uriel238

@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The ineffective Democratic leadership ain't going away unless we make them.⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re supposed to be beholden to their constituency. Allegiance to their campaign contributors and to schemes to enrich them personally is literally corruption.

  Granted privileging property owners over the working class is baked into the Constitution of the United States, but we’ve had multiple reckonings during which we collectively reaffirmed we want our society to be a pluralistic liberal democracy. And the capitalists curse and swear vengeance every time.

  (And, as Marx predicted in Das Kapital the capitalists immediately look to recapturing government institutions. It’s what they do. And so far we’ve failed to adequately punish them when they are caught trying.)

  (Also, this phenomenon isn’t unique to the US. After rights in France were established in the Napoleonic Code, they were rolled back during the Bourbon Restoration, requiring a second revolution and a lot more piled heads. The French public began to realize even good kings are arbitrarily followed by tyrannical kings.)

  At this point the US public is beginning to understand what’s at stake, why we need independent regulatory bodies, why rule of law has to apply to everyone, that capital never sleeps. And more of the Democratic party is tired of corporate shills. (More identify as moderate than progressive, but the platform they want is progressive. UHC is super popular.)

  On the other hand, capitalists come better prepared with higher tech every time. The MAGA propaganda machine is very powerful and uses proven brainwashing techniques. And we don’t have a cure for that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My people need me⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Replace dumb with desperate and you got it right, despite Hegseth, despite the elective war without goals or strategy, despite the conditions on the Lincoln, all branches of the US armed forces are making their recruitment quotas, where before, recruitment was beset by the obesity crisis and an epidemic of bullying, abuse and SA of the enlisted.

  And FOX News has been calling for the draft and escalation specifically to thin the ranks of zoomers and alphas.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fix the system..⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Relevant video from How Business Worked. (on YouTube)

  TLDW: No one wants to work anymore is a running theme throughout the history of pro-business periodicals. Businesses are lon accustomed to leaning on contrived desperation to fill the ranks of their overworked, underpaid, arduous job positions in toxic work conditions. Any time there is an alternative, and workers bial from an industry for positions that are slightly better, some editorialist has to write an opinion piece that no one wants to work anymore.

  Of note is the Great Resignation of 2021, in which furloughed workers took upa hobby during the COVID-19 lockdown, and some were able to monetize their product. Others still recognized their prior job was to unhealthy to return to. For a short while, bottom-rung positions had to compete to fill their ranks, and workforces got a brief taste of class consciousness. The owner class is still sore about it in October 2026.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tiddies are nice but the metric system is better⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  No yotta-? How do you describe the number of joulles it takes to blow up a planet?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Minimum Wage Must Cover Basics⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It really should be 20 hours or less.

  Speaking as.one of the 1980s latchkey kids, we don’t allow our adults the time or energy to parent. Nor do we allow anyone the energy to be civically engaged.

  Since the 1970s there’s been an onslaught to capture government so it only serves business interests, which allows big business to flourish even when they are run incompetently, or in bad faith.

  We are seeing the owner class cannot function even in their own best interests, rather they manage industry entirely on vibes and feels. And the feels usually are I deserve everything and workers are trying to steal from me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hard Out There For A Woman⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In the current typhoon of men behaving badly in the US and the ongoing response and safety movements often advocating romantic abstinence, sometimes the observation is made that not every woman — even those pledged to the movement — is on the same page.

  And then there’s the abstinence-until-marriage doctrine of white Christian nationalists, in which young women pledge to preserve their virginity until their one-and-only trad-minded husband puts a ring on it. (Young men might take a similar pledge, but they’re not held to it and in fact are pressured to get some early experience. Double standards and inconsistent value systems and all that.) Yet, a conspicuous fraction of these (sometimes underage) young women overestimate their willpower, frequently contributing to the disproportionate rate of teen pregnancy in school districts that have committed to abstinence-only sex-ed.

  Then there’s the women’s magazine I remember reading during the COVID-19 lockdown, that asked readers to write in their stories when they needed the d so badly they risked infection by a stranger to get it. There were a lot of confessional replies.

  And all this is to say, sometimes a girl has needs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bisexuality released in 1995 and the devs still haven't dropped an update⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it was simply a metaphor referring to the capacity to accept either of two standards.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shaving not necessary⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I was born the same year as the Summer of Love. My parents weren’t hippies. They were Brad and Janet.

  Actually my dad was one of the black ties in Apollo 13 except he was on the Apollo 12 team.

  And yeah, he grew up to be a Reagan Republican. Now he’s staunch MAGA and a FOX News devotee.

  But the hippies were the ones who warned us of the rising police state while stoned out of their ears. I knew some of them. And yes, they weren’t purely liberal or Democrat either, but both parties were a bit more intermixed at the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which is worse: not wanting kids, or wanting them too much?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My concerns about catastrophic existential risk are descriptive, not prescriptive

  I didn’t have kids. Okay, I had a son, but was separated from him at birth. I married into a family around fifty, and thanks to the troubled economy, the millennial daughter moved in with us, and brought her son.

