Spoken like a person who isn’t forced to use JIRA

Yelling at voters doesn’t help, neither does educating them.

These things only affect individuals, and there’s hundred of millions of voters out there, in a constantly shifting cohort.

You may as well try to bail out the rising tide with a teacup. You can expend unlimited resources on the task, and you’ll achieve precisely dick.

It doesn’t matter how wrong people are, how stupid people are, or how fucked-up their reactions to things are. You cannot effectively change that at scale, except via constant, persistent social engineering over years or even decades.

If the opposition is offering free pizza, then it doesn’t matter how much healthier and better your free salad really is. Don’t waste your time on trying to convince people, don’t waste your energy on it, don’t waste your emotions on it. People are going to choose the pizza, and you damn well know it.

If you want them to take your offering instead, you need to come up with something that hundreds of millions of people will think is tastier than pizza.

Now sure, you can try and sell people the idea that the pizza guy doesn’t wash his hands after taking a shit. You can put up giant posters of the cockroaches crawling all over the stall, and sure you might make a dent.

But when the alternative looks like a bunch of dry bitter rabbit food to them, no matter how tasty it actually is, you’re fucked.

You need to address the actual concerns of the voters (no matter how stupid), and you need to show them that you’re addressing them, in a way they’ll actually notice and appreciate.

Not ‘ought to’. Will.

What it needs is some angry people who will get up on their hind legs and fight for the working classes. It needs people who are loudly and visibly sick of the status quo, tired of the bullshit and ready to rip the face off anyone who gets in their way.

Not the fucking charity-auction Moira Schitt ghouls schmoozing up to $LARGE_CORPORATION while laughing about the dirty poors, or smirking about how bombing Palestinian children is the only moral choice.

(Seriously, Trump ought to hire Matt Miller and Vedant Patel - they did more to undermine the Dem campaign than anyone else. The optics were an unmitigated disaster.)

“Am I out of touch? No, it’s the voters who are wrong”

M.A.S.H

If you spend the whole time sucking up to fascists, people are just going to cut out the middleman and elect one to run the place.

I mean he did kill Hitler, that’s got to count for something.

As a fellow Australian, I don’t understand why you’re surprised.

“Hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil” may be pragmatic, but it doesn’t get people emotionally engaged. It doesn’t get you infectious enthusiasm and passion. It gets you reluctant, dejected compliance, and that simply does not catch fire.

On the other side you have nothing but emotional engagement; god knows it’s not a rational or pragmatic choice there. Trump does nothing but pander to hatred and cruelty and fear and the power fantasies of gullible idiots, and it fucking works. Cheap shallow emotional satisfaction, no matter how stupid an idea it is. You know, like junk food and binge drinking and cigarettes and pokies; things that people know full well are ruining their lives, but they continue to seek them out regardless.

If the dems ever want to win, they will have to make the progressives fall in love with them, and you don’t get that by backing genocide unconditionally, you just don’t.

They didn’t get the oh-god-yes, just a not-no, and that does not equal consent.

Well, Democrats can rest easy knowing that Palestinian children will continue being murdered.

I hope it was worth it.

4k. Give me pixels.

:laughs in Australian:

I don’t understand why the entire region hasn’t wiped Israel off the map. They’re clearly expansionist, and are clearly going to keep bombing their neighbours a little bit at a time; why just sit around and wait?

Okay:

In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn’t want to deal with.

Palestine was not happy about this - the land was taken without their consent, a great chunk of their country just taken from them by decree, backed up by a still highly militarized Europe.

Over the following decades, Palestine tried several times to take their country back, and each time got slapped down (since Israel had vast backing from UK/USA/Europe, both from postwar guilt and because Israel had a lot of strategic value as a platform from which to project military power in the middle east).

Cut to today, and Israel has expanded to take virtually the entire area, apart from some tiny scattered patches of land, and the Gaza strip - a strip of land 40km by 10km, containing most of the Palestinian population, blockaded by sea and land by the Israeli military.

Israel also runs an apartheid regime very similar to the old South African one - Palestinians have very few human or civil rights, generally get no protection from the Israeli police or military, while being treated as hostile outsiders that can be assaulted or have their land ‘settled’ at will by Israelis.

It has been decades since Palestine has had any kind of organised military, and it’s also not recognised as its own country by most of the world, so there’s virtually no way for it to push back, or to call on assistance.

In a situation like that, the only recourse is guerilla warfare, which often descends into (and is exploited by bad actors as) terrorist attacks. It’s a damn good way to farm martyrs, and this hugely serves Israel’s ends, since it can keep pointing to terrorim as justification for their ongoing oppression. Israel in fact provided a great deal of ongoing funding for Hamas, while blocking more moderate groups.

Back in October, a small organised group raided across the border from Gaza into Israel, killing about 1200 people and taking a couple of hundred hostages.

In response, Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinans in Gaza - mainly women and children - systematically destroying the city’s infrastructure, water, power, food production and distribution, hospitals, universities and schools, bombing refugee camps and destroying the majority of all housing and shelter in the area. It’s also bombing humanitarian aid convoys, preventing food and medicine from reaching the people there. The death toll is expected to reach many hundreds of thousands, since people are already starving and there is no medical care available.

The rest of the world is wringing their hands about the ‘regrettable’ loss of life, while continuing to sell Israel all the weapons and bombs it needs to continue the genocide.

Fuck Israel.

NVIDIA RIVA 128

Even when it’s the “most important election ever”, they don’t just pull out all the stops to ensure it’s a shoe-in - they try to finesse it down to a hair, and get away with 99% of the bastardry of the other guy.

Exactly the same thing here in Australia, every single fucking time. And 90% of the time, they lose.

it’s an effective meta for rich people.

being alive

Because the conditions required for fascism to take root have been incubating for decades.

Massive wealth inequality, insecure employment, non-existent labor laws and worker’s rights, hollowed-out education, healthcare and social services, large corporations getting to write their own laws verbatim, political parties sucking dick for their donors, endless war ensuring unlimited money for the military-industrial complex, demonization of brown-people-of-the-week, fetishization of ‘the troops’ and ongoing acceptance of brutality.

People are poor, desperate, ignorant, exploited and forgotten, they’re shown every day that killing the shit out of outsiders is the solution to all the country’s problems, anyone pushing actual progressive ideals is shut down and demonized as a threat to the profits of the 0.1%, giving people a choice between rightwing bastardry and neoliberal bastardry as their only lens through which to see the world.

Give that the opportunity to flare up and of course it’s fucking going to. The republicans want it, the dems do nothing to prevent it.

It’s like watching a party get the wrong kind of rowdy all night, you keep supplying drinks regardless, then you wonder why it turns into a fight, oh no how could this ever happen?

Sucks to your ass-mar

Yes, yes she is.

Someone once described her as machine girl’s furry alt account :D

Good lord, speak plainly.

That’s more of a swingers thing than a poly thing.

In the vast majority of poly relationships, people are in separate relationships with each of their partners.

Triads (and quads, etc) are hard-mode. They certainly exist, but they take skill and effort from everyone involved, and so are significantly more rare. And of those, probably only a minority are going to be into the whole group-sex thing in the first place so… not very often.