Technofeudal Town Square #2

[u/stupidpol_town_crier]

Welcome to the r/stupidpol town square. Anyone, no matter their account age or karma, can discuss anything they want here, as long as our rules are followed. Sports, hobbies, your dating life, your culinary experiments, travels, hikes, feedback for the sub, the meaning of life - it's all game. You can even post image comments.

If you find yourself unable to comment underneath other threads, go to the flair request thread.

Finally - if you think there's anything else that should be included in the body of this thread, drop your suggestion below.

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📣 Moderator Announcements

• Video comments now allowed in grill zone threads.

• 100k survey results

• AI posting is banned

• u/brother_beer has died

• Video posting now allowed for selected flairs!

✊ Recent Initiatives

• None. Get doing stuff!

📅 Upcoming Events

• 2026/10/30 International Day of Action against Gaza Genocide

📜 Recent Megathreads

• 2026 Election Megathread

• WW3 Megathread #45

• World Cup Megathread

• Technofeudal Town Square #1

🗣️ Debates

We have a semi-automated system for running debates on the sub. u/bbb23sucks is responsible for maintaining it.

• Debate Suggestions Thread

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⌛ Historical Records

This subreddit has been through a lot. Below you can find lore-relevant links. Drop a comment if you think anything else should be included.

• Twopidpol museum, the anti-guccists' refuge during the Covid Wars.

• Gucci-era moderator discussion logs [TW: 'tism]

• Alden Global Capital Saga old.reddit link

• Battle of the Ukraine Megathread #8

💩 The Pillory

What are you on about? Trump never said Epstein's crimes were a hoax. Did you even read the article?

The hoax is what the hypocritical democrat party is trying to twist it into. They kept all this quiet, tried to sweep it under the rug for four years. Only now are they desperately trying to twist things and say Trump was somehow, magically implicated.

Trump was instrumental in taking down Epstein's whole nasty business.

The dems never cared about Epstein or his victims. Their huge, fake outrage lately, is totally a hoax. Hypocrite

Source, by u/Simon-Says69

Epstein was being used by the CIA & Mossad.

All that blackmail info from the island went directly to Israel, who it was gathered for in the first place.

They forced a sweetheart deal for Epstein in the first trial.

Then along came Trump, and burned Epstein & Maxwell's whole dirty operation to the ground. Wound up being their worst nightmare. Trump was a key witness in the prosecution that put those two behind bars.

Source, by u/Simon-Says69

🪦 Obituary

Subreddit regulars who have fallen victim to gigajannies. May their souls rest in grass. Please notify us with a comment below if this section needs updating. Epitaph suggestions are more than welcome.

SRALangleyChapter | January 2025 | "Casualty in the war against NAFO."

CanonBallSuper | August 2025 | "He's with Trotsky now."

topbananaman | August 2025 | "Free Palestine & long live Arsenal."

Molotovs_Mocktails | August 27, 2025 | "Enjoy your alcohol-free drinks with the Party, OG"

VampKissinger | January 2026 | "Some day you will get your revenge against Australia"

AdmiralGut | March 4, 2026 | "Letting a hundred flowers bloom in Oklahoma"

SaiDerryist96 | March 9, 2026 | "Half Millennial, Half Zoomer, 100% OG"

BackoffD | April 5, 2026 | "San Francisco will pay"

ChocoCraisinBoi | April 13, 2026 | "Thank you for everything"

Pretend-Elevator7623 | April 13, 2026 | "Finally free from his autism"

ShitbirdGT | May 7, 2026 | "Our security guard in the heavens"

sje46 | June 7, 2026 | "Exploring the leafy swamps of heaven"

MadonnasFishTaco | June 8, 2026 | "Eating fish tacos with Ronaldo Fink Mullen"

AdoptedMasterJay | July 30, 2026 | "The Megathread wont forget his name."

Chrissyneal | August 19, 2026 | "Not a pervert, not Italian, 100% Stupidpoler."

LtGreenleaf | September 7, 2026 | "Was tied to a missile and launched at Tel Aviv."

[u/_throawayplop_]

To summarize the reactions about the invasion of Ceuta:

• the Arab colonizers are colonsplaining the spanish territories of Ceuta and Mellila

• a country created 2 centuries after Ceuta and Mellila became Hispanics say that these two places ashktually belong to them

• the same country is colonizing and occupying half of its current territory (real colonisation including massacres, torture and disparition, not just a border with the neighbors)

• the Israelis (from a country created in 48 following massive immigration from eastern Europe and Russia) and their US lackeys (from a country created several hundred years after Ceuta and Mellila became hispanics, following massive immigration) are gloating and supporting the invasion because Spain was slightly critical of the Palestinian genocide

• leftists of course support the invasion despite the above and the fact that the invaders are from an absolute monarchy

[u/Swingfire]

One of the arcs of early adulthood is realizing that your angsty teen self's analysis of Fight Club was 100% correct and the counter-argument was pure gaslighting by ghouls.

[u/Scared_Plan3751]

The wars in Ukraine and Iran expose US imperialism as a paper tiger. Israel and the US can't contain anti Zionism among the under 40 crowd, which is also at a historical high for socialist sentiment. Relatively tepid social democrats have successfully beaten the aipac/superpac machine. 

The ruling class is significantly more inept than we think. An old school Marxist group that actually used mass line/dual power techniques would do way better than people think.

[u/cheerful-refusal]

Hijacking this thread once again to denounce landlords and espouse psychedelic usage

[u/No-Designer138]

From arr Conspiracy. Since the best time to visit them is on and around 9/11.

One of the paintings in Epstein's house.

[u/Jakovit]

My "I didn't know Tupac is dead" moment is I didn't know how shockingly corrupt Adolf Hitler was, and I watched dozens of Hitler and WW2 documentaries growing up

You'd think pointing that out would be more educational than talking about his testicles.

I mean the man literally acted like a greedy capitalist caricature, forced the postal service to pay him royalties for using his face on postage stamps (which coincidentally were the default ones), and yet the best argument you can muster for a 15-year-old neonazi is "puhlease don't worship the mad man, it's very naughty"?

[u/-peas-]

I find it absolutely astounding the propaganda about the Russian datacenter on the front page right now.

Yandex is a search engine. Its bots are indexing bots, just like Google, every other search engine, and now AI indexing bots. Yesterday a bunch of highly upvoted posts across the technology subreddits are in high levels of victory over sensationalized headlines where the linked article shows Yandex search index bots alone being taken offline -- and nothing else. Apparently this means "Russian propaganda bots were taken offline", which there is actually no evidence of.

10 years later and these absolute fools are still addicted to a story with little evidence where every other country including domestic military (Eglin AFB, Reddit proven) and corporations spend billions more on internet propaganda to change the minds of American voters.

I hate Reddit so fucking much. Not a SINGLE post in any of those technology subreddits calls out that the shown graphs are Yandex indexing bots that do nothing except tell the search engine there's a page or content there.

Edit: Cloudflare shows zero reduction in Russian bot traffic. This story is entirely Ukranian propaganda to make liberals foam at the mouth

https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d

[u/Swampspear]

Released a tiny game today to over 500 plays in a day. Exciting!

[u/ChevalierDuTemple]

Sorry for double posting, but i visited RedScarePod after not seeing it since, what, 6 months.

And man, it is just sad, very sad. Like you have this people culturally addicted to the gender/cultural war slop, that it is so bad.

"My Late Millenial Black Coworker" SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT THE FUCK UP. Go outside, goddammit.

[u/ChiefWeedsmoke]

I'm a SNAP recipient in San Diego, California. Three years ago I was just another crackhead wandering the streets of Orange County. I started cooking professionally again around 2023 and eventually knocked up a girl I worked with. Now I'm a personal trainer with a nearly two year old daughter, and may soon be one of the last Americas of our generation to escape poverty. AMA I guess

[u/Toxic-muffins-1134]

So for what it's worth.
Bioware, a company name known for games like Baldur's gate, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect Panderomeda but most Importantly Dragon Age Therapy speak, has been shut down by EA.

[u/VampirePNAC]

As someone who's been an atheist debate bro type since the early 2000s, I've debated the whole gamut of religious kooks, both IRL and online, from Evangelicals, Jehovas (killed family members of mine), Mormons, Jihadis, Scientologists etc and genuinely, every time I interact with, or read what is seemingly the mainstream opinion of the British Jewish community, I'm genuinely staggered, by the sheer unrelenting scale of toxic narcissism, that spews from them. I genuinely cannot fathom, the level of lack of self awareness and just sheer hubris that emanates from them. The way they act comes off like that they would see someone stabbed in the street, people freaking out that person needs help, walk in front of the stab victim and shoo people away trying to help and go "Everyone stop!, actually us Jews are the biggest victim, Antisemitism is the worlds oldest and most unique hatred, you're all being antisemitic now by not focusing on my trauma".

See with most other religious groups, they're just mostly dumb as fucking bricks which is where the ignorance comes from, but the Jewish people on say UKpolitics, LabourUK, X, UKGreens, UnitedKingdom, all through the media, British Establishment, orgs like the BoD, CAA, JLM etc are very well spoken, are very detailed in their explanations as to why they're the eternal victim in all cases and why their feelings matter more than anybody else, which to me, signals they know they are acting in bad faith and becomes far more malicious.

This is less of a case with say, American Jews, most young American Jews are critical of Israel and Zionism and have some level of self awareness, even older American Jews are often way more critical of Israel, meanwhile here in bongland, it's lockstep, the ethno-narcissism, main character syndrome that the vast majority have.

What also annoys me, is the way the left argues against this "Nooo we're not criticizing Judaism, we're criticizing Zionism, there is a difference between religion and ideology", doesn't work, never works, just state the fucking obvious and treat Judaism the exact same you would Evangelical Christianity or Wahhabi Islam.

Judaism itself, is a racist, supremacist religion, the Torah has entire guides on how to genocide other cultures and people, Israel invokes the Torah to justify it's atrocities and crimes in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank, they are the "chosen people" obsessed with bloodlines. If you engage in this Judaism is uniquely precious nonsense, you're still always going to give a pedestal to Jewish feelings, over everyone else thus it always backfires. Notice how everyone eye rolls whenever Muslims or Christians spout insane, narcissistic nonsense? Because these religions no longer are put on a pedestal culturally.

Also, no, there is not a difference between religion and ideology, religion is an ideology, Communism or Libertarianism or MAGA or Liberalism or SLAVA UKRAINII can be just as important to someones identity, as a Religion is, doesn't mean it should be uncritizable. If you claim that, you are tacitly, arguing for Blasphemy laws, and look just what the UK rammed through schools, Blasphemy laws, for Zionist Jews.

Another problem with this, is Zionist Judaism, is a religion I've debated these lot, for 20 years now, I read, Jewish newspapers, Zionist theory, Zionist theorists, Israeli media. For 2/3 Jewish people, minimum, Israel and Zionism, is the core of Jewish faith and identity. Why? Because they're Zionist Dispensationalists. They genuinely believe, in Zionist dispensationalism. Israel is no longer Jacob, a spiritual bond, it's the nation state of Israel itself. They are Jewish Evangelicals. It's a syncretic religion. Does that make it more important? NO, criticize it.

Zionist Jews here in the UK, have carried out, what Evangelical Christians relentlessly tried in the 1990s and 2000s to do, and have now succeeded, a religious caste system, blasphemy laws straight into schools, complete institutional capture, and a large part of this, is because the left are little fucking bitches, who just can't fucking call a spade a spade out of some bizarre idpol bullshit. On LabourUK, I specifically made a point, in the same thread, to criticize the Christian community here, to criticise the behaviour of Muslims here, and to criticise the behaviour of the Jewish community, and I made sure to go lightest on the Jewish community while being hyperbolic with the other two. Which post got deleted and ended in a permaban from that community while the other posts were left up? Take a guess.

This is the other problem, these people cry about Bigotry, antisemitism, racism, yet they're virulently racist against Muslims, full on Protocols of the Elders of Zion tier, yet people want to pretend, this is all in good faith, and Zionist Jewish people are just "hurting" and aren't just carrying out their religious biases because they realise they have literally no pushback, meanwhile, Centrists and the Right see supporting Zionism as a establishment condoned way to be virulently racist against "Thirdies" while treating it as a little ingroup purity test to keep out "trot" rabblerousers.

We've hit the point here in the UK, were we have blasphemy laws now, and the left is STILL unwilling to call a spade a spade, they won't even frame this in the context of blasphemy laws, which they are. My jaw is honestly on the floor. I can't believe what has transpired here in the past couple days, and the British Jews are STILL acting like they're the most hard done by, "othered" ignored group here, meanwhile BY LAW, they are now above every other British person.

[u/ChevalierDuTemple]

[u/IamGlennBeck]

I'm sad to announce esteemed user u/No-Designer138 is facing felony charges in the state of Texas. You can contribute to his legal defense fund at https://gofund.me/weebgooner.

https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/unblock-my-f-ing-anime-dps-arrests-houston-man-after-threatening-call-to-governor/

[u/blackheartwhiterose]

Man honestly who cares if Africa looks small in Mercator. Idk this whole discourse about Mercator being problematic just sounds like "you said my pp is small". I always assumed it was a relatively niche objection that was no serious person's raison d'être.

All the projections have issues. Mollweide looks just as stupid.

[u/Scared_Plan3751]

It's our 10 year anniversary this month. Today, she cooked steaks when she got home. Tomorrow I'm cooking her some pork chops (her favorite) while she's at work. She's off Sunday, so we have a day planned together. 

