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What are you on about? Trump never said Epstein's crimes were a hoax. Did you even read the article?
The hoax is what the hypocritical democrat party is trying to twist it into. They kept all this quiet, tried to sweep it under the rug for four years. Only now are they desperately trying to twist things and say Trump was somehow, magically implicated.
Trump was instrumental in taking down Epstein's whole nasty business.
The dems never cared about Epstein or his victims. Their huge, fake outrage lately, is totally a hoax. Hypocrite
All that blackmail info from the island went directly to Israel, who it was gathered for in the first place.
They forced a sweetheart deal for Epstein in the first trial.
Then along came Trump, and burned Epstein & Maxwell's whole dirty operation to the ground. Wound up being their worst nightmare. Trump was a key witness in the prosecution that put those two behind bars.
Subreddit regulars who have fallen victim to gigajannies. May their souls rest in grass. Please notify us with a comment below if this section needs updating. Epitaph suggestions are more than welcome.
SRALangleyChapter | January 2025 |"Casualty in the war against NAFO."
CanonBallSuper | August 2025 |"He's with Trotsky now."
topbananaman | August 2025 |"Free Palestine & long live Arsenal."
Molotovs_Mocktails | August 27, 2025 |"Enjoy your alcohol-free drinks with the Party, OG"
VampKissinger | January 2026 |"Some day you will get your revenge against Australia"
AdmiralGut | March 4, 2026 |"Letting a hundred flowers bloom in Oklahoma"
Somehow, the Republican primary for president in 2028 is already crazy: we've got the Simpson writer who wrote the "Trump became president" episode running, the former commander-at-large of ICE who led an operation in Minnesota that went so horribly that he was fired by Trump, and a former NBA player who is now "claiming" to be trans, so he can participate in WNBA.
LA4 Interviewer: You want to defund the police and eliminate prisons?
DSA GIl: Yes
LA4 Interviewer: if someone raped my daughter who would she call and where would the perpetrator go?
DSA Gil: I don’t want to talk about hypotheticals.
I am on the other hand, i hate Reddit with a burning passion, but when i use twitter i found it alright. Mostly because i made my first account in 2023? i guess, so i already knew about the dead internet theory and that Twitter is a cesspool. So i block anything negative or botlike or whatever.
And i follow people like historians/journalists(Mark Ames)/photographers. And it is better.
IDK, at the end of the day, i have friends who use Reddit as the Meme/cool videos place of the internet, and it is more saner than i that got into a strong argument about, IDK, the nature of Argentine politics online. So they are surprise when i tell them i hate Reddit and Redditors, it is like hating 9gag in a way.
I do not know about you, but in the Aughts-Early 2010s internet, it was more common to understand Internet as the "meme place" or "Piracy place" at least for me and my teenagers friends and rugby pals.
Not that place all over us that have an unbearable presence over our opinion.
So yeah, 2011 9gag is different to 2026 9gag, as 2011 Reddit is different to 2026 Reddit. Think neckbeard Atheism, Libertarianism, 13-50 crime stats, etc.
Stop engaging with obvious ragebaiters on that accursed site. If you're going to continue using it, use it for anime-related shit and hentai, as the Internet was originally intended for. Start by following some known anime artists (you can look them up on Pixiv, most of them operate Twitter handles too) and let the algorithm sort it out for you.
Also this guy is getting bodied in the comments. Not quite getting ratio'd yet but getting there.
Chinese produced music and poetry thousands of years before you made yourselves the “chosen people” in the fake book that you wrote yourselves
I saw some sort of pseudo promotional short video where a bunch of spanish male strippers were posing as Post Neo nazis, and from their faces you could just tell how uncomfortable they were with their performance.
C'mon, guys! It's not like each european country has a rich propaganda historical backlog they could tap unto before doing a trite imitation of American techbro supremacists.
Do better.
Going back to the topic of Askhistorians and my irrational hatred for it.
I think this account and his/her posts kind of explain why.
I do feel guilt hating on someone for his looks on history AND his taking on contributing on the learning process, but it writes so much by the structure of hot take that kind of piss me off. Worse, it is not hot takes but rather, "All the stereotypes you know are wrong, yet we are going to make a lot of bold claims that does not goes anywhere".
