We should try giving the measles virus a MS-13 tattoo.

Weird that you’re taking all this time to call out people who focus their criticism on the Democrats, yet your post is completely silent on Ghenghis Khan. I can only conclude that you support rampant killing and pillaging since you don’t spend as much time calling them out as you do calling us out, since apparently that’s how you think logic works.

Alternatively, we can acknowledge the simple fact that it’s not necessary to make arguments about why Ghenghis Khan was bad if nobody is defending him around here, and by the same logic it isn’t necessary to argue about why the Republicans are bad when nobody is defending them around here.

The few times that I’ve seen a Trump supporter wander into Lemmy (and inevitably gotten ratio’d hard), I have attacked and criticized them. I can show my receipts if you like.

It’s mostly heaping scorn on the Democrats exclusively and sometimes taking time out to say that the Republicans are better or equivalent on some issue on which they objectively are not).

You can’t present receipts of me doing that. Maybe somebody at some point has made such a claim, but it’s generally a bullshit strawman.

“I disagree with both the Republicans and the Democrats.”

“Impossible! You must be a secret Republican here to turn people against the Democrats”

“It kinda seems like you’re assuming has to be either a Democrat or a Republican”

“Strawman! I never said those exact words!”

I have to say it’s pretty ironic to accuse someone else of strawmanning while simultaneously rejecting every single thing they say about their own position and arbitrarily assigning them a completely different position that contradicts everything they say in a way that makes it easier to dismiss what they say.

I suppose it must make the world a lot simpler if you assume the US Democratic and Republican parties represent the full range of beliefs that exist in the world, and anyone who doesn’t neatly fit into those categories is simply lying.

Imo classical economists were generally more clear-sighted and honest than modern ones. Of course they had their biases and perspective based on their class (and their audience), but at that point economics was so poorly understood that theorists were legitimately trying to figure stuff out, moreso than trying to produce propaganda. Of course, the industrial proletariat and threat of socialism wasn’t really present yet either, so the class conflict was more about new money bourgeois vs old money aristocrats and landlords.

Marx and Smith are a lot more similar than most people think, because Marx was writing in the context of various economic assumptions that come from Smith, such as the labor theory of value, which is usually attributed to Marx but actually comes from Smith.

The thing about Smith though is that his writing style was very dry and repetitive so nobody actually reads him, at best, they might read abridged versions which cut out any inconvenient parts like that. So he just kinda became known as the capitalism guy and is thrown in the same category as Ayn Rand.

Bulls on Parade (Hell Yeah Cover)

Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes (Hell yeah!)

Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal (Hell yeah!)

I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library (Hell yeah!)

Line up to the mind cemetery now (Hell yeah!)

What they don’t know keeps the contracts alive and movin’ (Hell yeah!)

We don’t gotta burn the books we just remove 'em (Hell yeah!)

While arms warehouses fill as quick as the cells (Hell yeah!)

Rally 'round the family, pockets full of shells (Hell yeah!)

There’s a long history of anarchists who oppose voting

https://libcom.org/article/why-anarchists-dont-vote-elisee-reclus

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/aotearoa-workers-solidarity-movement-why-we-don-t-vote

https://apps.lib.umich.edu/online-exhibits/exhibits/show/debatedemocracy/anarchism---anti-voting

I live in Illinois. If somehow the heavens and earth move such that Illinois turned red, then there would be absolutely zero chance it would be the tipping point in the presidential election. The vast majority of people in the US live in safe states.

And for the record, I do vote in down-ballot races, the ones that actually matter, but none of you care because it’s all about genuflecting before the leader of the blue tribe. Which, frankly, just gives me more reason to refuse to.

“Democracy” doesn’t need our help to be sabotaged, it’s falling apart on it’s own. Every time someone says that the voters have to change en masse to meet the policies of politicians rather than politicians having to respond to what their constituents want, they are the ones taking the axe to democracy. Why the hell would anyone care about upholding or defending a system that we have no say in? Somehow, insisting on popular demands and trying to turn the will of the people into policies that protect the rights of the vulnerable gets translated into “trying to sabotage democracy” equating Anarchists and Marxists alike with fascists.

You’re saying you’re learning… seitanic magic? 😈

Reabsorption of bone is fairly common place in non unionized fractures that don’t end up getting good blood flow. Osteoclasts will breakdown the bone fragments that don’t unionize

This is why it’s so important to talk to your coworkers and get organized, if those bones were unionized this never would’ve happened.

If you wanna play chess, use your head.

Purple is a fine color to use while employing alternative methods of holding people accountable when they control the courts and the senate

“In fact, we don’t want them to make cars for us. We want to make our own cars. We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need their energy. We don’t need anything from Canada. And I say the only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state.”

Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution:

No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.

Trying to remove any and all trade barriers in order to prevent trade.

A man rubs a lamp and a genie comes out and says, “I will grant you one wish, anything you ask for, whatever you can imagine, your wish is my command.”

The man shouts, “I want a dragon!”

The genie responds, “I’m sorry, but a dragon is just too much, it’s just not possible for that to exist. Can you think of something else?”

