Victim of Communism
I was going to say… Does anyone genuinely believe we’re going to see fewer bots by late October? As though we didn’t have a bumper crop of them run out of American datacenters?
Does anyone seriously believe “the bots are gone, so I shouldn’t accuse anyone on the internet of being a bot anymore”? Or are we going to see the same “Bad Take = Russian NPC” response every time someone with an .ml origin says something that sets a .world local account on tilt?
Poor Man’s Huel
You should look into serfdom or feudal land tenure if you think mortgages are something new.
Serfdom was a consequence of Land Barony, which became a formal process of effectively robbing peasant farmers at swordpoint. Land tenure was a consequence of Enclosure, which was a formal fencing off of public grazing lands by these same land barons. Both of these were prerequisites for the eventual advent of mortgages. But they required a lot more direct application of armed goons. And they were designed to expel native peoples to clear the way for settlers.
Mortgages are a debt vehicle used to move settlers onto seized land, not a military occupation designed to force native people off of it.
Also, unsurprisingly, mortgages exist pretty much everywhere.
Post-WW2 US Hegemony cast a long shadow.
But you see mortgages in places where native people have been expelled, land has been enclosed and financialized, and new settlers have been ushered onto the land under debt peonage. Native people who have held onto their lands don’t pay mortgages. They have no one to pay mortgages to, because nobody else has title to their property.
each vote is strategic
Votes can’t be deployed strategically if they have no weight. When voting districts are enormous, when elected representatives never have to face their constituents in person, and when all of the incentives of pursuing office tilt towards selling out to the wealthiest partisan activists, your individual vote quiet literally doesn’t matter. It cannot be deployed strategically on its own.
Only a coalition of voters can sway a candidate’s behavior. You have to be an active member in an organization that rallies other voters. You have to contribute to the bureaucracy of that organization, either through your money or your labor. And you have to be publicly vocal in your support for your candidate.
If you vote for a third party you risk the worst candidate winning.
If you organize with a third party campaign and rally people to its banner, you are doing more to influence the remaining candidates by expressing a threat to their potential majorities.
The clearest recent demonstration of this is the RFK Jr independent campaign. RFK was polling at around 10%, while Trump was underwater with respect to Biden/Harris. So what did the Trump campaign do? He onboarded RFK to his own campaign. He promised RFK a cabinet position. And he co-opted RFK’s platform, pivoting hard into vaccine denial and MAHA bullshit. By running independent of Trump, and racking up an election-winning share of indie voters, RFK forced the Republican Party to swallow his brand of pseudo-science bullshit.
Compare that to the Harris campaign, which tried to capture the #NeverTrump block through his courtship of Liz Cheney and Jeff Flake. The #NeverTrump voting base was barely 1-2% of the total voting pool. It paled beside RFK Jr’s block. And it alienated a bunch of more progressive voters. Particularly voters of color. Double-plus particularly Muslim voters and their friends in key swing states like Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
These indie voters never formed a visible coalition. They never aligned around an alternative candidate that Harris would (or even could) explicitly align with. They never showed up in popular polling as a “gettable” block of issue-oriented voters. So Harris ignored them. They dropped out of the general election pool as non-voters, contributing to Harris’s catastrophic plunge in support after Biden’s 81M vote high watermark from 2020. And they remained faceless, until…
The DSA began mobilizing these voters in the 2026 primary campaigns. Suddenly, they were a viable, vocal block of support. They showed up at rallies as a community. They donated as a block. They block walked as a block. They backed candidates as a block. They won primaries as a block - first (notably) in the NYC Mayor’s race. And then again in primaries from Maine to Minnesota.
This partisan block was now gettable. They were visible to pollsters. They were visible to fundraisers. They were visible to candidates who wanted to win them over. As unaligned individuals, they didn’t matter. But now they fucking mattered.
The only conduct they have issue with is getting blown up in right-wing press. If Gilfoyle’s scandal had been exclusive to the Lying New York Times circle of media, Trump would be either ignoring it or outright defending her.
As someone who lives in a deep red state and an even redder district, voting third party is about all I got.
For a long while, down in the beating heart of Tom DeLay’s Houston suburbs, the Libertarians were the second party. Democrats regularly failed to make it onto the ballot (for… reasons).
Supporting people over party is what I care about.
Absolutely. Although that’s got nothing to do with voting.
I’m sure you weren’t the only one, if polls are to be believed
Thanks, I’ll give it a shot.
