely no plan in how to handle trans people’s listed passport sex. Their voter base wants low egg prices, and yet they create a regulatory environment where bird flu will become a massive epidemic.

This isn’t to say that they’re totally incompetent morons, but they are legitimately disconnected from reality in a way which is both dangerous and highly unstable and contradictory at a fundamental level. The south did not lose because of some sort of fundamental lack of moral character, they lost because a slave economy is straight up incoherent and inefficient and offers you much less efficiency in the grand scheme. The nazis dedicated a shocking amount of energy explicitly to cruelty in ways which were both intrinsic to their ideals and actively made their war efforts much less effective overall.

I still don’t have any confidence that this will not be a bumpy ride or that we will get out of it or that there won’t be like, global nuclear warfare or whatever, or that lots of people won’t die in the wake of it. I’m just making the sort of more basic point that with these people, on some level, it doesn’t matter how organized they are. They’re stupid on a much harder to solve level, than that.

Everyone’s eating it up, not only his supporters. He got a solid like, 2 to 3 day’s worth of news cycle out of an absolute nothingburger, while everyone is safely diverted away from analyzing all the other shit he’s been doing, say, through executive orders. I think he’s just throwing a massive amount of shit at the wall, seeing what sticks, seeing what he can get away with. Media will not contest him shitting on trans people, or removing DEI from all the government websites, or forcing government employees back into offices that don’t exist, among any number of other things.

It doesn’t even really matter if the things he proposes are even possible at all. The only way he’d be able to invade gaza with US troops in order to forcibly relocate the palestinians, conceivably, is by overthrowing jordon, which could be something they’ve been cooking up for a while, or pressuring egypt into doing so which would probably completely fuck over egypt’s domestic politics and flip the region into an uncontrollable civil war which would be another actor in the region that’s no longer amenable to israel, and the resulting blowback might even cause the total collapse of israel. Even with that excuse, which is ultimately what it would be, it would basically just be a full US backed genocide, both in the literal sense of having to kill basically everyone, and under the academic definition. That would probably kill any domestic US support for israel, and again, would maybe result in their collapse. Outside of that, outside of a full US backing and ground invasion, Israel can only really do what they’ve already been doing, to a mixed amount of success.

Despite the improbability, he might still go through with all of that. It’s not even really up to him in terms of sort of, just whether or not he’s dumb enough to do that, which he probably also is, but it’s mostly just whether or not everyone else in the administration is actually planning to do that. Will the concentration camp in guantanamo that libs failed to shut down before it got to this point get off the ground? Will the ICE officers actually be capable of running around and arresting everyone, or will that be utterly stupid as an idea for the same exact reasons that it’s always been utterly stupid, and for the same reasons that the foundation of the system is basically non-functional? Is this all just a bunch of bullshit until trump can justifiably pass almost uncontested another round of tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy? Who could say.

I mostly just find myself hoping that the admin goes careening off a cliff after the internal contradictions of the system begin to fully bear their weight, and something better emerges in the wake of that. It’s not really up to us, at the bottom, and it never really has been. It’s maybe up to, how hard the pharoah lets his heart become, or what have you.

unless there’s some fundamental misunderstanding about how our elections work.

Yeah, this is pretty much the core of it, I think. There were very minor attempts to gain nuance on the issue, say, there were people in the swing states that were committing to a vote towards kamala which would be contingent on an equivalent one or two protest votes for a given DSA or PSL or whatever other kind of candidate in a non-swing state, so as to be a protest vote.

I think the underlying logic kind of remains the same though. You can’t leverage votes, because democrats don’t give a shit if they lose, realistically. That’s jack shit, to them, they don’t really care one way or the other, I think. Cynical part of my brain says that trump probably didn’t even really want to run a second time, and also didn’t really want to win, and is just coasting on the momentum that he had previously which has sort of locked him into the track he’s currently on, which would at the very least comically make this election a comical contest between candidates who are almost actively trying to lose.

well, hopefully known sleeper agent JDPON don accelerates the amerikkka burgerreich into the shitter so we can move onto a less bad country, not founded on slavery and genocide. the mandate of heaven will surely pass on to the BRICS nations, everyone will move away from the petrodollar and climate change will be solved, there will be a transgender furry revolution where they take over the mechanisms of information control from the inside. and bernie sanders will finally be elected in the year 2040, also, at the age of 99.