  But it sounds like you think of kids as a means of fulfillment for the parents, rather than autonomous persons of their own. I see that a lot, in our children’s welfare policies, in our attitudes towards education and juvenile crime, in society’s complete disinterested in making society accessible to future generations.

  And zoomers and alphas are not feeling the love. The fertility rate in the US dropped below 1.6, which scares the snot out of our owner class. And they’ve cut off immigration, which we’ve depended on for decades to increase our numbers.

  The silent generation was also conspicuously small. Three guesses as to why.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which is worse: not wanting kids, or wanting them too much?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I like kids, and value getting to be a grandpa for a boy from four to ten (then he became a basketball star and didn’t visit much).

  But I feel sorry for the alphas and betas. In fact, I feel sorry for zoomers, who I’ve watched grow up. And millennials got a raw deal too.

  We don’t know which catastrophic existential risk is going to manifest, as we’re working on several. But one is, and the aftermath is going to be an ordeal.

  Needless to say, I’m anti-natalist. I think bringing new life into the world right now is a disservice to them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shaving not necessary⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m an old guy with a long romantic career. When I had this conversation it was about shaving her legs. I understand some young people these days expect full Brazillian, or at least a tidy trim.

  One first-date purposely did not shave her legs as a disincentive for intimacy, I wouldn’t have minded, but she felt embarrassed over obe day’s growth. We were chaste that night, but had a second date.

  Different partners trimmed or shaved completely (some brave women waxed) and I was delightedin all cases. In LTRs, sometimes shaving resulted consistently in ingrown hairs, in which case I insisted please don’t do so on my behalf.

  But then, I was a kid in the 1970s and society was getting accustomed to the idea of being our natural selves, body hair, (armpit hair,) and all. It stemmed, I think, from the hippy movement. It was very live and let live.

  But of course, for the glamour and cosmetics industry, that just wouldn’t do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bisexuality released in 1995 and the devs still haven't dropped an update⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I very much remember AC/DC being the term used in personal ads by bi- folk

  A tribute to the Australian rock band, of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the new-world screwworm presents a strong case that any omniscient, omnipotent creator god is malevolent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t found an adequate explanation of how anarchism works to not be tinder for the fires of corruption and power consolidation.

  I get that these are diseases of all societies, but the institutional systems of a liberal democracy seems at least to slow the process down. Granted, we’ve not had a one that has lasted for a thousand years.

  So —seriously asking — how does anarchism work to last a thousand years?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Actually, the financial class captured the political class to unlock more and more financialization methods. Meanwhile, business interests captured the courts to open the political class to more and more bribes.

  What happened here in the states can happen anywhere. And if your own nation is being run with neoliberal policies, it’s going to happen there too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Betcha you live in a neoliberal state.

  Your own countries shitty policies are catching up to you.

  And the very same billionaires driving the current US state of affairs have plenty of money left over to capture your political class as well.

  And they will, unless your society gets active now about it, and doesn’t wait until AfD takes over, or whatever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Musk⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d say he’s openly white supremacist but in the end, he’s Musk supremacist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Capitalism is all about using state power to protect capital by force⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Doorddash will take full responsibility when they return the money and stop doing it.

  Claiming whoopsidaisy on social media only flaunt the position of power and the contrived desperation that keeps drivers in their place.

  I’d suggest unionize but union-busting practices are very effective and the courts are against you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When will we learn⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Masturbating doesn’t warrant hurricanes.

  But using fossil fuels and methane to run your hyperscale data centers absolutely does.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That’s just unrealistic… too few poop breaks.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Still necessary to quiet-quit at $48K and keep looking for openings in competing companies.

  According to a How Money Works video (a while ago), tech companies stopped paying for training or promoting from within, so employees just started keeping their résumé current, and keeping an eye on openings. As a result, companies actually paid more to fill their middle-management positions than if they kept on promoting from within.

  It is scary just how incompetent top-down companies are at maximizing their profits, especially considering how much data-driven research there is on human resources.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When did humans stop creating wonders?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In Rise of Nations modern-era wonders are science projects like space programs and supercolliders.

  The LHC is absolutely a recent wonder.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Title⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Decades of arguing on the internet has mellowed me out some. At this point if someone is hostile without adding anything meaningful to the thread, I ignore them.

  If they’re being a dick but made a point that might be seen as valid, I’ll talk to the lurker who’s reading the thread.

  I feel the most useful when I can link to content that is informative, say a deep dive or a source that has academic or press chops. This is even useful if I agree with the other correspondents because then it’s no longer just the hearsay of a bunch of dudes on the internet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨the tech billionaires have lost the plot⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s evidence that extreme amounts of wealth and power do drive one mad. One study had people play monopoly with one player (chosen at random) starting in a privileged position (e.g. extra starting money, and twice the income passing go). They became assholes really quick, and believed their victory in the game was due to superior playing.

  But it gets crazy when you’re so rich that no one will disagree with you about anything. Surrounded by sycophants, it becomes easy to assume you’re the smartest person in the room and expert of everything.

