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Gumball is right about the ultimate solution being to overturn capitalism. This is yet another rich man’s war. You can’t buy or not buy your way out of that, not least because people have a much greater personal stake in having the treats that alleviate a little of the suffering when the vibes are as hosed as they are right now vs an attempt to hurt a corporate entity that is treated as an abstract itself; these efforts can only rarely ever truly/effectively change corporate behavior, because they talk about companies rather than the actual ruling class of people behind them. Boycotting Nestle will never do poo poo to Nestle, too many people depend on those treats day to day. Nationalizing Nestle is the only way to actually achieve the goals we want, because the fiction of corporations allows endless maneuvering of the people behind them, spinning off subsidiaries to do the evil stuff, rebranding, and accumulating such huge piles of wealth that any of the punishments of the fictional entity barely dent its potential to keep on doing what it’s doing. You have to take power away, because why should power respect restraints the powerless want to place on it? It’s been shown again and again that they won that one. Conscientious capitalism or whatever is a ragged comfort blanket that cannot possibly serve anyone with a shred of dignity anymore. The comfort it provides is too small and too personal to ever meaningfully alleviate the suffering that is so widely distributed.
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Mar 23, 2022 01:51
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Eh I'd argue we've never really tried to truly regulate capital in the US. Other nations manage highly regulated capital markets while also maintaining a high standard of living and social freedom. It’s the only answer if you don’t want to constantly deal with capital seeking to overturn any ground you gain. It makes it a constant war for dignity which sucks a lot! Deciding you can ultimately get what you want out of capitalism doesn’t mean millions don’t still suffer.
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Mar 23, 2022 02:06
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Harold Fjord posted:Sounds like Russian capitalists are just as horrible as American ones. Jacking up the prices because they have a vague explanation for doing so. We went in there with Larry Summers after the wall came down and showed them how it’s done. You gotta shake those people down, they were coddled under communism! That’s why life expectancy fell so dramatically lol.
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Mar 23, 2022 14:29
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Class3KillStorm posted:Madeline Albright has died. What’s the correct brooch or pin to wear to signify “a good start”?
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Mar 23, 2022 20:27
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How are u posted:I'm more of a mind that politics is about getting things done. If you're grandstanding to the point that you alienate all of your allies while also failing to accomplish your objective I don't think you're doing it right. Really depends on what you’re getting done. I think it’s more illuminating to see it as the formalized competition for resources and power among different interest groups. It’s pretty obvious based on who is in power and keeps getting richer who “getting things done” has been working for for decades now. And Sanguinia, now that Carter isn’t gumming up the works I assume this coalition you’re talking about is on top of repealing right to work, right?
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Mar 23, 2022 21:05
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Residency Evil posted:Can there be any consequences for either Thomas? The consequences are Clarence Thomas being in the hospital with some rare Covid strain that sprung from the social milieu she runs in. Beyond that? Hahaha no my friend, what country do you think you are in?
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Mar 25, 2022 13:55
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punk rebel ecks posted:As far as I’m concerned the Supreme Court should be completely ignored. Not only is it idiotic in practice (LIFE appointments? WTF?) but like most justices were put in over bullshit means. Gore won the popular vote in 2000, Hillary won in 2016, Obama should have picked his Supreme Court pick back in 2016. Bush and Trump appointments during their first terms shouldn’t apply. The naked illegitimacy of the Supreme Court and the senate are great reasons to doubt the legitimacy of the entire enterprise. We can see the edifice of state being nakedly corrupt over and over again, undeniably so. So where does the faith in the system come from? If an entire third of the substructure is an obvious partisan rubber stamp mechanism and half of another third is an antidemocratic institution designed to subvert popular will by deciding arbitrary units of population (states) all get equal representation, where is the legitimate work product we can point at? I get being scared of change, or just saying “well it’s not actually a democracy but it’s as close as we’ll ever get” but I couldn’t bring myself to accept that level of humiliation. How much of the government do we have to accept as illegitimate before the whole enterprise can be thrown out? Why bother with laws when they obviously don’t apply to the rich and famous, Eric?
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Mar 25, 2022 17:14
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Mellow Seas posted:"Throwing out the whole enterprise" has a couple of problems. Smaller problem first: None of this goes to supporting the legitimacy of what we currently have though; if I’m reading this right you’re just addressing that change is hard (agree) and would be violent (agree; the rich won’t go quietly) and that maybe people want different things. How does any of this affirm or undermine the legitimacy of the current situation?
