UnderpantsWeevil
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
- Comment on true story 23 hours ago:
You won’t believe what happens in the Chili’s Champagne Room.
- Comment on it sucks that you can't use social media for a full month once every 2 years 1 day ago:
Canadian
Strange. You’re not posting in French.
- Comment on the chance to do it all over again 2 days ago:
Full Tara Westover story would work.
Who is Tara Westover? Nevermind, I’ll just Google i- FUCK.
- Comment on the chance to do it all over again 2 days ago:
Be me
Wake up in 1983
Realize I’ve got the opportunity of a lifetime
Reach into my wallet: Empty
Check my bank account: Empty
Check couch cushions: $1.47
Feel kinda hungry.
Remember what you can buy at Taco Bell for $1.47 in 1983.
Have lunch.
Go get a job at Blockbuster.
Kick back for the next twenty years.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 days ago:
I don’t think people can deny or change what they’re attracted to.
I’m not even going that deep on it. I just think policing what people are attracted to (for whatever reason) is a fool’s errand. At the same time, advertising what you’re attracted to invites public criticism.
They need to reserve the furthest and darkest place in their mind, build walls around it like they’re building nuclear bunker and seal off all the exits.
Not even that. They just don’t need to throw on sandwich boards and parade around anime conventions with bullhorns insisting they have some god-given right to fuck the art.
- Comment on POV: You are Margaret Thatcher 2 days ago:
Ha. That’s so old school. Now it’s more like…
- Comment on [deleted] 2 days ago:
If you’re going to be a perv, the least you can do is keep that shit to yourself.
You wouldn’t be the first person to have a freak fetish in a room full of people who all agree “Freak Fetish is bad!” that just nodded and smiled and kept their fucking mouths shut.
- Comment on This Is The Ideal Swing Voter. You May Not Like Her. But She's What Democracy Looks Like. 2 days ago:
I don’t see any of this actually ever happening even in primaries.
I mean, I do see it happening from time to time. Bernie was a recent example. Jesse Jackson also a big one during the 80s. Even Obama had his moment in the sun, back in his 2008 run.
They never last, either because the party snuffs it out or because the candidates themselves turn milquetoast and lame by the time they get to office.
But, idk. Would Ralph Nader have governed any better or worse than Al Gore? Really hard to say without giving them both a shot at high office. But neither landed. Instead we got Bush and Clinton.
- Comment on it sucks that you can't use social media for a full month once every 2 years 2 days ago:
The Crusades were a catastrophe for Europe and mostly a nuisance for the late Byzantine Empire. The victory of the First Crusade was almost an accident and that was the only one that might be considered successful.
Meanwhile, the Moorish conquest of Southern Europe began in 711 AD and lasted until the Columbian Era - practically the year European Colonialism began.
And The Golden Horde dominated Eastern Europe for 200 years, starting in 1240, after wrecking their way into Poland and turning back when they ran out of anything worth conquering.
Hell, west Rome fell to other Europeans. Viking Age, Europeans.
Because all the action was in the Eastern Empire. The West was functionally abandoned by the time it fell.
And that was after centuries of humiliation, all the way up through what would become France, England, and Spain.
- Comment on it sucks that you can't use social media for a full month once every 2 years 3 days ago:
In fairness, Europe was the punching bag of its neighbors for the 1000 years prior.
But otherwise, I gotta say, I’ve been hearing a lot more about global geopolitics as a matter of public interest generally speaking. All the Latin American elections are big news, especially with Brazil being the latest pink-tide domino to fail. The Pacific Rim states regularly make headlines. Everyone who has even a casual eye towards global affairs is keyed up on the BJP anti-democratic turn on the eve of India’s general election. Americans are watching with bated breath on every election from the UK to Hungary, given how they threaten to shape the Ukraine/Russia war.
If anything, American politics hasn’t been getting as much coverage by comparison. It’s weird not to have the entire month of October be one Surprise after another, during an election year. Hell, we skated right through prime Silly Season in August and everyone was too fixated on diesel prices and AI stocks to notice political bullshit.
Y’all got off easy this time.
- Comment on it sucks that you can't use social media for a full month once every 2 years 3 days ago:
Vibes-Based Voting is how we got Trump in the first place.
If you have shit politics, please STAY THE FUCK HOME. I’ve had too many fucking Redcaps showing up in election booths for the last ten years, thank you very much.
- Comment on it sucks that you can't use social media for a full month once every 2 years 3 days ago:
Europeans spent 40 years trying to ignore American politics, and look where it got them.
- Comment on Wealth inequality will destroy America. 3 days ago:
Very funny to see this at the top of my feed when the poster is banned.
- Comment on When you're in a rush and need to eat on the go 3 days ago:
Poor Man’s Huel
- Comment on This Is The Ideal Swing Voter. You May Not Like Her. But She's What Democracy Looks Like. 3 days ago:
each vote is strategic
Votes can’t be deployed strategically if they have no weight. When voting districts are enormous, when elected representatives never have to face their constituents in person, and when all of the incentives of pursuing office tilt towards selling out to the wealthiest partisan activists, your individual vote quiet literally doesn’t matter. It cannot be deployed strategically on its own.
Only a coalition of voters can sway a candidate’s behavior. You have to be an active member in an organization that rallies other voters. You have to contribute to the bureaucracy of that organization, either through your money or your labor. And you have to be publicly vocal in your support for your candidate.
If you vote for a third party you risk the worst candidate winning.
If you organize with a third party campaign and rally people to its banner, you are doing more to influence the remaining candidates by expressing a threat to their potential majorities.
