Guess I misunderstood “sticking with it” then, sorry

Refusing to vote for pro-genocide, pro-homeless-persecution candidates isn’t “perfection”, it’s basic human empathy. I could probably give a pass on the other points for political purposes.

Absolutely. Democrats support genocide and (unless a Republican is in charge) support ICE. That’s not a “lesser evil”… it also isn’t even quantifiably a lesser measure of dead bodies, if that’s all you care about for some reason.

The DNC is where progressive movements go to die. It cannot be reformed.

The courts already allowed DNC to rig their primaries, I bet they’ll keep up the theater. Might as well.

“We could have voluntarily decided that, ‘Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way,” DNC’s lawyer Bruce Spiva told a Florida court.

Unless you mean Trump. Probably you mean Trump. Last time he tried stealing the country (before getting elected again wtf) the military seemed ready to intervene. Wonder if that’d happen now.

He vetoed legal psychedelics, unemployment pay for striking workers, repeatedly ignored COVID restrictions, maintained a relationship with AIPAC, and did photo ops throwing out the only possessions of homeless people.

Oh I absolutely do apply that position to all work. But I would do so with the caveat that if you have a career which helps people even despite the reality that you’re being exploited while doing so - like taking care of kids or special needs people or the environment or something - then that might provide you with more happiness than purely selling access to your body.

That’s not at all intended as a judgement of the mere fact, though. If you genuinely prefer sex work to the available alternatives to you, get that bag. Or maybe you even help people in your capacity as a sex worker, I don’t know.

Well, maybe I’m just projecting then, but as a child I had no inherent respect for any authority simply for authority’s sake. I trusted authorities to give me a sufficient explanation as to why something was, or had to be, a certain way. If they couldn’t do that, I didn’t care how much older they were than me or what their titles were, I did not listen to them.

The example my parents always give when recounting my childhood is that my dad could say, “Don’t run in the street,” and the first thing I would want to do would be to run in the street. But my mom could say, “You shouldn’t run in the street because cars are very heavy, very fast, and can’t stop quickly, so they could hurt you very much,” and I would accept that and not run in the street.

I liked (most of) my teachers as a kid and I would never be mean to them or intentionally make their lives harder, but that’s not the same thing as listening to them or respecting their authority. Even in elementary school, I understood things like Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy and how that resulted in me being given work far below my level that wasted my life and potential. There is no reason for a child to respect any authority derived from the public school system, to be frank.

Granted that’s a very American perspective, but I can’t imagine it’s too much different in Britain given the near-analogous nature of our political parties.

There’s a bit of an emerging trend in leftist European circles in particular that sees porn as inherently patriarchal

So long as women choose to do it to fulfill capitalist needs (which is to say, to avoid the implicit violence of homelessness and/or incarceration), rather than simply because they enjoy it, then it kind of is.

If not specifically patriarchal, then at least evil and exploitative in some capacity.

These boys need to learn that if they aren’t BDSM billionaires they don’t deserve a woman.

I’m sorry but that’s not why you don’t have a woman. It’s because your personality is insufferable, from what you’ve shown in this thread.

I get it the most from women when I tell them I am not interested in financially supporting a woman and tell them they should pay their own bills rather than be dependent on men for financial solvency

I have a feeling that you were called a misogynist less because of this opinion in and of itself, and more because you probably bring this up unsolicited and seething at any opportunity.

It didn’t come out of fucking nowhere. It (to the degree we see it today) came out of social isolation caused by the pandemic, at least in the US and Europe. Japan kind of already had the phenomenon even before COVID.

And AI on top of that is like an adult equivalent of the wire monkey experiment, except the wire monkey is adequately-convincing for many people and tells you whatever you want to hear.

American here but I first saw a porn magazine at 8 or 9 years old. My friend would steal them from his older brother. 11 years old is not unreasonably young to have been impacted by porn, if that’s what you’re implying.

That’s a strawman argument, and I assume you know that. I can remember being a kid and my mindset then. The point isn’t “the State is bad” (though it is), the point is “kids naturally rebel against institutional authority figures and the programs those authority figures conduct.”

Remind me how successful DARE was?

This is essentially a childhood version of trying to legislate personal behavior and beliefs without addressing the social and material conditions that give rise to those behaviors and beliefs.

Want to stop (or at least start to tackle) misogyny? Hold companies whose algorithms promote it financially responsible. Actually convict, or at least prosecute, high-profile creeps like Prince Andrew. Make DNA processing of rape kits a priority, and stop giving rapists lighter sentences than drug dealers. Prosecute companies like Roblox and Meta who knowingly allow creeps to hit on minors (though that isn’t limited to just girls, it still helps contribute to the social conditions and sense of impunity). Teach your own kids to shame their friends who behave in misogynistic ways, and to fight back if they’re pushed to accept such behavior. In particularly severe instances, like boys who actually physically assault girls, maybe consider having the state examine their home life and, if appropriate, pursue some type of action against fathers (or maybe mothers but… probably not often) who condone such behavior.

And even a lot of that is still surface-level stuff. For example, if you want parents to be able to raise their children more and have the algorithm raise them less, we need higher wages and lower costs of living (or, even better, the full surplus profits of our labor which we are rightfully entitled to). Ideally, we also need those parents to be given a good education so they can critically think about the material they are presented with online. As with basically everything, the problem is, at least partially, capitalism. If you want children to learn how to be functional, healthy humans, they need unsupervised places to play and learn on their own - a recent study showed that most kids would prefer unsupervised outdoor play (where generally there are no Andrew Tate-esque figures yelling misogynistic garbage at them) to unsupervised screen time (where there often are), but parents more often deny the former and allow the latter.

A stern institutional finger-wagging serves to make the institution feel like they’re doing something and like the broken system under which we all live is capable of being repaired and reformed. Hopefully I’m wrong and this program is a massive success, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

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If you’re German, then your government aided and abetted the genocide in Palestine just like America did. I’m not sure what Germany’s current state of involvement is, but I doubt they’ve entirely severed support for the fake state. It’s not just us being run by criminal lunatics.

The Democrats were unabashedly supporting genocide in Palestine and ran a candidate who vowed no deviation from that policy. If you think it’s just Conservatives, you haven’t been paying enough attention.

If your focus is solely on the MAGA cult instead of the oligarch cult leaders, “just smart enough” might be a little generous.

I don’t know if “sane” is the right way to describe the historical MO of the US Government with or without Trump, but I know what you mean. I think.

Inkjet printers can be traced if the feds really wanted to (probably very unlikely just for stickers though).

Rhodesia didn’t make it though, so there’s some precedent for real-world hope too, even though I largely agree with you.