When you smurf long into an abyss, the abyss smurfs back into you.

This was a thread about making the specific argument you’re mad at me for making

Steelman:

The US is currently a fascist, imperialist state. It has brutalized the global south, indigenous people, and POCs generally since its founding and will continue to do so unless the status quo is disrupted and changed significantly.

The Democratic party supports the same militaristic policies and the same neoliberal economic system that the Republicans do. The primary difference between the parties are various social issues that may make life somewhat better or worse for US citizens, but will never address the core problems of fascism, imperialism, and capitalism. Both parties support and protect the status quo. This status quo only benefits the bourgeois class and rich white people and harms literally hundreds of millions of others around the world.

The Democratic party is the only one of the two major parties that the Left has any degree of leverage over since the Democrats want the Left to vote for them. So, organizing to essentially boycott the Democratic party is a powerful method of protest that could effect real policy change. It is possibly the only effective method of protest left since the US police & surveilance state is cracking down on protests and the Left has no chance protesting violently against the most powerful military the world has ever seen.

The only way to make that threat matter to the Democratic party is to follow through if the demands aren’t met, even - or especially - if it means a second Trump term.

The liberal establishment has ignored and abandoned the working class for decades while dangling the carrot of milktoast social democratic reforms that rarely come to pass, but they blame the same people they abandoned for not energetically voting for them. They say it is a moral imperative to vote for them, but they are incapable of bettering the lives of working class people.

Strawman:

It would hurt my feelings too much to vote for COPmala Harm-us. Plus, Trump would let Putin annex Ukraine. Also, I’d risk touching grass if I went outside to participate in bourgeois electoralism. Gross.

Reality:

You can, and should, do more than one thing. Voting for Kamala is effectively playing defense against outright, full-throated fascism a la Mussolini even if you’d still consider the US fascist - it is clearly worse under Republicans. So vote, play defense, AND organize to raise class consciousness, provide mutual aid, protest when possible, and contribute to socialist causes. Letting Trump win would be a bad move. But, ultimately it is not the Left’s fault that he won. He won the popular vole and the electoral college vote by a large margin - larger than all third party socialist/socialist-adjacent candidates’ votes combined.

Thank you so much for the reply! That is extremely helpful.

What rifle and in what caliber do you most recommend for home defense and cheap, relatively plentiful ammo that is shortage-resistant?

I am considering a cheap Palmetto State Armory AR kit chambered for 5.56 NATO rounds so I could also fire .223s. Is brand particularly important, or are most ARs on the market good enough for practice and emergency use?

I don’t think it’s possible to abolish prisons for all crimes. But why does a thief or a drug dealer (or worse, just a drug user) need to be in prison? What about the nature of their crimes necessitates imprisonment as a reasonable method of corrections?

If the point is stopping people from reoffending, prisons don’t do that. Like objectively. Recidivism in the US is super high, and going to prison predicts increases in the severity of crimes people commit.

So, what reduces recidivism? Eliminating the factors that drove them to crime in the first place. So, you monitor them closely - house arrest, assigned social/case workers, etc. Like a more robust parole system for nonviolent offenders. With enough surveillance, you can reduce the likelihood of reoffence by making the chances of getting caught much higher. This enhanced monitoring would be temporary.

For violent offenders and more serious criminals, maybe prisons are still necessary. But they don’t have to be dehumanizing and can provide necessary health/psychiatric, educational, social, and job skills training.

You could make the corrections system more effective by making society easier for criminals to reintegrate into. If you’re a felon and you can’t find work because you’re a felon - how are you going to afford to live within the confines of the law? Step 1) jobs programs for felons with a path to eliminating non-violent offenses from your record as it relates to work with exceptions as necessary. Step 2) improve the education system to prevent people from turning to crime and to help give former criminals relevant job skills to earn an honest living. Step 3) provide healthcare to people - having access to healthcare for mental and addiction-related conditions is super important to reduce crime.