The clearest recent demonstration of this is the RFK Jr independent campaign. RFK was polling at around 10%, while Trump was underwater with respect to Biden/Harris. So what did the Trump campaign do? He onboarded RFK to his own campaign. He promised RFK a cabinet position. And he co-opted RFK’s platform, pivoting hard into vaccine denial and MAHA bullshit. By running independent of Trump, and racking up an election-winning share of indie voters, RFK forced the Republican Party to swallow his brand of pseudo-science bullshit.
Compare that to the Harris campaign, which tried to capture the #NeverTrump block through his courtship of Liz Cheney and Jeff Flake. The #NeverTrump voting base was barely 1-2% of the total voting pool. It paled beside RFK Jr’s block. And it alienated a bunch of more progressive voters. Particularly voters of color. Double-plus particularly Muslim voters and their friends in key swing states like Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
These indie voters never formed a visible coalition. They never aligned around an alternative candidate that Harris would (or even could) explicitly align with. They never showed up in popular polling as a “gettable” block of issue-oriented voters. So Harris ignored them. They dropped out of the general election pool as non-voters, contributing to Harris’s catastrophic plunge in support after Biden’s 81M vote high watermark from 2020. And they remained faceless, until…
The DSA began mobilizing these voters in the 2026 primary campaigns. Suddenly, they were a viable, vocal block of support. They showed up at rallies as a community. They donated as a block. They block walked as a block. They backed candidates as a block. They won primaries as a block - first (notably) in the NYC Mayor’s race. And then again in primaries from Maine to Minnesota.
This partisan block was now gettable. They were visible to pollsters. They were visible to fundraisers. They were visible to candidates who wanted to win them over. As unaligned individuals, they didn’t matter. But now they fucking mattered.
- Comment on This Is The Ideal Swing Voter. You May Not Like Her. But She's What Democracy Looks Like. 3 days ago:
As someone who lives in a deep red state and an even redder district, voting third party is about all I got.
For a long while, down in the beating heart of Tom DeLay’s Houston suburbs, the Libertarians were the second party. Democrats regularly failed to make it onto the ballot (for… reasons).
Supporting people over party is what I care about.
Absolutely. Although that’s got nothing to do with voting.
- Comment on Anon joins girl's night 3 days ago:
🥚
- Comment on Very helpful. 10/10 🎉 4 days ago:
Wouldn’t happen to me. I’d simply understand better.
- This Is The Ideal Swing Voter. You May Not Like Her. But She's What Democracy Looks Like.lemmy.world ↗Submitted 5 days ago to [deleted] | 23 comments
- Comment on "What is the cost of lies?" 1 week ago:
We know Covid originated in Wuhan.
Neither has the “no natural zoonotic path” bit, incidentally.
Accidents happen even in level 4 biolabs.
And we’re back to Wuhan Lab Leak Theory.
- Comment on "What is the cost of lies?" 1 week ago:
there is no natural zoonotic path to Wuhan
How do you get from “we don’t think the disease naturally originated in Wuhan” to “China engineered a virus, released it in their own city, and then used that as a vector for malicious infection of the rest of the world”?
Half the US intelligence agencies support the lab origin theory.
They also insisted Iraq had nuclear weapons.
- Comment on It's a very revealing photo of him 1 week ago:
AWS is the real cash cow
Significantly higher margins and bigger government contracts, particularly with state security services. So no surprise there.
But Amazon, as a retail business venture, generates significant profits on its own. What’s more, it is gradually supplanting the USPS, which puts the business at the logistical center of a critical piece of US infrastructure. A classic “Too Big To Fail” setup that also guarantees Amazon a customer base indefinitely and lets them freeze out competitors as the USPS decays.
AWS is a bigger funnel of money, but Amazon retail and wholesale is an enormous economic footprint with lots of downstream political consequences.
- Comment on It's a very revealing photo of him 1 week ago:
Beginning to think that Jeffery Epstein was at the center of a massive financial and influence peddling network that reached into the highest levels of business and politics.
Well, now that we know this picture exists, I’m sure someone will be doing something about it.
- Comment on Just coincidence 1 week ago:
a guy who has been out of power for a decade
You keep bringing up this Adolf fellow, but he hasn’t been in power in a long time. So why would he be relevant?
- Comment on "What is the cost of lies?" 1 week ago:
It was definitely some random scary bullshit on the internet that co-mingled the two. But so much of the hype in the early days of COVID ended up being FUD used by the administration to justify draconian anti-immigration policies. We had FOX News screaming about Leprosy and “Mexican Flu” being transmitted by Migrant Caravans decades before that. Any disease outbreak became an excuse to hyper-police people entering the US at the borders.
Part of the problem with all this disease discourse is that it’s routinely anti-foreigner agitprop. This goes straight back to The Spanish Flu, which originated from a Haskell County, Kansas pig farm and got spread across Europe by WW1-era US soldiers. It became major weapon of the 20th century reactionary right to ban Italian Immigrants way back then. Now we see disease scares used to freeze out everyone from Taiwan to Brazil to Afganistan. If anyone is sick anywhere, it’s an excuse to ban migrants everywhere.
- Comment on "What is the cost of lies?" 1 week ago:
Leaving their international airports functional while locking down their cities, intentionally infecting as many places as possible.
Are we still doing Wuhan Lab Leak Theory? Wasn’t that debunked ages ago as some Trumpie lie pushed to deflect our own abysmal COVID response?
- Comment on Just coincidence 1 week ago:
Always with the whataboustism.
More a vulgar critique of asthetics without regard for material policy.
I might go with “Hitler Also Invaded North Africa” if I wanted a proper comparison. But you’ll get mega-yelled-at if you draw a straight line between Operation Odyssey Lightning and Operation Sonnenblume.
- Comment on Just coincidence 1 week ago:
- Comment on Just coincidence 1 week ago:
- Comment on Just coincidence 1 week ago:
