They’re making an effort to make them illegal too.

Not weird at all, they’re eating like many hunter-gatherer societies used to. It was very common to season meat with fruits and honey.

The US killed Iran’s leadership and strengthened their resolve. Now a bunch of younger, more creative, and more passionate people have taken leadership positions. Iranian propaganda has proven more effective and internet savvy, and their military decision-making has likely improved due to destagnation. Trump literally threatening to wipe the entire civilization off the face of the earth likely pushes Iranians who are against the regime to reconsider (even if only temporarily while they deal with the bigger threat), and I couldn’t say I wouldn’t make the same judgment if I were in their position. What a colossal failure, but hey, at least the defense contractors are making money, right? I can’t wait for the blowback from this to inspire the next round of interventions, if we’re even still around by then.

I used to think this way when I was miserable and disillusioned with society in general. When you approach life with the assumption that people are evil by default you tend to only notice things which affirm that belief. I’ve since made a lot of changes in my life and gained a new perspective, and I’ve found that I more frequently notice people doing small acts of kindness when they think no one’s looking. Most people want to do good, it’s just that they don’t often succeed.

Most people are good, it’s a wealthy few who exploit the planet and people for profit who are destroying the planet. The “humans are inherently selfish/evil” line only serves to protect those responsible from accountability by distributing the blame.

They’re not - or at least no one can reasonably claim ignorance now - and they have already voted for anti-genocide representatives in special elections and primaries thus far. It won’t be a wipeout across the board, but AIPAC will lose their stranglehold on US politics this primary season and they know it. They’ve been doing damage control rather than trying to get pro-Israel candidates elected recently.

When most of the AIPAC candidates were elected the electorate was largely ignorant of Israel-Palestine.

I guess it depends on whether they’re referring to elected officials or the electorate, because support for the genocide is only mainstream among elected officials and not the electorate.

But they could also be referring to border policy, which is a little less straightforward, as a lot of the Democratic electorate still has some reactionary views on the border and immigration as a result of candidates and elected officials refusing to offer a counter-narrative to the “border crisis.”

Which views would those be?

I’ve been oversensitive to AI gen images recently and it’s worse with low-rez. This image just tripped a false positive for me.

No one lives there.

It’s often said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but it seems vastly more difficult for people to imagine the end of the state, so much so that it’s equated to the end of the world.

It’s hard to tell with the low resolution, but this looks like AI to me. The guy on the left’s feet look weird, and also the bricks don’t appear to have a consistent pattern. The layout of the house with the two garages separated by what I guess is a hallway also doesn’t make sense to me.

Why don’t you correct me instead of marking my comment as bigotry and removing it? I said that China’s social credit system is just an ordinary credit system much like ours, and that is bigotry how, exactly? Explain it to me.

It’s wild, you don’t even have to say anything bad about China to piss you off, you just have to talk about it neutrally without constantly praising it as a socialist utopia.

The fact that you can take a hit to the credit score for engaging in protests and demonstrations is still scary

I was saying that this sort of thing actually doesn’t really happen. The social credit score for the most part is just an ordinary credit score and is only meaningfully affected by finances. Some localities made an attempt at implementing the “social” aspects of the system and subtract small amounts for certain criminal offenses, but it barely makes a difference.

Engaging in protests and demonstrations gets you the same thing it gets you here; tear gas, pepper balls, beatings, and possibly prison time & a criminal record. The hysteria around the social credit system is very silly when the actual dystopian shit is so glaringly obvious, and occurs in both China and the US.

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IMO the best vegan substitute for chicken nuggets is breaded and fried lion’s mane mushrooms. They are absolutely perfect in taste and texture for this purpose, and the best part is that they can be grown very easily and cheaply.

Sure there’s been a wave of imperialist wars, but it would have to cascade out of control and legitimately threaten world superpowers directly for a world war to break out. All this adventurism taking place is unfortunately just par for the course. IMO something truly unprecedented like the US launching a ground invasion against Mexico would have to happen to set off a cascade. I don’t think even airstrikes on Mexico would do it, only a ground invasion.

Edit: not even 3 days since I made this comment and I think I may be horribly wrong. Israel employing the same genocidal tactics in Iran that they did in Palestine, Shiite uprising in Bahrain and Saudis sending in forces to put it down, US and Israel setting the stage for Kurdish forces from Iraq to invade Iran, submarine strike on Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean, China and Russia providing satellite support for Iran, Israeli ground invasion in Lebanon. The cascade seems to have begun.

To explain that a bit better, lots of schools and workplaces have a VPN for employees / students to log into the local network of the campus / workplace to allow them to access internal resources (databases and such) without having to expose those resources to the public internet. It’s a sort of security measure.

In the above commenter’s case it was a university VPN, meaning the servers were run by the university on the university’s private network. That means the university can monitor everything you do on it. The professor’s mistake is that they heard ads from commercial providers saying VPNs make you anonymous and assumed the university VPN was the same thing. Commercial providers have servers set up in a variety of locations so you can make your traffic appear to be coming from somewhere else, and most at least claim not to log any traffic and will present independent audits as proof. If the professor had used a commercial VPN provider instead then the university would not have known what they were up to. It is still possible for the websites you visit to deanonymize you through the use of trackers, cookies, fingerprinting, etc. and there’s no real guarantee that the VPN providers are being truthful as some have been caught giving logs they claim not to keep to law enforcement agencies.