The labor movement improves lives for all kinds of workers, and the two largest National Labor Relations Board elections of the month of May were at two very different workplaces: the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and Dold Foods in Wichita, Kansas.
The labor movement improves lives for all kinds of workers, and the two largest National Labor Relations Board elections of the month of May were at two very different workplaces: the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and Dold Foods in Wichita,…
Since 2016, Democrats have operationally withdrawn from rural America. No party can win nationally without rural voters, and progressive economics have plenty to offer, if only the party would embrace them.
You calling Kristen Sinema and Joe Manchin "centrists" just shows you have no idea what you are talking about. They are 100% corporate Democrats who took millions from oil or pharmaceuticals lobby to kill bills that were unfairable to them. Hence Build Back Better and Medicaid prescription drug negotionations being neutered into nothing. But you continue living in your denial bubble.
John Fetterman voted with Republicans more than he voted with Democrats. He's a a simple sellout to a foreign country and primarify funded by The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). He should be treated as a traitor.
I and 70%+ of the country prefer Tim Walz style rural vision.
With a 1 seat majority in Minnesota he did: - universal free school meals - legal weed - carbon free electricity by 2040 - tax rebates for the working class up to $1,300 (making under $150k per year) - 12 weeks paid family leave - 12 weeks paid sick leave - banned conversion therapy - red flag laws for guns - universal background checks for guns - automatic voter registration - free public college (under $80k) - ban on PFAS (forever chemicals) - $2.2 billion increase in k-12 school funding - sectoral bargaining for nursing home worker
You calling Kristen Sinema and Joe Manchin “centrists” just shows you have no idea what you are talking about. They are 100% corporate Democrats who took millions from oil or pharmaceuticals lobby to kill bills that were unfairable to them
Yeah. centrists.
John Fetterman voted with Republicans more than he voted with Democrats. He’s a a simple sellout to a foreign country and primarify funded by The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). He should be treated as a traitor.
You clearly have no understanding of what centrist means. Neither of them represent the middle of the country. Even going by party affiliation and definition used by US corporate media, the center of two right wing parties is still right wing.
Following the lead of Starbucks workers, employees at board game cafés across New York City unionized in 2023 as Tabletop Workers United. After impressive shows of customer support and a credible strike threat, TWU has just won its first tentative agreement.
The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is warning that it suffered a data breach after a threat actor downloaded 300,000 crash records from its database.
A new attack dubbed 'EchoLeak' is the first known zero-click AI vulnerability that enables attackers to exfiltrate sensitive data from Microsoft 365 Copilot from a user's context without interaction.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
This is nothing short of stunning, had no idea anyone was even close to this sort of interface. And it's only an 8-bit input! Fuck me, I would have made a (totally ignorant) guess of at least a couple of thousand sensors.
it's 256 electrodes, yes, but the article doesn't say whether those electrodes are simple digital signals or if each one has some analog range they resolve. Even if it's 100% binary, the tresholding (what level of neural activity is considered a 1 or 0) could be adaptive.
This is amazing technology. I can't imagine how it would feel to have your ability to speak and even sing back after losing it.
I also wonder whether this could let someone sing or speak outside their normal range. When I was young I was in the school choir - after puberty hit and my voice dropped, I still had the muscle memory for high notes that my vocal cords would not allow.
Study co-author Maitreyee Wairagkar, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues trained deep-learning algorithms to capture the signals in his brain every 10 milliseconds. Their system decodes, in real time, the sounds the man attempts to produce rather than his intended words or the constituent phonemes — the subunits of speech that form spoken words.
This is a really cool approach. They're not having to determine speech meaning, but instead picking up signals after the person's brain has already done that part and is just trying to vocalize. I'm guessing they can capture nerve impulses that would be moving muscles in the face, mouth, lips, and possibly larynx and then using the AI to quickly determine which sounds that would produce in those few milliseconds those conditions exist. Then the machine to produces the sounds artificially. Because they're able to do this so fast (in 10 milliseconds) it can get close to human body response and reproduction of the specific sounds.
Like what the title says. There's always a catch unless it's FOSS. So, what is the catch with them giving games for free that you can keep forever? What will the developers of the games get as a thank you?
It's likely a scheme to entice people onto their platform because they're not as trusted as valve or gog. If they become a monopoly then we'll get to see all the various catches to that.
"developers see sales increases on both the Epic Games Store and on Steam, Valve’s competing PC game store. Sweeney also points out that the free games can be a good deal for players in developing countries where gaming may be more expensive, meaning that they help expand the global reach of some titles. And since developers get a flat fee from Epic so that Epic can offer their game for free, they make some money no matter what.
Epic isn’t being entirely altruistic, of course. The company spends a lot of money to be able to give games away for free, and it certainly wants to offer good ones that keep people playing on its platform instead of others like Steam. And if Epic can attract players with free games from notable developers, those same players might also try out some of Epic’s big free-to-play multiplayer games like Fortnite or Rocket League, keeping them in Epic’s universe — and, again, off Steam. "
Exactly, Unlike Steam, who does have some popular games, but if I think about it their only free titles are TF2 and Counter Strike and dont care much anymore on developing games, and they are popular, but old. Epic is giving free games, and you might also end up playing Fortnite and get hooked on it. Little by little they might spand their options but thats how they start to grow. The thing that I do find stupind on their part and genius on Steam is the support of linux development and how they made the Steam Deck, just having a device that is very easy to use, replaces a gaming console, and you dont have to spend anything developing anything for it, no games, no software, just their OS and making Proton more compatible, and you have access to the biggest gaming library. Even if their SteamOS is closed sourced, hardware is decent, and you can change OS easily, unlike old game consoles because its just a pc in a gaming case. It changed the gaming industry forever, they might not have been the first to offer this, but they did produce a good product that others take as a standard. If Epic starts to support linux, they would have a much better and secure future, the main problem is that they have to change their gaming engine to think of doing that, and thats hard and they might not want to touch their golden chicken for a while. Steam can make those investments because they have being here a long time and they stabilized their growth venture, Epic is on their first couple growth sprouts and decisions for the future might not be that appealing.
The catch is you have to install the Epic app or whatever it is called.
Also they hate Linux and shitcanned the already-existing native Linux port of Rocket League when they bought it. It's fair to say you won't dump resources into making new Linux ports but shitcanning a quality one that already existed? They can eat shit.
Of course they want to lure you in, but honestly I never bought anything there despite catching the free games regularly. Setting up the account doesn't require much personal information and you can just use tools like Heroic instead of their app.
Epic claims it increases sales (much in the same way that pirates do) but I suspect it's just to get people past the very high barrier of creating an account and installing their (presumably) ad-ridden and data-collecting (they're owned by Tencent) launcher.
The former doesn't make much sense to me given they could just buy those games on Steam anyway and have a much better experience.
One catch is that Epic's mystery code is allowed to execute on your computer.
Note that I don't mean just their launcher. Often, if not always, the games themselves are linked with Epic code, ostensibly for license checks and/or integration with Epic services. This gives them the ability to snoop on stored data, installed/executing processes, biometrics, etc.
Running those free games with an alternative launcher does not protect against this.
It's not just a theoretical concern, either. Epic has already been caught copying Steam files, collecting friends play history, and scanning running processes.
Flatpak permissions are famously coarse, and its sandboxing mechanism is weak and full of holes. It can be useful for guarding against damage caused by programming mistakes, but I would not recommend it to anyone wanting protection from adversarial software.
But imagine if someone did want to use it, what would be your recommended approach? You seem quite knowledgeable in this area and I'm sure we could all learn something.
You might want to read my other comments elsewhere on this post.
Please keep in mind that no matter what technical measures you take, accepting Epic's "free" games requires agreeing to their terms and conditions, which they can change after you get the games. I really don't recommend it.
You could download and play the games on a machine that is never used for any other purpose, but it would still be able to collect biometric data (mouse movement, keystroke patterns, voice if you have a microphone, etc.) and probe/fingerprint your network.
Short of a dedicated machine, the closest you're likely to get is a hypervisor-based virtual machine. Of course, that won't safeguard your biometrics or (in most cases) your network, either.
Such a machine would be safer if you never gave it network access, so it couldn't exfiltrate any data that it had collected, but downloading games requires network access at some point, and it would only take milliseconds for a "helper" process (perhaps quietly installed/launched with the game) to leak the data.
In general, hostile code will always be unsafe. If it concerns you, it's best to avoid it entirely.
Citing "fuckepic" 🤦. The spyware claims from amateurs not even understanding the basics of Process Monitor have been long debunked by people who aren't even sympathetic to Epic (1, 2).
Trying to discredit people because of the forum on which they discussed a topic, or because you view them as beneath your skill level, is a more than a little misguided, and frankly, disingenuous.
