This!!! Nobody of any actual note on the left is pretending protests are the solution or the end goal right now, on the contrary I think people ALL across the political spectrum are standing up and asking the people around them whether this is existential moment and noticing who can meet their gaze and not cower in centrism and the status quo.
This is the political function of these protests.
The protesting is what makes people realize and become confident that radical change is needed you fool.
DO NOT STOP PROTESTING
Protest AND do the things you are saying.
There are nationwide protests, there is one this weekend…?
Where was the outrage when AIPAC dropped money bombs on progressive primaries to silence opposition against Israel and the Genocide of Palestinians?
The DNC is dead to most USians, the party leadership just refuses to acknowledge it even when their candidates and strategies lose to literal outright fascists.
No, this is the bare minimum I will accept in order to not consider the DNC my enemy.
Burn it down.
Also, age isn’t the problem, the problem is money and a rigid party ideology.
Fight Now Or Be Deported Later
Productivity is part of the dominant theology of (at least) Western culture and functionally extends and replaces the societal functions of christian (also other religions) conservatism to centralize power in a rigid and defensive structure of guilt and judgement.
If you are interested in video games, mental health and the current moral panic about it from an actual scientific perspective… from a scientist who is also a life long fan of video games… and understands them beyond “is too much video game bad?” check out the youtube channel Psychgeist, in particular this recent video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42D9olrXL-s
If Mike Johnson gave a shit about young men, he would be terrified by the speed that mobile phone gambling, especially but not limited to sports gambling is tearing through and destroying the lives of young men in the U.S. I mean, everyone is suffering from it but demographically the whole industry seems aimed at young men.
Fuck you Mike Johnson, video games are art and you don’t understand art because you are a boring-creepy ass fascist.
Let me say this emphatically, if you are out there playing video games and not really wanting to go through the hellish process of applying to jobs in the U.S. and decide to play an extremely good video game that is both mentally challenging and also a vehicle for socialization and making friends… good. The rules of capitalism were supposed to be that if the pay and conditions you are offering employees isn’t sufficient vs. the required amount of labor and time, you need to sweeten the deal as the employer, that is how bargaining works?? The fact that people like Mike Johnson always return to this rhetoric the minute the “wisdom of the market” turns not in favor of the rich tells you everything you need to know about Mike Johnson and his ilk.
fuck you, pay me - The Philharmonik 🎵 🎵 🎵 🎵
https://thephilharmonik.bandcamp.com/track/pay-me
Hours - Maky Lavendar 🎵 🎵
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3d0bcuokTk
non-acoustic version that bumps 🎵🎵🎵
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyfH8zSfTX4
https://makylavender.bandcamp.com/album/at-least-my-mom-loves-me
No they won’t? Do you know who makes the best drone fpv pilots in Ukraine?
The pentagon has been growing like an out of control cancer since at least 9/11, this doesn’t prove that.
I am sorry, do you still at this late date think Trump listens? Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t know how he hasn’t done it in decades.
Rank Of Preferences of what I would most prefer to do after reading this, starting with most preferred!
the F35 program has provided a living for a great many people.
That amount of money could have provided those people a future instead of a job that paid well for a bit.
You are going to tell that to me with a straight face lol?
No, the problem is the program spent an obsene amount of money, just because you also can no longer trust the people controlling the program doesn’t mean the program wasn’t a titanic, strategic faceplant of burning so much money that any future conflict is already lost.
…but also, this is what military nerds seem to refuse to understand about this, you can’t act like it is a detail that maybe now you can’t existentially trust the person you are buying an incredibly advanced fighter aircraft from, as if that wasn’t directly connected to why the f35 itself is a strategic failure of a program, and as if there is any sense that you can consider the f35 separately from the incredibly incompetent politics and runaway cancerous military industrial complex surrounding it.
