OBJECTION!

War profiteers. If you work for a company like Raytheon or Lockheed Martin then you are doing an incredible amount of harm to the world and I have even less respect than I have for people in the military. These companies are constantly looking to fuel conflicts, destabilize, and pump all sorts of weapons into every corner of the globe. These people are the true scum of the earth, they are among the worst people who have ever lived.

But it isn’t wrong. I’d like it to be wrong, and I can appreciate wanting to shift the Overton window, but that’s not where we are and it won’t change before November.

Cool, so which other groups are acceptable sacrifices for the sake of political convenience?

The rights of any minority are always precarious because the majority has the ability to fuck them over. The only way to protect ourselves is by banding together in solidarity with other vulnerable groups and drawing red lines and treating an attack on one as an attack on all. A group I belong to could very easily be the next in the crosshairs. “We will hang together, or we will hang separately.”

You want to convince me to support a third-party candidate, first we need to put Trump in prison, then we need to roll out Star Voting, and then we need some third-party alternatives that aren’t obvious Russian assets.

Oh, is Star Voting part of Kamala’s platform? Is that listed on her campaign website? Has she talked about it in speeches, rallies, or debates? Has she ever even mentioned it once?

Your plan is, “unconditional support of the Democratic party whether or not they provide any sort of voting reform, until they voluntarily choose to give us voting reform, in direct contradiction of their interests, and if they never do then just unconditional support to the democrats forever.” In other words, talking about voting reform is just a red herring to obfuscate that your actual stance is just unconditional support to the democrats forever.

You know who does support voting reform to make third party candidates more viable? Third party candidates. So if you wanna talk about voting reform, in order for that to happen, we would need to get a third party candidate to win first. Or, alternatively, we could say that our support for Democrats should be conditional on them supporting voting reform, so that when they do their calculations they realize that they need to incorporate that into their platform to have a better chance of winning. Because why on earth would they ever support it otherwise?

Right now, the Dems have decided that supporting Israel gains them more votes than it loses, and they can live with that.

I don’t see how you can say this and still not get it. We’re trying to make sure that this calculation is wrong. Because it’s only if that calculation is wrong that they would have any reason to change their stance. Voting for them regardless would mean that their calculation was easily correct and they should keep making the same calculation in the future. If you aknowledge that such a calculation is being made, then surely you can understand the rationale for making the decision more costly.

I only brought up Jim Crow in response to the claim that the the state will protect people and that there are ways to appeal the state of it doesn’t. The point being that having legal protections on paper is not always enough to keep people safe.

The “fascist enablers” don’t have consciences you can appeal to, because what drives them is money, and they are specifically selected for their willingness to serve capital and cause harm to innocent people. The system selects for sociopaths.

You analysis takes absolutely zero account of the systems or material conditions that exist which compel people to act in certain ways. Germany had an unemployment rate of 30% in 1932, but in your mind, it seems like the communists were only fighting because they wanted to and the capitalists were just reacting to that.

Had everyone on the left coordinated on mass nonviolent actions, like mass strikes for example, the capitalists would still have turned to the fascists in order to preserve their money and power. Violence or nonviolence doesn’t matter, what matters is whether their positions are threatened. You either never do anything to gain power in hopes of being able to beg your enemies for mercy, or you do whatever it takes to win so you don’t have to rely on that. The in between stuff where you pull your punches and try to disrupt things without defending yourself is the surest way to get yourself killed.

Yeah, and those same mechanisms existed in the Jim Crow South but that didn’t stop the Klan from lynching people and getting away with it.

Maybe if we just don’t fight the Nazis, they won’t be able to justify violence against us 🤡

Yeah let’s just allow roving gangs of brownshirts to run around attacking and terrorizing minorities because if we don’t they might stage an attack and the “atmosphere of violence” we’ve created by trying to keep people safe will allow them to blame it on us and seize power. The solution is to just allow them to seize power directly through force, without resistance.

This is nonsense. Nazis don’t need a justification to use force against you, they can literally just lie and make shit up, like they did with the Reichstag Fire. It doesn’t matter if it’s true because it’s directed at the weakest and most vulnerable and stigmatized populations, who have the least capacity to fight back and the fewest platforms to counter their narratives, and once they’re done with them they work their way up. They will create terror on the streets and then use the fact that the streets are full of terror to seize power. People are going to try to defend themselves when attacked whether you think they should or not, so the only question is whether that resistance is strong enough to actually work.

I’ve seen too many examples throughout history of people trying to use nonviolence and do things the right way and just getting slaughtered because the other side simply does not care to be a pacifist. The world is clearly a better place because people employed violence in WWII to stop the Nazis. And street fighting in the 30’s was one of the ways that the Nazis secured their power in the first place.

