McNadoMDNothing gives Israel a special right to invade neighbors, bulldoze their homes, and create a DMZ.
US voters must make anyone supporting the Israeli state unelectable until support for this bullshit stops.
Netraven@mcnado Ultimately it comes to AIPAC and shadow money which banks are happy to facilitate. Unless the banks are regulated and forced to pay for their crimes, then this will never stop. The banks can't be regulated without getting good candidates in... which can't get in because... circular logic. We're back to the billions of dollars spent bribing officials.
ᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIESyeah but despite all of the shadow money we can still vote
especially in the primaries coming up
so many elections are decided by such a small percentage
and such a large percentage don't vote
yeah not all of them are leftists but if leftists did show up imagine the difference
the problem is this sort of mindless cynicism, that something is inevitable. it's not
vote, assholes
why would anyone give dark money what it wants by not voting?
Pine Affinitywhy would I vote for this party?
https://www.commondreams.org/news/schumer-israel-aid
@benroyce @Netraven @mcnado
https://www.commondreams.org/news/schumer-israel-aid
@benroyce @Netraven @mcnado
'No, That Is Not Your Job,' Say Critics After Schumer Claims 'Job' Is to 'Fight for Aid to Israel' | Common Dreams
"Seventy-five percent of Democratic voters oppose sending Israel more military aid, as do 66% of independents and 60% of Americans overall," noted one domestic policy expert.
@Pine_Affinity @Netraven @mcnado
you don't vote for them
you show up in the primaries and you replace them
the problem is this "dems suck" whine then people don't show up in the primaries out of useless pathetic indolence. so nothing changes
The Hill believes a leadership change is unlikely.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5807683-schumer-future-senate-leadership/
@benroyce @Netraven @mcnado
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5807683-schumer-future-senate-leadership/
@benroyce @Netraven @mcnado
@Pine_Affinity @Netraven @mcnado
this is an inversion of responsibility
if you vote, the party answers to you
if you don't vote, the party answers to dark money and spineless centrists who do vote
if we vote, we may fail. if we don't vote, we *will* fail. so why would you want to define your political consciousness as acceptance of fascism? you understand that is what your cynical "unlikely" is about right? cynicism is acceptance. do you accept fascism? i don't think so. so vote
@Pine_Affinity @Netraven @mcnado
by voting
sitting back and passing your responsibility to dem leadership to magically change is absurdity
i am confused why you think that's a valid position
you mob the primaries, you replace them
proof it works?
mamdani
dem centrists opposed him every step of the way. and yet he won
how?
because people showed the fuck up
you have to change the way you think about the problem
don't depend upon assholes who will never change to change
vote
@Pine_Affinity @Netraven @mcnado
if no one on the left shows up, spineless corporatist dems win, because spineless corporatist dems show up to vote
but what you are saying is you want people you know are rotten to the core to suddenly and magically grow a conscience and resign?
rather than, you know, just getting off your ass and voting them out?
that's the way it works
why would you argue against the only way to remove them, and argue for a behavior which ensures their continuing power?
Because that doesn’t work.
JakeKb@Pine_Affinity @benroyce @Netraven @mcnado I really don't understand why can't Americans accept that the democratic party is an imperialist party for the elites that doesn't answer to its people. Why can't you build actual grassroot movements and put forward your own candidates that are not compromised by the democratic party systems of control? Far easier task than changing the democratic party from within.
@JakeKb @Pine_Affinity @Netraven @mcnado
a 3rd party divides the left vote and ensures MAGA domination
we need to take over the democrats. i don't like it. it's just the most feasible option
the problem with international observers like yourself is you come from a different voting system
the usa is FPTP
meaning there will only ever be 2 parties (we need RCV to fix that)
it's not corruption, it's math
educate yourself before commenting on the matter next time:
@Pine_Affinity @JakeKb @Netraven @mcnado
and that's on you. because you didn't show up in the primaries to vote him out
🏴☠️ regor 🐦⬛@benroyce @[email protected] @JakeKb @Netraven @mcnado goddamn some holier-than-thou pricks just refuse to understand the assignment.