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Mar 25, 2022 17:58
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:I know I shouldn't be shocked but seeing people flock to defend Will Smith committing a violent crime during the Oscars then getting a standing ovation an hour later is pretty nuts. His acceptance speech was basically him saying God told him to do it- just completely unhinged poo poo. Our culture is deeply, perhaps terminally sick. A lot of the same people cheering Smith would get the vapors at hitting someone for loudly advocating for genocide. It’s rich people business, you don’t have to care. They don’t give a poo poo about you, after all.
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Mar 28, 2022 15:22
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:The LAPD says they won't be charging Smith with assault because Chris Rock declined to file a police report and "lack of evidence/victim cooperation." Even though it was broadcast on live TV and you don't need the victim to file a police report to charge someone with a crime. See last post, rich people business; they get to decide which laws apply, and the cops go along with it, right in front of all of us.
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Mar 28, 2022 15:30
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Main Paineframe posted:It's too early to say anything for sure, except that 2024 is going to suck no matter what, but at least there's a chance of it being funny. That article's narrative of "he's an absolute black hole of charisma who refuses to interact with human beings, but he checks all the right boxes, our loyalist media loves him, and party officials are excited for his middle-management energy" sounds eerily similar to what was being written about some of the more obviously sideshow candidates in the 2020 Dem primary. But if DeSantis ends up underperforming, he's going to flame out a lot more entertainingly than the likes of Buttigieg or Harris did. Oh it’s DEFINITELY going to be funny as hell, just a loving clown show on the GOP side, with the Biden folks trying to keep him awake and coherent enough to campaign as the stable, sensible choice. This is after Biden gets impeached after ‘22, however that turns out. We are in for like a 6 year episode of Veep I figure, 4 at the very least if Dems come back in the ‘26 midterms after the DeSantis Pog Crisis or the Trump Balkanization Crisis explodes, or whatever the hosed up inconceivable thing that happens is. Whatever it is, posting it accurately now would be considered a joke, so it’s pretty guaranteed to be funny.
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Mar 29, 2022 18:08
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The Hunter Biden stuff is plain and simple corruption. Hard to see it any other way when the antics are so zany and the actual business being conducted seems to in no way justify the ludicrous amounts being paid to Joe Biden’s family. The idea that we need to prove the quid pro quo is ridiculous when the obvious conclusion, that they were buying influence from a failson, is so clear. This is way more obvious and detailed a case than anything I’ve seen about the Trump children, who I have no doubt are just as corrupt, but never lost their laptops on a bender. It’s going to take a miracle to keep an impeachment off the calendar after November ‘22 and Hunter’s dick pics out of the congressional record.
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Mar 30, 2022 23:45
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:It really seems like the Obama kids left a lot of potential money on the table if you go by Hunter and the Trump kid's actions. It seems that way because we don’t have evidence to the contrary, not that it’s not happening. I mean it’s happening, duh. It always happens. Whether it’s jobs you didn’t earn or passes you were given that you didn’t deserve, it’s always happening, to every rich kid. The dumbest rich kid will always come out on top over the smartest poor kid. No war but class war.
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Mar 31, 2022 15:10
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The laptop story is just the narrative, most partisans won’t care, but there will be a slice of “independent” voters, maybe people with a drug conviction or related to someone with one, maybe people who have experience the effects of corruption, that will be turned off by this. As a vote mover, on its own, it’s not much. It’s a little more powerful as part of a narrative: the president who won’t do poo poo to alleviate the lives of working Americans bends over backwards for his corrupt son. Especially on the drug stuff: Biden is an immense hypocrite there. It’s a handcrafted setup for a Trump stinger: “But he loves his son, too bad he doesn’t love his country. Sad!” What the laptop will be useful for is setting up a narrative for impeachment that is far more coherent, to the average voter, than what the Dems offered up for Trump. It’ll be very simple: a president covering for his corrupt son. It might not actually rise to the level of impeachability on paper, but who cares? Those rules don’t matter. I dunno that it will succeed, I just think the odds are extremely likely we’re going to be talking about it for weeks if not months in the not-too-distant future, because as a party the Democrats have collapsed into a rump corporate rent-seeking enterprise. In other words, I’d start learning all about the laptop now if you want to be ahead of the posting curve when you can’t ignore it and are neck deep parsing emails from it in posts in this thread. selec fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Mar 31, 2022 |
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Mar 31, 2022 15:44
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Solkanar512 posted:Once again, more lies and more bullshit. You don't get to put words in my mouth. The only conservatives here are the ones shouting Breitbart talking points about a laptop. You don’t get to call people conservatives just because they’re to your left and don’t tow the party line. What is conservative about my desire to tear down our racial caste system, destroy discriminatory practices and outcomes, make sure all are fed, housed and have their medical needs taken care of? What’s reactionary in my (and many others here) goal to liberate our society from constant grinding anxiety and death wrought of capitalist greed? It’s a perplexing assertion to call the people posting about this in a way you don’t like conservative when the evidence to the contrary for that is thousands of posts in this forum. People can genuinely hate corruption and see the Democratic Party as corrupt! It’s actually a kind of common view, even outside of Conservative circles. Anyway, looking forward to sharing The Year Of The Laptop Of Earthly Delights with all of you.
