They're likely all the way in for this kind of culture because they are victims of those same kinds of places. People who grow up in catholic school are the ones who grow up to be catholic schoolteachers. Who grow up and send their kids to catholic school. That's kind of how it works.

actually the correct response, yeah. the same people who control the social media algorithms, the same people who have been pushing andrew tate, are the same people who control society more broadly. that the response is always instinctively to just hand over more control to them is extremely cool.

Yeah. It's sort of insanely ironic, to me, that it seems like the prevailing attitude in this comment section is to just eat this, hook, line, and sinker. Everyone's consuming internet disinformation that reinforces their biases right here. The exact thing they're complaining about, with the newer generation. Just as low, in terms of literacy, or the ability to distinguish. Everyone's so insanely eager to cite whatever anecdote their friend's friend who works at a school gives them, without a second thought, about how the kids today are just worse than the kids of yesteryear, and how social media is surely to blame. Reactive response to just ban your kids from using technology at all, which is a pretty good way to get them alienated from their peers and also not prevent anything at all since their peers will probably also be fully willing to expose them to whatever they get exposed to. It's awesome to see every generation become boomers over time, really cool.

because it's way more convenient

They need to have rehearsed and prepared talking points because that's the only way they'll actually come across as standing for anything other than the status quo, which is deeply unpopular. Most democrats probably don't even know what they even theoretically stand for without a corporate donor explicitly telling them what to do, and most of them can't do improv on the level of even being able to make shit up or lie in the absence of that, much less to charmingly lie by omission or tell the truth by technicality.

Realistically, the only actual solution to this problem in any long term would probably involve stationing nukes, which nobody really wants to do. A combination of not wanting to risk pissing off putin, because everyone thinks that he's an insane trump-level idiot that will engage in mutual self-destruction over ukraine, combined with the post-soviet destruction and hollowing out of the ukranian economy into private enterprise, an economy which wasn't exactly doing hot before. So it's pretty clear that most everyone doesn't actually give a fuck about ukraine or the ukranian people at all. Everyone's just gonna use this as an opportunity, as with every conflict, to pawn off old military hardware, bury the receiving country in a huge amount of IMF bank loan debt, and scale up their own domestic military production while paying off a bunch of private contractors which are, hmm, suspiciously close to the levers of power inside the real government. Weird how that happens. What a noble sacrifice.

I dunno, the wheels turn.

I mean, if you're assuming the worst, a nuclear strike could pretty much wipe israel almost entirely off the map. With a more conservative and realistic positioning, you know, one singular, small nuke, probably sourced from somewhere else, then you'd still be looking at probably 20,000 people dead or injured if it were to hit the downtown of any city. You know, ten times the amount of october 7th. That would be a huge international incident, especially seeing as how the nuke would have to be provided by some other foreign government, which means that there could be a chance of a probably unpreventable follow-up attack at almost any time. It would be a pretty big deal, even if they were credibly threatened. I mean, that's part of why Iran isn't allowed to have a nuclear program.

Destitute communities come with a lot of political instability which probably has to be channeled into something, which despite what everyone's been thinking so far, has sort of been, to mixed or poor success with basically every succeeding administration. The protests keep getting bigger, basically. You get a big or well-organized enough one of those, and then there's a chance that you get something much more serious than chaz, or you get a politically galvanizing one-sided massacre, or something else to that effect.

It's because the movies are written by christopher nolan, and that guy does not have good politics. The other guy is right with their explanation, but the underlying message is, as you say, pretty much total nonsense.

isn’t a slur more than that?

Not really. I could provide actual specific examples, but I don't really want to start saying like, slurs, so. I think maybe if you think that you couldn't make a slur out of almost any word, then you're not being creative enough, or, you haven't acclimated to how creative some of these other guys can be.

Here, I'll come up with a theoretical example. You could probably make a slur out of, say, calling someone a banana-eater, right. I can even imagine two ways to do that.

You could have it be, okay, well, monkeys eat bananas, so, the banana eater is like a monkey, and then obviously comparing people to monkeys is gonna be a little bit of a red flag, is maybe racist, especially depending on whether or not you're using it to be racist, or applying it disproportionately to one group of people. I've seen people just throwing out, like, the specific lego number piece of the mass produced lego monkey, whenever they see a black guy online. I think, at that point, that's basically a slur, in how they're using it, and that's like, just a sequence of numbers.

Or, you could say, okay, well, bananas are kind of a phallic type of food, right, like hot dogs, or whatever, so, people eating bananas are gay, as a kind of substitute for a cock. So, it could also be a homophobic thing.

