shazbotter

> This is an undeniable truth.

Well, I disagree. What evidence do you have to demonstrate that a) this is true and b) it's so unassailable that one could not deny it?

Because it sure reads like, "I have a worldview. I will assert that it is true and talk down to anyone who does not accept my worldview as truth." It's a way to paint your discussion partner as an intellectual lesser, while adroitly dodging critique. You'll have to do better than just asserting something is true because you said so.

Good thing I'm not a communist or I might be upset. You keep moving the goal posts all over the place. I was just saying I'm not a tankie, lol, and you've pivoted to philosophers.

But what about Bookchin, Kropotkin, or the people of Rojava? Bakunin? Thoreau?

Yes. Of course it failed. It also succeeded several times. I'm not a communist, though. (I do have communist friends, however.)

Most of my communist friends are not authoritarian communists (aka tankies). A tankie is a very specific type of communist who believes in central autocratic power and a single party.

I think you'll find most modern communists tend to prefer a worker led democratic government. And people like myself prefer a syndicalist democracy without a central government.

I consider tankies my opponents, just like I consider all authoritarians my opponents.

I'm old (50s), I don't want a strong any of those. I especially, however, don't want a strong executive because I don't think decision making should be strongly centralized.

I'm a syndicalist anarchist, who believes communities should be primarily bottoms up driven, democratic, and cooperative. I argue we don't need any of those branches to be strong.

I'm not a tankie, and if you think all leftists are tankies you definitely need to refresh some definitions.

Unless you are saying, "I have nothing in common with the narrow subset of leftists that are tankies" rather than implying I'm a tankie then, sure. I guess you could make that case.

You have to stop thinking it's us or them. You have to stop imagining that somehow any of this is ok because my team or your team did or didn't do something.

I certainly hope I've been clear that this isn't some D vs R conflict. Both parties are at fault, both parties own some blame, but the situation today is not ok. It was also not ok under Biden, Trump 1, or Obama. We should be looking at ways to get the working class to look past our differences and securing more of the pie for ourselves. We should be reducing the power of the executive, no matter who is sitting in the seat. We should be focusing on the wellbeing of all.

Stop making a team sport, or at least correctly identify that you have way more in common with me (a working class anarchist) than you do with the people in power.

It's absolutely not the case. The US is an empire with increasingly dictatorial power centralized in the executive. Clinton increased prison populations and increased police power. Bush increased executive power during his post 9-11 presidency. Obama regularly enforced U.S. policy at the end of a drone strike and shut down U.S. domestic agitation. Biden increased police funding and continued to sell surplus military equipment to cops. He also shut down a workers strike. Trump is a symptom of a general slide towards dictatorial policy. If it wasn't him this time it would have been one of the next 5 presidents from either policy.

Trump is doing some fucked up shit, but he doesn't get to be able to do that without decades of groundwork from both sides of the aisle.

Yes. The Supreme Court affirmed this in Texas v Johnson. It is an act that expresses a political view through a symbolic act. It might be offensive to you, but "I find it offensive" is not sufficient defense to stop political speech.

And the left did not get their way for sixty years. The left is predominantly socialist, communist, anarchist. Democrats are not a leftist party. The left hasn't held many political positions in the US. But we on the left hate the democrats as much (or more) than folks on the right. We also tend to be broadly supportive of individual freedoms (most of my leftist colleagues are anti gun control, for instance.)

Newsom is a fucking nightmare. Willing to burn every minority community alive if it gets him 5% at the ballot box.

Obama also engaged in dictatorial policy... Just because two people have done it does not make it "not dictatorial".

Or, using logical constructs - "A therefore B" is not made invalid by "C therefore B".

It's an executive order that contravenes existing legislative and judicial precedent, sets penalties, and is expected to be unchallenged. It limits free speech by fiat because a single man wants it to be so.

It's clearly dictatorial, you'll have to demonstrate why it's not an act of a single person dictating policy.

