Lurker > Antifar

https://youtu.be/BSfpoSrCGsQ

It feels *so* good when you land a well timed smash.

Update on this
https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1664600937564893185

https://twitter.com/nkulw/status/1664612093398507522

Poverty is a lack of money problem. We have a big apparatus designed to tell you it's something else, but the way to solve it is to give people money.

willythemailboy posted...

Well at least one of you has the balls to admit to terrorist intent.

I live in a country built on terrorist intent

willythemailboy posted...

Or are you going to be supporting the French labor habit of taking managers hostage as part of "negotiations"?

Yes.

Some info that some of you may find helpful
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/employment-alone-isnt-enough-solve-homelessness-study-suggests

Genocide victims

Where do we go? We go free

Update: https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/1664386409753370634?t=BZC0faf_ym-rLEJsGaDchA&s=19

https://twitter.com/AlexThomp/status/1664345849063677959?s=19

Housing costs are no joke.

https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki/status/1664249459230769152

Lol

https://twitter.com/asymptosis/status/1664305662522953729?

Pretty cool

Yagami voice: hell yeah

Your Kickstarter Sucks

Something to note: a Jeb Bush presidency would be horrendous

Can I be a socialist who thinks the fetishization of "real jobs" is weird?

joe40001 posted...

It's not your rival team you are dunking on, it's your fellow american with whom you have a lot of common cause.

Is it only nationality that compels this sort of solidarity? Would it be cool if the Americans here spent their time dunking on Tories or Canadian conservatives?

Just block anyone you see with a check

Bump

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Spend 5 more seconds thinking about this idea.

https://theintercept.com/2023/05/31/cop-city-bail-fund-protest-raid-atlanta/

ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, a heavily armed Atlanta Police Department SWAT team raided a house in Atlanta and arrested three of its residents. Their crime? Organizing legal support and bail funds for protesters and activists who have faced indiscriminate arrest and overreaching charges in the struggle to stop the construction of a vast police training facility dubbed Cop City atop a forest in Atlanta.

In a joint operation with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or GBI, Atlanta cops charged Marlon Scott Kautz, Adele Maclean, and Savannah Patterson all board members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund with money laundering and charity fraud.

The arrests are an unprecedented attack on bail funds and legal support organizations, a long-standing facet of social justice movements, according to Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center.

This is the first bail fund to be attacked in this way, Regan, whose organization has worked to ensure legal support for people resisting Cop City, told me. And there is absolutely not a scintilla of fact or evidence that anything illegal has ever transpired with regard to Atlanta fundraising for bail support.

While the Atlanta Solidarity Fund has been a crucial resource for activists facing harsh repression for their involvement in Stop Cop City, the nonprofit predates the movement and has been providing bail funds, jail support, and assistance with legal representation for Atlanta activists since the 2020 Black liberation uprisings.

The fund, a project of the registered nonprofit Network for Strong Communities, has also provided grants to support an array of anti-repression work in Atlanta, including to groups working with unhoused trans youth, Black worker-owned cooperatives, and abolitionist community builders.

What happened this morning is a terrifying escalation by the state, and a chillingly direct attack on the First Amendment. This is fascist political repression, Hannah Riley, an Atlanta-based organizer, told me. Providing mutual aid to people exercising their constitutionally protected rights to protest and dissent is not a crime.

A public statement from the GBI said that [a]gents and officers executed a search warrant and found evidence linking the three suspects to the financial crimes. The warrants for all three arrestees cite records and reports of certain currency transactions and fraudulent, misrepresenting, or misleading activities regarding charitable solitations. (Solitations is, of course, not a word, but the apparent misspelling of the word solicitations appears on all three arrestees warrants.)
...
WEDNESDAYS ARRESTS ARE just the latest in extreme law enforcement persecution of the popular Stop Cop City movement. A total of 42 activists are currently facing state domestic terror charges on the flimsiest of police claims, while three others face hefty felony intimidation charges for distributing flyers that named a police officer connected to the brutal police killing of 26-year-old forest defender Manuel Tortuguita Tern.

