I mean, unironically.

ActBlue is hardly democratic. It heavily favors candidates who can capture the attention and sympathy of the professional classes, particularly on heavily curated corporate dominated social media networks.

But it’s still far too democratic for the current administration. So it’s got to go.

This is just The K-Street Project for social media. Cut Dems off from the money so they can’t compete in a for profit media marketplace. Then railroad them with negative campaigning while they’re budgetarily on mute.

If you read a bit further it even says how it originated in industrial revolution Britain and happened all over the world.

Industrial Britian had an enormous activist labor movement. A slew of left wing thinkers and agitators emerged from the British academic scene, including Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Ghandi.

I’m not asking about socialist or social democratic or labour movement policies in capitalist countries

How are you defining “Capitalist Country” if you ignore all the socialist policies a country has implemented?

Hell, how do you define Socialist Country, if you exclude every one that’s undergone Capitalist accumulation?

8-hour work week is a socialist policy, espoused by socialist parties and implemented in governments with socialist majorities. Same with pensions and other public retirement funds.

The more socialists you have setting policy, the shorter your work week and the earlier your retirement.

Don’t cars account for 30% of total energy consumption, and 70% of petroleum?

Transportation does. But that includes planes, trains, and boats, not just cars.

Not defending AI here, the last thing we need is another unchecked, massive, resource hog.

I’ve seen the argument that AI will reduce travel demand. But I’ve also seen AI guys lobby aggressively to end Work From Home.

Dude is going to be drooling into his pudding well into his 90s, while some surgical team harvests another batch of cum for his baby Farm

People who are happy to be alive does not “pay” for bringing someone unhappy into existence.

How are you evaluating happiness absent existence? Hell, how are you evaluating happiness, period?

Even if your child is perfectly content being alive throughout their life, they did not choose to be here.

How do you reach that conclusion? We’re all just bits of matter, assembled in various shapes and configurations.

He was here before he was born as matter. He’ll be here after he’s dead as matter. All life has given him is senses to perceive his surroundings and agency to affect them.

Are you arguing a given child would be better off inert? Are blindness, deafness, and paralysis virtues?

Arm CEO Rene Haas cautions that if AI continues to get more powerful without boosts in power efficiency, datacenters could consume extreme amounts of electricity.

Haas estimates that while US power consumption by AI datacenters sits at a modest four percent, he expects the industry to trend towards 20 to 25 percent usage of the US power grid by 2030, per a report from the Wall Street Journal.

We’re past this point of a “recession”.

We’re not. The economy has stubbornly grown since the COVID rebound. That’s what is so staggering.

And its not the Jobless Recovery of 2002, either. Unemployment remains low. There’s upward wage pressure from all the retirements. We keep building out more capital and demanding more hours of work, domestically.

What very likely will fuck us short term is the massive supply chain distribution from Trump’s fickle on-again / off-again tariffs.

What will fuck us long term is the rest of the global economy decoupling from the US, as we stop operating reliably as a consumer of last resort.

Our trade partners are gone, no one trusts us anymore because we somehow managed to elect the literal worst person for the job, TWICE.

They aren’t gone. This is potentially a short term disruption. It can still be papered over.

But we’re going to see some amount of international supply chain rerouting to deal with our unreliability. And we’re going to see Brain Drain from our university. And we’re going to see the consequences of that.

But we’re also going to see a bunch of Finance Bros running the economy and trying to pump it. We’re going to see neighbors with Trump politics try to align with us. And we’re going to see more speculation, because that’s how the US has always operated back to the founding days.

How much of the economy is just two rich guys jerking off on each other’s Bitcoin collection remains to be seen. But the Big Number will rise, thanks to the Federal Reserve System and our domestic credit elasticity.

Very possible he had a conversation with a low level diplomat who just smiled and nodded and told Trump what he wanted to hear.

Shame the comic doesn’t explore that.

But also, its weird to claim babies are “dragged into existence” since there’s no way to establish who wants to be here.

If we’re going to entertain non-existent people who don’t want to exist, we are obligated to consider non-existent people who do want to exist.

China Century Let’s Go!!!

In my experience Chinese people know extremely little about world history as well as their own uncensored history.

We must be talking to different people. No shortage of history buffs and politics nerds in the neighborhoods I visited.

Often they believe that because of their size harsh controls are needed to prevent chaos and they now easily point at the US as an example of what they don’t want to become.

Well, the US has QAnon and other elaborate conspiracy theories. They’ve got all sorts of horrifying racist media that stokes tension and fear between communities and ethnicities. They’ve got a political system that rewards persecution of opposition and spawns enormous amounts of corruption and waste.

I can’t blame other countries’ leaders wanting to avoid that.

But if you’re a racist then hearing “the government says you’re not allowed to post ‘Black people are eating the dogs and the cats’ to social media” will feed a combined sense of paranoia and self-righteousness.