This is all dependent on the context of use, too. If you're exclusively calling one group "banana-eaters" based on their intrinsic traits, that's gonna turn that expression into a slur more. It could also be a statement of fact, right, oh, chuck over there, he's a banana-eater, he eats bananas, sure. It depends entirely on use. If you need evidence for how this shit can progress then you need only look at websites like 4chan or some other such nonsense.

On top of all this you kind of have the complications of, say, slurs only really applying to particular intrinsic traits that people have rather than others. Slurs can apply to black people, but calling someone a "cracker", despite being still based on an intrinsic trait, of white skin, isn't really a slur. Neither is, as upthread, calling someone a "boomer", because we all age over time, where it's sort of used generically just to refer to anyone older than you, or because it's usually applied as a reference to a very specific class of people that have a specific socioeconomic context, more than just being based on their age. You'll usually only hear people call, say, american boomers "boomers", in that context, but you won't hear that in, say, china, or africa, or most of south america, or whatever. It's a reference to the post-war boom years, explicitly.

There are also certain subcultures which re-appropriate slurs, which basically means that those words aren't really slurs in how they're being used in that subculture. I'm sure you can think of examples of that.

Sorry, you gotta upgrade everything every 5 years, because otherwise there's a security vulnerability! Sorry, looks like there will be no new updates on your software, no compatibility! Surely, things have become so much more efficient in the last 5 years as a result of processing gains, and surely that will be passed onto the consumer rather than eaten up in the middle, and surely we need that increased processing power so you can run the increasingly dwindling number of social media sites that are actually relevant!

Sorry, looks like we got rid of the headphone jack because it takes up too much space and it's too hard to make the phone water resistant! The IR blaster isn't relevant anymore because everyone has unilaterally switched to wifi operated smart TVs! Surely! Sorry, the micro SD card slot took up too much space, we need to use that space for processing power! Same with irreplaceable batteries! Sorry, the 16:9 aspect ratio we used to have for phones isn't available in any phone anymore, because we decided to replace the physical buttons and ugly bezels with basically unusable screen space! But we're still gonna have a hole punched in the screen for the camera!

I dunno. Modern phones are fucking dogshit now, I hate them so much it's unreal. Even the software is progressively getting worse year over year. Shit used to be so basically functional and it's become so horrible.

Can we find five or ten people like that amongst the American population of 330 million people?

probably not, no

A lot of ink gets spilled around this kind of bullshit, when most of communism is focused more directly around anti-capitalism and economic theory.

Effectively, the preventative mechanism against authoritarianism is just democracy, but extended towards parts of the economy which, under capitalism, are conventionally privatized, and thus, are kind of ruled in an authoritarian, "meritocratic" manner. Then this authoritarian capitalism infiltrates and rules the public, democratic portions of society, as we've literally just seen right now with the kind of, explicitly corporate-backed trump administration. I mean, as we've been seeing for maybe the last 80 or so years, right, in a slow ramp up. Which isn't to say the US really had much of a democracy to begin with, it was sort of, designed from the inception to be more of an kind of joint-corporate state ruled by landowners, so in a roundabout way we are actually making america just as it was at inception. You could maybe contrast this situation of authoritarian capitalism with co-operative corporations, which sort of exist at various levels of democratic ownership, and exist to mixed success in a capitalist market context. Or union activity, maybe.

More specifically and directly to answer your question, you'd probably wanna use a Condorcet method, I'm partial to the Schulze method, and you'd maybe wanna set up certain factions of the economy to be voted on by those with domain-specific knowledge so as to not be overly politicized, weaponized, or met with undue interference by other portions of society. You want your railroad guys to be in control of the railroads, basically, rather than having to frame everything for the perhaps relatively uninformed general public. You want to avoid just using the public as a kind of rubber stamp where their approval of your program is contingent on how well you've phrased your proposal, because it just sort of meaninglessly increases costs for no reason. You want engagement to be legitimate rather than taken advantage of by cynical forces. Hopefully, by breaking up these specific sections of society, and giving them agency over their specific domain and nothing else, you can prevent a massive overly centralized and thus more authoritarian hierarchy from arising.

The other criticisms, say, of democracy itself, socialism doesn't quite do as well with. Say, with majoritarian rule slowly shrinking over time, or, the lines and borders that you draw up around particular domains creating a kind of insular and exclusive self-interest of a given class. Which conflicts explicitly with the previous idea, right, of splitting the economy into more and more factions so you can have each of them operate in their domain more efficiently. These would sort of be, more anarchist criticisms of socialism. Communism is sort of, depending on who you ask, some theoretical end state of all this which puts all of these questions out of mind, where everything is as flat as possible.