Kautz, one of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers arrested on Wednesday, had previously shared numerous reflections with The Intercept on the Atlanta cops extreme repressive tactics. He noted that the indiscriminate arrests and use of state domestic terrorism charges against protesters represented an unprecedented level of repression and a strategy of blatant malicious prosecution.

It is a vile irony that for his own role in legal support work and rightful criticism of police violence, Kautz is now part of this same pattern of apparent prosecutorial abuse.

In targeting the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, police and prosecutors are attempting to further the groundless narrative that the multifaceted movement against Cop City is a criminal organization, enabling profoundly unconstitutional arrests based on no more than association with a resilient anti-racist, environmentalist movement.

Politicians keen to see Cop City built in Atlanta have doubled down on the pernicious line, none more so than Georgias Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. These criminals facilitated and encouraged domestic terrorism, said Kemp in a statement responding to Wednesdays arrests, despite the fact that no one has been convicted in the weak domestic terrorism cases.

Organizing bail funds and legal support for protesters facing charges, however serious, is a decades-old social justice movement practice. As the Atlanta Community Press Collective noted on Twitter, When Dr. King was held in Birmingham Jail, churches and community groups including the NAACP came together to fund his $4000 bail the equivalent of $39,000 today.

Like the overreaching domestic terrorism charges, if any established legal standards and precedents are upheld in these cases, no financial crimes or money-laundering charges will stick. Yet even unsuccessful malicious prosecutions exact a painful toll on movements, especially when a resource hub like the Atlanta Solidarity Fund is targeted.

Proto_Spark posted...

There has to be some kind of collusion going on. All of these people who don't have political futures higher than they already are are running for President to try to recreate 2015 where there was a huge field and Trump could ride the wave over top of them.

Trump is polling at like 60 percent. He doesn't need a big field to win. There are just a lot of campaign consultants looking for vehicles to take donors' money.

joe40001 posted...

Idk, I want it to be overblown. It is possible, but every so often I'll hear some stories about a young kid coming home after a diversity class and asking something like "why can't I be friends with (their black friend)" because apparently the teacher like separated kids based on race and the kids didn't get the point, or research grants in math/sciences fields that are getting rejected for inadequate DEI statements, or just second hand stories from people I trust who are talking about dozens of people who talk to them in confidence about the chilling effects on their campuses.

I do feel a chilling feeling in the air, but maybe that's all a delusion of social media hyping up every culture war, or maybe it just feels like that until the day that something BS happens to me.

Even treating these now third-hand anecdotes of vague unease as an issue, it seems to me that the problem they pose is miniscule in comparison to the impact of state efforts to wipe entire subjects of study
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/27/1151725129/florida-advanced-placement-african-american-studies-backlash
Or censor professors
https://reason.com/2023/03/15/a-florida-bill-to-censor-professors-just-got-even-worse/
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/18/1164530319/florida-professor-fired-racial-justice-woke
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/sep/14/black-us-teachers-critical-race-theory-silenced

What happens when you treat politics as a test for your theoretical muscles is that you can end up fixated on the inner workings of some individual storm while unaware of the tidal wave of real effects on people. The media focus on these campus culture stories has not just overshadowed but abetted the legislative push by Republicans to remake the ideology of college institutions by any means necessary.

Beyond the utter lack of creativity of those utilizing it, the capabilities of AI are being sorely overestimated
https://twitter.com/interacciones/status/1663898138518642689?t=IygkRL1DFFg0QjM9-7m1MQ&s=19

joe40001 posted...

But I wouldn't be so worried about youtube propagandizing you. The feed is based around what you like, it's not like it's going to push an agenda on you.

There is some data that would suggest that actually, it does funnel people into more radical content
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/29/276000/a-study-of-youtube-comments-shows-how-its-turning-people-onto-the-alt-right/

To put my point in fewer words: debate is not the end goal of politics. It is a means, not even the only means, of reaching political ends.

joe40001 posted...

And IMO that's the point of good faith discussion, to all move together in more accurate directions.

Do you not find those kinds of discussions interesting?

At what point are we allowed to move together?