I will concede maybe I was being overly negative about the capabilities of the plane, but this whole conversation is still absolutely absurd, we might as well be arguing about comic book super heroes if we aren’t going to include the context of this program was CLEARLY a strategic failure for everyone involved from the beginning, because the existential risk to the security of other nations at the highest levels is now threatened (sureee the U.S. military can’t hack their own jets… … …).
The f35 is meant to be a lynchpin of an integrated battlefield, collating, identifying and tracking targets. It is like you took all the corporate surveillance of a microsoft 11 laptop and made it into a fighter jet, it is constantly gobbling up, receiving, and sending data… which is exactly what makes it such a powerful asset… but need I remind you… looks over at the dumpsterfire that is the U.S. it was designed over there.
Honestly, I would be very surprised if the f35 didn’t have multiple kill switches purposefully built into the design from agencies that actually have no idea the other agency or entity also put a killswitch into the f35. I don’t know if I believe any single person actually knows all of the backdoors that were essentially designed into the aircraft.
Why wouldn’t the plane be an endless hallway of backdoors for U.S. military industrial interests and intelligence agencies? Every creator of weapons of war since the first weapon would do the same thing if they had the chance and didn’t care about the consequences (the U.S. clearly does not care about the consequences if you haven’t noticed).
As evidence: see any modern smartphone, computer, car, tractor, tv or other electronic device “from” the U.S. and imagine if any time somebody started asking difficult questions to the greedy person in charge they could pump up their toxic masculinity and attack them back with “THIS is a serious matter of national security”.
Additionally something that national security staff at many major allies of the U.S. right now have to be thinking is that nobody really knows how much information has been accessed by completely untrustuable, unvetted or people proven already to be untrustworthy in the Trump administration, this is a strategic intelligence failure up and down the entire breadth and width of the U.S. military empire since potentially ANY of the information from ANY of the people that are crucial to making all of that stuff function… well somebody might know their address now might they?
I don’t relish this, this is bad, I am just being honest.
No I just didn’t realize how naive you were about your privilege.
Overall though, the costs were worth it. No, no they weren’t.
This isn’t a cool military video game where you compare stats between units and nerd out about it, that money could have gone to providing people in the U.S. a future and that future is gone forever now.
I know this is the kind of hyperbole that leads to markets crashing spectacularly, but honestly, sell your bonds, get the fuck out of the U.S., this place is cooked. DO NOT RELY ON THE U.S. FOR ANYTHING IMPORTANT for the foreseeable future.
Centrists strangled any hope of mitigating this disaster by spending all the democrat/left’s political capital on meaningless handwringing about the parlimentarian saying no to higher minimum wages and whether well should we be so radical so as to suggest free healthcare… and well should we really keep feeding the poor isn’t that handouts?
Now centrists in U.S. culture learn why the leftists they have been angrily tone policing for being too negative where just describing in a sad voice the future that was heading for us like a freight train, covered in fascists hooting and hollering.
It is going to be bad, and I am very sad.
Yes which is why warfare is a struggle where you make your enemy so completely devoid of any desperation that they cannot fight anymore.
if I were to move to Europe and get the exact same job and free Healthcare, I’d be making a fraction of what I do now.
facepalm dawg you can’t just compare how much you make in the two places, how do you quantify the stress that comes from never knowing if medical problem is going to end your life… because it will bankrupt you and your family not because it will kill you directly?
I know that my quality of life is likely to tank in the coming years, and if it doesn’t it is because I got lucky where others didn’t, but damn is it hilarious seeing how fucking stupid centrist business bros and tech people are in the U.S. right now, they are JUST NOW realizing the boat is sinking, when only half of the boat is still above the water… it is fucking hilarious honestly and I don’t take joy in this happening, I mean I do, but I am not happy it is happening I am rather so sad that if I don’t laugh about it all I will do is cry.
Yup, definitely a moment where someone just told me it is working by revealing they can’t admit that part of themselves is afraid of a world more progressive than they are because of how it invalidates cynicism core to their world view, life choices and judgement.
Edit, referring to the person you responded to.