I suspect there’s a good portion of liberal voters who are above a certain level of wealth, and know they aren’t really affected by politics in more than superficial ways, and just sort of hate republicans for acting stupid, or, unfashionable, and see muslim voters as being unfashionable, because they failed to “fall in line”, as they explicitly state in their oft-repeated adage. Beyond that and maybe more understandably, probably a good proportion of them are people who don’t really know what they’re talking about, and are sort of, vaguely frustrated or terrified about the shit they keep seeing on CNN, or hearing about on their daily drive to work on NPR, unable to really tear themselves away from the political slop mill, where trump is kind of, notoriously good at just shoving a million things down the pipe.

I think a lot of these types can sort of be discounted out of hand, because the pipe is pushing such an overwhelming glut of content down their throats that they’ll probably never be convinced by anything you say almost ever. For every paragraph you punch out, you’re maybe gonna be counteracting like, a couple minute’s worth of propaganda, and you’re having to counteract like, eight hour’s worth of propaganda that they’re consuming on a daily basis.

I think mostly social media more broadly is engineered explicitly to facilitate this kind of like, using other people as punching bags, and venting explicitly at them, behavior. Even lemmy, which is just, designed exactly the same as reddit, but with a more open-source slant. This behavior where people use each other for rhetorical arguments rather than seeking to discuss things in good faith. More than that it’s sort of engineered to accompany the former propaganda apparatus. It’s the new media, same as the old media.

Yeah. I thought this sort of shit would’ve been cut down after those CIA layoffs trump did or whatever, or, that’s what everyone’s been jokingly saying, at least. Probably it’s more along the lines that social media companies keep selectively propagating this shit because they’re a revolving door with those three letter agencies anyways. Saw a LOT of black liberals posting with starbucks cups and mcdonald’s after the election, and talking about how they want to buy beachfront property in gaza, because the michigan vote didn’t come through for Kamala. Most of those people probably weren’t conforming to the boycott in the first place, and more broadly didn’t give a shit at all, but still, incredibly harrowing stuff, there.

Anyways yeah I agree with the other guy, if you wanted to spurn discussion, you probably would’ve been better off posting some shit that’s not like, immediately just blaming the protest votes? Is in better faith more generally? Probably wouldn’t gain as much traction exclusively because of that, as is the case with the site, but you’d at least not be contributing to that sort of bad faith discussion as much, which I think the initial post is doing.

You know I think maybe this resolves me that more people should just, run for political office, or maybe, resolves me that the dirtbag left is a concept which could probably be measured with some sort of success. You’re probably right, the left needs to learn that people would probably vote for any stupid piece of shit with no sense of decorum, as long as that guy gave them healthcare. No sense of decorum actually might be an advantage, even, because then there’s nothing left to rhetorically attack you with. That’s sort of the whole, like, john fetterman-phenomena. Too bad he turned into an actual piece of shit instead of just being a guy that dresses in a hoodie.

I was up and down many threads immediately before the election straining with every fiber of my being to explain to people the variety of ways in which their democracy is actually a sham and isn’t effective or reflective of popular will or sentiment.

The most I got in return was that, nah, none of that applies, because I just don’t really feel like it. It’s infuriating.

Every 4 years the machine churns, every 4 years people forget everything that happened the last time, forget every detail of the system, and just decide to kind of, sloganeer constantly rather than discuss critically, because that brings them some sense of control over the way things are going. It can be prefigured into their personal narrative of events, and how much they, personally, put on the line, how much they tried to change people’s minds. A participation trophy for their rubber stamp, for their ticking of a certain box, while the real rulers are off in washington making the real decisions. Ultimately it’s kind of fruitless, I think, or should only be viewed along the same lines as being personal slop-entertainment, or “self-improvement”. Anyone who’s not honest with at least that much can’t really be trusted to speak on these things, I think.

