because it’s way more convenient

They need to have rehearsed and prepared talking points because that’s the only way they’ll actually come across as standing for anything other than the status quo, which is deeply unpopular. Most democrats probably don’t even know what they even theoretically stand for without a corporate donor explicitly telling them what to do, and most of them can’t do improv on the level of even being able to make shit up or lie in the absence of that, much less to charmingly lie by omission or tell the truth by technicality.

It’s because the movies are written by christopher nolan, and that guy does not have good politics. The other guy is right with their explanation, but the underlying message is, as you say, pretty much total nonsense.

isn’t a slur more than that?

Not really. I could provide actual specific examples, but I don’t really want to start saying like, slurs, so. I think maybe if you think that you couldn’t make a slur out of almost any word, then you’re not being creative enough, or, you haven’t acclimated to how creative some of these other guys can be.

Here, I’ll come up with a theoretical example. You could probably make a slur out of, say, calling someone a banana-eater, right. I can even imagine two ways to do that.

You could have it be, okay, well, monkeys eat bananas, so, the banana eater is like a monkey, and then obviously comparing people to monkeys is gonna be a little bit of a red flag, is maybe racist, especially depending on whether or not you’re using it to be racist, or applying it disproportionately to one group of people. I’ve seen people just throwing out, like, the specific lego number piece of the mass produced lego monkey, whenever they see a black guy online. I think, at that point, that’s basically a slur, in how they’re using it, and that’s like, just a sequence of numbers.

Or, you could say, okay, well, bananas are kind of a phallic type of food, right, like hot dogs, or whatever, so, people eating bananas are gay, as a kind of substitute for a cock. So, it could also be a homophobic thing.

This is all dependent on the context of use, too. If you’re exclusively calling one group “banana-eaters” based on their intrinsic traits, that’s gonna turn that expression into a slur more. It could also be a statement of fact, right, oh, chuck over there, he’s a banana-eater, he eats bananas, sure. It depends entirely on use. If you need evidence for how this shit can progress then you need only look at websites like 4chan or some other such nonsense.

On top of all this you kind of have the complications of, say, slurs only really applying to particular intrinsic traits that people have rather than others. Slurs can apply to black people, but calling someone a “cracker”, despite being still based on an intrinsic trait, of white skin, isn’t really a slur. Neither is, as upthread, calling someone a “boomer”, because we all age over time, where it’s sort of used generically just to refer to anyone older than you, or because it’s usually applied as a reference to a very specific class of people that have a specific socioeconomic context, more than just being based on their age. You’ll usually only hear people call, say, american boomers “boomers”, in that context, but you won’t hear that in, say, china, or africa, or most of south america, or whatever. It’s a reference to the post-war boom years, explicitly.

There are also certain subcultures which re-appropriate slurs, which basically means that those words aren’t really slurs in how they’re being used in that subculture. I’m sure you can think of examples of that.

Sorry, you gotta upgrade everything every 5 years, because otherwise there’s a security vulnerability! Sorry, looks like there will be no new updates on your software, no compatibility! Surely, things have become so much more efficient in the last 5 years as a result of processing gains, and surely that will be passed onto the consumer rather than eaten up in the middle, and surely we need that increased processing power so you can run the increasingly dwindling number of social media sites that are actually relevant!

Sorry, looks like we got rid of the headphone jack because it takes up too much space and it’s too hard to make the phone water resistant! The IR blaster isn’t relevant anymore because everyone has unilaterally switched to wifi operated smart TVs! Surely! Sorry, the micro SD card slot took up too much space, we need to use that space for processing power! Same with irreplaceable batteries! Sorry, the 16:9 aspect ratio we used to have for phones isn’t available in any phone anymore, because we decided to replace the physical buttons and ugly bezels with basically unusable screen space! But we’re still gonna have a hole punched in the screen for the camera!

I dunno. Modern phones are fucking dogshit now, I hate them so much it’s unreal. Even the software is progressively getting worse year over year. Shit used to be so basically functional and it’s become so horrible.

Mexico actually belongs on the left and the EU belongs on the right

Can we find five or ten people like that amongst the American population of 330 million people?

probably not, no

A lot of ink gets spilled around this kind of bullshit, when most of communism is focused more directly around anti-capitalism and economic theory.

Effectively, the preventative mechanism against authoritarianism is just democracy, but extended towards parts of the economy which, under capitalism, are conventionally privatized, and thus, are kind of ruled in an authoritarian, “meritocratic” manner. Then this authoritarian capitalism infiltrates and rules the public, democratic portions of society, as we’ve literally just seen right now with the kind of, explicitly corporate-backed trump administration. I mean, as we’ve been seeing for maybe the last 80 or so years, right, in a slow ramp up. Which isn’t to say the US really had much of a democracy to begin with, it was sort of, designed from the inception to be more of an kind of joint-corporate state ruled by landowners, so in a roundabout way we are actually making america just as it was at inception. You could maybe contrast this situation of authoritarian capitalism with co-operative corporations, which sort of exist at various levels of democratic ownership, and exist to mixed success in a capitalist market context. Or union activity, maybe.