And then you end up with people who double down, get louder, get more insidious, and start calling down a police response as a result.

Then you’ve got a group of ugly reactionaries buried in a “Freedom of Speech” movement, which poisons the idea on both sides of the issue.

democracy didn’t immediately solve all problems so we should ban or murder all political opposition

The democratically elected government murdered hundreds of Russians - people who originally supported the government - because they protested the state’s continued disastrous warmongering.

The liberals were doing the murdering. The Bolsheviks responded in self defense, often by cajoling infantry into not killing protesting civilians.

This is what brought down the “Democratic” pre-Lenin government. Liberals couldn’t order their soldiers to massacre the Bolshevik civilians, so the democratic government fell apart.

That’s news to me. Certainly possible given what I’ve seen of domestic cya reporting.

But “nobody talks about the cops in China” is just… pure Western mythology.

“Wasting water” is bullshit most of the time.

Pumping water out of reserves, using it as coolant, and then disposing the hot water into local waterways where the heat kills off the local ecology is “waste” on several levels.

This is a common practice for industrial cooling, as pumping water and releasing it is cheaper than cycling the water through a large ventilator and recovering it.

in china it’s not on tv

No shortage of crime dramas and procedurals on Chinese networks.

It’s so weird to hear people talk about China like its this hermit kingdom. Visited there a few months back and… the biggest difference between Zhuhai and Houston is the number of people speaking Mandarin. Oh, also, lots of trains and buses.

But the idea that Chinese citizens are somehow oblivious to the country’s politics, its security systems, its cultural strictures, or its relationship to western nations is fucking bananas. They know as much about the Chinese Civil War, Tienanmen Square, and the Hong Kong protests as you know about The American Civil War, 9/11 and the War on Terror, and the BLM protests. There’s no shortage of young Chinese folks saying the Mandarin ACAB equivalent, listening to punk rock, and feeling unfairly persecuted. There’s no shortage of stogie old MAGA conservatives who think liberals are ruining everything and the country was better 30 years ago. There’s no shortage of middle-aged middle-income bureaucrats just going through the motions and getting their jobs done, without thinking to hard about what it means at a national socio-economic scale.

There’s no shortage of people shitposting on the Chinese internet. There’s no shortage of mods banning those people, either. And if you believe otherwise, go on RedNote and see for yourself.

Dont dare talk about communist crimes

Funny thing is that you’ve got a new crop of YouTube streamers going to these regions in China and coming out of them immersed in the culture and lifestyle that we’ve been told repeatedly was exterminated.

We also had a UN Human Rights investigation into the region that came out woefully short of what western media sources reported, such that anti-China critics are now complaining that the UN isn’t a reliable investigator.

It all reeks of the same march to war we heard with Iraq. IAEA investigators running through the country looking for nuclear weapons that don’t exist. Hair-raising stories about babies being ripped from incubators and smashed to death by soldiers that turned out to be wild fabrications. Religious cult groups insisting they were being horribly persecuted, when its later discovered they were - themselves - caught up in all sorts of human rights abuses and financial scandals.

Didn’t finish highschool and get fired from mcdonalds every 3 months.

Its so weird to see the knee-jerk Lemmy response to skepticism of China Hawks boil down to “You’re too stupid to work at McDonalds”. Like, fuck me, man. That’s so corporate-brained, it makes me nauseous. Even outside the realm of HailCorporate Reddit and psycho hustler culture Twitter, you’ve still got folks who value a human’s intellectual capacity and innate humanity by how much money they can produce for shareholders.

Don’t expect a kid to fix a failing marriage.

“If I didn’t have a kid, my wife would be more fuckable” is the takeaway I get from this comic. And fuck me that’s sad.

The trick to being stress free is to get older without any kind of family, to work yourself to death consumed entirely with your bank account high score, and to consume, consume, consume forever without any thought to the next generation.

Fuck, this comic makes me want to have kids more, just because of how bleak and shallow the worldview is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day_movement

The eight-hour day movement (also known as the 40-hour week movement or the short-time movement) was a social movement to regulate the length of a working day, preventing excesses and abuses of working time.

Just for starters.

The modern concept of “Retirement” is also tied to socialist policy and politics. One of the first major reforms states implement after a socialist election or Marxist revolution is the implementation of retirement age. And those countries with the strongest socialist histories tend to have the lowest retirement ages and most generous pensions. Fully socialist states like Vietnam and China and South Africa have retirement in the 55-62 range. More socialist-leaning European/East Asian states like France, Denmark, Korea, and Japan have a retirement age in the 63-67 range. And fully captured capitalist systems like Uganda or Bangladesh or the undocumented worker pools of the Americas have no retirement for private workers whatsoever, working people to death.