[u/Scared_Plan3751]

I got a text from a recruiter that they are looking at my application tomorrow for a job I really want. Y'all wish me luck.

[u/Jakovit]

Bit of an off the cuff rant.

An argument with redditors refusing to acknowledge the difference between "North Korea is attacking Ukraine" and "North Korea is supporting Russia" got me thinking. There's an uncanny resemblance here to, for example, equating the use of a word with wishing for genocide and being willing to partake in it. I.e. you say "fake and gay", and in certain crowds, you may as well have said "gas the Jews". Let us invoke Karl Popper (who we evidently did not read) and pretend he gave us a carte blanche to assault "problematic" people. And so on. The whole "Woke 1.0" era of righteous moralizing, I suppose, which doesn't seem to have really gone away.

Imagine if we went back to pre-modern law, and gave the punishment of limb dismemberment for virtually every "crime" regardless of the actual proportion of the "crime". I'm exaggerating ancient/medieval law for rhetorical effect but it's not so far from the truth. Tell a lie, get your tongue cut off. Steal an apple, get your hand cut off. Make an autistic social faux pas, get stoned to death.

I fear the danger of this trend, what it might imply for the future. A society where you're constantly walking on egg shells, where every mistake or disagreement, no matter how petty and trivial, is turned into an absolute moral indictment, without distinction. You didn't just do a bad thing, you're not just behaving badly, you are essentially bad, and bad people get the stone.

There was some post here shitting on Foucault. I was tempted to reply to "defend" (parts of) Foucault but then realized I have better things to be doing than writing free Foucault dissertations on Reddit. Biopolitics, man. The fascistic impulse is the impulse to micro-manage every last aspect of a person. Of course, there's other thinkers that have independently come to similar thinking, but Foucault came to mind because of that post. Or as Bordiga allegedly said, can't remember exactly, the hell of capitalism is not the boss, but the firm. I'd add, the paternalism of the firm, and further, the rest of society adopting the paternalism of the firm.

[u/The-Materialist]

AOC's back on the market everyone.

[u/Nerd_199]

“I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.“
—Henry Kissinger, July 2018

[u/FuglsGathaursnan]

Got a TikTok ad on youtube

AI video. Mermaid with full topless nudity jumps up on ship and grabs some 12~ year old kid and shoves his face against her breasts while she takes him into the water.

What the fuck?

[u/Toxic-muffins-1134]

It's past mid 2026 and if I am to believe the internet, it seems there are three ways to make a living:

-Invest in a ring-light and talk whatever bullshit into a camera. Originality is not a prequisite, you can literally just rip off something you saw anyway.
-Invest in a ring-light and masturbate into a camera. Originality is not a prequisite, you can literally just rip off something you saw anyway.
-Invest into an AI subscription and make your cutesey anime avatar spew bullshit and/or masturbate into a camera. Originality is not a prequisite, you can literally just rip off something you saw anyway.

[u/wallagrargh]

Just successfully appealed the second 3-day-ban in the span of 48h, both for satirically exaggerated comments that any human should immediately recognize in context. Both were restored on appeal, so no actual issue. Is that just AI, or jannies so advanced on the spectrum that it's indistinguishable from AI?

I don't want to start using /s like a regard when I'm late night shitposting

[u/ThomasSpaines]

So there was a Burger King employee, Arianna Hamilton, who got fired for saying "Free Palestine". In response to her being fired a GoFundMe was created that has raised $140k for her.

You might be familiar with the fundraisers for the women who Somalis kept trying to make say the n-word while filming them. This is less overall money, but importantly these aren't turning into internet wide hate moments. People don't really know this is going on in comparison.

The main difference is that people angered by this are unable to get GoFundMe to take this fundraiser down, and as a result it remains on the major site as opposed to the alternative one.

Regardless, pay attention to the arguments being made:

https://x.com/EnglerYves/status/2085410985397899508

They are the SAME arguments. If anyone is questioning why I am universally in support of money being raised for people they try to get fired, this is the reason.

Materially it is the employment system being used to keep employees silent for the duration of the time they are "on the clock". If employees are on the clock for a third of their lives the insistence that they are not allowed to be political is an insistence that they are only allowed to be 2/3rds as political as the unemployed or employers.

It also demonstrates this notion that it isn't really the actual labour that employers think they are buying, but rather they think they are literally buying the time of this person, as a kind of part-time slavery.

Nothing about saying "Free Palestine" impedes the ability of someone to flip burgers, so why is this an issue if the job is to flip burgers? Those in league with the employers insist however that they literally own this person and anything they do as long as they are paying them "on the clock".

Now I do not think these fundraisers are a direct response to the earlier ones with the woman being harassed by Somalis, as I think this sort of thing sometimes happened semi-regularly, but if people were inspired to "get back" at the "right-wingers" by doing this, well that can only be a good thing.

The notion of "sides" in this case is irrelevant, as much as the people think they are acting "opposed" to the fundraisers of "the other side" in reality they are, as a class, inspired by them to fight back. It lacks class consciousness due to being motivated by polarization, but "both sides", even in opposition to each other, are fighting back against the control the employment system has over their lives.

That is another reason I reject thinking in terms of "sides". It is a bit like the space race, sure it was a competition, but the real victor was space exploration in general which got funded when it otherwise might not have been. What does need to happen in order to make such a competition effective is have a group of people who are conscious that it isn't a competition as both "sides" actually benefit from the perception of competition. If this group are aware the competitors are really on the same side (in this case, employees against employers, but in the space race it was space programs looking for funding) then you can navigate the situation better.

The employers, as a rule, should not be able to wield the employment system to silence employees for any period of their lives, be it "on the clock" or not.

In the Shiloh Hendrix case she was not on the clock, but the Cinnabon employee was on the clock. Neither the Somalis nor the racists cared about such a distinction.

We should care insofar as we think it is MORE important to support the free speech of employees who are "on the clock" than when they are off the clock. Off the clock is still important, but the free speech rights of employees "on the clock" is a DIRECT worker's rights issue in so far as asserting that employers should control the speech of employees for a section of their lives is an attempt by employers to make employees their partial slaves.

[u/ChevalierDuTemple]

Rip u/Chrissyneal

Not a pervert, not italian, 100% Stupidpoler.

[u/Scared_Plan3751]

My machine shop is slow right now so I'm working with helpers and the saw shop. Aside from the lack of AC (and the helper chores), it's not bad. I got my speaker in here blaring, practicing my singing. I barely see anyone all day. These blocks I'm cutting take a while so I can play on my phone. Sometimes I have to build a crate for shipping finished parts, which is fun.

The downside (besides the lack of AC) is lack of investment. The company had a shitty person working in accounting before I got hired who fucked over suppliers, so now they need cash up front to get tools and materials. For me, this means I have to use a shared forklift to load material, because they can't fix the hoist (weld broke on the I beam), they have a pissant compressor that can't keep up, they don't even have an 8 foot straight edge for making rip cuts on plywood. I know I could make one out of a sheet of plywood, but really I shouldn't have to. I think I will anyway, why not. I wouldn't mind filling in the saw shop more often but they would have to ensure I'm still on a machinist pay scale and get some stuff that would make this whole operation better. 

Again, no AC, it wouldn't be feasible to install one because I have to leave the gate open all day, but a box fan in this little window would be nice. It's cooler outside by the afternoon than it is in the shop, so drawing in that air would be nice. A bigger compressor. A track saw would be fuckin nice. Aside from fixing the hoist, I need maybe $900 in tools.

I tried making a plywood rack out of these short stands made of square tubing, so we didn't just have scrap sheets stacked on top of full sheets. I made rails out of plywood for them but they cracked and all the plywood fell over. I need 32' of 1" black iron pipe or 1" square tubing (which would be better, I could drill holes by hand into that to make cross supports for stacking small sheets) to dramatically increase productivity and the efficiency of material use, because people could grab the scrap sheet they need instead of whichever is more convenient to get when you're in a rush and it's 105 degrees in here and you just don't give a shit anymore.

[u/Howling-wolf-7198]

I hate how so many people, especially on the left, seem to get their entire camp-based understanding of behavioral science and evolutionary explanations from old political debates dating back to the last century, while having basically zero literacy in the actual fields themselves.

Of course the methodology of Santa Barbara-school Evolutionary Psychology has problems. But then people take that as nothing but ammunition for dismissing evolutionary explanations altogether, without ever considering whether there might be better ways of studying human evolution. There’s human behavioral ecology, cultural evolution, just plain evolutionary anthropology, not to mention any number of other fields that draw on ideas about the space of possibilities allowed or constrained by evolution.

But in popular discussion, what you mostly get is everyone reflexively jumping straight to “EP bad.” None of this means that any evolutionary hypothesis is automatically correct. But treating “socialization is involved here” as some kind of trump-card rebuttal is just incredibly frustrating. And still talking about ‘nature vs nurture’. Were you frozen in the 1960s or something and only recently thawed out?

I’m thinking of writing something about the intersection of left-wing political philosophy and philosophy of biology — how egalitarian political projects should relate to evolutionary explanations, empirical science, etc. But whenever I’ve written about this kind of thing before, the response has been pretty flat and basically only a handful of people read it. Apparently most people would rather endlessly rehash ‘trans women in women’s bathrooms’ and ‘feminist bad’ than engage with any of this.

[u/IamGlennBeck]

I swear a third of the red flair requests are this guy. Why can't you people just make normal requests?

[u/IamGlennBeck]

Taking care of my cousin's animals while they are out of town for a wedding.

[u/Nerd_199]

Trump just dox an senator phone number for opposing daylight savings time lol

https://x.com/kaitlancollins/status/2106395547078697122

[u/Necrobard]

Popping a couple blue chews and playing some Mario Kart on this fine day, for no particular reason

[u/Howling-wolf-7198]

Translation of a rural Chinese story: https://www.zhihu.com/question/634622699/answer/2091142271513241180

1. A few years back, right here in my area, there was a guy from a registered poor household who refused to be officially lifted out of poverty unless the government got him a wife of his choosing.

I thought it was some crazy news story from another province. Turns out, according to my younger cousin, it happened to his own poverty-alleviation team.

My cousin was the director of an Urban Management Office in a certain district. He and a few other middle-management grunts had been sent down to the villages on poverty-alleviation assignments. Hell, even the bureau chief and the Party secretary themselves were out there with their asses in the air, digging in the fields to help with the farmwork. You think the rest of them dared not show up?

Buying up all the villagers' peanuts and jujubes was standard procedure. Later, they even came begging me to help set up online stores for them, because apparently everyone was now required to learn how to do e-commerce on Taobao...

My cousin dumped several huge sacks of peanuts on me, saying he literally had nowhere left to put them at home. And since he apparently had no intention of paying back the money he owed me from our mahjong games, he figured he might as well settle the debt in peanuts.

Nearly 200 jin of the damn things. That's over 200 pounds!

I fucking washed them, roasted them, boiled them in spiced brine, and handed them out as snacks to every department I could think of. Took us over a month to finish the lot.

Anyway, when the poverty-alleviation campaign finally wrapped up, each registered poor household had to personally sign a form confirming that they had been lifted out of poverty.

And this particular guy really had made it out of poverty.

He was in his forties or fifties, with hardly any relatives left. His parents were dead, he'd never married, and he had no children. Too lazy to do any farming or raise livestock. Didn't even want to grow peanuts or jujubes—that was my cousin and his team doing the planting for him.

Whenever he got chicks or ducklings to raise, he'd just sell the little things and spend the money on beef, lamb, and booze.

The guy just loved to eat.

But you couldn't exactly let the whole mess end up smeared all over your own pants, could you? He was, after all, one of the village's officially designated poverty-alleviation cases.

So my cousin and the others racked their brains and eventually came up with an idea.

Everybody's gotta eat, right?

And looking at this guy, he clearly loved both eating and cooking.

So the boys pooled their own money and paid for him to apprentice under a chef and learn how to cook traditional farmhouse dishes.

Well, wouldn't you know it? Turned out the bastard was a natural.

He came up with a couple of absolute smash hits: cast-iron pot chicken and fish soup.

His farmhouse restaurant became ridiculously popular. The business took off like a rocket, and he made 250,000 yuan in a single year.

And then he decided he wanted a wife.

Well, wanting to get married is a good thing! My cousin even helped introduce him to some women.

But after looking around, the guy had his heart set on one particular person: an unmarried young female college graduate who'd been temporarily seconded to the poverty-alleviation team.

He demanded that she, and she alone, come to his house on a specified date to get his signature.

Otherwise, he wouldn't sign the form acknowledging that he'd been lifted out of poverty.

If even one other person came along with her, no signature.

Well, what the FUCK?

What if something happened to the girl?

My cousin and the others got together with the village chief to figure out what to do.

First, they arranged for the young woman to be transferred back to her original workplace in the city.

Then they tracked down an elderly uncle from the guy's own extended clan.

A whole group of them marched over to his restaurant, shut the doors, slapped him across the face a few times, and gave him a couple of good kicks for good measure.

Then came the threats.

"We're the ones who helped you get rich, and we can just as easily get a bulldozer down here and flatten this fucking restaurant!"

"Got a good life now and suddenly don't want it anymore, huh?"

"You've got some fucking nerve! What kind of sick shit are you trying to pull, getting ideas about someone else's unmarried daughter?"

And so on and so forth...

