I’m pretty well off but a lot of this stuff just sounds like cliche. It’s like the equivalent of thinking “why don’t the serfs and peasants just rise up against the rulers?”

Ask the people working three jobs just to afford rent if they’re comfortable.

Not a significant portion of the population as far as I know.

Ask the people living in tent cities in they’re comfortable

Is it a large enough number of people to change anything? There are very few people proportionally who are homeless on the street.

Ask the people on the kill line who are one medical bill away from being on the street if they’re comfortable.

Probably not a very large portion of people. Most people aren’t having life-altering medical problems they can’t pay for. It’s definitely ruining a bunch of people’s lives, but is it significant enough to mean anything, or has the ruling class made an accurate calculation so far?

downplaying the severity of psychological violence

There just is no comparison between the physical violence of actually dying or being hurt and psychological violence of having your life kinda suck and not being able to change it.

The vast majority of people are employed and make enough money to live on. Which is why the US is as stable as it is right now. People are generally not under thread of starvation or murder. Throw in some spoils of empire and that’s what this country is.

But you’re right it’s all stuff to organize around. It just feels weird getting mopey about how hard people have it. My thinking is definitely affected by my own privilege though.

I think left-wing orgs definitely have very little mojo right now. But I also think the country’s population just isn’t there either. Like, if people’s “spirits are broken” while being far and away the most privileged poor people on earth (this is simply true lol, with the exception of the peeps that literally live on the street), I don’t really know what to say. I think people still just “have it too good”.

I’m in Seattle though, where the median income is literally over $100,000 (and I am quite privileged myself) so that definitely affects how I think about things.

The glasses are giving Jeb!

It’s not just a Cumtown, it’s a whole Cumworld

Be the Jesus you want to see in the world.

The GDR still had tons of reactionaries that the communists had to live with.

Some top Google search results. Various amounts of liberalism and I’m not sure how much to trust that these articles are not trying to use a negative light, but they seem okay:

https://newlinesmag.com/essays/african-experiences-in-east-germany-are-erased-but-not-forgotten/

Pugach has illustrated how these romantic entanglements were often at the root of anti-Black violence toward African men in social situations. More surprising was the social ostracization of East German women romantically involved with African men. These women were often portrayed as loose and immoral.

The East German state’s behavior contrasts with the West German treatment of mixed-race children, many of whom were sent to the U.S. to find homes with Black families or were adopted out to white German families rather than being allowed to remain with their white West German mothers.

Despite the reports of racism against African students and workers, East Germany maintained its facade of anti-racism until the East German state dissolved, leading to the reunification of Germany by 1991. However, in the two years during which the status of East Germany was in flux, there was an explosion of racist violence against foreigners, particularly former contract workers from Africa and Southeast Asia.

I think calling it a “facade” is their snobby liberal propaganda showing itself, but at least the rest of it seems meaningful.

The most infamous example of this violence is the attack on the housing for contract workers and refugees in Hoyerswerda. On Sept. 17, 1991, groups of neo-Nazis began to throw bricks, Molotov cocktails and other objects at the residential center. Over 200 foreign workers and their families were trapped in the residential tower as they were called racial slurs, their homes were vandalized and the center was set ablaze. Worse, the local police stood aside and watched the destruction occur. Racist chants of “Auslaender raus!” (“Foreigners out!”) and “Germany for Germans” rang out in the streets for the seven days of the riot.

I think communists in Germany were dealt a horrible hand in having to lead a society full of these kinds of people. Maybe more they could have done, but idk. 😢

https://migrantknowledge.org/2022/08/05/violence-against-migrants-in-the-gdr/

What a NEEEEERRRRRRRRRRD.

But the “consultative democracy” stuff is really good to bring up. There really should be a lot more “propaganda” publicizing the election systems in socialist countries, showing how much more vibrant political participation is in so many non-Western countries.

Even just that little series of clips of people voting in China would break a bunch of Americans’ brains.

Just compare the process of putting a ballot in a box next to a bunch of other people in a room to elections in the US where vote-rigging electronic voting machines and other nonsense turn the whole process into a joke. I like doing mail-in voting in Seattle but it is definitely so far removed from anything I’d call democracy. The place where they count ballots has camera feeds on it and stuff but that doesn’t really matter, it’s completely divorced from actual transparency just because of how it’s all “taken care of” for us (yes you can become an elections worker).

Elections that have more than a hundred voters are absurd.

Yeah they created and were trying to push the For You feed before Elon Musk was forced to buy Twitter.

lions and suns and swords are kinda overplayed anyways tbh

It’s developed largely by Google. They control what features it has and doesn’t have, the same way they do with Chromium. It’s not minor in my opinion. Not really community-developed the way desktop Linux is.

Thanks for the correction.

Where in the World is Benjamin Netanyahu?

You mean Google software?

I think the best option to not be locked into Google stuff is to just get a global version Xiaomi or other Chinese phone. At least for most places in the world, where they’re sold.

You’re still locked in to Google’s Android operating system. Which will now only get a new open source release every 6 months.

My Fedora Linux PC gets updates about once a day. And Linux kernel updates are maybe every couple weeks to almost the latest kernel version. Most Android phones have a years out of date Linux kernel.

Unless it involves making much more of their device software and specs open source, it’s nothing to get excited about. The way it talks about a partnership makes it seem unlikely that it will help compatibility with postmarketOS. GrapheneOS doesn’t even use the latest Linux kernel like postmarketOS does. Hope I’m wrong, and it’s cool that this is coming from a company owned by Lenovo.

@UNCENSORED_KNOWLEDGE
🚨 BREAKING: Iran has kidnapped the entire Israeli leadership and are flying them to Iran. The war is OVER!!!

critical support for inside traders

Exactly lol! All the stuff the US has implemented so far is just insecure, anti-privacy, poorly designed crap. The digital ID stuff Europe developed is the obvious system if your goal was actually just providing age verification.

Deorbit all starlink satellites NOW

also lmao at the Baofeng walkie-talkies. Can’t even splurge on some encrypted radios (which Baofeng also makes)?

Europe already has a digital ID system that just uses public key cryptography. It doesn’t require a central server other than the government signing server when you create the digital ID. I think the US might have something sort of similar that isn’t as well known. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EUDIGITALIDENTITYWALLET/pages/712508927/Security+and+Privacy

yeah I guess it’s probably a thing in most of the world. At least anywhere the internet is super slow.

There are little places you can go in Cuba to have a bunch of media downloaded to a USB drive for you.