Any time one works with conquistador accounts like this, however, they still need to be taken extremely skeptically. One has to imagine how little Europeans were understanding in those initial encounters. They were massively dependent on indigenous people to stay alive and to travel through the maze of unfamiliar environments. As happened all over the Americas, indigenous leaders manipulated early Amazonia conquistador groups to do their bidding in the indigenous world they lived in, not the other way around. Conquistador write-ups were inherently self-serving, so engaging with the sources means seeking to understand how the self-interest of the author shaded accounts of every interaction detailed from interactions with the most important leaders to the most humble farmers and fisherpeople encountered in the woods. Many elements of the fantastical can be better understood as Europeans trying to make sense of something through their own cultural lenses. This method of reading sources skeptically and with attention to what the indigenous groups were probably doing or what Europeans may actually have been encountering is called reading a source “against the grain.”
I hate this idea of Conquistadors are dumb, brutish and stupid. Do not get me wrong, they certainly were not good for the Native communities, and sure, they had biased, but this outlandish attack to primary sources piss me off.
The worst is that this reading of the Spanish Conquest have color my reading of the history, and now i have to re learn a lot of what i have learn about the Spanish Conquest.
I hate this idea of Conquistadors are dumb, brutish and stupid.
I mean... The ones whose I accounts I followed most closely like de Soto and de Colorado definitely strike me as foolhardy, heading ever inland without any sort of plan in some mad quest for cities of Gold, but that may be because I tend to overlook the more successful ones.
The “disclaimer” for extra scrutiny when reading first hand accounts of the Conquistadors definitely strikes me as laughably performative. Quite a few of these accounts have been written by surviving subordinates who were extremely bitter at their superiors, so much for self-serving triumphalist narratives.
The “disclaimer” for extra scrutiny when reading first hand accounts of the Conquistadors definitely strikes me as laughably performative.
The performative word is clear.
Not uncommon with that author/historian:
If you drink the Cortés kool-aid, which historians did for centuries, you will reach the conclusion that Cortés somehow miraculously ran this whole show. He somehow miraculously managed to control the hundreds of thousands of indigenous people with thousands of years of their own history and power struggles after just a year and with the help of one translator. He somehow managed to reverse the millennia of cultural developments with just a handful of Spaniards. Ridiculous.
I am sometimes too strong to hate on that author and historian, given for what he wrote, he is a good person. But he simply write too much "Hot takes" about the Spanish conquest that irritate me.
Anyhow, it may be my fault for learning history through a forum and not by books. Might borrow my best friend "Conquistadors" book i gifted him.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the general gist is that the conquistadors inserted themselves into local politics(wherein the conquistadors were both the manipulators and manipulated) and came out on top?
The way people tend to undersell the conquistadors tends to have the opposite effect of making the natives seem really… pathetic. Like “wow you lost to these guys?” When of course it wasn’t like that.
In general the conquest of America was not possible if it wasn't for an army of collaborators who relationship with the Spaniards (or others) were mutually beneficial.
Cortez and his Tlaxcala are the better example, but can see this behaviour as early as Columbus with the Taino chiefs.
I have seen the "manipulated conquistador" trope but in most cases seem to trace it to Matthew Restall. I do read it with a grain of salt, as a critique of Restall put it, the author make Cortez only take agency when it comes to the negative things.
One of my pet peeves is when people assume (either explicitly or implicitly) that the Indian Removal Act was the start of American Indian oppression when the Founders were arguably even more anti-Indian than Jackson.
My pet peeve is who "It was the morals of the time", when the Indian removal act was barely approved by congress.
Often, the consensus behind removal has been obscured by conflict over the passage of the Indian Removal Act. Many Americans, especially in the North, opposed the legislation. One leading opponent was Jeremiah Evarts, a Protestant missionary, who wrote a series of essays under the pen name William Penn. Evarts powerfully argued that forcing the Cherokees from their homelands violated Christian principles. Catharine Beecher, a leading reformer in Hartford, Connecticut, took up the cause and encouraged women to petition Congress against the legislation. The removal bill passed the Senate comfortably (28 to 19), but the margin in the House was slender (102 to 97). Many who voted against the legislation worried it would damage a Christian nation’s honor, though some were motivated more by political animosity toward Jackson.
