MaeBorowski [she/her]

Weird, that’s a big part of the reasoning I have for wanting the Democrats to lose. (It shouldn’t need saying, but just in case: I don’t want either of the two fascist parties to “win,” and it probably wouldn’t be wise to say what I do want to happen to both the candidates , but since one of them unfortunately will be winning the election…) I think a Trump win will make it harder for these people to pretend they care, because they actually have to, you know, pretend. Which is the hard part. They can’t just go back to brunch again (as they did when Biden won), simply ignoring everything the profess to care about (like children in cages) and saying that all is right in the country, or at least on the right path, since one of their good guys is in office. Their brains are in dire need of breaking imo, and that won’t happen if Trump loses.

Nowhere near as bad as your mom as far as the level of obsession, but as I see it, my dad fell much further from having relatively good politics (for a lib boomer) to a flat, simplistic “Trump bad” position without much concern beyond it and with a seeming sudden lack of curiosity (let alone understanding) about world events and geopolitics that he used to follow.

When I was a kid in the 90’s he would tell me about US imperialism (though I don’t think he used that word with me) in South America, how terrible it was, and how much the US lied about all of it. He fucking hated Reagan and Bush 1 (for all the right reasons) and strongly opposed both Iraq wars, attending protests against them, even the second one when most of America was deep in the throes of Islamophobic 9/11 derangement. He got really into learning about the life of Che Guevara for a while, reading several biographies on him, though to my disappointment now, I don’t think he ever actually understood the politics, just recognized Che as someone who was genuinely fighting for the oppressed people of the world and respected him for that. I hate to say it, but I’m sure there was also just some glamorization of the revolutionary aesthetic in there too, which is fine so long as you also have an understanding from a materialist perspective and engage with the theory, which is where I suspect he fell short.

He’s old enough now that I think actual age-related cognitive decline is playing at least some role in this, but the much bigger factor is that since he has no energy, he just lays around watching CNN and MSNBC all the time, and it is really sad to see. He thinks he’s not being affected by the propaganda and still considers himself “on the left” because he also watches and likes the far left radical Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! (I know). I was shocked back in 2022 how easily and fully he bought into the narrative for how terrible it was that the big evil Russia invaded poor, innocent little Ukraine just out of the blue. I’m not surprised by it anymore, but now with election season, his politics are centered entirely around Trump. And it’s an odd, almost gossipy kind of talk about Trump’s latest shenanigans that I know is inspired by CNN talking points. It’s not odd in itself, it’s actually very typical, it’s just odd for him, as he was never like that. He often now refers to the news anchors by first name as if he knows them sometimes, which is so uncharacteristic of the way he used to be that I couldn’t have imagined it 15 years ago, or even 5. A few weeks back he was telling me about how he is now boycotting the brand of wine he used to enjoy because the owner of the company is a Trump supporter and how he just couldn’t in good conscience keep giving business to a Trumper. I think he was hoping this would impress me. I asked him if he really thought that any of the other multi-millionaire or even billionaire winery owners were any better, and started to ask if he was fine buying from Biden supporters, seeing as Biden was (is) the one currently committing genocide. But I didn’t say that because we were getting along well and I didn’t feel like it would do any good at this point.

But yeah, it has been sad to see not just someone I care about but someone who was even formative for me on my own path to leftism become so hooked in to the same kind of thing he used to be critical of, and with so little awareness of it.

It’s been said around here before (just a little while ago in one of the similar threads. edit: here) that the democrats aren’t seeking moderate or republican voters, they are seeking republican donors. Their strategy suddenly makes much more sense when seen through that lens. Even setting that aside though, they would absolutely prefer to lose to Republicans than concede to the left. It’s basically the same idea as class solidarity in that they will always be on the side of those who actually share their interests, even if they are in competition with them, rather than side with those who oppose their interests, even when doing so could give them a competitive advantage over their supposed adversaries in an election.

How are you supposed to stay alive during those two years? Fuck you, die in a gutter.

Exactly. And if somehow you do find a way to work despite your disability just to survive in the years you’re waiting and hoping for help, they will use that as proof that you don’t need the help and deny your application since clearly you’re capable of working! It’s just one of the more enraging Catch-22’s of the whole ridiculous process, but it’s hardly the only one.

Ok, well if you’re going to go to bat for a troll who baits serious discussion with takes like “biological complexity is nothing more than opinion,” who is literally saying that those who point out the fact that biology is complex are like Zionists calling their settler-colonial apartheid state complex, and use my account age to somehow equivocate us, then why don’t you also compare what comes up for our usernames in the modlog? Then, I don’t know, maybe consider reporting yourself for abuse of the report function?

So your entire argument comes down to “there’s no such thing as consensus reality, it’s all just like your opinion, man!” Got it, you are deeply unserious.

But YOU could be wrong about the degree of “complexity” of the human body as well.

lol. Ok, troll.

But that doesn’t invalidate anything that I said in my post.

But that’s just your opinion. MY opinion is that it literally did invalidate everything you said in your post, and opinion is the only thing that is real or matters, remember.

Yeah but this is what people say to dismiss socialism/communism. “It’s too complex, human nature, etc. etc.”

Sure but lots of things are “hard.” Or “complex.” That’s what zionists say about Israel (“oh it’s soooo complex!”) when we know for damn sure it’s not.

