We literally know now that anti-trans legislation was pushed by a pedophile ring to allow a pedophile ring to serve a pedophile ring’s interests, and legislators have decided the best course of action is to keep doing what the pedophile ring wants.

Whenever I see people suggest that 'X has been moving further left for years', I want to sit them down and explain the difference between social politics and economic politics. Western Democracies have moved to the left, but only socially. Their economics have shifted to the right.

There is a reason that politics is increasingly polarized: the status quo does not work. Minorities have been correctly shouting this for decades, it's simply taken a while to affect the majority.

I am so tired of watching conservative governments claim to be 'fiscally responsible', overspend, then cut funding for public goods. It is such an obvious & repeated pattern that it's worn away any patience I have for those who support them. It's been happening for decades, wake the fuck up.

I've also seen fascism described as "when one-third of a population kills another third while the last third watches." It should be no surprise that Trump and his ilk have a floor of ~30%; whether they are fools, racists, or easily seduced by fascist 'solutions', they are deplorable all the same.

I've seen fascism described as "the aestheticization of politics", and I believe that's on full display here. These are not serious people; their focus is pageantry, not leadership. The most tragic part is that a portion of Americans cannot tell the difference.

Make America Healthy Again.

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." –Justice Louis Brandeis Words spoken many years ago that are just as relevant today. We must continue the fight to get big money out of politics.

Perhaps it's not important that the curtains were blue; however, it likely is important that they were not covered in polka-dots.

Living under capitalism is like being forced to play a board game you dislike where the rules are boring, unfair and nonsensical but which the winners, who started with an advantage, keep explaining are excellent, and if you try improve the game you’re “cheating” but if you stop playing you’ll die

First off, this is simply a blatant lie. The more disturbing thing to people who know it's a lie is the brazen and almost joyful way it's told. How does someone just lie like that?

Not blowing a gasket, feeling vindicated, because what Kotick’s involvement in the Epstein files has done is demonstrate exactly how fucking right I’ve been for ten years. Oh I’m absolutely fucking disgusted, but now it’s unequivocally clear as fucking day. It was always, *always* about predation.

You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs) Good tech. Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales) Bad tech.

Placing a layer of algorithmic recommendation on speech does not make speech less free, but it does pervert it. Algorithmic mediation turns speech into a resource extracted from human behavior. Platforms do not value speech because it is protected, they value the service it provides them.

It's always fascinating watching watching the Right's propaganda apparatus kick into gear. The murder of a man legally carrying a weapon is now being justified because *checks notes* "only criminals carry guns". Any reasonable person will see that this is not only false, but blatantly hypocritical.

I told my friends years ago that Trump winning re-election would see the rise of a fascist US. Fast forward and we now have masked secret police executing people in the streets and throwing folks into concentration camps. Americans did not deal with the rot, and the fascism has taken root.

Isn't it weird that the US President is behaving as one would expect a Russian pawn to behave? While some will try to rationalize his actions as somehow being good for the US, make no mistake: disrupting US soft power and destabilizing NATO are Putin's goals.

If history cares enough to look back at the nerdzis’ obsessive hatred of Sweet Baby, history will be utterly baffled by such an embarrassing grudge. It might be the stupidest of all their manufactured outrages, one of the most clear cut examples of them getting mad at their own imaginations.

Synopsis: You need to kick more people out. You will actually have a larger base of customers/attendees if you kick more people out. You will make more money. I am dead serious.

I've long disagreed with Plato's political ideals; however, I have grown more sympathetic to his perspective over time. We are living through a turbulent political climate, as he did, and I can understand his disdain for the masses who, by their own ignorance, usher in further destruction.

I hope Canadians are prepared to fight against the US in the coming years. While it is easy to dismiss the president's rhetoric as hyperbolic, or hoping these ideas will perish with him, remember that there is an entire political apparatus that is not only enabling him, but is aligned with him.

Americans and the world are getting a crash course on neo-liberalism's inability to resist fascism. The president has been committing atrocities with impunity for months, and the attacks on Venezuela should not be surprising. These crimes will continue until the American people put a stop to it.

“The billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30-an-hour that their enemies are those earning $20-an-hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long, broken system.” -Zohran Mamdani

Tech platforms censor words, not meaning. It’s frighteningly insidious. This kind of censorship explicitly empowers bad actors by robbing their critics of the language to criticize. Euphemisms are often the domain of fascists and predators. It’s a domain that online media wants to gate us inside.

