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darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]

@ darkcalling @hexbear.net

Posts
2
Comments
592
Joined
6 yr. ago

  • [Mask Deal] $27 for 440 Aura N95 masks for comrades who need cheap masking options

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  • To read the lot codes: first letter indicates country of origin factory, second and third characters (first two digits) indicate the year of manufacture, so 20 would be 2020, next 3 digits indicate how many days since the start of the year they were made (so 330 would be 330 days since Jan 1, 2020). Last one is the machine that made it.

    If anyone can chime in on where that 5 year rating comes from that would be great (I know for a lot of drugs the maximum safe time is from tests done by the manufacturers and in their own interest they only test for a few, maybe 5 years and when the US military tested some substances they discovered they retained most of their potency for much longer). As I wouldn't be surprised if it's a case of 3M only warranties them that long and under proper storage they can last longer but at the same time I understand there is something of a static charge in parts of the mask that does the heavy lifting for particle trapping and that may dissipate over time or other materials may suffer degradation. I know it's important to keep them sealed in the wrapper packaging until time of use for instance.

    The things to look for as I understand are: they don't smell strongly off when opened (outside of packaging smelling doesn't matter), the adhesives aren't breaking down (nose pads coming off, melting), the straps don't snap on first use (probably least consequential but it could be a sign of bad storage conditions and stresses to the rubber/elastic and hence the rest of it) and they fit test properly. The straps on these ones aren't that great anyways, I've had store bought ones of this model break on me after the first use if I pulled a little too far trying to get them out and over my hair without tangles.

  • [Mask Deal] $27 for 440 Aura N95 masks for comrades who need cheap masking options

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  • Checking into the lot codes from the photos I got according to a post on reddit (https://libreddit.privacydev.net/r/Masks4All/comments/168a53a/3m_aura_9205_respirator_lot_a202496_expiry_date/) the ones they received should have been made at the very end of 2020 (days/weeks before the new year) so with a 5 year official expiration date for the full NIOSH rating that puts the expiration of them at around December 2025. So as expected these are discounted because they're "officially" expiring in the near term.

    As long as you store them out of the heat (not in your 140F garage or car) and they weren't too badly mistreated before this I figure the official dates are conservative estimates and with any luck they'll still provide nearly all of their protection through at least the middle of 2026 and maybe beyond. Certainly better than nothing and probably safer than the bulk government resellers who break up these 440 piece boxes into 20 packs and sell them for $0.50 each.

  • New anti-communist talk point just dropped: The Soviet Union sucked because abortion was legal

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  • What I recall is that the understanding of what that was changed over time. The wiki article on the issue of the CC's stance on abortion mentions compilations of lists of abortifacient herbs by the church several centuries later among other things. Basically abortion used to refer exclusively to doing so either shortly before birth/deep into pregnancy or after the first "quickenings" or movements could be felt or at the minimum a month after impregnation. By the 20th century they decided that basically the second that sperm gets in there and division starts it has a soul and messing with it is unacceptable.

  • Oh jeez

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  • Robert is a masculine name generally speaking and one given to AMAB types generally speaking. Yet the news refers to the shooter as she that's something in support of this idea unfortunately along with the fact pronouns are being avoided in some of the news reporting and the name change.

    I've since found this:

    The shooter’s mother also applied to change her child’s name from Robert to Robin in Dakota County in 2019, according to court documents obtained by FOX 9. According to the name change filing, Westman identified "as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification."

    Not the source of that text but another source (ABC): https://archive.is/YXmhD

    Someone better at sifting through court records can maybe find this though it looks like unless it was digitized by a third party you likely need to go to the records place in person or at the very least submit an online form and pay a fee to get this kind of info.

    This is pretty bad. This trans person had some parental support to change their name from their mother as a minor and went on to kill people, we can't say what else happened in their life or how much support they really had but the reactionaries will harp on that fact until time ends as proof that embracing trans kids identities leads to violence when of course evidence shows not supporting trans kids leads to suicides (what reactionaries would prefer of course). This, the other shooting at a religious school in Kentucky by a trans-man a few years back, they'll say its a part of "discrimination" and violence against Christians and drive them into an even further frothing frenzy to criminalize trans people, classify being trans as a mental illness and harp on denying mentally ill people guns as the solution. And that's part of the whole "woke pink-hairs are mentally ill" push to put such people in camps (to be slaves doing farm-work deported migrants used to do and/or illusory re-shoring) and not just deny them guns for self-defense. UGH.