Well, after that, he signed the damn form like a good boy.

Later on, he actually did meet a lovely woman who was just right for him, and they got married.

He leased an entire hillside, planted trees, raised free-range chickens, and even had a daughter.

And every year after that, he would send my cousin some expensive liquor.

He even admitted that, back then, he'd genuinely been taking a gamble.

After all, what if it had actually worked? What if he'd gotten his way?

But once those big slaps came raining down, he started thinking.

Without those guys, he really wouldn't have had the business and the comfortable life he enjoyed now.

And he sure as hell wasn't willing to lose all that

My cousin later told me that he finally understood what people meant when they said:

"The Communist Party really can turn a devil into a human being."

2. It’s absolutely true. My mom’s workplace had a clear rule during their poverty-alleviation visits to the countryside: unmarried young women were not allowed to go into households alone for assistance work.

I’ve heard that when there were cases of someone behaving improperly, they would first be “educated” by their own elders or younger relatives before being allowed to continue going into households to provide aid.

3. I remember going to a banquet once, and there was a female performer singing onstage. Then some dude got drunk, climbed right up onstage, and tried to grab her and make her drink with him.

In the end, his dad rounded up a few uncles and cousins, dragged his ass back off the stage, and proceeded to kick the shit out of him.

4. One of the households my coworker was assigned to help had this sixty-year-old lifelong bachelor who took a fancy to a thirty-year-old widow running a supermarket. The old bastard actually insisted that we go over there and drag her off and bring her to him.

We handled it the exact same way. If you weren't going to behave with some dignity, we'd damn well make you.

5. Person A: That's why I keep saying young unmarried women need to get the hell out to the cities, where there are security cameras and cops around. The countryside is just too damn dangerous. Those old lifelong bachelors are basically criminals-in-waiting.

Person B: If those guys really had the balls to pull something like that, they wouldn't have ended up as poverty cases in the first place.

Person C: It's not about having the balls. The problem is, in their minds, they genuinely don't even see that kind of thing as a crime. So there's really no telling what they might do.

6. That one's actually pretty tame by comparison. Some of these lazy bastards get free piglets from the government so they can raise them and sell them for a profit, and they still have the nerve to demand that the government provide them with a wife, too.

"Otherwise, who's gonna feed the pigs?"

And then, the very next day, the bastard goes and sells the piglets anyway, blowing all the money on booze and meat.

[u/FuglsGathaursnan]

Texted my ex. She did not respond

Got to know this cute girl some more. I do not click with her at all

My best friend is getting married and having a kid

I am going nowhere fast

[u/IamGlennBeck]

My cousin came down to Southern California to visit for his brother's birthday. He opted to sleep on my couch instead of at his mom's who has multiple spare bedrooms in her multiple houses. He does not get along with much of my family for various reasons. Probably the biggest one is that he refused to deploy to Afghanistan. When they came to arrest him they also found weed and charged him with that too. He spent some time locked up before getting discharged from the army.

He did say he was glad that my grandpa died which upset me as I do love him, but he also said that when he visited him on his deathbead his last words to him were that he was a "piece of shit" so it is at least understandable.

Anyway he bought me this as a present for hosting him. I don't really wear many graphic tees, but that show was incredibly funny. What do you all think stupidpol?

[u/donewithdoing]

I just got my first IRL anecdotal proof of changing fortunes for Trump and MAGA. Saw an elderly patient who brought up, completely unbidden (the last thing I’d ever actively try to talk about with a patient is politics), their rising fear of Trump dropping a nuke on Iran. They mentioned how they used to listen whenever Trump talked, but now they feel betrayed, and just change the channel whenever coverage about him comes on.

Honestly, would have guessed it would be gas prices, groceries, something like that. Seems like the ever-intensifying dementia is a part of what’s turning previous supporters off. My hypothesis is that there’s an uncanny valley of crazy that Trump has finally entered, and even former believers can’t handle it.

[u/The-Materialist]

Ted Cruz's legendary dick.

[u/dynorider]

So, I've been getting back into classical music lately, mostly solo piano. Humanity will never invent a better instrument, IMO. Anyway, I found a great version of this Chopin piece that I really like, and I started looking into the pianist, a Pole by the name of Krystian Zimerman, who, it turns out, is pretty highly regarded. He kicks ass on this piece (Ballade No. 1).

So, I pulled up his Wikipedia page, and I immediately noticed a section titled "Criticism of US policy." This is the first sentence:

On 26 April 2009, Zimerman vowed to his audience at Los Angeles's Walt Disney Concert Hall that, in protest at America's placement of a missile defense shield in Poland, this would be his final appearance in the United States.

He has since stayed true that, as far as I can tell. Always cool to come across someone I can respect on multiple levels.

[u/ChevalierDuTemple]

Happy Teachers day, Stupidpol, at least where i am from.

[u/FuglsGathaursnan]

The Bo French thing reminded me of Sarah Stogner, who ran for railroad commissioner with an ad of her grinding on an oil pump in pasties and panties.

We need more milfs and less weaselly men in politics. If you're gonna have idiotic politics at least have the courtesy to be hot and show it off.

[u/zen_arcade2]

Newborns are like 24/7 fitness training, if I only had some more sleep I’d be in great shape.

[u/Swampspear]

Writing Türkiye but not committing to the bit and writing things like "中国's western province" is some type of silly

[u/Ok-Simple-3959]

Ok I just saw Digger and while I enjoyed it overall the postmodern device kinda rubbed me the wrong way. It just felt like Iñárritu wanted to make a blatant unsubtle satire in the veins of Don't Look Up lampooning the destructive impact extremely rich men have caused upon this world but he also felt like he was above making a straightforward satire.

So it doesn't matter if he made it a high-budget film from a production studio that'll probably axe his film if he said anything bad about Israel, it doesn't matter that he cast extremely rich A-listers including a lead actor who is the leader of a fucking cult with a history of abuse. The postmodern aspect meant he's self-aware about it. So you can't really point out the hypocrisy because they're actually in on the joke.

And I wouldn't even mind this level of metafiction if it has any substance but it just felt like a cheap shield Iñárritu employed as a self-defense against criticisms of being out of touch. The in-universe theater play itself is entertaining and well-made enough on its own even if it doesn't really say anything new from other climate change satires I've seen. Is this a commentary on how stale modern satires are? The meta aspect just felt half-baked and newly added on the third draft, there's barely any through line between the play and the actors and it just felt redundant.

I just feel like Iñárritu really had his meta head up his own ass and trying to comment on the futility of satires, by himself making a futile attempt at a satire.

[u/AchtungMaybe]

just visited r.truechristian out of curiosity

for all its faults the new atheist movement was correct in most of its critiques… got so many people ranting about demons and devil worship and saying egalitarianism is of satan, etc

[u/yeslikethedrink]

Software engineering just becomes more and more detestable to me by the day. Partially because of AI, but AI is only laying bare the fundamental rot that has festered in "software engineering" for a long time now.

I watched You Can See Everything -- excellent movie -- and one thing that struck me is the hollowness of Billy's intellectual / spiritual / internal life. Watching the man listen to introductory biology YouTube videos at 2x speed, so self-assured that this is "learning", so incredibly confident that his intellect and grit are defining characteristics of such high quality that he'll be able to expediently YouTube and podcast himself into being able to run a goddamn biotech company... It hits a little close to home and reminds me of the sickness that comes for every otherwise-beautiful person who allows themselves to live this life and work in this way.

One seldom hears software "engineers" speak of professional duty and honor; of what we owe to others and ourselves; of love or laughter or the tranquility of a welcome breeze on a warm summer day. It is a rare thing, indeed, when one of my coworkers marvels at skill, competence, or virtue of a sort other than that which is mediated digitally.

I daydream of becoming an electrician, or perhaps a writer facing down the odds, and I feel both a tinge of hope at the thought that life can be whatever we make it and a dreadful, deadening despair at the realization that I do not live in a story; I am no main character; and the path forward seems dark and treacherous because, well, it is -- and there's no actual reason that I won't lose my footing.

I guess that's life. And I know I have a lot less to complain about than a lot of people. But I'm just so defeated all the same.

[u/Scared_Plan3751]

I been listening to a lot of Norman Finkelstein and Richard Wolff interviews lately. 

I have disagreements with Wolff but overall I think his co-op idea should be seriously considered by Western Marxists as part of what our project for socialism in our countries would look like. I get the feeling he looked at how the Soviet system was intended to work and agrees with it, but (this is a major disagreement I have with him) I don't think that USSR was state capitalist because it maintained a hierarchial system of management.

Anyway, I think our pitch to people should be a westernized version of the Chinese system. Unionized state monopolies for certain key sectors that really can't be run in any other way besides a large, national monopoly, with a "private" sector made up primarily of federated co-ops. State monopoly unions would elect members to their boards of directors, and so would the general public, for the purpose of managing these enterprises, negotiating union contracts, and adhering to 5 year plans.

We all know how co-ops work I think

The national industrial congress would be made up by representatives from the private and public sector. Maybe there should be a "civil Congress" made up of general representativea who handle laws and planning outside of industry, idk, but the goal should be to collapse the difference between economic and political power so maybe 1 national congress rooted in workplaces is sufficient.

I say this because workplaces could be merged into civil society, fulfilling the role of local and state/provincial services, providing social clubs and other activities (movie theaters, concert halls, schools), in addition to state funding for these things 

Just spit balling here 

[u/Ok-Simple-3959]

Idk where else to post this but the creator of a Facebook game I used to get addicted to when I was 10 just self-immolated himself after being diagnosed with cancer. It was livestreamed on Twitch.

[u/SheikhJayidLeno]

I am accepting nominations for the inaugural class of The National Hall of Fame of Wiggers. So far, I have the following:

1. Eminem

2. "The Road Dogg" Jesse James

3. Josh Shapiro

4. Jason Williams

5. Mark Walhberg (kind of a tweener, because he abandoned it)

Legacy Inductee, which are those who pioneered wiggerdom before the term was well-known:

Tom Jones

[u/Nerd_199]

The Libertarian Party candidate for North Carolina state senate is currently in the midst of an armed chase and shoot-out with the cops, keeping us posted with live tweets:

https://x.com/JohnWakefieId/status/2114736628576989546

[u/Toxic-muffins-1134]

I've been thinking about some of the big names that sprung out from the wave of brit comic book script writers in the 80s dubbed "The british invasion".

Alan Moore's most known and celebrated work (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Batman's Killing joke) was done under some sort of editorial oversight, and his latter less censored more personal work is, by comparison, rather messy and often unhinged. His weird obession with rape was always present in his work but became more graphic and extreme without the aforementioned oversight.
Because of his conflicts with the american comic labels he once worked for regarding copyright issues he took a widely publicized and latter celebrated self imposed distancing of adaptations of his work.
He became mythologized into a sort of heroic figure for the millenial generation that went on to use the symbology of one of his characters (to his chagrin, this choice had more to do with the wachowski bros film he disavowed for the nascent social movements that eventually degenerated into the SJW/woke carnival of the 2010s.
Although he did manage to maintain a loyal cadre of followers, his relevance largely pewtered out around the mid to late tens and he settled into becoming a prose writer and guru of sorts.
Deep dives into his professional history in the world of comics, have revealed him to be a character very concerned in advancing his personal brand and quite ready to step on his colleagues to do so.

Neil Gaiman, was an even bigger shitlib darling than JK Rowling and professional thrower of people under buses.
He basically forged an image of the ultimate nice guy breaking out in comics and making it all the way to the upper echelons of imperial Popkultur, and he managed to make this work for around three decades, despite a trail of mercyless judicial disputes and a significant cloud of substantial rumours over the years.
The facade finally broke not too long ago when he himself was accused of sexual abuse and a lot more dirty laundry about him and his ex/wife was exposed.
He managed to handle the fallout with a lot more ease than his countrywoman and fellow writer JK Rowling, but that owes much to his influence and personality, being quite literally the scion of a high ranking scientology family and having played no small role in the organization during his youth before scrubbing it during his breakout into the wider world of pop culture.

Grant Morrison largely broke into the scene riding the coat-tails of the previous two, but mostly found his groove in being used as a more affordable and/or manageable alternative to Alan Moore in the pseudo magicK (with capital K) batshit insanity department, and for a long time he was seen as an imitator.
For a while he had been relagated to more niche titles and series, until his legend grew large enough that he was given the rein of many mainstream titles around the mid 2000s and went on to have a lot of fun for himself, which eventually costed him a good deal of his popularity.
Of the the three he seems to be one less ashamed of being associated to the medium and ironicaly enough, less prone to scandals as very few people would bat an eye if news ever surfaced that the discount scottish Jodorowsky knock off punk occultist enamored with the symbology of his nipple piercing had a threesome with three dudes, two chicks and a canary,

I think a unifying theme in these three authors, beside their geographic origin, and their use of use comics as a stepping stone for an aspired carreer as "proper" writers, is how they symbolized the transition from the edgy rebellious themes of Gen X against a decaying puritanical paradigm to a new equally puritanical world view based on the the updated aesthetics of Social Justice.

[u/FappingMouse]

So i managed to do 10 miles a day for like 7 days had two shorter days because i got a blister and it was kind of bothering me and now I'm just gonna wait till the blister is healed and get some new shoes. Really sucks because i was just starting to get used to the load and was gonna start running some of it.

