I think the dems have been losing for decades in essentially every political arena because the repubs have cartoon villain mastermind Mitch McConnell pulling the strings and the dems have fucking Nancy Pelosi behind the curtain fixing races against Bernie, etc.

This was a thread about making the specific argument you’re mad at me for making

Steelman:

The US is currently a fascist, imperialist state. It has brutalized the global south, indigenous people, and POCs generally since its founding and will continue to do so unless the status quo is disrupted and changed significantly.

The Democratic party supports the same militaristic policies and the same neoliberal economic system that the Republicans do. The primary difference between the parties are various social issues that may make life somewhat better or worse for US citizens, but will never address the core problems of fascism, imperialism, and capitalism. Both parties support and protect the status quo. This status quo only benefits the bourgeois class and rich white people and harms literally hundreds of millions of others around the world.

The Democratic party is the only one of the two major parties that the Left has any degree of leverage over since the Democrats want the Left to vote for them. So, organizing to essentially boycott the Democratic party is a powerful method of protest that could effect real policy change. It is possibly the only effective method of protest left since the US police & surveilance state is cracking down on protests and the Left has no chance protesting violently against the most powerful military the world has ever seen.

The only way to make that threat matter to the Democratic party is to follow through if the demands aren’t met, even - or especially - if it means a second Trump term.

The liberal establishment has ignored and abandoned the working class for decades while dangling the carrot of milktoast social democratic reforms that rarely come to pass, but they blame the same people they abandoned for not energetically voting for them. They say it is a moral imperative to vote for them, but they are incapable of bettering the lives of working class people.

Strawman:

It would hurt my feelings too much to vote for COPmala Harm-us. Plus, Trump would let Putin annex Ukraine. Also, I’d risk touching grass if I went outside to participate in bourgeois electoralism. Gross.

Reality:

You can, and should, do more than one thing. Voting for Kamala is effectively playing defense against outright, full-throated fascism a la Mussolini even if you’d still consider the US fascist - it is clearly worse under Republicans. So vote, play defense, AND organize to raise class consciousness, provide mutual aid, protest when possible, and contribute to socialist causes. Letting Trump win would be a bad move. But, ultimately it is not the Left’s fault that he won. He won the popular vole and the electoral college vote by a large margin - larger than all third party socialist/socialist-adjacent candidates’ votes combined.

It’s fucking crazy to me that this is a hot take these days. I just want movies to be good. Throwing unnecessary sex scenes into a movie to drive ratings up usually does not achieve that.

Edit: And by unnecessary, I don’t even mean just not plot relevant. Only that they should add to, not detract from, the characterization, tone, or plot/story. Fucking loved Challengers (check it out, it’s great) and that had a sex scene like every 5 minutes. I just wanna watch some good fucking movies. If I wanted to watch good fucking-movies, I’d just find those online.

Definitely recommended! There are tons of recipes online - but that’s the basic formula.

Easily: leftovers. Literally just cook on sunday. Takes like 1.5-2hrs. Make 10-12 servings. Dinner for 2 for 5-6 days. Eat it all week.

I have done this every week for my entire adult life and have never spent more than like 2hrs per week cooking unless I wanted to make something particularly difficult for fun.

Also, you can make big batches of stuff to freeze or can. Canning is easy: get a pressure cooker, buy some big mason jars - they’re cheap and reusable, look up the pressure and time requirements (especially if the dish contains meat), and boom. Shelf stable food you can store in the pantry and eat whenever.

Meal prep ideas:

Spend like 3hrs making 10 dozen pierogies (potato & cheese and pork & mushroom & sauerkraut are my favorites), freeze half & boil/pan fry whenever. Eat the rest for the week with some sauerkraut or cucumber dill salad (umborksalat) as a side. Costs maybe 30 bucks for everything and makes food for 2 weeks (6 pierogies per serving). Make more if you want - it doesn’t take much extra time.

Chinese style dumplings are the same as pierogies but with square wrappers and more ingredients. Buy wonton wrappers. Make filling with ground pork, garlic, green onion, msg, ginger, salt, pepper, soy sauce, vinegar. Add napa cabbage if you want to stretch the filling. Fill wonton wrappers. Make however many you want. Takes a few hours if you’re gonna make a shitload, but it is easy - pop on a movie and make hundreds if you want. Freeze and boil whenever. Or make potstickers by heating oil in a pan, putting in fresh or frozen dumplings, cooking for a bit before adding some water before immediately covering with a lid. Cook a bit and they should release from the pan - scrape them up with a spatula if they don’t.

Get a very large pot. Make a full pot of gumbo, red beans and sausage for red beans & rice, or split pea soup. You can make gallons of these very cheaply in the same time it’d take to make a smaller quantity. Freeze or can most of it. Cook rice for the week for gumbo or red beans and rice (20mins on the stove, 2mins of prep). Serve over rice (don’t serve split pea soup over rice unless you’re a psychopath). Done.

Make west african peanut soup. Made of sweet potatoes, peanut butter, chicken if you want, collard greens, tomatoes. Fucking delicious. Very filling and calorie dense. Like 25 bucks for a week of delicious soup. I make like 2kg when I do this. Could double batch and freeze/can half as well.

Jambalaya/jollof rice/other similar rice dishes. Make 10-12 servings for the week or double it and freeze half.

Lasagna or other pasta bake dishes. Make one dish for the week. Make another to freeze and pop in the oven to cook whenever. Serve with a quick salad.

