If someone walked up to me and told me to label anything as the gravest, worst thing to happen in human history I would definitely abstain. It’s just not possible to say that [as a representative of millions of people] unless you’re OK with diluting the conversation around serious ongoing problems with hyperbole.

Sorry to the millions of people being genocided in Gaza, the real gravest tragedy is something else (or vice versa). There is no correct objective answer to such loaded propositions.

You don’t abstain from a resolution about slavery that include reparations to the victims because you think another crime against humanity is worse.

You shouldn’t frame honest attempts at reparations and progressive policy in black/white terms. The point of this resolution is the same as everything in the UN: toothless posturing that goes nowhere to the domestic political benefit of everyone involved.

The Nay votes can say they’re defending whatever tragedy plays best to their audience, the Yea can play off their moral superiority (either in opposition to Nays or for support of their tragedy) and the Abstainers get gold stars for their deft diplomatic balancing. And it didn’t cost anyone anything but ink!

Us peons are supposed to slurp up the drama and pump our echo chamber full of our chosen narrative (see: this post). But there’s another secret option: stop engaging with rage porn content, it’s better for your health.

For sure, for sure. 15 million humans forcibly relocated and an estimated 30-60 million deaths over 400 years is certainly among the gravest human tragedies.

On the other hand could you imagine if tragedies like the holocaust or holodomor or the Chinese three years famine were extended to even a fraction of those 400 years? Or if a handful more cities had been nuked? Or if we let the 50 million people living in modern slavery die in bondage? What about the billions of people that have died from preventable diseases over centuries of neglect?

…Why are you even bothering to argue about this? There’s no objectivity in these conversations, and yet you insist that everyone but you is wrong.

Why use a computer at all, it’s the first step towards mass surveillance, better go back to the abacus!

This but unironically

Yeah look at the right face droop. You can tell when he has a TIA because he starts making exceptionally terrible decisions to feel like he’s still in control

The solution is simple, just launder each comment through an LLM to fudge the style and details a bit

Edit, tried it for fun:

lowkey just run every comment through an llm and let it switch up the words and details a bit so it dosnt sound like you wrote it

I guess it’s like a barometer for morals: the lower it goes the bigger the storm

Oh missed that, thanks. Thought video only included cameras since screenshare wasn’t in the bullet points

Are there any options out there with screen sharing yet? Last I checked stoat was dragging their feet on it

The coverage is fine but the phrasing of these articles is downright subversive. Every single headline should be “Trump pretends he can cancel midterms” or “Trump hallucinates authority to change state voting laws”

Things like “…threatens to order new laws” or “…floats canceling election” or “…nationalize voting security” only serve to muddy the conversation. These things are explicitly not within his power and never will be possible (barring a farce amendment push, which can’t happen before November). He cannot do them even if he pretends to do them.

The only thing that could happen is blatantly unconstitutional election interference (probably by force). Add that as a tagline to every article. Then when people show up to ICE goons monitoring their polling place their first thought won’t be “hmmm, must be [Trump’s new law/a canceled election/national voting security]”. They’ll properly think “why tf is this guy here?..”.

I get that a lot of this linked article is written to (correctly) change the narrative around slavery erasure but some of it delves into baseless hyperbole that can’t be anything but counter productive.

For example:

Evidence suggests that sexual abuse of slaves was so fundamental to chattel slavery that it’s reasonable to assume any histories of “kind” slave owners are complete fabrications designed to preserve the legacy of the masters.

That is either playing fast and loose with wording or an absolutely incredible claim requiring incredible proof.

On one hand, the “kind” slave owner is always a fabrication because the act of owning slaves is inherently immoral and reprehensible. This view makes the claim a borderline platitude; perpetuating an institution that enables rapists is very obviously unkind.

On the latter interpretation, you’re claiming that rape was so universal that any slave owner was almost certainly a rapist (especially if they claimed they weren’t). This would require some sweeping evidence, think studies on the demographics of mixed race slaves or on medical records tied to sexual assaults.

So what evidence follows? Excerpts from Frederick Douglas giving second hand accounts of rape and of Harriet Jacobs giving her first hand account. Nothing that incriminates slave owners broadly beyond Douglas’s phrasing “…in [rape] cases not a few,…”.

