All idealism regardless of type can be summed up in one belief: that it is not possible to improve the world. Materialism, on the other hand, posits that it is possible. Is it any wonder that Capital goes to such lengths to keep materialist thought out of its public discourse? The worker who believes they cannot improve their lot poses little threat to Capital.

I suspect the involvement of the CIA or some of their rogue assets, either mobsters or gusanos. He was allegedly warming towards Cuba, and I think that may have been part of the motivation. Blowback Season 2 made a pretty convincing argument for that scenario.

man pointing at butterfly Is this Butlerian Jihad?

My “favorite war” is class war. 🙃

Yeah. I am fairly confident more of those “injuries” were fatal than the US/Israel want to admit, and I also doubt they have as many confirmed kills as they are claiming.

It’s going to have to hit $5/gallon in the Midwest and Southern US before we really see much reaction from the USians, and it would have to be sustained. There will be plenty of grumbling before we hit that point, but no action. That’s my prediction anyway.

Of course. I wasn’t suggesting otherwise. I just hope CIA propaganda loses any appeal it may have outside of the imperial core. As for inside the core, it’s hard for me not to feel ‘doomer’ about the state of the working class. I think there would have to be a sudden, extreme change in material conditions before the working class would start to ‘wake up’ en masse here.

I’m impressed. The US legal system is incredibly anemic when it comes to punishing corporations for violating workers’ rights. I hope we really can achieve a multipolar world, one where a standard like this is upheld to emulate, and not the rotten neoliberal legal morass of the West.

If the US regime actually wanted to stop Israel, they could stop sending them boatloads of money and materiel. The fact that they haven’t stopped materially supporting Israel renders all of this hemming and hawing about how the US allegedly doesn’t like it moot. It’s all theater to keep the Western public from questioning the narrative.

Get libs to stop reading The Atlantic challenge: impossible

Educate yourself, and question everything. No one is worth following blindly. If you don’t understand the “why” of something, keep digging until you do. Critically thinking is the most valuable skill you can have, so develop it as much as you can.

Cognitive dissonance. Looking at their own government means acknowledging all the ways they themselves are complicit. Plus, Americans are largely programmed from birth to defer to authority figures. That’s largely not true of Europeans, or at least not by the same mechanisms, so I don’t know what their excuse is.

EDIT: I’m agreeing with you, by the way, in case that wasn’t clear.

Who owns the Military Industrial Complex? Who owns the corporations? WHOSE INTERESTS ARE THEY?

If you live in the USA and you haven’t studied USA history critically, beyond what you were taught in school, then you really don’t understand it at all. I get that Citizens United is a tempting scapegoat, but it was not better before that; all Citizens United did was strip away some of the pretense.

I don’t blame anyone for trying to get out. When I was younger, I always thought I’d get out at the first sign of trouble, but now that I’m older, I’ve realized I can’t bring myself to. Even if I could escape, I’d be leaving friends and family at the mercy of whatever comes next. I don’t know that I’ll survive the next couple of decades, but I’m trying to make peace with it.

And are they going to require ID to verify birth dates, or is this just going to be a drop down menu? If the latter, I’m pretty sure everyone’s birth date is 1/1/1901. I’m so tired of this surveillance shit masquerading as “save the children” nonsense. I hate to say it, but this is a parenting problem and if your kids are more tech-savvy than you are, they WILL find a way around these safegaurds.

It’s definitely not something I would throw at my parents or my less tech-inclined friends. I think it’s alright for me precisely because I’m already motivated to learn the command line and this gives me more incentive. There’s more I want to do with my machine and I’ll get there, but I already feel annoyed when I have to use my work laptop (which has Windows 11 on it). I didn’t think I’d get to a point where I despise Windows File Explorer, but every time it lags I long for Dolphin, lol

I may throw Mint on my personal laptop just to get some experience with it. While I like bazzite, I absolutely see why I can’t recommend it to most people starting out. I think more software will need to run on Wine before I can convert people, though.

As a beginner on Bazzite who’s been struggling to figure out said distroboxes (via Distroshelf), is there a good guide somewhere to them? On like, a conceptual level. I.e., when do I need to use a distrobox and why? A lot of information I’ve been finding has just been command line instructions and that’s great, but I really want to know the ‘why’ of things so I understand what I’m doing.

This is what I’ve been doing, and I’ve been on Bazzite for about 4-6 weeks now. I haven’t booted my Windows drive since the first week. It’s definitely an adjustment, but I’m finding my way around. Gaming on it has been pretty easy, it’s figuring out the Linux command line that is taking me more time. Knowledge of MS-DOS is really not transferable; all the commands are different. It’s kind of like learning a new language.

But I also don’t depend on a bunch of proprietary software that won’t run on Linux, as I’d been moving away from that over the past 1-2 years. I think that’s made my transition a lot easier. My goal is to get to a point where the only proprietary stuff on my computer is video games.

Fix Or Repair (Toilets) Daily

I think this depends upon your definition of success. I think it could be done now such that you could get to a live birth, but not without serious health complications for the clone, probably resulting in an imprinting disorder or maybe something akin to progeria. You’d wind up with a sick infant instead of a healthy adult. Producing a copy of a human being as they are, if that is the definition of success, is still a ways away, probably a decade or more. This is without even considering the ethical issues with human cloning.