Spoken like a person who isn’t forced to use JIRA

Yelling at voters doesn’t help, neither does educating them.

These things only affect individuals, and there’s hundred of millions of voters out there, in a constantly shifting cohort.

You may as well try to bail out the rising tide with a teacup. You can expend unlimited resources on the task, and you’ll achieve precisely dick.

It doesn’t matter how wrong people are, how stupid people are, or how fucked-up their reactions to things are. You cannot effectively change that at scale, except via constant, persistent social engineering over years or even decades.

If the opposition is offering free pizza, then it doesn’t matter how much healthier and better your free salad really is. Don’t waste your time on trying to convince people, don’t waste your energy on it, don’t waste your emotions on it. People are going to choose the pizza, and you damn well know it.

If you want them to take your offering instead, you need to come up with something that hundreds of millions of people will think is tastier than pizza.

Now sure, you can try and sell people the idea that the pizza guy doesn’t wash his hands after taking a shit. You can put up giant posters of the cockroaches crawling all over the stall, and sure you might make a dent.

But when the alternative looks like a bunch of dry bitter rabbit food to them, no matter how tasty it actually is, you’re fucked.

You need to address the actual concerns of the voters (no matter how stupid), and you need to show them that you’re addressing them, in a way they’ll actually notice and appreciate.

Not ‘ought to’. Will.

What it needs is some angry people who will get up on their hind legs and fight for the working classes. It needs people who are loudly and visibly sick of the status quo, tired of the bullshit and ready to rip the face off anyone who gets in their way.

Not the fucking charity-auction Moira Schitt ghouls schmoozing up to $LARGE_CORPORATION while laughing about the dirty poors, or smirking about how bombing Palestinian children is the only moral choice.

(Seriously, Trump ought to hire Matt Miller and Vedant Patel - they did more to undermine the Dem campaign than anyone else. The optics were an unmitigated disaster.)

“Am I out of touch? No, it’s the voters who are wrong”

Eggplant. I tried cooking it until just tender, like zucchini - and it was nasty as hell; I never got it and never wanted to.

Then I encountered some actually properly cooked stuff in a pasta dish when eating out and ohmygod.

Mush? Slime? How long was she cooking them for, for god’s sake?

Saucepan. Lots of boiling salty water. Cut an X in the bottom so they cook more evenly, then drop them in for just 2-3 minutes until barely tender. They’re amazing, and they actually taste like themselves.

By all means complain about overcooked vegetables, but you don’t need to fry everything in bacon fat to make it taste good.

M.A.S.H

Consider how you’d go about exploiting the opposite case.

If people will always vote for the slightly-less-worse candidate, then you only ever have to be slightly-less-worse than the opposition. You can sleaze right up to them and be almost as corrupt and evil as they are, so long as there’s just a little bit of extra sleaze sticking out that you can point to as the worse alternative. And you can farm the shit out of that, because then the other side never has to improve either - it’s an anti-competitive duopoly, where they both agree to only compete over surface details, not their overall horribleness, leaving them free to sleaze right up to the fucking-monster end of the spectrum.

Presumably a percentage of people refused to enable that behaviour, and said that slightly-less-genocide is a bridge too fucking far.

They made it plain from the outset that if the dems wanted to play chicken on this, the dems would lose. That they were not to big to fail, that daddy wouldn’t bail them out this time; put down the bombs or you’re getting kicked out for real.

The morally-correct choice would have been for the dems to stop supporting genocide, especially with so much at stake.

There’s this huge narrative that’s been consistently pushed that the actions of politicians are beyond accountability, sent down from on high like acts of god, and that moral responsibility lies only with the voters; that it’s meaningless even imagine any obligation for the ruling class to try and be good enough to vote for.

You know, the way the fossil fuel lobby found ways to shift the blame onto the consumer instead of themselves. The way the opioid manufacturers did the same. The way the gun manufacturers did the same. The way plastic manufacturers did the same fucking thing as well. We’ll act however we fucking well want to, and if you don’t like it, that’s literally your problem.

Oh no, you can’t hold us accountable now, it’s the worst possible time. It’s too soon to have this conversation, how can you be so insensitive, can’t you see there’s a highschool full of dead kids?

Somewhere, sometime, people have to say enough. And they did.

The conditions required for fascism to flourish have been building up since the freaking 1950s.