Epic themselves have admitted to copying Steam data and scanning running processes, as has been documented in various news articles. (example, example)
In any case, the point is not one particular incident or report, but rather that they have the capability, grant themselves permission to use it via their policy documents, and have earned distrust among a lot of gamers. Posting condescending emoji here doesn't change that.
Edit: P.S. In future comments defending Epic, you might do readers the courtesy of stating up front that you are moderator of an Epic Games forum.
Why would I trust a random cropped screenshot from a bad faith subreddit about hating everything related to Epic? Either of us can run Process Monitor, filter by the desired process, and see if their claims have merit. They don't.
The article and post I linked already explain the Steam and process list parts. How in your opinion does any program that needs to check if a process is running do that? Where would you expect Epic to get your Steam friends list if you're asking it to import your Steam friends?
Logistically, it's super cheap marketing. Epic pays the dev a reasonable pittance ( assuming it's not a free game, they do that too) you got to watch their ads during download/install, they got you email, they know what games you're interested in. Your interests are for sale for sure, but for a free game, may be worth a throw away email.
it's not "forever". it's however long they don't have any ideas to the contrary.
why it was implemented - so that executive #279 can show executive #114 that number go up. look how our engagement is rising! look at all them people downloading our app! when I took over from exec #317, number was this big, lookie now!
same way google made their search worse, so you have to search multiple times, thus upping the engagment, page views, etc. and then exec X goes to exec Y and say "look there's a huge rise in searches where my bonus at!"
So true. Today it is known that you only buy a license of the games from Steam. And since Epic Games works in the same way as Steam, this also applies to them. They can delete any games from your library whenever they want - just like that *click*. I stopped buying games on Steam when that came out publicly and moved to GOG instead.
At least in the first years, most of the games released on the Epic Games Store were DRM-free, in the strictest sense in that you could move the folder from PC to PC without needing the launcher, like on GOG. You can see the data as of today here.
Still below 600 (if the numbers are dead-exact) which makes me glad. GOG should be the only place for DRM free games. But that's my opinion. What I know of, GOG is today the only place for downloadable installation files of games.
The numbers represent confirmed cases, so there could be more. There used to be a GOG thread dedicated to testing games for DRM on Epic, but then it was locked and its main contributors have switched to adding the information to the wiki.
It's not about engagement. As the court documents have shown, they want to increase the number of users and then see how many of those convert to paying customers.
Point is so that you might accidentally click on some F2P crap over there and actually spend more money than you would have otherwise. Bonus points if it's Fortnite. They love filling it with so much confetti and showing off. Brings a lot of money.
It's 2025. If you are getting a 'free' software product, there's a chance of about 99,9% that the answer to that question is either 'analytics/tracking/telemetry/customer retention' or a combination of many or all of them.
I've claimed probably 70% of the free games for the past four or five years. I've noticed some of the titles disappear. So one catch is, you may not get to keep the free game(s) you grab.
I don't even remember the name of the game, but it was one that was next to a title I do play often when sorted by "recent" which is based on purchase (or redemption) date. Might have been that underwater exploration title.
Hm, the only underwater ones I can think of are Subnautica and Abzu, both of which are still in my library (although I wouldn't mind if Abzu went away, as it was basically just an underwater walking sim). I couldn't find anything on the list quickly, despite a couple ones sounding like underwater ones, like Stranded Deep and Submerged: Hidden Depths, which didn't look like they actually were underwater games.
I was wrong that it was water-themed. It was "Pacific Drive" which I guess made me think of underwater. I never got a chance to play it, and it's no longer in my library. I think there was another one, but I can't remember now. It was a while back that I discovered it.
EDIT: I agree with you 100% about ABZU. Boring after the first five minutes. Also, I don't see Pacific Drive on the free games list. I need to try to remember the sequence of events. I know I never bought it, because I've never bought any games from EGS; all my titles were free ones.
To lure people away from Steam and onto their platform. There is no ulterior motive. Origin does/did (IDK I haven't played an EA game in years) this too for the same reason.
This. The court documents from the trials vs Google and Apple even showed that they divide how much they pay the publisher for the giveaway by the number of users acquired to determine the cost per user.
It's also one of the reasons why they allow 3rd parties to run their own activation servers. All you gotta do is type a couple of lines in command prompt to change your activation servers from Microsoft's to such a 3rd party, type in the volume license key they provide for free, and now you have a 100% legit copy of Windows, no cracks or workarounds needed.
Microsoft makes it so easy to activate Windows for free that there's no way it was unintentional.
The problem with EPIC games is, that you need an account with your full name and data, even for an free game, not needed in Steam or GOG, where it is enough with nick and mail, only the need for more if you want to buy a game. Searching free games, only Steam and Itch.io are full of these.
You have free games always for years if you like these, without the need of fake names and data, often even without the need of accounts, controlled by companies with desktop clients and other crap which rest a lot of privacy. Free games don't need all this, less paid games, you install it and it's yours forever, all other is an abuse of big corporations which make money with your data.
I've an Steam account, but forced, because a lot of years ago I bought in a store an CD with Portal, but to run it, it was mandatory an Steam account FOR AN LOCAL SINGLEPLAYER GAME WHICH I BOUGHT PHYSICALLY IN A STORE, WTF.
They also for sure get revenue from the hardware companies, seeing recent game releases like Doom -The Dark Ages or ILL, where you need a GPU with at least 32 GB to run it with more than 20 FPS in standart resolution, while you grill bacon on the power supply
DOOM: The Dark Ages is the prequel to the critically acclaimed DOOM (2016) and DOOM Eternal that tells an epic cinematic story worthy of the DOOM Slayer’s legend.
Standard resolution for me is FHD. Heavy duty games If it is true, that is. Any source? DOOM: The Dark Ages requires 16 GB in GPU on recommended and ILL's system requirements are TBA.
When I read your comment, I could not stop thinking about those exclusive games that Epic Games have every now and then. I highly dislike that!
Hardware companies need money. Yes, Doom need at least 16GB Ram for running the game in 1024x768 pxs, as said windowed and ILL for sure need more when the release it. It's programmed onsolence, while current PC can survive almost 15 years or more, they try it with the soft to make these obsolete. Apart of the prices for these games, DOOM>€100 and ILL for sure isn't cheaper. OK. the graphics are stunning, but this don't make a game better than others, these games anyway, apart of the graphics, offers normally an gameplay pretty lineal.
My favoritefirst person game since almost 10 years is The Dark Mod, nice graphics, not worse as in commercial games, intelligent gameplay, it don't need an NASA computer to run it, almost any cheap Laptop is enough, works on Windows, Linux and Mac and is 100%free. 170 community made missions, more released every few month, you can download and add these in the same game menu.
THE DARK MOD is a FREE first person stealth game inspired by the Thief series by Looking Glass Studios. Download and play hundreds of missions for free.
Thanks! Will try them out sometime 😀 Last time I tried download missions (which was maybe 2 months ago), I got 404. Hopefully that issue will be fixed now.
Edit: the error was not 404, but "Cannot connect to server". I had to execute a command to make it work. Will give one of these missions a shot now.
Like any company offering "exclusive deals only in the app" the catch is you have to sign up for an account and install an app. That's one more account and one more app that you would have not normally installed but for the "deal."
Israel has placed two international activists from a Gaza-bound aid ship in solitary confinement, an Israeli rights group said on Wednesday.
“Rima Hassan was placed in isolation under inhumane conditions in Neve Tirza Prison after writing “Free Palestine” on a wall in Givon Prison,” it added.
“She was moved to a small, windowless cell with extremely poor hygienic conditions and has been denied access to the prison yard.”
Yeah, Isreal is known for how much they care about legal jurisdiction or rights in their genocide of the Palestinian people, that will definitely stop them from doing awful shit to these activists.
After the Justice and Development Party (AKP) took power, AA and the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) were both restructured to more closely reflect the administration line. According to a 2016 academic article, "these public news producers, especially during the most recent term of the AKP government, have been controlled by officials from a small network close to the party leadership."
Still, the writing is flat in a good way? I have found that reporting from politically captured sources (say, RT) can be conspicuously good, if it’s on an international subject that aligns with their incentives. For instance, Turkey's AKP is no fan of Netanyahu, hence AA is motivated to produce (seemingly) original reporting like this.
There are different degrees though, and different environments for each one, which is what I meant to convey. Like, AA is a better source for Gaza information than, say, Turkish political opposition parties.
Well, I was expecting you to say Reuters, allowing me to rip into them + AP + AFP. Was not expecting someone to say that the PKK is an unreliable source of information. Who sent you? That's supposed to be one of my takes!
You misinterpreted my, to be fair, vague statement. I meant AA is seemingly a bad source to read about opposition parties like the PKK, because of the obvious conflict of interest.
