overly-thoughtful-side-blog2024

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bestie those are the same thing

i really do think it's unfortunate that fatphobia's connection to fascism gets consistently boiled down to "bad people just want a socially acceptable target" or "bigots like to test out the waters" or w/e when i think it reveals a lot more interesting and important patterns of fascist obsession around degeneracy theory and discipline & control of the body

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PSA: Don’t install 3rd party apps to remove spyware when the command line will do. Why introduce more potentially malicious software when it’s a one-liner to fix it?

Literal definition of spyware:

Also From Microsoft’s own FAQ: "Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. 🤡

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For this analogy to work you have to include that the “Ice cream” party has won about 50% of the time for the past 75 years and has still failed to stop the bus from careening towards the cliff the other 50% of the time. You also have to remember that the “Ice cream” party likes it when we have to choose between “cliff” and “ice cream” every 4 years because it means that “Vegan ice cream” never gets an opportunity to gain power. You also have to include that “Ice Cream” and “Cliff” are both being paid by Big Gravity to make sure no one ever installs guardrails to keep the bus from driving over the cliff. You also have to leave out the part about how if “Cliff” wins, all the “Ice Cream” and “Abstain” voters still have options outside of the democratic process to stop the bus from going over the cliff, and that even after the bus goes over the cliff, the “Ice Cream” and “Abstain” voters still will be able to take action to get the bus back on course.

Dear Undecided and Both Sides are Evil voters.

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this is actually a very bad take because they’re just people. “it also makes everyone else very uncomfortable” holy shit go outside. i work with a lot of vets and they’re just people! a lot of them fucking hate the military and were radicalized by what they saw inside the beast.

in closing: eat my ass, jesus christ, you are all children incapable of relating to people you don’t consider ideologically pure, congratulations on inventing a new dogma, etc etc. morons.

there's this annoying thing that companies do where they pretend like having military veterans in their workforce counts as diversity. not only does having state-sanctioned serial killers in your workplace not count as diversity because they already get special benefits and privileges, but it also makes everyone else very uncomfortable!

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imagine a world where henry kissinger was young and spry forever. imagine a world where despots never died and handed the reins to their marginally more humanist children.

A lot of the time when seeing deathists talk on the topic of life extension makes me want to reach out and say "the cultural tech we as humans developed to avoid freaking out about death is working too well on you and you're stupid on this topic forever now. I am sorry."

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my reading of that phrase has always been “[mere] outrage is not activism”, i.e. no amount of bitching will change the world - you have to do something about it.

"outrage is not activism" and just like that, I know you're a white person

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untainted by spoiler votes from curious people who want to see what people voted for?

now, did it reach its target audience? that’s debatable, but having the button is better than not having one. I don’t mean to sound smug (im autistic) but this is literally experimental design 101. I went to college and in my Statistics class they taught that you basically always include the “I don’t know/im bald/some incredibly contrived nuanced answer (aka ‘other’)” option. It just… stops people from pissing in the pool.

people are dumb. it’s tragically true. it’s much easier to design safeguards into a poll than to try to filter out the # of curious apes who clicked the button to look inside. Some jerkoffs may still piss in the pool and vote wrong/randomly out of spite, but that’s just error you have to try to compensate for in a public poll like this.

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This razor has a spring loaded head but takes standard replaceable shaving blades. it is easy and cheap to keep the blades extremely sharp, the articulated head makes it hard to cut yourself, and you can put 1, 2, or 3 blades in it for a gentler or more aggressive shave.

i am not necessarily recommending this product. Fwiw I think the actual razor is solid, but I bought mine years ago so maybe they suck, idk. Ask reddit if you want autistic product recommendations. This was the first one like this I ever found so I bought it and haven’t had to look at the market since then.

anyways, regardless of razor, you get the closest shave using sharp blades and more blades, and by shaving with, across, and then against the grain. (3 complete passes) You can reduce skin irritation by using a good shaving cream, by using clean sharp blades, and by washing your face beforehand and washing and moisturizing after.

I use my foaming face wash soap as both a shaving cream and a face wash. I usually wash my face with it, rinse that off, then add a new layer to shave with, then shave & rinse, then finally rinse (not scrub) with soap and then rinse with water. (fyi if you scrub/exfoliate after shaving it can give you acne. here I mean just a gentle rinse of whatever is left from shaving - this is true for your body too - don’t exfoliate after you shave).

You might want to use something thicker for shaving cream - at this stage of the game my facial hair is thin enough that I can get by with that soap. I used Cremo back when I was shaving more and it was decent enough for the price. I have no strong opinions on shaving cream so I guess ask reddit or figure it out yourself.

For blades, I use Astras, off amazon. Probably any standard, separable double-sided shaving blades will work. The razor is expensive but its 3 half blades per refill, so that’s 100 cycles per 150 blades. It’s pretty cheap and easy to keep sharp, for me.

For moisturizer I usually use another CeraVe product - they have a big tub they sell at Costco and that works fine for me.

For face wash I use the CeraVe foaming cleanser. Get something that doesn’t dry out your face too much but still lets you get off makeup and stuff.

hello transgender woman on reddit. before you is a transfem who is pre-everything asking about how to get a close shave on facial hair. if you reply "just get laser hair removal" a bomb will go off killing you instantly

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The Democrats should be trying to crush the power of the Republicans to make war. Wrestle control of it from them and shut out this kind of abuse of the system.

Why try to meet halfway with people who, at best, think gay people should be closeted or ‘fixed’? People whose actions wholly align with "anything for power"? Every Republican has put their stamp of approval on Trump and Trumpian graft. (He took 90% of the primary in 2020, and easily won his primary with the Republicans.)

