It surely feels good to see a fascist lose. That’s enough for me these days.

Falls Du Musik machen möchtest, um Geld zu verdienen, dann ist die Antwort leider klar: Nein, es lohnt sich nicht.

DIe Künstlersozialkasse (KSK) über die die meisten Künstler’innen und Musiker’innen ihre Sozialversicherung abrechnen, gibt jedes Jahr die harten Zahlen zu den Einnahmen der bei ihr Versicherten heraus. Musiker’innen sind dabei die Berufsgruppe, die im Jahr am wenigsten verdient, und zwar zwischen 14.143 (Frauen) und 19.434 (Männer). Wohl gemerkt: Das sind Durchschnittswerte, dh. Musiker’innen müssen damit rechnen deutlich weniger zu verdienen.

Während AI natürlich zusätzlichen Druck macht, sind diese Werte nicht erst seit kurzem so schlecht. Es ist bereits seit Jahrzehnten der Normalzustand. Sicherlich gibt es außerordentlich gut verdienende Künstler’innen/Musiker’innen, aber diese sind die Ausnahme und man kann nicht damit rechnen zu ihnen zu gehören.

Man muss natürlich noch erwähnen, dass die KSK nur die selbstständigen/freischaffenden Musiker’innen versichert und es noch fest angestellte Musiker’innen gibt, etwa in Orchestern oder in Ensembles. Diese Karrieren bahnen sich aber langfristig an, etwa durch Teilnahme an Jugendorchestern oder Förderprogramme. Die meisten dieser Wege schließen sich irgendwann, wenn man älter wird.

Ich weiß, dass das eine sehr ernüchternde Antwort ist, aber ich wollte hier Deine Frage geradeheraus beantworten und hoffe, dass Du Dir davon und den anderen Antworten ausgehend selber ein Bild wirst machen können.

Wo es Dich auch immer hinführen mag: Viel Erfolg!

One of the articles you posted contains this bit:

According to Fuentes, who could not be reached for comment, Kent told him “I love what you’re doing.” Fuentes said he and his organization — as well as his social media following — boosted Kent’s message.
“We retweeted his stuff, we showed his stuff on Gab, we got his social media up off the ground,” Fuentes said in the three-and-a-half-hour livestream. “That was part of that call.”

So whether you believe Fuentes or rather Kent’s denial, Fuentes was at one time convinced that they are working together. That’s “ties” to me. YMMV

The two of them may not like each other all that much, but all of these articles affirm their connections and their past interactions with each other. And whether they Fuentes and Kent are amicable towards each other or not, they run with the same crowd of white supremacists and neo-nazis.

Joe Kent is a white supremacist with ties to Nick Fuentes and Fuentes has publicly denounced Trump for fighting Iran at Netanyahu’s behest.

The catch: He is a white supremacist with ties to Nick Fuentes and his motivations may rather be rooted in hatred for Israel and him disapproving of Trump fighting a war at Netanyahu’s behest.

This is - unfortunately - not surprising. Niantic has always been in the business of selling/using user data for profit, they were a spin-off from Google after all. Their first big game, Ingress, was used to train Google Maps.

Why, thanks for disseminating the queerphobic talking point that seeing queer people makes children require therapy, Mr. Wholesome-Pixar-Movie-Guy. (Yes, I know the statement can be read differently, but it resembles the right-wing’s narrative to a T, so there is no reason to assume he meant anything different.)

I agree with you and the lineage is obvious when looking at how Steve Bannon pushed GamerGate at Breitbart and then went straight on to become Trump’s campaign manager.

And Bannon’s name missing from that article is one of the article’s major flaws, considering how much Bannon shaped the MAGA movement as a whole.

I know this is a hard pill to swallow for most people, but our conscious thoughts are not necessarily “ourselves”, even though they often get framed as such. We are the whole, the uncountable unconscious small machinations, as well as the big thoughts.