  • New anti-communist talk point just dropped: The Soviet Union sucked because abortion was legal

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  • From what I've read back in my atheist activist days it coincided with integrated schools as a culture war issue becoming untenable as a position so they moved on.

    There were always Christian groups against it, Catholics were required to be against it because of a non-revocable Papal decree in the form of "received wisdom from god" type was announced at some point in the 20th century I think. Some Protestant sects were against it, others shrugged at it. There were different theories for centuries on when the fetus was given a soul so different time periods where it was okay. Some traditional religions for example thought the soul was inhaled on the first breath after birth, others gave 30 or 90 days and for much of history abortion was considered okay as long as no movement had yet been felt.

    So basically they grabbed onto this as a culture war issue. You know that Republican strategist who wrote in his memoir about how you used to say n-word n-word, etc and then you couldn't do that you moved onto integrated schools then busing and soon it was all an abstract thing but racism just the same. It's the same thing but for sexism, they couldn't be against sexual freedom that second wave feminism had brought and won and which was quite popular, at least they couldn't do so while winning without some wedge issue (they still were openly against feminism but a lot of

    type folks shrugged at all that and didn't care to join their movement). So they couldn't just slut-shame and call for criminalizing sex outside of marriage, it wouldn't fly and wasn't going to succeed. So what do you do instead? You punish women with "consequences" in the form of having kids. It becomes abstract, you invent dishonest tactics and claim they're killing babies and do this whole moral masturbation thing and freak-out over that, that plus trying to keep contraceptives to couples and you clamp down on sexual liberation by making women liable to suffer pregnancies and bear children they may not want as punishment for sex and then go on and on about stable families and births in wedlock and you're doing the same slut-shaming thing but it's abstract, you're talking in sociological terms and of murder and stable society and families and its cryptic.

    And what happened was the school integration and open racism card was no longer as useful by a certain point so political operatives latched onto it after prominent "moral majority" Evangelical leadership did (who themselves of course were deeply political creatures) and they turned it into a culture war issue, they made it part of their purity culture push but they also pushed it beyond that. After all if you can convince people that abortion is murdering a baby you don't have to sell them on your whole system of morality, they don't have to accept the purity culture as a whole because they can delude themselves into thinking oh the women will give it up for adoption, there are plenty of families who want it, it'll be fine for the child and there wasn't much further thinking on it or these poor misled fools would sit there and cry and be upset about the situation because blah blah murder is wrong, poor kids, boo hoo. And they won over a lot of women that way and continue to unfortunately.

  • Oh jeez

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  • The reactionaries are spouting it. True or not the damage is being done and they'll continue pushing that angle as school shootings spark cries for gun control and this gives them an excellent chance to do an uno reverse and cry for cracking down on trans people and decrying how it's propaganda that turns perfectly straight kids gay and trans and satanic (because Catholics targeted), shifting the blame from guns, from an alienated, hyper-individualistic, barbaric, consumption culture with easy access to weapons to "woke trans".

    Looks like they were also Russian, maybe immigrant given their manifesto was posted in Russian so they can talk up anti-immigrant talking points and the necessity of ICE, add on the anti-zionist points and this is a a triple whammy for them in shifting blame and casting immigrants, trans people, and anti-zionists as violent criminal terrorists. Add on the bonus that it was a Catholic school targeted and they'll keep harping on this because Christians LOVE feeling persecuted from a distance and pushing the idea of how their victims are so mean and hurtful to them.

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    Bulletins and News Discussion from August 25th to August 31st, 2025 - The Limits of Electoralism - COTW: Bolivia

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  • It really is a failure of Russia that they haven't achieved intelligence capabilities strong enough to find and strike these repair facilities. Even just killing a large number of their trained repair techs without totally destroying the buildings/facilities (e.g. taking out a bus they all take leaving or going to work) would do immense damage and hampering to Ukraine's ability to repair things and that of the German arms industry to continue servicing things and psychologically strike an incredible blow to the happy go lucky murderous German arms companies.

