Basically, the OP article said that the main vehicles by which protest can drive social change are twofold:

• At a small scale, by galvanizing public opinion one way or another. A violent or disruptive protest can make the voters think the protestors are the “bad guys”, or a protest without clear cohesive demands can be too abstract to produce any real change, but a clear and cohesive protest can induce people to vote for the side they see advocated for, especially if there’s a violent police response to paint a clear picture of the protestors as the good guys and the establishment as the bad guys. That perception can swing elections.
• At a large scale, the awareness that there are millions of people ready to get in the streets for an issue can cause existing leaders to react differently on it, regardless of any voting in the equation.

The absolute best kind of propaganda is the type with a big grain of truth in the middle.

If I were Ukraine, I would most of the time say that we got information from enemy agents in the military, when I didn’t, and then when I actually did I would say nothing about it. Kind of take the legitimate level of it that is happening, and the legitimate fear and overreaction about it from the Russian commanders, and just toss a little more fuel on that already real fire every now and again.

All animals tend towards reinventing crab, all transport solutions tend towards reinventing train

I liked his video on Operation Praying Mantis and then I watched one about how awesome was the US bombing campaign in Vietnam and how we could have won without the politicians ruining everything, and that ruined my stomach to want to watch more of him 🙁

My theory is that these stories are purely to make the Russian military paranoid of its own troops

Merry Uristmas

Haha glad you enjoyed; I have many more. I thought of Dwarf Fortress games like explaining your dreams or your DND sessions, in that they’re only interesting to the person who went through them, but if it’s not that way I may start making a habit of posting them in a DF sub somewhere.

Nothing to do with anything, I just feel like some levity is needed:

So: I had a little guy in my Dwarf Fortress game who was a master at combat. All his physical stats were extraordinary, and he loved war. He was in the military and excelled at it; my military saw a lot of action and he became legendary in several fighting abilities. Then there was a great disaster which led to the decimation of my military, and a period of several years hiding in the fortress with all the doors locked until the goblin army got bored and went away on its own. He survived the disaster, but he was badly wounded. Like real messed up.

The fortress survived, and gradually things came back to life, but this dude was crippled. He had to walk with a crutch, and had nerve damage. He became a cook, at which he also excelled, and his excellent meals became another key fixture of the fortress. I would sometimes sell barrels and barrels of them to trade caravans when I was short of other stuff, at huge prices. But. He always had unhappiness because of wanting to be able to get back to fighting. It was clearly a non starter of an idea, but it bothered me somewhat that the guy had been through so much and now had any kind of sadness in his daily life.

Finally, during a period of needing some additional troops, I finally said fuck it and put him back in the military. I gave him a battleaxe to go with his crutch, honestly not really sure how it would work out. His physical stats were excellent but the fuckin dude’s got a useless leg. I don’t think this is going to work. But it’s what he wants to do, and who am I to tell him no?

I watched him close during his first encounter in combat. He wasn’t good for much, to be honest. It was clear that his physical ability was impaired. He kept falling down. Until, somehow, he lost control of his axe, and then he picked up his wooden crutch and BEAT THE FUCK out of his adversary with the crutch. Like absolutely took him the fuck apart.

I don’t understand the combat engine well enough to say exactly how it works, but it seemed clear that the answer was to give the guy a steel crutch and have that be his weapon. He kept breaking wooden crutches across enemies’ faces and falling down, which is an issue in combat obviously, so I didn’t feel like it was safe to continue to let that happen and have him maybe come to harm. I made a bunch of steel crutches, and tried to manipulate things so he would pick one up and start using it, but I never quite got it to happen. I think I gave up the whole endeavor and put him back in the kitchen. But if someone can tell me how to assign a particular crutch to a particular wounded dwarf, I’d love to give him a brand new indestructible crutch and let him hobble his way into battle and go the fuck to town and finally come into his own.

Seriously. Surely making certificates is one of the absolute apexes of the ratio of how much money you can make versus how much actual work you have to do; in what world did they manage to be sufficiently massive cockheads as to screw that ticket up?

I couldn’t really make head or tail of it and I’m still not sure, but Google’s announcement linked to the list of incident reports that they said were being mishandled, and I picked out this one at random, and I have to say it definitely seems like they kind of have a point. Certificates were being signed with SHA-1 for about 2 years, as far as I can tell, and most of Entrust’s responses over several months of people asking them “how are you taking steps to endeavor that things like this aren’t still happening or will not happen again” was basically, thank you for concern but fuck off stop bothering me.

100% right. It is the temptation for easy solutions.

Turns out all that was needed to eliminate war and oppression was to pick out one semi-democratic country that’s doing it, and don’t vote in their elections, and bingo! Fascists take over, country collapses, no war and oppression anymore. I am amazed it was so easy the whole time and people were wasting their time with all these other more complicated structures and efforts to get it done.

