I get what you’re doing and that’s totally your right to do whatever with your body, but you shouldn’t go around saying it’s completely safe. You’re taking a risk with your health that others should be made aware of when you choose to share advice.

Nor does it end with the UK, which is the perspective I assume you were speaking from when you said owning a car is a privilege and that people should just walk.

Not in the US we don’t. A car is a necessity for the vast majority of Americans because of how our cities and towns are built. The car lobby makes sure that doesn’t change because they can take advantage of that fact to put people in massive amounts of debt.

It’s a good thing we have a robust public transportation system and pedestrian infrastructure then. /s

People generally have a sex drive, then develop an instinctual drive to protect their children after they are born. Of course, contraception allows us to sate our sex drive without it resulting in children, so you can choose to opt out of the evolutionary process before you develop an instinctual drive to raise children in the first place. Most people still have that instinct ready to kick in for a child that is not their own if such a situation arises, which is still evolutionarily advantageous for the group as a whole, even if it’s not for the individual.

Of course in rare cases some people lack that instinct entirely, but that’s the exception not the rule.

I started to make a long effort post detailing Putin’s rise to - and subsequent consolidation of - power, but then I came to my senses and realized it would be pointless. If I went through with it, you would just do what you’ve been doing already, dismiss all sources I provide as false and biased propaganda while engaging in ridiculous whataboutism. I decided it would be a poor use of my time, is this really how you want to be spending yours?

Putin is a dictator in the same way that Trump is trying to be. He consolidated power under his office, removing term limits and checks, and manipulates the democratic process in his favor (often with blatant ballot stuffing and crushing opposition).

The US political system, as corrupt as it is, isn’t quite to that point yet, though unfortunately that might be changing soon.

Edit: Removed mention of Xi because I’m not as familiar with the topic and don’t want to spread misinformation.

The boomer ellipsis drives me nuts. It gives me a very ominous feeling, like something is being left unsaid that I’m supposed to extrapolate. The only time I use an ellipsis in text is when I want to indicate that the thought is incomplete.

I unfortunately have to spend a considerable amount of time around racist Americans and you are very wrong.

I get that it offers a bunch of features that you can’t get anywhere else, but I just can’t shake the uneasy feeling that it’s all a trojan horse for something more sinister. I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop and see it suddenly explode in controversy after someone exposes something not quite kosher going on under the surface.

It’s just too good to be true.

Exactly! It’s really disheartening to me to see so many youtubers who are otherwise insightful be so uncritically supportive of Ground News because they “like what they’re trying to do.”

This is partly why I don’t trust Ground News. They’re putting way too much money into advertising for me to believe they’re genuinely interested in providing an unbiased factual categorization of news sources.

I also simply don’t believe it’s possible to be unbiased, so anyone claiming to be is immediately suspect to me.

Even if they have a covid-related autoimmune disease?

900 people is a fairly small sample size for a study like this, and the data is entirely self-reported. Given that long covid is suspected to be autoimmune-related and the 17.9% that reported worsening symptoms after vaccination, it seems premature to recommend everyone with long covid immediately get the vaccine.

I’m not a medical professional and you probably aren’t either, so we shouldn’t be taking one study and running with the shaky conclusions it draws. Let the scientific community do their work.

Is that the guy who was drunk and returning to his hotel room when the gravy seals mowed him down in the hallway? That video was so irredeemably fucked up that if I remember correctly the cops actually faced consequences. I don’t think I ever heard if those consequences stuck though.

But ideologically, while not communist, I don’t see how that structure can’t be considered socialist.

It’s not that it can’t be, I just personally don’t consider a state socialist unless it is a functioning democracy that enacts what is at least an approximation of the will of the workers. It becomes obvious this is not the case when a state is hostile towards workers who attempt to organize.

Only because the very concepts of ownership and the collective-individual dichotomy are necessarily vague and subjective. China considers themselves socialist because they equivocate the people with the state. If the people are collectively represented by the state and the state owns (some of) the means of production, then at least transitively the people own (some of) the means of production.

As an anarchist I don’t believe the state adequately represents the interests of the people, nor do I think it could even if it were radically democratic and egalitarian, though I would still certainly prefer that to the existing status quo. Somewhere a line must be drawn arbitrarily and I prefer to draw it on the other side of authoritarian state control.

Socialism isn’t when the government does stuff for the people, it’s when the people take matters into their own hands and do stuff for the good of each other. Even if a state behaves in the most benevolent way possible, it is not socialist unless the workers have collective ownership of the means of production.

Maoist/Trotskyist fucks

And therefore they deserve repression? When you justify the action and then deny it in the same breath it makes the denial seem suspect. I admit I don’t know what - if anything - transpired between the CCP and the aforementioned student groups, but you’re not doing the CCP any favors by responding to allegations in this childish manner.

Reminds me of this:

Not sure if this is real, but you know you’ve won at life when you can submit something looking like this and still get hired.