I mean, AP is a pretty decent source. It’s a nonprofit coop stretching back to 1846 in a country with, err, could-be-worse press freedom history, while AA has been explicitly state run since 1920, somewhat akin to VOA, BBC, Al Jazeera or RT I guess.
And yes, I know, AP is still an objectively bad source for specific topics, you don’t have to drill that in. So would whoever shills for the PKK, in some respects. But I’m not playing the game of “they did this and this, they can’t be trusted like them and them!” either. One has to look for conflict of interests everywhere, but it’s also okay to respect the good work long running institutions have done (like AA and this article).
Brazil's plan to sell its first sovereign debt in the Chinese market is an important step for Brazil in expanding its financing channels and strengthening financial cooperation with China, as well as a clear indication of the growing appeal of the yu…
Instance PeerTube généraliste, une bonne alternative à YouTube et autres plateformes de streaming contrôlées par des géants du WEB.
General PeerTube instance, a good alternative to YouTube and other streaming platforms controlled by WEB giants.
Whenever I need to provide an estimate, I ask everyone on the team for their gut feeling, take the second-largest estimate and multiply by 1.5. Seems to work pretty well. (if you can't tell I don't know what I'm doing with management)
I find the most relevant aspect of an estimate is how familiar the person making the estimate with the problem. People who have the best understanding will inevitably give the best estimates.
Alt text: Wrestler AJ Styles laughing with a label of "Trump sending in the military." Unbeknownst to him his opponent, The Undertaker, is standing behind him menacingly with the the label "Mass of protesters coming off the sidelines."
The thing is I agree with nearly every premise of superdeterminism. But the conclusions seem stretched.
I love the idea of not abiding to the strict assumptions set forth by Bell’s theorem. The idea that determinism doesn’t have to hide within the simple hidden variable model bell’s theorem disproves to be true. The idea that we are essentially always part of the experimental system. The questioning of the objective rational experimenter with free will ideal.
Yet I haven’t seen any serious mechanism explaining how the required correlations between experimenter choices and particle states could have been embedded in the universe’s initial conditions in such a finely tuned manner, given that experimentally, the outcomes are indistinguishable from standard quantum mechanics.. I just can’t imagine how this could likely be the case without adding quasi-conspiratorial assumption.
Hey everyone, this is Olga, the product manager for the summary feature again. Thank you all for engaging so deeply with this discussion and sharing your thoughts so far.
Reading through the comments, it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea and opening up the conversation here on VPT back in March. As internet usage changes over time, we are trying to discover new ways to help new generations learn from Wikipedia to sustain our movement into the future. In consequence, we need to figure out how we can experiment in safe ways that are appropriate for readers and the Wikimedia community. Looking back, we realize the next step with this message should have been to provide more of that context for you all and to make the space for folks to engage further. With that in mind, we’d like to take a step back so we have more time to talk through things properly. We’re still in the very early stages of thinking about a feature like this, so this is actually a really good time for us to discuss here.
A few important things to start with:
Bringing generative AI into the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications, and we intend to treat it as such.
We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement. An editor moderation workflow is required under any circumstances, both for this idea, as well as any future idea around AI summarized or adapted content.
With all this in mind, we’ll pause the launch of the experiment so that we can focus on this discussion first and determine next steps together.
We’ve also started putting together some context around the main points brought up through the conversation so far, and will follow-up with that in separate messages so we can discuss further.
They still don't get it. There's very little practical use for LLMs in general, and certainly not in scholastic spaces. The content is all user-generated anyway, so what's even the point? It's not saving them any money.
Also it seems like a giant waste of resources for a company that constantly runs giant banners asking for money and claiming to basically be on there verge of closing up every time you visit their site.
I also think that generating blob summaries just goes towards brain rot things we see everywhere on the web that's just destroying people's attention spam. Wikipedia is kind of good to read something that is long enough and not just some quick, simplistic and brain rotting inducing blob
Summarization is one of the things LLMs are pretty good at. Same for the other thing where Wikipedia talked about auto-generating the "simple article" variants that are normally managed by hand to dumb down content.
But if they're pushing these tools, they need to be pushed as handy tools for editors to consider leveraging, not forced behavior for end users.
Summaries that look good are something LLMs can do, but not summaries that actually have a higher ratio of important/unimportant than the source, nor ones that keep things accurate. That last one is super mandatory on something like an encyclopedia.
The only application I've kind of liked so far has been the one on Amazon that summarizes the content of the reviews. Seems relatively accurate in general.
Is there a way for us to complain to wikipedia about this? I contribute money every year, and I will 100% stop if they're stomping more LLM-slop down my throat.
Edit: You can contribute to the discussion in the link, and you can email them at addresses found here: wikimediafoundation.org/about/…
I passionately hate the corpo speech she's using. This fake list of "things she's done wrong but now she'll do them right, pinky promise!!" whilst completely ignoring the actual reason for the pushback they've received (which boils down to "fuck your AI, keep it out") is typical management behavior after they were caught trying to screw over the workers in some way.
We're going to screw you over one way or the other, we just should have communicated it better!
I canceled my recurring over this about a week ago, explaining that this was the reason. One of their people sent me a lengthy response that I appreciated. Still going to wait a year before I reinstate it, hopefully they fully move on from this idea by then. It sounded a lot like this though, kinda wishy washy.
I don't see how AI could benefit wikipedia. Just the power consumption alone isn't worth it. Wiki is one of the rare AI free zones, which is a reason why it is good
If they thought this would be well-received they wouldn't have sprung it on people. The fact that they're only "pausing the launch of the experiment" means they're going to do it again once the backlash has subsided.
Not everything is black and white, you know. Just because they have this blunder, doesn't mean they're down for good. The fact they're willing to listen to feedback, whatever their reason was, still shows some good sign.
Also keep in mind the organization than runs it has a lot of people, each with their own agenda, some with bad ones but extremely useful.
I mean yeah, sure, do 'leave' Wikipedia if you want. I'm curious to where you'd go.
Hey everyone, this is Olga, the product manager for the summary feature again. Thank you all for engaging so deeply with this discussion and sharing your thoughts so far.
Reading through the comments, it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea and opening up the conversation here on VPT back in March. As internet usage changes over time, we are trying to discover new ways to help new generations learn from Wikipedia to sustain our movement into the future. In consequence, we need to figure out how we can experiment in safe ways that are appropriate for readers and the Wikimedia community. Looking back, we realize the next step with this message should have been to provide more of that context for you all and to make the space for folks to engage further. With that in mind, we’d like to take a step back so we have more time to talk through things properly. We’re still in the very early stages of thinking about a feature like this, so this is actually a really good time for us to discuss here.
A few important things to start with:
Bringing generative AI into the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications, and we intend to treat it as such.
We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement. An editor moderation workflow is required under any circumstances, both for this idea, as well as any future idea around AI summarized or adapted content.
With all this in mind, we’ll pause the launch of the experiment so that we can focus on this discussion first and determine next steps together.
We’ve also started putting together some context around the main points brought up through the conversation so far, and will follow-up with that in separate messages so we can discuss further.
LOS ANGELES—Responding to escalating clashes between civilian activists and militarized immigration authorities, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass publicly urged protesters Monday not to give the Trump administration any pretext for what they’re already doing and will keep doing no matter what.
“Angelenos, don’t engage in violence and give the administration an excuse to inflict all the damage they have been inflicting carte blanche for months on end,” said Bass, adding that Trump and his team are just looking for a reason to respond with violence, as they would have done whether or not any of this happened.
“Don’t fan the flame that has been fanned behind the scenes at the White House since day one of Trump’s term in office. You wouldn’t want them to start abducting people in broad daylight and deporting them, would you? No, so let’s not become scapegoats for the horrific violations of civil liberties that would have eventually landed at our doorstep regardless.”
At press time, Bass warned that Trump was using the actions of protesters to justify sending in the National Guard that had been pre-deployed to the conflict days before it even began.
LOS ANGELES—Responding to escalating clashes between civilian activists and militarized immigration authorities, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass publicly urged protesters Monday not to give the Trump administration any pretext for what they’re already d…
An aid boat carrying environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg and other activists was intercepted by Israeli forces, with Israel’s defense minister having vowed to prevent the ship from reaching the Gaza Strip. What do you think?
Are you trying to say that dozens of millions of people in one specific country went nazi because of teenage rebelliousness, ignorance and neural disfunction?
A combined subliminal and supraliminal message generator for use with a television receiver permits complete control of subliminal messages and their manner of presentation.
This is a very romanticized version of American intervention in WW2.