    Targeting foreign specialists and foreign trained specialists should be a very high priority for Russia if they're serious about demilitarizing and rendering harmless the Nazi state of Ukraine and of course taking out repair capabilities will seriously hamper Ukraine militarily. The Germans should be taken a lot more aback by furious Russian destruction of their capabilities to service their equipment in Ukraine at all.

  • Trump: "We have to stop nuclear weapons."

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  • Really the only thing these talks are for. Such an obvious ulterior motive.

    That and to cast Russia/China as intransigent, suspicious, untrustworthy and hostile if they don't agree in order to pave the way for justifications to expand our own and/or the golden dome by saying we tried peace but now the only choice is spending $5 trillion dollars on re-vitalizing the nukes, building more, and building the massive interceptor system in space, land, sea, etc.

    What worries me is they may have already made a decision to use nukes and consider it a given that Russia/China won't agree and just want some plausible cover to build up this system, to act like they're just being oh irrational belligerent America again doing a thing when this time they're serious about using it, then count on launching a surprise nuclear attack on China and/or Russia, limit their own nuclear response by catching them by surprise and use this system to they believe blunt enough of the retaliation that does get launched to be winners (in the words of that general from Dr Strangelove "minimal and acceptable casualties therefore making us the winners, uh 10-20 million tops depending on the breaks"). Whether this system works or not is not the problem so much as if the planners believe it does and launch the attack.

    The alarming thing of course being how much MAD is disregarded these days and how determinedly the US is moving forward with first strike/decapitating strike capabilities along with extensive early warning, monitoring nets over air and sea to say nothing of extensive land monitoring via their satellite network. One side and it is the US unfortunately has a massive advantage for early detection and even tracking movement of these assets compared to the others and it's one that has grown with partnerships in the Pacific and the expansion of NATO eastward.

    Their determination to break MAD should be reason enough for the Chinese and Russians to dismiss such talks until such time the US takes down the level of its unfair advantage against both Russia and China first as a good faith move. The US encircles both of them not the other way around. Its talk of "mad north korean threat of rogue suicidal nuke strikes" is enough for the gallery of rubes in the audience but is not a fitting explanation on the international stage at the highest diplomatic level for its efforts in this field.

    We were at a basic stalemate with a meaningful US advantage at the end of the cold war and rather than leave that status quo of MAD in place the US went out of its way to expand its advantage and continues to press that leading Russians to need to talk of bizarre and perhaps impractical at scale undersea hypersonic nuclear powered defense evading weapons and more recently more practical nuclear powered long-flying fire and wait for up to a year nuclear-powered nuclear tipped cruise missiles.

    The need is not to get rid of nukes as that's not going to happen, it's for the US to stop pressing aggressively to diminish the utility of the nukes that exist and pushing Russia and China into an arms race that requires these dangerous new launch and forget perhaps autonomous even nuclear weapons that circle and circle and wait for the go order. And the US is unwilling to negotiate on that or even bring it up, it chafes at the very notion that it doesn't have a given right to hegemony and a first mover advantage in detection and first strike time compared to its enemies as well as increasingly a right to interception systems greater than those of adversary peer powers.

  • Japan asked countries to skip China's WWII commemorative events in September

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  • You know moments like this and the whole war criminal shrine thing (unironically should be heavily bombed into a crater and if Japan gets into a shooting war with China I hope they take the time to launch an oreshnik level conventional explosive strike on that thing to make the Japanese fascists seethe) and the revisionist history schoolbooks make me want to say certain things about nuclear weapons and deserving but getting for the wrong reasons by the wrong parties (who themselves assuredly deserve the same).

  • RFK Jr. may ban the COVID vaccine within months.

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  • I mask all the time but with things like this I worry it's only a short matter of time before masking in public is banned as well.

