God idk what version I’m even using. I never update programs like this unless I have to. From breaking things, to confusing my workflow and moving things around; I’ve always been more frustrated than thankful. I haven’t updated Reaper in ages too and I’m certain they’re better about keeping continuity than anyone.
Edit: lol people are mad about my own software updating habits? why and how are .worlders this way? I can’t imagine the realities they live in, and am glad so
How have I known about Varoufakis for years as a serious political economist and speaker-on-the-topic, and never heard he was a Valve employee with a catalogue of ‘gaming-economics’ blogs in the early 2010s? LMFAO what a world
That article is literally just reporting what the president did. How does that mean they’re “pro-gun control?” Do you not even read the articles and just seethe and shit yourself about what you think about the wording of headlines? You are such a raging rightist ideologue you have been blinded to all reality and don’t even understand the things that you are mad at. Is this satire? Are you a real person who engages in media and politics like this or have I been trolled?
If you’re serious, the US must have gasoline in the water or something (but ah that would be COMMUNIST to regulate that; or even report on it!)
exactly my thought
people consumed all these dystopian movies and thought “what a great rubric for society!” we’re so fucked lol. These death machines (like drones and such) are also where the most work and funding go for machine learning and AI research too. What could go wroooong
well except all the Nazis in Germany that were brought directly back into:
but other than all of that though!
(And that’s not even mentioning the Nazis and collaborators which made up the origins of Radio Free Europe/Liberty, the “Victims of Communism Foundation” which grew out of the fascist-filled anti-Soviet “Captive Nations Lobby” headed by OUN-B Nazis from Ukraine, and all the Operation Aerodynamic, Operation Paperclip, Operation Sunrise, Operation Beladonna, Operation Lynx, etc etc.)
Shitty billionaire
ah but you repeat yourself
Sees the USA doing what it’s always done, which we’ve known since COINTELPRO and Snowden’s whistleblowing
“THIS IS LIKE CHINA!!!”
to this day I still occasionally mutter “it never ends, this shit…”
honorable mention to New Marijuana Study Confirms Everyone Knows You’re High And You Will Be Stoned Forever
because when this was originally uploaded on their website it would play a slightly different version every time you opened the page. So you’d laugh and show your friends, so then even if your (allegedly) stoner ass hadn’t gotten tripped out the first time, while they’re watching it and laughing you’d start sweating.
Second honorable mention to “Is The Government Spying on Schizophrenics Enough?” But I’m honestly still not sure that one’s totally okay, even if I still laugh every single time I watch it. I’m not that type of mentally ill but have had people close to me who struggle enough with it and the very nature of the disorder is such that even though I laugh I’ve always at the same time felt it treads very much on the line.
Prague’s Kafka International Named Most Alienating Airport
And a ‘from-16-years-back’ broadside at the US approaching November:
Claudia and Karina of PSL are the only decent choice I see right now. Stein and West are also better than either duopolists policy-wise and between them I’d probably prefer Stein as she seems to have more political experience and acumen (though I’d probably like West better as a person and compatriot). But for my vote it’s PSL.
The problem I see is that not only will we never ‘get a 3rd choice’ if nobody votes for existing 3rd choices due to fear over the duopoly entrenchment, but also the duopoly has had and will continue to have zero reason to ever stop becoming more and more fascist and ignoring all of the rest of us, because they can comfortably say ‘they’re going to vote for us anyway because we’re not [other person/party]’ and wouldn’t even be wrong. Dems can just keep flying to the right while talking about how bad Republicans are and pretending Fascism is a person and can be “voted out;” rather than it being a historical trend, which both parties are converging into the apex of. A trend which arises regardless of the party in power, when the natural economic downturns and crises of capitalism produce hardship and push the ‘aspiring capitalist’ ‘small business owner’ petty bourgeois toward precarity-and-fall into the increasingly-destitute working class. So then the most reactionary portion of this traditionally upper-caste group, humiliated by the ‘indignity’ against what they are accustomed and feel they ‘deserve,’ become radicalized. They get set against internal minorities and external ‘threats’ (scapegoated to divide society into vertical segments rather than by its horizontal class relations, thus preventing working people from uniting against the common ruling class enemy) and against the communists; who during the same capitalist crises also grow their ranks among the exploited working classes in all nations and too become radicalized and fed up by the ever-worsening state of things.