The bitter truth is that we had guys with Nazis war trophies back home who were waving Confederate flags the year after their deployment ended. Hell, we had guys like Mark Fuhrman, who were decorated detectives in the LAPD back in the early 90s with a naked well-established fetish for European fascism. And that's before you get into the Ratlines that imported thousands of Nazis into Latin America under cover of the CIA and Opus Dei.
This isn't something that got lost in translation or distorted through history. It's a direct consequence of American fascism reproducing itself in America as an outcropping of American tendencies.
The Stars and Stripes is as much a symbol of fascist oppression in Vietnam and Indonesia and the DRC and the Oklahoma Reservation system as any German flag.
This really overstates the US opposition to the Nazis and understates the role the US played in cementing former Nazis in key roles around the world, including the US. The US was never anti-fascist just like the US has never been anti-Capitalist, the US's involvement in World War II was late, and for the purpose of profit. Lend-lease was one mechanism, and solidifying its position as the only major allied power not devastated by World War II, it could transfer into the position of unquestioned global Hegemon. It couldn't let the Soviet Union take all of the credit for winning World War II (or the Great Patriotic War, in the former USSR), as that would have challenged US legitimacy in the post-war world.
In reality, fascism and liberalism are both superstructural elements of Capitalism, in different conditions and contexts. When class struggle is heightened, and Capitalism in utter decay with the bourgeoisie in need of violence to retain their hold on society, the mask of liberalism falls to reveal the ugly face of fascism. When Capitalism puts the mask back on, it pretends as its liberal self it is distinct and opposed to its unmasked self.
The US praised the Nazis for killing the communists. They supported their "cause" riiiiight up until they started attacking western Europe AKA the countries that actually matter.
The US also hired tons of Nazi "scientists," including granting them immunity for their roles in the Holocaust. They also granted the head of Unit 731 immunity (specifically from the USSR who rightly wanted him executed) in exchange for the human experimentation data. NATO coincidentally also has a ton of Nazis in its leadership.
The US went as far as installing prominent Nazi figures back into West Germany in the same way they let confederates go back to their lives after the civil war. Whereas the Soviets executed Nazi leaders in East Germany because that's what they fucking deserve. The US then claimed that the executed Nazis were victims of communism and included them in their "communism death toll" numbers.
This isn't an error. The US has always been sympathetic to Nazis, before, during, and after the war. They only begrudgingly pitched in against them because they viewed western Europe as slightly more important.
Finally, the US didn't even fucking do that much. Certainly nowhere near enough to justify their claim that they "saved the world" in WWII. The USSR and UK each did far more yet the US seems to think the USSR was fighting for the Nazis and the UK was a scared poodle hiding in their island until the heroic Americans came to save them, when in reality, the tide had already turned against the Nazis by the time the US joined. They also nuked Japan just because they could, it had nothing to do with the war because they already had intelligence that Japan was about to surrender.
Which might be understandable if they were lowly conscripted soldiers, but the ones that got into NATO were high ranking officers and other leaders in the Nazi party, many of whom architected the Holocaust.
It takes years and a ton of personal effort and commitmemt to climb the ranks of any military or party. Even if you did get conscripted, why did you keep going?
"Help I'm being forced to use my own cruelty and demonic propensity for making people suffer to organize a genocide after I spent years proving that I was the right person for the job! My only hope is if a peaceful, civilized, Western military alliance hires me once this ordeal that I'm in no way enjoying or benefiting from is over!"
Minor correction: the US nuked Japan so the Soviets couldn't be credited for Japan's surrender as well as Nazi Germany. It was a calculated move by the US to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians just so that Socialism wouldn't spread as much as it could have after the war due to the Soviets saving the world. The US paid the price of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilian lives in order to benefit its own standing after the war.
The Red Army was responsible for 90% of Nazi deaths, and took Berlin. The Soviet Union paid by far the biggest price in winning World War II, and was by far the most responsible for ending it. I'm not going to apologize for being a Marxist, it sounds like you wished the other side won World War II.
"Tankie" is just a pejorative for Marxist, though, like "commie" or "pinko." Marxism is "authoritarian" in that it expressly calls for flipping the Capitalist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie into the Socialist dictatorship of the proletariat, ie turning from a society where the Capitalists are oppressing the working class via the state into a society where the working class wields the state against the Capitalists.
This isn't a real "dictatorship" in the modern sense, but a descriptor for where the balance of power lies, in the working class or Capitalist class, via Public ownership or Private ownership being primary. Socialism is still democratic, but will use the power of the state against the bourgeoisie. All states are authoritarian, what matters is which class is in control of the authority, and how we can move beyond class and thus the state.
Marxism is a branch of Socialism. The other major branch is Anarchism, and both Marxism and Anarchism have many sub-branches. For example, I am a Marxist-Leninist, which is generally the ideology guiding Cuba, the PRC, former USSR, etc. These are not "corrupted," they are real and thus face real problems that systems that only exist in the minds of dreamers don't have to. Marx would scoff at such dreamers that let perfection be the enemy of progress. I have an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list you can check out, if you are curious and want to glance through it to get an idea of what Marxism-Leninism is all about.
Secondly, Animal Farm. If you have the time, I think it would be worth reading A Critical Read of Animal Farm by Jones Manoel, and On Orwell by Roderic Day. Animal Farm is a work of fiction, written by an anti-Marxist Socialist. Orwell worked directly with British Intelligence to out Socialists and Communists, and kept a list of people he suspected were Jewish, due to his anti-semetism.
Orwell is magnified by Western Countries because he's useful, he's someone that at least pretends to be Left but spent more time attacking the Left than anything. Even his comrades in arms in Spain, when he fought alongside the Anarchists against the fascists, questioned why he wasn't fighting on the other side. Animal Farm is chiefly a story about how the Russian Working Class was stupid and illiterate, and thus destined to be taken advantage of and could never hope to understand Marxism. Orwell spends an absurd amount of time describing just how stupid the non-pigs are, as describing poor, working folk as incapable of knowing their own interests is his critique.
As for corruption, Marxist Socialism solves it with recall elections and broader extension of democratic input. Democracy in the workplace is utter fantasy in Capitalism, but is very real in Socialist countries. Even if this democracy often is flawed, and runs into the real problems that real, existing systems run into just like any other, it still forms a higher degree of public control.
Let us broach a polemical subject. The British author George Orwell is very well known for works such as Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and his book about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia.
It's time to read theory, comrades! As Lenin says, "Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle." Reading theory helps us identify the core contradictions within modern society, analyze their trajectories, and gives us the tools to break free. Marxism-Leninism is broken into 3 major components, as noted by Lenin in his pamphlet The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism: | Audiobook
Dialectical and Historical Materialism
Critique of Capitalism along the lines of Marx's Law of Value
Advocacy for Revolutionary and Scientific Socialism
As such, I created the following list to take you from no knowledge whatsoever of Leftist theory, and leave you with a strong understanding of the critical fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism in an order that builds up as you read. Let's get started!
Section I: Getting Started
What the heck is Communism, anyways? For that matter, what is fascism?
Breaks down fascism and its mortal enemy, Communism, as well as their antagonistic relationship. Understanding what fascism is, where and when it rises, why it does so, and how to banish it forever is critical. Parenti also helps debunk common anti-Communist myths, from both the "left" and the right, in a quick-witted writing style. This is also an excellent time to watch the famous speech.
Section II: Historical and Dialectical Materialism
By far my favorite primer on Marxist philosophy. By understanding Dialectical and Historical Materialism first, you make it easier to understand the rest of Marxism-Leninism. Don't be intimidated!
Further reading on Dialectical and Historical Materialism, but crucially introduces the why of Scientific Socialism, explaining how Capitalism itself prepares the conditions for public ownership and planning by centralizing itself into monopolist syndicates. This is also where Engels talks about the failures of previous "Utopian" Socialists.
Section III: Political Economy
That's right, it's time for the Law of Value and a deep-dive into Imperialism. If we are to defeat Capitalism, we must learn it's mechanisms, tendencies, contradictions, and laws.
Best taken as a pair, these essays simplify the most important parts of the Law of Value. Marx is targetting those not trained in economics here, but you might want to keep a pen and some paper to follow along if you are a visual person.
Absolutely crucial and the most important work for understanding the modern era and its primary contradictions. Marxist-Leninists understand that Imperialism is the greatest contradiction in the modern era, which cascades downward into all manner of related contradictions. Knowing what dying Capitalism looks like, and how it behaves, means we can kill it.
Section IV: Revolutionary and Scientific Socialism
Can we defeat Capitalism at the ballot box? What about just defeating fascism? What about the role of the state?
If Marxists believed reforming Capitalist society was possible, we would be the first in line for it. Sadly, it isn't possible, which Luxemburg proves in this monumental writing.
Excellent refutation of revisionists and Social Democrats who think the State can be reformed, without needing to be replaced with one that is run by the workers, in their own interests.
