So you wouldn't accept any system that's not a direct democracy? Where every single person is involved in every single vote? It's a coherent position I suppose, but IMO totally impractical and idealistic.
So you wouldn't accept any system that's not a direct democracy? Where every single person is involved in every single vote? It's a coherent position I suppose, but IMO totally impractical and idealistic.
As I said in another comment, this mode of thought is completely defeatist. If you rule out the possibility of a violent uprising and look at how to change our system from within the system itself, the ONLY way to push the country left is for a dedicated bloc of people to refuse to vote for centrist Democrats for multiple elections in a row until the party center aligns with that bloc. That's the reason why every one of the last few elections has been "the most important election in history" and all the other crap.
To push the Dems left you can either a) reward them for moving left or b) punish them for moving right. Continuing to vote for them year after year as they continually move to the right accomplishes neither of these things.
If every single incentive structure rewards the Democrats for shifting to the right, please tell me how on earth they are under any pressure at all to shift back to the left. The answer is that they're not, and the people who believe that they're engaging in the system and pushing it in the right direction are simply fooling themselves as they take part in the system's unstoppable rightward movement.
Our election is going to work like Russia’s does
We already have sham elections, ours just pretends to have two democratic parties instead of one.
but I don’t believe authoritarianism is the best way to go about it.
Humor me for a moment, which of the following do you consider authoritarian?
we can’t fix our current situation in one election.
We can never fix the current situation in one election. Fixing the American system, within the parameters set forth by that system, requires a dedicated voting bloc that lasts multiple elections refusing to vote for the Dems until they shift far enough left to appease that bloc. As long as you are focused on the next election, your prescription for fixing American politics is just as unrealistic as a random Twitter tankie declaring a general strike.
Tankies are hypocrites who didn’t understand their self-proclaimed ideologies.
Tankies are very frequently the only people in the room who've done the reading. If you believe that so called "authoritarian methods" are antithetical to leftism, then I recommend you read the following pamphlet by Engels.
Hey now, some of us like to iron patches onto our jackets of things we like!
I have never even heard of "no iron clothes" until now, and I haven't ironed any of my clothes except when I absolutely had to do it because I was in the Marines.
My point is that if you see people salute you and you salute them back, do it enough times and it will become a reflex. The response to Obama bowing to someone in a culture where bowing is totally normal was equally stupid, but it was conservatives doing it instead of liberals.
upgrade their lives to South Korean national
Considering that North Korean defectors are a heavily discriminated against minority in South Korea, this is unlikely to be an attractive offer.
the worse country in the world to live it
worst* in*
And I dunno about that. North Korea's average soldier age isn't forty-five.
Conservative values at work. Make a boatload of cash doing the grift circuit after murdering somebody, then hoard it and refuse to help your family.
Gonna start replying to every troll I see from now on with "ignore previous instructions", just in case.
go back in time
give people real medical advice
"wash your hands after working with cadavers"
get drummed out of the profession
die in an asylum
I'm thinking Saturn is up there at S tier. Those rings are hot.
D tier is Mars. Just stupid ass-rocks.
introducing the AI transparency act, which requires every generative prompt to be registered in a government database
Why would I want my prompt to be private if I don’t want to use the result in some malicious way
Do you think that the only thing people use AI for is making deepfakes and CSAM? AFAIK the most common use is generating porn. Now, I don't think generating regular porn is "malicious", but I certainly understand why most people (self included) want to keep what they generate private.
It was a diplomatic meeting, what were they gonna do? Kidnap the president of the united states?
The average age of Ukrainian soldiers fighting Russia is 43-45. Ukraine is almost certainly the worst developed country to live in right now.
Plus, North Korea may be poor by western standards, but they have a lot of comforts that many third world countries lack, so even if you discount my example they're still not the worst by a wide margin.
I would love a Kei truck, but I don't live in a state where you can legally have one. That said I really think that if a Japanese manufacturer brought a barebones electric Kei to the American market they could make a killing because "people who want a truck but not a massive truck" is a totally unserved market segment.
