I agree completely. Though I personally practice harm reduction at the ballot box, I don’t believe that brow-beating people who express a reluctance to vote for a lesser evil into practicing harm reduction is an effective means of garnering their vote. Though it’s easy to become frustrated with non-voters or third-party voters and place the blame on them for fascism taking over, the responsibility is really spread across the whole population, and most importantly our electeds and party officials who have consistently failed to present a positive and opposing narrative to the fascists.

Woke sharia putting in the work.

So we’re just going to hash this out every single day for the next 2 years, huh?

Edit: I do find it interesting how many replies to this comment are vague enough that you can’t determine which side of this argument they’re on, but I guess I did start it myself.

You’re just projecting your insecurity about the fact that you do nothing but sit in a dark room performing activism through edgy forum posting.

This sort of randomness seems more like the text produced by a markov chain than a modern LLM.

And here I again wonder where your from to have such a mindset

Why does it matter?

These people aren’t politicians…

That does not make them a purely objective and neutral third party, particularly when they are funded/employed by a state.

You’ve not seen Dutch news. They don’t talk about hate speech as an equally valid option to our constitution the way that you’d expect with the current voting patterns and government composition if your statement were true.

I presented two different examples of how they can be biased; you have ruled out the latter and not the former. I don’t even need to have seen Dutch news because you have actually expressed their percieved bias yourself, though you don’t realize it. Supporting the validity of the constitution of their state government is a bias, regardless of whether or not you believe that to be a good thing. This is the status quo bias I mentioned.

I think you perceive the word bias to have a negative connotation, but it is actually a neutral term. A bias in favor of human rights, for example, is IMO a good thing.

You can be completely factual and still biased by the language you use and what you choose to focus on. Publicly-funded media is great and all, but that’s because its bias is obvious and upfront, not because it is unbiased. Attempting to be purely objective leads either to a status quo bias or a “centrist” bias where multiple extremes are presented as being equally valid.

If you consume news that carry a bias (either way) then it is time to find other news sources.

There is no such thing as unbiased news sources, and any news orgs that claim to be are some of the least credible sources. The most credible news sources are honest and upfront about their biases.

Doesn’t anyone find the recent uptick in articles about Islamic fundamentalist crimes odd? There are billions of people in the world and these sorts of things happen frequently, yet they rarely receive non-local news coverage. It seems to me like the media is capitalizing on rising Islamophobia (due to the escalating conflicts in the Middle East) by releasing sensational articles about Islamic extremism, which has the effect of drumming up more Islamophobic hate. When crimes like this are committed in the US by Christians the media tends to blame mental illness.

For the record, I don’t really support these strikes, but neither am I terribly passionate in opposing them for reasons I’ve stated.

You should be more passionate in opposing them because this shit is the closest we’ve ever been to WW3 and Israel only seems interested in further escalation.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if the US and Israel were doing a little of such, though the contributions would hardly be significant.

wp:International Railroad for Queer Refugees doesn’t seem to be getting much support from Israel.

Gee, I wonder why that is. It couldn’t be that Israel doesn’t give a shit about equal rights, being a fascist ethnostate themselves, surely. This isn’t a “both sides” situation, Israel is clearly the aggressor, and no good can possibly come from this.

Such places might have stuff and people of interest, but yeah, they’ve been saying that a lot about their targets in Gaza.

It’s interesting that your instinct is to assume some level of good faith on Israel’s part. Perhaps you should examine that?

and if Hamas, Islamic Jihad, et al narrowed their attacks to just soldiers, cops, many of the politicians, and settlers, I wouldn’t have much of a problem with it.

The standard of violence is set by the oppressor. It’s a clear double standard that you speak charitably about Israel’s attacks on civilians immediately before dismissing others for theirs. Not to mention the massive difference in scale.

If Iran’s mode of government were really the casus belli of Israel’s attacks, they would be providing support for revolutionary movements within Iran, not bombing their capital city including civilian apartment buildings and claiming that they’re only targeting nuclear sites. If having a government that denies equal rights to certain groups is justification enough for attacks on civilian populations in the capital, think about what that means for Tel Aviv.

VPN companies and data brokers have a financial incentive to lobby for intrusive age-verification and restrictions, and prudish politicians are conveniently present in every political system. The porn lobby is powerful, but it seems they’ve been losing this battle recently. Or maybe they’re cutting deals with the data brokers, who knows.

Legal ≠ moral. Both instances of mobilizing the national guard against the wishes of the states’ governors were illegal, but one was moral and the other is not. One could argue that by breaking the law the first time a precedent was set that allowed it to be done again for a less noble cause, but I disagree. The fact that it was possible for Eisenhower to federalize the national guard without the state governor’s approval in the first place means that nothing would stop it from happening in the future regardless of whether or not a precedent was set.

As someone who left the Southern Baptist cult as soon as my brain developed, this is nothing new.

You might try stepping away from your keyboard and checking for yourself.