    Trump will say anyone masking in public is antifa and start leaning on states and cities to criminalize it. Stores and businesses will mostly happily go along as they don't give a fuck about your safety and worry about it enabling ANY level of shoplifting or crime and it also only would impact a tiny fraction of their customers at this point. Public institutions will fold and treat you like a criminal if you're wearing a mask, the cops will gleefully start targeting anyone wearing a mask in public for inspection, shake-down and harassment.

  • [RESOLVED] Issues paying Vietnam visa application fee, cannot contact support, please help

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  • Contact the US state department or whoever your country's equivalent is maybe and see if they have any contacts or can nudge someone? Could try the US embassy there for example if the main office provides nothing.

    Or try another credit card. Or see if they take some other form of payment you can arrange.

  • RFK Jr. may ban the COVID vaccine within months.

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  • Increasingly not in the amounts they have so think of this as a cull not extermination.

    They're afraid of what happens if they do perfect robotics and AI and fire half the population (something they desperately DO WANT to do to forever resolve things in their favor). Unless they kill a hell of a lot of people there will be a revolution or they'll be forced to make extraordinary concessions like universal basic income at which point the proles start thinking about other basics needing to be free like medical care and gasp nice things.

    So their choices are a massive war (may still be coming with China) though presently that mainly kills young men (not ideal as you've already spent money educating and raising them to the minimum age for compulsory service and that's basically throwing away what's considered an important investment before its matured, though it does have the benefit of resolving problems of too many angry young men without romantic/sexual partners by creating a surplus of women to men and thus also increasing the value of the remaining men and beating down further feminist impulses among women in favor of settling) and disease (which disproportionately kills the elderly and disabled who are considered of lesser value to these monsters) for quickly killing off a lot of the unneeded excess labor pool.

    As usual the bourgeoisie will be able to fly to Europe to get a vaccine for themselves so this really only impacts the workers most likely to be targeted by automation at the lower rungs who absolutely cannot afford to even go to Mexico for a weekend to get some shots. Service workers, retail workers will get this disease repeatedly and be weakened by it and perhaps killed off at younger ages just in time for the imagined dawn of automation and the final triumph of the bourgeoisie over labor (as they imagine it anyways).

  • Locked

    The Haitian Revolution - Novo General Megathread for the 22nd to 24th of August 2025

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  • The answer 9/10 times is the internet and watching some reactionary propaganda slop programming pushed directly into their minds by the algorithm. Some "history expert" reactionary nerd probably said something like that in some video and they parroted it. One of those map pushing soy-facing history explainer or alternate history dorks no doubt.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • I am well aware of how to avoid it, but does anyone have advice on how to get selected

    I've heard they want the most bog standard, boring, ignorant people. You have significant knowledge of the law? Out. You have strong political opinions that you voice? Very likely out. So don't appear terribly informed, don't appear like you're a progressive champion of justice. Act like you're open to being fair to either side but not convinced of anything in particular other than the rightness of the rule of law going in, that you're a blank slate. If it's like a case about a cop shooting someone they'd for example ask your opinion on police and push out anyone who said ACAB or anything even remotely like that. If it's about an oil company they'd ask you about energy and the environment and climate change and push out anyone too strongly negative on the industry. You have to appear to be a void, a robot willing to judge the case totally on the facts they give you and entirely according to the law they present to you. Someone without prior strong opinions.

  • Imagine being nostalgic for megacorp buildings.

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  • Also I literally never saw a McDonald's that looked like the 90s one and my family did a lot of traveling as a kid back then. They all looked like the 2000s one.

    I think I did but it was in the 2000s so I think they've messed up the order here badly.

    The 2000s one they have there was probably the 1990s model, the 1990s one they have there was probably one put up in select areas in the 2000s through early 2010s. As if you look closely you can see it's probably just a facade on the model they have under 2000s in that picture, McD's put some fake stone, exterior, some animal stuff and transformed that tiled sloped roof look into something a bit more interesting looking. Because that same old roof style is under all that.

  • Where do mega celebrities go when they have to go to a mental hospital?