The man thinks for a minute and says, “Well, in that case, I guess I wish for the rich and powerful to face significant legal consequences within the existing system for the harm they do to regular people.”

The genie sighs and says, “What color did you want that dragon?”

didn’t immediately solve all problems

I love how liberals constantly downplay shit like this. If you’re upset about your friends and family being shoveled into a pointless meat grinder and you’re experiencing mass death and oppression, then you’re just upset that “democracy didn’t immediately solve all problems.” In the same way that opposition to genocide is frequently framed as, “throwing a fit because you don’t get your way,” and such.

It’s literally just the Joker speech from The Dark Knight, as long as there’s a plan, it’s fine, even if the plan is horrible, the only thing that matters is that the norms are respected and the proper procedure is followed. You and everyone you care about can be sent to concentration camps, just so long as the decision is made by a legislative body following proper procedure. Systemic violence, like dragging people from their homes to die in a trench en masse, is perfectly acceptable, just so long as it isn’t disruptive, just so long as everything is going according to plan. The only problem y’all have with fascism is that it’s so rude and blunt, if it persued the same goals respectfully you’d be completely fine with it.

Yes, it did benefit the people immensely to get out of the war. Aside from the horrors of WWI, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that if they hadn’t dropped out and focused on rebuilding and industrial development at that point, there’s a fair chance that they lose to the Nazis in WWII and we’d all be speaking German right now. Besides, in the chaos of this period the so-called “democracy” wasn’t some kind of established, functional system, we’re talking about a provensional government, and one that completely failed to address ongoing crises (which is kinda the point of having a provisional government). Under the conditions of the time, sensible people radicalize, and then they force things to change and get rid of those conditions, and then people 100 years later to whom the conditions are utterly foreign waggle their fingers about it, but they don’t care because they’re no longer dying in a ditch.

One easy trick that makes you immune to propaganda - simply respond “not sure” to every question you’re ever asked. It doesn’t really even save you though because they’ll just lump you in with the people who chose the wrong answer. The site repeatedly uses the phrase, “failed to identify as false” to group the “not sures” in with the incorrect responses.

There’s an almost endless way to present poll numbers and survey results to support whatever conclusion you like, you could say that “fewer than half the respondents were able to identify this claim as false,” or you could say, “80% of respondents avoided incorrectly labeling this claim as true,” depending on what narrative you prefer. And that’s assuming that the raw data itself, which comes from an internet survey, is reliable and representative.

In 2020 the democrats were calling the border wall racist and they won, then in 2024 it was “we’re the ones who are actually gonna build the wall, Trump’s all talk.” They literally tried to position themselves to the right of Republicans on the issue in order to win over the mythical centrists, and predictably what happened was that their support among Latinos broke down.

A lot of these people are religious and conservative, but were willing to vote for Democrats as long as there was substantial differences on race/immigration. But even if they were the “lesser evil” on immigration from a pro-immigrant perspective - something which they denied as hard as they could, by the way - if the difference didn’t appear substantial any more, if it was framed in technical arguments about how to do it rather than moral arguments about what to do, then many of them no longer saw it as damning and voted based on other issues where they’re more aligned with Republicans.

This is often what swing voters actually look like, by the way, and why pivoting to the right to capture them is often counterproductive. It turns out pivoting right on an issue where doing so directly harms millions of people so you can appeal to the dozen or so people who like Dick Cheney loses elections. Swing voters are a lot more complex than the idiotic “conventional wisdom” that just has everyone at a different point on a one dimensional left-right scale.

Their methodology involves asking people a bunch of questions and then if they don’t get 100% correct they’re counted as believing misinformation. Putting aside the unreliability of online polls, that’s a pretty misleading way of framing it, if you ask me.

If you asked people 10 questions about just about anything, you’d probably find a substantial number of people who don’t get every one right. In fact, they did do this under the heading, “Disinformation Nation: Americans Widely Believe False Claims on a Range of Topics.” That’s probably why they found that, “Respondents identifying as Democrats were about as likely (82 percent) to believe at least one of the 10 false claims as those identifying as Republicans (81 percent).”

Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about. If you are first encountering a claim in that context, you pretty much just have to guess whether you think it’s true based on vibes. And you can easily set up misleading vibes, like, “Conservative initiative Project 2025 proposes cutting or eliminating Social Security” which is false because it’s not explicitly stated, but it does explicitly state a whole bunch of other horrible shit, so like, if you get got by that one it doesn’t really show that you believe in an inaccurate picture of the world, just that you got tripped up by details. But that claim dings you for “believing misinformation” just as much as " COVID-19 vaccines killed 15 million people worldwide."

So like it doesn’t really tell us very much about how far reaching disinformation really is, the results are more of a reflection of their methodology.

[Reposted from the last time this study was posted]

If you define everyone you feel like doing violence towards as “an other church” then sure, but then the distinction is completely meaningless. Plenty of the examples I mentioned such as the inquisitions were used against people who were longtime, faithful members of the church. No one was safe.

Well, if it didn’t, then perhaps there’s no way to get them to do what we want and in that case it is imperative that they be replaced as soon as possible, a goal that is also furthered by voting third party.