Yep! Always has been.

Ashoka the great who’s credited with doing a lot to spread buddhism globally was a murderous warlord known for his personal torture prison called “Ashoka’s hell”. After he brutally killed uprisings against his rule he plowed state funds into a PR campaign to change his name from ashoka the cruel to ashoka of the dharma.

Bill gates is another good example, he’s a pedophile known for running one of the most toxic work cultures, but he can use some of the money he made illegally stifling competition to rehab his image.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has “given complete operational freedom to the armed forces to decide on the mode, targets and timing of India’s response to the Pahalgam massacre.”

Modi seems to disagree.

I must say 4 incorrectly

I move my lips the same way you do. Another poster mentioned four, five as well.

It’s not incorrect though - there’s not really such a thing as pronouncing incorrectly. People just speak how they speak and it’s always changing.

over 30% of people somehow still voted conservative.

It’s similar numbers for determined trump supporters. 30-40% of people just seem to enjoy the idea of living under a punishing overload. Maybe it makes them feel safe, or they think of themselves as superior so presume they’ll end up on top. Probably a lot of other drivers as well - poverty and uncertainty seem to play a role.

I tend to think of this more as a flaw we possess as an organism, something we need social institutions to counteract, rather than as the personal failing of one in every two or three people.

The cat just absolutely has the face of a narc.

This is an outrageously screen ready story of brutal, crushing mental illness against a backdrop of the decadence of 1960s ultra rich. The incest could be a lie, but there are so many moments of her life that just read like fiction:

She walked barefoot across central park, in the snow, wearing only a lynx fur coat, at the age of 48, to speak to a guy who had made it amply clear he didn’t want anything more to do with her.

Her son goes to take hallucinogens in Morroco with his boyfriend and she drives from Switzerland to “save” him from his homosexuality, having previously hired prostitutes to de-gay him. They get thrown in jail after trying to get into France without his passport.

Then Barbara tries to set her son up with a woman, Sylvie, but Sylvie sleeps with Barbara’s husband instead - marrying him after they divorce.

This was someone’s life! So many scenes of glorious tragedy.

It feels natural to be angry at people who fell for fascist lies, but the fascists tell these lies because a certain percentage of people will always believe them.

It’s more effective to acknowledge that sad reality, rather than blaming the people who make up that percentage.

It takes a lot to turn your back on a former identity, even when it’s hurting you. Calling people stupid all the time makes that harder and gains us nothing.

Generalizing all trump voters as irredeemably bad is a barrier to antifascist organizing.

Some of trump’s most affected victims voted for him and it’s naive to think we don’t need them to defeat fascism.

I lived in Western Australia when I played WoW - 400ms was a good day.

Twitter and facebook are the two main platforms used by russia to deploy their weaponized disinformation and both musk and zuck steadfastly refuse to act against it.

It’s time we sanction twitter and meta as russian military contractors.

Monopolists always say that and it’s never true. AT&T said that but instead after they were broken up we got cheaper long distance and a better array of features.

I suspect that the venn diagram of people who talk about this and people who think this a good idea is two separate circles.

People always think that the spark of invention is all that’s required, ignoring the social and material tinder and kindling that’s required for something to be useful and take off.

Since russia took over the government, we the population of the US are the foreign adversaries. And boy howdy are we being treated like it.

Worth noting that he opposed russia’s invasion to begin with, and then eventually fell victim to russian influence operations. Yet another death attributable to same weapons of russian disinformation that installed their regime in washington.

Social media companies allow russia to daily deploy some of it’s most effective weapons - it’s high time we sanctioned meta and twitter as partners of the russian military.

That’s the largest tardigrade I’ve ever seen.

as a teenager he was associated with terrorists.

As a teenager he was the head of the youth wing of a group the israeli government deemed terrorists.

a statement about a Christian politician, and like a day later he was killed.

He personally held up yitzhak rabin’s car hood ornament at a press conference and said “we can get to your car, we can get to you” shortly before the then prime minister was assassinated by a fellow far right israeli.

Ben Gvir is a lifelong, on-the-record proponent of genocide who was officially labelled a terrorist by israel and almost certainly helped kill yitzhak rabin and end the peace process.

Nope, the latter was correct.

This kind of punishment first mentality can be unlearned or acculturate against, but it’s probably a primate thing, not a white supremacy thing.

The earliest written laws were already largely punitive and Hammurabi predates white supremacy. Aboriginal Australian legal codes involved a lot of retributive not restorative practices too - spearing in the leg was a common legal recourse. And those codes probably predate the existence of whiteness by tens of thousands of years.

having the ability to create art from scratch is what makes someone an artist.

But in that case all AI artists are artists because all humans can create art from scratch. Everyone draws in the dirt.

I’m happy considering all humans artists - I do think that - but again that means that burning a stick and drawing on a rock is just not a valid metric for being an artist.