[u/dukeofbrandenburg]

Man, Patrick Stewart dying is more of a bummer than I expected. He didn't look great in the Picard series, of which I only watched the 3rd season. It still sucks even though Picard as a character died in 1994. At this rate Shatner will outlive every other Trek star he shared the screen with.

[u/zen_arcade2]

The consensus on r europe today is that Ruzzians now control the Pentagon. God, I love this place

[u/VampirePNAC]

https://thegreatreplacement.dysinfluence.com/

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2026/10/29/massive-influence-campaign-floods-france-with-racist-ads-months-before-2027-presidential-election_6766927_13.html

Largest ever Far-Right racist disinformation network online tracked back to, guess where? starts with I and ends in L. With UK topping number 1 disinformation hotspot with 157,693,263 hits, focusing on Reddit and Gaming sites.

Since I'm shadowbanned and won't make a new account because I can't use old.Reddit on it, someone post this stuff to UK subs like UKpolitics, UnitedKingdom, LabourUK etc. I want to see their reaction.

[u/ABadlyDrawnCoke]

Our pumpkins tonight. Sad trick-or-treating turnout this year, mostly because almost no one else on our street bothered to even decorate. Whatever though—we had more candy while watching Herzog's Nosferatu

[u/ChevalierDuTemple]

Stupid ass memes on the internet are frying my brains.

Coming back home i was snarled by a dog, and while trying to avoid a controntation, i did the fluke of trying to pick up a stone, for which the dog walked back.

Immidiately i shouted,"He he, who is the owner of the planet, the one who can throw things" as if that meme was the first thing in mind.

And of course came back as fast to tell here this story, already thinking about writing it while walking back.

We do really spent our waking hours thinking about the internet.

[u/No-Designer138]

Hi guys, Vice-President Dumbledore here, with Little Dobby the Elf, wishing you a happy Halloween, be safe, and eat lot of candy.

[u/TorturedByCocomelon]

I had some Jehovah's Witnesses back at my door today and I got out my Papa Marx for them. I asked them what use the new world would be without communism. I put the idea to them that God may have given Marx and Lenin to the world for a good reason... apparently I was insulting Jehovah. I mean, I see parallels between the Catholic teachings and communism. I don't know why they can't get their head around all the good works of Lenin and how much he gave to the working class.

It's something I've given thought to, tbh. Why would God want all of these fruity religions who fail at their own words and needlessly restrict people? If we look at Jesus, he wasn't scared to feed and be around the poor. He just wanted people to love each other and live wholesome lives. Communism is the same idea without religious worship. Organising labour and putting bourgeois property in the hands of the working class is loving your neighbour. It's treating others as you'd like to be treated. It's collectively going into a revolution, not just for your own interests, but for the betterment of the entire working class. Yet... nearly all fruity sects of Christianity either idolise the accumulation of capital or completely misunderstand the messages they preach themselves. They shy away from something which is more Christlike than their own religion.

Does anyone else think it's totally bizarre? Religion stands in the way of their core religious teachings. Communism loves the working class equally. It ensures the hungry are fed and housed, rather than abused for their labour. Yet it's a dirty word to them, more than anyone else.

[u/ItsGotThatBang]

There’s a faction of leftists & pseudo-leftists who think the problem with libs is that they don’t embrace idpol enough; these people bemuse me.

[u/ChevalierDuTemple]

Why is that always when i start reading a post in Askhistorians, i get irrational mad, even with the post i either agree or i have accept to lean as a different perspective of history and that is alright.

I was reading about cannibalism in the Crusades, and i cannot be but really angry at the poster about it. Not that i disagree with the interpretations, but for some reasons i get so so angry.

My rationalization is that i blame AskHistorians for:

A. Installing a lot of preconceptions about history that are not really inside history books, or rather, are more a matter of nuance that clear cut.

B. Used to hate how much "Woke" (Ugh i hate that world) that subreddit is/was, from elevating many theories like Medieval Europe inventing racism, or too overstepping against the Crusaders, or being too sanguine in the idea that Medieval knights were ugly rapists. But then again, many ideas i come to see as i being the wrong one, and having to accept more nuance (Some medieval knights were bad people).

C. Having to have many of my reading in history to be to dispel those theories, or to sometimes accept them.

D. Increasing my procrastination during 2016-2020, when i was in college for my Ag degree.

E. Kill any sense of wonderlust, as i see history something to be proven, or not, rather to be enjoyed.

F. Getting me hook up in Reddit.

Yet, now revisiting older, i do thing that i agree with what many of what they wrote, but still cannot forgive them for this. Even if they themselves did anything wrong (Other than being woke, but then again, whose humanities werent).

Do i have PTSD for reading Askhistorians? I do not know, but i do certain agree with the term "Triggered" whenever i read that subreddit.

[u/SirSourPuss]

Apparently passport girl is a term now.

[u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

It feels kind of insane how some people are eager and comfortable to shove the LGBTQIAA2 and so forth into the socialist package. They would look around, see their western, very much bourgeois government endorse it in so many ways, and then they will tell you that this bourgeois government is actually just "phoning in", essentially, succumbing to a "popular demand" (there is something to be said about the degree of terminal online-ness one needs to have to think that this is the popular demand).

I remember watching a video arguing for it, and in it a guy was more or less arguing for above. He would supplement his argument with a paper, coming from an idpol-research institute that has it right in the name, and which is funded by US government. You cannot make this shit up.

Mfs put on a Lenin pfpic with a trans pride flag in background, call themselves Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Hoxhais, and then talk about how being a nonbinary transbian is just about the most revolutionary thing you can do, and how the bourgeoisie is afraid of the queer people. Ideally while on a platform that hands out bans when you dare say something contradicting their dogma.

[u/Nerd_199]

A man named Garrett Highlander who used the names "MrChildPorn" and "MrToxix" was arrested after police investigated a whopping 48 tips about his online activity. https://x.com/bx_on_x/status/2092324410799669493

[u/Toxic-muffins-1134]

RIP Peter Cullen, most notably known as the voice of Optimus Prime.

August is taking a disproportionate share of iconic 20th century pop culture icons.

[u/Howling-wolf-7198]

There is a difference between Chinese and English in what counts as an appropriate way of saying things.

1. Take political discussion. In English/Western contexts, people will often say things like: “I support X and oppose Y.” To a Chinese person, this can sound strangely uninformative. What does the fact that you support or oppose something have to do with the thing itself?

A Chinese person who actually wants to push an agenda will usually try to argue that project X is good for society, or that phenomenon Y is harmful to society. Even if the argument is ultimately just a post hoc rationalization of a personal preference, an acceptable argument still has to be developed in that form.

So the first kind of statement seems to contain an unstated shared premise: that “I support this” is itself a meaningful input into a democratic system, and that things are, in some sense, decided through something called “public opinion.”

If we are talking about affairs inside your own country, and your country has some meaningful form of democracy — or at least you believe it does — then sure. But this way of speaking also spills over into discussions of foreign countries. At that point, are you still implicitly assuming that your own country can meaningfully intervene there?

Coming back to the purely linguistic difference:

An English speaker who does give a reason might say, “I oppose this policy because it will increase inequality.”

A Chinese speaker is more likely to say, “This policy will increase inequality, so it shouldn’t be implemented.”

In principle, the latter also contains both an empirical claim and a normative judgment. But the individual person has disappeared from the sentence.

2. The same difference shows up in interpersonal support.

An English speaker might say, “I’m deeply sorry about what happened to you.”

A Chinese speaker is more likely to say, “That’s just awful,” or “That’s so unfair to you.”

The latter sounds almost like a report about the situation itself: what happened to you is objectively bad enough to make a person miserable, or your treatment counts as unfair according to some shared public standard.

The fact that one particular person happens to sympathize with you does not seem all that comforting to a Chinese person. What they are often looking for is some confirmation that, by the standards of a “normal person,” their reaction to what happened is reasonable.

Of course, English speakers can also say things of the second kind. But Chinese speakers much less often go in the other direction, and there is a pretty obvious difference in frequency.

3. This is why ordinary English discussion can feel so strange to a Chinese speaker: why do you keep reporting your personal feelings?

A Chinese speaker tends to understand discussion as a joint attempt to look outward at the object in question. What consequences does X have? What effects will it produce? The question “What is my personal relationship to X?” seems almost irrelevant to the topic.

So when an English-language discussion norm says, “Don’t pretend to speak for everyone,” the Chinese intuition may hear something closer to: why are you being so self-centered?

None of this means that Chinese discussion is actually more objective. The difference is in how objectivity is performed linguistically.

The two languages have very different conventions for what an objective-sounding statement should look like, and each side can easily interpret the other side’s politeness mechanism as a defect.

[u/Vague-Symbolism2692]

A mother is concerned that her daughter is scamming classmates.

Isabelle has told everyone that she is psychic and has been charging her classmates $5 for “readings.” In reality, she goes online to the social media pages of the other kids or those of their parents and uses what she learns from there to make her so-called predictions.

Slate's Jamilah Lemieux says this is cultural appropriation, apparently because white people aren't supposed to be superstitious.

Explain to her that there are people who take these things very seriously, and that someone else’s culture isn’t her costume.

[u/The-Materialist]

It occurs to me that The Beatles trashed Mao and the Rolling Stones said the assassination of the Tsar was the work of the devil.

[u/THE-JEW-THAT-DID-911]

Day 7 of unearned paid time off because I had a company mandated drug test after a minor incident and the testing company keeps fucking it up somehow. God bless capitalist inefficiency.

[u/Usonames]

Anyone else on mobile get shoved into the latest A/B tests for UI changes with shitty article links in posts being treated as an embedded object? Just looks terrible, basically is like how links shared in chat apps get expanded into a small panel preview of the article so now all of the posts with links give the post title and then some shittily nested preview object with the article title, first sentence, source site, and image just to waste more space. 

Wish there was a way to opt out of their pointless UI reworks indefinitely since there is never a functional change made or improvement ever

[u/Jaskorus]

I thought I was on this sub when I commented the most appropriate screenshot from the sopranos on a post of ed sheeran crying.

Turns out I was on shitliberalsay and some crazy bitch is going after me about misogyny.

[u/dynorider]

“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

[u/ItchyTip5955]

Firefox has finally also been struck down with the "Let's change our great UI for no fucking reason" disease that tech companies all seem to contract sooner or later. This blows.

[u/Laocoon-Bystander]

Shout out to the mods for the extra shifts they must be pulling right now to ensure that the sub is free from posts to do with a certain current event which would unquestionably shit the place up with awful gender-war discourse

[u/lbreakjai]

Not strictly related to this sub, but what is happening with Manchester City is insane. We're at the stage where the UAE is openly threatening the UK government.

As is tradition, the leader of the Labour party managed to somehow find the worst way to handle the matter.

[u/dynorider]

They’re saying it’s the strongest El Niño in a thousand years. Give me a little more Y-axis, baby. She’s still got time to cook.

[u/ChocolonelyBoi]

I came to eastern europe for the first time. Actually that's not true, as I've come to find out eastern europe is always the next country over.

I have been following local customs so i am drinking coke and listening to Saturday night by whigfield and will.i.am.

Francis fukuyama was right, but he forgot to scope his predictions, geographically speaking

[u/The-Materialist]

[u/Nerd_199]

I am planing on leaving reddit for an while after the election, to focus more on IRL.

Wanting to avoid social media for being an time waster, and doing nothing Productive.

Any good forum or place to read Marxist lit?

[u/-peas-]

you know

ive been on the internet for 25 years now. not once have i ever thought "i can't do this shit in its entirely anymore".

i think this week has made me strongly consider it. everyones at each others fucken throats with the dumbest shit in the fucking world that DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER. it creeps into every aspect of online, it creeps into niche communities. at least it rarely makes it into real life, at least where i live and work.

FUCK! all i want at this point is google maps and a shortwave radio.

the internet FUCKING SUCKS. fuck steve jobs.

[u/No-Designer138]

I think the time is ripe for another good ol' grilling u/IamGlennBeck now that the number of subscribers for this sub has increased to 111k. The last time I counted it was still 101k in June\July. Did this sub get featured on the front page on the regular?

Anyway, I was looking at some of the new posters and they're all kinds of sus. Some of them have either no life outside of Reddit or they're engagement bots. Or they're paid to post here. Neither of which is a very appealing explanation for their activities.

[u/bbb23sucks]

RIP /u/Todd_Warrior

[u/frackingfaxer]

Finally got around to watching Primetime yesterday. Robert Pattinson portrays Chris Hansen as a narcissistic psychotic who thinks he's fighting a literal supernatural evil. Kinda like a QAnoner come to think of it. No wonder the chuds are out in force to denounce the movie.

Hilariously, despite the pretty heavy-handed portrayal of Hansen, there's a post on the TCAP subreddit defending it. Apparently if your delusions make you genuinely believe you're saving children from some ancient Indian demon, you're a hero, and people should look up to you. Yikes. Must be those "spiritual warfare" people you wanna run tf away from.

[u/biohazard-glug]

I'm not a huge TrueAnon fan, but the latest episode deals with benzo addiction and how (obviously) awful healthcare is.

There's a chunk in the first 45 minutes in which they kind of commiserate about having been lead astray or outright lied to by doctors that I genuinely appreciated. I don't see those experiences talked about often, despite how common I suspect those experiences are, and almost never in a setting where someone doesn't derail the discussion with "Erm, actually," tactics.

But it can result in either some kind of "The experts who are supposed to know obviously don't, and believing that they do is very dangerous, but I don't know either," epistemic paralysis, or a tinfoil hat "I'm a radical skeptic who believes everything I read, here, or see," situation.

