Patreon has it’s own internal hosting, yes. But is it still leaning on Azure/AWS? shrug Probably.

I’ve been getting NewPiped down, myself.

But it’s nice to see alternatives floating.

Condescending Joel Osteen Noises

We talking Iran, the secular democracy prior to 1953? Or Iran, the US backed military dictatorship that lasted until 1979? Or Iran, the Revolutionary Socialist Government that imploded in the run up to the US instigated Iran-Iraq War?

Oh oh oh. I gotcha. We’re talking about the modern theocratically controlled Kingdom of Saud uh… Hinduvista Federal government of India um… Revanchist Anti-Communist Christian Cult of the Park/Yoon government er… Apartheid State of Israel oh, here it is, Ayatollah’s Iran.

Damn, can’t believe America would end up like Evil Foreign Country, instead of a model liberal secular government we traditionally support.

“Black Friday” was just a day well-established as a popular shopping day, due to it being a day off industrial and office workers had in the run-up to Christmas.

The “Black Friday / Cyber Monday Sale” was always a clearance sale. The stuff you were getting “for cheap” was inevitably products that the store needed off the shelves before they pulled out the next line of high-demand kitche. So you could get clothes a year out of fashion or electronics a step behind the curve. But the store wouldn’t restock this stuff because it was inevitably the last bits they still had in inventory.

This - combined with hypersensational news coverage of “Incredible Unbelievable DEALS!” - sparked a slew of deadly crowd crushes that created the impression of sales so amazing people would die for them. But it was always just clearance sales, with the occasional scam or flim-flam thrown in. Once savvy consumers started to notice the degraded state of the merchandise and more conservative retail shoppers saw the crowd crush as a scary hazard rather than a bandwagon to climb aboard, the sensationalist news coverage dimmed and the marketing strategies changed.

But the rise and fall of “Black Friday” was never actually about it going to shit. It was always shit. It just took time for retail shoppers to notice.

We don’t really have evidence of Jesus’ historicity.

We have multiple written testimonials, period artwork, and documentation of the resulting mass movement.

Almost nothing that would point to historicity in the gospels is corroborated by archeology… like was Pilot a person who existed? Yes, very likely he was. Is there biographies of him? Yes, there are contemporaneous sources showing him to be real. Is there anything, outside of the gospels, recount him meeting Jesus in any capacity let alone a whole trial and execution? No, there’s nothing like that.

You could play the same game with Socrates. Dismiss the fragmented reproductions of - periodically contradictory and occasionally fantastical - accounts of the pupils of his pupils and he doesn’t exist either. Indeed, there Socratic problem tackles the root challenge of reconstructing the veracity of a 2000 year old figure’s existence. To complicate things, some of the earliest writings on Socrates known to exist are Gnostic Gospels (which contains fragments of a transcribed copy of Plato’s Republic).

You disabuse yourself of historical Christian accounts at the peril of ignoring the accumulated history of the ancient world.

just because New York exists it doesn’t mean Spiderman is real.

We have real life video accounts of people in costumes identical to that of the cartoon character climbing buildings. What’s the line here? Are we saying nobody’s ever gained superpowers from a radioactive spider? Or that nobody’s ever dressed up in a costume like that to chase after petty criminals? Or that nobody’s ever climbed a building in that iconic outfit?

If, two-thousand years from now, we discovered a written account of one of these performers along with a handful of comic book fragments discovered in a book case buried in a cave in the deserted island of Manhattan… what kind of conversation would you have?

If we then somehow managed to resurrect a snippet of footage what would be concluding, then?

You can dispute Magical Jesus with the same cavalier attitude as Spiderman. But this is more akin to disputing the existence of Eliot Ness by pointing to a stack of Dick Tracey cartoons and saying “Unbelievable!”

Anyway, cool for AOC to be honest, but unfortunately her views (specifically support of MMT) are a certain way to nuke the economy of the USA.

The US economy gets nuked every 8-12 years thanks to private equity and boom-bust capital trends. MMT just moves the ball out of the hands of a cartel of hedge funds and into the hands of the US Treasury. I’ll happily agree that its not sufficient to solving the problem of malinvestment and industrial waste. But that’s precisely because its an extension of Keynesian-cum-Friedmanite monetary theory of economics. At some point, you have to take account of real assets, not just float around fictitious capital.

if USD as a currency takes a 10000x inflation in a year

You don’t get inflation like that under Eisenhower/Carter era tax laws. MMT, in practice, is still predicated on some degree of currency recapture. You’re just replacing credit elasticity through private lenders with spending elasticity through public spenders. “Here’s a $500k loan, build a house and pay me back at 6% APY” isn’t meaningfully different than “Here’s a $500k grant, built a house and your builders are going to pay me back 6% VAT”.

Except that’s not the way people like AOC promise.

AOC promises a large public investment in value-adding infrastructure. She’s just proposing direct payment rather than tax-incentivized private investment.

Houses don’t all cost half a million dollars there and retirement is funded through taxation.

I suppose we could be cheeky, take Solidium - the Finnish sovereign wealth fund - and amortize assets across the population as “collective wealth”. But holding individuals with 401ks to account for being “rich” because they’re doing the only legally expedient form of retirement savings is absurd, I agree.