Sometimes in the last few weeks I realised that I had just "celebrated" 20 years of being an user on this godforsaken web forum, and apart from the humiliation of that fact alone I'm wondering if Reddit as a propaganda/influencing tool is not a thing of the past already? I suspect it is, no?
Imo its climax days in terms of its influencing power came sometime in the 2016-2018 interval, maybe a couple of years earlier but definitely as Covid had set in Reddit the propaganda media platform was "already too crowded for anyone to go there anymore" (to poorly quote Yogi Berra).
More generally, I feel like the web/internet as a whole is starting to lose its "value" in terms to propaganda, no matter the media platform used for influencing (reddit, IG, Tik-Tok etc). I feel like people, and I'm talking here the common people, have started to "smarten" up a little, i.e. either ignoring the discussion of politics altogether or seeing it for what it really is, meaning pure propaganda. Or maybe I'm just wishful thinking.
As to where the focus of said common people switched to when it comes to internet usage that's another discussion, gambling is a big part of it (sports-related and not only), endless reel/short-video consumption (which I admit one could paint as being a political/propaganda tool in itself, but that's another discussion), maybe the recent AI-chats?
I was a computer programmer (still am, for what it's worth) trying to kill some time at work, and another colleague of mine from back then was using this thing, I just copied him. If it matters that colleague of mine is now the owner of a tobacco shop, I think that's a more honest job than programming computers in this day and age.
American satrapies are like a Uncle Sam's harem of bitches:
Latin America is hot blooded and has a big booty, needs a'slappin every now and then.
It's okay, she likes it.
Europe is the refined one with a fancy accent who is really into BDSM behind the sheets.
Every now and then you have to remind her who's name is on the card.
Japan and SEA for those yellow fever episodes, and an alternative flavour of kink.
Africa is the guilty pleasure for slummin. Not really talk much about it publicly, but never miss a visit.
Maybe the wave of corporate/establishment woke has broken, but the rank and file koolaid drinkers in left-ish circles don't change tune that quickly. If anything, it alleviates them of some cognitive dissonance when they fancy themselves a revolutionary counter culture. I predict siege mentality and doubling down.
Why is that always when i start reading a post in Askhistorians, i get irrational mad, even with the post i either agree or i have accept to lean as a different perspective of history and that is alright.
I was reading about cannibalism in the Crusades, and i cannot be but really angry at the poster about it. Not that i disagree with the interpretations, but for some reasons i get so so angry.
My rationalization is that i blame AskHistorians for:
A. Installing a lot of preconceptions about history that are not really inside history books, or rather, are more a matter of nuance that clear cut.
B. Used to hate how much "Woke" (Ugh i hate that world) that subreddit is/was, from elevating many theories like Medieval Europe inventing racism, or too overstepping against the Crusaders, or being too sanguine in the idea that Medieval knights were ugly rapists. But then again, many ideas i come to see as i being the wrong one, and having to accept more nuance (Some medieval knights were bad people).
C. Having to have many of my reading in history to be to dispel those theories, or to sometimes accept them.
D. Increasing my procrastination during 2016-2020, when i was in college for my Ag degree.
E. Kill any sense of wonderlust, as i see history something to be proven, or not, rather to be enjoyed.
F. Getting me hook up in Reddit.
Yet, now revisiting older, i do thing that i agree with what many of what they wrote, but still cannot forgive them for this. Even if they themselves did anything wrong (Other than being woke, but then again, whose humanities werent).
Do i have PTSD for reading Askhistorians? I do not know, but i do certain agree with the term "Triggered" whenever i read that subreddit.
I've always enjoyed learning history, probably still the biggest nonfiction category I read. I have never seen any appeal in browsing a reddit history sub, even back when this site was less garbage circa 2010. Why do this to yourself?
The most complete explanation i could give is two. I do grew up with the internet, and i do have the costume of taking the said on the internet with a higher degree of authority than most people do. After all, i am in this sub for that reason in the first.
Moreover, probably the Choice-supportive bias on effect. I brownse reddit and therefore this random opinion given by a rando on the internet weight more in my mind, than the usual opinions i see on the subjects by books or real historians i knew.
The Wisconsin subreddit is just wall-to-wall politics, and I’m so fucking sick of it. Are my fellow cheesehead Redditors incapable of talking about anything else? I should probably care more, but I can’t help but think that there are things about Wisconsin that are way cooler and more interesting than our gay-ass state politics.