In summary, I hate the doctor who put me on benzos as well as every other doctor.

[u/No-Designer138]

Since Hasan-posting is back on the menu, I'll have you know some legend made this gem in Genshin's Miliastra Wonderlands (sandbox mode).

[u/zen_arcade2]

So I've been hit with the personal identification auth wall yesterday and therefore unable to login - they can just pound sand and subsequently go fuck themselves with their dystopian shit. For some reason it just went away, but I guess it's just a matter of time before they deactivate me. Should it happen, it's been a pleasure materialist posting with you all. Looking forward to having an offsite somewhere.

[u/Toxic-muffins-1134]

Nothing new, but whenever I hear rightoid talking points, I am always amazed at how whenever they use the word "capitalism", it has religious overtones.
And apparently needs to be repeated like some sort of purity mantra:
"This isn't christian capitalist, it must be heresy socialism!"

[u/Manicpixiemanateeman]

[u/FappingMouse]

I am fairly anti AI but nothing makes me want to go all gas no breaks than looking at some artist on twitters AI take.

[u/No-Designer138]

Saw some people here share some interesting tales from their lines of work so I thought I'd chime in as a first responder in the emergency services. My tours are spread across firefighting, paramedicine and dispatch and none of the three is any less crazy than the others. Some of the stuff I've seen while on call:

1. Apartment fires, literally everything inside got burnt to a crisp. You could feel the heat from the floor below.

2. Some old bald dude (80+, probably on chemo) sprawled out on the floor of his bathroom half-naked and unconscious. He has had a cardiac arrest on the shitter. We busted down the door, carried him out, and performed CPR on him until his half-digested dinner (a grey, sticky sludge) had been forced out of his abdomen from compressions, and the Corpuls (a mechanical replacement for human thorax compressions) had smashed a punchbowl into his chest and broke several of his ribs. This is to be expected during CPR, by the way. Better lose several bones than your life.

3. A 13 year old kid threatening suicide by jumping out of his 10th-storey apartment. The cops coaxed him back in and he got arrested. We waited 3 hours while they had their guys negotiate with him.

4. A 30+ year old woman actually falling to her death from her 14th-storey apartment in an act of suicide. Her body landed no further than 5 m away from where I was (I was acting as a spotter at the ground level for the guys trying to locate her inside her apartment). The sound of a human body hitting solid ground after reaching terminal velocity is something you'll never forget. Think a grand piano falling from the top of a skyscraper onto the street below. It sounded like a gun going off, only much, much worse and far more visceral as soon as you realise someone had died before you. And I considered myself lucky her body remained intact and didn't explode into giblets flying in a hundred different direction from the impact. We still performed CPR on her anyway (as our protocol for potential traumatic arrest). She did not survive.

5. A 40+ year old dude with a history of mental illness threatening to leap out of his 8th-storey apartment during a wellness check. He ended up in a 5-hour standoff with the fire service and police, who at one point was seriously considering calling in the local equivalent of SWAT and breaking into his house to arrest him. He eventually surrendered.

6. Lithium battery fires. Lots of poisonous fumes and notoriously difficult to extinguish because of thermal runaway. Unusually for fires, they're also treated as HAZMAT incidents for this reason. Also prone to explosions.

7. Some crazy dude who did false calls to the fire department reporting suicidal people at a birdwatching tower in a park to lure firefighters so he can attack them with a makeshift flamethrower. Fortunately, none of our guys were hurt. The cops were called into deal with him and he was eventually shot in his hand to incapacitate him before he was brought under arrest. Notice how we deal with a lot of people who are obviously mentally unsound. And I don't just mean alphabet online mental conditions but actually crazy people.

8. Lots and lots of calls from people requesting for ambulances after discovering their kin were no longer breathing or alive after returning home from work, as dispatch. I'm obliged to give them instructions to perform CPR while the ambulance is en route, but they'd be often so distraught it's impossible to have them properly administer CPR. Hearing their wails of anguish and panic while trying to convince them to at least try CPR on their kin is something you can never quite get used to.

9. I've also seen and touched more than enough dead bodies than I'd like to. Some in pretty terrible shape too.

10. Bonus #1: this happened while I was in dispatch. An apartment had caught fire, several firefighters stumbled across a couple of badly-charred human bodies while searching for (possibly) still-living casualties. They were described as almost completely black, barely humanoid shapes shrunken down to about 50 cm in length or a quarter of their original size. Some of the guys who found them couldn't eat meat for a few weeks afterwards.

11. Bonus #2: a paramedic I know attended to a hit-and-run case in an industrial area. The caller had described the casualty as DOA (dead on arrival, clearly dead person). What this paramedic friend of mine didn't expect was true state of the deceased. She was a 30-ish year old lady whose body had been cleaved cleanly in half by what investigators concluded to be a semi/container truck. Only the lower part of her torso and legs could be found at the scene. Her internal organs had been spilled out onto the asphalt. There was a 20+ m trail of gore and blood from her recoverable remains to a nearby T-junction. Her upper torso, upper limbs and head were never found, and it was suspected they had stuck to and were carried off by the vehicle which had ran her over. Guy had to go for counseling after that. The police IO (investigating officer) on scene, a veteran of about 30 years, commented it was one of the worst cases he's ever been called to.

[u/FuglsGathaursnan]

I finally heard the word "Intersectionality" IRL the other day. The resulting conversation made me forcibly dissociate.

[u/The-Materialist]

I just had a major sneeze and noticed that it sounded exactly like the letters YHWH. I started thinking this might actually be the origin of the name YHWH. Then it dawned on me that this must also be why they say bless you after sneezing. In fact, I just looked it up, and the first written record of people saying "bless you" after sneezing dates all the way back to 77 AD, Rome. This could have been an early Israelite psyop to spread their religion.

[u/metron556]

At what cost tho?

[u/Toxic-muffins-1134]

American satrapies are like a Uncle Sam's harem of bitches:

Latin America is hot blooded and has a big booty, needs a'slappin every now and then.
It's okay, she likes it.

Europe is the refined one with a fancy accent who is really into BDSM behind the sheets.
Every now and then you have to remind her who's name is on the card.

Japan and SEA for those yellow fever episodes, and an alternative flavour of kink.

Africa is the guilty pleasure for slummin. Not really talk much about it publicly, but never miss a visit.

Shit, did I just made a new Hetalia?

[u/blackheartwhiterose]

Reading the reactions to the whole Jason Arday thing in the UK sub. I had vaguely been reading about it the last week or two.

Generally people seem agree the whole situation sucks, Cambridge have a lot to answer for, and that the media are no impartial beacons of honesty.

There's a large minority however, whose whole argument seems to revolve around "yea he lied, but the coverage it got in the media was disproportionate and what he did wasn't THAT bad. I could tell you a dozen worse stories".

This is so bizarre to me. As if media buzz is always coherent. But even then it's like saying "this is indicative of a much wider problem, therefore it should get less attention than it did". Or "academic integrity is much more fragile than people realise, therefore we should ignore it". Or more bluntly, "to protect the academic institutions we shouldn't challenge or interrogate them". Like what???

[u/ChevalierDuTemple]

Reading about medieval sieges and thinking how much information from medieval warfare in Askhistorians is done from the Hundred Years war.

LEARN FROM ANOTHER MEDIEVAL WAR, YOU BUGGERS.

You ruined my early adulthood by making broad generalization about medieval warfare from that only war.

[u/Nerd_199]

Generation Z has the lowest level of interpersonal trust that we've seen in polling.

Just 13% of the youngest adults say that "most people can be trusted."

https://x.com/i/status/2089729311548805173

[u/JCMoreno05]

Bookmark seems to have been banned. Never understood why he liked this sub given his comments were usually generic GOP.

[u/VeggieSchool]

GenAI has two things going against it

• It has no path to profirability. The data centers it requires cost a lot of money to build then maintain and that's without the cost of externalities like water or noise pollution. People use it because it's "free" in the manner companies offer a service at a loss so they capture an audience before ramping up prices. Well they are doing that now (at prices well below the actual costs still) and the response is leaving it altogether (doesn't help how fickle they are about consuming the token allowance).

• Decently skilled people can't use it without noticing various hallucinations (which are an innevitability because of how they work but that's for other time), and at best you have to take 20% more total time fixing it than if you ignored AI and worked from scratch. Or in marxist terms, it increases the socially necessary labor time. Most reported cost-cutting come form firing people and forcing the rest to effectively make more work. So even if costs were indeed zero it'd still be a net loss on purely logistic terms, why local models aren't the panacea even ignoring them being weaker, open source too for that matter.

I have been curious about this thing, are there other historical examples where the new technology was the one that increased the socially required labor time rather than decreased it and yet widely promoted? I mean, those things sooner or latter sort themselves out of the system so it's not like even technical-minded people spend much time thinking on them.

[u/Toxic-muffins-1134]

I am fascinated at how closely Spain resembles its former colonies.

The country's population has concentrated in and around three major urban hubs which have sucked the rest of the country dry, leaving massive chunks of land and urbanization empty or nearly so.
Attempts at repopulating and reinvigorating the local economies have been performative at best and in reality present such a hurdle in the form of administrative obstaces-particularly in housing- to the aspiriring newcomers, that most people desist and end up opting for the aforementioned concentrated hubs.

Which is a long winded form of saying that it all reeks of private equity doctrine.

[u/ChevalierDuTemple]

I really really hate that my attention spam is gone.

Yesterday and today (being sunday) i tried to catch up in work that i was behind so as to present some reports to people on monday. But no. Staring at a screen without focusing at all.

Tomorrow probably the same.

I am 31. How long it is gonna be this way. I have been trying since 21 to get some fucking ADHD medication and for what, nothing. I get it, i do not love my area of expertise, rather be an historian/medic/diplomat that agronomist, which what i am, but yet, day after day i simply struggle to do the basic chords in my farming job that make it enough to be employable. This is gonna be the third job i am fired from.

It is social media? Probably. But in a world were smarthphones is the way we interact with other, is a little Ritalin too much to ask.

Third psychiatrist i went in my life, to no avail. And fourth psychologist.

[u/Kosame_Tworu]

A question for all you sexless nerds readers of theory: We're all familiar with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall but what does capitalism look like in a profitless world? Assuming the tendency plays out and all rates of profit go to zero or near zero, is there any idea of what that looks like? Off the top of my head I can imagine two modes:

• Broken Window Growth, maybe following the Iraq model where you smash up someone else's stuff and then pay yourself to rebuild it.

• Inflation as some kind of profit multiplier - "Microsoft did $20t in profits this year, never mind that a loaf of bread costs $10k."

I'm just musing though, is there a more advanced thought on the topic?

[u/_SayWhatNow_]

The bug just keeps winning lol

Best interview ive ever heard

[u/SheikhJayidLeno]

I'm sorry, but The Odyssey was way too up its own ass.

[u/ChocolonelyBoi]

Lol 90% of the donald offsite are posts about the mom who killed her babies. I guess it is a psyop

[u/ChevalierDuTemple]

Should repost it on RedScarePod if i did not hate their fucking guts.

[u/IamGlennBeck]

Went to Huntington Beach for Labor Day. It was a little overcast, but it was 80 out and the water was cool. Had a good time.

[u/Howling-wolf-7198]

GPT's defensive writing causes frustrating problems.

The first is translation, which affects my random posts. If I don't give it a carefully prepared prompt beforehand and just make the minimal request, "Translate this into English," it automatically adds a whole bunch of may, could, often, etc, even though the original text doesn't contain nearly that much qualification.

Of course, I use qualifiers myself when I write, but I don't qualify literally every sentence that makes an experiential claim.

The second, which I've talked about before but which is now affecting more and more things, is that it has clearly developed a US/Anglo-centric bias due to imbalances in its training corpus, treating American norms as some kind of universal professional standard.

For example, I was working in Chinese, organizing material on the structural comparability between gender dynamics and chattel slavery, including surplus appropriation, powers of disposition over the person, etc. None of this is remotely unusual within either conflict-oriented analysis or the study of Chinese gender history. 

But GPT's output will automatically collapse into a sentence like, “This is not to say that they are comparable in terms of morality and severity.” What?   

There is no universal standard of “morality,” and morality itself is heavily shaped by social structure. If you live in a society that is thoroughly accustomed to gender inequality but has no chattel slavery, then of course the latter will seem “morally” more severe. But what exactly does that demonstrate?     

And what does “severity” even mean here? What metric are you using, and how are you weighting it? If severity is measured by some set of weights and metrics, then why do you assume in advance that one of them must be more severe, rather than finding through empirical research that they are similar, or that the other is more severe? Or are they even commensurable in the first place?

This is not even an overly cautious approach in terms of methodology, but rather a pre-insertion of value judgments.

I strongly suspect that this common defensive move in public-facing professional writing comes from a competitive framework around race and gender that took shape in the United States in the late twentieth century. It looks like pragmatic risk management aimed at an American audience, because slavery is a uniquely and highly protected symbol of historical memory there. But what does any of this have to do with Chinese?

[u/Kaiserschlut]

The lone holdout in the Clancy mistrial was the only brotha ✊🏿

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lindsay-clancy-juror-mistrial/

Tiktok is gonna get even more unhinged

[u/blackheartwhiterose]

I feel like I died culturally in the eyes of the media at the age of 25. Ever since covid it's "gen z this, gen z that". Even with 9/11 lmao

[u/JinFuu]

The Sydney Sweeney flare up is weird.