It is a trend of the big capitalists actively supporting, and the capitalist politicians half-supporting-half-willingly-capitulating to, a movement of the ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaire’ upper-caste petty-bourgeois radicals seeking to violently reassert and deepen the pre-existing capitalist social relations and societal divisions, along the lines of a mythologized vision of the “proper natural order of things,” vote or no vote. The poem started “first they came for the communists…” Because the communists are the ones who, also radicalized by the worsening conditions on the other end, instead set out to OVERTHROW and abolish the existing social relations and divisions, which means the big capitalists and the upper-caste petty bourgeois forever lose out on their previous status and claim to positions of power over the masses. They’re the only meaningful opposition and alternative, hence the adage “socialism or barbarism.” And the adage “fascism is capitalism in decay.”
If we accept the Democrats’ dangerously ahistorical notion of what fascism is, and allow that to cow all of us to the left of Thatcher into voting for the Democrats without fail, where they never risk losing votes even for prosecuting the most-televised genocide in history and becoming increasingly just as fascist as Republicans over the last decades; then the Democrats objectively have no reason to try to even pretend catering to or pandering to the center-left liberals and socialists. There’s no need for a political reorientation to recapture votes that were never lost or risked being lost in the first place. This is why the duopoly serves the ruling class so well, and why it seems to emerge so regularly. But it has had ruptures and reorientations before, even in the US, due to various strata losing faith or no longer having their interests served by the parties to which they were previously constituent. The Federalist Party doesn’t exist anymore. The Whig party was formed by conservative elements that abandoned the emerging Democrat party, forming coalitions with various third parties, then itself ruptured and split. In order to stay in power, politicians were forced to reorient due to the changing material conditions and expressed interests of the voter base (which is today FAR more expansive and wielded by more actual working people [see: any] than it had been during those early reorientations).
Another historical example I found was in the British parliamentary situation around WWI when I got to chapter 9 rereading “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder by Lenin. The duopoly then was the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party with Labour being a minor but growing third party – but various material and political realities activating support for Labour led to “a number of Liberals… deserting to the Labour party like rats from a sinking ship.” And in the Liberal party’s ever-rightward slide and their ultimate allegiance being to the ruling class and their capitalist (and imperialist) system, the liberal bourgeoisie, under the leadership of Liberal politician David Lloyd George, formed a Liberal-Conservative coalition together “abandoning the historical system of “two parties” (of exploiters), which has been hallowed by centuries of experience and has been extremely advantageous to the exploiters, and [considering] it necessary for these two parties to join forces against the Labour Party.”
In the USA 35-50% of eligible people don’t even vote. If that isn’t proof of complete loss of faith in the duopoly, as well as prime fertile ground for activating disenfranchised people through doing the work ourselves to uplift real working class parties like the PSL into the national consciousness, who concretely advocate for empowering the least empowered, I don’t know what is. This is how you force a political reorientation in the electoral system from the bottom up and lay bare the duopoly’s true interests; and more importantly, from there continue movement-building among masses of now-politcally-engaged working people organizing for real work to improve our lot; like forming worker and tenants unions, pushing to end the forever wars, to nationalize the more-vacant-houses-than-homeless that exist while people freeze on the streets, and in general confront the impediments to changing society and the world for the better, things which BOTH duopoly parties stand in the way of. Worse, even — both duopoly parties are active agents in all of its worsening for the benefit and profit of the big capitalist donors they work for.
Even the relatively small movements of “Undecided electors” and Michigan Arab voters demanding better of Democrats, as well as the Democrats’ dark-money Super PACs sending teams of high-paid lawyers to purge small 3rd parties from the ballot (“Democratic Party” my ass lol, I’d write in 3rd party out of spite at that point) shows that withholding votes or voting elsewhere is an impactful course of action. They are scared of exactly this, that being “better than the other guy” is not good enough. Why not show them they are right to be scared? It’s not like under Biden and his cop VP who’s now running for President things stopped spiraling into fascist hell domestically and abroad. Cop City is happening under democrat president and local governance, where they are tearing up Atlanta’s only nature grounds to build a fascist police academy (on the plot of an old slave prison) to crush worker protests. The cops murdered a protestor and initiated the largest RICO case ever (originally created to fight organized crime), against these protestors to punish all of them together and even people who were organizing bail funds.