@roger @JakeKb @Netraven @mcnado
some people don't care about fixing the world or righting wrongs
their primary concern is rationalizing to themselves their entitlement to sit it out and whine
they don't want to sully their magical sense of purity. their self-regard is their highest concern, they do not care if the country is fascist. as long as they get to say "not my fault" when we're going to concentration camps. even though it is their fault, because they did not participate
Deb Nam-Krane@benroyce These people are the compostable straw users of democracy. The actually useless activity keeps their extremely shallow consciences clear but does less than nothing to address the microplastics already circulating in their organs and bloodstream. But it's easier than fighting for policies that end industrial plastic pollution.
Let me not go on Toxic Purity (TM) too much now...
@dnkboston @[email protected] @roger @[email protected] @mcnado hello? Mastodon police? I’m being held hostage by a thread I was never part of. Send help.
@dnkboston @roger @mcnado ohhh thank god. It’s ok I’m just trying to listen to music and my phone is blowing up.
@Netraven Oh, I shut off notifications for both Mastodon and Discord. And my email. Otherwise I'd never get anything done.
@dnkboston I've enjoyed a quieter, calmer fediverse ever since I blocked mastodon.social. Sorry to benroyce, but he's just one voice that is drowned out by too many chuckleheads and bots for me to warrant keeping it around for just him.
@Netraven You're not the only one who has blocked everyone from mastodon.social. I think it's inevitable that people are going to have to move from that server, but, well, Ben and Liza are there :-)
@dnkboston right? it's not all bad, that's why it sucked to do. But my sanity is thin as it is, doesn't need anyone scraping their keys against it.
@Netraven If I wanted to preserve my sanity, I wouldn't have opened Mastodon and just dug into my book on why nuclear energy is such a grift...actually, no, this might have been the saner choice.
@dnkboston well see, I did all that first, well, ever since I abandoned technology in 2007-or so and came back as a stranger from a strange land, apparently. Do you know how I'm treated by the system just because I never had a facebook account? I'm some kind of un-person now. Big whoop.
I could probably do well as an astronaut on solo voyages but after 10 years and 3 of them spent talking to cats, sometimes I feel like not yelling at the cloud metaphorically, and doing it literally instead.
@Netraven You didn't have a Facebook account? I am so filled with jealousy now, LOL. I had to open a WhatsApp account for a group project, and it makes me want to disinfect my phone.
Screaming at actual clouds/heavens is definitely superior to screaming in bits and bytes.
@dnkboston it was around that time that the government tried to recruit me for war crimes without looking into my profile, just because my metadata matched some loose algorithm that says "this guy went to a hacker website once, he's probably a corrupt soulless husk that would do anything for personal info."
They sent their navy cyberwarfare goons to convince me it would be really great™ and fun™ if I went to Kosovo and caused all kinds of mayhem on their data networks. In return I could have access to everyone's personal info, even the data on their hard drives. I remember that part very clearly, because that's where I understood what was going on and convinced them I was loonier than a funny farm and they never came back but I unplugged from everything.
It used to be that I could could go and just wait in places that I would go to myself, and eventually I'd find someone not unlike myself to talk to and find common interest.
...That is not the case, anymore.
@Netraven Oh my god, what?
@dnkboston yep. either that or it was some kind of character test and I gave them a curveball... but I highly doubt it. These guys were painfully versed in the script they were giving. Like they'd done it so many times they didn't even bother to check that I was the administrator of a network security forum, not some casual user asking to hack my neighbors wifi.
I was there to do good. I was working with universities to protect themselves from what was a new attack at the time, Wifi Man-in-the-middle with SSL spoofing. It was a big deal, people were changing their grades with ease cause they could just sniff their teachers login password in the classroom.
