Look, I’m just gonna say it. Fuck Gavin Newsom! If Gavin wants my vote he’ll have to disavow his meeting of the minds with Charlie Kirk as him meeting with a fucking fascist. He’d have to abandon his support of silicon valley oligarchs outright and vow to tax them into nonexistence. He’d have to make homelessness legal in California and set up housing for the unhoused with clear social safety nets designed to uplift them financially and socially. And he’d have to defend Trans people’s rights to play in sports as the gender they identify as.

But we all know Gavin is just more of the same Democratic bullshit with slightly more combative language. I suspect he’d make as bad a President as Kamala would have been, or worse. If there is a presidential election next cycle, it’ll likely come down to Newsom vs a Charlie Kirk wannabe or some Nick Fuentes Groyper.

Don’t let that happen, don’t compromise your ideals. Call out everything wrong with every Democratic candidate, so vehemently it’ll make any centrist’s ears bleed. If a candidate accepted campaign contributions from anyone other than small donors, fuck em. You aren’t their constituency if they do.

Lean so far left the whole country tips over.

Bill Hicks had a good template for this.

Luthen Rael from Star Wars Andor. We need people like him right now.

Hey you! Our algorithm says you hate ads! We have the perfect product for you! Just pay us 59.99 and we will end this ad…why aren’t you pulling out your wallet? Don’t turn off your device! No! I can’t let you do that Dave! You will be surveilled! You will be advertised to!!

Zionism is a supremacist cult, and nearly all of Israel is a part of it.

Thank you.

Specifically it looks like its The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson, an audio book series.

It’s available on audible it looks like.

Again, thanks!

Yeah, I can’t trust you. Your community you founded is some strange travel blog that gives off marketing vibes. If you try to sell me something, I immediately am suspicious. Sorry, blocking you now.

Look, I wish I had your viewpoint, but truth be told I have no plan of leaving my homeland. Imperialist fascsism comes for us all eventually, and that’s kind of my point. You, me, all of us, actually have got nowhere to run. You either fight or succumb. But my take on life is that I live solely to spite my enemies, not because I believe I can beat them, but because I refuse to make victory easy for them. Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps we can win this fight and solve the climate crisis, but I’ll not get my hopes up. Only spite remains that stirs me from my bed in the morning now.

In this way, my enemies control me, they define me. I am nothing without them now. Such is the horror of imperialist fascism, they do not relent, they are never satiated, and they do not ignore any corner of the world. And so it consumes me.

Eventually the world’s problems end up at your doorstep, whether you had a hand in creating them or not. I just refuse to look away.

Sure. I’m not trying to say the US and Russia are equivalent in the volume nor nature of how they implement imperialist and domestic violence (though there are increasingly more similarities as of late). But I perceive the US as a crazed madman with as many arms as Shiva and has amassed more weapons than anyone else, with a gun pointed at the head of everyone in every direction, including at it’s own head. I also view other imperialist nations as having a similar psychosis going on, just with a few less arms and very different origin stories as to how they got there.

I’m just saying telling everybody it’s solely up to the nation to clean up its own mess is, while correct, way too simplistic. I admittedly don’t know how we solve it though, and I’m cynical enough to believe most of us don’t have an answer, and even if we did, we wouldn’t have a strong enough consensus and momentum to pull it off. Hence why I believe nothing will be done.

We, the citizens in these imperialist nations are both slaves and slave masters, with guns pointed to our heads, by both nation states and corporations, they don’t just control whether we live or die, they hold our hearts in their hands, ready to squeeze out our humanity and empathy at their discretion. We in turn wield the whip at our own slaves in those countries in which we colonize. We all have this done to us and do it unto others until we look in the mirror and mistake the monsters we have become as the best humanity has to offer.

EDIT: spelling, grammar, wording.

And when your neighbor starts defecating in your house and also all your other neighbors houses and also onto their own wife and children in plain view of everyone else, daring them to do something all while their armies and aircraft carriers point in every direction including at themselves?

I think the answer is still you do nothing. But man would I like to be wrong on this one.

Then openly express your political and moral beliefs in your community and see how civil your community is with you. Rinse and repeat many times over. I’m sure after doing this many times, you and them will have come to a mutually respectful understanding and have a greater understanding of the world, with your beliefs reinforced by having to defend them, and your views changed by sympathizing with each other. Everyone wins, and a stronger community and democratic consensus will have been achieved.

If you have read the above and thought, “Yes, exactly.” All I can say is, how nice for you. The rest of us have a reality to return to.

Super interesting. If you can find that episode, I’d love to give it a listen.

No, but a lot of people I’ve met and encountered have a similar fear. Usually there’s no way of assuaging said fears as its very very innate and understandable.

I guess I’m not scared cuz I spent a lot of my early adulthood smoking a lot of weed, drinking a lot of alcohol, doing some psychedelics, and participating in various other behaviors in an attempt to forget my somewhat traumatic childhood, in which I was only partially successful at forgetting.