So often these "good faith discussions" take the form of rehashing long-settled topics. Dead and discredited ideas - climate change denial, bigotry, trickle-down economics - get propped up Weekend at Bernie's style in our discourse. That's not so we might sharpen our rhetorical blades against them, but to stifle our ability to move on to new subjects and make concrete progress on issues.

Additionally, to people for whom politics is a matter of life and death (trans people, pregnant people, those at risk from climate change) and for those whom politics makes material difference in their lives - the working class - it becomes incredibly tiresome to see the matter treated as an intellectual exercise, where policy outcomes are rendered secondary to mental masturbation.

joe40001 posted...

Nobody owns ideas, ideas are articulations of perceptions of objective reality and we exchange them so that we can all come closer to a better shared understanding of objective reality.

Do bad ideas - ideas that aren't worth the effort of exchanging - exist?

Agonized_rufous posted...

True or not, what's bad is there's enough true stories from NK to make most people not even question if it's true.

It is nevertheless important not to believe bullshit just because it sounds right to you. Bad things happen when you do that.

If Chick-fil-A is really embracing the dialectical science of Marxism, I will have no choice but to support them

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/31/politics/chris-christie-2024/index.html

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie plans to announce his candidacy in the 2024 race on Tuesday, according to three sources familiar with his plans.

Christie, who also ran in 2016 and has been outspoken against Republican front-runner Donald Trump, will make the announcement at a town hall at Saint Anselm College.

Now, you may be wondering: who is the constituency for a guy with zero sugar versions of Trumps politics and temperament, who has already floundered against Trump in the past? Who would give the money required to launch an effort that is so obviously doomed, while at the same time offering no benefits if it succeeds? nd the answer is at least one multi-billionaire Mets owner:
https://twitter.com/ChrisRyan603/status/1659296578157309957

I fucking hate remakes.

I think a story in the NY Post that doesn't name any names should pique your skepticisim

Kitt posted...

This reminds me of a topic I made some months ago asking Conservative posters about what their beliefs are exactly. In that 60+ post topic, not one notable Conservative poster that are active here decided to contribute.

Pathetic.

Which conservative posters were you hoping to hear from? That's a group of
A) six shitposters hiding behind 20 alts who haven't made a genuine post about politics in 7 years
B) maybe like two normal people who are shy about identifying as conservative because it associates them with A

Above all else, I just don't understand where one finds the time to make YouTube a major means of their information consumption

Not as bad as the world

ellis123 posted...

The guy in post #2.

Why are you trying to reach him? He sucks

Is this a topic for Sonicfan, or what

Who are the conservatives you're trying to reach?

To speak in BotW's defense: I put 100+ hours into AC Odyssey; I've played through multiple Watch Dogs games. I respect and enjoy the Ubisoft formula. But those games rarely ask you to think for yourself. The next stop on a mission or sidequest is typically gonna be a blinking dot on your map or your hud. You go to it, you do the task you're told to do, you move on. AC offers very little that could be called a puzzle, and Watch Dogs is only a little better in that department.

BotW respects players' ability to figure shit out. The clues are cryptic, and sometimes there might not be any clues at all. You're enticed to far corners not because there's an icon to tick off, but because it looks interesting, because it looks like something you haven't encountered before. I've seen people belittle the puzzle-solving element of the game by noting that the reward is often trivial, or the same as other puzzles. But the reward for solving a puzzle is sometimes the satisfaction of having solved a puzzle. The crossword puzzle doesn't give you rare loot, Wordle doesn't entice you with epic armor. You do them because figuring shit out is fun in its own right.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/rich-republicans-party-car-dealers-2024-desantis.html

This was opening night of the NADA Show, the annual convention of the National Automobile Dealers Association, one of the most powerful trade organizations representing one of the richest professions in America, and there was much to celebrate.

The years since COVID hit had been some of the industrys best ever. Supply-chain issues had sent prices skyrocketing. New car prices were up; used car prices were up even more. This has been an unexpected bonanza for new car dealers, George Hoffer, professor emeritus of transportation economics at Virginia Commonwealth University, told Time late last year. Only a few months prior, the research firm Haig Partners clocked average gross profit for dealers at 180 percent over 2019 levels.

