Sure, but every time someone’s like “I’m going to do a game of secret modern day vampires doing political intrigue in DND” I’m going to judge them.

I’ve used credit cards for (oh gosh i’m old) many years and never carried a balance nor paid a fee. I could probably optimize harder (eg: finding cards with higher rewards), but that would probably be more effort than it’s worth.

But as others have said, that’s not always easy. I knew a guy years ago who just maxed out his cards and then to his surprise he got in a lot of trouble. I don’t really know what he expected to happen. We lost touch but last I heard he’d finally managed to turn his life around, but it was a lot.

Speaking from the US so my context may be different, but:

One of the things that bugs me is people don’t seem to want to do anything except in the days leading up to the election. Then they want to vote for some moonshot candidate.

To me the strategy should be a lot of hard work throughout the year, and then harm reduction as needed (eg: vote against trump). The hard work may be phone calls, canvassing, protesting, coalition building, I don’t know.

When people do nothing political except vote for a fringe party, it seems ineffective. Maybe even counter productive.

I mean, I’m lazy and being strangled by capitalism too, so I kind of get it.

Right. And that probably leads to criticism of capitalism (the owners want to make more money more than anything else). Or at least the primacy of money (this small developer put ads in his app because he needs money or society will let him die)

I think a lot of people have internalized parts of our society and don’t really look hard at them anymore. Like, “if you don’t labor you’ll be allowed to die of exposure” is kind of fucked up. So is “you don’t have to labor if you have enough money. Then you don’t need to do anything at all, and you can live a nice life”

Saw one of these that had the Nazi in the back and a maga-hat in the front.

Unemployment not helping. And all the ownership class seem to be salivating over replacing their workforce with AI. Who’s going to buy anything when we’re all out of work?

Zitron’s posts are generally pretty good.

He doesn’t really propose effective solutions, though, I don’t think. Like, yeah you can tell people that the internet sucks because some assholes made it that way. But if it wasn’t these assholes, it’d be some other assholes. And we’re not going to get most people to care about things.

The problems are structural.

The megacorps need to be broken up, at the very least.

The ultra rich need to not exist anymore. Either because they were taxed down to size, or they met the guillotine.

Without touching those parts of the problem, nothing’s going to get better.

I’m reminded of some garbage post I saw in the hell known as LinkedIn. Some soulless suit was saying “Don’t do PRs - just let your team merge directly to production.” I didn’t engage with it because I hate everything about LinkedIn and its clickbait trash feed, but “it protects you from a lone disgruntled employee” was one of the reasons I thought about.

By any reasonable measure, we’d be better off if Musk died. But that’s true of a lot of people.

Big “y tho” response from me

i feel like we should… do something about Liberty Counsel, then?

Like, the right wing protests abortion clinics and murders people. Why don’t we find where Liberty Counsel’s leadership lives and… uh… you know, we just wanna talk to him.

He’s not eligible for office via the 14th amendment. Neither are a bunch of republicans.

I feel like trying to follow all the rules and norms while your opponent doesn’t isn’t really a winning long term strategy, but I guess this doesn’t hurt much.

Instead I would like us to insist, with as much force as necessary, that parity with men is not a treat benevolently bestowed upon us, nor a kindness that can now be rescinded.

(emphasis added)

Yes, but I don’t think a lot of people are ready for this. As soon as someone’s like “Maybe when someone threatens to kill you, you should hit them first” it’s all “violence is never the answer” and “We have to compete in the marketplace of IDEAS”

At some point, people are going to need to fight for respect and rights again. And that might mean putting people like Tate in the ground.

Not mad about it. Fuck trump. Also golf kind of sucks in terms of environment and public access to green spaces.

I feel like a lot of people look at a bad system and go “We should change!” and then accept any change. But that’s stupid. If you have a machine that often breaks down, yeah you should change that. But you shouldn’t replace it with a machine that shoots rusty nails out every couple minutes while filling the room with toxic gas. Yeah, that’s a change, but a change for the worse.

Or like if you realize you got on the wrong train. You should change because you don’t want to go where this one is going. But don’t go on an express train going to the same wrong place!

I always set a quorum for my groups. Usually it’s like “If there’s 4 players, we play with 2”

He said new laws further criminalising disruptive protests had made traditional, accountable methods of activism increasingly unsustainable, and a clandestine approach increasingly attractive. He pointed to the case of activists from JSO who received sentences of four and five years – reduced on Friday after an appeal – for organising road blocks on the M25.

This is exactly what myself and many others said would happen. If you punish peaceful (but disruptive) protests as hard as, say, murdering the CEO of exxon, you might as well go for the murder.

I don’t really want to live in a world where vigilantes are murdering the entire board of oil companies, but i also don’t want to live in a world with big oil companies destroying our climate.

Anyone else thinking of that book “a libertarian walks into a bear”?

That sounds really tricky to implement.

There are so many ways to mislead, sometimes not even intentionally or maliciously. Like, is the passive voice going to have to go? There’s a difference between like “Man killed after interaction with police” and “police fatally shoot man”

I’m inclined to agree with your intent, I think, but I don’t know how to implement it

Trump voters are some of the stupidest people alive. Just vibes voting that trump will somehow “end inflation” despite there being no evidence that any of his proposed policies would do so. Many of them will suffer as a result of his changes, but as they are unbelievably stupid people, I don’t think they will reject conservatism or capitalism. They’ll just be conned again.