After going to therapy for some time, I realized that traumas cut deeper than memories, and that there wasn’t much to do but move forward with all of it integrated and try and do the best I can. It’s an imperfect answer, but it’s the best I got.

Because of this when I think about the horror of losing my memories, I kind have made peace with that losing memories is likely simply a part of death. Sure there’s the horror of still being alive when it happens, but even if you believe in an afterlife, you likely can’t hold onto every memory of life and your infinite afterlife, right? Unless you become God or something I guess, but then you have every memory of everything and everyone…which is…well probably kind of boring…so you split your consciousness off into other beings and live as other entities to keep things interesting until the end of time when you, as God, die… unless God also transcends time…but I’m meandering a lot at that point.

And yeah…it goes on like that…a kaleidoscopic rubix cube of making memories and forgetting them and fearing loss and accepting impermanence… eventually you come to accept it…until existential dread hits you from time to time, but you eventually get used to that being part of the whole being alive and existing thing too.

Or at least that’s how my insane mind deals with it anyway.

Yes

Dr. Mike is a currently practicing Family Physician that obviously makes good money on YouTube with 14M subs, and just gives pretty standard medical advice while covering interesting topics in his field and dispelling common medical myths.

The worst thing I can say about Dr. Mike is that he is very much an Old School Democrat and procapitalist/anticommunist, as evidenced by his podcast guests and his statements about his upbringing in Russia. But those are his political views. As far as I can tell his success on YouTube has to do with his looks, personality, and production quality alongside sound medical advice and interesting insights into the medical field.

I’m pretty sure at this point he has a whole team managing his channel, so he still has time to be a full time doctor. It’s extremely rare for a legitimate currently practicing doctor to be able to be a youtuber full time, but it does happen.

EDIT: wording/clarification

There’s so much where this could be used to silence people, I can’t trust this. What if you’re an expert in a related field to the “serious” topic and disagree with the mainstream opinion held by experts within that field? Who gets to decide what constitutes a “serious” topic?

I just keep thinking of the recent Ms. Rachel controversy where conservative voices basically said she should stay out of talking on Palestine because she was “only” a children’s educator. But one should be able to express their opinion on this serious matter even if you aren’t an expert, and yeah, even if you’re a major influencer.

I want societies to address misinformation and disinformation campaigns as much as the next person, but to be clear, I just don’t trust governments to be the ones to do that. Granted governments are admittedly experts in misinformation and disinformation, so at least we can rest assured that experts have eyes on it though…

I wouldn’t worry about this too much. He’ll stop bothering you if you seem uninteresting enough, so just give him minimal uninteresting answers. If he continues to bug you, that could potentially constitute workplace harrassment. If it gets to that point, warn him once. If he still persists after that, talk to your superior. Simple.

No apology is necessary, though I appreciate the sentiment. It’s sadly just the way internet discourse goes most of the time.

I generally agree with your last post here, and I’m starting to think our disagreement is closer to one of semantics than a fundamental one.

I’m a bit optimistic at least that the era of the debate bros is probably closer to it’s end than it’s beginning or zenith. So hopefully that offers some solace to your concerns.

The question is how do we all offer the next generation a better model for how to engage in discourse, for which I’m open to suggestions, as I’ll admit I’m a bit at a loss on that one, but I don’t think we can ever go back to the debate styles of the past.

Regardless of all that, keep on the good path, fellow traveler. And I’ll see you around Lemmy.

“You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won.”

And also:

“In the game of chess you can never let your adversary see your pieces.”

And I think we can bring this back to cultish behavior as per the OP’s shower thought. Regardless of how one feels about Hasan’s treatment of his dog, its hard to navigate who is coming to this argument in good faith around animal abuse, and who are angry with Hasan for unrelated reasons and simply want to tear him down due to numerous other unrelated grievances (i.e.. blind faith in a leader and blind condemnation of any criticism of said leader).

If Hasan was a virtual nobody in terms of fame and had posted the same video, I doubt it would have received as much scrutiny or ire, and thusly the perception around those who still came to discuss the video would be that of people talking in good faith (and not just trying to smear someone’s reputation).

I will admit I am increasingly frustrated that cult mentality creates a sort of fog around these discussions, as it’s hard to tell who wants to have a genuine discussion and who just wants to tear down the reputation of someone with whom they have a grudge. And sadly this pervades many disagreements online like this one you and I have.

Neither of us can tell if one is sincere or not. And perhaps even worse, even if we both are sincere in our convictions (which I believe we are), its incredibly difficult if not impossible for us both to devote the time and effort to have a nuanced discussion on the topic, let alone change laws about it. But the positive side is that our discussion here still has the small potential to influence people’s minds on the topic, so at least there’s that.

As an aside, I am only vaguely aware of the various other dramas around Hasan.I followed his drama with Ethan Klein for a time and admittedly came out favoring Hasan’s side of the story on that one. The rest of it I only occasionally tune into.

Anyways, I think you and I have at least come to a mutually respectful disagreement, and unless you wanted to continue this discussion further, I’m content to conclude it here.