First, I am not on Israel’s side in this matter. I denounce their historical and ongoing oppression of Palestinians to say the least and generally see a two state solution as an ideal outcome, along with the outcomes you mentioned, dismantling apartheid and establishing self-determination for Palestinians. However I would not condone atrocities to achieve this goal. Just as I am in support of Ukraine’s resistance against Russia, I would not condone any war crimes if they were to commit them. How we achieve our goals matter.

Sure, neither of us are directly affected won’t be the ones deciding, yet here we are expressing our opinions and hopefully having a worthwhile conversation about it. Perhaps all of social media is just political noise, yet us humans seem to like to weigh in on world events.

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What does destruction of Israel as a genocidal settler-colonial ethnostate look like to you? Does it look like Oct 7 writ large across all of Israel? Does it look like the massive bombing campaign, displacement, and destruction of capacity for civilians to live that Israel has perpetrated in Gaza?

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

TIL, be a noun, don’t be a fucking adjective.

I 💯 went through this disappointment. I used to also love looking at a game’s concept art because they always looked so much cooler and atmospheric than the game. I remember the inflection point clearly. I was playing Mass Effect 3 and walking around the citadel wards/docks, with it’s beautifully detailed textures, evocative colours, and painterly lightshafts, feeling absolutely enthralled, and thinking “Holy shit, they’ve finally done it, the gameplay looks better than the box/concept art.”

Prepping is just a normal gay/anal sex term, no kink necessary

Who said AI was gonna put people out of jobs? Look here, a whole new industry of gig work where people can market themselves as “best buyers”. Is your Kroger algorithm fucking you over with horrible prices? Not to worry, with a low low subscription fee, you’ll have access to our best buyers whose meticulously curated profiles will buy your items for you with guaranteed lowest price every time. They’ll even deliver it to your door for a small fee, or upgrade to our premium plus preferred plan for unlimited free deliveries. We also offer a comprehensive algorithm consulting service to help you reshape your algorithm for optimum purchasing power. Be the best buyer your can be ;) /SARCASM

Just because not everything needs to be political doesn’t mean things that are inherently political stop being politically consequential when you say it doesn’t have to be.

Elon in particular has used his wealth to overtly become a political figure. His political power comes from his wealth. Therefore supporting his wealth through your economic choices inherently supports his political activity.

No. Rent and mortgage are two different things. One is a fee for service and one is a loan.

If your home that you own doubles in market value and you decide to sell it, you pay off the mortgage (loan) and keep the profit (capital gain). If you are renting and the home is sold, you gain nothing.

If your home that you own burns down, you still owe the bank the money you borrowed for purchase (mortgage). If you are renting the home that burned down, you don’t owe anybody money. There is to service to pay a fee for anymore.

Like sure, fuck capitalism. But we don’t need to misrepresent how these systems work.

That’s what we expected when Biden won in 2020, then Jan 6 happened and Trump is running again. There’s an implication that things will gradually return to some 2007/2008 status quo (which was also very polarized) and right-wing extremism will simmer down. But there’s no reason for it, no cultural forces for it. Right now there’s no reason to think another Trump or someone worse won’t take up the mantle of owning the libs by grifting the right.

I’m not sure how much the kingdom was involved in Al Qaeda’s early years, unless you count American-Saudi-British funding of MAK/other Mujahideen during the soviet-afghan war. However, it’s clear Al Qaeda was already declaring against the kingdom a couple years before the USS Cole in '98. But sure I’d see Al Qaeda being a child of SA in a way similar to the KKK being a child of the US

You forgot the part where Saudi Arabia started courting American aid and literally expelled Bin Laden for being anti-American. That doesn’t make SA “the good guys” but it makes a huge difference in how your framing paints SA’s position and involvement with Al Qaeda during the 2000s. Their history is long and complicated, but during the war on terror, SA was much more aligned with the US against Al Qaeda and Bin Laden

You forgot the part where Saudi Arabia started courting American aid and literally expelled Bin Laden for being anti-American. That doesn’t make SA “the good guys” but it makes a huge difference in how your framing paints SA’s position and involvement with Al Qaeda during the 2000s. Their history is long and complicated, but during the war on terror, SA was much more aligned with the US against Al Qaeda and Bin Laden

The risk with that position is that if you don’t have an idea of what the system to fix things ought to look like, other people will tell you what idea to have, and you may accept it without any real critique because it sounds like it will give you the outcomes you want, because you’ll accept ANYTHING.

This is how we ended up with Trumpism. Conservatives also felt the country was broken, they felt left behind by Washington elites, and what they wanted was to feel secure, stable, and represented. So when someone comes along and says they’re gonna “drain the swamp” and “build that wall”, they ate it up. Because ANYTHING seemed better than the status quo. Many regretted it.

The onus is on every citizen to develop some idea of how society ought to be governed, especially when one of has the means and most of us have the means nowadays. It sucks because that exposes you to personal critique and problems are all hard and complex so it never seems good enough. But that’s the only way to develop better ideas. Otherwise we end up with another Stalin.

“not fucking up the environment” and “not creating wealthy elites” are descriptions of outcomes, not descriptions of political/economic systems like democracy, capitalism, monarchy, or Marxism.

So given that you want to achieve these outcomes, what political/economic system do you think would better help us achieve them? What system of governing people and economic product do you think would help us better preserve the environment and avoid wealthy elites?

For example, Marxism suggests a transitional phase of “dictatorship of the proletariat” that might align with things you’ve said. However it is exactly that, transitional. Historical examples of this we’ve seen such as Cuba, Vietnam, and China have transitioned to some form of market economics and with that, re-emergence of wealthy elites.

Okay, but you haven’t really answered the question of “what’s the new system”. You don’t have to solve all the problems of creating a new society, but you should have a general idea. “Not the old system and not the past people” is not an actual system. “Normal people thrive” is not an actual system.

For example, monarchy would be a system where “capitalist dystopia is finally unwinded and whoever opposes it gets rekt,” but somehow I don’t think that’s what you want.

You have to make an actual positive claim about what you envision, about your ideology, values, ethics, etc.

Isn’t there one happening in Gaza right now?

And then what? Yes, identifying and resisting an oppressive power structure is all well and good, but any revolution has to grapple with the fact that you will still have a massive population with cultural and ideological structures that can only conceive of the world in terms of the old system. Congratulations, you’ve toppled the government and now you have the power to implement a new system. What will you do with that power? Will you implement yet another system in which there is a powerful in-group that the law protects but does not bind and a disempowered out-group that the law binds but does not protect?

They offer reputation. Career advancement is highly dependent on publication history and impact. Getting into a prestigious publication means your work will more likely be read and cited. Because highly reputable journals can charge high publication fees (because it’s in such high demand), they get to set the industry norm, which other less reputable journals/publishers get to follow. It does cost money to develop and maintain that reputation for rigour and impact (i.e. good science). But yeah it’s exploitative AF. There are attempts for less profit-motivated publications… But making those rigorous while still being democratic is hard