Really, the past hundred years had been great. Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1 percent of American earners. Car dealers, gas station owners, and building contractors, it turns out, make up the majority of the countrys 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year.* Crunching numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, data scientist and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that over 20 percent of car dealerships in the U.S. have an owner banking more than $1.5 million per year.

And car dealers are not only one of the richest demographics in the United States. Theyre also one of the most organized political factionsa conservative imperium giving millions of dollars to politicians at local, state, and national levels. They lobby through NADA, the organization staging the weekends festivities, and donate to Republicans at a rate of 6-to-1. Through those efforts, theyve managed to write and rewrite laws to protect dealers and sponsor sympathetic politicians in all 50 states. All of which meant that this year, presidential hopeful Nikki Haley and Fox News darling Greg Gutfeld, among others, had made the pilgrimage to kiss the key ring.
...
As the automobile industry flourished, so did the dealership modelbut the American entrance into World War I threatened to interrupt that ascent. So, in 1917, a group of 30 Chicago dealers went before Congress to argue that cars shouldnt be classified as luxuries by the tax code. The luxury distinction would have allowed car-manufacturing facilities to be converted to use for wartime production. That would have been fine for manufacturers, which would have continued making money manufacturing, but disastrous for car dealers, who couldnt just sell tanks.

The dealers won the argument and then some, leaving Washington with a 40 percent cut in the luxury tax, which was then being levied on car sales. With that, the National Automobile Dealers Association was born.
That first taste of triumph only whetted the appetite. By the 1930s, with another war effort in the works, dealers went state by state. At that time, there was lots of attention being paid to small business as having inherent virtue and the need to protect mom-and-pop shops, Daniel Crane, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told me. They embraced that story, and were extremely successful at getting legislatures in all 50 states to strictly regulate how cars were sold. In 17 states, it is outright illegal for car manufacturers to sell cars at all.

The mom-and-pop facade of the postwar period gave way to multibillion-dollar, intergenerational dealership empires. As of 2021, the top 10 dealership groups in the U.S. had annual revenues around $100 billion, more than any company that actually makes cars.* The NADA became one of the most influential lobbying entities in Washington, with 16,000 dues-paying businesses spanning 32,500 franchises. Soon enough, a stop at the annual NADA convention became routine for presidential hopefuls and even presidents. Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton all attended ahead of presidential runs; Bill Clinton and both Bushes came after they left the White House.

By the time car salesmen had won their reputation as the very least scrupulous of business practitioners, dealers had secured such an astounding array of political protections via their lobbying outfit that no countervailing forceeconomists, car manufacturers, civil rights groups, environmentalists, or the Koch brothershas been able to thwart them. A survey done in 2016 by one of their own trade publications found that 87 percent of Americans disliked the experience of buying a car at a dealership. So what? You dont have to be well liked if youre powerful.

Now car dealers are one of the most important secular forces in American conservatism, having taken a huge swath of the political system hostage. They spent a record $7 million on federal lobbying in 2022, far more than the National Rifle Association, and $25 million in 2020 just on federal elections, mostly to Republicans. The NADA PAC kicked in another $5 million. Thats a small percentage of the operation: Dealers mainline money to state- and local-level GOPs as well. They often play an outsize role in communities, buying up local ad space, sponsoring local sports teams, and strengthening a social network that can be very useful to political campaigns. Theres a dealer in every district, which is why their power is so diffuse. Theyre not concentrated in any one place; theyre spread out everywhere, all over the country, Crane said. Although dealers are maligned as parasites, their relationship to the GOP is pure symbiosis: Republicans need their money and networks, and dealers need politicians to protect them from repealing the laws that keep the money coming in.

They might have no intention of filling them

https://www.wsj.com/articles/that-plum-job-listing-may-just-be-a-ghost-3aafc794

https://twitter.com/McJesse/status/1663411785163239425

Heineken14 posted...

It really depends. If republicans get any sort of significant say in any of it, then fuck no I'd rather we just suffer with what we have now.

Republicans have significant say over what we have now, because of what we have now.

What fraction of violent crime is committed by septuagenarians?