The actions of former governments in Spain are not the actions of the current government of Spain.

Yeah but they get badass hydraulic locomotion that way. Imagine you had no muscles and you lifted your arms by manipulating your blood pressure.

Why don’t you correct me instead of marking my comment as bigotry and removing it? I said that China’s social credit system is just an ordinary credit system much like ours, and that is bigotry how, exactly? Explain it to me.

It’s wild, you don’t even have to say anything bad about China to piss you off, you just have to talk about it neutrally without constantly praising it as a socialist utopia.

The fact that you can take a hit to the credit score for engaging in protests and demonstrations is still scary

I was saying that this sort of thing actually doesn’t really happen. The social credit score for the most part is just an ordinary credit score and is only meaningfully affected by finances. Some localities made an attempt at implementing the “social” aspects of the system and subtract small amounts for certain criminal offenses, but it barely makes a difference.

Engaging in protests and demonstrations gets you the same thing it gets you here; tear gas, pepper balls, beatings, and possibly prison time & a criminal record. The hysteria around the social credit system is very silly when the actual dystopian shit is so glaringly obvious, and occurs in both China and the US.

There have been so many lawsuits against Valve recently from so many different angles. I’m not usually one for conspiracy but I wouldn’t be shocked if this is a coordinated campaign to unseat Valve from their monopoly on the PC gaming market so that other games industry corporations can move in. They’ve been trying and failing to break into this market for years because Valve has built so much consumer loyalty.

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moving at nearly the speed of light.

Couldn’t resist being a bit of a stickler but 🤓 erm… technically it is moving at the speed of light through a medium, which is slightly less than c, the speed of light in a vacuum. Fun fact, when things move faster than the speed of light through a medium - such as water - it produces Cherenkov radiation, the glowing blue light associated with some nuclear reactors, which is sorta like a sonic boom but with light instead of sound.

When people are so quick to point an accusatory finger so frequently and unprompted towards them as you did commenting on this post is it any wonder that 3rd party and non-voters start to grow bitter towards their accusers? It would be far more productive of you to join their calls for a better Democratic party and not constantly chastise those with whom you agree on all except their choice to vote on their principles. Harm reduction is not a persuasive argument, it is a strategic decision to acknowledge your moral culpability in both action and inaction, informed by reality not ideals. It would be ideal if everyone understood this concept and voted to cause the least harm, but that is not the reality, and you will not convince them with finger-wagging and moralising. I am asking you to continue practicing harm reduction by keeping your frustrations with non-voters to yourself - knowing that voicing them only causes further harm - and instead direct them to dem electeds and primary candidates to be better at inspiring their vote.

This explains but does not justify the decision to kill on behalf of the state.

Sure there’s been a wave of imperialist wars, but it would have to cascade out of control and legitimately threaten world superpowers directly for a world war to break out. All this adventurism taking place is unfortunately just par for the course. IMO something truly unprecedented like the US launching a ground invasion against Mexico would have to happen to set off a cascade. I don’t think even airstrikes on Mexico would do it, only a ground invasion.

Edit: not even 3 days since I made this comment and I think I may be horribly wrong. Israel employing the same genocidal tactics in Iran that they did in Palestine, Shiite uprising in Bahrain and Saudis sending in forces to put it down, US and Israel setting the stage for Kurdish forces from Iraq to invade Iran, submarine strike on Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean, China and Russia providing satellite support for Iran, Israeli ground invasion in Lebanon. The cascade seems to have begun.

To explain that a bit better, lots of schools and workplaces have a VPN for employees / students to log into the local network of the campus / workplace to allow them to access internal resources (databases and such) without having to expose those resources to the public internet. It’s a sort of security measure.

In the above commenter’s case it was a university VPN, meaning the servers were run by the university on the university’s private network. That means the university can monitor everything you do on it. The professor’s mistake is that they heard ads from commercial providers saying VPNs make you anonymous and assumed the university VPN was the same thing. Commercial providers have servers set up in a variety of locations so you can make your traffic appear to be coming from somewhere else, and most at least claim not to log any traffic and will present independent audits as proof. If the professor had used a commercial VPN provider instead then the university would not have known what they were up to. It is still possible for the websites you visit to deanonymize you through the use of trackers, cookies, fingerprinting, etc. and there’s no real guarantee that the VPN providers are being truthful as some have been caught giving logs they claim not to keep to law enforcement agencies.

You should give it another viewing. There’s violence, but it’s not just random murder for its own sake like in The Purge. The protagonist carries out a series of targeted assassinations against people who were involved in detaining and experimenting on him in a concentration camp, and blows up a couple of empty buildings at the beginning and end of the movie in a symbolic act of defiance against a fascist regime. There’s a bit towards the end where he ships a bunch of guy fawkes masks to everyone and there’s some robbing and looting, but no killing until a secret police guy shoots an unarmed child in the street and some people jump him. The plot overall is about people rising up against and toppling a fascist regime, which is pretty relevant to current events.

Don’t wait for midterms, vote in the primaries for the most progressive candidates. We should want strong candidates in the general who aren’t compromised by corporations and who run on a progressive economic platform. This is what it will take to make a Democratic win a true victory rather than a brief respite from only the most visible aspects of fascism.

Jasmine Crockett being better / more aggressive in a debate doesn’t make her better on policy. She’s the establishment choice in this primary, an AIPAC-compromised ghoul with a snazzy coat of paint. Roasting Republicans with sick burns on fox news doesn’t wash the Palestinian blood from her hands, and she’ll keep up the appearance of fighting while caving at every opportunity to corporate interests.

Where did they mention wanton violence? That’s not what anarchism is, and that’s also not what’s portrayed in V for Vendetta.

TBH I wouldn’t put it past a bunch of right-wingers from Florida to think storming Cuba with half a dozen people in a speedboat is a good idea.

Japan’s just lagging behind, they recently elected a reaganite/thatcherite to implement austerity policies. Fascism will soon follow, and they’re no stranger to it.

Whenever the Pentagon catches even the slightest whiff of a conscience among its contractors they move immediately to snuff it out.

Obviously you’re part of the target audience - the entire western world is - but the primary target demographic is US Americans. There has been an increase in selective reporting on the political situation in Iran in order to manufacture consent for military intervention and ultimately regime change by the US. Western media has been known to do this in the past such as during the leadup to the Iraq war, and they’re doing the same thing now with Iran. They make certain editorial choices to play up the emotional impact and imply that US intervention is justified or even invited by Iranians, and because they don’t (usually) outright lie about what’s happening they have plausible deniability about their intent, which is why it can’t be proven.