You keep trotting this out but it’s a ridiculous (and frustrating) comparison. People (libs/chuds) will often say “starving millions of people is bad” to “dismiss communism.” It doesn’t mean that the opposite is true and that “starving millions of people” is actually good. Those who say that it is bad are right. It is bad. It just doesn’t apply to the Soviet Union or communism but it does apply to other circumstances (like Churchill’s evil, racist, and fully intentional genocidal policies causing four million people to starve to death during the Bengal “famine” in 1943). Just because people use a truism to sometimes criticize a thing unjustifiably, that doesn’t mean the truism is false. Some things actually are inherent human nature, it’s just that market competition isn’t one of them. Some things actually are complex, it’s just that the Isntreal-Palestine conflict isn’t one of them. Etc.

I can’t believe I’m reading this here and I’m not convinced you aren’t a troll. Modern medicine is a fucking miracle of human accomplishment, and while it’s not cured us of death or the human condition, and despite how much it is disgustingly hampered and distorted by capitalism, we are profoundly lucky to live in an age where so many of the conditions that have caused untold human suffering and death for the entire existence of our species are now nothing more than a minor inconvenience. I for one, without question, would not be alive without “modern medicine.”

There are … novels!!! Okay frick, I have to check these out, thanks!

Sure! And yep, there’s three of em (plus apparently a fourth that was never finished). It’s been roughly 2 decades since I’ve read them () so I’m hesitant to sing their praises too much, but I can confidently say that as novels they are far better than I would expect any book-based-on-a-video-game has any right to be. They definitely deepen the universe and the lore, as you might imagine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myst_Reader

Glad I could help!!

I was so into Myst as a kid I even read the novels. Book of Atrius was decent for what it was, as I remember it anyway, but I really loved the Book of D’ni. To this day I will still sometimes use the name of one of the major characters from that book as a screen name.

It’s shocking to me how little I actually remember of it all now, but hot damn do some of the images you posted push that nostalgia button in my brain.

Don’t know tbh, I still only have an old original PS4 I bought used. But a while back for a brief moment I looked into what it would cost to get a PS5, I read about the major problems people had with it and stick drift is a really big issue with the dualsense controller. What I’ve read since is that it has only gotten worse, and there are countless nightmare stories from people trying to return or replace them. Apparently there is a “pro” version of the controller that has been out since 2022 or something and it’s main selling feature is that you can swap out the sticks. The sticks still have the same drift problems, mind you, they’re just modular and swappable, so instead of having to buy an all new controller every year or so, you only have to pay for a new pair of sticks. But that controller alone like like $140 or something.

Well, you’ll definitely want a second controller because the PS5 controller sticks are well known for very quickly developing problems like severe stick drift. So when your first controller inevitably goes bad, you’ll want that spare, either as a replacement entirely, or as a backup while you spend weeks first arguing with Sony just to honor the agreement to fix their shit (if you’re lucky enough to still be under warantee) and then shipping it to them and waiting far too long for them to return it, and then only to find they did nothing and have to go through the process all over again, to finally hopefully get back a fixed (for the time being) controller. So yes, a second controller is necessary, even if you only ever play solo.

You might also want to report this to wherever you downloaded it from. Even if found on the high seas, there’s usually a mechanism for reporting a download that isn’t what it’s claimed to be.

I am almost certain this isn’t revisionism by the author, rather OP found a hijacked text.

I can’t find any evidence of a 2021 edition of “In God’s Path” being published. The book was originally published in 2015, and there doesn’t appear to be any subsequent editions. Which means that what you found is almost certainly a hijacked textbook. Some fascist piece of shit is passing off their own fascist rhetoric as academic text. Since it looks like your prof is in the clear for not actually teaching a course on Islamic history with disgustingly Islamophobic text, I would encourage you to tell them about this. It’s fairly likely that you’re not the only student who downloaded this load of chauvinist lies thinking it is the real text they’re meant to study, but other students might not be so aware of how blatantly false (and fascist) it is. If your instructor is actually cool, then this could end up being a good opportunity for a teaching moment even.

You do know about the backrooms right? And liminal spaces in general?

It is definitely not just you that gets certain… feelings about such places. A strange familiarity. The realization that most of us do was even a bit of an internet phenomenon for a while.

Here’s another kind of interesting video essay: Liminal Spaces: A Theory Concerning Our Existence

I could have sworn it was on the list of things that would quickly get your comment removed if you didn’t edit it out, which I think is the right call for a community that has a firm stance about oppressive language in even common and casual phrases. But a quick perusal of search results shows (to my disappointment) that “butthurt” is still used somewhat regularly around here.

edit: maybe I’m too sensitive to this sort of thing, but the way I’ve always interpreted it is that it’s not just homophobic (though it is that too), it also reflects how normalized (cw) r*pe culture is.

I think before the capitalist system beats it out of them and corrupts them into sociopathic monsters, they do. There are likely exceptions and outliers like there is for any human trait, but for the most part, as a social species, individual members of it are born with an inherent empathy for others. The major question here is whether or not a grain of that empathy still exists or can be re-instilled in a person who has been so thoroughly corrupted by the pathology of being a top beneficiary in a capitalist, greed-is-virtue system. I’d like to think so. That’s perhaps the main purpose of reeducation.

Bye! As you slink away, embarrassed to have been so schooled, I want to thank you for proving once again that all "rUzZia is the AgResSSSSoR!" libs are intellectually vacuous and willfully incapable of learning anything about the real world whenever something challenges their simplistic, infantile understanding of it.

I’m sorry. I feel almost tainted having even written that. For reals, only compassion to you, comrade.