https://www.pcgamer.com/games/a-week-after-a-major-hack-brought-down-4chan-and-doxxed-all-its-users-it-seems-like-it-may-be-dead-for-good/

I mean, the fact that people tear each other into pieces over a Jill Stein vote illustrates how feeble and easily fractured the modern western leftist movements have grown. You’ve got people fighting tooth and nail over a vanity vote in a fully captured and completely undemocratic process.

Nobody seems to have their eyes toward any kind of real social projects. We’re not talking about building up food banks or opening housing to the indignant. We’re not talking about engaging the lumpen proletariat in revolutionary action or disrupting the cash flows and power dynamics of the corrupt elite. We’re not talking about any kind of material accomplishments. Much less doing any of them.

It’s just arguing over your favorite political sports team.

I have seen so many tankies deny the pain of others

That’s as often as not tit-for-tat. In my experience, particularly when “Tankie” is flung out as a slur rather than a serious material analysis, you’ll see people respond in what is effectively an in-kind retort. “My grandparents left Cuba because they were being persecuted by the villainous Castro government! You’re a tankie if you support them!” often signals a person (or online persona) that’s aligned itself with a class of Cuban who profited from the abusive practices of slave plantations and child brothels, pre-Revolution.

Go straight back to the term’s root - the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the subsequent quashing by Khrushchev’s armored cavalry - and what you’re effectively advocating in defense of is a CIA/Nazi collaborative stay-behind network that ushered in the Years of Lead. Are we expected to show empathy for the Hungarian Rebels if they’d been bombing and butchering civilians a decade earlier without compunction?

One unspoken, implicit tenet of their beliefs is the denying others the same humanity they claim to uphold and represent.

Empathy cuts both ways. It isn’t merely a sense of naive compassion and maudlin despair at the atrocity du jour. Empathy can be a source of fiery opposition and vengeful passion, in response to historical crimes and horrors committed by the current-day self-professed victims.

that’s why I have a hard time to show them empathy

Understandable. But again, that’s exactly the position these “tankie” types are coming from. They’re reading the history from a different angle and viewing the revolutionary violence of a given period as social justice extracted by an empowered proletariat. They’re reading your defense of the historic persecutors as a defense of prior persecutions and an obstruction of justice - possibly even an apology for revanchism and a return to the old horrors.

To reference Mark Twain

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

It’s so crazy that this asshole is up for his second criminal rape proceeding, having spent virtually no time in prison for his crimes.

Meanwhile, we’ve got people getting snatched off the street and stuffed into an El Salvadorian prison sweetshop because of a minor traffic violation.

Not on its face, no. I think it’s still a band-aid attached to a bigger problem of generational inequality. Public housing, education, and a large competitive public hiring sector would have gone much farther in rectifying poverty in the US.

But the extra insulting aspect of “Baby Bonds” is that they’re an idea dangled over a public hungry for economic reforms which never actually gets delivered. When liberals lose, they get to nag centrists and insist “We had all these good ideas but you were too racist and stupid to accept them”. When they win, we get an earful about how the federal courts, the super-majority Senate, the prior administration’s mid-level bureaucrats, the state legislatures, and two dozen of DC’s biggest lobbying firms all have to agree to go along with it or the reforms can’t pass.

Seems like Republicans are getting in on the same act, now that kitchen table liberalism is experiencing a popular resurgence.

In the ballet and other examples, the difference to me is that they’re not pretending to be in a ballet competition while dancing the ballet.

In the Nutcracker, at least, they’re pretending to fence, in a choreographed dance. A first-time naive viewer who came out of the show offended when they discover skill at fencing has nothing to do with whether the dancers playing the Nutcracker or the Rat King wins would sound silly.

I do think that the kayfabe is what sets wrestling apart from more traditional performance art. The carnival-barker lying-to-your-face aspect of the performance is what makes it feel extra circus-y. But when you accept that the kayfabe is just part of the performance, you stop feeling offended by it and start recognizing degrees of commitment to the bit as part of the artform.

wrote one user on X

Any article that quotes an anonymous account on Social Media must be obligated to prove it is not a Bot, beyond a reasonable doubt, before I’m going to take it seriously. FFS, for all we know, the person who wrote that was working for Newsweek at the time.

