This is why I only hire Shelly de Killer.

No ban

Ban

When the ICC next probes war crimes claims against the chief sexual misconduct prosecutor:

Good. Fuck Chegg. Let cheating, plagiarizing dipshits have the dubious AI slop.

I wrote them a follow-up thanking them and giving them some tips on buying a bike rack – the kinds, the pros and cons, and what use cases they’re best-suited for.

I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs’ absolute credit, they don’t push new users toward any of those, though.

I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there’s a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in ‘all’).

Yeah, I phrased that poorly; I should’ve said “will be brushed off”. The person who responded CC’d multiple people, so I can tell they weren’t just placating.

CosmicRaySort.

The deeply, deeply unfortunate parts of intelligence tests to vote are two-fold:

• The first is that corrupt politicians use them as a cudgel to keep “the wrong people” from voting. This was seen during the US’ Jim Crow era, where southern states had intelligence tests to vote. These were intentionally confusing, and – as intended – black voters would be turned away for ridiculous, ad hoc nonsense. Moreover, any degree of intelligence test we can come up with today will have some degree of bias to it. Even clinical intelligence tests which are written and administered by expert neuropsychologists to be as unbiased as possible show some level of cultural bias.
• The second is that it’s ultimately not fair to refuse someone a say in how their life is run. Literally every aspect of our lives is political, and to not give the poorly educated or the intellectually disabled a say in that is simply not conducive to a fair society. It can even further entrench uneducation by removing these people from a process which can give them the right to an education or to special needs protections within that education.

The problem I feel the DNC needs to own up to is that ultimately, it doesn’t give the uneducated voters whose lives are worse off than they used to be a target to go after. They’re (thankfully) not explicitly bigoted like the Republican Party blaming it on “the other”, but they’re also not speaking truth to power like they should be; platforming on radical, populist change; and aggressively blaming the real sources of the average American’s problems. It’s also hugely Republican stonewalling that prevents them from taking the fight to these powerful institutions, but we saw Harris for instance start courting voters by taking a pro-fracking stance, backing off of criticisms of corporate America (who most people fucking hate for some reason or another at this point), cozying up to extremely unpopular politicians like Liz Cheney, and backing off of the sort of populist rhetoric that wins votes in this climate.

Republicans are even more favorable to the institutions that ruin American lives than the Democrats are and are orders of magnitude worse than Democrats, but they give the average person something to divert their frustration toward. Whereas Democrats say “we have some policies to help somewhat improve your lives” while never giving them something to be angry at. And to be clear, the average American has a good goddamn reason to be angry. They’re nauseatingly wrong to direct it to the places Trump wants them to and are creating their own and others’ oppression, but their poor circumstances broadly are caused by systems which the typical “moderate”, neoliberal Democrat kowtows to.

What we need to do is get out there as grassroots advocates and educate them not just about the issues, but about how they’ve been lied to by Republicans and (centrist) Democrats alike to work against their own interests. Some of them are truly beyond saving, but for the rest of them, we need to meet them where they’re at, affirm their right to be angry and show them we are too, and unify. It’ll be damn hard, but fascists win because they divide and conquer. Americans need a target, and instead of the ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities, there’s an even better minority for them: the rich elite.

For those reading this, I have since re-opened the community. This post will remain locked, as I want zero harassment toward pinkdrunkenelephants.

Hence “4+”, because I agree with you wholeheartedly.

When I told people that literally every aspect of life will be worse under Trump, I absolutely meant it. Republican poison will seep into literally every aspect of our lives. And this is exactly what I mean when I say “everything is political” to those who only single out a handful of hot-button issues as “political”.

With the rise of fascism in the US, just keep “everything is political” in the back of your mind for the next 4+ years, and if you don’t believe it by then, I don’t know what to tell you.

When saying “Israel shouldn’t commit genocide” is how you define “SJW shit” (stuck in 2014 with that terminology?), nobody here will take you seriously. (Before you answer that, by the way, understand this community has zero tolerance for genocide denial.)

Edit: maybe I phrased my comment poorly? I’m pointing out that they label people who acknowledge Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinians as “SJWs” – to show you how low their bar for “SJW” is.

There literally is, though. Trump got nearly the same level of votes as in 2020, but Harris got over 10 million fewer votes than Biden. That’s objectively decreased turnout.

Happy to help.

Are you admitting you can’t name even one?

This is so transparently projecting from the fact that you can’t answer by naming a single policy or regulation, which is pretty sad. Go ahead. The NYT listed 100 of them; it should be easy to find at least one. And you’re in a Solarpunk community to boot, so I’m sure you care enough about the environment that you keep up with this news, right? You’re not just concern trolling about an issue you don’t actually keep up with to get in a shallow “own” against the Biden administration and then scrambling to save face when it’s pointed out you don’t know shit about fuck, right?

Which one(s)? Go ahead. Tell me; this should be easy for you, because I know you actually care about this and aren’t just commenting for the rubles.

Edit: wait, what do you mean “no idea”? The Wikipedia article is full of regulations Biden verifiably put back into place which Trump did away with.

Which specific regulations did he not put back which you’re concerned about? I couldn’t in good faith say “all of them” because there’s no head-to-head comparison, so I hedged with “quite a few”. But I’m sure you know them by heart, because I know you’re just so, so concerned about the issues. Fucking clown.