BashfulBob [none/use name]

Enshittification Comes For Us All.

Very cool that this can happen to Vice but the courts will block The Onion from taking control of InfoWars.

This is India not China or the US. Most people don’t give a shit.

I got an earful about how Evil Communist China Doesn’t Care About Its People back in 2008 when Beijing had some of the worst air quality on earth. I remember a bunch of noise about Californians living in their own filth back in the 90s, when LA was a smoggy soup. Every dollar-store pundit runs this line until the public anger spills over.

if they protest against the current Hindutva Fascist government hence ruining their lives as they rot in Jail for decades without trial.

Thank goodness the US and China don’t have large police forces and carceral systems.

imagine if they went communist like the Chinese did

They were Soviet Aligned for most of the Cold War. But the division between Hindus and Muslims eventually created a wedge that western capital could leverage to break the leftist tendencies of the earlier governments, ending with Chaudhary Charan Singh. By the 80s, they’d begun a full transition to neoliberal governance.

I’m sorry, I was thinking this was some sort of weird IQ thing and was about to roll my eyes. But its actually Air Quality Index, which leaves me feeling incredibly sad.

On the plus side, air this bad tends to produce popular backlash that states can’t easily ignore. From LA to Beijing, we’ve seen huge reversals in air quality in the face of widespread public demand for breathable air. A good foundation for a next generation environmental movement is putting several million people into an industrial smoker and telling them to politics their way out.

You all doubt entryism, but when RFK Jr nominates Dasha as Undersecretary of HHS, who will be laughing?

Given that they didn’t run on trans issues

They kinda did run on Trans-Issues, in so far as they asserted “Trump will be worse”. Also, when they tried to shoe-horn the LGBTQ flag into the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel. That’s what made the Dems Woke. They pinkwashed themselves, which must have been what cost them all those votes between 2020 and 2024.

Next cycle, when the vote-shaming kicks into gear, I’ll calmly explain that I’m not voting for their ghoul because I don’t want to harm their electoral chances.

The game is always and forever “We owe you nothing, you owe us everything”. The vote-shaming is a way of deflecting blame for future shitty policies by insisting Dems (A) only win by catering to conservatives and (B) only lose when they are stabbed in the back by leftists. The path forward is always rightward. Voting for them proves that. Not voting for them proves that.

The only real way to disprove it is to run a candidate that is unapologetically pro-LGBTQ and win. But this becomes an increasingly difficult task in gerrymandered districts and disenfranchised states.

I really struglle to understand how so many seem to be so on board with this

Headlines like this are why. Just a giant echo chamber of “We’re under attack! We’re under attack!” getting louder and louder until its the only thing people hear. How do you not get on board with resisting the eternal siege of Evil Empires who are behind every conceivable bad thing happening inside your country’s borders? Fighting Russia and China and Iran and <Evil Country To Be Named Later> becomes a panacea. It will cure every ill, because they are the but-for cause of every harm. Only by defeating these evils can Europe reach a Utopian state of existence.

Maybe the evil Russians did it. Or maybe Germany and Finland have been so fixated on ramping up their military spending that they failed to budget for domestic infrastructure maintenance. Who can say?

The important thing to remember is that Russia is ontologically evil and therefore anything bad that happens isn’t our fault.

The disease on that boat by the end of four years…

It’s either that, or we get returned to slavery.

If you believe your only value to your friends and neighbors is the commission of arbitrary suicidal stochastic violence, then you’ve already lost.

I’m not interested in hearing cracker-assed pearl clutching about “buh buh buh martyrdom” the fuck are we getting from existing in this state in this cracker-assed country???

You have access to physical capital, to education, and to a significant minority population that still has ample organizing capacity for local mutual aid and self-defense. Throwing that all away in the vain hope of making headlines is shortsighted to the extreme.

Until there’s harsh, incapable-of-being-ignored, and expected consequences for said betrayal

The fundamental problem of being a minority is that your relatively small population size and often fragmented diaspora makes you an easy target for bullying. And westerners love their Strategy Of Tension. Which means your minority community is often being Grima Wormtongued with some bullshit about how Other Minority is the real reason you’re being persecuted.

I can very easily see a future in which Arab-American Voters and Trans-American Voters are told “Sorry but its the other guy standing in the way of your civil rights” and told to duke it out, while Christian Conservative Mayo Americans heckle both groups from box seats.

They wanna sell us, well, let’s bleed them.

Easy to call for violence in this way. Significantly harder to deliver on it. Talk is cheap. But who is seriously interested in martyring themselves Thomas Matthew Crooks / Ryan Wesley Routh style trying to make a point?

I’ve seen chickens with thicker hammies.

Damn, can’t believe Cromwell happened again.

No no no. Economics is when there’s an evil ghost and you have to beat it with the power of being horny for a girl that’s not into you.

they would run the same campaign

I’m waging they would have simply not pulled Biden off the front of the ticket and let him take the L, so Kamala could run in 2028.

This year it’s nothing. I say that I’m with the people of Palestine and it’s like I said the secret word. Immediately it’s “Ok, thank you.” and they hang up. What is up with this?

They’re trying to hit a call-quota. The people on the other end of the line don’t actually care if you vote or who you vote for. They just want to make their 1000th call and go home. You’ll notice you still keep getting called so its not like anyone is registering what you’re saying.

When I dabbled in electoralism I used to see this on the other end. There would just be a line of phone numbers getting dialed. 90% of them wouldn’t pick up. Anyone who answered the phone promoted you with a “R / D / Undecided / Other” option menu. If someone on the other end of the line is saying “I won’t vote for genocide!” what do I select? Undecided/Other. But that doesn’t take you off the phone list, it just spits you into the “Try again later” queue.

The best way to get these calls to stop is to identify who is making them and say you’re staunchly supporting the other one. That still doesn’t work too well, because you’re getting called independently from Presidential, Senatorial, and House phone bankers who don’t bother to coordinate because that would mean functioning as a party rather than a random assortment of self-centered egomaniacs. But it does at least get the network you said “I’m voting for the other guy” on to flag you as “Opposition, do not call again”.

Go the Exo-Squad route. Colonize Mars and genetically engineer a race of superhumans to survive the harsh conditions. Then become terrified of your Mars-Engineered Children, reclassify them as a hostile alien species, and spend the next five years doing interstellar pogroms in cool mechs.

William Shattner went to space and it just made him sad.

What a waste. You could be using it to build a guillotine instead.

Spending millions on a PR stunt with the surplus income you siphoned out of your victims? Literally vampirism.