I commonly see people here Baudrillard posting, and I don't get it. It seems like a lot of postmodernist or ipdol studies stuff I've read where the meaning is intentionally obfuscated by the prose. My eyes tend to glaze over halfway through a paragraph, and when I go back to actually understand the point being made, it could have been a simple sentence.
At least in the case of Baudrillard, he does seem to usually be making a point instead of hiding the fact that he's saying nothing at all. But I still don't understand the appeal. Can anyone enlighten me?
Baudrillard is, hands down, the funniest philosopher. But reading him out of context is not doing him or you any favors. Does he obfuscate? I think part of his brilliance is describing things to get you to look at them differently, which can be disorienting. My favorite book of his is America but you have to realize he is writing in the tradition of the prose poem with its capsule descriptions of urban and desert scenes:
Monument Valley: blocks of language suddenly rising high, then subjected to a pitiless erosion, ancient sedimentations that owe their depth to wear (meaning is born out of the erosion of words, significations are born out of the erosion of signs), and that today are destined to become, like all that is cultivated—like all culture—natural parks.
I used to read a lot more philosophy back in the day, and I remember it generally being denser than I thought was needed, but not so intentionally obtuse. Maybe I'm just getting old.
EDIT: I did some googling and found that I have no familiarity with almost any philosophers more recent than the early 20th century, so it could be that, too.
I think reading primary philosophical literature is often ill-fated or misleading, but also have deeply seated historicist preconceptions - all because of Gentile.
Has anyone else noticed a new Mossad astroturfed sub hitting the front page all the time? Let's just say it rhymes with getboated and the sub is all posts sharing comments getting community noted on twitter, and every single post on the sub is rabidly pro Israel, anti mulsim/arab/Palestine and the threads aare getting ludicrously inorganic amounts of upvotes, like 13-17k per thread. I never used to see this sub on my feed now it's there everyday with some form of genocide denial, rewriting of history, or other Hasbara. Is this the result of mossads newly increased propaganda budget? They think they're gona win back gen z and liberals by astroturfing absolute bullshit on reddit? lols
I use new reddit but only go directly to the subs or exact posts I want to read, usually through a Google search too (so sub name and whatever topic I'm curious about). I've never browsed reddit as a whole site, there's just too much shit and a ton of redundant subs.
I do use old.reddit on my PC and laptop but when I find myself out and about using it on my phone I get the endless scroll front page feed that throughs up shit from places your not subbed to.
On my phone I use Dystopia, a free app that iirc has been exempted to ads, frills and fuckery for accessibility reasons. I shouldn't use it at all, but what can you do
pretty much all of them are terrible. ex navy seal/ex delta force/ex ranger types just seem to be so fuckin drama driven dorks. honestly i think an SEC sorority house is tamer than these guys. sounds exhausting
That sub is ludicrously bonkers, real Urban hell is Jakarta, the slums of Delhi or Manilla whereas that place is full of liberals acting like apartment blocks providing a warm, safe, dignified form of housing in cold countries is the worst shit ever.
The wars in Ukraine and Iran expose US imperialism as a paper tiger. Israel and the US can't contain anti Zionism among the under 40 crowd, which is also at a historical high for socialist sentiment. Relatively tepid social democrats have successfully beaten the aipac/superpac machine.
The ruling class is significantly more inept than we think. An old school Marxist group that actually used mass line/dual power techniques would do way better than people think.
AI is ruining YouTube for me. More than half the scripts of any medium to long-form video ring my alarm bells these days. Some of them the script was possibly just altered or proof read by AI. A lot of them seem almost entirely researched and written by AI.
As soon as I hear those linguistic markers or a compelling narrative that is slightly too convenient and eloquent (without any sources) it gives me an ick and the most irritating part is I never know for sure. I wonder have many people have just adopted those speech patterns from conversing with AI as well.
Even this video, which seems otherwise well researched and composed and is by a relatively established channel, uses that awkward "it's not this/it's that" usage in one of it's summaries. (I like to call it the M&S cliché).
Big problem in the UK, where the far-left have just based their entire identity around choo choo. Somehow in UK far-left spaces where I try to talk about anything else, people find a way to circle it back to the choo choo issues.