Section V: Intersectionality and Solidarity
The revolution will not be fought by atomized individuals, but by an intersectional, international working class movement. Intersectionality is critical, because it allows different marginalized groups to work together in collective interest, unifying into a broad movement.
Critical reading on understanding misogyny, transphobia, enbyphobia, pluralphobia, and homophobia, as well as how to move beyond the base subject of "gender." Uses the foundations built up in the previous works to analyze gender theory from a Historical Materialist perspective.
De-colonialism is essential to Marxism. Without having a strong, de-colonial, internationalist stance, we have no path to victory nor a path to justice. Fanon analyzes Colonialism's dehumanizing effects, and lays out how to form a de-colonial movement, as well as its necessity.
Solidarity and intersectionality are the key to any social movement. When different social groups fight for liberation together along intersectional lines, the movements are emboldened and empowered ever-further.
Section VI: Putting it into Practice!
It's not enough to endlessly read, you must put theory to practice. That is how you can improve yourself and the movements you support. Touch grass!
Mao wrote simply and directly, targeting peasant soldiers during the Revolutionary War in China. This pair of essays equip the reader with the ability to apply the analytical tools of Dialectical Materialism to their every day practice, and better understand problems.
Congratulations, you completed your introductory reading course!
With your new understanding and knowledge of Marxism-Leninism, here is a mini What is to be Done? of your own to follow, and take with you as practical advice.
Get organized. Join a Leftist org, find solidarity with fellow comrades, and protect each other. The Dems will not save you, it is up to us to protect ourselves. The Party for Socialism and Liberation and Freedom Road Socialist Organization both organize year round, every year, because the battle for progress is a constant struggle, not a single election. See if there is a chapter near you, or start one! Or, see if there's an org you like more near you and join it.
Read theory. Don't think that you are done now! Just because you have the basics, doesn't mean you know more than you do. If you have not investigated a subject, don't speak on it! Don't speak nonsense, but listen!
Aggressively combat white supremacy, misogyny, queerphobia, and other attacks on marginalized communities. Cede no ground, let nobody be forgotten or left behind. There is strength in numbers, when one marginalized group is targeted, many more are sure to follow.
Be industrious, and self-sufficient. Take up gardening, home repair, tinkering. It is through practice that you elevate your problem-solving capabilities. Not only will you improve your skill at one subject, but your general problem-solving muscles get strengthened as well.
Learn self-defense. Get armed, if practical. Be ready to protect yourself and others. Liberals will not save us, we must save each other.
Be persistent. If you feel like a single water droplet against a mountain, think of canyons and valleys. Oh, how our efforts pile up! With consistency, every rock, boulder, even mountain, can be drilled through with nothing but steady and persistent water droplets.
"Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent."
Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) is a national organization of revolutionaries fighting for socialism in the United States. Our home is in the working class.
Again, "Tankie" is a pejorative for Marxist in the same vein as "commie" and "pinko." All 3 were used against Communists historically, though pinko seems to have fallen out of fashion.
That is reductionist and overly simplistic. Just because they are all pejorative does not mean their meaning is identical. Not all communists are “tankies.”
(But I know very well we need to agree to disagree on this, because I don’t think there’s any value in trying to convince you.)
Their meaning, historically, has been identical. All 3 have been used against the same Communist parties, the same supporters of Actually Existing Socialism, the same Marxists. Personally, I see the desire among some left individuals to drive a wedge between the "tankies" and the "true/good/real Marxists" as a way for these people to shut down uncomfortable conversations with the overwhelming majority of Marxists around the world.
This process splits the "Marxists" that oppose AES, or advocate for reform over revolution, or support the Nordic Model, etc from the "evil" Marxists, the ones who support revolution, AES, and oppose Western Imperialism, giving a pass to the former because the former supports the status quo, which benefits Western Imperialism. Even if the overwhelming majority of practicing Marxists fit into the latter category, the former category are elevated in the West for their utility in supporting the system.
What this creates in the minds of those who think "tankie" isn't a pejorative for Marxists is utter distortion of the real viewpoints and real stances of Marxists. The "good" aspects of Marxism get pushed onto the Western supporting "Marxists," and a strawman is built up for the evil "tankies" that ends up being a mixture of interpreting genuine Marxist analysis in a negative light with absurd contradictions that don't really exist.
I don't think I'll convince you, either, but it's important for me to respond so that onlookers can at least see both points of view on the matter.
Soviets where with the Nazis at the beginning of the war. Then when they got attacked they damn near lost their capital. Without lend lease they would have crumbled. Then when the war ended they fucked over a bunch of countries that didn't want to be in the USSR. They did a bunch of work by sending millions to be cannon food.
The Soviets were never "with the Nazis." The Soviets spent years trying to get the West to form an allied pact against the Nazis, insteas the West gave the Nazis Czechoslovakia. The non-aggression pact was paid to buy time, as the USSR was a developing country and Germany a more developed one. Nazism and Communism are diametrically opposed and cannot coexist, in the years of the Nazis rise the Nazis murdered the Communists in Germany first, and the Soviets were constantly warning about the Nazi threat.
The surprise attack by the Nazis was swift, brutal, and with genocidal intent. They took land quickly, but were pushed back into a stalemate, and then rapidly the Nazi line collapsed. Lend-Lease equipment arrived after the Red Army had stabilized, it certainly helped but was not critical to the success of the Red Army, they weren't crumbling. Repeating Goebbels "Russian hordes" anti-Slavic racist talking points doesn't help you either, there are no records of "wave tactics" as was reported by the Nazis. Those records came largely from pre-Soviet Russian tactics, not the tactics of the Red Army.
They didn't "fuck over" a bunch of countries either.
There were also 400,000 soldiers who died fighting fascists under the US flag, who were not responsible for their government's decisions regarding the use of nuclear weapons, nor Operation Paperclip, nor any other major government decisions.
I'm aware, and am not trying to downplay that. My comment was about the US gov's decision to bomb Japan, not to downplay the lives given by US soldiers in the fight against the Nazis.
I hear you, I just feel like the meme was about the ordinary soldiers rather than the government. Fully respect wanting to correct the record regarding the government, just felt it was worth a reminder that there were people like the soldier in the meme who did sacrifice a lot fighting for a worthy cause and who do deserve respect, and our criticism of the government shouldn't overshadow that. Just a small pushback on that, but one I felt was important.
That's a fair point to push back on. It wasn't my intention to downplay the many brave US soldiers involved who were genuinely antifascist, but if my comments gave off that impression, then it's good that you spoke up. My main critique of this comic isn't even with the US, but with how (in my view) it treats liberalism and fascism as distinct, and not as the twins I understand them to be. The ending of the comic gives the impression that the former US was a bastion of antifascism and the modern US failed to get the memo, but the reality is that the fascists were always there, and the anti-fascists too. I wanted to add more materialism to the picture, and if in doing so I accidentally downplayed the role of the brave antifascists in the US Army that gave their lives fighting the Nazis, then I made my point poorly.
I think I see your point a bit more, I didn't really think about the implications of American fascism being a new thing. Also didn't want to single you out or anything.
Oh, it wasn't because of the fanatical dedication of the Japanese armed forces that were so dug in it would have taken years and cost thousands of American lives to defeat them, island by island? It was because they didn't want the Russians to hog all the glory? Never heard that one before
On August 9th, the Soviets invaded Japanese-controlled Manchuria, and Japan announced surrender on August 15th. The nukes were launched on the 6th and 9th of August, because the US didn't want Japan to go Soviet, the US had plans of reforming Imperial Japan as a subsidiary Empire, maintaining Japan's colonization of Korea and other Asian countries while profiting off of Japan, in a form of double Imperialism, and a Soviet Japan wouldn't let that work. Their plan was thrown to dust with the Korean War that followed.
While publicly stating their intent to fight on to the bitter end, Japan's leaders (the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, also known as the "Big Six") were privately making entreaties to the publicly neutral Soviet Union to mediate peace on terms more favorable to the Japanese. While maintaining a sufficient level of diplomatic engagement with the Japanese to give them the impression they might be willing to mediate, the Soviets were covertly preparing to attack Japanese forces in Manchuria and Korea (in addition to South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands) in fulfillment of promises they had secretly made to the US and the UK at the Tehran and Yalta Conferences.
the first bomb was dropped on 6 August, the Soviet Union declared war on the 8th. But contrary to American expectations and post-war claims, the author’s diligent research in the Japanese sources demonstrates conclusively that it was the Soviet declaration of war, not the atomic bombs, that forced the Japanese to surrender unconditionally.
While technically true, there were plenty of affiliated fascist organisations around the world who openly paraded their nazi sympathies in public. Oswald Mosely and his British Union of Fascists spring to mind.
