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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I totally agree that talking about the economy is just stupid. It has been a conservative talking point for decades now and is ridiculous to bring up for most of the reasons you cited.

    You can’t deny he tried to overthrow our rule of law. You seem to think he is so inept that if he tries again he will fail. This is akin to letting an arsonist play with fire in your house because last time he couldn’t keep the fire going.

    As I was explaining your privilege keeps you from seeing what it means to women to have a serial rapist in the white house. The kind of guy who jokes about sexual assaults and walks in on underage girls dressing just because he can.

    The damage has already been done and now it is insult to injury. It really is hard to describe a world to men where women live in constant fear of sexual violence. This is what having Trump as President means. Make no mistake that women are not the only group that will suffer.

    The psychological damage alone of having a abuser represent our country is a bridge too far. The damage his first presidency did will be felt for decades. Another will snuff out the dreams and desires of so many Americans along with emboldening the worst of our society.

    There is no comparison between a narcissist felonious rapist and our current VP. Like I was saying logically you can’t compare the two despite your attempts to. I really do think your take is pretty ridiculous.

    It is like you have already fallen for their shit rhetoric and now you have to fight to justify the garbage reasoning in your head.

    We are not voting for Trump, we are voting for his apparatus. Your belief he won’t go after women when his apparatus has already set their rights back several decades is ludicrous.

    I get you can’t blame Trump personally because he is self absorbed and incompetent. I generally agree. But just like with Reagan the president is just a figurehead and their mind can be completely gone because it is their apparatus that is really running things.

    This is the crux of the whole issue. If Trump is a figurehead what does he represent? What does Harris represent? Look at what they claim, say, and have done. If Harris is a soggy sandwich then Trump is two pieces of asphalt with a turd in between them.

    We can’t manage the damage and your resignation just shows you are unwilling to fight for what is right. When they are done othering everyone else who will defend you?

    Perhaps you are counting on your privilege to save you. Sounds like you may manage but millions of others whether it be the dreamers, LGBQ, transgender, POC, immigrants, Muslims, or women won’t be able to.

    All I really hear from you is, “I will survive another Trump presidency”. Well good for you, but you are missing the point.


  • Yeah it does sound like an apology. You sit here hemming and hawing over the two-sides of the same coin fallacy saying one is perhaps slightly worse than the other.

    You can’t even compare the two logically as candidates or human beings. I guess when you had a daughter who was raped and the police won’t take it seriously because of our fucked up culture it changes you.

    I won’t sit here and listen to a detached armchair comparison of the economic outlooks if one gets elected over the other. Like that is what even fucking matters and in fact plays into decades of bullshit rhetoric the right has been pushing. The conservatives have never been better with the economy and that is objectively verifiable.

    You pretend that Trump can’t break this country. That putting a buffoon in charge doesn’t denigrate our place in the world. That the women in our country will ever feel safe, that discrimination won’t reign supreme.

    You act like it is no big deal because you are privileged. You think it won’t affect you and you know the fucked up part. It may not.

    But it will affect a lot of others. People you probably don’t think about. If you did you wouldn’t be worried about the economics and status quo.


  • Well it looks like we can both agree that round 2 Fascist Trump Boogaloo won’t be a positive thing and will instead be profoundly negative.

    Let’s be clear your hope he won’t get anything real done is misplaced wishful thinking at best. Even if he can’t reach his goals he is an enormous piece of shit and those in his orbit that will be assisting him are often even worse.

    It is allowing life to be breathed into a astro-turfed political movement created by the wealthy to openly oppress our citizens.

    Stroking racial and gender divides does not settle tensions and instead ramps them up. Think about the next gay man who gets beat to death because of these bullshit culture wars. Think about the next young mother who dies because politicians are deciding their health options. Trump and his party own this shit.

    Trump winning will just be another misogynist dagger in half our population continuing to set back rights and progress. The example we are setting for our daughter’s by even allowing this man to run is disgusting.

    While I can appreciate your impartiality historians are not going to be half as kind as your are. In fact, I would say a lot of what you said felt more like an apology, giving the benefit of the doubt, and hand waving.


  • Did you forget about his last presidency? Millions of Americans dead, huge increase to our debt, economic crash, loyalty oaths, refusal to help half of Americans who did not vote for him, ridiculous nepotism, elimination of half of citizens bodily rights, selling national secrets to the highest bidder, pay for play schemes up the wazoo, more lies than every previous president in history combined, steady increase in right wing terrorism, constant never ending culture wars, refusal to listen or accept briefings from advisors, travel bans, trade wars, praising of dictators, alliances dismantled, attempted coup, politicizing vaccines, demonizing healthcare professionals, refusal to transfer power, and of course illegally profiteering from office.