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Mar 31, 2022 15:54
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Killer robot posted:It might be important if I was making some sort of algorithm to identify and tag self-described leftists that find the far-right to be their natural lib-owning allies. But I'm not so metrics don't seem like a priority. This has a built-in assumption that the leftists aren’t interested in actual change and thus harangue liberals because they are a few steps away from becoming leftists. If you just build that charitable assumption into your model things look pretty different! But if the only lens you view politics through is aesthetic, about who owns who rhetorically, and you have internalized the kind of powerlessness that the ruling class hopes you have, then yes, your perspective might make sense. And FWIW I have more in common with a far right voter who earns a paycheck than I do with AOC, Biden, Sanders, Manchin, or any GOP pol you can name. You do too, but our society has been heavily propagandized to make that seem unlikely. But in your day to day life, the challenges you face, the guy rolling coal is your peer, not those politicians.
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Mar 31, 2022 17:06
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CommieGIR posted:Yeah, that's part of my point: The GOP was already winding up the 'Election Fraud/Dems Unfit to Lead/Stolen Election' machine well before the election even started. The amount of influence Russia had in 2020 to generate outcomes you don’t like is dwarfed by the amount of influenced American oligarchs had to do the same. It’s not even comparable. They may have influenced the election, but that’s just mystification compared to the level at which American billionaires tainted it.
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Mar 31, 2022 17:36
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CommieGIR posted:Given that we know the GOP was directly involved in discussions with Russia around how to enable it: Eh, I wouldn't say dwarfed. A lot of those same American oligarchs were caught with their hands in the Russian cookie jar. I mean, they’re definitely in direct conversations with the American money men too, not sure why Russia makes it worse unless you’re actually experiencing Nationalist Feelings in 2022. I’d welcome any invader if they gave us universal health care.
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Mar 31, 2022 18:22
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Koos Group posted:Any invader? I guess if we got invaded by the United States in some kind of interdimensional or time travel gently caress up I would pick up arms and fight to my last breath, because you know those bastards don’t believe in universal health care
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Mar 31, 2022 18:41
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:(I was joking and not taking the obviously wild story the Russian Defense Ministry is saying seriously.) At this point I’m not really counting anything out because poo poo just seems to be approaching the Weirdness Event Horizon constantly. It’s unlikely Hunter Biden is also working for US intel in that he’s a sexed up crackhead failson of a US pol, but also he’s got several of the markers of people who frequently have worked for US intel in the past: drug abuse, family connections, failure in life, extremely horny. Like if you filed the serial numbers off the story and presented it without the context it exists in currently I would absolutely say it fits a pattern for the kind of people US intel has recruited in the past.
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Mar 31, 2022 20:58
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https://twitter.com/cnbci/status/1509907115212746765?s=21&t=8nx2VP73UqtCOF5b5HUH9g The revolving door revolves
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Apr 1, 2022 15:58
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Meanwhile in Good News... This is doubly great when you learn that the guy who organized this was the worker Amazon fired and publicly targeted a couple years ago. Revenge is a dish best served by unionized labor.
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Apr 1, 2022 18:22
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Killer robot posted:"Lots of people agree with me, don't be mad because I'm the only one brave enough to say it!": famously never used by people being called out for lovely stances. I mean this was said behind closed doors, it’s safe to assume she can mention Chris Coons and others by name when talking privately. Decorum doesn’t allow them to name names in front of cameras. I’ve been saying for months now that the vibes are hosed, and no amount of statistical evidence (measures which themselves have been dickied with for years for political reasons) is going to convince people the vibes aren’t hosed. Life isn’t as fun anymore. People are pissed all the time. I think a major part of this is people realizing the system is performing as expected, which COVID and the government response to it highlighted. You haven’t been screwed out of a decent life on accident, or because you made bad decisions, it’s because money grubbers and shitheads won’t stop picking at you. New fees. New bullshit you gotta deal with. Shits more expensive and it’s not better than the old poo poo. Everybody’s worried all the time. The vast majority of people do not like or are made anxious by their jobs, to the point we’re culturally all using the phrase Sunday Scaries to indicate how hosed work is right now. I think we need some kind of major cultural shift to get out of our malaise. 4 day work week, national debt jubilee, Medicare for all, something that takes a meaningful pressure away for a significant number of Americans. loving fix something, anything. Nancy Pelosi’s unconcerned haughtiness becomes more and more intolerable the closer we get to the culmination of her failure, which will have absolutely no material effect on her whatsoever, but historically will be seen as a political malpractice of astonishing proportions. At least we get to talk about Hunter Biden a whole loving lot next year, just so much of him coming up. Thank god, it’s a small price to pay for the dynamic presidency his dad has delivered.