I know, see Operation Paperclip and I also know that the end of the nazi Germany is mainly thanks to Rusia and allies, US entered when the main task was already done. Without the French and British resistance, USA couldn't even have managed to enter Germany.
They also granted the head of Unit 731 immunity (specifically from the USSR who rightly wanted him executed) in exchange for the human experimentation data.
"Experimentation" data that was entirely useless, if I remember correctly.
Zionism is anti-semetic, ironically. The Zionists were anti-Yiddish and collaborated with the Nazis (yes, you're reading this right). Further, the Zionist mythos depends on fostering anti-semetism abroad, so that there seems to be legitimacy in having a "safe country for Jewish peoples," even if that country is a genocidal settler-colony.
Zionism is the one thing where anti-semites and Jews (at least zionist Jews) agree.
Zionist Jews want it because it gives them their own country where they are not persecuted.
Anti-semites want it, because it means that the Jews are not in their country.
That's why even the literal Nazis supported zionism. Every Jew in Israel was one less Jew in Germany.
You get the same thing still today with the most right-wing politicians supporting Zionism/Israel. On the one hand because it's a way to keep Jews far away and on the other hand because it can be used as a "I'm supporting Israel, so surely I can't be a Nazi. Anyway, let's go shoot some Muslims."-kind of excuse.
(#47 in the series Palestine Essays by the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center.) CONTENTS Introduction Chapter I. The Early Zionist Attitude to...
The Nazi eugenics program was also strongly inspired by what the US was doing at the time.
It's just that the Nazi went a bit too far, too obvious (and mainly they lost the war). It was one of the arguments of the defense in the Nuremberg trial that the German eugenics differed little from what was practiced in the US.
I gotta push back against the criticism that several of my comrades in here are expressing. Y'all are talking about the US collaborating with Nazis after the war, and you're not wrong about that, but that was the US government, while this meme is about a soldier. The soldiers on the ground fought for all sorts of reasons, they might have opposed the Nazis for all sorts of ideological reasons, or they might have just been doing it out of loyalty, or any of the other reasons soldiers fight. But there were people on the ground fighting the Nazis under a US flag who were committed antifascists and even communists. As for the others, whatever their reasons, when the call came to save the world from fascism, they answered, and were willing to sacrifice life and limb to do it. That's pretty heroic if you ask me. And they weren't the ones who made the decision to let Nazis into NATO and stuff afterwards.
I understand the defensiveness against attempts to glorify the US while villifying the USSR and downplay their (more substantial) sacrifice and contribution to the war. But there's nothing in this meme that's doing that, and there were Americans who contributed to the war effort. Is it necessary to kneejerk react to a meme celebrating someone who fought the Nazis by talking about the government that ruled over them? People aren't defined by their nation or their government.
Let's not forget the proud tradition of people like , who explicitly tied the war effort to a broader idea of antifascism, nor of the people on the front lines who he inspired.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
OP's post is about fortnite, the top commenter of this comment chain added on a link about Twitter. Both are about a supposedly popular thing being overwhelmingly just full of bots. What's not to get?
Bots in Fortnite are no secret but it really has gotten bad, huh? I remember trying the game out some years ago, was annoyed by the obvious bots in my games and never touched it again after one session. Things must've gotten more downhill since.
Funny thing is, even if your skills were in the bracket for more human weighted matches, you’d not have hit them in your first few sessions. The first few matches are always 100% bots to give you a feeling for the game without the rick of being steam rolled by humans.
There’s also the problem of matches being 100 people and not starting until it hits about that number. Imagine the fun of sitting and waiting for 10 minutes for people to hop on.
I never even played fortnite, but i watched some videos on it, and it's pretty weird. I can just assume it's for children who don't care because they don't know and actually have a chance playing and winning. Marvel rivals put you in pity matches after you lost a game or two and it's ridiculous. It's just a waste of time. But even if the bots are so obvious, there are still teammates that go: let's go guys, we got this. They have a combined 3 kills and we have like 30 each. There is no reason playing this.
Back in the day we dreamed of games with large war zones and hundred of people. Sadly, technology wasn't advanced enough. So we would have bits running around everywhere. Simpler times😂
Bots were a big reason why I didn't continue playing Naraka. A battle royale that has bots is just awful. I'd rather have long queues than a BR lobby with a handful of people.
Quantum computers pose a threat to Bitcoin’s security. Developers are rushing to future-proof the network. Michael Saylor is unconvinced this is a problem.
At the same time, the hope is that Russian society would come out en masse against Russian President Putin and dispose of him from power.
Theory that Russia will collapse relies on hoping that Russians don't understand the existential threat of NATO expansion, and NATO hatred of them, AND all Russian power brokers will start believing NATO disinformation, AND risk of losing war will motivate Russians to surrender to Ukraine/NATO.
Instead, any Russian regime change is likely to be caused by Putin weakness and failure to nuke German and UK US military bases. Or otherwise perception of insufficient aggression/speed of progress.
Exactly, the only actual criticism of Putin in Russia is that he's being too soft with the west. If Putin is somehow ousted from power, then it would almost certainly be by somebody far more hardline like Medvedev. The whole notion of regime change as a path towards defeating Russia is fundamentally rooted in lack of basic understanding of the political situation in Russia.
A lawsuit disputing the results of the 2024 election has moved forward after it was revealed that former Vice President Kamala Harris received no votes a New York county.
Statistically it is very unlikely this would happen given the votes for other Democrats down ticket. It would be like betting on an old horse to win a race and somehow winning.
Also from a technical and logistics perspective, Russia already hacked into a variety of polling stations over the last few years and did seemingly nothing but gather information and plan. Technically this isn't hard or even expensive.
Trump said months before the election that he's got it covered and he isn't worried about it. Why would that be? He told us what he was doing at the time, his people were rigging it.
I also strongly believe in their use of projecting as a preemptive defensive strategy.
They say "you cheated you cheated you cheated!" so we reply "you're nuts there's no evidence, it's all a conspiracy theory" so then they can cheat later on and turn it around on you when you go to investigate. "Oh now it's true because you lost? Yeah yeah yeah..."
They're always playing psychological warfare with the population... 🙁
They already believe it's happening to them which is why they refuse to listen to any source of information that isn't from their preferred brand.
There are plenty of intelligent MAGA that just have an innate bias that they want to have confimed so they allow themselves to be convinced by mis/disinformation. To admit you were wrong, or to accept that you misunderstood actually creates a "pain" type response that people are very adverse to, there are also the types that have so entrenched themselves in their political beliefs that it becomes their identity. This form of physiological warfare I mentioned is just one way of allowing these people to maintain their identity and to give them a "valid" defense against inconvenient information.
Over time a person can be chipped away at, but if you always give them an answer then they never have to suffer the thought that they were ever wrong about anything so they can remain on "your side."
A strongmen is elected for seeming strong. Of course he will say beforehand that he is certain that he will win. Saying anything else would harm is brand and make less people vote for him. Trump claiming to be successful at anything and everything also isn't something new for him. He did that his entire (adult) life.
This is evidence for Trump being a narcissist and liar, but with the amount of lies, delusional and nonsensical claims he makes, this can be hardly taken as evidence for election fraud.
He knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers. And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide.
— trump, on stage at a victory rally in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 19, 2025
The idiot can’t keep his mouth shut and basically blabbed exactly what they were doing, yet nobody really listened.
Casual dismissal of statistically relevant recount and largest recount ever in Wisconsin, even including compared to 2020.
Local elections officials in 336 randomly selected municipalities across the state hand-counted 327,230 ballots as part of the 2024 audit. That is nearly 10% of all Wisconsin ballots cast in the 2024 election and the largest post-election audit ever undertaken in the state.
The only errors found during the audit were made by people, not the vote-counting machines. And only five human errors were detected, resulting in an error rate of just 0.0000009%, according to the report.
I will point out that if they did it in a state they weren't going to win and that would be too suspicious for them to actually win in the first place, why wouldn't they replicate it in a state they actually needed and on which his election actually hinged? Just means New York was a control/test case
Frankly after election there are two things that bugged me in California. There was a proposition that removed mandatory work requirement for inmates comparing it to a modern day slavery. There was no one who was willing to endorse vote against it (I suppose due to optics) yet the proposition failed.
When he visited CA after fires were already put down and made that spectacle with water dam, he also mentioned that he had a good feeling about next election.
I have a feeling that maybe CA voting is also compromised and this was a test for California, as trump winning here would be extremely suspicious, but no one will care about this proposition.
That one isn't suspicious to me. US public opinion has always had very little regard for anyone who's incarcerated. Hence, once the system gets ahold of you, you're fucked whether you're guilty or not (unless you're wealthy).