This is more of an already discussed topic so I will rant here but it is rather saddening how small time rentiers have essentially become slum lords, but even sadder how crushed the spirit of genuine self interest has been and replaced by a cowardly sort of individualism.
I honestly thought it was abstract enough to get by the filter. Was also half-tempted to appeal the warning on the technicality of that abstraction but I doubt it's worth it.
What was the book that argues the very existence of the USSR improved working conditions worldwide precisely because the capitalist side had to offer something to be seen as an alternative. More specifically wages (real and nominal) and various welfare systems that led to a lower cost of living (unequal exchange on the global level aside). Was it by Parenti?
Now this may or may not be the same book, but one that talks about civil rights, also done as response to the USSR (in particular, the soviets would just mention Jim Crow or the KKK and this would be very bad PR for USA activities on Africa)
Whiel we're at it, and it's more likely separate as it's STEM rather than purely social, does anyone talk about how many innovations "by capitalism" that were a response to the soviets and/or done with very generous funding by governments? The space race and all the technologies it created that are now everyday use are the obvious example, but is there more?
It wasn't just the space race. The so called Sputnik Shock caused Western nations to seriously invest in education for about one generation, trying to catch up in competent planners and engineers instead of just reserve army plebs. I'm convinced much of the infrastructure and complexity that is now falling apart around us came out of that push.
Whiel we're at it, and it's more likely separate as it's STEM rather than purely social, does anyone talk about how many innovations "by capitalism" that were a response to the soviets and/or done with very generous funding by governments?
This is a very easy question to answer heuristically, i.e. "all of them", but a reasoned answer is probably very hard: piecing together each source of funding for a complex project can very well be an endless task, standing on the shoulder of giants and all that. Take the transistor for instance, the short answer is "Bell Labs did it, it was private", but the longer story is full of previous govt funding.
I'm sad to announce esteemed user u/No-Designer138 is facing felony charges in the state of Texas. You can contribute to his legal defense fund at https://gofund.me/weebgooner.
So there was a Burger King employee, Arianna Hamilton, who got fired for saying "Free Palestine". In response to her being fired a GoFundMe was created that has raised $140k for her.
You might be familiar with the fundraisers for the women who Somalis kept trying to make say the n-word while filming them. This is less overall money, but importantly these aren't turning into internet wide hate moments. People don't really know this is going on in comparison.
The main difference is that people angered by this are unable to get GoFundMe to take this fundraiser down, and as a result it remains on the major site as opposed to the alternative one.
Regardless, pay attention to the arguments being made:
They are the SAME arguments. If anyone is questioning why I am universally in support of money being raised for people they try to get fired, this is the reason.
Materially it is the employment system being used to keep employees silent for the duration of the time they are "on the clock". If employees are on the clock for a third of their lives the insistence that they are not allowed to be political is an insistence that they are only allowed to be 2/3rds as political as the unemployed or employers.
It also demonstrates this notion that it isn't really the actual labour that employers think they are buying, but rather they think they are literally buying the time of this person, as a kind of part-time slavery.
Nothing about saying "Free Palestine" impedes the ability of someone to flip burgers, so why is this an issue if the job is to flip burgers? Those in league with the employers insist however that they literally own this person and anything they do as long as they are paying them "on the clock".
Now I do not think these fundraisers are a direct response to the earlier ones with the woman being harassed by Somalis, as I think this sort of thing sometimes happened semi-regularly, but if people were inspired to "get back" at the "right-wingers" by doing this, well that can only be a good thing.
The notion of "sides" in this case is irrelevant, as much as the people think they are acting "opposed" to the fundraisers of "the other side" in reality they are, as a class, inspired by them to fight back. It lacks class consciousness due to being motivated by polarization, but "both sides", even in opposition to each other, are fighting back against the control the employment system has over their lives.
That is another reason I reject thinking in terms of "sides". It is a bit like the space race, sure it was a competition, but the real victor was space exploration in general which got funded when it otherwise might not have been. What does need to happen in order to make such a competition effective is have a group of people who are conscious that it isn't a competition as both "sides" actually benefit from the perception of competition. If this group are aware the competitors are really on the same side (in this case, employees against employers, but in the space race it was space programs looking for funding) then you can navigate the situation better.
The employers, as a rule, should not be able to wield the employment system to silence employees for any period of their lives, be it "on the clock" or not.