More specifically and directly to answer your question, you’d probably wanna use a Condorcet method, I’m partial to the Schulze method, and you’d maybe wanna set up certain factions of the economy to be voted on by those with domain-specific knowledge so as to not be overly politicized, weaponized, or met with undue interference by other portions of society. You want your railroad guys to be in control of the railroads, basically, rather than having to frame everything for the perhaps relatively uninformed general public. You want to avoid just using the public as a kind of rubber stamp where their approval of your program is contingent on how well you’ve phrased your proposal, because it just sort of meaninglessly increases costs for no reason. You want engagement to be legitimate rather than taken advantage of by cynical forces. Hopefully, by breaking up these specific sections of society, and giving them agency over their specific domain and nothing else, you can prevent a massive overly centralized and thus more authoritarian hierarchy from arising.

The other criticisms, say, of democracy itself, socialism doesn’t quite do as well with. Say, with majoritarian rule slowly shrinking over time, or, the lines and borders that you draw up around particular domains creating a kind of insular and exclusive self-interest of a given class. Which conflicts explicitly with the previous idea, right, of splitting the economy into more and more factions so you can have each of them operate in their domain more efficiently. These would sort of be, more anarchist criticisms of socialism. Communism is sort of, depending on who you ask, some theoretical end state of all this which puts all of these questions out of mind, where everything is as flat as possible.

Realistically, these all tend to be kind of overblown as criticisms anyways, and the much bigger problems stem from the real world circumstances of trying to establish a communist state in a global capitalist hegemony, which is an inherently isolating, hostile, and cruel context. It’s hard to do effective democracy in such a context, for the same reason that it’s hard to have democracy on a pirate ship when you’re getting shot full of holes, while, in other times, the ship would actually be ruled democratically.

hey look, it’s all understandable given the current state of the world, ey?

I mean, yeah, you’re right, feeding the troll is kind of a classic blunder, but I still think it makes sense not to go out of your way to give them any ammunition. Maybe I come off as a little victim blamey, but I don’t think it’s that serious

My point is only that bull bars sort of, have a different cultural association and collective cost-benefit than, say, cowcatchers on rural freight rail, and my only point in pointing that out, is really just to sort of, educate people about a series of fun facts, or things they may not have previously considered very much. i.e. if you live in suburbia, or if you find yourself driving to walmart once or twice a week, you should maybe not have bull bars on your car. Sort of also plays into the idea of like, larger cars, or even lifted cars, being overly tall in their hood height, meaning they’ll dump most pedestrians face flat onto the ground and potentially under the car, rather than tipping them onto the hood of the vehicle, and bull bars can serve to potentially exacerbate that problem. Which also ties into the jeeps and SUVs thing. I dunno.

Ranchers were sort of who I was thinking of when I was thinking of someone who would be extremely rural, and who on occasion will commute into a probably very small town with only one or two big box stores, gas stations, maybe a motel 6, and other highway-exit popups. There’s not much out in the boonies outside of agriculture, and like, maybe forestry or things of that nature.

There’s sort of, a weird kind of stereotyping around rurality on the internet, where it’s all seen as being sort of, extreme poverty, or, people living entirely disconnected from society, maybe working occasionally for some soulless big corporate farm that has no local upper management, and so everything there is sort of, supposed to be put upon, but also be noble in poverty, and be authentic, agreeable, and agree with me in all the ways that matter, especially politically. That’s the sort of like, idiot stereotype of rurality. That wealth gap is real, sure, you’ll drive through and see a bunch of millionaire plots of land flanked by like, random trailers that haven’t really been updated or maintained since the 70’s, that part is true enough. But basically, the idea that small trucks are the true sign of the working class ranchhand, and the large truck is always, always, some sort of like, pavement princess owned by an IT worker in san-francisco, that’s obviously false, and people don’t think about it at all. Obviously things aren’t as clear cut, plenty of people working what are otherwise blue collar jobs have big trucks, live in actual rurality, and have an at least somewhat justified reason for owning the kinds of vehicles they own.

I dunno, I’m just, making a lot of conversation, you know? I saw bull bars brought up and I decided to bring up more shit about them. Cultural context, pedestrian safety, shit like that.

I dunno, I tend to see that shit way more often on lifted pavement princess f-150’s and dodge rams than on, say, your classic rural 1990’s nissan shitbox truck, or your classic ford ranger. Though the lines do become blurred, when your private ranchers are naturally also multi-millionaires. In any case, bullbars are somewhat sensible maybe for encountering, say, a bull, or if you’re a police vehicle with a specific application, but more generally they’re horrible for ensuring pedestrian safety, ensuring crash safety when met with a stationary barrier like a bollard or a tree or a concrete barricade, or a storefront, and they’re obviously much worse in a crash with any other car. There are bullbars which try to get around these issues with more thoughtful integration with the frame of the car or the choice of material, but the vast majority I’ve seen are just tube steel.