We don’t negotiate with terrorists but they expect to be able to play nice with Majorie Tyler Green and Clarence Thomas? With LibsOfTiktok? With Trump??

You cannot fight an uncivil regime with civility. They want to kill us. They want power. The DNC should be prepared to fight them with guile and cunning at every turn.

We all know what kind of ideals repel and shield us from this kind of thing, but whenever it’s time to pursue them our alleged protectors let themselves be stopped by ‘civility’.

If the DNC had any integrity they would be swinging for the fences and forcing the Republicans to negotiate from the Dem’s own hardline positions, rather than prematurely compromising with the same people who can’t decide if everyone deserves equal rights.

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Why does it work this way?

Why do we need to dump money into Wisconsin’s political economy in order to not have regressive politics affect us halfway across the country? Why does the electoral collage require us to get the assent of people who can’t pick between TRUMP and Biden.

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Spectrum of overwhelm, now in triangle form due to popular demand

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everything worth celebrating in this country from a national but leftist perspective is things that the government really doesn’t want us to think about. I mean shit, Labor Day isn’t May Day in this country for a reason. Are we expecting the federal government to give us Angela Davis’ or Mother Jones’ birthday off?

My actual sincere hot take is that if The Left or whoever is invested in delegitimatizing patriotic celebrations and big monuments to slavers and whatever, we really do need to come up with some replacement stuff for people to uncomplicatedly feel good and dance and get drunk about.

Like unironically people like excuses to party and some sort of mythology to tie it into. As far as holidays go Juneteenth is a good start. But, like, fewer educational infographics, more barbecues.

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*extremely loud buzzer sound*

One of the hallmarks of good survey design is giving people an N/A option. you can as well stop the tides as you can stop human curiosity.

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you have to read between the lines but all of her work on prison abolitionism is about not treating men as disposable or women as precious and delicate. Are Prisons Obsolete recommends a system which does not treat men and women who fail to toe their assigned lines as failed people unfit for society.

“We seek to build movements that not only end violence, but that create a society based on radical freedom, mutual accountability, and passionate reciprocity. In this society, safety and security will not be premised on violence or the threat of violence; it will be based on a collective commitment to guaranteeing the survival and care of all peoples.”

(and FWIW there are probably better feminists for this topic she’s just the first one that came to mind)

Like @jadagul to put it another way: if someone says they're opposed to 'feminism' - not some specific group using that label, but 'feminism' - what on earth should one take that to mean, if not 'I am opposed to women's rights and equality'?

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feminism deconstructs the idea that men are disposable and women are precious if you actually read feminist literature. Go read Angela Davis for Christ’s sake.

Like @jadagul to put it another way: if someone says they're opposed to 'feminism' - not some specific group using that label, but 'feminism' - what on earth should one take that to mean, if not 'I am opposed to women's rights and equality'?

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Hey man that’s true and all but like this kind of thing has been happening basically as long as America has existed as a country and every generation people still fall for the “but the slightly less overtly evil side is Morally Good!” bit.

People have short memories and the system keeps us trapped without options. They cannot hypocrisy themselves out of a job when they get to pick the candidates and control the high school history books and nightly news.

Remember this year and see what happens when the next one happens under an R president (or your country’s equivalent). Then remember both this and that when the *next* one happens under the next D president. It will be “oh, if only D had won/oh well we can’t let R win!” when it comes time to make a choice at the ballot, and most people don’t feel empowered to be heard in any other way.

One of the silver linings coming out of liberal-democratic countries making the Palestinian genocide the hill they want to die on is that liberalism is being fully exposed as the right wing ideology it always has been; the dying ideology of a class in descent. The liberals are casting away every belief in universal freedoms and rights, from speech, liberty, even to life only to clutch desperately to property as the most sacred right of all. With that steadfast belief in property rights, they goosestep one by one into fascism.

Every person who continues to espouse and support liberalism despite all the material evidence against it that has surfaced now has a material stake in its continued existence. They are the enemy of the proletariat and all peoples who seek true liberation. Today's liberals are tomorrow's fascists.

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I feel like starting with the assumption that people saying that we should change our national budgetary priorities are ignorant of the fact that that would change our material conditions and how we relate to other countries is begging the question. I feel like it’s kind of self evident that if we spend less on the military we’ll have a different relationship with other countries- that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?

Israel exists at least in part as an extension of the US’ global power base - it is there to establish a friendly power base in the Middle East. It’s not like people saying we should shift away from the military industrial complex are not also the same people saying we should move away from oil dependency and sweatshop labor.

Also the implication that governments can only provide welfare for their citizens via foreign exploitation is… well, it’s a hell of an opinion, that’s for sure. What is this even really arguing? The U.S. should gut itself? The U.S. should center it’s economy around foreign aid? What is the actual proposal here beyond “the U.S. in its current form is bad”?

It pains me the way leftism in the US is framed as “the government is spending all their money on the military when they should be funding welfare for us :(” When in reality like maybe we shouldn’t be funding the military because it is responsible for the murder of millions worldwide and it is one of the key tools in maintaining US hegemony? It completely overlooks the fact the economic success of the US is dependent on extracting wealth from other countries and doing so through violence. Government funded programs and public infrastructure exist in any capacity thanks to the fact that the American government and all American industries (at this point in time) have amassed enormous amounts of capital off of the labor and resources of imperialized and colonized nations. This type of response to imperialism leaves the central problem of imperialism entirely unaddressed, instead focusing those who benefit from living in the imperial core. Like yes privatization in the US is especially severe amongst Western nations but… your life is possible thanks to the exploitation of people in the Global South. American leftism is just entirely lacking in internationalism. We must reject such nationalistic conclusions and impress the needs of the global working class.