Oh, neat! So it’s like a website equivalent to those old Vsauce DONG videos

Is one of them RFK’s brain worm?

Relevant

As someone who doesn’t know river lingo, can you translate this?

I’m doing my part! o7

Rent free

I enjoyed the trigonometry unit in my highschool geometry class, but that’s because it was mostly proofs, and those were just philosophy about triangles.

As a colorblind person, this new color palette is so much fucking worse

I’m gonna quote a passage from a play called The Fever, which is a really great explanation of the concept:

Then I turned back to an earlier section, and I came to a phrase that I’d heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on “commodity fetishism,” “the fetishism of commodities.” I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change.

His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, “Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds.” People say that about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things—one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money—as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat’s price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. “I like this coat,” we say, “It’s not expensive,” as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, “I like the pictures in this magazine.”

A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history—the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all these people—the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer—who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.

For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn’t see it anymore.

So Fetishism, in this context, is referring to the anthropological concept of a fetish, which is a mundane object which has a spirit living within it.

So when commodities are fetishized, we see it as having some immutable, Inherent, value. When we do this, the commodity is, metaphorically possessed by the spirit of this supposed inherent value.

But what we ignore when we fetishize commodities like this, is the fact that the value of a given commodity isn’t inherent. It is actually the product of a web of social relationships between all of the people who helped make it. And those relationships are what makes the commodity have value.

There are definitely left wing, collective, community focused prepping folks. They’re largely anarchists, I’ve noticed. But that’s way fucking better than some dipshit chud LARPer thinking he’s gonna be a fucking warlord.

You’re a fucking idiot. Do you know anything about the history of the region? I do not condone the killing of civilians, but the people of Gaza are in effectively an open air concentration camp. If you back an animal into a corner, you shouldn’t be surprised when it bites you.

The violence of the oppressed can not be compared to the violence of the oppressor. If you punch me in the face unprovoked, that’s entirely different from me punching you back in self defense.

The people of Israel are settlers who, by and large, have not lived their whole lives there. Benjamin netanyau grew up in Philadelphia for fuck’s sake. Those people largely chose to bring their children into a war zone. They could just as easily have left. The Palestinians who’s land is being actively stolen from them have no where else to go!

The Israeli government has the choice to end this conflict. They could grant Palestinians equal rights, end settlement in the West Bank, provide Palestinians a right of return, and formulate a long-standing peace plan tomorrow.

They choose to not make progress towards any of those things though. They choose to continue treating Palestinians like cattle to be caged and slaughtered. As far as I’m concerned, any fresh perpetrated by Hamas is a direct result of Israeli policy.

Eat shit. You’re a genocide denier, plain and simple.

One of these cultures has normalised vegan and vegetarianism for centuries, the other is trying to wean a meat-obsessed population

As someone who works in a grocery store, the worst fucking people are the ones who go up to the deli counter and yell at the clerks, demanding the "bloodiest* roast beef they’ve got. That or the spiciest turkey, or whatever.

Dudes who’s entire sense of self is invested in eating meat. Easily the most annoying kind of guy I encounter in my daily life.

Lol. Lmao, even

1. The Queer liberation movement has long been spearheaded by communists. Harry Hay, Sylvia Rivera, Rudolf Klimmer, and many others, were all communists who, in some form or another pushed forward the cause of queer liberation.

2. On the whole, Socialist states in the 20th century were no better or worse on queer issues than any liberal democracy. We were treated like shit pretty much everywhere. They were not special in this regard.

3. A notable exception was East Germany, which, though not without flaws, had a far better queer rights track record than its Western capitalist counterpart:

The HIB (Homosexuelle Interessengemeinschaft Berlin) was established in 1973 with the belief that ‘homosexual emancipation is part of the success of socialism’.

4. Modern ML states like Cuba have made immense strides in queer rights in the modern day, and progress in, for instance, China is slow but steady.

The USA did not kidnap those kids. They were typically orphans as a result of the wars but hey don’t ket nuance get in the way.

So if I shoot at random people on the street, and kill you, and decide your baby is cute and I want it. It’s not kidnapping, because that was just an orphan bro, that baby’s parents were dead.

Nah, if country A precipitates a war on Country B, people die, and then you started adopting their orphaned children out, back to County A, and not within their county of origin… That feels an awful lot like kidnapping. In fact, it feels an awful lot like the definition of genocide

I’m gonna put on my political scientist hat, and point out that almost every political party on this planet enforces internal discipline in a multitilude of ways, a handful of which have been mentioned in this discussion thread already.

The idea that parties are these big tents where you can’t possibly enforce any kind of internal discipline is both a uniquely America-brained take, and also not entirely true.

Like, there are literally people called “Party Whips” who’s job it is to pressure the party members vote along party lines.

Doesn’t matter, tbh. It shouldn’t be there in the first place

Cool! Now if only it would scrap the shitty DRM