  Some world cultures see it as an illness just to hoard massive amounts of wealth, but here in the states we nurtured a culture in which superlative wealth became a common ambition. Especially after the California gold rush, and get-rich-quick schemes became the norm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When the Democrats regain power, their centrist leadership will claim, "We can't do anything because...". Don't be fooled. We need to get the corporate centrists out and real progressives in!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m totally game. Someone well above my pay grade needs to organize a panel of legal and civic experts to hammer out a charter and make sure it’s got ironclad protections against corruption.

  Otherwise, we’ll just be here again in a decade or two, and they’ll have the experience of this time to guide them.

  For one thing, Citizens United only scratches the surface of money in politics. How Money Works did a video about just how entrenched it is. (Here on YouTube). And presently, politicians at the state and federal level expect to be able to enrich themselves by using the power of their office.

  This is why it’s way beyond my pay grade. We need historians to remind us how systems failed in the past, so we assure we don’t repeat the same mistakes. We need legal scholars to check how our terms could be misinterpreted by bad-faith judges given authority, while making sure the language is plain enough that high-school students can understand what it means.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When the Democrats regain power, their centrist leadership will claim, "We can't do anything because...". Don't be fooled. We need to get the corporate centrists out and real progressives in!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, busting the rail strike really tipped the hand of the establishment Democratic party to show they still are captured, and the blue-dog ranks are in office not to serve the public or to make specific changes but to get rich by peddling their political power. Given they’re negotiating with MAGA more than they’re coordinating with progressives and DSA, I’m really expecting some Democratic officials will flip so they can continue exploiting their positions for personal gain.

  Heather Cox Richardson notes that this sort of thing has happened before, in which business interests dominated the government and enacted policies that wrecked the economy, but got magnates very rich, but the backlash was a revival of public serving interests. In the case of Roosevelt and the New Deal, there was the threat of communist revolution, as we were also watching what was going on in the Soviet Union, and even communism had to be better than living in homeless encampments and barely surviving on flour paste.

  We already have a conspicuous number of homeless encampments, and while we’re not yet living on cups of noodles, we can’t afford food and fuel at the same time, we’re skipping meds, and we’re also suffering from food poisoning while watching corruption and money getting poured into an unpopular war where our soldiers and sailors are being unnecessarily treated like shit.

  Hopefully things don’t have to get much worse before the mischief begins. I suspect we’re all hoping the midterms turn out well (and we survive to the new Congress) which might save us from getting our hands dirty. But when there’s no hope at all, some of us may realize we really don’t have anything else to lose.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When the Democrats regain power, their centrist leadership will claim, "We can't do anything because...". Don't be fooled. We need to get the corporate centrists out and real progressives in!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I, too, am pessimistic about our chances. But some folk who are more read up than me about it (e.g. Jamille Bouie, Helen Cox Richardson) express more optimism, citing trends and moments in history that rhyme.

  Although, I am worried that our ultra-wealthy are exponentially richer than the robber barons ever have been at any other time in history. Once they’re done financializing the US into a wasteland (of quarries, oilfields and data centers), they’re going to move onto the rest of the developed world, and they are rich enough to buy all the elections and control all the governments.

  So if we can make our stand here, and recognize our billionaire class as the existential threat that they actually are, (and as Paul Krugman suggests, tax them out of existence) we’ll be sparing the entirety of human civilization a lot of devastation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Happy Kirkiversary⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s why I said it’s remotely plausible. For that hypothesis to work we’d have to justify why Israel wanted to kill him.

  I remember reading in a historical bio that it was Hermann Göring who convinced Hitler that Ernst Röhm was a threat and needed to be removed from power, because Göring wanted to run the party, or at least be in line behind Hitler, and Röhm was in the way of that ambition.

  Likewise, it’s not necessarily Israel or the Netanyahu administration that would have sought to kill Charlie Kirk, but someone within the regime that has access to the levers of control, and could convince them that, for sake of the security of Israel, Kirk needed to be eliminated.

  So the question to ask is who that might be, and what grievance he might have with Kirk enough to use the state to attack him. As I have no idea, I personally don’t believe Israel assassinated Kirk. But if I were to steel-man the conspiracy theory, this is how I’d approach it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When the Democrats regain power, their centrist leadership will claim, "We can't do anything because...". Don't be fooled. We need to get the corporate centrists out and real progressives in!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We need to organize twelve million Americans under a common manifesto.

  If the Democrats don’t take power in 2029 (both houses of the legislature and the executive), if they fail to move quickly, overhauling SCOTUS and ironcladding elections to stop tampering and voter suppression cold, then the US public needs to occupy Washington by multiple millions with a list of demands.

  Or general strike.

  Or riot in multiple municipal areas hard enough to overwhelm responders.

  Or go on a billionaire assassination spree.

  If we cannot do that, then we’re all going to be packed onto the cattle cars. Not necessarily all together, but the US will fall to one-party autocracy.

  US Dictatorship by 2033 is on the BINGO card.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't worry about it haha⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Restrictions to child labor in the US are about factory work. And states are passing exceptions so that teens, especially delinquent teens, can work near dangerous machinery.

  But kids have always been allowed to do agricultural work for less than minimum wage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Happy Kirkday!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t laugh! As the Islamic Golden Age was pivoting towards religious extremism, algebra was labeled as sorcery and turned into a capital crime.