Nonviolent methods are tools that are useful to have in your toolbox, and in many situations, they are more practical in achieving your ends. But there are cases were violence is more practical, even necessary, and one shouldn’t shy away from it when it’s needed. You gotta have your head in the game, the stakes are too high. A diversity of tactics is best.

The logic that violence is oppressive so it should be renounced in all cases in order to reduce oppression is idealist. You have to look at the actual evidence and material situation to evaluate what effects violence will have in a given situation.

Punching Nazis is cool and good. Just try not to get arrested for it because it’ll take you out of the action longer than it will them.

I can see how an RV, lab equipment, and a helper might help, but you don’t actually need any of those to do OF.

out of context

Everything’s always “out of context” with him, isn’t it? Because that’s his whole deal. He does controversial stuff to make people mad while hiding behind plausible deniability.

Whether it’s saying the n word on stream, or saying what he did about CP, or whatever other antics he’s gotten up to, it’s the same playbook of controversy-bait. Stir up shit, get people mad, get hate clicks, get clicks from people who hate the people who got mad, get clicks from people who don’t want to get left out of the loop about what’s going on, etc.

I only partially dislike him for the times he’s taken the controversy-bait too far and done something legitimately shitty. Mostly I dislike him because he’s controversy bait, and whether or not he plays the game well enough to make sure nothing sticks doesn’t really matter. It’s still just stirring the pot for attention.

The best thing to do with people like that is just to pay them no mind. It’s not like I’m missing some unique insight or valuable perspective. I wish I could to that with politicians like Trump who employ similar outrage bait tactics, but he is unfortunately relevant to world affairs.

Anyway, it is my longstanding policy to downvote any comment or post about Vaush, positive or negative, since I don’t think he’s worth paying attention to and doing so just drags down the level of discourse, so, true to my policy, I will now be downvoting my own comment since I talked about him.

You should’ve listened to your hesitancy, the less you know of him the better.

When I was a teenager, I encountered a bunch of different perspectives that contradicted the beliefs and ideas that I was raised with, and I realized that if you had wrong ideas about reality and tried to be a good person based on those ideas, you could easily wind up doing more harm than good. So I made a vow to myself to always pursue the truth - to learn about the world, to examine myself and my biases, to seek out and understand different perspectives, to ground my beliefs on evidence, and to reject peer pressure and comforting lies and to face reality even when it disturbed me.

My brother got fucked up psychologically from murdering Iraqis and Afghans and then came home and started “self-medicating” with meth while spending all day sitting in his house alone while listening to far-right propaganda like OAN. He tried to check himself in for treatment at the VA but they committed malpractice which nearly killed him, and he responded violently, which put a flag on his record making it difficult for him to get help in the future, while at the same time giving him a deep distrust of doctors. He was incredibly paranoid and accused everyone of being part of some sort of conspiracy against him and would make violent threats, veiled just enough to not be actionable. Eventually, he went over to someone’s house with a gun, but the cops had been watching his house and they showed up, he pulled a gun on them and got shot in the arm, which he lost the use of, but he eventually recovered somewhat on account of getting off the meth while in jail. He’s still a fascist and still listens to all the same shit, but he’s at regular fascist levels of paranoid-schizophrenia now.

I don’t give a shit about him but the pain he put my family through, a memory is burned into my mind of tears in my mother’s eyes as she gets another text and it’s another crisis and she can’t enjoy even a single night out at dinner because she has to act like a 911 operator 24/7 - and whenever I think about any of the people responsible for the stupid, pointless wars that caused all this, Bush, Obama, Biden, Trump, and all the rest, I remember that we got off incredibly easy, that our suffering was absolutely nothing compared to the actual victims of our country’s wanton slaughter and pointless wars of aggression, and I multiply the pain I felt in that moment and the trauma throughout the whole experience by a thousand, a hundred thousand, by as much as my mind is even capable of comprehending which is still only a tiny fraction of the reality, and I focus it into pure hatred directed towards all the people responsible for the wars.

One time when I was 10 my teacher rolled in a TV and made us watch some building fall over on the news. I thought it was boring and wanted to go back to learning stuff. But then afterwards all the grown-ups, and I mean like, all the grown-ups got really really angry and weird, like I would say things like that I don’t want to knock over other people’s buildings and they said that meant I was a terrorist.

All the answers are slightly wrong. The Katagana that’s causing confusion is “under-skort,” skorts being a combination shorts/skirt, “under-skort” is the part that’s like shorts, underneath the skirt part.

Jisho.org

Honestly at that point I think it’s lower effort to just go vegan. You’re already avoiding meat in every situation where you can’t investigate the supply chain, so no meat at restaurants, fast food, other friend’s houses, etc. I guess if you really crave the taste of meat or something or if you live on a farm already I could see a case for it. For me, the case of going to the grocery and making a meal at home was always the easiest case to have a vegan diet (and avoiding all the extra prep and cleanup from preparing meat were nice perks), the parts that were actual hurdles were the convenience of fast food and not wanting to assert myself in group meals.