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Apr 5, 2022 22:17
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Simena also said that there were other senators who had problems which portions of the bill, but that they weren't going to sink the bill over it and didn't want to come out against it if it wasn't going to make any difference. Do you truly believe that it’s just her and Manchin, and if they got out of the way, it would go through? Because I think that’s extremely naive; why would the people who pay Sinema and Manchin to oppose it not be able to find other proxies?
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Apr 5, 2022 22:25
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Manager Hoyden posted:Maybe the rotating villain theory is true and maybe it's not I think this is a great point for moving the discussion along positively; by whatever eldritch mechanism of power and money behind it, a great evil is in the land, preventing the people from enjoying life. Now are you going to hold your nose and vote for the lesser Eldritch Money Demon or not? The classic exasperated Matt Christman cry of “What difference does it make?” If the outcome is a demonic subservience to the eldritch money god, who cares what words get spoken in the ritual, what faces are hidden in the hooded robes of the supplicants? I’m not giving those weirdos my money or votes regardless!
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Apr 5, 2022 22:37
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Willa Rogers posted:What we need is a campaign-financing overhaul, plus joining the rest of the world in treating healthcare as a human right rather than as a profit center for "stakeholders," plus restoring the social safety net in various permanent ways as was done temporarily through emergency legislation. I am extremely pessimistic of this kind of change occurring without major upheaval. If it comes down to freedom with lower profits or more authoritarianism and poo poo tier living conditions with higher profits, the ruling class will take door 2 every time. If the laws and custom of society do not apply to them already (and they don’t) then why would they be concerned about the laws and customs that would further restrain us but not them? Without accountability it’s a dark future. With accountability too many people on My Team go to jail. People can’t countenance the idea of holding powerful people to account. That’s why we creating so many legalistic explanations for why we don’t, but the end result is the same now as it was in medieval aristocracies; those Of The Blood do not respect the law because there is no need for them to do so. It’s wild how so many people would look at this parallel, of elite immunity, and just say it’s completely a coincidence; those rich people got away with being above the moral code because of their imperfect systems. Our rich people are so rarely held to account because they’re just that good at obeying the law.
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Apr 5, 2022 23:02
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Killer robot posted:So it's of similar age to the phrase "cultural marxism," huh? Not disuputing that, but the existence of the phrase only means people believe in the phenomenon, not that it exists. But you do realize that a "hall pass" means that if the party is getting the numbers it needs to achieve a legislative priority, it won't sweat dissent from individual legislators whose constituents disapprove of the national party's stance and might punish them in the long term. Those are terms of art that originated from within the legislative culture, not without. “Cultural Marxism” is a nonsense slur made up by people who hate both of the words in the phrase: hall passes, messaging bills, horse trading and so on are jargon from within the sausage factory. The secret shadowy policy isn’t secret or shadowy, it’s right in front of you, rich people getting richer, every single aspect of your life being financialized, services cut or eliminated. None of this requires any conspiritorial mindset to understand, just the willingness to read graphs and the news, and the sense that powerful people do try and shape things larger than their own lives, using the resources they have to do so, which at this point are so vast scientists are telling us our brains cannot make accurate estimations or models of them.
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Apr 5, 2022 23:23
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Sarcastr0 posted:Wait, so the timescale is *Entire Senate careers?!* The phrase being a decade long is not a lot of time on that scale. I think this in the end comes down to a question of faith: Under the current system, say we had 53 democratic senators right now, would BBB be passed? I say no, it would not. Would the discomfort Sinema is experiencing being the focus of so much ire for money be shared with three other Dems? Yes, it would. I’ve been voting since 1994 and we’re always just a little short, in the same way an alcoholic dad has the kind of bad luck that means he never keeps his promises. I have lost the faith, I’ve decided the product of the system is the intent of the system, and it requires a lot less explaining things to myself or getting mad because they disappointed me again. They will never not disappoint me because they don’t work for me, duh! Why would I get mad that somebody is buying a huge dinner and I don’t even get a roll? It ain’t my dinner, im not even allowed in the place.
