SoyViking [he/him]

Come on… This can’t be true. The yanks must have known that Iran would strike back.

It would be very funny and I hope that it is true. I just don’t think it.

Say what you want about the Sino-Soviet split but it least it involved two independent and politically viable powers who were able and willing to actually split.

This is not the situation with Europe and the US. European elites have made themselves completely different on America in everything from defense and financial infrastructure to pharmaceuticals and communication services. This is not a split, this is butthuet satraps bickering while being unable and unwilling to risk actually defying the empire.

Republican Holden Bloodfeast receives bipartisan accolades for accidentally saving kitten while giving keynote address at yearly Murder All Kittens conference

Communist Democrat Numbers Fuckstein unleashes WOKE PREDATOR on American heartland!

Ukraine: Meet the brave volunteers who saved a Kitten from Russian full-scale terror (the volunteers all have swastika tattoos, the kitten was stuck in a tree and the volunteers didn’t save it)

Palestine: Hamas uses kitten as human shield while twirling moustache, says IDF spokesperson

Iran: Could this story about a kitten being rescued be the end of the islamic republic?

Never attribute to stupidity or malice that which is adequately explained by a combination of both.

The people who rule us are stupid and evil.

Back in the noughties they would run in every election where I live and get two to three digit vote counts. They also flooded my campus with flyers, I tried reading some of it but none of it made sense.

Their posters were good though, complete gibberish to the uninitiated as well as a poster demanding major construction of bridges with maglev trains on them “after the finance crash”.

Jensen - Denmark

Meanwhile they are pissing and moaning over the Evil Empire’s threats to occupy and annex Greenland. Then Washington acting like gangsters is suddenly bad - but not so bad that these cowardly little Eichmanns dare do anything to get out of the Evil Empire’s chains.

“Kommunister i lysthuset”

A direct translation of “lysthus” would be gazebo but “lyst” can also be translated to “lust” or “desire”.

It was lovely. I am still recovering from all the food I had.

The kids loved their presents, the dinner I had cooked was just as I wanted it to be. I spent most of the evening assembling a toy construction crane for our youngest kid. My mother-in-law was less toxic than usual and her attempts at outshining my dinner failed.

If you sell people a phone with enough storage in it you can’t sell them subscription-based cloud storage

I work as a computer toucher in the private sector. I usually get a gift card to chose from an assortment of bougie gifts worth about USD 200, the maximum you can get before being taxed. In addition the company pays a Christmas party in the form of a nice dinner at a nice restaurant. I’m not complaining.

My partner on the other hand is a public school teacher. Last year they got an insultingly small bag of caramels and a half-assed Christmas card with a picture of their asshole principal.

Because then we would cram all sorts of ungodly things up there. We’re no better as a species than that.

There is a test suite. It tests that three lines are logged to the console. The tests all fail.

This is good for an American.

Good for an American is still really bad.

It happened in Denmark a few weeks ago. Someone flew a couple of drones near an airport and a military airstrip and everybody lost their shit.

I think I agree with most of what you say. Sex work is horribly exploitative and most sex workers are driven into sex work from precarity.

On the other hand, who am I to tell someone who finds sex work to be the lesser evil compared to a grueling minimum wage job that they’re wrong?

I think it is important to be pro-sex worker. I think you can be this while acknowledging the harm of the sex industry. Personally I don’t think bans and cops are the right response. You can compare this to how doing drugs is obviously bad for you but sending cops to arrest people with substance abuse disorders is only making things worse.

My personal belief is that the best way forward is harm reduction. Both when it comes to the actual sex work (unionisation, labour safety standards, legal protections) but also when it comes to the social factors that promotes sex work. Nobody should be coerced into sex work because the alternative is poverty or mistreatment, any moral society should help people long before they get that desperate. That help should also include adequate and compassionate responses to substance abuse, such as providing patients with free, safe drugs so that they are not forced into crime or prostitution. I also think harm reduction includes social attitudes to sex work, it doesn’t make anything better that sex work is considered shameful and that terms for sex workers are used as misogynistic slurs.

I’m afraid that pushing for criminalisation acts as a bandaid that allows liberals to call it a day and avoid dealing with the harmful structural social factors that causes sex work and worse its outcomes

This year they didn’t give out a Nobel peace prize, they gave out a CIA employee of the month award

You’re giving the liberals too much credit by saying they admit that electoralism has never worked.

The liberal position is not only that electoralism works but that it is the only thing that works.

A closely related thing that has bothered me for quite some time is the way supposedly anti-racist liberals love to spread the trope of racists being “losers who have failed at life” and framing racism as a disease of the lower class.

It’s wrong on several levels. There are plenty of majority-ethnic poor people who are not racist. In fact, they are more likely to live and work among racialised people and be less susceptible to racist propaganda.

And at the other end of the scale, there are plenty of people who have been very successful under capitalism who hold racist beliefs. These people are a lot more dangerous than some shouting slurs and they are allowed to slip under the radar when every discussion about racism has to be about the racist “losers”.

The trope also exposes liberal class hatred. To the liberal mind, the most morally reprehensible thing you can be is not to be an exploiter, a parasite or an oppressor — it is to be poor.