Are you under the impression that Trump’s destruction of the US won’t involve him doing 10 times more terroristic things all over the world?

Or that the powers that will invade the power vacuum left by a US collapse wouldn’t instantly start resuming the exact same terrorism, and worse, that you are (with every righteous reason) opposing when the US is doing it?

Judging by the number of people who showed up at the Stormy Daniels trial the army is pretty understrength.

I won’t say they are not dangerous but I think there’s like a couple thousand of them that are actually ready to go to war at this stage, which if it doesn’t grow, is nowhere near enough

I think Godwin’s Law died out around the time the actual Nazis came back. It’s actually sort of difficult to talk about some elements of politics and media in the present day without referring to the historical parallels, and one particular parallel is absolutely significantly more parallel than the others.

But you don’t have to justify to me, man. You can abandon the conversation at any point you feel that that’s what you want to do. All the best.

I didn’t even know about this

I watched one of his speeches at random just to see what the guy was about and TL;DR I wasn’t impressed and I would not be at all surprised to learn that the Republicans are trying to trick leftists into getting behind him. But I hadn’t heard that he also dislikes NATO. That seems like a weirdly specific and incongruous stance for him to take, given how extraordinarily nonspecific was a lot of the stuff he was saying when I watched him.

Yeah. Those guys I’m fine with. I was around in the 90s, man; you don’t have to tell me that the Democrats don’t have my back.

My point is that that subset doesn’t spend all their time on political forums picking on the DNC. Their time on the internet in my experience is spent in anarchist / activist forums or just on other, non political things; their not caring about electoral politics is a lot more universal and they don’t get all amped up talking about it or want to spend all their time on it (and specifically spend all their time on criticisms of only one of the parties, a lot of which are sort of made up and weird if you look at them closely.)

Throw some Costco Ghirardelli brownie mix in a mug

Add a little milk and stir

Microwave for roughly 45 seconds, until it starts bubbling, then quickly stop

Throw some vanilla ice cream on top

Eat it up with a glass of milk on the side

Fuckin delightful man

Stop climate change, stop killing Palestinians, economic justice for working people

There are various strategies you could use for any of the three, with various levels of timeframe involved and chance of success and all, but “let Trump come to power” is not a real good solution to any of them, to me. “Stop supporting the Democrats until they suddenly decide to start supporting them” also seems weird to me and unlikely to succeed. People have been not caring about politics (with every righteous reason) for quite a while now, and it doesn’t seem to have made the politics or the level of leftism progress in the equation any higher, to me.

What, you mean those guys that looked at Bernie Sanders and Gavin Newsom and Cory Booker, and said naw we want the guy with the crazy hair who is absolutely guaranteed to be unacceptable to the American electorate, to be the spokesman of the Left and specifically in this presidential election and we want people to take the world’s most bizarre strategy on his behalf which will NOT cause him to win or advance any leftist cause but MIGHT get Trump elected and destroy any large number of leftist causes

And, also, are totally uninterested in any leftist causes more strategic or logical than this weird and counterproductive single quixotic stand in this general election

You mean those guys WEREN’T trying to win the election for leftist causes, like they said they were?

That’s nuts man

It’s just part of an engineered drumbeat of various reasons not to vote for Biden. He’s the worst president for leftists in a whole generation. Okay actually he’s the opposite of that, but he can’t beat Trump. Okay he could have beat Trump but now he’s too old and can’t beat him anymore, and now we need someone else. I’m just pointing out all these problems because I want to help the Democrats. Now here are 10 different bad things that Biden did (of which it turns out, on examination, that he only did 2 of them and those 2 have asterisks). See, I’m helping the left!

None of it makes any acknowledgement that Trump will be actively destructive to the goals they say they care about, in a way that’s a hundred times worse than even the most outlandish of the false things they said about Biden. And, if the DNC did decide to replace Biden with Andrew Yang or Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders, or fucking Che Guevara for that matter, they would instantly pivot to saying it is SUPER PROBLEMATIC that Bernie said this thing about trans people in 1988, and anyway he’s too old to appeal to most Americans, and he screwed up this other thing last week, and anyway bottom line I’m staying home, I could never vote for a fake leftist millionaire who lives up in some rich person’s community up in New England and I’m voting for Cornel West and you should too.

It’s all just a bunch of shit. I mean, in this case they actually have something genuine to load into the cannon (Biden really did do a pretty incredibly poor job at the debate and it’s a real problem). But that’s not why they are firing the cannon this week. They are firing it because it’s Sunday and every day that ends in a Y from now until November is a good day to fire off the cannon.