Did they bother to look at any of that? No. Website matched = dirtbag. Go git em.
@Netraven That sounds legitimately frightening.
@dnkboston the good old boys and their chummy, scummy, deals never went away, they just went behind closed doors.
@Netraven Oh yeah. Actually, I think a lot of them still operate in the open, they're just not covered by the media.
@dnkboston ah yes, well, now... more and more we'll see them operate out in the open. They've been given an inch, so they'll take a mile. Though... in light of all this negativity, I don't believe that any form of fascism can exist indefinitely without eating its own mechanism of propagation due to an inability to verify ground reality and thus be rendered unable to trust anyone, even themselves.
@Netraven Absolutely. Did you read *Caste*? One of the most chilling chapters was about about a community during WWII that had "cleansed" itself of Jews. They then turned on themselves because they weren't satisfied that they'd "purified" themselves. Eating their own is a pretty apt way of describing it.
@dnkboston I have not read Caste, who is it by?
I spent the early years angry, at myself, others, the government, the world, etc. Then I tried converting that anger into fuel for a drive to understand what my mind demanded could not be as simple as it seems. It's given me time to reflect on how institutions become detached from reality when symbolic language such as security, stability, or compliance begins to replace evidence, judgment, and accountability, which ultimately aim to turn words into supports for the system itself rather than tools for describing what is true.
In this sense... people aren't evil, or stupid, they're not even failures. They're optimizing correctly in the wrong regime... because their own self-descriptions aren't connected to reality any longer. Due to fear, and belief of necessity for stabilization, people will convince themselves whatever most recently held belief that held their world together, however fragile, however easily disproven... is is the only truth there can be, and all else is noise, or threat. This is a civilizational failure of contact, and not some overwhelming conspiracy other than the fact that so many people seem to have chosen to become normalized to an upside down world.
I got news for them... Because if in the process of going through hell, you merely become used to hell, then you can never truly come out the other side. We just import hell with us wherever we go.
@Netraven Hear hear. I'm a little more cynical these days, and when something defies logic for me, I go looking for financial gain or possible cult capture. (Admittedly, I might be biased by recent, possibly unusual events, but I digress.) Your interpretation is perhaps more nuanced and generous 🙂
This is the book description from my library system. Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson.
@dnkboston that sounds very interesting. I've seen a bit of online speculation about who borrowed what from who when it comes to evil, but the belief in the inevitability of suffering is a uniquely human experience because humans invented politics as a system of upkeep. It is the way in which the world decides who it is for, and who else get discarded as noise, threat, or erased as if one was discarding waste. I'd say that is the true source and then, perhaps whimsically, I can blame Hammurabi for codifying and regulating an already existing agrarian order into durable rules on rent, debt, tenancy, and creditors which we still follow to this day in one manner or another.
@Netraven This decade has certainly given us all a chance to reflect on the point of "law and order". (And be ashamed that we didn't listen to our Black friends when they told us what they experienced as a matter of course.)
I think laws/rules need to be more subjective, period, and that's very hard in a large country. One more reason that I don't think our little empire-pretending-to-be-a-democracy experiment is working very well, but I digress.
@dnkboston the rotten spine is the population's unwillingness to change. To most whom are so entitled to believe in order, it seems as disorder to want anything else than to remain blissfully ignorant.
The prison's exist because people believe they work, along with an inability to imagine anything different. Just so long as they're not beholden to the system, it doesn't matter to them.
The profit-for-life exists because we were willing to allow it to become normalized. As a nation, this is a patch on our existential moral dilemma which created our justice and order out of the same pieces which made slavery legal and un-scientific and backward thinking to take such a deep root in our shared culture.
No one wants to be judged, no one wants to be evil, but evil was done, and victims hold the veto on reality. We will never heal as a nation until individuals can start taking responsibility for their own choices. Which is probably about as likely as a white guy named Jesus walking around Palestine 2000 or so years ago.