None of what you say is untrue, but if you don’t conform to codified grammar, then you’ll get harangued by a bunch of grammar apes that freak out as soon as you misspell something relatively minor, like -esque to -esk. Or you’ll even just find yourself getting hit with a bunch of clarifying questions about what your specific spelling actually was. So oftentimes it’s actually more fluid, and more clear, to use language that’s more codified.

I think maybe it’s naive to think that if the cost goes down, shrimp jesus won’t just be in higher demand. Shrimp jesus has no market cap, bullshit has no market cap. If you make it more efficient to flood cyberspace with bullshit, cyberspace will just be flooded with more bullshit. Those great lakes will still boil, don’t worry.

we can send 47 back to his golf course for the rest of his term because he wont be able to accomplish anything.

I mean I was kinda hoping agent 47 would be incredibly busy this term. I can imagine a level set inside the inauguration with the dinner and all that.

I dunno whether or not you’ve been hit with this before, but if you haven’t, it’s your lucky day, have a two hour miniature documentary on the bombs specifically, and how they weren’t really justified at all. People should probably still be pissed about it. I’d also say that stuff about japan being locked away from the resources it needed, is kind of dubious. I dunno if it passes the smell test, it smells like modern japan post ww2 nation building narrative stuff, to me. Maybe if we include “in the form it was in” to encompass the entirety of their imperial exploits up til that point. We maybe get, at some point, to the further debate about opening japan up as a more isolationist country through the use of force, by the US specifically. None of this is something I’m prepared to talk about in any respectable level of detail.

As for the prevalence of violence and war crimes in the world, I’d say, yeah, pretty undeniable, undeniably common. I don’t much like war, many reasons, that is among them. I think that vietnam, and the continued and unerring deviation from what vietnam basically was, all the way until the modern day, where we’re funding an apartheid state that’s bombing a minority population, is a testament to the character of the united states. Which is not to say it’s beyond rationalization, or is done out of pure evil, rather than cold self-interest, but I think that the true and fundamental character of the united states, as illustrated from those foreign escapades, is kind of self-evidently apparent. Trump’s only notable characteristic is that he’s turning that gun towards the domestic population a little more, or that he’s more rhetorically fascistic, or some other difference, but this sort of a behavior is something I fully believe to be within our fundamental character as a nation. As a political system. Elon exists on that continuum.

I’d kind of be willing to wager that we actually hated nazis mostly because they were foreign, more than anything else. I think all that ww2 valorizing history schlock about me and the good old boys from ken-tucky and all over going out and killing all the nazis has totally cooked america’s understanding of that war. I dunno, towards the end we did nuke a country, twice, in a totally superfluous and cruel act, and we also concentrated the domestic immigrant population that we were bombing during that war into camps. Everyone brushes over that part, though, and america is truly faultless. These aren’t our true characters, being revealed, no, this is just some errant deviation from a much more civilized and reasonable norm! Surely, that must be the case.

Yeah, the people who see this as a significant deviation from the norm aren’t exactly incorrect, but I wonder to what degree they really understand the total history and scope of america as it has existed for basically all of it’s span. What we’ve done, in this country.

I think a lot of people would cut contact with their family at times like this due to the ways in which these kinds of beliefs often intersect with massive amounts of interpersonal abuse and broadly dysfunctional and unhappy relationships. I think this is most especially true of people who are queer, neurodivergent, disabled, or a member of some other minority, who are easily going to be subject by that abuse from their family more and more, especially as they may be more dependent on them and as they’re more noticeably going to see that abuse well up as a result of those narratives. You know, people who get to see the “ugly sides” of their family.

I would say that if you’re not actively dependent on your family, and you’re not part of an actively hated minority which they will more easily discard, disrespect, and abuse, then that makes it easier to cut them out of your life, but that’s also definitely a time at which you will counterintuitively be in the best position to sway them, since you’re at your most secure.

So I would say that this is, in some part, a decision which you should probably make in reflection of your current material circumstances, the current state of your life. This also isn’t a decision which you need to make right now, really, to cut him out of your life or decide to blow this particular one up. You said he’s already married, and that your other two brothers aren’t going, so one more probably won’t hurt things that much even if you invent an excuse.

I’m like 90% sure if I showed my dad the picture of elon musk hitting the five knuckle shuffle live on stage in 4k 60fps three times in a row, he’d probably flee to the “my heart goes out to you” comment, right before trying to find some sort of talking point he could throw down the hopper in order to justify this shit, which is really to say nothing of the fact that he basically just fundamentally agrees with elon’s actions on basically every level if he was to actually sit down and think about it for long enough. There’s some people which cannot be helped, because they will repeatedly choose not to be. There isn’t exactly a correct answer, here, I think the major thing is that if it goes sideways because of your decisions, you shouldn’t beat yourself up or crash out over it, or become overly callous.

This is probably why the tech industry has been hardened against that sort of thing, and is, say, famously hard to unionize.