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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Honestly I’m shocked at the number of people that stayed on twitter. Like… just why? It’s zero effort to leave and minimal effort to find another platform.

    I realize many people choose not to care who owns the companies that make their stuff. And to be fair, sometimes it’s actually worse to throw away the product than keep using it despite the associated image. I still daily drive my Tesla model 3 that I bought in 2019. Throwing away a car creates a shitload of waste, versus just continuing to drive it. I’d never buy another tesla, which solves that issue.

    But unlike throwing out a car or even throwing out something with actual value like youtube, ditching Twitter as far as I see has no downside.








  • Republicans say the repeal will lead to Michigan becoming less attractive to businesses and will lead to forced union membership. House Republican leader Matt Hall said in statement following Whitmer’s signing that “businesses will find more competitive states for their manufacturing plants and research and development facilities.”

    Translation: Regressives want businesses to be able to abuse employees, and they’re afraid that not being able to abuse employees quite as easily will put up some reasonable guardrails on maximizing profits.


  • It’s desperately needed, and in some senses it doesn’t go far enough.

    Regressives held our state government hostage via superminority rule and actively forced us to compromise on their inhuman policies to make any progress for three straight years. Without this, only a rewrite to our state constitution’s quorum rule would prevent eternal hell regressives holding our state hostage via minority rule.

    Now, we can at least revoke these turds after they fuck us over. But in the grand scheme of things, I worry that what this law doesn’t do is prevent this new cycle from repeating. It doesn’t take many of them ruling over a few tiny, horribly misinformed districts to screw us all over. In other words, it only takes a tiny number of regressive candidates each year to accomplish that goal.


  • I won’t give the mouthpeices much credit. But be careful in underestimating them. Self-delusion is deep and complex, and that’s frightening enoguh. Even more frightening though, is that if you go searching deep enough in conservative donors networks, conservativeism always winds it’s way back to members of the 1% seeking unchecked power.

    Conservative and religious institutional donors do think ahead, and they are a special breed of cruel, ruthless, and smart. Yes, most of the conservative bloc is dickwaving while they push the “give money now” button of reaction hate politics. It’s pretty obvious that on the surface there’s nothing particularly thoughtful going on there.

    But the underlying strategy is as fascinating as frightening. There is a LOT of effort that goes in behind the scenes to figure out how to manipulate literally every aspect of people in society. These big donors typically have highly lucratice connections, often very direct ones, to big corps. Some of the most insidious manipulation that goes on in our society today is the result of capitalist businesses finding ways to perpetually squeeze us harder for a dollar. It’s no coincidence when we see the same tactics being used in politics.

    So yeah. I don’t entirely disagree with you but progressives consistently get our asses handed to us when we underestimate anything.



  • Yeah, implementing policies like this has to be done really damn carefully to prevent unintended consequences from dragging the whole thing down. It’s also not a push-button solution to a problem; it requires persistent, long-term commitment and gradually change to get right. Tricky, especially when, at least here in the US, regressive politicians regularly get elected and scuttle policies that would eventually work if left alone.

    Anyway, yeah, just focusing on a land-value tax alone won’t solve the problem of equitable housing. It’ll have to be worked in carefully with safeguards to prevent the 1% from abusing it, that prevent public green spaces from disappearing into the concrete jungle, that ensures we have space to build and improve public transit, infrastructure , etc.

    For example, single family home zoning on large (7000+ sq ft) lots isn’t appropriate major cities. It’s reasonable to expect people to compromise away from that type of housing into smaller lots and mixed-use zoning, so that SFH’s can exist in small spaces but be surrounded by businesses and apartments. But, if a small single family home or an apartment wants to work in a small garden or share a public garden, I think those types of things should be protected and, at least if they’re public access, exempted from land use tax to a certain point.

    We of course have to be careful not to allow loopholes that enable people to exploit that and keep inappropriate amounts of land to themselves without paying dearly for it. But we also need provisions for that kind of land use to exist without it being so expensive that only the wealthy have it, or that horrific things like HOAs are the only ones able to afford them.

    It’s a mess. I’m glad though that they’re trying it out. Just putting the idea off because it’s hard will keep things worse forever.


  • Yes, exactly. The short term solution requires that people recognize the greater evil in the room and defend what little progress we’ve made. We can’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Our first part the post voting system is horrible, but until we can build up enough progressive movement to update it to a better system, priority 1 is exactly what you said.

    Choosing not to vote for Democrats because they’re not perfect is choosing to step back and give republicans a free ticket to burn all of our progress to the ground. It’s naïve to think otherwise.

    And honestly, that naïveté is holding us back from actually addressing issues like us aid to israel. Enoguh splintering among progressives will by default give control back to republican leaders who would happily sit back and watch palestinians die while lying about it and blaming it on anything anyone else other than themselves.



  • When the options are sue or plan for the future…

    You’ve omitted the critical, first-priotity option: get out. Unless that I what you meant by “plan for the future…”

    Absolutely nobody who is sane of mind will look at texas, with its radical conservative “leadership” and sociopath 1% investors, and say “I want to stay here even though I could move.” And I’ll admit, I’m very quick to judge you for what you said: if you can afford whole-home solar, you can afford to move to a nice fucking house.

    Now, I was in the same boat.

    I left idaho (which by many measures is worse than texas) years ago, and have been trying to convince my family to do the same. They agree they need to leave that hateful shithole, but selling their home and uprooting from their tiny circle of non-psychopath idaho friends is still very hard. I’m going to end up digging deep financially to make it happen, but it’ll work out in the end.

    Still, nobody deserves to end their life in such a hateful place. Leaving is an option once you can afford a home, no matter what anyone says. And at least if people leave, they won’t be actively forced to support a radical conservative hate state.




  • Oh no. Anyway…

    Seriously though, if it doesn’t come out on PC it probably means I won’t be missing anything for the first couple years it exists. I can’t recall an exclusive that I felt I needed right away.

    Especially the old-school ones. Halo is just so much better on PC, especially now that I can torture my friends with brutal legendary difficulty mods for halo 3… Good times.