To say nothing of women’s right to choose, book burnings, anti-LGBTQ acts all still happening under democrats. Abortion rights and LGBTQ civil protections could have been passed and codified when Obama’s Democrat regime had both houses of Congress. Biden could’ve been forcefully pressuring the expansion of the court (after Obama gave away a seat in capitulation no less) but instead cowers from “politicizing the court” as if that ship isn’t sailed and past the horizon. They don’t do this stuff, because they don’t actually care about any of us. They care about appealing to their donors, monopolizing our votes, and selling us shit. Abortion rights being under threat is actually great for them, because they can drum up fear and anger about the Republicans. LGBTQ people’s rights being attacked is great for them, because they can weep crocodile tears and shake their fists about how evil Republicans are and “if only we get voted in this time we’ll solve it!!!” while doing little to nothing to fight it but occasional unenforceable half measures and symbolic gestures of “support”. This is all happening and increasing anyway, because fascism isn’t a person, or even a party. It’s a trend which grows out of capitalist crisis as a class movement. And Democrats and Republicans are both among and represent the same class which supports fascism, historically and now. And they’re doing everything they can to demonstrate that fact to all of us.
To my mind our votes are supposed to be earned, not taken for granted, and unless we put them toward who actually earns them through deed and not just two-faced empty word, and withhold them from those who don’t, none of the ruling class has to even pretend to remember or care about that fact.
Just the thought… Hang on… I got something in my eye
Counterpoint: Harris doesn’t need to be a monster such that it is a dereliction of democratic duty to not speak about it constantly.
Post-script to that counterpoint: You don’t need to railroad people talking about Copmala Handcuffs being a flamethrower unto human life and liberty her entire career into trying to convince people it’s worth helping and hoping she gets a new fuel tank handed to her.
He’s at his best when he’s borderline surreal. Remember when he accused Ted Cruz’ dad of killing JFK? lmfaoo
Both of these candidates deserve the Hague. But the Netherlands better arm up first! (That bill passed the Senate 75-19, with 30 democrats and 45 republicans in support. Never not a terrible country. Vote Communist and join the PSL)
collapse is less of an event, and more of a protracted decay and crumbling away of its structural integrity, out of which the existing contradictions which had been always simmering below the surface become increasingly sharp at points and times and ruptures along the fault lines begin to appear at increasing rates
Democrats outflanking the Republicans on the right over immigration has been a wild one. Though it’s been happening for years, they usually weren’t so proud and open about it. Obama himself was infamously known as the “Deporter-in-Chief,” and Biden not only didn’t put a stop to the concentration camps the democrats and liberals feigned outrage over with Trump, but also deregulated them and sent people to unknown fates, as well as allowing for and advertising the private subcontracting of these concentration camps, and pretending that was progress. Very normal country, with parties that are definitely not just two hands of the same sociopathic capitalist class.
These immigrants and refugees are people who are, I will add, fleeing from countries that the west under both parties have spent a century terrorizing, destroying, destabilizing, starving, and exploiting (same story with the European refugee crises, the refugees are blamed and demonized when they are all fleeing from the chaos and suffering and destruction caused and continuously caused by western imperialism — a bipartisan and usually NATO-spearheaded affair — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc.)
The democrats and republicans have fundamentally different world views
Correction: the democrats and republicans have fundamentally different standards of decorum and of how close they can be to the stench of the consequences of their highly similar world views without turning away.
fallacy is when real thing I don’t like
Makes one think who all has been benefiting from the expansion of militarism and conflict, doesn’t it? But no need for us to worry, because I’m certain the peace-loving Democrats, who I’m assured by very democracy-valuing liberals, are despite all appearances definitely not nearly-indistinguishable from the open-fanged right-wing Republicans, and will stop this US militarism which is destroying the planet faster than anyone.
Pay no attention to the 3rd parties who actually come out against militarism; If we just give the wing of the bipartisan-imperialists who actually rely on working class margins whatever votes they want regardless of their actions forever, then surely because of how appreciative they are of us that they will gift to us some result that’s remotely different than all of exactly this and exactly what brought us here… right?