Labour laws getting systematically stripped, unions getting crippled, corporations exploiting workers like fucking battery hens. Wages stagnating for decades, social programs stripped bare, people starting their careers with a lifetime of crippling student debt, Corporations and investors pricing housing completely out of reach, education systematically defunded, ongoing militarization of the police into armed gangs accountable to nobody, weird creepy fetishization of the military pushing unconditional support for increasingly brutal and cynical invasions and regime-changes, apologia for and allegiance to fascists like Netanyahu…

it’s literally everything that Cyberpunk 2077 was parodying, for god’s sake.

People are poor, they’re exploited to the bone, they have no secure income, they’re drowning in debt and can’t afford housing. They feel un-represented by the government, they have fuckall education, the corpo media piped into their home keeps telling them that immigrants and deviants are the cause of all their problems, they’re constantly shown how their government bombs hell out of Evil Brown People overseas and that this is a good and righteous thing, so they want more of it at home. They hark back to a mythical Good Old Days they’re constantly told about when things weren’t as bad and brown and/or LGBTQ people weren’t a thing (or could be freely lynched) and women weren’t so uppity, and they want that back; let’s try that last part and the first part will surely come with it.

You get these people, you show them a political outsider who says screw all the rules and bureaucracy, I’m going to take charge, sweep all the red tape out of the way and do all the things you know you want…

Of course they’ll get sucked in.

And of course it doesn’t matter that their figurehead is worthless and incompetent and clearly evil.

It’s not about results, it’s about emotion. People are fed up, worn out and sick of the way things are.

Trump and his degenerate shitgibbons promise to trash everything, and hurt the people their followers believe are the problem. And that’s deeply emotionally satisying.

As a fellow Australian, I don’t understand why you’re surprised.

“Hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil” may be pragmatic, but it doesn’t get people emotionally engaged. It doesn’t get you infectious enthusiasm and passion. It gets you reluctant, dejected compliance, and that simply does not catch fire.

On the other side you have nothing but emotional engagement; god knows it’s not a rational or pragmatic choice there. Trump does nothing but pander to hatred and cruelty and fear and the power fantasies of gullible idiots, and it fucking works. Cheap shallow emotional satisfaction, no matter how stupid an idea it is. You know, like junk food and binge drinking and cigarettes and pokies; things that people know full well are ruining their lives, but they continue to seek them out regardless.

If the dems ever want to win, they will have to make the progressives fall in love with them, and you don’t get that by backing genocide unconditionally, you just don’t.

They didn’t get the oh-god-yes, just a not-no, and that does not equal consent.

Well, Democrats can rest easy knowing that Palestinian children will continue being murdered.

I hope it was worth it.

4k. Give me pixels.

Claire Saffitz is great.

That they’re held on a work-day, to disenfranchise those that can’t take the day off.

“Americans”.

Fucking devastating.

Not counting music, I assume - I have a gazilion artists I love if anyone’s interested.

As for actual Content with a capital C:

• PhilosophyTube Extremely interesting, well-researched and entertaining presentation of a wide range of philosophical and sociopolitical topics. From the UK.

• Shaun Ditto, though with a different angle and a Northern accent.

• Contrapoints Ditto, but American and quite a bit more… theatrical. Quite a strong focus on gender and transgender issues; check out her video on J. K. Rowling for one of the best treatments of the topic.

• Dr. Geoff Lindsey - Linguistics and phonology stuff, deep dives into pronunciation, fascinating as fuck.

• Middle Eats Really damn good middle-eastern cooking channel, no-nonsense presentation.

• Brian Lagerstrom - Baking / cooking - good recipes, sensible treatment.

• J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats fame - damn good cook, nice guy.

• Tom Bates Creator of Nigel and Marmalade. Dumb, stoopid, awesome.

• Adam Millard - The Architect of Games - video essays on gaming

• Noodle - very funny animated video essays on gaming

• Ice Cream Sandwich - stoopid funny little cartoons about dumb shit.

• Jaiden Animations Animated little essays about stuff, she must be protected at all costs. See for instance Things about Relationships I wish someone told me about.

• Tom Scott has finished up his Things You Might Not Know series, but there’s like a decade of them and they’re amazing. Little investigative videos on everything from programming to wasp farming. You need to watch all of them.

• Taylor Tries Videos on juggling. I have the hugest talent-crush.

As someone who’s been on forums of every stripe since the goddamn 80s, I can say with a great deal of experience that all good internet communities have just one single rule: “Don’t make us ban you.”

Anything else just invites edgy trolls and rules-lawyering.

Now don’t get me wrong, guidelines are good and necessary. Give people an idea of the kinds of thing you do and don’t want to see, and the way you will generally act in turn, because managing expectations is important.

But the moment you make hard-and-fast rules that you’re obliged to follow, people will make a point of bending you over them with edge cases and not cuddling afterwards, just because they can. They think denial-of-service attacks are just as hilarious against human systems as they are against software ones, if not moreso - or they do it to assert control as part of one personality disorder or another.