Enchiladas. Same as pasta dishes (can freeze and cook later). Cook meat/other filling. Heat up a bunch of corn torrillas. Fill with filling. Put into a rectangular casserole dish with some enchilada sauce. Top with enchilada sauce and some cheese. Boom. 12 enchiladas - enough for a week. Especially if you make some cilantro-lime or ‘spanish’ rice to go with it (rice, boullion, onion, tomato paste, diced tomato, garlic, little oil, water) - throw it all in a pot, simmer 20mins, refrigerate, eat all week as a side dish. Maybe use canned refried beans as a side too.

Tacos. Shred up a rotisserie chicken. Pan fry with onions, garlic, peppers if you want (chipotles in adobo are my favorite. You could use salsa instead or jalapenos or whatever). Boom. Freeze or refrigerate. Heat up and put in tortillas whenever with some fresh cilantro/onion/hot sauce. Make rice as with enchiladas. Can serve with beans, too.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has been very useful to me. My cardio has improved dramatically, I am much stronger than I used to be, and I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of going from absolute trash to slightly less trash over 2 years.

But I don’t expect it to really help me in a fight. If I did get into a fight, I certainly would do better than if I hadn’t trained; but one thing I’ve learned from fighting people for like 8hrs a week is that it is REALLY easy to fuck up and get hurt in ways you wouldn’t expect. The outcome of a fight is unpredictable - especially when the other person could have a weapon. The best martial art for self defense would be running.

Not everyone with sense. The question was if Harris is electable, if the dems would rally behind her instead of infighting, and if there was enough time to spin up a campaign. Biden was previously electable, had the majority of dems supporting him, and didn’t need to spin up a campaign.

Now, in hindsight, Kamala was the right choice. She’s been great and people have responded well. But that was by no means a sure thing

They’re only worth that if people buy the shares

Nah. Obviously, you’d talk beforehand, and no one would be forced to use it. It’s no different than arranged dates through a matchmaker. Now, there’d be valid privacy and ethics concerns - especially if your ML model is racist. But that’s a whole different thing. People are often quite bad at picking good matches for themselves, and computers are great at pattern ID and so potentially good at finding matches.

I mean… maybe in this case? I feel like profile/picture based matchmaking is something an ML model could be pretty good at in theory. Match people based on physical preferences and attractiveness (get head scans and frontal & profile full body shots), basic demographic/location/financial info, fill out a questionnaire with hobbies, political views, sexual preferences, etc.

Do that for groups of satisfied pre-existing couples first to train the model on, then continue training the model on the successful matches from the app. Have it spit out X number of matches that have the highest ratings for all users, limit it to X matches per time period to limit “swiping” behaviors, then let users talk/date and provide feedback to the app about what they did/didn’t like.

Obviously, it would need major privacy protections given how sensitive the info is, but that’d be a way better system than Tinder and the like. Like a super powered robo matchmaker serving up the highest probability matches.

I didn’t realize how cheap the big hdds had gotten. Definitely looking into 2 bays.

You might be right. The Synology products look really good. I didn’t see that they actually have a sub-$400 4-bay NAS… DS423. Not sure if it’ll meet my performance needs. But the $600 4 bay doesn’t look too bad either really.

Afaik the IOC did all the standard testing on her and didn’t find any issues (no doping, normal testosterone levels, etc). Idk if they did a genetic sex test - I’d imagine that isn’t standard. Is that correct? Regardless of the Russian-run boxing federation’s intentions, I’d still trust the IOC’s findings over theirs.

Plus, even if she was XXY or something, does that actually have any impact on athletic performance? I’d imagine not

Edi: yep. Looks like it is widely believed that having a y chromosome is unfair, but the science doesn’t necessarily back that up.

“improved understanding about genetic factors that lead to selection in sport should offer reassurance that female athletes with hyperandrogenism do not possess any physical attribute relevant to athletic performance that is neither attainable, nor present in other women.”

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-014-0249-8

That’s… just her face

It’s partially that he does it so often and partially that many of the claims are so outlandish that no one takes them seriously. Like saying he’ll bomb Mexico. On the one hand, “he says lots of shit” and on the other "Ok, he won’t REALLY bomb Mexico. He’s just saying that. Someone will stop him from bombing Mexico. "

Nah. It’s something they don’t get bent out of shape for for any other religious artwork. Like nobody is up in arms about the memes of that shitty restoration of the picture of Jesus

There’s plenty of satirical art/speech/expression about Christianity and people don’t go through life being enraged at all of it until they’re told to have that opinion by media.

Plus, from what I understand, the only “sacrilegious” element was that there were drag performers doing it? There’s not even anything inherently anti-christian there except in that wearing the other gender’s clothing is prohibited in like 3 verses. But again, people aren’t typically upset by the identity of the author except in this case. Christians are only so vehemently anti-drag in the US because of media spoon feeding them opinions.

Other examples they dont get mad about

Or infinitely many others including ones with RuPaul, futurama, rick and morty, marvel, the charmin bears, pretty much any IP you can name has a version of this somebody made of it that is equally “sacrilegious”.

They weren’t saying the event called the last supper wasn’t in the bible, but that the artistic depiction of that event, “The Last Supper”, isn’t a part of the Christian religion. It is a painting.

But wait, Republicans, what about all the welfare queens with like 10 Democrat party welfare sponsored kids? Are they now the most powerful voting block? Or did they never exist?

Same here. The sheer 800ft. Drops on either sides of of the 2-4ft wide ridge with people coming both ways was a no from me.

Also even just on the way up the the first landing (the like 500sqft flat area where you can rest) with that 1.5ft wide ledge getting up to it and the rope with 300ft sheer drops- I had a frustrated dad wearing flip flops and a 2 year old kid in a baby backpack rushing by everyone while people were heading down too. Shit’s wild.