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  • Well the really wealthy could just afford to have a therapist and a pill-dispensing psychiatrist with them at all times if they so wished, just private doctor stuff and I assume billionaires, the top bourgeoisie have a private circuit of doctors and specialists who only ever treat them, their kids, etc and none of them would ever know about the other clients or know very little. They also like to go on little private mental health retreats with other members of their class to places like Aspen at $20,000 a night or some place in the middle of nowhere where they all go ayahuasca or whatever.

    But celebrities and the lower bourgeoisie go to mental health spas. Clinics that may also treat substance abuse disorders. These places charge a lot of money, we're talking like at least $10,000 cash a stay out of pocket, more likely $50,000-$100,000 or more a stay for the really exclusive ones. So the amount of people who can afford these places boils down to celebrities, the wealthy, certain c-suite types who might get the company to pay for it, etc. None of which are likely to go around blabbing about who they saw imminently and certainly not with any details of what was going on or the why of them being there. (The celebrity themselves can have some fashionable excuse like burn-out from working too hard)

    Also these places probably have people who enter them sign NDAs or similar not to disclose identities or issues of other patients and pissing off other powerful wealthy people is a good way to end up without money and without friends (because they're all in the same circles and no one wants to hang around a snitch or invite them to parties) after being sued into oblivion by their legal team joined by that of the clinic with a dead to rights paper you signed agreeing not to talk.

    Besides that they could have a policy of no real names or first names only or allow patients to enroll under an alias.

  • Focus on the Family founder James Dobson Dead (cw for child abuse, conversion therapy)

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  • Literally one of the most evil men in America of the past 30-40 years. Words struggle to convey how harmful this man's existence was to millions. How many lives he took with his anti-LGBTQ crusade. How much psychological torture he and his evil org and books inflicted on young people.

    God isn't real or isn't good. Because if it was real and good it would have killed this absolute monster, this demon decades ago in a very painful way.

  • Kim Jong-un consoles soldier at ceremony on Thursday honoring the 101 who died defending Kursk

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  • Incredible. Just incredible stuff. Actually hugging the surviving relatives of the soldiers. But tell us again western propaganda about how he's an out of touch, gluttonous dictator autocrat who revels in subjugating and killing his own people without a second thought. Just pure projection.

  • Man arrested on charges of hitting 12-year-old girl with a sex toy at a WNBA game

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  • Not sure how he isn't being charged with a sex crime tbh.

    They must be saving all of them for serious things like trans people (sigh). IMO it's flashing a child with a simulated penis and striking them with it in doing so.

    All of it should go to the kid.

    Agreed.

    Also not sure how the WNBA is a "victim" in this.

    I mean purely in a law sense. I don't think they're benefited from crypto grifters throwing sex toys into the arena, being disruptive for their personal gain to attempt to pump and dump their scam and annoying the players and audience, impacting the performance, lowering the value of tickets to buyers of the sports show performance because of juvenile disruptions like this, creating safety hazards, necessitating stopping play, creating work for staff to grab and remove the item which as a sex toy can be classed a biohazard as its unknown if it was ever used. Creating costs associated with censoring or avoiding showing the toy on recording cameras, etc. If I were a WNBA attorney and I'm not I could think of a lot of things to write in legal filings suing these losers over that the bourgeois courts would nod sagely at.

    It'd be one thing if they were doing something relatively harmless like throwing bananas or inflatable balls with their scam name on them. But the whole sex toy thing against a woman's sport is very misogyny coded and this whole "girl goes to watch women play sports, gets hit with sex toy by misogynist grifter" just has me quite upset as it's horrible, I mean it's an unintentional metaphor if not several.

  • Locked

    Bulletins and News Discussion from August 18th to August 24th, 2025 - The French Colonial Linchpin - COTW: Ivory Coast

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  • I can't celebrate this. He lived to a very old age. Died in absolute comfort watching his side winning the long culture war they'd waged for Evangelical Christian supremacy unfolding. His final moments were living in the glow of that victory and suffered absolutely zero consequences for his childhood torture manuals which are still widely sold and will continue to be widely sold, recommended and used for decades more.

    Obviously fuck him. He should be tortured for millions of years for the psychological torture he inflicted on countless children including me and if hell were real he would be in it.