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Posts
4
Comments
588
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I was heartened to hear about the people keeping up the public opposition of the clerics, beyond knocking off their turbans. I hope that the clerics understand that their time is passing and that they are shaking in their sandals with the very realistic fear that they will continue to get randomly gunned down by the people anytime an opportunity presents it. Fuck theocratic Islam and all other exclusivist religions.

    Even the Gulanist movement from Turkey, who likes to put on a friendly face to the western world, is exclusivist -- if pressed, their real opinions come through their strategic friendly face da'wah, e.g., it is not hard to get them to call Sufis (one of the few mystical/not-exclusivist islamic groups) heretics or "not real muslims."

  • The mental convolutions required to turn a rural food desert issue into a racial justice issue are extreme—it is this kind of thing that absolutely alienates good people who aren’t willing to say there are five lights when there are clearly only four. Its fucking purity politics and it’s vastly more harmful than helpful.

  • The Logan Act deals with private citizens negotiating with foreign governments. Unless he fucked with Starlink at the direct request of the Russian gov't, I don't see how the Logan Act applies. EDIT: apparently he did it after speaking with Russian government officials. So never mind, Logan Act is absolutely implicated.

  • NOTE TO DOWNVOTERS: @MrBusinessMan@lemm.ee is a parody account. Their comments are always a caricature of things wealthy/business people say. They don't use /s flags to indicate sarcasm. I am not this person, but I've seen them comment elsewhere and usually people understand the sarcasm.

  • I watch precisely zero of my news. I read. More importantly, I am in the orbit of grassroots organizers and social justice folks, and at least in my location, they are great at talking to each other but not so great at connecting their messaging with average people.

  • I heard Polish Hill was getting gentrified like the "East End" aka the side of East Liberty that bougies decided to rename so their friends wouldn't think they live in the scary ghetto with GASP... (whisper) black people. I used to hang out at Gooskies back in the day, though I heard it might be closing or closed? EDIT: I have not watched it but now it's on my list, thanks! EDIT 2: Man you also brought back some memories of Nico's Recovery Room - where you'd have blue collar guys side by side with Carnegie Mellon future millionaires. Fucking great.

  • I lived in Pittsburgh for a decade, and man, you're totally right - there were (are?) some serious ghost towns in the area. I recall a trip to Ford City where it was like "here is a town, there is a neoclassical courthouse, there are streetlights and pavement and buildings, but no cars or people." Went to a bar there and there was literally nothing inside that would let you know you weren't in the year 1985 (when it was 200X). Even the prices were out of the past. It was totally surreal.

  • I'm in the mid-South. The two leaders were, most everyone else was white. But honestly, it wouldn't have made a difference. When you've got white supremacist groups arguing for socialism (for white people), and progressives arguing for preferential treatment for POC to the extreme that it comes off as punitive to a majority of non-POC folks, sure seems like a centrist position is social protections and support for poor people, regardless of race.

  • Grown adult women aren't allowed to wear a hijab in public school either. Girls and women are perfectly free to wear whatever they want/are forced to wear by the men in their lives, outside of public schools.

  • I'm not talking about Biden, I'm talking about progressives. I am not talking about people protesting racist corrupt murderous pigs. Literally every progressive I know is using race as the primary critical lens they use for seeing the world. Folks give lip-service to instersectionality, but for the life of me, the discourse is being defined by the right. The right acts racist and persecutes LGBTQI+ folks, so those issues end up taking up all of the air in the room to the expense of everything else. A couple of years ago, I was at a social justice exchange in a poor white area, and the subject was food deserts in the area. I got shut down because I was steadfast in asserting that the reason that there were food deserts in the area had next to nothing to do with race, and everything to do with economic inequality and rural underinvestment.

  • I lost my mother. She was always an idiot when it came to politics, but my step-father was progressive and toned her down a lot. He died and she married a reactionary and now she's a die-hard Trumper alternative-facts maniac. I hardly talk to her any more - I hope it was worth it for her.

  • Because school children are not adults, religious parents that believe females are subservient to men will continue to compel their children to comply. Then, suddenly, instead of the Catholic Church impinging on all aspects of society, you have islamic groups impinging on all aspects of society - same game, different religion. France is a secular society and fought hard to get that way.

  • If progressives can come up with messaging that wins elections, great. So far the messaging appeals to a fraction of the voting public, and has zero working strategy for how to effectively deal with the right coopting, twisting and ridiculing the progressive agenda. Inequality is growing faster than ever for people of all skin colors, and yet progressives have essentially stopped giving a fuck about labor and switched over to race. I'm not saying that racism isn't a problem in this country, I'm saying that the research shows that you get a SHIT TON more support if you don't tie the messaging of a social policy to a particular race. I'm worried that in the (perhaps distant) future, progressives challenging racism, examining race as a social construct, etc. will have the perverse effect of reifying and reinforcing race and othering.

  • Can't we just agree that religions that teach women are subservient to men should be opposed? A concept of religious freedom that gives parents/fathers the right to compel observance on their children under threat of beatings or death is a fucked up sense of freedom. I don't blame France for trying to protect their secular society by banning religiously-derived garb in public schools - removing the power of parents to dictate such garb gives kids a chance early on to make up their own mind - do they like the freedom from family-mandated othering they experience at school, or do they like displaying that they are subserviant to men when compelled by their family?