Personally, I figure that the tiny sliver of meat that’s produced ethically can go to the tiny sliver of people with weird dietary restrictions, and to cats, I guess. We still need to see a massive reduction in meat consumption if we want to address the abuse that’s rampant in the vast majority of meat production.

This isn’t the most quintessential 90’s movie, or even a good movie, but the fever dream of Romeo+Juliet (1996) is the most 90’s thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

Ah, the classic diffusion of responsibility under capitalism.

The consumer is blameless because they have no control over the production process. The people committing abuse are blameless because they’re just doing what they’re paid to do, and if they didn’t do it someone else would. The CEO is of course blameless because they have a fediciary responsibility to maximize profits for their shareholders. And so, the real villains are the shareholders, like granma who has a S&P 500 retirement fund with 0.00001% of the company.

If you accept that when it comes to meat, then what’s the difference when it comes to something like slave labor, or sweatshops? A company sets up in a third world country with deplorable, illegal conditions, which are necessary to compete in the market and secure a contract with a multinational corporation, if their practices get exposed, the big corporation pleads ignorance, some low level manager takes the fall, and they set up another company to do the exact same thing. Once again, everyone’s just responding to price signals and doing what they’re told or what they need to to keep their job.

It’s a wonderfully designed system that ensures that the evil necessary to keep the machine running can be performed without the hindrance of those peaky little consciences. But I have to question whether it’s more moral to make sure everyone can pass the buck for doing something wrong, rather than one person directly doing the same thing and being responsible for it.

Is it more “moral” to kill someone if you do it via firing squad where only one gun is loaded than just having one person shoot them? Is it more “moral” to be 1% responsible for abusing 100 animals than 100% responsible for abusing 1? I’m not sure I understand the moral framework you’re using to arrive at your conclusions.

Go has been changed a lot by technology, mostly for the better. The ability to review every game you play with AI, for free, is an invaluable resource, and we’ve also learned a lot about the game from AI.

But, there are also several limitations that it’s important to be mindful of. The AI likes to play on the razor’s edge because it can read well enough to know exactly when it’s actually in danger. A human player trying to emulate that style will often just get themselves killed. Human teachers can still be more useful, despite being weaker, because they can better identify trends in a person’s thought process and explain the “why” behind a move, communicating the general principles that we as humans need to rely on because we aren’t computers and can’t read out every variation every time. Sometimes people get too obsessed with trying to play the “top engine move,” and it can blow up in their faces.

I was at a go event a couple years ago where a professional from overseas was reviewing people’s games, and somebody got in an argument over a move because the pro criticized his move, but the player said the AI backed him up. I can kinda understand both sides of that. On the one hand, if the AI says something, it’s not wrong. But on the other hand, I think it’s important to consider multiple perspectives and incorporate them into your play, and you’ll always be able to put things into the AI, so I think there’s something to be said for biting your tongue and just letting the pro give their perspective with the limited time you have them for. I guess I’ve never been one to be afraid of telling stronger players when I think they’re wrong, but it feels kind of disrespectful to me to pull AI on a visiting pro.

I guess one part of the game I find appealing and beautiful is that there’s so many ways to play it, and your moves can serve as an expression of your personality. Introducing this sort of objective lens can get in the way of developing your style and making your own judgements. On the other hand, getting feedback that tells you when your judgement is way off can help your refine your instincts going forward. It’s just that it’s important to understand why the AI is saying something, and to understand that a minor percent loss can be worth it to push the game in a direction that’s easier for you to play. It’s a complicated subject, all-in-all.

It’s kind of impressive how many wrong things you just said.

First, it is valid to disregard someone’s opinions based on their other political views. If you had a swastika in your username, should I ignore that and listen earnestly to everything you say? Of course not.

Second, this is about fascism because the quoted text in OP is fascist propaganda. What they’re describing is the idea of the ubermensch, of certain people being inherently superior and genetically predisposed to rule over others.

Third, you’re not a mind reader. You’re incorrectly assuming that you know my thought process. I did not think, “This person has an Israeli flag, therefore they must be wrong,” I thought, “This person is telling people to look for a point in what is very clearly fascist propaganda, hey, look at that, they also have a fascist flag in their username, I guess it makes sense that they’d do that.”

So no, I didn’t write off your opinion because of your support of a fascist regime, though if I had it would’ve been valid. I simply thought critically about two different behaviors you did and noticed that they both display sympathy towards fascism, which I found interesting.

I thought critically about the issue and came to the conclusion that genocide and apartheid are bad and that fascism is wrong. Not my fault if enough other people reach the same conclusion for it to be trendy.