If a result like this was found in a swing state, I'd be sure it was malicious. In New York, that seems improbable. Someone clever enough to conduct the attack is unlikely to be stupid enough to employ it in a way that creates an obvious anomaly without changing the result.
From what I understand about the issue that I read about in a different article it was about software changes made to a program that many states use, PA was one of them.
I think NY is the only place where it is currently being investigated, but if it happened here I don't doubt it happened elsewhere.
our election was, literally, stolen. Trump and his fascists have spent years calling his loss to Biden “stolen” which ultimately harmed any real attempts at calling out future election results. many statisticians are sounding the alarm bells—something is wrong. the data doesn’t lie and the voting heavily implies manipulation. there is a group investigating our election results and making their findings public. they are very concerned with what they are uncovering.
odds and probability are unimportant to me. I'm only concerned with the reasons these investigations are continuing. What does justice look like in best and worst case scenarios?
In Volusia County, Florida during the 2000 election Al Gore received negative votes, and I'm sure we all remember how that turned out because everyone on this site is old as fuck so let's temper our excitement this time around.
Some algorithm probably takes votes away from a canadiate but you can't have negative votes. Someone forgot to insert the threshold killing the program.
Let's just say there was fraud, and Kamala did actually win:
Now what? This administration has been blatantly breaking the law, ignoring the constitution and court orders since day fucking 1 without consequence. Will someone with authority finally grow some fucking nuts and arrest the felon(s) over this, even though they could and should have already for numerous other reasons?
Winning a majority of the electorial votes is what's required to be elected president. There is no federal requirement that the electors of the electorial college vote in accordance with the popular vote of the state they represent. If enough fraud is proven that Harris should have ~~one~~ won it doesn't change the outcome of the electorial vote. According to the laws as they currently are Trump would still be president.
Also not surprising that investigations weren’t pushed harder after election and before new administration. Biden and Garland should’ve put throttle down on a five-alarm-fire investigation into election. Did they? No. Surprised? Not at all.
Transitions shouldn’t necessarily be smooth if an election was potentially fraudulent — peaceful, yes.
It's ironic that Hitler's "Night of the Long Knives" (when the Nazis arrested and eventually murdered numerous brownshirts and their leader, Ernst Roehm) acquired that name because Hitler himself used the expression in a speech that he gave immediately after the event. In the speech, he accused Roehm of having been planning a "NIght of the Long Knives" himself, directed at Hitler and the other Nazi leaders. Quite unintentionally, the phrase came to describe Hitler's actions.
Yes, but then he un-conceded. How do you think it got to the Supreme Court unless he fought?
He brought it to the Florida circuit court, and when he lost he appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, who ruled in his favor. Then Bush appealed to the US Supreme Court.
The problem was a coordinated effort to steal the election by the bitch queen Katherine Harris, Florida Secretary of State and Bush's Florida campaign co-chair, a fake riot by Republican operatives to disrupt a recount, and a collaborating Supreme Court. It was all tied up nicely in a bow and there wasn't much Gore could have done, although he should have requested a statewide recount right from the start instead of just cherry picking solidly Democratic-leaning counties like Miami-Dade.
He initially called Bush to concede and then called him back to un-concede, which really pissed off Bush. That's what I was referring to. It wasn't public, though.
because that’s what the left does unless it’s against their own. it’s infuriating to watch the party fight itself harder than it’ll fight the opposition
To be clear, the DNC is fighting against its constituents. This is Washington politicians and funders vs. the people. Sad to say, Washington is winning.
Others clearly have their pitch forks ready to go but the real reason here is because they won NY. I'd be shocked if any presidential candidate in the history of the US demanded a recount in a state they won.
Is 0 votes suspicious? Absolutely. Is the recount process the right way to uncover something happening at a scale to compromise an entire district's election process? Probably not.
However suspicious this district is, it's not justification for a recount in another district in a completely different state.
If there is interference at a meaningful scale, it's not going to be uncovered by volunteers working without sleep to deliver election results as quickly as humanly possible. The wheels of justice turn far top slowly.
Because they didn't want to be perceived as doing the same thing as the Republicans after the 2020 election. After complaining about the Republicans not having a "peaceful transfer of power," Dems thought it was important to demonstrate how that works, and be smug about it.
Unfortunately, this was precisely the wrong election to make that point, since this election truly was rat fucked by MAGA.
I've thought about that. But that seems like a terrible strategy, because it lets the Republicans do anything. The Republicans do a bad thing, or accuse you of doing a bad thing, and now you're incapable of responding to it?
Yes, it's a terrible strategy, but it's the easiest one to default to if you are a cowardly spineless weenie Democrat who is afraid to confront serious treason and corruption, like Chuck Schumer. Traditional Dems are satisfied with losing, as long as they can feel smug about being morally superior while doing it, even if it means watching the Reps systematically dismantle America on behalf of the Russians.
We need elected representatives at every level who aren't afraid to go to battle to defend our country from treasonous criminals and Sociopathic Oligarchs.
I always had a feeling that the election was a bit too quickly decided. I’ve said before that in the coming months and years after the 2024 election we would find out something fishy was happening.
That’s honestly what got me too. Like it took a week for them to get all of the results from 2020, and sure, that could’ve been all the mail in ballots, but then you have Rogan saying elongated muskrat had called the election the night OF voting?
I don’t know man. I’ve seen a few elections now and don’t remember that happening.
If you have a few hours to kill, this podcast had the guy from election truth alliance on. It is the most tolerable of the few podcasts he's appeared on because this guy is data heavy, and quite frankly it can be boring with how much he talks about data and graphs, but the data is there. They are very data driven. Part 2 has most of the data, but essentially votes went way up for Republicans as time went on. Statistically speaking, there should be a similar distribution of votes throughout, but what we see is any time Kamala gets close, a flood of red votes come in. The theory is a vote switching algorithm. Imo Elon saying that without him the Dems get the presidency and the house is not hyperbole. I'm pretty sure they were flipping votes and/ or using data from the super PAC $100 giveaway to file fake votes. There are a bunch of submitted ballots that were down ballot dem, but president and house / Senate (the ones that mattered the most) went to Republicans. The only way to find out is to do audits. And even if (and imo when) we do find out it was stolen, I don't think we have any recourse to remove him, but it would be nice to know that we didn't choose this, and the states can beef up their election security and politicians can stop being so spineless thinking that he's so popular and they are powerless.
The guy was dancing around like a crazy person to Ave Maria at his last rally and yelling about people eating cats and dogs on the debate. There's no way anyone saw that and wanted that running the country save the maybe 8% of the population that are Trump Simps.
His rallies were empty and Harris had the momentum with a packed house everywhere she went. She mopped the floor with him in the debate. The fact that she accepted the results and didn't push for a single recount was asinine imo. With Trump, everything is projection. There's evidence they tried to steal '20 and we're just overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people who voted by mail to oust him. Vote by mail is typically hand counted and harder to alter.
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The guy was dancing around like a crazy person to Ave Maria at his last rally and yelling about people eating cats and dogs on the debate. There’s no way anyone saw that and wanted that running the country save the maybe 8% of the population that are Trump Simps.
If the new standard is for Republicans to cast doubt on the legitimacy of every election, except for the ones they win, then we should, at the very least, be scrutinizing every single aspect of the election. Refuse to concede, demand recounts, hand tally the electronic ballots, search up and down and under every rock for evidence that the other side is guilty of some foul play.
Because if they had done that in the first place, they might have uncovered shit like this before it was too late to stop the wrong candidate from getting inaugurated. If they had bothered to put up a fight instead of maintaining decorum that the Republicans never bother to show, maybe they would have discovered what many of us already suspected - that Elon Musk somehow tampered with the voting machines to swing the election in Donald Trump's favor in key swing states. They practically admitted as much on stage, and nobody batted an eye at it.
I don't expect to ever live to see another fair election for the rest of my life.
I remember asking a few weeks after the election if anyone at all was talking about it being rigged. It seemed at the time everyone just accepted the result. Only in the past month or so have I started seeing talk of it.
Leading up to the election all we were talking about is how trump got ahold of documents through court filings that would show exactly how the voting machines worked. Crazy how thst talking point just fell away.
At this point we know the who, the why, the what, and the how. We need to figure out the where and when.
I'm very much against conspiracy theories, especially concerning our elections which are administered by many many independent entities. I was very concerned as I watched electronic voting machines - especially without paper trails - become more and more popular over the past 30 years. Even more as the industry consolidated and it came down to a handful of private, for-profit manufacturers.
The thing I've read about that is keeping the door of conspiracy open in my mind is the "drop off" rate, which has to do with the number of "President only" ballots, where only the President is chosen, and no down ballot votes are cast.
Apparently Trump's ballots have an unusually high - like statistically unlikely - drop off. And it's either only in or mostly in/more pronounced in swing states.