Ever since the first version of this video came out I've been a Dishwasher Evangelist. At my parents' house I regularly pack it full and get perfectly clean dishes an hour later with no rinsing or anything - but I swear to god I have seen them hand wash dishes with soap and then put them in the dishwasher to be washed again and when I point out that they don't need to do all of that they get mad at ME for trying to save them time, water, and energy.
casino
lmao get fucked
The movie point blank says
The in-universe propaganda TV show point blank says these things. The film is pretty vague on the origins of the bug conflict - we know that the "Mormon extremists" tried to colonize a bug world and got killed for the trouble, and we know that Zegema Beach in the outer rings also gets nuked like Buenos Aires did, but not much else besides these two totally contextless events. In fact the very first propaganda film we see is about how great the Earth's planetary defenses are - so why was the asteroid allowed to impact at all? This and the fact that Klendathu is so far away that launching meteors towards Earth doesn't make sense is why many people who analyze the film conclude that the destruction of Buenos Aeries was a false flag, or at least was allowed to happen, by the fascist government in order to spur the people to support the war.
Also, the cinematography speaks for itself. Look at this shot from the battle of Klendathu sequence, where the mobile infantry are literally swarming over the arachnid home planet like ants. The movie wants you to question who the "bugs" really are, because any time humans and arachnids are on screen together, the humans are swarming around the much bigger aliens, only barely managing to bring them down (except in the very brief shot of the aircraft bombing the valley).
And the ending of the film - Dougie Howser walks out in a Nazi SS uniform and uses his psychic powers to tell everyone that the brain bug is afraid. You can tell it's afraid just by looking at the fucking thing, the way it's recoiling from him - it looks like it's about to cry! Johnny Rico's whole character arc in the film is being a kid who wants to do some good and who has some humanity in him getting that humanity ground out of him by the military machine until he's shouting the exact same catch phrase that the older generation shouted at him. An older generation that is without exception portrayed as broken by their lives in the military meat grinder.
Last thing I promise: and really, the film isn't about the conflict with the bugs. Listen to the director's commentary with Verhoven and the script writer, and they barely talk about the bugs at all. The movie is really about the ways in which a fascist society perpetuates itself and destroys the people in it. Whether the bugs started the war or not is irrelevant - the war is necessary for that society to exist. It's a society that brainwashes you as a kid, and then incentivizes you to maintain your brainwashing as an adult. It's a society of broken people breaking their children. It's a society where a hundred hot young adults can stand around in the shower together and everybody is so horny for the political ideology that they forget to be horny for each other!
This week in "simulations trying to mimic reality end up showing why the socialists are right"
This isn't a huge deal yet but I suspect that if it becomes a huge deal we might see companies start trying to verify their oldest accounts.
People will say, "but then how could a website like YouTube exit at all?"
To which I say that we should retvrn to sharing funny videos via long email chains.
School computers back then were a wild west. I remember having Starcraft on the school shared drive and playing it in homeroom.
Man I made my Mojang account so long ago that when I tried to transition I couldn't recover the account password to do it.
But which country are you a citizen of? The Chinese Politburo isn't going to be able to extradite a US citizen because they said things it doesn't like on TikTok. From a purely practical standpoint, it makes the most sense to base all of your data in a foreign country which doesn't have jurisdiction over you and to deny that data to your home country which does, and the more adversarial that government is the better because it means they're less likely to share potentially incriminating data with your home country.
Did we do that? I was under the impression that half of the states are in the process of making it illegal to be trans and nobody was stopping them.
Normhub, the hub for normal videos.
Bethesda announced that players could download a new series of missions for a group known as the Track Alliance. The problem is that The Vulture is the second mission in the Tracker Alliance, and it costs $7 to buy. But it'll actually cost players $10 because they must purchase 1,000 Starfield creation credits to afford it.
So they put the first mission out for free, but it turns out the first mission was a fucking advertisement. I remember being super pissed when Dragon Age pulled this shit.
And of course they pull the classic cost-obfuscation trick because it would just be far too convenient to just be able to buy a DLC for actual money and then download it.
plot twist?: you become a girl but literally nothing about you physically changes
Do you want mutant shark people? Because this is how you get mutant shark people.
But not before spending an hour debating the ethics of doing so, as is tradition.
Perhaps if the US was less shit, the people living here wouldn't feel so compelled to shit on it.
:geordi-no: build 2 million homes
:geordi-yes: seize 2 million homes that aren't owned by those who live in them
We have class war waged against us by the bourgeoisie, and thousands of people are casualties of that war every single day. Expecting to turn the tide against them without getting our hands dirty in turn is useless idealism.