Similarly, some hardliners

Anyone we’d recognize? No? Just anonymous randos, then?

I swear to god, if 4chan hadn’t imploded last week, we’d be getting Greentext in the headlines.

Can you even imagine his response if a gay man had approached him the same way? Dude would be on the 6 o’clock news crying into the camera while covered in blood.

The US has been a petro-state for over a decade. Can’t imagine what they could bring to the table at this point. Probably the most effective policy towards the US is the same one applied to Iran or Cuba.

Taking money from Russia is one of the least reprehensible things Tim Pool has ever done.

Creepy Tim Pool: I Miss Being Able To Sexually Harass Women at Work

Clinton Floats $5,000 Baby Bond

~ September 28, 2007

It’s nice to know these two are still in touch.

It’s been in decay for a while, thanks to corporate and ultra-conservative ideological interests leaning on it. A lot more of the content has drifted towards anti-immigrant fearmongering, pro-war jingoism, and paleoconservative fixations on Big Government (in the form of social programs rather than police power) and public debt. The parade of hagiographies for the ultra-wealthy and the endless pumping of tech sector vaporware haven’t been great, either.

But enshittification has been strangling every major television news publication for a long while now. Owens isn’t exactly a radical. He made his bones giving Bush Jr an hour long platform in between 9/11 retrospectives on the eve of the 2002 election and then spent a big chunk of his career producing glossy sports media spreads for the benefit of some of the most shamelessly corrupt billionaires in the country. Since taking the “60 Minutes” producer’s desk, he’s bent over backwards to accommodate the studio’s biggest advertisers.

If the job is too miserable for him now, I have to assume it is because he is just answering angry phone call after angry phone call from a corporate advertising base that’s plunged right off the reactionary cliff.

How about you stop with the whataboutism

How about you stop trying to defend genocide, eh? You’re standing on a hill of corpses and you think you’ve got the moral high ground?

Get fucked. Trump’s peeled the mask off your rotten empire. Nobody is falling for this shit anymore.

The outcome of the match is predetermined while the participants pretend that it isn’t.

The adventure is in the journey, not the destination. I don’t care whether you win or you lose when I came to see two roided out giants do backflip kicks into one another’s torsos while their friends spray silly string to distract the combatants from the sidelines.

That is why there are constant arguments about whether or not it’s “fake”.

There is absolutely no question that the outcome of the matches is predetermined, in the same way that there is absolutely no doubt that the Rat King is going to get killed by the Nutcracker at the ballet. But both wrestling and ballet are athletic endeavors.

the Chinese supported the Trump campaign

The Evil Foreigners Strike Again!

Chinese end goals are one people walking along a path of corpses.

How many genocides does the US have to be involved in before this reads like a punchline?

Market goes up, people make money. Market goes down, people make money. I would not say that “people made money” is a litmus test for success by any means.

The DOW is still 3,000 points off its peak, the US has rattled multiple trillions of dollars in supply chains, Europe and China are closer than ever, multiple conservative parties allied with Trump internationally are getting fucked in the polls, sales of US Treasuries are hitting historic lows, domestic industry is seeing cost of doing business internationally (thanks to insurance and future contracting costs) climb, and the current administration has squandered an enormous amount of good will within the business community.

Oh, and we’re not actually doing any of the protectionist measures Trump promised. We just took a bunch of hedge funds and banks for a ride. Presumably so a handful of insiders could gamble on fluctuations in day-trading.

I mean, maybe that was the plan? But it looks like a fuck up to me.

It’s so funny to see people respond to Kristi Noem’s “Fuck you, you fucking <racial explicate>s” TV ads and think to themselves “It would be just as terrible if the Chinese started running ads where they were friendly and nice.”

The American idea of fairness is bananas. Literally getting mad because the Chinese are being too polite to brown people.

Getting really nervous when my office computer sign-on keeps prompting me to enter my credit card information.

Over time, you tend to develop more sources and a diversity of views. That’s why we don’t remember the USS Maine as a villainous attack by the nefarious Spaniard to this day, but recognize it as a result of poor military maintenance and crew training combined with intense yellow journalist agitprop.