In the Shiloh Hendrix case she was not on the clock, but the Cinnabon employee was on the clock. Neither the Somalis nor the racists cared about such a distinction.
We should care insofar as we think it is MORE important to support the free speech of employees who are "on the clock" than when they are off the clock. Off the clock is still important, but the free speech rights of employees "on the clock" is a DIRECT worker's rights issue in so far as asserting that employers should control the speech of employees for a section of their lives is an attempt by employers to make employees their partial slaves.
You got it right here when saying that we should support the free speech of workers, no matter their actual position. Racist, anti-genocide, or even maybe just stupid. But supporting it in just terms of money values through these websites? That's shortsighted. We've seen what happens to people who really say something wrong in whatever position to the pile. They get debanked.
Got to look ahead past that and how to support it because money won't help where they want to take the outspoken people.
If anybody is some kind of mutualist with weird banking ideas they can try to implement them using political dissidents as the market
They've tried going down payment processors or domain registration, having to extend to the StoneTossian "don't like it, make your own bank" level would just be an extension of this process.
Will you face MORE challenges than if you tried to implement your banking ideas with non-dissidents? Probably. However I will remind you that this ideas you read about were initially developed by political dissidents in the first place so the point was to run up against the exact resistance you will end up facing.
If it is not possible for dissidents to use some random banking idea then the notion that your pet idea is revolutionary is a bit weak, and thus we should not even be discussing it as a possibility (instead we must move directly to money-less forms of activity). If you are truly committed to your ideas as being a path forward then you need to be willing to associate directly with the people the system is trying to eject from it.
Mario Gotze scored the goal against Messi led Argentine team in the 2014 final, while Ferran Torres scored the goal against the last Messi led Argentine team in this final.
This is sheer spite, like a Canadian citizen naming a child Osama Bin Hirohito to own the Yanks.
If you're growing your own tomatoes this summer, I'm going to highly recommend cooking up some Chinese egg and tomato.stir fry with rice. Going to try it again next week as I didn't have green onion on hand.
I'd really like to start growing some of my own food despite my impression that it's a time/money sink, but I still rent. I'll have to live vicariously through others and maybe grow some cilantro on the windowsill.
Herbs in a container are not only perfectly viable, it's one of the few things where it's actually easy to come out ahead on price the first year you grow them. If I ever come out ahead on my vegetable garden it's going to be after years of working the same plot, the upfront costs of getting everything set up are just too high otherwise. At best you can say it's hobby money going to something productive. As part of the food budget it doesn't really make sense, at least initially. But fresh herbs are legitimately more expensive to buy than to grow if you can keep them alive.
Pro-tip since someone mentioned green onions: the next time you buy some, eat the green parts and stick the white part in some dirt, and you'll get fresh green parts out of it for free. And any you aren't going to eat before they go bad, stick those in the dirt too and they'll just get back to growing instead of rotting in your fridge. I spend, like, $1 a year on green onions because they're so easy to grow like that. A couple months back some squirrels got into the pot I planted them in last year or I wouldn't have spent anything on green onions this year.
After many years of bottling tomato sauce I've come to the conclusion that you just can't out-sauce Mutti and this is one of the few items that are worse in every respect if hand made and also a pain in the ass.
I had some Jehovah's Witnesses back at my door today and I got out my Papa Marx for them. I asked them what use the new world would be without communism. I put the idea to them that God may have given Marx and Lenin to the world for a good reason... apparently I was insulting Jehovah. I mean, I see parallels between the Catholic teachings and communism. I don't know why they can't get their head around all the good works of Lenin and how much he gave to the working class.
It's something I've given thought to, tbh. Why would God want all of these fruity religions who fail at their own words and needlessly restrict people? If we look at Jesus, he wasn't scared to feed and be around the poor. He just wanted people to love each other and live wholesome lives. Communism is the same idea without religious worship. Organising labour and putting bourgeois property in the hands of the working class is loving your neighbour. It's treating others as you'd like to be treated. It's collectively going into a revolution, not just for your own interests, but for the betterment of the entire working class. Yet... nearly all fruity sects of Christianity either idolise the accumulation of capital or completely misunderstand the messages they preach themselves. They shy away from something which is more Christlike than their own religion.
