i get my tea from yunnan sourcing, which i believe is available worldwide through the website. they carry a wide selection of reasonably priced loose leaf black teas.

cute li’l snugglebirb

as others have mentioned - join a revolutionary org and get to know your neighbors.

also - learn about leftist prep/survival. not even remotely the same as what those right wing doomsday preppers have been up to.

things will get a lot worse. we are not likely to see better days. but keep in mind that what we do now can make possible for future generations to have a fighting chance to build a better society. we have to keep one another alive so they can have that.

i love the way so many people want to hold up the Third Reich as the standard for fascist evil that must be perfectly matched or else it’s just not bad enough. jk i don’t love it.

the Nazis took inspiration from U.S. treatment of Natives and Black ppl. in fact, some high ranking Nazis thought the U.S. took it a bit too far.

there are mass forced sterilizations going on in the U.S. all the time - i say “all the time” because it’s safe to assume that a very small percentage of these ops are ever brought to public attention, yet there are still a lot of them. in 2020, a whistleblower reported mass sterilizations at an ICE detention facility (concentration camp). in 2013 (i think), the California prison system was caught doing it to incarcerated women. in many states, it’s perfectly legal to sterilize disabled women and girls against their will. and while it’s definitely NOT legal, poor women are sterilized against their will by their doctors pretty much daily - eugenics is the basis of our healthcare system and our doctors lean heavily fash, just like they did in Nazi Germany. that’s because they are cut from the same cloth.

in the U.S., the repression of disabled people, homeless people, people who use drugs, and incarcerated people has long since reached the extermination phase. but somehow even that is not bad enough for y’all. most Americans either don’t see it or they think it’s good.

Congratulations on discovering the morose whining of Morrissey. He’s a run-of-the-mill self-important right wing douchebag. But as someone who has been listening to the same songs for 30 years (including lots of Morrissey), i went almost my whole life having no info on who the guy is as a person, which is true of all the musicians and other popular artists whose work i consume. i’ve just never really been interested in that stuff.

then as i was spending more time in online leftist spaces, i started finding myself under attack for mentioning my enjoyment of particular songs or movies due to an artist’s demonstrated lack of character and/or crap right wing political beliefs. these artists’ stated beliefs/actions are not good and they do matter, and while thoughtful discussions around “death of the artist” and what not are warranted (and desperately needed), that is not what’s happening most of the time. what i see is pretty much just replication of neoliberal individualism.

People compete for social status by calling out others as a means of establishing their ideological superiority. it severely undermines solidarity and only serves to reward those neoliberal individualist tendencies that we really need to be focused on unlearning - and that can only happen when we embrace nuance and acknowledge that this is a complex issue, people are complex, art is complex, and so is the social context that shapes our character, values, and principles. for example, how many of us have taken into consideration the ways consumerism has shaped our understanding of what it means to be “political?”

that’s just my .02 cents or .72 cents or whatever lol

relevant-ish

Propaganda is all you need

“As ML is still a (relatively) recent field of study, especially outside the realm of abstract mathematics, few works have been conducted on the political aspect of LLMs, and more particularly about the alignment process and its political dimension. This process can be as simple as prompt engineering but is also very complex and can affect completely unrelated questions. For example, politically directed alignment has a very strong impact on an LLM’s embedding space and the relative position of political notions in such a space. Using special tools to evaluate general political bias and analyze the effects of alignment, we can gather new data to understand its causes and possible consequences on society. Indeed, by taking a socio-political approach, we can hypothesize that most big LLMs are aligned with what Marxist philosophy calls the ’dominant ideology.’ As AI’s role in political decision-making—at the citizen’s scale but also in government agencies—such biases can have huge effects on societal change, either by creating new and insidious pathways for societal uniformity or by allowing disguised extremist views to gain traction among the people.”

hellooo, hope y’all are still around to offer an update?

i just signed up for micro.blog this week but i haven’t dared to post yet because the vibe confuses me. like, boring on purpose.

found this post when i searched Lemmy for clues.

also signed up for nicheless.blog yesterday, and will be checking out the other suggestions listed here

unfortunately, reading cannot solve a problem of alienation and belonging.

we only have a right to an attorney if we are faced with criminal charges AND cannot afford a lawyer.

most of us haven’t really thought about who we’d call if we ever needed a lawyer. i found myself in a terrifying situation last year, then again this summer, in which i needed a lawyer. they are not easy to find and if you do call one, they will not call you back. rich people have lawyers in their networks, we do not have those networks.

we do not have those other “rights” if we can’t afford to sue the cops

mMore than Half of Americans Mistakenly Think They Have a Right to an Attorney in All Civil Cases

Here are some books by media analyst, Robert McChesney. I haven’t read all these. He actually died recently and when i found out, I just went and downloaded every book by him i could find R.I.P.

Capitalism in the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution

Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America

The Death and Life of American Journalism

The Political Economy of Media

Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights? The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix it

got his paper right here

The Maidan Massacre in Ukraine: The Mass Killing that Changed the World

American security culture vs Chinese security culture

“Chairman Xi, the Main Character demands an audience to witness in awe as they enjoy the smell of their own farts. Failure to meet this demand will result in charges of censorship”

Chairman Xi: these conditions are acceptable

that is not a cheat, that is an integral part of the analysis. no one needs to cheat. we are not clairvoyant, we recognize patterns, we have a solid understanding of the opposing interests involved, and with this understanding, as events play out, a clear picture will emerge.

our job is to observe, learn, analyze, discuss, and in some cases provide material support - being the first one to be right on the internet is not among our priorities.

nobody did. he keeps it way on the DL. he’s actually a phenomenal air guitarist. legendary. fans only know him by his stage name, Torgasm. they have no idea he’s Ted Cruz. his Finnish is way too good.

executive function.

last time i opened, i found it hidden underneath that intimidating tree with the sunglasses on and detective hat

nah, these vetting questions are getting more and more over the top, we’re expected to spend hours formulating responses, not knowing if we’re being tricked (because trick questions are now a regular thing) - this is not how you vet people, and i certainly won’t go through all that to be on discord.

obviously it’s not just the deprogram, there are plenty of servers in the fediverse that also use vetting questions to showcase their big brain

competitive individualism makes us endlessly exploitable by bad actors, feds, and wreckers. what do they want? personal gain, personal achievement, and elevated social status.

i’m gonna be honest, i’m still pretty aggravated by what happened in this community this afternoon - there was a post that warranted serious discussion. not to scold the comrade who wrote it. in fact, we all need to take some responsibility for letting this type of “neoliberal left anti-left” mindset take root and flourish. we can’t just change spaces and expect everything to be better for it. the character of the space depends on the social interaction within.

there were the makings of a thoughtful discussion about cultural hegemony but it got deleted bc one person was embarrassed so nobody learns a thing and these dangerously wrong ideas still go unchallenged.

that was a perfect opportunity to discuss ways to recognize it, root it out and resist so we don’t just end up reproducing reddit over here. vetting questions can’t protect us when the feds are inside the house. case in point.

(is that how you say case in point?)

so this is NOT a parody? people are replying like it’s a legitimate concern.

this is the most important thing you all need to know right now.

given that we have not even begun to properly organize, and given that y’all haven’t done a single thing besides learn wrong things off of reddit.

you are not in any position to be deciding who you want to kill after the revolution. what revolution?

i have never listened to this podcast before but i’m familiar with Hakim. this post is just joking right? people don’t really talk like this except on Facebook, i’m scared lolol