This is why I love jumping spiders.

I’d be terrified of a huntsmen spider, but I love jumping spiders i leave them be whenever I see them, knowing that they will snack on all the fruit flies, moths, and mosquitoes that make it into my house.

You don’t need to be downtrodden to feel like a party is failing you. Considering life is getting harder for so many lower and middle class people, a lot of people are feeling worse than they did 10-15 years ago. This is where people have been failed by both parties.

I mentioned that there are people who are feeling like they are losing their position in society. Some people are simply bigoted and are upset at seeing minorities get visibility, some are upset that christianity is less prevalent among Americans. I don’t think either of these reasons is valid, though, fuck the old hierarchies.

The issues faced by Americans in the rural south are completely different than the ones faced by Americans on the east or west coasts. We basically live in separate worlds. Republicans failed them, but to think the democrats didn’t is silly. For example, a lot of people live in rural areas, where the police would take an hour to get there if someone was being attacked by someone or some animal. Guns are a bit more necessary in places like this than they are in a big city.

Granted, I think the media’s lies is the biggest cause of the populism. And holy shit does right wing media spew lies at an incredible rate.

That’s true. I was just trying to explain my view of the US system.

Broadly speaking, do think that if a country has two dominant neoliberal parties, like the US, this will inevitably happen.

In a two party system, populist movements grow when the opposition party is failing (or is perceived as failing) people. Alternatively, both parties can fail the people before one becomes populist.

The two party system has failed Americans. But now that the republicans have created a populist movement, the failure of democrats to properly serve many people causes them to be pulled by populism. It doesn’t help that the culture war lets absolue horseshit issues fly by without actual basis in reality, since that fuels the fire without actually having to do the hard discussions about policy.

The MAGA movement is a “third way” that formed because the paths forward shown by both democrats and republicans seemed to lead to nowhere for many people.

I don’t think this is a cancer, I think this is a horrendous feature of the design of a representative democracy under capitalism (at least, in the American sense)

Capitalism will crush people while trying to wring every bit of profit out of them, and in a capitalist democracy, the state supports capitalism.

Representative democracy leads to unaccountable representatives. They still need to get re-elected if they want to (or they could just serve capital and dip), but with all the dogmatism caused by political parties, the hierarchy of the parties protecting the politician, and the benefits of having corporate sugar daddies, especially media corporations, they can get away with enriching themselves at the expense of Americans, while still having decent odds at reelection.

Further, people in power, for whatever reason gave this tendency to build their power, usually at the expense of those without it. The state gives itself new powers and new toys at the expense of everyone else. Fear of terrorism gave us some of the most draconian laws on the books, such as the patriot act, which has not been repealed whenever there has been an opportunity to. The police got afraid of the people, and bought themselves guns, counterinsurgency training and tools from a foreign apartheid state, armored cars, and raises. The supreme court went from writing itself into existence to giving the president near legal immunity, rolling out the red carpet for the authoritarian state to become an even more authoritarian state.

When you mix these tendencies together, its no wonder why this state has failed. And while it hasn’t failed everyone, the nature of capitalism leads to a pretty large exploited class ripe for exploitation. And this populist movement is ready to take advantage of that, between those primed by culture war drivel, economic suffering, or seeing their demographic and/or class lose power in some way.

This populism isn’t a cancer on an ailing democracy.

It is a symptom of a failing democracy, unable to sustain itself from the structure of itself.

I run two APs, and a Unifi server running on a thin client linux server.

I have the U7, and the U6 extender that goes in a wall outlet

I have a few of their small poe powered ethernet switches, they’re great since I have a poe switch as a backbone I can put it near a group of devices in a room, like consoles, raspberry PIs, etc, and just not have to worry about much setup or powering yet another tiny device.

Highly recommend unifi devices

Removed by mod

I wrote mine in LaTeX, highly recommend.

I mean, I spent years writing LaTeX for school so it was real simple and mindless. YMMV

I wish they’d do that for me. I’m a pasty white guy who is a spice fiend. I fucking love spicy food, and I have some sauces I regularly use that have Scorpion Peppers, Carolina Reapers, and Ghost Peppers.

Thai food is great, but when I go to thai restaraunts, they see me order the spicy option, I swear to god they give me a quarter of the spice that they’d give someone who doesn’t boil in sunlight.

Ahhh, prison labor, the one exception to the 13th amendment.

I know!

Like, jesus fucking christ, you are making it legal to fucking plow down protestors, ignoring their right to live, much less their first amendment rights to protest.

I fucking hate desantis and I wish him a very unpleasant rest of his life. I might not believe in heaven or hell, but I hope he never gets the pleasure of seeing his god face to face.

And when we weren’t drone striking the shit out of them, we were giving Turkey the weapons needed to fight them on the ground, for some reason

Great, I wasn’t sure whether I’d see fascists “counter protesting,” a fascist plowing a car through the crowd, or police brutality/repression, and now I gotta add foreign terror to my threat modeling?

Fuck man, these were supposed to be my normal protesting experiences

Bad take

Acting like biden is powerless in this when he has gone around congress to fund israel is willfully ignoring the truth.

Calling people foreign agents is also just shit brained. Rather than arguing a point, it just says “hey, u are (maybe) not American, we can ignore you”. Or just saying “Hey, ignore this guy, because I said he’s not American.” Plus, it holds less water when america has constantly interfered in so many other countries. Imagine saying a palestinian shouldn’t have a say in american politics when america has stances on Palestinian politics.

Only authoritarian governments crush student protests

I wish my cats were too small to press my keys

I’ll get up to get coffee and see my cat loafing on the numpad and there’s a slack message of a bunch of random numbers still getting typed

And she bites me when I try and push her off!

That’s some serious capitalist realism you’ve got there, it would be a shame if you were incorrect.

Real big shame…

It would also be a shame if people are trying to put said other systems in action right now

Real

big

shame

I like a lot of your proposals,but I don’t think they will fix everything. Certainly an improvement though.

I don’t think the supreme court changes would fix issues with the court, and I think a 15 yr. limit could make it worse.

Each presidential term would get 2-3 nominations per term, allowing them to establish a majority if elected for 2 terms. Considering how powerful the court is, allowing a president to establish a majority simply by being in office for 2 terms isn’t great.

The pro-palestine protests near me are often organized by jewish orgs, palestinian orgs, muslim orgs, and socialists. I have not seen a hate crime take place at any protest, even though there are people with jewish voice for peace there, or jewish people in the other orgs.

I do that to my dead drives, but I’ve only had one fail that wasn’t an SSD. Moreso because the washers that separate the platters have a very satisfying ring to them that makes me keep them as a fidget toy.

I use the magnets to hold screws, it works great for that.

Unfortunately, SSDs have less interesting parts, so I just take them apart to destroy the chips after failure

I love the fascist-punching enthusiasm, but a good movement will need diversity of action to get things done. Support the antifascist who beats nazis in brawls, and the antifascist who plans rallies that sing songs and march. Both are valid, and both are important.