Realistically, these all tend to be kind of overblown as criticisms anyways, and the much bigger problems stem from the real world circumstances of trying to establish a communist state in a global capitalist hegemony, which is an inherently isolating, hostile, and cruel context. It's hard to do effective democracy in such a context, for the same reason that it's hard to have democracy on a pirate ship when you're getting shot full of holes, while, in other times, the ship would actually be ruled democratically.

hey look, it's all understandable given the current state of the world, ey?

I mean, yeah, you're right, feeding the troll is kind of a classic blunder, but I still think it makes sense not to go out of your way to give them any ammunition. Maybe I come off as a little victim blamey, but I don't think it's that serious

My point is only that bull bars sort of, have a different cultural association and collective cost-benefit than, say, cowcatchers on rural freight rail, and my only point in pointing that out, is really just to sort of, educate people about a series of fun facts, or things they may not have previously considered very much. i.e. if you live in suburbia, or if you find yourself driving to walmart once or twice a week, you should maybe not have bull bars on your car. Sort of also plays into the idea of like, larger cars, or even lifted cars, being overly tall in their hood height, meaning they'll dump most pedestrians face flat onto the ground and potentially under the car, rather than tipping them onto the hood of the vehicle, and bull bars can serve to potentially exacerbate that problem. Which also ties into the jeeps and SUVs thing. I dunno.

Ranchers were sort of who I was thinking of when I was thinking of someone who would be extremely rural, and who on occasion will commute into a probably very small town with only one or two big box stores, gas stations, maybe a motel 6, and other highway-exit popups. There's not much out in the boonies outside of agriculture, and like, maybe forestry or things of that nature.

There's sort of, a weird kind of stereotyping around rurality on the internet, where it's all seen as being sort of, extreme poverty, or, people living entirely disconnected from society, maybe working occasionally for some soulless big corporate farm that has no local upper management, and so everything there is sort of, supposed to be put upon, but also be noble in poverty, and be authentic, agreeable, and agree with me in all the ways that matter, especially politically. That's the sort of like, idiot stereotype of rurality. That wealth gap is real, sure, you'll drive through and see a bunch of millionaire plots of land flanked by like, random trailers that haven't really been updated or maintained since the 70's, that part is true enough. But basically, the idea that small trucks are the true sign of the working class ranchhand, and the large truck is always, always, some sort of like, pavement princess owned by an IT worker in san-francisco, that's obviously false, and people don't think about it at all. Obviously things aren't as clear cut, plenty of people working what are otherwise blue collar jobs have big trucks, live in actual rurality, and have an at least somewhat justified reason for owning the kinds of vehicles they own.

I dunno, I'm just, making a lot of conversation, you know? I saw bull bars brought up and I decided to bring up more shit about them. Cultural context, pedestrian safety, shit like that.

I dunno, I tend to see that shit way more often on lifted pavement princess f-150's and dodge rams than on, say, your classic rural 1990's nissan shitbox truck, or your classic ford ranger. Though the lines do become blurred, when your private ranchers are naturally also multi-millionaires. In any case, bullbars are somewhat sensible maybe for encountering, say, a bull, or if you're a police vehicle with a specific application, but more generally they're horrible for ensuring pedestrian safety, ensuring crash safety when met with a stationary barrier like a bollard or a tree or a concrete barricade, or a storefront, and they're obviously much worse in a crash with any other car. There are bullbars which try to get around these issues with more thoughtful integration with the frame of the car or the choice of material, but the vast majority I've seen are just tube steel.

None of what you say is untrue, but if you don't conform to codified grammar, then you'll get harangued by a bunch of grammar apes that freak out as soon as you misspell something relatively minor, like -esque to -esk. Or you'll even just find yourself getting hit with a bunch of clarifying questions about what your specific spelling actually was. So oftentimes it's actually more fluid, and more clear, to use language that's more codified.

I think maybe it's naive to think that if the cost goes down, shrimp jesus won't just be in higher demand. Shrimp jesus has no market cap, bullshit has no market cap. If you make it more efficient to flood cyberspace with bullshit, cyberspace will just be flooded with more bullshit. Those great lakes will still boil, don't worry.

we can send 47 back to his golf course for the rest of his term because he wont be able to accomplish anything.

I mean I was kinda hoping agent 47 would be incredibly busy this term. I can imagine a level set inside the inauguration with the dinner and all that.