wonderingwanderer

I don’t know your local area and I’m not going to do that research for you. Look up who’s running in your state and district, for every position down the ballot, in federal, state, and local government. Don’t be lazy.

Find out who you agree with most, or as a last resort who you disagree with least, and if you question whether you can trust the information that’s available about them, dig a little deeper.

Look into their voting record to see if it aligns with their stated values and goals. Look into their financials, who they receive donations from, where they primarily source their campaign funds, whether they own any stock. Look into their public activities, whether they’re civically active in the causes they claim to care about. Look into their career before they got into politics and ask yourself what that says about them.

But don’t go on lemmy asking people to tell you who to vote for. That’s just asinine.

During these episodes, the current and former officials said they saw Lyons break out into a full sweat, with his face turning deep red.

That must have been the moment it dawned on him that he’s now a high-ranking nazi…

Exactly. Doomers need to take a back seat while the grown ups are demonstrating.

People saying saying things like “we need tangible action” are just veiled attempts to damage the movement.

Large-scale nationwide protests are tangible action, for reasons other commenters have already mentioned. Sure, maybe they won’t solve all our problems overnight. Nothing will. But they build and sustain the momentum that we need if we’re ever going to overcome this. Without that, we have nothing.

Midterms are this year. Not happy where things are going? Run for something in the primaries, or support someone who is.

ICE stopped paying for medical care months ago, so there are probably a lot more stories like this.

So… what’s that $70 billion budget for?

(Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know 🙉 LA LA LA LA I’M NOT LISTENING!)

That doesn’t change the fact that saying “the US should pay Africa reparations” misses the mark by a long shot.

And the countries in Africa are in shambles for many reasons, but the transatlantic slave trade is a relativey small part of that. Try colonialism more broadly, especially ivory trade and gemstone mining. Try the rivalries and warlords that colonial powers left in their wake when they left. Try harsher environmental conditions, harsher epidemiological condition, harsher pests and parasites.

There’s lots of reasons QOL in most of Africa is among of the lowest in the world, but transatlantic slave trade mainly affected the African diaspora, who today are mostly citizens of countries that you’re suggesting should pay Africa reparations. It’s an overly simplistic attempt at a solution which ignores reality in favor of convenient half-truths.

Also, I never suggested returning as an option. You’re just full of red herrings, aren’t you?

Maybe it’s not that common, I’m just not trying to attract the notice of israeli web crawlers…

It stands for something, but I’m afraid if I type it out I might get on a list. The first word is protocols, the middle word is what you call people who are older than you, and I think you can guess the z…

That’s one way to destroy the cash economy…

Has “let’s play a game” vibes

Brawndo’s got electrolytes. It’s what plants crave.

P.E.Z. refers to a nazi propaganda piece about a made-up cabal of satanic, pedophilic, and cannibalistic Jews who secretly ruled the world or were plotting to take over the world and subjugate every non-Jew.

It was a complete fabrication and total lunacy, obviously. But the nazis used it to instill fear and mistrust of the Jews, blame them for society’s problems, and attempt to justify the discrimination, segregation, and eventual holocaust.

And yet… less than a century later we have the Likud, Epstein, Israel bombing almost all of their neighbors to destabilize the region under some sort of eschatological and ethno-supremacist delusions, and with a standing policy to nuke the entire planet if their total defeat is ever imminent.

The “torment nexus” refers to a trope where a guy was talking about some tech bros who invented the torment nexus from the science fiction novel titled “don’t invent the torment nexus”…

i.e., the unimaginable horror was fiction, until reality changed suit to match it…

Ummm… no.

Except that many of the descendents of the people who suffered most from slavery are now citizens of the countries which “committed it”, if by that you mean the countries which enslaved them. So telling the US to pay reparations to Ghana would in effect make descendents of enslaved people in the US pay reparations to the descendants of the people in Ghana who weren’t enslaved.

Add to that, as someone else pointed out, the people who actually captured Africans in Africa to sell to the European enslavers, were other Africans, often from rival tribes.

So not only would it mean US descendents of enslaved people would pay reparations to countries of descendants of non-enslaved people, but they’d actually be paying it to people who are in some cases the descendants of the people who captured their ancestors.

There’s no way to do this with precision, and people need to stop calling it racism every time someone points that out.

I think at this point it would be better to focus on providing things like universal healthcare, education, and retirement, to everyone, keeping the cost of living in check, and working on ensuring opportunities for dignified labor and fair compensation are available to everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity.

That alongside rigorous policy measures to reduce (with a mind towards eliminating) things like workplace discrimination, redlining, racial profiling, etc.

There are some examples where the descendants of enslaved people can trace their heritage to their enslaved ancestors, and identify the descendants of their enslavers (often generationally wealthy business tycoons who own factories that pollute the neighborhoods of the enslaved people’s descendants…). The people of Africa Town near Mobile, Alabama are a prime example, and there’s a pretty good documentary about it.

In those cases, where there is a demonstrable chain of ancestry, yes, civil law should require the descendants of the enslavers to pay reparations to the descendants of the enslaved.

But so many times it happens that everyone wants to paint with a broad brush, where there’s no room for nuance, and say things like “all white people should pay reparations to black people.” And that’s just too clumsy and would never work.

One, because not all white people are generationally wealthy descendants of enslavers, so such a blanket policy of collective punishment meets the definition of racism. Two, because there’s no way to quantify in abstract terms how much money “every white person” owes to “every black person.”

It’s better to focus on making society better as a whole, filling in the gaps where racial disparity still exists (by lifting up the disenfranchised, not by tearing down the privileged), making the wealthy pay their fair share to the government’s coffers, making the government ensure robust social safety nets which benefit everyone who needs them, and only demanding reparations in specific cases where there is a direct link between the descendants of enslavers and the descendants of the particular people they enslaved.

Isn’t that it in the bottom left?

They turned PEZ into a torment nexus…

It’s almost comedic how predictable this shit is, if it wasn’t so tragic…

Add another one to the list of countries this administration has bombed…

I’ll never be okay with targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure, but what the fuck did they expect to happen? This is on the Israeli government. They didn’t need to start this war.

All the competent professionals got fired and replaced with sycophants…