Americans are obligated to save individually for retirement and tax-incentivized to stockpile appreciating assets in personal trusts, in anticipation of becoming too old to work.

It is not that unusual at all for a 30-something professional earning a six-figure salary to set aside 10-20% of that in savings. I suppose you can argue Congresscritters are overpaid and therefore anyone in a federally elected office is de facto not trying to help people. But then you’ve got a problem with how we handle retirement, not with how AOC handles her politics.

AOC is a prodigious fundraiser with a significant national following. She might only have a half-million in the bank, but her name and her reputation are worth orders of magnitude more.

Conservatives have a hard time believing someone like that isn’t getting rich quick on $AOCCoin or LeftyBear merch offerings.

there’s zero evidence that he was even real.

There is abundant testimonial of his existence, enormous bodies of archeological evidence dating the nascent Christian church to the period immediately following his life, and plenty of contemporary evidence describing the more prominent figures central to the gospels and the various letters that follow.

We have at least as much evidence of Jesus as we do Socrates or Confucius or Boudica or Pakal the Elder.

I’m saying if you read the Bible, Jesus’s teachings align with socialism.

Not exactly. Socialists are not a Millenarian Cult eagerly awaiting the end of the world. The early disciples believed the apocalypse was nigh and material wealth would be of no consequence in the Next Life. Their socialist policies were heavily informed by their dogmatic belief in a Final Judgement coming within their lifetime.

Modern socialists don’t hold this view at all. On the contrary, they tend to be deeply concerned with the long term health and well-being of their communities, their economies, and the global ecology. One of the major distinctions between modern Friedmanian free market thinking and MLM economic central planning is the focus on fluctuations in market price relative to the long term socio-economic consequences of current economic policy.

If anything, it is the capitalists (particularly the more Millenarian-minded Protestant cults) who behave like there’s no tomorrow. The socialists are the ones talking about the next century of climate change and the next millennium of biodiversity / sustainability.

Those weren’t Real Christians. They were followers of some fringe leftist ideology from the Middle East.

Capitalism is based on slavery and genocide

Feudalism is based on slavery and genocide. Capitalism is based on industrial development yielding a compounding rate of return.

It is fucked, nothing good about it

Its a historical stage of economic development every society ultimately passes through. Again, go back and read Das Kapital. Go pick up a copy of Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century. Get a book on Lenin’s NEP or Dengism or the modernization of Castro’s Cuba. Even the most staunch leftist cannot escape the materialist need to industrialize.

I genuinely enjoyed the early game. It had a lot of promise, the build up of tension was engaging, the world they laid out was exactly the kind of FF7 techno-magical cyberpunk and sorcery mish mash Final Fantasy does well. I loved the characters as they were introduced and was curious to see whether the wanna-be boy band aesthetic would culminate in an FFX-2 style dance battle motif.

But its obvious they just ran out of gas after the first major arc. All that world building up front, but the game completely falls apart after you leave the main continent. By then of the game, you’re literally On Rails after giving you this rich open world to explore for a hundred hours upfront. Tons of buildup but very little payoff. Not what you want in an FF title. I was deeply disappointed in FF13’s Big Hallway style of storytelling, but at least the story paid out in the end.

Wasn’t this specifically against Harris?

It was specifically against the current administration, which was funding and propagandizing a genocide.

I just don’t know why they were only “Abandon Harris” instead of abandoning the whole process

The turnout for Democrats plunged between 2020 and 2024. A big chunk of that came from liberal Midwesterners staying out of the election entirely because they had no candidate to support in the race.

I know you’re very afraid because your favorite genocider lost and now you’re having a taste of your own medecine

Joe Biden to rich donors: “Nothing would fundamentally change” if he’s elected

And then nothing fundamentally changed, people were still mad, and the groundswell of support he enjoyed in 2020 collapsed under his successor in 2024. We should believe this is the fault of checks notes one of the Dems’ largest constituencies and not checks notes again the massive surplus of Mayo-Americans who flooded into Donald Trump’s camp over egg prices.

Liberals put a ton of effort into winning conservative voters, failed to win any conservative voters, and then blamed their base for only turning out 6M more votes than what put Obama into the White House in a landslide.

why was only Harris punished for it

Trump: “I’m doing genocide.”

Harris: “I’m also doing genocide.”

Palestinians: “I can’t vote for either of these two.”

Liberals: “Well then, I guess you deserve the genocide you get.”

anymore

Point to the moment in history when intelligence agencies were interested in protecting anyone worth less than $10M.

https://www.salon.com/2016/11/03/fbi-takes-a-page-from-breitbart-far-right-clinton-cash-book-used-in-foundation-investigation/

In meetings, the Justice Department and senior F.B.I. officials agreed that making the Clinton Foundation investigation public could influence the presidential race and suggest they were favoring Mr. Trump. . . . They agreed to keep the case open but wait until after the election to determine their next steps. The move infuriated some agents, who thought that the F.B.I.’s leaders were reining them in because of politics.

Its the same FBI. They’re a pile of writhing fascist maggots, all too eager to get back to their COINTELPRO days of breaking the knees of union organizers, torching the homes of civil rights activists, and padding their wallets with protection money from the New York Mafia.

The MAGA is coming from inside the J. Edgar Hoover Building.