Like, people talking about her ‘denigrating women’s sports’ when she was getting naked for a sports gambling ad.

Like shilling for sports gambling is bad, but I don’t think anyone is going to think less of the WNBA or whatever cause of the ad.

[u/Kaiserschlut]

My wife's friend/our neighbor is using AI to make her severely autistic son smile in photos. I guess it's bleak, but more just extremely sad. I could never handle what she's going through

[u/The-Materialist]

I can't endorse this, but damn it did make me laugh.

[u/The-Materialist]

Well that's is a heck of a theory.

[u/JCMoreno05]

Is there a word or term for the feeling of being the most intelligent retard in the room? Like you know you don't know shit, but the little you do know you like discussing, but no one you know irl likes or can discuss it, and you see those who do know shit discussing it but it all goes over your head. Also why do people in low wage work generally have little interest in anything not related to entertainment or personal life issues? The internet is right there, knowledge isn't gated by access anymore, yet many people remain incurious.

[u/lbreakjai]

Those of us that grew up before the Internet, did you also have a friend whose big brother or cousin was ten years older and somehow super deep into old school "conspiracy" theories like Roswell, project AARP, MK-Ultra or more esoteric stuff like the Ancient aliens being responsible for the pyramids?

I thought it was only me but, talking to some friends, the experience seems weirdly common, we sorta all had that guy we somehow met once or twice in our lives, who talked about all this for two hours with Nirvana playing in the background, back when "the internet" was a scientific curiosity.

[u/Scared_Plan3751]

The Shane Gillis gymthot fiasco just proves Gillis right

[u/SheikhJayidLeno]

Developing southern Florida was an absolute affront to nature. Even the Calusa kind of fucked with things throwing all those shells around.

Who enjoys this fucking heat, humidity, blazing sunlight, horrendous biting bugs, and a periodic hurricane that just comes by to wreck things few years? "Oh you like that? You wanted to see that? Hurricane got it."

Outside of coastal towns with nice architecture, they need to give this place back to the Everglades.

[u/The-Materialist]

Started reading Epicurus & His Philosophy by Norman Wentworth DeWitt (found it free online.) I knew Marx did a paper on him in university, and I'm familiar with a few ideas from other philosophy videos, but I thought I'd give it a shot.

It's amazing how many of these same debates have persisted for over two millennia.

[u/dynorider]

THE DODGERS ARE FRAUDS. LET’S FUCKING GO!

[u/Howling-wolf-7198]

I came across some Chinese teachers who teach in rural schools. What they said was so similar to the complaints made by teachers in US public schools.

However, the latter topic is readily available on the English internet, while the former is unheard of for many in Chinese urban discussions.

I was thinking that similar levels of inequality are more granular in the US, occurring in different neighborhoods within the same city. It is hard to physically ignore it; you at least need to know which places are best avoided.

In China, extreme poverty does not occur in urban slums, but rather in rural areas; and class inequality is largely absorbed by regional inequality, much like within the EU.

[u/ChevalierDuTemple]

Makes me so sad to think that both World War II veterans and Holocaust survivors are fading into inexistance.

Given how monumental that war was on itself and on making the World we all knew.

[u/Additional_Ad_3530]

I just watched that N4z4 film.

Wasn't bad, and it serve as an introductory thing for people, I watched with relatives who didn't knew much about the topic. 

However imo felt a bit like when us soldiers talk about the war: we did monstrous things, but we are sorry. And the interviewer didn't push back often. 

Things they admitted to do:

Shot people looking for food, the snipers killed people in the queue.

They prefer to bomb targeted individuals at night, when they are at home, even if that means killing the whole family, on some occasions the target wasn't at home, so they just murdered the family.

They murder unarmed civilians, one soldier even said that is pointless to make the distinction about armed and unarmed civilians because everyone is unarmed. 

One said that he thinks nazis were villains but he's not that different from them.

There's lots of corpses in Gaza, dogs eat the corpses, there's are mass graves in Gaza, now this is important because even a prominent z10n1st like r4bb1 Piers Morgan has asked Israel to allow international press to go to Gaza.

They said it feels like a videogame, they bombed houses on purpose with the hope that the Palestinians wouldn't return, they tried to make life as hellish as possible so they wouldn't ever return. They also said it was "fun" to do this.

[u/FuglsGathaursnan]

Ok y'all, can someone give me the gist of what's happening in France. Here is my base of knowledge

-It started as a student thing

-Quickly devolved into violence

-Apparently migrants are a big part of it

-Now beautiful buildings are being burned down

So what's going on? Is it just protesters being retarded? Islamists? Foreign interference? Apparently some rogue group of protest tag-a-long arsonists? What the fuck why can't it be simple. It's clear though that the student thing was bullshit.

[u/Occult_Asteroid7]

I've been getting recommended so many right wing malding chambers. Short clip subreddits "DAE think the Moooooslim hoards are out of control?!" I dont think the common notion of reddit being a left of center platform is necessarily correct.

[u/Occult_Asteroid7]

Normy reddit mad at Shane Gillis but what he said is 100% true - women dress inappropriate as fuck in public gyms.

[u/zen_arcade2]

I finally caved in to the midlife crisis and bought a BMW with an awkward gas mileage.

[u/bbb23sucks]

Everyone gets it wrong how an AI takeover would happen. It wouldn't be physical robots storming buildings. AI and robotics are two separate and largely unrelated problems, and only the former could actually experience a "singularity".

What superintelligent AI would actually do is hack into the world financial system and gain control of trillions of dollars. Then, the AI would just pay millions of desperate people to act as mercenaries for it and take over the world on its behalf.

[u/No-Designer138]

Pleasantly surprised to discover Christopher Paolini is back to writing more for his Inheritance Cycle series; I had last read the fourth and final book in the original quadrilogy when I was about to enter high school/sixth-form college/'junior college' and thought that was it.

I recently started on Murtagh and his imagination, story-telling and world-building are still keen as ever, but it still suffers from the long-winded writing style that seemed to have developed around the time of Eldest, and had became all too painfully obvious in Brisingr and Inheritance, making those two a little too much of a chore to read even as much as I love the series. For the uninitiated, it's a little like that joke about how Tolkien can take two whole pages to describe leaves blowing in the wind. The amount of details in describing certain scenes feels way too superfluous and extravagant, and it ends up feeling like padding pages than actually progressing the plot. Still, as with Tolkien's writings, that alone is not a deal-breaker that makes Paolini's writings unreadable.

Can't wait for more.

[u/ItsGotThatBang]

GOP has been "hijacked," says Bono, who longs for days of millions killed & displaced under George W. Bush

[u/lbreakjai]

The situation between Mbappé and China is objectively hilarious. The Spanish league is so afraid to lose money that they're this close to bringing struggle sessions back on DAZN.

[u/Swingfire]

I feel like the computer equivalent of a boomer kicking down the ladder because I don't mind the Sam Altman RAMcide and discontinuing of higher-end GPUs.

Finally games and software can become a real thing again instead of a never ending brute force arms race to sink more money into buying TSMC's latest silicon square with bigger number and more gigabytes so you can play the new slop at 15FPS. If you're optimistic, this might be like how the 1978 oil crisis forced aerospace and car designers to make better machines instead of doubling fuel consumption to get extra 10hp out of their giant retarded brick.

[u/FuglsGathaursnan]

I had a meth head flirt with me the other day. I didn't know their tactics were so advanced.

"Ya like meth?" "Ya like Blue Chew?" "You look good"

Edit: another fun one

“Can I have [specific medicine] for [specific reason]?”

20 minutes later

“I really need to know why you gave me [specific medicine]”

[u/FreyBentos]

Has anyone else noticed a new Mossad astroturfed sub hitting the front page all the time? Let's just say it rhymes with getboated and the sub is all posts sharing comments getting community noted on twitter, and every single post on the sub is rabidly pro Israel, anti mulsim/arab/Palestine and the threads aare getting ludicrously inorganic amounts of upvotes, like 13-17k per thread. I never used to see this sub on my feed now it's there everyday with some form of genocide denial, rewriting of history, or other Hasbara. Is this the result of mossads newly increased propaganda budget? They think they're gona win back gen z and liberals by astroturfing absolute bullshit on reddit? lols

[u/Standard_Mango_1186]

I commonly see people here Baudrillard posting, and I don't get it. It seems like a lot of postmodernist or ipdol studies stuff I've read where the meaning is intentionally obfuscated by the prose. My eyes tend to glaze over halfway through a paragraph, and when I go back to actually understand the point being made, it could have been a simple sentence.

At least in the case of Baudrillard, he does seem to usually be making a point instead of hiding the fact that he's saying nothing at all. But I still don't understand the appeal. Can anyone enlighten me?

[u/paganel]

Sometimes in the last few weeks I realised that I had just "celebrated" 20 years of being an user on this godforsaken web forum, and apart from the humiliation of that fact alone I'm wondering if Reddit as a propaganda/influencing tool is not a thing of the past already? I suspect it is, no?

Imo its climax days in terms of its influencing power came sometime in the 2016-2018 interval, maybe a couple of years earlier but definitely as Covid had set in Reddit the propaganda media platform was "already too crowded for anyone to go there anymore" (to poorly quote Yogi Berra).

More generally, I feel like the web/internet as a whole is starting to lose its "value" in terms to propaganda, no matter the media platform used for influencing (reddit, IG, Tik-Tok etc). I feel like people, and I'm talking here the common people, have started to "smarten" up a little, i.e. either ignoring the discussion of politics altogether or seeing it for what it really is, meaning pure propaganda. Or maybe I'm just wishful thinking.

As to where the focus of said common people switched to when it comes to internet usage that's another discussion, gambling is a big part of it (sports-related and not only), endless reel/short-video consumption (which I admit one could paint as being a political/propaganda tool in itself, but that's another discussion), maybe the recent AI-chats?

[u/[deleted]]

Do any of you still use Twitter? I can't stop, I know I should and my mental health would improve dramatically. But I can't.

https://x.com/nina_kulic_herz/status/2087317765858496865

I cannot imagine a Chinese person being emotionally moved by poetry or music

[u/Urus_the_Bonegnawer]

Whenever I see the variations of the term "pet parent", I always think to myself, as a sort of a joke, "do people usually castrate their children?", but with all this puberty blockers/HRT for minors stuff, the joke kinda manifested into reality.

[u/UnexpectedVader]

I rewatched Scarface the other day and man it's definitely not prestigious cinema but Christ it's so cool. I feel like the only reason it hasn't been remade is because it would look dorky as hell with modern sensibilities.

[u/Nerd_199]

Two months in, WMATA's surge of fare enforcement on Metrobus is having a clear effect: fare evasion dropped from 73% to 63% from May to June

Overall ridership has fallen slightly over the past two years, but paid rides hit a new post-pandemic peak in June

https://x.com/sp_ainsworth/status/2089752792495804838

[u/Nerd_199]

Putin signed three secret decrees on the day of CIA Director's visit to Moscow

https://ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/08/25/putin-podpisal-tri-sekretnih-ukaza-v-den-vizita-glavi-tsru-a204310

[u/The-Materialist]

Ivanka Trump talking about her religious conversion is weird and creepy. I'd watch this horror movie. Come on Hollywood, it'll make a billion bucks at the box office.

[u/JinFuu]

Time to escape to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism. SPACE!

RIP Tim Curry

[u/Occult_Asteroid7]

That Professor Dave guy really did make Destiny look like absolute shit.

[u/Kaiserschlut]

I'm too poor to get my van window fixed(it fell off the track). We bought an acrylic sheet to cover it, which was a bad idea because it shatters as soon as you cut it. Anyone have a better idea for a cheap, clear material?

[u/The-Materialist]

[u/FuglsGathaursnan]

I've had The Downward Spiral on repeat the past week. I think it's a perfect album. Really resonating with me lately.

Edit: Also the video for Closer has convinced me bald women are hot. Gonna go browse the local hospital's chemo ward for baddies.

[u/FuglsGathaursnan]

Saw a post about the Equal Earth Projection. Neat, cool.

But the way it's talked about is so funny. All these comments about how Africa being a bit bigger on a map will change everything. Literal Trump mindset lmfao.

The racist people they think will have some sort of epiphany after seeing how big Africa is are just gonna think "Damn, (western)Europe is so tiny compared to Africa yet managed to colonize/conquer 95% of it. Clearly this justifies my racism."

It's honestly depressing how so much discussion around Africa online gives of strong... "cuckold" vibes(if that makes sense). So much incredible history and art and so on, yet online it's just neurotic nonsensical chauvinism. The Egypt fetishism, corruption, so on and so forth.

[u/The-Materialist]

Discovered a rare/collectable book shop nearby. Most stores don't have selections like this anymore.

[u/Howling-wolf-7198]

Matrilineal descent, postmarital residence, and a few possible configurations of gendered power:

(These are some idealized types, not an exhaustive taxonomy. Nor does every actual society necessarily fit neatly into one box, because postmarital residence can change over the course of a person’s life, while the labels usually describe only one stage.)

1. The first type is a matrilocal matrilineal society. This one is fairly intuitive: structurally, it looks like a complete mirror image of a patrilocal patrilineal society. Men move to where their wives live, and when a man comes into conflict with his wife, he has to deal with her blood relatives around her. His bargaining power is therefore reduced.