If you play their game, you will lose.

You need to have an admin-discretion clause, and not feel bad about invoking it whenever it’s the right thing to do.

Of course, this can lead to tyrannical asshole mods - if you have a mod team, you need to keep a close eye on it to prevent shitty personalities taking over in that domain. As the person that the buck stops with, if you can’t trust yourself with it, then the place is going to hell anyway.

I don’t understand why the entire region hasn’t wiped Israel off the map. They’re clearly expansionist, and are clearly going to keep bombing their neighbours a little bit at a time; why just sit around and wait?

Okay:

In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn’t want to deal with.

Palestine was not happy about this - the land was taken without their consent, a great chunk of their country just taken from them by decree, backed up by a still highly militarized Europe.

Over the following decades, Palestine tried several times to take their country back, and each time got slapped down (since Israel had vast backing from UK/USA/Europe, both from postwar guilt and because Israel had a lot of strategic value as a platform from which to project military power in the middle east).

Cut to today, and Israel has expanded to take virtually the entire area, apart from some tiny scattered patches of land, and the Gaza strip - a strip of land 40km by 10km, containing most of the Palestinian population, blockaded by sea and land by the Israeli military.

Israel also runs an apartheid regime very similar to the old South African one - Palestinians have very few human or civil rights, generally get no protection from the Israeli police or military, while being treated as hostile outsiders that can be assaulted or have their land ‘settled’ at will by Israelis.

It has been decades since Palestine has had any kind of organised military, and it’s also not recognised as its own country by most of the world, so there’s virtually no way for it to push back, or to call on assistance.

In a situation like that, the only recourse is guerilla warfare, which often descends into (and is exploited by bad actors as) terrorist attacks. It’s a damn good way to farm martyrs, and this hugely serves Israel’s ends, since it can keep pointing to terrorim as justification for their ongoing oppression. Israel in fact provided a great deal of ongoing funding for Hamas, while blocking more moderate groups.

Back in October, a small organised group raided across the border from Gaza into Israel, killing about 1200 people and taking a couple of hundred hostages.

In response, Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinans in Gaza - mainly women and children - systematically destroying the city’s infrastructure, water, power, food production and distribution, hospitals, universities and schools, bombing refugee camps and destroying the majority of all housing and shelter in the area. It’s also bombing humanitarian aid convoys, preventing food and medicine from reaching the people there. The death toll is expected to reach many hundreds of thousands, since people are already starving and there is no medical care available.

The rest of the world is wringing their hands about the ‘regrettable’ loss of life, while continuing to sell Israel all the weapons and bombs it needs to continue the genocide.

Fuck Israel.

NVIDIA RIVA 128

Long posts rely on what is basically the essay format you learned in high school, following the old rule-of-three.

Three main sections:

• Introduction
• Thesis
• Conclusion.

Each section is further split into three:

• The basic idea, background, why it matters.
• Three supporting arguments, from different angles
• Thesis restated, arguments summarised, you should agree.

And each supported argument is further divided into P1, P2, C - either modus ponens or modus tollens.

Modus ponens is ‘X is true, X implies Y, therefore Y is true’.

Modus tollens is ‘X implies Y, but Y is false, therefore X is also false’

Of course, not every long post is necessarily an attempt to convince someone, so you modify the technique to suit the content. Sometimes you’re just setting out to explain or inform - but this changes less than you’d think: instead of frogmarching someone towards your conclusion, you’re leading them towards understanding. In either case, you still break up the concepts into about three pieces, and present them in an order that makes the conclusion feel inevitable.

If you want to expand beyond that, you can break it down inwards, splitting supporting concepts in three, or you can build it outwards, making three supporting arguments for each basic angle.

One important thing to remember is that nobody wants to read a huge unbroken wall of text, so use paragraphs to break up separate ideas into small manageable chunks with whitespace in between. And remember that the last sentence of a paragraph hits like a mic drop, so use this strategically.

Another trick is to sound out the post in your head and think about cadence; you don’t want a string of five-word sentences that all fall off at the end. If you have a whole page of “Dada da da da DUM. Dada dada da DUM. Da dada da daDUM.”, your readers will get annoyed and dismiss you without necessarily knowing why. You need to change up the rhythm, throw in some parenthetical clauses, vary the length and keep the flow of tex sounding interesting. It makes the difference between school assembly anouncements and a professional youtuber.

Honestly it’s all a bit of a hack - once you get the hang of it, you can hammer it out all day with surprisingly little effort.