Basically - prison abolition isn’t about just letting rapists and murderers go free with no consequences. Instead, people in favor of prison abolition are typically in favor of reducing the societal pressures to commit crimes and preventing reoffense.

Having potentially thousands of years of embarassing moments of social awkwardness to think about. And, over the aeons, being relieved when the people you know and love die because they won’t remember the things you’re so ashamed of.

Many people have auras before and during migraines. These can be visual (seeing colors or black spots or colors/lights look brighter or dimmer), sensory (sensitivity to light/sound), speech-related (difficulty speaking or understanding speech), motor (impairment to movement), and brainstem (vertigo, tinnitus, ataxia, decreased consciousness, etc).

I get sensory, speech related, motor, and possibly some brainstem aura symptoms. You kind of just learn to recognize when a migraine is coming on and not a regular headache.

Ah yes, IPAs, the least manly of beers.

Oh yeah, and it makes total sense. The brigading, insofar as it happens, really shouldn’t. But also, as someone who espouses left wing views, I always want to give critical support to left spaces - even if they’re imperfect. And .ml and even hexbear have a lot of valuable discourse - I comment on hexbear threads regularly with less radical points of view than their users often have, and I get good responses and engagement usually because I’m good faith.

As someone on .ml I really don’t think it’s that bad. Definitely left, and generally pro-China, but not too extreme imo. Hexbear is pretty bad. I’m a socialist and I disagree with a lot of the stuff there. But .ml is very much not a true “tankie” instance, in my opinion.

That’s the neat thing: our pancreases do! Until they don’t…

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has been very useful to me. My cardio has improved dramatically, I am much stronger than I used to be, and I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of going from absolute trash to slightly less trash over 2 years.

But I don’t expect it to really help me in a fight. If I did get into a fight, I certainly would do better than if I hadn’t trained; but one thing I’ve learned from fighting people for like 8hrs a week is that it is REALLY easy to fuck up and get hurt in ways you wouldn’t expect. The outcome of a fight is unpredictable - especially when the other person could have a weapon. The best martial art for self defense would be running.

/*grabs a screwdriver and a flash drive and runs to nearest korean tank */

I didn’t realize how cheap the big hdds had gotten. Definitely looking into 2 bays.

You might be right. The Synology products look really good. I didn’t see that they actually have a sub-$400 4-bay NAS… DS423. Not sure if it’ll meet my performance needs. But the $600 4 bay doesn’t look too bad either really.

Amazing. You don’t think that a system for individualized pricing would take demographics into account? Brilliant! You should take your thesis on how demographics don’t affect consumers’ willingness to pay to every ad agency on earth. They’ll be riveted. Or is it that you don’t think race and SES are correlated? In that case you should hurry to publish a book on economics before someone steals your idea.

It’d probably be the opposite. I bet they’d charge more to specific demographics - and common convenience store beverage brands would probably cost more for poorer people.

Plus, without controls, they’d probably end up charging different ethnic groups more for specific goods - they’d probably obfuscate it somehow, like to charge white people more for something they’d probably say they were doing it because you’re a model train enthusiast or something. Or like “our consultants have told us that Tejano music fans are willing to pay a premium for coca cola” and so they jack up the price of coca cola for Mexicans without saying it’s because they’re mexican.

But yeah, I bet poorer people who have less free time would be “willing” to pay more for essentials because they often have less choice in where they get groceries. In other words you could force poor people with fewer options to accept jacked up prices whereas non-poor people may have the luxury of shopping around or paying someone else to get their groceries.

Also, if poor people were charged less there’d be a whole industry of personal grocery shoppers who’d get discounted prices for rich people and charge them a service fee in exchange.

Imo the price of those was justified solely by fraud. I.e. they lied about picture quality being better, etc. I also don’t know that demand for those was all that high and am even more skeptical that it’d be driven by price.

That typically only works for luxury goods, but yes. A good that inverts the effect of price on demand is called a Veblen Good.

But that strategy probably wouldn’t work for something like rice or shampoo or socks or drywall putty unless people start using those as status symbols.