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Apr 5, 2022 23:32
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Main Paineframe posted:If that's the case, then why even bother following politics news at all? Why are you spending your days reading discussions about what the Democratic legislature is doing? You're already convinced you know the outcome of any potentially-progressive bill, to the point of constructing a worldview in which that outcome is the only possible outcome, regardless of conditions. Why bother following the actual bills, their actual course through the Senate, or the actual votes? I follow politics because it’s interesting and funny. It’s like being a fan of pro wrestling, you know it’s fake but man sometimes they really say some amazing poo poo.
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Apr 6, 2022 00:04
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metachronos posted:Are we allowed to discuss local politics here? My city elected a couple stop the steal cranks to city council and "anti-crt" people won big in school board elections in outlying suburbs. Seems like a bad news bellwether. Plenty of folks will fight them earnestly, your job is to keep heightening the contradiction. And what I mean is to get them fighting over which village in Kenya Obama was born in and attempt to get them to put this into the curriculum, alongside a picture of Castro for some reason.
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Apr 6, 2022 13:18
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I’m giving the internet less than ten minutes before somebody photoshops that picture so Mandel is sitting on a couch
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Apr 6, 2022 14:39
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Discendo Vox posted:It's explicitly, even in the tweet you're quoting, not the only thing in this sanctions package. Literally none of it will improve the lives of any American voters so it’s a wash anyway. Big ole WHO CARE imo. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 6, 2022 18:31
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:People with friends and family in Ukraine? Is that a major voting bloc? And arguably, even then it does nothing for them, because nobody can tie sanctions to any concrete action or positive outcome. Taking food out of a Russian’s mouth doesn’t put it into anyone else’s. It’s thoughts and prayers at best, for that very small group.
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Apr 6, 2022 18:36
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Crime is racialized in America. “Tough on Crime” is recognized as a racist dogwhistle. So security systems, the culture around them and the discussions around them cannot be disentangled from race. Also communism doesn’t mean you’re not secure in your home, it just means you’re not allowed to own a factory. So when you perpetuate “communists want to make it illegal to lock your door” stereotypes you are mouthing John Birch rhetoric, an insanely reactionary thread which I often am disappointed but not surprised to see picked up by liberals.
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Apr 7, 2022 21:59
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How are u posted:What about people who live in other countries than the USA who desire home security? Other countries are not relevant to the discussion.
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Apr 7, 2022 22:05
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Mellow Seas posted:Why do you think it is that minority voters are currently expressing so much anxiety about crime? Like, I get that "crime" is something people express concern about because of racial discomfort, but that doesn't seem to mean it can't also be an actual problem that needs to be addressed. Because poverty, like crime, is racialized in the US. The poorer you are, the higher the chances that you are a racial minority, a victim of crime, or convicted of crime. So the prevalence of home security signage in predominately white, upper middle class neighborhoods which are statistically least likely to be targeted for property crime demonstrates that racial and class component. Read the debate in any neighborhood message board when new bus lines or housing development is proposed—lots of people with IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE signs in their yards develop absolutely gonzo theories on what bus exhaust contains, because they know their feelings have no language they can express them in that is acceptable in public.
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Apr 7, 2022 22:40
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Koos Group posted:What in the article indicates the author believes that eliminating those sources of inequality will eliminate child abuse completely, rather than just lessen it? The latter seems reasonable, since child abuse is strongly correlated with socioeconomic factors. I would also love to untangle assumptions about abuse and socioeconomics: Do well-off people abuse their children at the same rate as poor people? If not, why not? If yes, what’s to be done?
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Apr 7, 2022 23:24
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Ron DeSantis raising an astronomical amount of money for a re-election campaign he is expected to cruise to victory in. He's also not spending any of it. He can’t transfer it, but I would bet there are a lot of categories of payments he could dip into either fund for. Image consultants, polling and research, maybe paying a ghostwriter for a book, he could spend state campaign money on all those.
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Apr 8, 2022 17:23
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https://twitter.com/mtarm/status/1512495066560012291?s=21&t=ISnCFWMUv8MO9N1EBw13fQ Too much FBI in the batter spoils the cake
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Apr 8, 2022 19:21
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Beat me to it. The FBI seems like a liability for many investigations into right wing violence. I wonder why that is. They’re cursed until they come clean about MLK and Malcom
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Apr 8, 2022 19:25
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