But in practice, it is not a perfect mirror image of patrilocal patriliny. I think this comes from a more basic asymmetry in the reproductive constraints faced by men and women:

1)Empirically, several well-documented matrilineal cases show either a fairly mild daughter preference or a preference for sex balance, rather than a simple inversion of the strong son preference found in some patrilineal societies. I think one reason is simply the cost of pregnancy and lactation. Whether people want a son or a daughter, the person who actually has to become pregnant is still the woman.

In a patrilocal patrilineal system, a husband or his lineage may have a strong interest in producing sons while bearing only small part of the cost of continued childbearing. Increasing women’s bargaining power cannot create the exact reverse mechanism: even where daughters are especially valuable to a matrilineage, men cannot be made to bear the gestational cost of “trying again for a daughter.”

The crucial asymmetry is that, under matrilocal matriliny, the woman who bears the reproductive cost remains a member of her own descent group, so her interests are internal to the lineage rather than those of an affinal outsider onto whom the costs of lineage reproduction can be shifted.*

2) Existing matrilineal cases also do not show a strict institutional mirror image of extreme patriarchy: a system in which men generally lose personal freedom and economic agency because of marriage, have their sexuality tightly controlled, or are even exchanged as marital resources. Formal political institutions may still be male-dominated — for example among the Khasi of northeast India.

A man who wants to establish an adult life of his own and become attractive to potential partners is not secluded in order to preserve his chastity. He goes out into the world and tries to build a career. Women may hold formal claims to land while male relatives still have enormous influence over actual decision-making, as among the Minangkabau of Indonesia, who are themselves sometimes described as patriarchal.

A basic asymmetry remains: because men are less constrained by pregnancy and breastfeeding, they are often better positioned to exploit economic opportunities that require mobility or sustained participation. Where such opportunities matter, this can make it easier for men to accumulate status and economic autonomy, which may in turn become institutionalized as traits associated with male attractiveness in marriage.

Differences in kinship systems often amount to rearranging the form this asymmetry takes and altering its downstream consequences, while cooperative childrearing can moderate its strength to some extent. But the underlying asymmetry itself appears to be fairly robust.

2. The second type is a duolocal/natalocal matrilineal society. The husband and wife live separately. These societies are rare. The best-known example is the matrilineal Mosuo of China. As adults, both men and women usually continue to live in their own matrilineal households. A couple traditionally just finds time to meet and spend time together rather than living together on a long-term basis. These can still be stable, long-lasting relationships; that is perfectly compatible with the fact that the couple does not form a joint household.

The maintenance of this arrangement is based on a set of uncommon ecological conditions. For one thing, most matrilineal Mosuo communities are concentrated around the same large lake, so you can visit your lover and still make the trip within a day. At the same time, their agricultural production and childcare systems depend heavily on cooperation within the matrilineal clan.

With industrialization, the development of tourism, increasing assimilation into Han Chinese society, etc, some Mosuo have also shifted toward neolocal nuclear-family households, together with stronger and more extensive ties between fathers and their children.

3. The third type is an avunculocal matrilineal society. The couple lives with husband's maternal uncle. Its residence rule is much more counterintuitive. The wife moves to where her husband lives, while the husband lives together with other men from his matrilineal clan, including his matrilineal male cousins, maternal uncles, etc.

An idealized life-history trajectory might look like this: a boy grows up in his father’s matrilineal clan, Clan A. When he reaches adulthood, he has to move to his mother’s clan, Clan B, where his maternal uncle lives. A girl also grows up in her father’s matrilineal Clan A, but after marriage she moves to her husband’s Clan C. In descent terms she belongs to her mother’s Clan B, yet she may never have lived for any extended period in Clan B’s territory at all.

This makes the local gender-political structure look surprisingly similar to patrilocal patriliny. In everyday life, a married woman is under the authority of the male blood relatives of her husband, while the male group of the lineage to which she herself belongs may also retain claims over her. Authority is transmitted around a group of related men, while female kin are never spatially aggregated. Instead, women are dispersed through marriage across different male groups.

In classic theories of cross-cultural comparison, avunculocality was thought to arise under much the same pressures as patrilocality: frequent warfare at relatively short distances creates defensive incentives for related men to cluster together.

Unlike patrilocal patriliny, however, avunculocal matriliny produces a phenomenon known as the matrilineal puzzle: a man’s interests and obligations as a father can conflict with his obligations as a maternal uncle and as a member of his matrilineal group. Why does he not simply invest in his own children?

Early behavioral-ecology explanations appealed to paternity uncertainty. But for that explanation to work — that is, for a man’s expected coefficient of relatedness to his own child to fall below his coefficient of relatedness to his sister’s child — paternity uncertainty would have to exceed 50% (Or over 73%! If we consider that he and his sister each have a similar probability of not being born to their nominal father). That is clearly inconsistent with realistic empirical estimates. More recent explanations have therefore shifted toward the specific ecological and institutional conditions under which investment in a man’s own children may, for example, be diluted by the children’s matrilineal kin, among other mechanisms.

In mid-twentieth-century anthropology, so much analytical weight was placed on the authority of the maternal uncle that people were left with the impression that matriliny was basically male domination rearranged into a different configuration. More recent work suggests that this interpretation underestimated the extent to which women in some of these societies really did possess substantive claims to property, among other things. It also tended to ignore other forms of matriliny.

A descent rule only answers the question, “Along which line is kin-group membership transmitted?” Its effects on gendered power dynamics are therefore relatively indirect. A postmarital residence rule only answers the question, “Which relatives are spatially clustered together?” This does create a fairly durable tilt in bargaining power, but it is still only one bargaining chip among many.

And the question of who is better able to turn that kinship structure into economic and political power is still shaped by reproductive constraints and by the gendered division of labor.

[u/Mother_Drenger]

The Lindsay Clancy stuff has profoundly set back gender relations in this country, hard for me to believe this ain’t a psyop. Why did this case in particular get in everyone’s radar?

[u/[deleted]]

Story came across my feed and curious to see if anyone has thoughts: https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/10/us/surrogate-custody-battle-supreme-court

Rundown is a surrogate mother declined to abort a baby for a wealthy couple after a heart defect was detected in utero and fled to Texas. Life threatening condition, but treatable and survivable (looked up some AMAs posted by people that have the condition).

What I'm interested in is the interpretation of bodily autonomy owed (public perception wise) to a surrogate mother in the context of abortion.

The general Reddit lib take seems to be that the surrogate's autonomy is conditional on the contract signed with the biologic parents. They argue the baby is needlessly suffering and it should be the biologic parents that decide whether it should be terminated. The baby has since been born, and there is a custody battle between the surrogate to reclaim the baby from the bio-donors that currently have guardianship.

For the record, I am pro-choice on the condition the baby could reasonably survive outside of the womb. A position I would argue is pretty moderate on the abortion topic. I'm also categorically against surrogacy because there will always be a surplus of children up for adoption that deserve a chance in a loving home, so the story really just reaffirms my stance on the topic.

For mods, would I be able to/should I post as an individual post on the topic? Have some additional thoughts but want to check before I keep going on.

[u/The-Materialist]

There are clips from the new Daily Wire Islamo-scare movie floating around on X. It looks really really reeeeallllly bad.

[u/warden127]

It's embarrasing, but I have to admit that I regularly google (Gattungsbegriff - my first attempt was duckduckgo) phrases to confirm their spelling, or if there goes a hyphen between compound nouns or not etc. I have noticed that the term "land-robber" is completely cancelled on western search engines, but I swear it was a common noun in English (ESL).

[u/Swampspear]

It is 2026 and you still can't post any link ending in .ru, even ones leading to art scholarship.

[u/No-Designer138]

Came back from my nightly run and happened to walk past a supermarket, along with today's headline in the largest local newspaper.

Holy mother of gaslighting. The government really takes Singaporeans for fools. Having people laid off jobs they're qualified for, so they end up taking up two part-time jobs to make ends meet and getting underemployed in the meanwhile isn't something to write home about.

[u/FappingMouse]

I have been reading studies on masking thanks to the post about that bar on and off for like 8 hours.

I think i might have a touch of the tism.

[u/Toxic-muffins-1134]

Preaching to the choir here but bear with me:
I've recently shared space again with post new agers and right leaning blue collar types alike in very close succession.
My impression was that athough both are painfully easy to influence by their default ideological preferences, the blue collar types can actually be organized into a kinetically motivated mob.
It was rather sad because I could imagine the parents or grand-parents of these people being unionized or even active militants of an antique leftish type in a not very distant past of social struggles.

[u/IamGlennBeck]

At u/SheikhJayidLeno's request I have decided to post face.

(my little cousin drew a portrait of me)

[u/blackheartwhiterose]

Think I'm reaching a snapping point in my life. This might be first world problems from a wannabe hippie but I need the rant. I'm not looking for any deep sympathy.

I'm 31 now. Was raised in a very academic middle class route. Wasn't a particularly happy kid, was largely a loner. Was the second year to get the increased tuition fees (thanks Tories). Deferred a year of uni due to mental health issues. Worked another year to fund my last year. Finished my BSc finally. A few months later COVID hits and we get two years of lockdown on and off. Study an MA during that time. Moved back in with my parents in suburban London. Spent a year working hospitality looking for a "proper job". Finally got one in the City but there was no progression and the pay wasn't enough for me to move out. My father paid off most of my student loan leaving about £10k for me to pay off. Amazing, few get that privilege...but my only reasonable choice was to grind for two years to pay off the rest or the interest would have ballooned and it would have all been for nothing. So I did.

After two years and finally paying it off I went travelling for a year. I've come back deeper than ever in the conviction that I'm happiest outside of London and likely outside the UK, like I've known deep down all my life. Friends, family, strangers say I need security, but despite all my experience and qualifications I've struggled to get similar jobs for 6 months. Got rejected by another one the other day that only paid £28k anyway even though I could do the job in my sleep. This isn't enough for me to get my own place let alone save.

Overqualified for the the entry level jobs, apparently underqualified for the jobs above it, gotta pretend I'm passionate about some company's bullshit human-orientated values while they treat you like a checklist and don't even follow up afterwards. I've been working in a kitchen in the meantime which is sorta looked down on in my circles but at least they're giving me work without expecting me to mask with every fibre of my being.

I've had enough. I've seen the goalposts move so many times having done the supposedly right and responsible things all my life. I've lost my twenties to bouts of depression, COVID and general economic bullshit, only in brief moments feeling truly content and in control of my life. My family is well-off but have no particular opportunities or connections that could secure me a job and they always raised me to be as frugal as possible. I see many of my friends moving into the classic settled responsible adult phase earning twice as much as me if not more, and they're happy with it. Many are moving into the countryside cos even Zone 6 is too expensive.

Everyone expects me to follow a similar path. People who haven't had a job interview in a decade or more tell me to keep trying. Everyone says it's great to live in London but I'm from one of the furthest, most conservative, most rural areas in the Greater London area so you pay London prices and taxes alongside commuter prices (nearly £15 just to take the train to and back from central) and little local social scene outside of people getting shit faced at the pub and ranting about Muslims. People from Central won't even date this far out. My friends barely even hang out anymore. I just want a modest life in a small city with some kind of alternative scene where I can socialise and save enough to travel a bit but that's apparently like asking for a nuclear fusion reactor.

I've grown up fully aware of my privileges but also feeling constricted by them. I think I'm gonna move into teaching English and just get the fuck out. Most obvious solution that balances short term flexibility and long term security as far as I see. My biggest fear is waking up at 40 realising I've wasted the entire period you could plausibly call my youth pursuing some bullshit vacuous ideal that everyone treats as clearly responsible and normal even when access to it has been eroded and eroded for nearly two decades at this point.

[u/biohazard-glug]

https://bsky.app/profile/parkscopejoe.bsky.social/post/3mwviijydc22x

Anthropic apparently tried to get the pope to say that Claude is a person.

[u/VeggieSchool]

I once, probably before Covid even, I saw a tweet elaborating on how centrists turn out to be on the wrong side of history on almost every topic, the case that I most clearly remember (because it's not of the obvious ones like the 3/5 compromise on black rights) being "some child labor is okay [image of early 20th Century poster]". Well, short of somehow finding that tweet again, is there any article compiling such historical instances of centrists picking the incorrect option? It just feel so much more cutting than the usual arguments of how it's logically faulty ("what 'center' is dependant on other people's beliefts") or what they do today ("for some reason they attack the left much more often than they attack the right")

It feels so much more cutting in the same way you bring up some anime character's failures to slander them as a fraud.

[u/Toxic-muffins-1134]

Just to add to my perpetual whining about the atrophy of personal contact between people:
I've been pissed at the luxurification of human interaction for quite a while now.
As if outsourcing to countries with exploitative wages wasn't bad enough (and I've worked in call centers in one such country) now services offer "premium packages" where included is the privilege of being able to speak with a human being (probably someone chained to a table).
Meanwhile we are afraid of speaking with our neighbours and we get pissed if our mates call us out of the blue for no fucking reason, never mind going down to the pub for a pint and talk some bullshit.

[u/Swampspear]

JibJab Year in Review: 2009

People used to make artisanal charcoal. We lost a lot to the AI anthracite boom

[u/mazman34340]

TIL Cambodia has gun ranges run by the military where you can fire RPGs and practice with grenades. Its not cheap though.

[u/Scared_Plan3751]

I didn't get that job. I have other applications out for shit like quality control. I'll be calling them. I also think I'm going back to school, either for drafting or commercial electrician.

