comfy

the US doesn’t have a left party

Yes*.

Technically speaking, there’s the Green Party and PSL on federal ballots for many states, but the electoral system is positioned so that there’s no foreseeable way that a party other than the two main ones could realistically win. So for all intents and purposes, there’s no federal left-wing option.

The complaint is that they’re a leech on society, and proud of it.

It doesn’t matter if a practice is ancient and common. So is organized crime. Being old and normalized doesn’t imply it has value.

There is absolutely huge moral and ethical, and pragmatic, issues with hoarding essential resources, such as housing. Homelessness is a growing problem, and these people are gladly treating it as a money-making scheme. Society would be better if they had productive jobs instead. As a collective, landlords are responsible for systematic preventable homelessness and death. Most moral frameworks consider that very bad!

The middle class? As far as I’m concerned, the two important classes are the worker class and the owner class, and the leeches can’t survive without the host. If there are people tricked into thinking they’re a middle class above us, they’d better figure out that they’re a thousand times closer to us than to them, hopefully before our collective desperation turns to violence.

Yep, date of birth is 71 so it’s very unlikely to be an automatic initials+random number username.

Not sure how that changes anything.

…do you not know where Bosnia and Herzegovina is? It’s a coastal post-Yugo country next to Serbia and Croatia, south of Hungary IIRC. The Bosnian war and NATO intervention isn’t exactly secret knowledge.

Very cool for your 1 country

The USA (the country in question) has zero (0) women presidents elected ever. Not even one. So yeah imma stop reading this conversation lol

If you are aware of what they are doing, and you provide support to them, that is therefore knowingly providing support to their actions, whether you agree with those actions or not.

Or, if you just meant ‘agree with’ rather than ‘supply’, then I would say that what they’re doing is not something they will ever stop. It’s an integral part of their existence as an imperial Zionist state, they aren’t just doing it for fun, or because of some ‘bad apples’. They have no plan or desire to stop, their history is mostly just this same type of war and besieging repeated, and the USA would probably abandon them and let them collapse if they miraculously did decide to stop, because the US imperial strategy only values the Zionist Regime as a attack dog in the Middle East, a region critical for resource control.

A lot of words to say, it might as well be supporting guns without supporting bullets. There is no realistic situation where guns won’t be used to shoot bullets. They can’t be separated, in reality. Why support guns, at that point? It’s just a comfortable abstract idea in a vacuum.

Not sure why that’s relevant, but:

The first democratically elected female prime minister of a Muslim majority country was Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, who led her party to victory in the 1988 general election and later in 1993

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_first_women_heads_of_state_and_government_in_Muslim-majority_countries

Thanks for linking the Red Sails article, I’ve finally gotten around to reading it. Interestingly, while the work critiques even the title of Manufacturing Consent, it provides a similar sense of fulfillment to Manufacturing Consent by providing a material, non-conspiratorial explanation to a more-or-less ‘common sense’ phenomenon (media control, brainwashing).

In a way, the premise and conclusion echo some wisdom I’d heard before, albeit in a different context: It’s not enough to be right.

While that speaker had basically meant that theory is useless if it is never applied, and only used as an “I told you so” after-the-fact, this article makes a related case, that the correctness of an idea doesn’t automatically mean it will be accepted by a typical healthy person. And as someone who veers towards a more academic and scientific side of life, where correctness is so valued and there’s an expectation that everyone in the scene is on the same page about basic fundamental facts, the brainwashing framework is a convenient and intuitive (even if false) rationalization of why so many people can be so ignorant to these basics (like flat earth theory, anti-germ theory, that level of ignorance). It really is hard to empathize and not be condescending to people in relatively-advanced countries in the modern age still believing that kind of thing. The brainwashing theory is convenient - they’ve been dupped by a cult leader! the [religion/government] wants to keep them ignorant and encircled them with a false reality! they’ve been conditioned to be dumb since birth! This explains it! But that only goes so far, there is a point where a person has enough access to information that the brainwashing theory fails to justify their rejection of evidence. I know first hand, like many, that it takes time to dismantle the propaganda pervading our liberalist status quo, but it’s not magical or hypnotic.

Is that how they act once they get home after a long and exhausting day of labouring? Just sit down in the couch and die, staring at the white wallpaper until they collapse?

Replace the wallpaper with a television and this is awfully familiar in my neighborhood.

ie. topic boards with ephemeral linear message threads

This describes a general forum format, but you might mean chan imageboards specifically. There have been federated imageboards for a while, but they’re very niche and experimental and I don’t see the value. The two examples I’ve heard of are NNTPchan (2015-present, NNTP protocol) and Fchannel (ActivityPub protocol).

There’s the related imageboard webring, but there’s no actual federated interaction between the boards, it’s effectively just cross-advertising to allow easier discovery.

Ideology does not come about from ‘convincing’ or ‘swaying’ anyone.

Tell that to the propaganda model. False consciousness is a real barrier which can, and has, dominated material class interests.

Agnifilo argues against this decision. He is a model prisoner

The way the clothes they wear are flying off the shelves, and Luigi’s outstanding photogenic quality, you bet they’re a model prisoner.

The Wikipedia page on East German jokes has a few Trabant jokes.

• What’s the best feature of a Trabant? – There’s a heater at the back to keep your hands warm when you’re pushing it.

• A new Trabi has been launched with two exhaust pipes – so you can use it as a wheelbarrow.

• How do you double the value of a Trabant? – Fill it with gas.

• The back page of the Trabant manual contains the local bus schedule.

• Four men were seen carrying a Trabant. Somebody asks them why? Was it broken? They reply: “No, nothing wrong with it, we’re just in a hurry.”

• How do you catch a Trabi? – Place a piece of chewing gum on the road.

Some people who were in Special Ed report, like, major emotional trauma from it.

Is that with people also in Brazil? Because your experience sounds very different from the cases I’ve heard in some other countries where Special Ed students are isolated rather than given extra classes at the end of the school day.