It’s not even really that, it’s just that home loans of like 10,000 to people who have made rent for the past 2 years and have a salary of over 80,000 but not over 200,000 and own a small business and own at least 2 cats but not over 3 cats and have a birthmark in the shape of a strawberry, isn’t very enticing or hopeful policy. Neither is campaigning with liz cheney when like 200,000 people are being killed with US bombs.

Can we find five or ten people like that amongst the American population of 330 million people?

probably not, no

hey look, it’s all understandable given the current state of the world, ey?

I mean, yeah, you’re right, feeding the troll is kind of a classic blunder, but I still think it makes sense not to go out of your way to give them any ammunition. Maybe I come off as a little victim blamey, but I don’t think it’s that serious

My point is only that bull bars sort of, have a different cultural association and collective cost-benefit than, say, cowcatchers on rural freight rail, and my only point in pointing that out, is really just to sort of, educate people about a series of fun facts, or things they may not have previously considered very much. i.e. if you live in suburbia, or if you find yourself driving to walmart once or twice a week, you should maybe not have bull bars on your car. Sort of also plays into the idea of like, larger cars, or even lifted cars, being overly tall in their hood height, meaning they’ll dump most pedestrians face flat onto the ground and potentially under the car, rather than tipping them onto the hood of the vehicle, and bull bars can serve to potentially exacerbate that problem. Which also ties into the jeeps and SUVs thing. I dunno.

Ranchers were sort of who I was thinking of when I was thinking of someone who would be extremely rural, and who on occasion will commute into a probably very small town with only one or two big box stores, gas stations, maybe a motel 6, and other highway-exit popups. There’s not much out in the boonies outside of agriculture, and like, maybe forestry or things of that nature.

There’s sort of, a weird kind of stereotyping around rurality on the internet, where it’s all seen as being sort of, extreme poverty, or, people living entirely disconnected from society, maybe working occasionally for some soulless big corporate farm that has no local upper management, and so everything there is sort of, supposed to be put upon, but also be noble in poverty, and be authentic, agreeable, and agree with me in all the ways that matter, especially politically. That’s the sort of like, idiot stereotype of rurality. That wealth gap is real, sure, you’ll drive through and see a bunch of millionaire plots of land flanked by like, random trailers that haven’t really been updated or maintained since the 70’s, that part is true enough. But basically, the idea that small trucks are the true sign of the working class ranchhand, and the large truck is always, always, some sort of like, pavement princess owned by an IT worker in san-francisco, that’s obviously false, and people don’t think about it at all. Obviously things aren’t as clear cut, plenty of people working what are otherwise blue collar jobs have big trucks, live in actual rurality, and have an at least somewhat justified reason for owning the kinds of vehicles they own.

I dunno, I’m just, making a lot of conversation, you know? I saw bull bars brought up and I decided to bring up more shit about them. Cultural context, pedestrian safety, shit like that.

I dunno, I tend to see that shit way more often on lifted pavement princess f-150’s and dodge rams than on, say, your classic rural 1990’s nissan shitbox truck, or your classic ford ranger. Though the lines do become blurred, when your private ranchers are naturally also multi-millionaires. In any case, bullbars are somewhat sensible maybe for encountering, say, a bull, or if you’re a police vehicle with a specific application, but more generally they’re horrible for ensuring pedestrian safety, ensuring crash safety when met with a stationary barrier like a bollard or a tree or a concrete barricade, or a storefront, and they’re obviously much worse in a crash with any other car. There are bullbars which try to get around these issues with more thoughtful integration with the frame of the car or the choice of material, but the vast majority I’ve seen are just tube steel.

None of what you say is untrue, but if you don’t conform to codified grammar, then you’ll get harangued by a bunch of grammar apes that freak out as soon as you misspell something relatively minor, like -esque to -esk. Or you’ll even just find yourself getting hit with a bunch of clarifying questions about what your specific spelling actually was. So oftentimes it’s actually more fluid, and more clear, to use language that’s more codified.