Learning about AI bros going at each other's throats over "prompt theft", and it's *delightful*. My initial thought was how funny it is to see no honor among thieves in real time, but the more I thought about it, they really do give the whole game away. There is no community, it's a *competition*.

This is so messed up because sentiments started turning against immigrants during covid, when they were doing jobs no one else would do (for the wages offered, of course). But folks misattribute their anger; they should be frustrated with the corpos (and politicians on corpo money).

Taking notes while playing games is underrated Not even just for story stuff. I’ve even done this for gameplay stuff in fighting games and it leveled up my play drastically

As mentioned in an earlier post, Musk's toy LLM has clearly been instructed to be as obsequious as possible when questioned about him. However, while these are certainly amusing anecdotes, they betray what I said earlier: this tech cannot be trusted because its owners ultimately control it.

It's important for everyone to know that Elon Musk's LLM is engaging in Holocaust denial. I'll also add that all of the arguments here (about architectural plans and gas residue left in materials on site) were refuted decisively in the 1990s. There is *nothing* here but 30 year old falsehoods.

The point of the technology isn't to make anything, it's to not pay anyone who does.

I don't resent poor people who use food stamps to buy another soft drink. I resent rich people who take away the funds for food stamps to buy another yacht.

for them, the deal is that in exchange for aid, they're owed a proper performance of poverty and humility that reinforces their superior position in the social hierarchy, and anything as small a preferring a condiment above one's station is an unacceptable act of defiance

I've built a socioeconomic system that depends on everyone to do useful work and act ethically except the people at the top, who get unimaginable rewards for being antisocial frauds and criminals. And I think it will stand the test of time

When I try to explain to folks why the game is so rigged, this is an excellent demonstration. The executives who made decisions on baseless assumptions not only got paid substantially but are insulated from the consequences of their actions.

Your ability to eat should not depend on your productivity Your ability to get healthcare should not depend on your productivity Your ability to get housing should not depend on your productivity Saying “be more productive!” To those who are struggling devalues human life. It aids fascism.

An understated reason figures like Newsom are so dangerous is because what really advances the most violently reactionary parts of the American state aren't just the openly far-right rulers, it's their successors entrenching what they did. Newsom types aren't an end to fascism but its completion. 🧵

It sure is good that Mario Kart World came out before getting upstaged months later by Kirby Air Riders. Masterful play on Nintendo's part - they get folks comfortable with an increased price point and then release an even better game in half a year.

Makes sense. Xbox spent a lot of money on acquisitions, and Microsoft expects them to make that back quickly (with interest). 30% is crazy, but it's important to remember: Capitalists don't want some of the money - they want ALL of the money.

IMO promising people hope & change & then bailing out bank donors as they foreclosed on 10 million families was the defining political moment that birthed this era & IMO liberals/Dems still refusing to reckon with this & discard the politics that led to it is part of why this descent persists. 🧵

I'm going to use the zombie analogy again: If you want us to survive the apocalypse - 1) we can't let people in the safe house who WANT to open the door to the zombies 2) the person who arbitrarily says we need to give up some of us to save the others also can't stay in the safehouse.

One thing I've told folks is that the current president's actions only make sense if he is: A) an impossibly lucky imbecile or B) a Russian tool who, while given a leash, is tasked with unseating US hegemony.

Here's the part that really sticks in my craw: of all the people who voted for Brexit and now see that as the wrong choice, how many do you think took a moment to reflect on which information sources they should trust moving forward?

The unfortunate reality is that many of the so-called 'left-wing' parties across the world are neo-liberals and thus are not actually interested in left-wing politics. They will abandon any group before turning on their owners. They serve capital, but they do so with a rainbow varnish.

I think one of the biggest cleavages in our society that no one talks about is the division between those that think powerful people must be held to a higher standard than non-powerful people and those who think powerful people should be flattered and sucked up to.

Universal masking, which we tried for two hot seconds in America before people started throwing tantrums & posting up with their guns, is about the same kind of understanding ourselves as a collective we would actually need to counter fascism. You care about the community so you set a group norm.

"Rules for thee, not for me!" No reasonable person should accept or support such blatant hypocrisy.

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry

Something that is bewildering to many is how fascists are seemingly immune to being labelled as hypocritical. However, it's important to realize that fascists simply do not care. To them, words are merely tools; meaning is irrelevant - only power matters.

To make this easier, I've compiled all the performers into an image:

So obviously we don't let any of the people who performed on the Riyadh Comedy Festival forget that we know. They don't just get to go back to fame now they have infamy.