I don’t even deny that the evidence might exist, and I would love to see it brought to light if it does. But the thing about slavery, and specifically the USA’s commercial cotton slavery: it’s fucking awful enough if you just list verifiable facts without aggrandizing. Even if everything in this article were true, it doesn’t move the needle much farther beyond the baseline of American slave ownership.

If you’re going to broadly claim “America’s founding fathers were sex traffickers that raped children” then please, name names! Bring receipts! You can’t open with…

These facts are not debatable. [Child sex trafficking] happened.

…and then lay out a single link rehashing that Thomas Jefferson was a massive piece of shit. What do we know about the other 54+ Founding Fathers?

Sounds like someone has never had to beat traffic to get to a second job… or a doctor’s appointment because your boss kept you late… or pick the kids up from school on time because you can’t afford childcare/after school activities… or get home to let a spouse drive the car because you can’t afford two cars or…

Being poor is expensive, time consuming and dangerous.

USA is so dystopian that not having a car can very easily fuck your life up. Tbh the big brother solution is still a better idea than cutting off a person (or even a household) from transportation to jobs/groceries/healthcare.

It already is a whites only event. Do you know how much it costs to get in? Very few POC have that type of disposable income unless they’re already in the “one-of-the-good-ones” club.

If anything this is a shakedown of the NFLs undocumented concession workers.

What’s that permanent blue ink that explodes and they use to mark stolen bank money? Can we just spray them with that and look for the chubby white guys with an inverse blue mask on their face?

I don’t think it can mean anything even in the best case scenario. If a Texas lawyer is now allowed to use their toilet paper degree in other states that doesn’t mean they have to get hired.

If someone is dumb/cheap enough to hire one, they’re going to get a shitty lawyer.

Again you’re conflating their dubious federal powers of immigration enforcement + “self defense” against a well defined and core process of election. People can disingenuously argue frame-by-frame on a video about “intent” or “threats” all day. You can’t let them do the same to the clearly written, fundamental legal structure of the country.

Holy fuck just stop talking about US governance if you don’t know what you’re saying. Declaring a state’s elected officials are terrorists or putting them in jail does not remove them from office.

Because there is nothing giving the federal government jurisdiction over state elections, it is very explicitly a power reserved to the states. As I’ve said, they can go far beyond their jurisdiction to interfere but there is nothing that can happen to grant them the constitutional power.

it wouldn’t be legitimate by traditional standards

No, this phrasing right here is the problem☝️

IT WOULD NOT BE LEGITIMATE BY ANY STANDARD. THE USA WOULD BE OCCUPIED BY A HOSTILE FORCE

The difference between those two things is the difference between your EU neolib governments covering their eyes and going about business as usual and actually responding to the crisis that it is. That recognition is very real and tangible both in the USA and internationally.

It’s so moronic how I 2 days ago was downvoted to oblivion for claiming that […] he can shut down the midterm election, because the federal agencies have higher jurisdiction than local authorities.

You should be downvoted because that’s not how jurisdiction or granted powers or authority work relative to the constitution. Like yeah, he can:

• tell the Supreme Court to make him king of his kangaroo kingdom
• burn down polling stations and arrest everyone who shows up
• have his House speaker refuse to swear in “contested” elections and hang all representatives that jump to the nascent quorum in the new, legitimate House
• topple state governments and only allow loyalists to be appointed, thus abolishing state elections

Could those things happen? Sure. But that’s not the same thing as keeping a continuity of legitimate governance in any sense of the phrase. You’re just describing things that anyone could do with a handful of cronies and an occupying army. He emphatically does not have to mechanism to change the constitution to sanction those actions.

Calling any of that “in his jurisdiction” is dumb as fuck and preemptively legitimizing a hostile occupation. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of American political institutions and encourages fatalistic defeatism.

Just to add on for the people in the back:

protesting means losing healthcare and housing

Unlike in a sane country, this can be damn close to a death sentence. 11% of Americans have diabetes and can just straight up die when they lose access to insulin. Hospitals do not give any service beyond emergency care if you’re uninsured, God forbid you need something like regular dialysis. Homeless services are barely existent and are stretched to the limit already; unhoused people have something like a 3.5x mortality rate. If you spiral and lose your housing you’re statistically taking 20 years off of your life.

And of course some people are still taking that risk. I hope people in a safer position read this as a call to action. If you have stable housing, good health and have transportation to a state capital you’re in a better situation to act than the majority of Americans.