I don’t even think you can call them leftists at this point. Being a leftist is fundamentally about worker solidarity. This is something else entirely. It’s a purity spiral death cult!

Yeah exactly. Not having 3 grand is no obstacle for them to get you to lose 3 grand!

But it’s not just grocery stores as everyone thinks. Prices are up all the way along the supply chain. Supplies, feed, and seed for farmers are way up too.

It’s the economy. Look at the numbers for voters without a college degree, rural voters, and lower income voters. Trump won all of these groups. In the WaPo exit polls the issues are included, not just the demographics. For voters who think the economy is the most importantly issue and for voters who think the US economy is doing badly: Trump dominated.

The Democrats continue to fail at shedding their reputation for being out of touch with working class Americans. The only income bracket that Harris won was the $100,000+ group. This tells us that the Democrats are an upper middle class and upper class party.

Influencers are the tail that thinks they’re wagging the dog. When they aren’t shilling garbage products and cryptoscams they’re spending all their time trying to find the next trend to chase. Besides the shilling, at their worst they’re merely a sounding board for ideas and issues that are already out there (and have been for a long time).

The biggest mistake the Democrat campaign made was to ignore the plight of working class, non-college educated people. To a group that’s been reeling from inflation and the major setback of COVID lockdowns, the Democrats promised more of the same. That’s not good enough! What good is student loan forgiveness to people who never went to college?

That’s been the problem for the Democrats for decades now. A party that used to call labour unions its base now focuses pretty much exclusively on college-educated middle class and up.

I just had a look at the exit polls. Of the people who said the economy was the most important use, 79% voted for Trump. Of those who think the US’s economy is doing not so good/poor (67% of voters), 69% voted for Trump.

I know lots of people here will sneer at that and Trump seems pretty unlikely to right the ship but he actually promised change whereas the Democrats did not. Promising to keep things the same when 2/3 of voters believe the economy is poor is not going to get the job done.

They did this for people with WC3 CD keys.

I wonder if I’ll get access to it with my WC2 original CDs.

The burden of proof is on revolutionaries. Always!

You not only need to show that your radically new society is a genuine improvement (and won’t collapse into a brutal dictatorship) but also that it’s enough of an improvement to be worth the millions of lives that would be lost during the revolution! Furthermore, you need to show that the new society you propose can accommodate people whose ideology is different from your own.

Assuming that humans will all think and behave the same way has never worked throughout human history. Liberal democracy (and to a lesser extent enlightened monarchy) has been the only time period to accommodate diverse opinions, scientific and economic flourishing, and strong protections for individual liberty (and sexuality) simultaneously with a large population. All of the other systems were either very small (and so relied on the close bonds of kinship and inter-familial relationships) or dominated by brutal despots.

Thus, as much as we hate our current system for its many flaws, it’s so much better than everything that has gone before that the bar has been set very high.

Tomatoes are about 95% water, 1% fibre, and 4% other carbs (sugars and starches). Even with no added sugar, any tomato sauce is basically all carbs and sugar (if you ignore the water).

Even though we think of tomatoes as a vegetable they’re actually a fruit. Eating a whole bunch of tomato sauce is not much different from eating a bunch of pureed strawberries. Tomatoes just don’t taste as sweet as the strawberries because because they’re more acidic.

Empathy isn’t a feeling that happens to you, it’s a skill you practice.

Everyone knows about common human emotions. What you don’t know about a stranger is when they have those emotions and when they don’t. What most people think they’re doing when they say they’re being empathetic is engaging in projection. They’re imagining themselves in that situation and assuming the other person is feeling the same way they are.

Do I even have to tell you how often that’s wrong? Many, many people think another person is angry when they are angry and they project their anger onto the other person. It totally baffles them!

There are degrees of empathy! It’s a skill! A poker player may have enough empathy with you to be able to predict what you’re going to do based on the cards and the stakes. But they don’t know how you’ll react to a new pair of wool socks for Christmas from your aunt, the way your mom might.

To know how a person will respond to a situation is to know something about that person. That is empathy. But many people can be in a marriage for decades without ever learning how their partner responds to every situation. In many cases this leads to divorce.

Now, in that light you should see why I find it absurd when people claim to have empathy for everyone in the world. That’s like claiming to have Counselor Troi’s Betazoid powers. No one knows every person on earth, never mind knowing them as well as their own sister.

To take one person as an example: Vladimir Putin. Intelligence agencies, military commanders, world leaders, analysts, and journalists everywhere spend enormous amounts of effort trying to understand how Putin thinks because human lives are on the line. Yet many of these people failed to predict some of the major actions he has undertaken because they don’t really understand how he feels, nor how many Russians feel. That is a huge failure of empathy brought about by a lack of experience and cultural understanding.

Most people have some degree of empathy: for their friends, family, and their in-group. There are plenty of people who don’t, though.

Empathy is the skill of the therapist, the con artist, the salesperson, the poker player. Not everyone is good at understanding other people’s emotions and motivations.

That’s also a form of empathy. You get that, right?

No, because doing badly doesn’t imply feeling badly. People going through bad times respond in a variety of ways. They don’t all respond exactly the same way.

Of course you can respond by donating to help people who have been affected by a disaster. Everyone does that. That’s what sympathy does for us.

Empathy is different! To truly have empathy for someone means to understand them well enough to know how they’re going to respond to something even before they do. It’s very difficult to achieve. Many married couples never reach it.

That’s not what empathy means. Empathy is the capacity to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand how they are feeling, not to feel bad for them when they’re not doing well.

What you’re describing is more like sympathy.

You can’t develop empathy until you break out of the filter bubble. To understand a person you first need to know what their life is like, what motivates them, what values they hold.

Everything I’ve seen tells me that the opacity runs in both directions. Empathizing with someone who holds radically different, diametrically opposed values to your own is very difficult.

I love everything about this! Such a badass grandma!

Ahhhh, that was a typo. What they meant to say was “the Chinese government has a 95% approval rating among tankies!”

Yeah exactly, but even then there will still be scarcity of land. I’ve been a lifelong Trek fan and I’ve come to see all the holes in that universe. I think even the most diehard post scarcity believers understand that not everyone gets to be Captain Picard. But what about Picard’s family wine estate or even Sisko’s family restaurant? Not everyone gets one of those either.

The best we’ll manage is a tiny living quarters with a replicator and great public transit.

Yes, they’re fueled by resentment and righteous indignation. They see the world as a terrible place and demand that it be fixed for them. They also take for granted all the ways in which the world sucks so much less now than it did for most of history.

It’s easy to see how that falls down though. If everyone’s in it for the love of the game then lots of people are gonna want to be up on stage, like Taylor the superstar, not cleaning the outhouses like Bob the maintenance guy.

And people will say Bob is being exploited, of course, but Bob did choose to take that job. Of course Bob needs to eat and to pay rent and pay for health care and entertainment and to send his kids to university and all that. But let’s assume we take care of all those other things Bob needs the money for, would it still be exploitation if Bob was willing to accept some amount of money (less than what Taylor gets paid for the concert) to clean the outhouses?

I don’t think so, and I doubt Bob would either. I think he would be unhappy if his choice to accept payment for that job were taken away. I think Bob would say the job doesn’t bother him as much as other people and that he benefits from having a stronger stomach (or a weaker sense of smell) from everyone else. Just because we find the job intolerable and disgusting doesn’t mean Bob does. And that’s one of the limitations of empathy (which is so often brought up in these discussions).