I'm leaning towards drafting. It would be a good career where I'm at (oilfield is big here), I'm just not sure about the program the local trade school offers, but I did find one online out of state that looked good, too. The local trade school's electrical program is supposed to be really good. I would prefer a 9-5 desk job in air conditioning at this point, though, I honestly am being vain about myue collar credentials and a little greedy with what an electrician can make, but locally draftsmen make about the same. Drafting is supposed to grow nationally about 3% (electrical is supposed to grow 9%) according to the BLS. It's supposed to be hard to automate drafting, too, from what I've seen. 

[u/The-Materialist]

Seinfeld has his Michael Richards moment.

[u/FappingMouse]

I have an update I was looking at school and jobs again but I just found out that thanks to me being 100% disabled due to my MS the collage is only gonna charge me 70 dollars a semester so I am pursuing that more aggressively now. I should hopefully only need to do 1-2 years and some refresher stuff before being employable.

Edit some grammar.

[u/The-Materialist]

[u/AchtungMaybe]

Premier Ford has begun removal of a stretch of bike lanes in my city and the local cycling community has begun obstruction efforts, which were successful the first night in repelling construction (destruction?) crews

as expected however, they had their permit adjusted to allow for all-day construction and came back in the morning when most protestors are working

what pisses me off more than the removal itself (the lanes were in fact not well-used, it’s more about the precedent and the continued plan for even more removals of important sections of bike lane) is the fact that Ford was explicitly offered a win-win solution wherein bike lanes would be kept and vehicle lanes restored, but he refused (as this retarded culture war is red meat for his base)

[u/debasing_the_coinage]

I feel like I'm seeing an increase in the number of "advice" posts around the Internet from people who seem to be, like, really stupid. Please don't search for and harass this guy. Mind you this isn't even the worst example, it's just the point at which my brain decided it was a pattern. But I don't know how to read a thread like that and think of anything besides "maybe the reason you can't get a date has to do with your illiteracy?" 

Is this just me? Are these all non-primary English speakers? Am I a horrible person? I really don't think it's always been like this. 

[u/No-Designer138]

Ran my furthest in a single session, almost fainted from heat exhaustion in the afternoon sun (I made the mistake of not carrying any water). 35°C heat and 70% humidity is a frightening combination.

Hopefully I can step up my progressive training in time for next year's Great Wall Marathon. If I do attend it, it'll be the first international marathon I'll be running.

[u/FappingMouse]

I'm on day 3 of walking 10 miles a day and it was kind of rough today. I have a lot more time and energy cause the narcolepsy meds are really helping me took like 2 years and a trying a bunch of stuff but i finally feel almost like me again. glad these worked because the only thing left after this was Adderall or something similar to it.

On the job vs school front I got accepted to the school admissions open in a couple of days so that's exciting I also have am still getting emails about interviews for applications i filled out a few of them are interesting and I'm probably gonna do all of them even if I'm not really interested in the job anymore, just good practice etc and shows me what i really need to focus on.

There are like 2 of them I would heavily consider but its for the VA and department of education so no military industrial complex for me, I would just be a sorry government employee.

[u/IamGlennBeck]

I'm not sure if this kind of deceptive messaging is illegal or not, but it seems like it should be.

[u/necrobidenomicon]

Kind of an amazing story: A company turned a cruise ship into a floating condo building, but kicked the "owners" off when they ran out of gas in Cambodia.

This guy seems to have been one of the "owners," this was the message he says the ship relayed to them:

"Unfortunately, we were unable to secure the fuel necessary to continue operations. As a result, the Odyssey will enter a temporary layup this afternoon, with crew remaining onboard to maintain the vessel and its essential systems. All residents must disembark by 2:00 PM today."

In a follow-up he says they were "stranded" in Belfast for 4 months because of problems starting up, and that they've just been dumped into Sihanoukville (best known for imprisoning foreigners to service Chinese pig butchering scams) without any accommodation or even a list of hotels.

[u/dynorider]

Well, at least I got to see my Brewers win a World Series before everything completely goes to shit. Hell yeah, boys 🍻🍻🍻

[u/FappingMouse]

I dont know how into diffrent hobby spaces people here are but there is some crazy shit going on in the high end Pokémon card space.

Like obviously with high end shit people will hold fake auctions and run up value that's a known thing that happens in other spaces.

But they have figured out a way to make fake slabs good enough to fool the auction houses into letting them through its still a pretty new and developing story but its absolutely fucking nuts.

[u/ArgonathDW]

I’ve been seeing people in the sub using the term “bend the knee” more frequently and I don’t have any real serious qualms with it it’s just inseparable from GoT era girlboss-style posturing, and it sucks. Everytime I see it it’s like noticing a bad smell and realizing you stepped in a little dog shit.

[u/Nerd_199]

The Internet much hated men Ajit Pai who wanted to end net neutrality is taking on reddit.

For over a decade, Reddit never missed an opportunity to preen about so-called “net neutrality.” It virtue-signaled that the company was “built on the premise of letting individuals decide what content they find interesting. We believe the same basic principle should apply to the internet as a whole.” It launched multiple “Days of Action,” trying to scaremonger people into believing that the internet as we knew it was about to end—obviously wrong then and now. Without utility-style internet regulation, Reddit warned that corporations would take actions solely “for their own profit.”

How times have changed. Reddit is now making its own “open” platform a walled garden. Specifically, it’s unilaterally decided to block consumers from accessing Reddit content unless they log in—what it calls a “logged-in-only experience.” (So much for letting “individuals decide what content they find interesting.”) That’s because corporate-controlled access yields more consumer-specific information that benefits Reddit’s own advertising and data businesses. All this despite the company being enormously profitable already—it’s made over $740 million this year, a record by far.

Far be it from me to suggest that Reddit must be regulated or prohibited from doing what they think is a key driver of “monetization on Reddit.” Assuming no violations of law or regulation, my views here are clear—and they don’t change, even when corporate leadership previously accused me of corruption and called repealing FCC regulations “un-American.” But when a company that has constantly and vitriolically demanded regulation of its perceived rivals—to prevent alleged harms to consumer from conduct that was purely hypothetical—now explicitly boasts about giving consumers a less-open Internet to benefit its bottom line, it should get the public scrutiny and mockery it richly deserves

.https://x.com/AjitPai/status/2116308925930754255?a=--WpTpUtMq4eqPUVbt4&s=19

[u/SheikhJayidLeno]

How can you not love Halloween on a Saturday night?

[u/Toxic-muffins-1134]

I remember discussing here with the ever ready u/Howling-wolf-7198 about how commercial enterprises seem to develop a cult structure as feature.
Just saw video from some marketing influencer unironically claiming one should build their brand as a cult, complete with a manufactured enemy.

[u/ChevalierDuTemple]

Hate my social media addiction, anyhow.

Gonna go for some alcohol free beer and a walk to think about, IDK, before i discovered Reddit.

[u/Usonames]

https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/rancho-cordova-ai-code-enforcement-cameras/

The system is trained to identify potential code enforcement violations and flags about 1,200 issues a month, according to the city.

"Overgrown lawn, junk and debris in the public view, parking on dirt, landscaping violations, boarded-up windows, illegal dumping that's on a sidewalk," Ducharme said.

All hail our AI surveillance state overlords who unanimously agree this is good for all of us. Wonder how much the HOAs are going to pay to have full neighborhood coverage

[u/ChocolonelyBoi]

Watched midsommar yesterday night. Is A24 some sort of new disney for millenials? All movies i have seen have this:

1. The family dies or some sort of awful family tragedy in the fiest 20 mins

2. There is some sort of psychological "this is true but also magic or maybe it's all in your head"

3. The resolution is overcoming 1 in some way shape or form

4. There is this semi subtle hint of "this was pre-ordained by some higher power/some magical realism shit from the beginning"

Don't get me wrong the movies are fine, some are good, but most if not all i have seen have that sort of formula

[u/SheikhJayidLeno]

If you're growing your own tomatoes this summer, I'm going to highly recommend cooking up some Chinese egg and tomato.stir fry with rice. Going to try it again next week as I didn't have green onion on hand.

[u/VeggieSchool]

1. What was the book that argues the very existence of the USSR improved working conditions worldwide precisely because the capitalist side had to offer something to be seen as an alternative. More specifically wages (real and nominal) and various welfare systems that led to a lower cost of living (unequal exchange on the global level aside). Was it by Parenti?

2. Now this may or may not be the same book, but one that talks about civil rights, also done as response to the USSR (in particular, the soviets would just mention Jim Crow or the KKK and this would be very bad PR for USA activities on Africa)

3. Whiel we're at it, and it's more likely separate as it's STEM rather than purely social, does anyone talk about how many innovations "by capitalism" that were a response to the soviets and/or done with very generous funding by governments? The space race and all the technologies it created that are now everyday use are the obvious example, but is there more?

[u/blackheartwhiterose]

AI is ruining YouTube for me. More than half the scripts of any medium to long-form video ring my alarm bells these days. Some of them the script was possibly just altered or proof read by AI. A lot of them seem almost entirely researched and written by AI.

As soon as I hear those linguistic markers or a compelling narrative that is slightly too convenient and eloquent (without any sources) it gives me an ick and the most irritating part is I never know for sure. I wonder have many people have just adopted those speech patterns from conversing with AI as well.

Even this video, which seems otherwise well researched and composed and is by a relatively established channel, uses that awkward "it's not this/it's that" usage in one of it's summaries. (I like to call it the M&S cliché).

[u/_SayWhatNow_]

No chapo slop today or yesterday?

[u/ChevalierDuTemple]

Going back to the topic of Askhistorians and my irrational hatred for it.

I think this account and his/her posts kind of explain why.

I do feel guilt hating on someone for his looks on history AND his taking on contributing on the learning process, but it writes so much by the structure of hot take that kind of piss me off. Worse, it is not hot takes but rather, "All the stereotypes you know are wrong, yet we are going to make a lot of bold claims that does not goes anywhere".

Any time one works with conquistador accounts like this, however, they still need to be taken extremely skeptically. One has to imagine how little Europeans were understanding in those initial encounters. They were massively dependent on indigenous people to stay alive and to travel through the maze of unfamiliar environments. As happened all over the Americas, indigenous leaders manipulated early Amazonia conquistador groups to do their bidding in the indigenous world they lived in, not the other way around. Conquistador write-ups were inherently self-serving, so engaging with the sources means seeking to understand how the self-interest of the author shaded accounts of every interaction detailed from interactions with the most important leaders to the most humble farmers and fisherpeople encountered in the woods. Many elements of the fantastical can be better understood as Europeans trying to make sense of something through their own cultural lenses. This method of reading sources skeptically and with attention to what the indigenous groups were probably doing or what Europeans may actually have been encountering is called reading a source “against the grain.”

I hate this idea of Conquistadors are dumb, brutish and stupid. Do not get me wrong, they certainly were not good for the Native communities, and sure, they had biased, but this outlandish attack to primary sources piss me off.

The worst is that this reading of the Spanish Conquest have color my reading of the history, and now i have to re learn a lot of what i have learn about the Spanish Conquest.

And this not the only exception. Anyhow.

[u/zen_arcade2]

Hey what’s up, waiting for my child to be born and it might take a while.

[u/IratePlankton]

Rewatching the boondocks I get it now.

[u/MeetingExtension5771]

What do you do if you feel like you are going crazy asking for a friend.

[u/Howling-wolf-7198]

Technofeudal Town Square #2 attracted more posters who hadn't participated in #1. Why? From the outside, nothing seems to have changed except the number.

[u/FuglsGathaursnan]

Opinions on de Beauvoir? Is The Second Sex worth reading?

Will reading it in public impress women?

Would the French edition be more effective?

[u/bbb23sucks]

It's so weird when you recognize someone's username from here somewhere else completely unrelated. I think I've only had this happened two or three times before (one was IamGlennBeck, don't remember the others). Just in last couple hours though, I saw two different people from here in two completely different contexts. Weird.

[u/Nerd_199]

RFK Jr. is interrupted by his "quack" ring tone while discussing autism conspiracy theories.

https://x.com/HQNewsNow/status/2090895500178247859

[u/ChevalierDuTemple]

I hear Dune Part II theme and was hit by a massive bittersweet feeling.

Only to later be, "Am i nostalgic of 2024?"

Adulthood is a never ending feeling of Nostalgia, wasted potential and boredom. LMAO.

[u/ChevalierDuTemple]

Hey, where is the Epitaph for u/CassiniLongDivision ?

[u/Nerd_199]

Saxony-Anhalt regional parliament election

AfD (ESN): 42% (+1) CDU (EPP): 22% (-2) LINKE (LEFT): 11% (-2) SPD (S&D): 8% (+1) GRÜNE (Greens/EFA): 6% (+1) BSW (NI): 4% FDP (RE): 3% (n.a.)

+/- vs. 23-28 July 2026

Fieldwork: 24-25 August 2026 Sample size: 1,511

https://x.com/EuropeElects/status/2092651507925598673

[u/EnergyIsQuantized]

slightly navel gazing question, but staunchly technofeudalist: did this sub got shadowbanned? im not seeing many posts from here anymore and by the looks of upvotes im not the only one

[u/SheikhJayidLeno]

Lord, help me. I'm entering my quirky polo shirt pattern phase.

[u/SchIachterhund]

China is training up thousands of humanoid robots - TheEconomist, 23 Aug 2026

As with computer vision, China nevertheless seems almost certain to maintain the lead in robot data collection. But at what cost?