    This list is nowhere near exhaustive and I think you may be wishfully naive in thinking he won’t accomplish anything. Well, more accurately, all his shit ass handlers will get project 2025 rolling. The top search result right now is pro project 2025 debunking the “myth” it would be bad for US citizens. You can’t make this shit up.




  • I am not going to split hairs about whether the commoner would use copyright back in 1710. You know they would not.

    For the privilege of copyright your idea must be truly unique to deprive others the right to use it. Perhaps you have never thought through the reality of creating artificial scarcity.

    Your elaborate strawman is apparently copyright is needed for the arts which I have pointed out is not true and I had thought you agreed with.

    We will never know if the creator of Calvin and Hobbes choose not license merchandising for the reality they could have been hit with trademark infringement.

    Certainly if Nintendo can go after Palworld, Disney could have come after Calvin and Hobbes. This is all I was alluding to.


  • The commoner could not read or write in 1709. Even back then the law was meant for the upper class hence monied interests. So not the opposite at all. Wealthy using the law to protect their profits seems to be what has always happened. Hard to look at this as a some sort of positive for people like you and me.

    What you describe is exactly what is happening in the majority of commercial writing nowadays. The corporations still have complete control. Strange how the law didn’t change the status quo rather just carved out an exception for wealthy writers to be rent seekers. Once again, anyone without the means would have their work copied with no recourse.

    Copying is not a bad thing as it is the foundation of all human culture. Trying to create a artificial system of scarcity perhaps made some sense to commercial interests when publishing cost so much. With the Internet though and our fast past culture it really is a ridiculous concept nowadays.

    Once again owning the rights to your work doesn’t matter unless a corporation wants to reprint, distribute your material, or in modern times allow you on their platform. Copyright would never stop this.

    Even to this day the majority of those who create art don’t expect compensation. Most do it for fun as a creative outlet. This obsession with trying to conflate art with profit has always been a lie. Only an extreme minority of people will ever make money from their art. So we are all to bow down to them copying our culture?

    They did not create anything in a vacuum and they refuse to recognize this. This is what I mean when I say it is a flawed premise. We don’t need to commercialize art to promote it.

    We don’t need to concentrate wealth for rent seekers and lawyers by creating a system of artificial scarcity. This does not promote the arts or protect them in any meaningful way.

    Copyright does not protect the vast majority of artists because they don’t need it and if they did would not have the resources or time to access our dubious legal frameworks in a court of law. It is a broken idea turned into a broken system.





  • The real issue is we need to protect everyone from the extreme violation of privacy and psychological manipulation that has become endemic in our online culture. It is not just social media. It is also Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

    This is why when the government goes after Tic Toc to protect children it is so hollow. It is a scapegoat for the industry. Only the system is so corrupt it can’t even sacrifice the lamb anymore. It is has become a lip service to a problem so large it will likely be the defining point for the new millennium.

    We need real privacy protections yesterday. The government should have broken these companies up a decade ago. Everyday we normalize this behavior it is putting profits above human dignity.


  • I think you have bought into the lie about copyright that has been fed to us. It is really hard to look at something objectively when you have been propagandized about it your entire life.

    Currently copyright and the bigger category of intellectual property only exist to benefit commercial interests, this is self-evident. It is not a natural right by any means and is a perversion of the way art and science has existed for all of human history.

    We have to face the reality that in a world of billions of people nothing is really unique. If you are anything like me you would have had many great thoughts, ideas, and projects and seen many other people throughout your life with similar or sometimes identical concepts.

    Who should get to rent seek for these? If I create a very similar painting or song without ever seeing or hearing of another similar one who is the first? Well the current system is first come first serve, but is that really right?

    What about teachers. Should not your teacher get a portion of your creation since they inspired you? What about exposure to other art, should you pay a portion of your earnings if you were inspired by other artist?

    Even when looking at case law with derivative works, what is or is not okay is hardly settled and constantly changes based on the whims of ill-informed judges.

    These questions only begin to scratch the complexity of the situation because of the artificial constraints put on us by intellectual property. I don’t pretend to have the answers except to say there really is no need for any of this.

    Even when looking at something you may think is relatively simple like putting a characters likeness on merchandise it is never cut and dry. I have often wondered if Tigger inspired Hobbes. The likeness including even behavior is rather startling.

    Who has the rights is sometimes not even the person that created it originally. This is especially evident in productions that require lots of people like movies. This leads to interesting facts like most major recording artist don’t even own their own songs.

    Commercial interests love to have it both ways as well. Microsoft used piracy to its advantage to spread its OS across the globe and only cracked down on it after becoming a monopoly.

    I am not trying to muddy the waters here but I want to make it clear that intellectual property, including copyright was created by and for monied interests. It was ill-conceived from the start, based on false premises, and has been pushed to the breaking point from years of coordinated legal tactics.