As somebody else mentioned: Reacting first and thinking about it later was most often advantageous for our ancestors. “Flee from the lion first and think about that was necessary later.”

But that does not mean that the process of arriving at the point of “Flee from the lion” isn’t individual and very much “ours”. It’s just the fastest part of our brain taking the lead and everything else following.

Meanwhile in the real world…

Wall Street’s Favorite Trades Collapse After Market Selloff

US companies announced most job cuts for any January since 2009

Some older Americans are ‘unretiring’ to keep up with cost of living

Wir dachten sie wollten uns fressen, dabei wollen sie einfach nur mit uns rumhängen.

Yeah, people have to understand that right-wing politics considers science merely a tool to accumulate wealth and power. Thus right-wingers will not acknowledge that science pursues scientific truth, but rather insist that science that contradicts them must be a challenge to their interests that aims to embolden their political opponents and thus must be expunged.

RuneQuest does a similar thing: Everyone can do magic on a basic level, but it takes skill and time to become proficient. To me this always made more sense than the “chosen one” logic inherent in other RPG systems, because most RPG classes are inherently defined by a difference in skill.

For those who aren’t aware of it: “Shinigami Eyes” has become far less reliable and in some cases outright harmful due to the creators of the extension flagging people (yes, even trans people) they personally disagree with. One example is the creators denying the existence of intersex people, thus many advocates for the rights of intersex people are now flagged by Shinigami Eyes.

My pleasure.

To add to what SpookyBogMonster already said: On an international stage the big proponents of these views nowadays are Xi Jiping’s faction in China or North Korea, while even Cuba (which had upheld these views for a long time) have now abandoned this position.

In the US and in Europe, it’s a fringe position among leftists, mostly popular with those who also hold favourable views of Xi Jiping’s China and North Korea. It’s a very vocal minority though and infamously one of the key developers of the Lemmy platform is one of those.

Because it is not a coherent political standpoint, the justifications are all over the place. Ultimately people are being bigots and they come up with slew of explanations to justify their bigotry. So the arguments vary…

One of most popular argument goes something like this “Only rich capitalists engaged in homosexuality and transsexualism because of degenerate bourgeois ennui. True Workers™ are never homosexual and transsexual. Therefore any homosexual and transsexual must be a member of the bourgeois class and cannot be a True Worker™.” (Which is just circular logic.)

There are other arguments in the vein of “China (or another socialist country of choice) is queerphobic, China is socialist, therefore socialism must be queerphobic.” (Which fails to acknowledge that other socialist countries like for example the GDR were remarkably progressive in comparison to its capitalist neighbors.)

Then there are other circular arguments like “Capitalist societies are rotten to the core. There is more queer visibility today. Queerness is proof of capitalist rot.”

Appeals to queerphobia of the past like “The Soviet Union criminalized queerness. The Soviet Union is the socialist ideal, therefore we should do like them.”

Or there are appeals to the authority of some queerphobic socialist writer of the past. As well as riffs on the argument from the screenshot which boil down to “Individualism is bourgeois capitalism. Queerness is an individual choice. It cannot be allowed under socialism where collectivism reigns supreme.”

The official reason for me getting fired were budget cuts, but I knew that the new department head actually wanted to hand my responsibilities to a buddy of theirs they had brought on board. Despite being there longer at the department than the new head and their buddy, as well as excellent performance reviews I had no chance to keep that job.

Yeah, you can put horses on any pasture and they will happily graze on whatever weed grows there. Gryphons (just one example of a popular fantasy mount) should be carnivorous. So how many cows do you need to feed that thing before it will fly someone safely across the countryside, without deciding that this someone looks awfully tasty?

Big flying mounts should be horribly expensive to maintain. Only the most wealthy nobles and wizards who can literally conjure money should be able to pay for them.

Personally I always have to suspend a lot of my disbelief whenever dragon mounts are being mentioned in fantasy books and there is absolutely no explanations how these creatures are being fed. Usually the topic is quietly sidelined or simply dismissed with “something something magic”.