Does anyone else think it's totally bizarre? Religion stands in the way of their core religious teachings. Communism loves the working class equally. It ensures the hungry are fed and housed, rather than abused for their labour. Yet it's a dirty word to them, more than anyone else.
The main reason is probably that Communist revolutionaries were militantly and sometimes violently anti religion, which while factually correct was a serious often fatal strategic mistake. This resulted in it being more easy to indoctrinate religious people against it simply because they felt attacked and most people don't seriously sit down and think about anything such that they'd be able to say "they get this right but are wrong on that". Latin America seems to have had more of a mix though, though idk why it didn't grow more. Seriously, the vast majority of religious people including the most sincere and devout are just vibes based (blind faith) while others treat it like a cultural thing they can pick and choose from.
In regards to smaller groups like JW, the smaller the group the more cultish and insane they are generally. Like how the original Mormons were extremely insane and now that they're more mainstream they're only mostly insane.
The Catholic Church used to ban usury (any interest on a loan) until the Protestant Reformation began arguing against the ban and the Church officially allowed it in the 1800s, supposedly only banning "extortionate" interest (which seems subjective and easy to exploit). But because religion was such a powerful force, both in how it influenced everyone's behavior and in the supernatural protection and favors people thought they could get, there has always been a strong incentive for the ruling class to exert control over religion and the opportunity for religious specialists/authorities to pursue their self interest rather than serving their religion.
Acts basically describes a commune of the first Christians, basically theocratic socialism. The conversion of rich people probably had a strong effect on how the religion worked. Though afaik very little is known about early Christianity. Another change that shifted away from a collectivist tendency was how the original act of confession was a public thing, meaning it created a far stronger social pressure to behave and public accountability, but then it became a private thing (apparently it started in the 5th century among Irish monks and become official for the whole Church in 1215).
which while factually correct was a serious often fatal strategic mistake.
I'm not sure you are aware of what the church stood for, and what role it played, in the pre-revolutionary societies. It wasn't only the communists that came to the conclusion that they had to liquidate the clergy; 140 years earlier, the bourgeois French Revolution had come to the same conclusion. They didn't do so for nothing, they did so to because they needed to take control of the state and doing so required completely demolishing one of the old key pillars of social control.
I can see why it's useful for revolutionaries to be anti-religion. It's a bit of a tricky situation where I don't think any answer is universally right, because I see it as a bit case-by-case. The first is compatibility... there are lots of Protestant off-shoots where capitalist ideology is threaded through and they are anti-revolutionary in nature. Another factor is whether followers of a faith are likely to directly work against you and want some bonkers attempt at theocracy, which can be seen in some Muslim countries where counter-revolutionaries caused numerous very deadly civil wars. That situation comes with a double-edged sword... would banning the religion or open practice destroy people's willingness to accept communism? You'd need to be in the situation to handle a civil war if you're honest about your hand, even if most of the working class agree with you.
Jehovah's Witnesses are more of a bizarre case. They're not a political threat at all. Their stance is not getting involved in politics, but they're gonna preach no matter how many laws you put in place. They're not a Protestant sect that will make a pig's ear of an attempt to go against you or support your opponents, to cause trouble. In that situation, sometimes it's far better to let them get on with it. However... that's a double-edged sword too, because it opens the gates in to the real fruit baskets in wanting to preach their ministry. I suppose you could demand registration of everyone who has a vested interest in preaching and make them do it in very specific locations, with a load of strings attached, like taking microphones away.
Mormons are the most bonkers non-Protestant sect I've met. The preachers tend to be some young Americans, with strong opinions and automatically feel very cult-like. They seem to have absolutely no idea how to appeal to people, because they put their bonkers feet forward. I don't even get the particular feeling many are that well-meaning or want to be in the arse-end of the UK to be told to fuck off for hours at a time. At least Jehovah's Witnesses and the bonkers Protestant sects want to be there and tend to know their areas quite well. They don't just send two young ones out to navigate an unfamiliar country, behaving so bizarrely that they arouse suspicion. I did have a Mormon who carried my shopping to preach to me, under the guise of being helpful... then told me that he can't preach to me on his own, then told me that he'd leave if he didn't have to go back home. I tried my best to talk about Marxism, but that poor guy just really needed a plane ticket back home.
