PhilipTheBucket

When I was young I was hanging out with this girl who was teaching me how to kiss.

We spent some time together, and then the next weekend I saw her again, we start making out, and she instantly says, "You've been practicing!"

I admitted that I had practiced with a girl I sort-of knew, expecting that she would be upset. She said, "No, you're better! I like it." And lo, I received some valuable wisdom.

Yeah, probably federation issues for a brand new community. No worries, you do you.

Posted a reply in !deleted@quokk.au, since some of what I had to say about voting is forbidden to say here. Up to you whether you want to restart a long discussion about it.

Haha yep. The whole family was involved. I don't even think it's necessarily a bad thing, it's definitely not comfortable but as long as you don't have bad intent, it's probably better that everyone has some kind of tabs on what's going on, and you have to face up to justifying to them why and how you're hanging out with their daughter.

The zeitgeist is changing a lot. Trump took a lot of things that were under the surface being done by people more clever and deceptive, and made them out in the open in an undeniable fashion that's leading previously comfortable people to realize how fucked up they are and think maybe they're really not on board with it.

There are motherfuckers out there now with NO idea what it was like potentially having to talk with a girl's parents first, any time you wanted to call her

Seriously.

"So you're threatening to throw us and our allies into prison, taking over the media and financial systems of the country in an unprecedented bloodless coup, and you have the nation's law enforcement roaming the land turned against the residents and in some cases the citizens, throwing them into several varieties of extra-judicial hellholes without even a pretense of due process, and now you're convening the nation's military leaders for God knows what reason but the most obvious would be loyalty oaths and discussions about turning the federal military against the people of the country."

"I tell you boy, that is IT! I will not help you fund this endeavor anymore unless you write down for me what the deal is. No more Mr. Nice Guy."

Shoutout to when John Oliver jumped the gun on Mickey's copyright expiring, by doing a horrendously illegal and offensive unauthorized Mickey Mouse and then daring Disney to sue them.

"Because fuck him, that's why"

These are largely the folks who promoted Tulsi Gabbard and Jimmy Dore long after their grifts became obvious.

Yeah. (Edit: Don't forget Tucker Carlson! He's still on the sidebar for altmedia.house. Literally every one of the people on that sidebar who I looked into, who is still publishing in the modern day, is in some form or other spreading pro-Russia narratives. Just by random coincidence I am sure.)

Anyway, back to the "dumping Democrats as a way to promote the left" issue, it is almost exactly like how human nature involves greed, corruption, and deception, and then some people look at capitalist societies that are full of greed corruption and deception and say IF WE JUST GOT RID OF CAPITALISM ALL THESE THINGS WOULD BE SO MUCH BETTER.

I mean, maybe. Certainly capitalism carries with it some unique evils that seem like they need better ways of eliminating than we currently have. What's your plan? How has it coped with greed corruption and deception when it's been tried in the past? What would you want to do specifically and how do you think it would play out? HOW DARE YOU LOVE CAPITALISM I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU TRIED TO SAY THIS IT'S NOT A PROBLEM THAT IT HAS THIS MASSIVE GREED AND CORRUPTION AND...

I mean definitely at least some of it is astroturf. There have been some accounts that have been pushing that and then got caught with weird little inconsistencies in their story, or were using non-American number styles and then got confused when asked about it, or otherwise let the mask slip that they were not what they were pretending to be.

I notice that a lot of it is very emotional framings. "They betrayed us" "I'm so heartbroken" "They want us all to fall in line" "I'm so tired of showing up and then they always turn their back on us" and so on. Sometimes they specifically mention that they've always "voted Democrat," but after this latest thing, they just can't.

This is what blows my mind about the "Democrats are center-right ghouls" (accurate) -> "Let's stop voting for Democrats that'll fix it" conclusion. The first part is accurate, the second is a terrible strategy to arrive at to fix it.

The whole of Washington is profoundly corrupt. Anything that comes within its AoE radius starts to suffer this overwhelming pressure (financial, narrative-manipulation, violent, social, whatever else) to become neoliberal. Sure, that includes Democrats too, a lot of them are the fuckin' worst. Fixing it and getting humanity back into the politics is an urgent problem. But just holding your nose and walking away, hoping that it'll then start arriving at reforms on its own, instead of trying to improve things (through whatever means), is pretty much guaranteed to failure I think.