Roughly one in three Americans water sources are chemically polluted, predominantly in minority areas: https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP14721?mc_cid=180f74...

Most of the comments here suggesting the UK it's evil have been downvoted. It's clearly still uncomfortable for a lot of people.

You realize that being gay or being non binary are considered pornography to some legislators?

Until we can decouple those things, banning porn has the effect of criminalizing LGBTQ lives.

Yeah, definitely don't blame the country actually committing genocide.

You sound like someone who is excusing domestic violence by saying, "if she didn't want to get hit, she shouldn't have talked back".

Fuck Hamas, I don't support hamas, but like, Israeli actions in Gaza are clearly inexcusable.

> It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff

Civil asset forfeiture suggests that's very much a thing to fear.

> It's why you know the water's safe to drink

Tell this to the people of Flint, Michigan. Or the many communities near fracking sites.

I don't think that's what the parent was saying. They are saying the Nazis are truly evil, but the Brits are also truly evil. A different truly evil, of course, I'm not going to weigh tragedies against one another.

And they're not wrong. The British empire killed millions through policy -- read up on the Bengali famine to understand one example where Britain killed millions. Britain was one of the earliest users of concentration camps, deploying them during the Boer War.

The sooner Americans realize the democrats and the republicans aren't actually in opposition, the sooner we maybe get some parties who are.

Simple. The UK is not a pro democracy, pro human rights state.

It might be uncomfortable to admit this, but if your government is a police state that's pretty much mutually exclusive with being a pro human rights state.

Unlikely. I suspect this will be a rubber stamp mill just like FISA in the United States.

An executable is a random binary file...

A ROM does not. A ROMhack, however, might. A ROMhack injects code into a ROM, the same way a virus or Trojan might inject code into an executable.

MRIs produce shadows that are indistinguishable from cysts or tumors all the time. They are benign, but no amount of data will reduce them. And telling someone "you have a shadow here, it's probably benign" makes people anxious and they go, "maybe I should boost it?" Which is needlessly invasive.

Vile.

You know why we don't give everyone a full body MRI every year? Too many false positives, too many benign findings that result in unnecessary action, too expensive.

This is the same. It's going to have errors, it's going to find benign things, and it's going to be expensive. It's going to hurt people who fundamentally did nothing wrong.

If it's expensive and hurting innocent people, it sure looks like cruelty is the point.

I hadn't even considered that some right wing folks would be bothered by that statistic, as if deportations were good, actually. But no, I'm sure it does bother some folks in the right.

People really really dislike when you point out that the democrats are also broadly anti immigration in practice. They forget Biden deported 4.6 million people vs Trump's 2 million.

If I voted for Biden nothing fundamentally changes in 2024. My state already went hard for Biden. No, I did not support the winner.

But I agree, a vote for President is an invisible meaningless statement. At least we can agree there.

Installing something named "doxx" and executing it sounds like a top ten bad idea for computer users.

Needs a new name, or a certain percentage of the audience will nope out before you even get to explain what it does.

These are not cherry picked examples. These are meaningful, material regressions in policy that impact communities I'm either in or close to. Quit suggesting they don't matter, or that somehow they are no big deal. Or even worse, suggesting that when I talk about how he hurt my communities I'm somehow "arguing in bad faith."

Maybe Biden made your life easier and that makes it hard to see how he sacrificed millions of people to make that happen, but it's not bad faith to express these major policy concerns.

And fascism? It didn't come from leftists holding out for perfection. Historically it comes from Liberal (the traditional meaning, not the synonym for democrats) governments not addressing the material needs of their people. Through demagoguery and violence, fascists take over the working class. When the party that used to stand for the working class is pushing austerity and beholden to big business, fascism has no meaningful opponents. Go read some history, what happened here has happened many times in the past, and has nothing to do with purity tests at the ballot box.

I did it on my iPhone. I took me something like a minute.