Wouldn’t happen to me. I’d simply understand better.
the general public largely has no idea that the space exists
Idk, man. Like, 20 years ago? Maybe.
But not knowing about D&D in the modern day feels a bit like saying you don’t know about the NBA or you’ve that you’ve never heard of Disney World.
you have to introduce the medium in general before worrying about genres within the medium
I think the thing that makes “Like D&D” annoying is that it’s really the only easily accessible TTRPG franchise. It feels like you’re watching the Olympics while people keep shouting “Oh, so how is this different from Football?” at every event.
sigh
I take off my robe and wizard hat.
I gotta say, I’ve never actually found a D20 Modern game in the wild.
No shortage of WoD, GURPS, Call of Cthulhu, Alternity, Shadowrun, Battletech, Kids on Bikes, Big Eyes Small Mouth… But I’ve never seen a D20 Modern at an actual tabletop before. Might have just been on the wrong side of the GenCon convension floor. But I’ve been around playing these games for a while. I’ve never actually seen anyone do it.
Go run Hillary again and find out.
Can you really look around at our current reality: an executive branch shamelessly enriching themselves, a Congress that has ceded all power, a SCOTUS that has enshrined corruption and abuse of power, military and paramilitary in the streets, etc., and think, “well who knows if Harris would have been worse?”
We had all this shit in 2024. We had all this shit in 2004.
Liberals have an opportunity to clean up politics through prosecution and legislative reforms. They control numerous big wealthy states. They have oodles of cash and a wide network of friendly business interests.
What would have happened under a Harris Presidency with a Republican Congress? Same shit we got in 2011. Debt crisis. Economic slowdown. More wars. Business bailouts. Hordes of angry racist voters blaming women and minorities for all their problems. An incompetent boob in the White House poisoning the country against everything they stand for.
This shit is objectively worse
Worse than what? We’ve been sliding downhill since 2001. Every year is worse than the last, with vanishingly few exceptions.
This isn’t a problem of a single person making a handful of bad decisions. It’s endemic to the entirely national leadership, from city councillors to SCOTUS judges.
Genuinely very annoyed at the guy who sees a Californian or a South Carolinian vote third party and gets mad about it.
Why even bother with democracy if there’s only one correct choice on the ballot? Just do a dictatorship already, you cowards.
Within any given party, you’ve got a wide spectrum of opinions. Unfortunately, very few of these opinions are any good.
the housing crisis is not specific to the US, it’s a problem that exists in a lot of the Western world
The US expanded it’s housing model to the rest of the world. The concept of a mortgage - a lifelong debt to some faceless creditors for the privilege of not being homeless - is recent and local. And the hyper-financialization of these debts, resulting in exploding administrative costs, is even more recent and local.
It’s a creature of the American economy that has been spread by American banks for the purpose of juicing American profits.
Electing Obama was preferable to electing McCain, was it not?
It’s difficult to say. Would a John McCain Presidency with a Dem Congressional majority have produced the kind of progressive compromises that Bush/Pelosi and Reagan/O’Neil gave up?
Would it have all ended like Clinton’s second term, with Corporate Dems selling off the farm while crying about how the President made them do it?
In the same way it’s difficult to say “Hillary would be better than Trump” without knowing the fresh new horrors her campaign would have inflicted. Or, for that matter, whether a Hillary 2016 just ends in a Trump 2020.
It’s all empty speculation. And it’s all just predicated on eating what these corrupt organizations churn out.
This isn’t complicated. The system is dead simple, and certain people keep making the wrong choices.
The system is what it does. If you think the outcomes are wrong, then you either acknowledge the system itself is broken or you give up on the concept of liberal democracy.
Because the US isn’t unique. Trumpie candidates have been popping out of neoliberal democratic systems for over a century. “The voters are wrong” is a sentiment directly at odds with the democratic model. The voters can’t be wrong, unless you’ve identified some Guardian Council better suited to select the candidates.
Voting strategically for the least bad candidate presented by the two major parties is the only thing that has been shown to work
It hasn’t worked. It gave us Clinton, the OG Epsteincrat. Then it gave us a string of loser shitlibs who caved to fascism at the first shove. And a long string of corporate cutouts - from Biden to Lieberman to Manchin to Fetterman - who only knew how to obstruct from within the Democratic party.
This strategy is why America is the only country in the industrial world without a public health care policy. It’s why we have exploding student debts and a housing crisis. Neoliberalism is a curse.
Where is the lion’s share of LLM compute located?