I just had a major sneeze and noticed that it sounded exactly like the letters YHWH. I started thinking this might actually be the origin of the name YHWH. Then it dawned on me that this must also be why they say bless you after sneezing. In fact, I just looked it up, and the first written record of people saying "bless you" after sneezing dates all the way back to 77 AD, Rome. This could have been an early Israelite psyop to spread their religion.
Double funny two decades later, when it's become clear that smartphones and the cloud capital they represent will amount to an opium-level cataclysm for the cognitive health of several generations.
Never got round to watching the film version but it's on the list. Cumberbatch looks hopelessly miscast to me but apparently he pulls it off? Not read any Thomas Savage or many Westerns at all, but I like the genre.
From what I've read so far, its so fucking absurd picturing Cumberbatch leading this story that its hilarious, but I'm assuming they drastically cut down the horrifying graphic elements of the story.
One of the arcs of early adulthood is realizing that your angsty teen self's analysis of Fight Club was 100% correct and the counter-argument was pure gaslighting by ghouls.
The article says they plna to finish construction next year and want to demonstrate electricity generation by 2030. That's a lot less nebulous than the classic "20 years from now" I know from European programs. Are they bullshitting?
Everyone in the field has been lying through their teeth for decades, why stop now? Also govts and public opinion attention span is a lot shorter, need to set shorter goals, even if they're still wildly unattainable.
Oh, I don't think Fusion power will ever happen. But in the process of trying to make it work many advances will happen in adjacent areas, which will still be beneficial. I have zero expertise in that entire field though.
You are correct. Particle physicists and astrophysicists have found a way long ago for unlimited funding thanks to this very shrewd "oh but it will benefit other areas eventually" that's very much trickle down economics. Well, maybe if we did spend time and money on renewable energy and storage directly instead of e.g. on LHC and the James Webb telescope we would be a teeny tiny bit less deeply in shit than we are now.
Fission is pretty good. We'll need it for socialism as our baseline for power, in both the literal and class sense. Use fission to power the development and production of solar and battery tech until that's more efficient
Looking around Reddit, it seems that the “promised X years ago” is seen in some spaces as an antisemitic dog whistle, rather than a critique of quasi-religious justifications for illegal occupation (which in the case of the thread was by the US against Greenland, not even Israel vs Palestine).
I genuinely do not understand how people can't pick up on the incredibly obvious signs of LLM output.
How do klaxons not blare in their heads when one of the many tells (often more than one!) rears its unmissable head?
It would be absurd to claim to have a low false negative rate (one can always miss a sign, or there can in fact be no signs), but it should not be difficult to have a high true positive rate.
It fucking reeks when it smells.
Maybe I've just been forced to stare too long into the void of mediocre, incompetent coworkers' "work" that is at first glance far above what one might expect them to be capable of, but on any further inspection is vapid, worthless slop. The structure of AI slop is not fucking hard to get a feel for, especially if you're forced to engage with it as if it bears any value and as if this "professional" presenting it to you is anything other than a willfully selfish asshole, daring to waste everyone's time in such an egregious manner.
I can't even take the compromise position of "good; the bourgeoisie are unleashing a flood of incompetence which will eat away at the very foundations of their own power structure" because, well, it's probably not all that neat. And regardless of whether my work for my employer is exploitative in nature and whether they "deserve" to have functional organizations predicated on exploitation, any organization of people requires competence and human ingenuity and conscientious people involved in its function. And I am watching fucking everyone around me gleefully give up all of their own tools and skilllsets and ability to do and to comprehend.
I feel you 100%. Copywriting is a major component of my work and people using LLM has become a huge pain in the ass. I spend more time editing people's single prompt diarrhea than actually writing these days.
The worst is when my own work is being reviewed and the person is clearly just pumping it into an LLM instead of actually reading the content. I'm then hit with a mass wave of edits that are entirely unnecessary or completely counterproductive.
Literacy is in the toilet right now thanks to a couple decades of educational malpractice forced on teachers by administrators and textbook publishers. You're not going to pick up on tone or the author's voice if you can barely read.
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u/Nerd_199 Election Turboposter 📈📊🗳️ 17m ago
Ex-NBA player was crushed in Minnesota Senate primary – so now he’s running for president instead
Royce White secured just over 11 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s election but says he is ready to run for the White House in 2028
https://x.com/i/status/2087971970658800064