Shit even my in laws say they are centrist, they don’t hold a single view that’s centrist. They vote down ticket republican their whole lives. This is a thing republicans do.
I voted a mixed ticket until 2016. Then straight blue until 2024, and only one exception in 2024 and she was was a city seat that I knew and could knock on her door and yell at in person if she did something I didn't like.
Or to pick more immediately pertinent examples, RFK is a an idiot, but he supports banning some food additives that are already banned elsewhere for good reasons, Trump is an idiot, but he wants to end daylight savings time. Both are good ideas, despite support from terrible people and being supported by those terrible people doesn't make them suddenly terrible ideas.
That's what they said. You get given a choice between "drag things farther to the right" and "do nothing", with a system designed to always collapse into two functional parties, knowing you're too terrified of "drag things farther to the right" to meaningfully challenge "do nothing."
It's like a political ratchet.
It's just the End of Days... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RKRO_VssJQ
You may have nothing to fear right now, but you never know who’s going to be in office soon.
The way I always explain it to people - take any additional government power or access to information you either don't care about or actively support. Now imagine whoever you oppose/hate the most taking office and trying to use that against your interests. Are you still OK with them having that power? Same principle applies regardless of what power or who's pushing for it.
It's like due process - you don't want any category of alleged violation not to be subject to due process, and if you don't understand why then it's time to wrongfully accuse you of doing that so you understand the problem.
Fuck it, align='center'. That'll center it horizontally relative to some context and if that's not good enough then you should have been more precise in your request.
This was not personal interest, though it is an incredibly interesting text. It was fascinating to discover he devoted ~2.5 chapters to the importance of the same kind of simple, yet powerful finger-pointing rhetoric used by right-wing ideologists to this day. I joking say it’s one of the earliest texts on meme theory, and it’s only half a joke.
I still find it funny that just a few years ago a feminist social work journal called Affilia published an article that was essentially a rewrite of a section of Mein Kampf in terms of sex and with some "fashionable buzzwords" included under the title “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.” Especially since the bit is spelled out right in the title (for anyone who doesn't know, "Mein Kampf" literally translates as "My Struggle"). It was part of the grievance studies affair.
I think I have a mutation in a taste bud or something, but Sucralose is really a prominent and nasty taste to me in anything it’s in.
The only artificial sweetener I get a nasty aftertaste from is saccharine. But I get a really absurdly foul aftertaste from saccharine, I can't even compare it to anything because it's easily the worst thing I have ever tasted in my life and I can't think of anything even sort of similar. Glad basically nothing uses it any more, but it was more of an issue as a type I diabetic kid decades ago. Sucralose doesn't give me an aftertaste at all though, neither does aspartame or acesulfame potassium.
My preferred sweetener though is stevia (I used to go to the local new age shop and buy just dried stevia leaves for my tea and such during the time it was legal to sell in any amount for any purpose as an herbal supplement so long as you didn't mention it had a flavor which turned it into an unsafe food additive because fuck NutraSweet corp). It took such a ridiculous time to get approved because of NutraSweet, when stevia really should have fallen under GRAS status for the same reason things like tomatoes did - New World plant used in food forever by the natives, but wholly new to Europeans when they came to the Americas.
You never hung out on IRC warez channels getting stuff by DCC or by trading dodgy FTP servers? Young whippersnapper!
We all on here pretending Napster wasn’t the OG? The transition to kazaa was painful.
Napster was feature poor though. CuteMX was much, much better and out while Napster was still running, but it closed down after Napster lost the court case. Feature set was closer to Kazaa, including filters and being able to browse a user's shares.
If it was obscure, uncommon, niche, and other synonyms, if you did find it 90% of the time it was simply given an incorrect name and wasn’t actually what you wanted.
This is literally how I got introduced to several bands I never would have heard otherwise. Missing one track off one album, downloading...this definitely isn't the right track, but who is this? And now I need to download another 8 albums by that band...
If AI didn’t exist, it would’ve probably been Astrology or Conspiracy Theories or QAnon or whatever that ended up triggering this within people who were already prone to psychosis.
Or hearing the Beatles White Album and believing it tells you that a race war is coming and you should work to spark it off, then hide in the desert for a time only to return at the right moment to save the day and take over LA. That one caused several murders.
But the problem with ChatGPT in particular is that is validates the psychosis… that is very bad.
If you're sufficiently detached from reality, nearly anything validates the psychosis.
Headline was inaccurate - they didn't bomb a place for a gender reveal. Instead they bombed a place that produced blue smoke for some other reason and joked about how it resembling a gender reveal. That's...not better but it's an important distinction - one is blowing shit up to announce it's a boy and the other is blowing shit up to blow shit up and then joking about the color of the smoke.
You’d have to be an asshole not oppose country based on settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing
...and yet, being anti-Israel was considered a far-right neo-Nazi position not that long ago. It became acceptable again from the start of the current flare up (the current fighting isn't something new, it's been going on and off for decades). Before that, anti-Israel meant anti-Jew meant obviously Nazi. It's wild how when things change so many people will just quietly drop the old narrative and pretend it never existed. We've always been at war with Eurasia and all that.
The reality is that the US supports Israel, has for a long time and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It's not because of being pro-Jew or wanting to ethnically cleanse Arabs, it's because they're our only real ally in the Middle East and thus we'll remain safely on their good side unless and until we get a strategically more useful ally in the Middle East. Then keeping them happy becomes less important.
The bill got pulled. And even if it didn't it's such a blatant and egregious violation of 1A that even Trump's pet judges would have to shoot it down out of fear of the precedent it would set and what would happen if ever they lose power for any length of time.
That's the conversation I've been having with some people cheering on Trump's immigration moves. I've pointed out the machine the individual bricks seems to be building, and when they support that too because Trump will only use it on the "right sort of people" I point out that Trump won't be in power forever, and ask him what he'd think if someone like Harris or AOC had that same power. That's when they suddenly get it, because the idea that the same machinery could be brought against them is not something they consider.
The first question you should ask when considering "Should the government have this power?" is "If the people I oppose the very most had this power, what would they do with it?" If you're not OK with the answer to that, then the government shouldn't have that power.
If a theory and every attempt at real world application of a theory yield wildly different results, shouldn't that suggest something in the theory is deeply flawed?
Really it’s actually capitalism that supposes people are too dumb to make their own choices or know how a business is run, and thus shouldn’t have say over company choices.
Really it's actually that businesses with that structure tend to perform better in a market economy, because no one forces businesses to be started as "dictatorships run by bosses that effectively have unilateral control over all choices of the company" other than the people starting that business themselves. You can literally start a business organized as a co-op (which by your definitions is fundamentally a socialist or communist entity) - there's nothing preventing that from being the organizing structure. The complaint instead tends to be that no one is forcing existing successful businesses to change their structure and that a new co-op has to compete in a market where non-co-op businesses also operate.
If co-ops were a generally more effective model, you'd expect them to be more numerous and more influential. And they do alright for themselves in some spaces. For example in the US many of the biggest co-ops are agricultural.
Yeah, wasn't trolling. They literally start a court case against the property to determine if that property was used in or purchased through the proceeds of a crime, and the standard is a preponderance of the evidence. Hiring a lawyer to defend your property against the allegation it was bought with drug money or w/e often costs more than replacing it would. Which is the point.
The term used for it in law enforcement is "civil asset forfeiture". For her to get it back, her property is going to have to get a lawyer to defend that it is probably not used in a crime or purchased with funds obtained through criminal activity. Doing that is not cheap.
None of them include workers in that list, because most of them are white Americans, but are also workers. The whole point is "I want them to hurt people who are not like me, not people who are me!"