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Cake day: January 12th, 2025

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  • Sure they have important differences. At the same time however, it is the height of tone-deaf arrogance to expect people to vote for their own genocidal oppressors.

    Kamala likely lost Michigan due to her support for Israeli Apartheid and genocide. The Muslim population there quite understandably didn’t want to vote for her. You can’t really come to a group of people and say, “yes, we admit that we’re supporting a genocide of your people, but we need you to still vote for us for the good things we actually will do. We’re going to keep committing genocide against you, but we need you to vote for us for the sake of democracy.”

    Trump and Kamala were largely indistinguishable on the Gaza issue. Trump is just a lot ruder about it. Yet, in the months following the election, we’ve seen countless gloating by centrist Democrats openly celebrating further violence by the Israelis, gleefully mocking Palestinians and their supporters, saying that this wouldn’t have happened if Kamala won. Now we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Biden, Kamala, and Trump all shared the same policy towards Israel - full and unconditional support with no limits or red lines whatsoever. Gaza was getting wiped off the map no matter who was elected. Notably, despite being still active in politics, to this day, neither Kamala nor Biden have spoken a single word publicly against the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. Even though they’re out of power and have nothing to lose by speaking out, they still fully support the actions of the Israeli government.

    Are there still good reasons to have supported Kamala? Sure. But I also don’t expect anyone whose people are being genocided to vote for those other reasons. If you’re not willing to prevent a people from being literally murdered, then you can’t come groveling to those people, asking for their votes. If you don’t care about someone’s life, why should they care about your democracy? This is basic Maslow’s hierarchy of needs shit. People don’t have the luxury of worrying about abstract goods like democracy when their basic material survival is threatened.


  • Allegation: the DNC exhibited overt favoritism in the primary process to ensure Hillary won the primary.

    Your response: but Hillary won the primary, therefore she won the primary!

    No one is disputing that she won the primary. The problem was the DNC put their thumb on the scale through the entire process. Hillary was the presumptive nominee from the beginning. People voting for Bernie on day one had to vote against headlines that said, “Hillary is already 1/3 of the way to getting the nomination!” The DNC also collaborated very closely with the Hillary campaign, and they did not do so with Bernie’s campaign. They even went so far as feeding her debate questions ahead of time.

    Yes, obviously Hillary actually won the primary even without the superdelegates. Any brain-dead moron can consult wikipedia and see that. There’s no need to parrot the obvious. But you’re completely missing the core of the issue - that Hillary only won the majority of non-superdelegates and only won the primary popular vote because the DNC threw the weight of the entire party behind her nomination at the exclusion of all other candidates.








  • There any sense on what would be good to stock up on now? When I’ve searched this, the advice is usually pretty worthless. Just advice indistinguishable from general prepper stuff. I’ve seen recommendations to stock up on things like flour, things that the US produces domestically in abundance. But some necessities are going to be more vulnerable to disruptions in shipments from China than others.

    Anyone find a good guide or have a sense of what basic household necessities are going to be most vulnerable to disruption of trade with China? I’m not concerned with things like consumer electronics right now, those are luxuries. I’m talking basic food and household staples. I don’t need the standard prepper list that’s meant to prepare you for grave natural disasters. What’s really needed is an analysis of precisely what necessities are most likely to be interrupted by this.

    Has anyone seen such a list, or have a sense for what necessities are most vulnerable here?


  • Worse. This is really a “don’t negotiate with terrorists” situation. Trump could have gone to the Chinese, and any other country, and said, “look, this isn’t working. We need to renegotiate our trade deals.” Public opinion has soured enough on free trade that Trump likely could get some legitimate tariff package or set of new trade deals through. The public generally likes the idea of not trading so much with China. The problem is Trump is trying to do this via decree and blackmail. He thinks that by cutting off trade overnight, he can coerce China into giving the US favorable terms.

    But all this shows is that the US is an unreliable partner that is willing to back on its word at any moment. Nations can renegotiate trade deals. That isn’t some unprecedented violation of international norms. But it’s common sense to do these things slowly, giving both nations time to adapt their economies to the new conditions. You can’t just cut this level of trade off cold turkey without causing a global depression.





  • I think we shouldn’t even have legal names anymore. Nor legal sex/gender. Why does the government even need to keep track of my name at all? Maybe we just have a number tied to our biometric data. Maybe our profile is just defined facial scans, iris scans, thumb scans, and, for ultimate proof, our DNA profile. The state has a profile number on you that ties you to your biometrics. That sounds scary, but the government already has a profile on you if you have any kind of state-issued ID. And states are already collecting biometric data on their citizens.

    We could simply tie all state business to an ID number and biometric data profile. When doing a transaction with some other party, the same biometrics could be used to prove your ID. Buying beer at the store? You hand the cashier a card that has your photo and ID number on it. They can type that number in their computer, query a state database, and return your age. Opening a bank account? Prove your ID with ID card and at least two forms of biometric scan. Signing up for a mortgage? Prove your identity with a DNA test.

    We don’t even need legal names. Or legal genders. Let’s just do everything with biometric data, photo IDs, and other methods devoid of all the cultural baggage. Let people call themselves whatever they want. Let others choose how to honor that choice.

    You want to change your gender? Have at it, the state doesn’t care about your sex or gender at all. It doesn’t even keep track of it. Give your kid a stupid name? At any time, they can start telling their friends to call them by a different one And that new name will instantly have all the legal power as the one their parents gave them - none whatsoever. The state will no longer tell us what our names are. Our words and character will do that instead.




  • Honestly, at this point, I’m on board with just banning social media algorithms entirely. No more personalized feeds. You can have a website that publishes whatever you want, but you can’t tailor individual feeds to individual people. People can replace their “feed” with what the original internet was meant to be - visiting a series of websites. Want to read nothing but right wing blogs? Fine. You can spend all day navigating to different URLs for them. But no more spoon feeding individually personalized content to people.

    It turns out that method of content delivery is just a very dangerous and damaging technology that really fucks with the workings of the human mind. If you tell AI to build an ideal feed model for a person, it builds a nightmare that traps human beings in skinner boxes.

    We can ban these algorithms. We don’t have to continue to tolerate their existence. And in the grand scheme of history, it would be no different than a thousand other things that we discovered, at first thought was a panacea, but eventually decided the benefits weren’t worth the costs. Asbestos is a fantastic fireproof insulator, but we willingly let those benefits go in lieu of its severe respiratory effects. DDT is an incredible pest killer and insecticide, but it also was rendering entire species of birds extinct. Targeted, individually tailored social media algorithms create entertainment feeds that can entertain us to such degrees that the kings of old would lament their jesters in comparison. But what these algorithms are doing to us, what they are doing to our society? On political polarization? The effects they are having not just on children, but of people of all ages? We as a society need to recognize that the benefits just aren’t worth the costs. We are tearing our civilization apart for the sake of cheap entertainment.

    We need to ban targeted social media feeds. We have faced technologies like this before. We have made the choice before to give up the benefits of these things for the sake of the greater good. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. It is time we ban targeted social media feeds.