Even Chris Titus picked it up (3 hrs total, sorry)
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Trump didn't even try to get elected. Total fuck it all pill during his running like he knew he was going to win, then he wins by a huge margin electorally and the popular vote. It was surreal.
If only there was a give movement of Democrat voters telling you loudly WE WON'T VOTE FOR HARRIS...
You guys usually love to blame us for Trump, even though we promised you he would win if you didn't give us an electable candidate, but hey if you now want to change stories again to follow whatever dem narrative is being spun today, then yeah her winning NY so bigly is obviously evidence of a stolen election...
Or she wasn't electable. No no no, it's everyone else's fault.
yup, they kicked out Hogg because of the threat to their lifelong tenures and disrupt their ability to put their thumbs on the scale for the most disappointing republican lite candidates the isreali money wants the dnc to run
Sometimes you have to just suck it up and act/vote to reduce harm. That's called reality. It's like taking chemo if you have a fatal cancer. Chemo SUCKS and you might die of cancer anyway, but if you don't go through it, you will certainly die.
Most likely a mix of everything. I am sure that Republicans tried to win with illegal (vote tampering) and legal (voter suppression, gerrymandering, etc...) methods. Combined with a dumbass population, everything is possible.
The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.
Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system.
Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: "Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not."
Spoonamore explained that "they [SmarTech] have full access and could change things when and if they want."
Arnebeck specifically asked "Could this be done using whatever bypass techniques Connell developed for the web hosting function." Spoonamore replied "Yes."
Tomas Rueda, of the Hispanic Republican Club of Cleveland, a poll challenger, monitors voting at a polling site in Cleveland on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov 2…
In the 2000 election cycle, electronic voting machines manufactured by Diebold used Microsoft Access as the underlying database for storing vote counts. Only techie oldheads will remember this, but in the world of electronic data storage Access was basically a toy. Access databases did have an audit table (which tracks every change made to the data), but the audit table was hand-editable.
Leftists and liberals all think they're somehow immune to conspiracy theories, but here we are. Nearly everyone commenting or voting in this thread has an opinion based on feelings, and they're looking for evidence to justify their beliefs. "I'm not one to believe conspiracy theories, but..." That's a load-bearing "but" there.
No really: stop for ten seconds and think about why you believe this. Be honest.
Yes, I'm aware of the video that's been linked repeatedly where they can't explain how a small percentage of Trump cultists only voted for Trump and no one else. Imagine that: voters who think the entire system is corrupt and Trump is their savior don't vote for anyone else.
And as korendian has been trying to tell you, New Square in Ramapo, NY is a tiny, 100% Hasidic village and votes as a monolithic bloc.
There is a strong expectation that residents of New Square will conform to community norms... Those who have not conformed voluntarily have faced vigilante justice, as exemplified by the New Square arson attack and other incidents.
I'm not saying the election was clean. It never is. Red states purge voters they shouldn't, they enact laws to discourage voters and make it more difficult, etc. And sometimes it actually is a conspiracy: 2000 is one example where it really was rigged for Bush through coordinated efforts.
But there's zero persuasive evidence for 2024. If I see some, I'll charge my mind. But not until then.
After HitlerPig's 2025 State of the Union speech, new Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin gave the Democratic response, and tried to sell the idea that millions of people in her state voted for her for Senator, but Trump for president.
This past weekend, Amy Klobuchar tried to sell that same fantasy on Meet The Press - that millions in her state voted for her, but also voted for HitlerPig.
I'm sure there are a few people who split their vote, but they have to be as rare as white squirrels. There are supposed to be millions of them, so many that HitlerPig even won EVERY battleground state (an exceptionally unlikely outcome), but I've never heard one actual voter claim they voted a straight Democratic ticket, except HitlerPig for president. It sounds ridiculous when you actually say it.
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There are supposed to be millions of them, so many that HitlerPig even won EVERY battleground state (an exceptionally unlikely outcome), but I’ve never heard one actual voter claim they voted a straight Democratic ticket, except HitlerPig for president.
Harris and Slotkin net out almost perfectly. Trump outran Rogers by over 3% of the vote, which suggests people were showing up to support Mr Cheeto and then leaving the rest of the ballot blank.
That is... not unbelievable. The Trump Cult is strong, while the GOP as a party lags Trump's personality cult substantially.
Polling gets even worse in other Midwestern states, with Harris outright underwater to her down ballot Dems. But there's nobody in the GOP Trump doesn't outpace. The idea that people are voting Trump + Dem is far less likely than voting Trump + Nobody.
Citing the vote counts to prove the point that the election was "fair & square" is like using the Bible to prove that God is real. Of course they prove HitlerPig won, they're rigged! We're supposed to believe he won EVERY swing state? No Republican has won the popular vote since 1988, but we're supposed to believe the least popular Republican president in decades, one who actually LOST his reelection by a wide margin, is the guy to break that streak? Ridiculous.
What makes more sense to me, and is supported by the evidence and personal statements by the players themselves, is that they rigged the election, especially in the swing states, assisted by the richest man in the world (and his army of some of the best tech experts in the world), and Putin, who we know has been actively pursuing cyber-espionage for years.
When will people internalize that the two biggest FOREIGN Sociopathic Oligarchs, one with a government superpower at his disposal, another with the largest fortune on the planet, neither with any loyalty or patriotism toward America, have partnered up with the most prolific traitor in American history, to exploit our country in every way possible? None of them care about history or legacy or reputation, they see America as a rich, fat, lazy target, ripe for exploitation and looting.
This is why manual hand counted votes still happen to this day in Canada and Australia. They both faced the same MAGA threat and the lib won.
Yes it takes longer. And sometimes results will take weeks to resolve but at least they don’t end up in a situation like this where the entire system is so corrupt 4 months later it’s near impossible to fix it.
They both faced the same MAGA threat and the lib won.
Largely thanks to the local public backlash to Trump tariffs. If Kamala had prevailed in November, both countries would likely have MAGA governments today.
Yeah, it's weird to be an American and hope the silver lining of trump is that the rest of the world keeps making better choices in response to how bad this is.
Part of the Trump brand is "Fuck you, I've got mine" which isn't condusive to international coalitions.
Hell, just look at the Ukraine/Russia conflict. As soon as Trump got Zelensky to sign a bunch of Western Ukrainian real estate over to his cronies, he unleashed a large traunch of weapons to fuck over Putin. As soon as he got another Perfect Phone Call from Xi, and secured some unspecified promise, the Chinese tariffs evaporated.
My man stands for nothing that won't fit into his pocket.
Note to mention that not only are they harder to scale attacks against, manual vote counts are easier to trust, As anyone can understand the process and how it ensured that their vote counted.
No matter how well they are protected it's hard to explain to the average person how a computer ensures their vote was counted correctly.
So wait a minute here guys, you're telling me that the man who was convicted by a unanimous jury of fraud (cheating) in the 2016 election, the same guy who called the governors of various states and asked them to 'find him some votes' in 2020, did not run a clean honest campaign in 2024???
If it is true, that is. Any source? DOOM: The Dark Ages requires 16 GB in GPU on recommended and ILL's system requirements are TBA.
wildncrazyguy138
in reply to BrikoX • • •2014 - Democrats vote in some “blue dog” democrats. Progressives complain that they’re DINOs.
2022 - Democrats get push back from centrist democrats like Kristen Sinema and Joe Manchin on the Green New Deal. Democrats cast them out.
2025 - John Fetterman works across the aisle in support of rural voter causes…you get the drill
This article “we need more rural democrats!” Yeah, good luck finding ones who are willing to take the progressive lambasting.
BrikoX
in reply to wildncrazyguy138 • • •You calling Kristen Sinema and Joe Manchin "centrists" just shows you have no idea what you are talking about. They are 100% corporate Democrats who took millions from oil or pharmaceuticals lobby to kill bills that were unfairable to them. Hence Build Back Better and Medicaid prescription drug negotionations being neutered into nothing. But you continue living in your denial bubble.
John Fetterman voted with Republicans more than he voted with Democrats. He's a a simple sellout to a foreign country and primarify funded by The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). He should be treated as a traitor.
I and 70%+ of the country prefer Tim Walz style rural vision.
With a 1 seat majority in Minnesota he did:
- universal free school meals
- legal weed
- carbon free electricity by 2040
- tax rebates for the working class up to $1,300 (making under $150k per year)
- 12 weeks paid family leave
- 12 weeks paid sick leave
- banned conversion therapy
- red flag laws for guns
- universal background checks for guns
- automatic voter registration
- free public college (under $80k)
- ban on PFAS (forever chemicals)
- $2.2 billion increase in k-12 school funding
- sectoral bargaining for nursing home worker
Ensign_Crab
in reply to BrikoX • • •Yeah. centrists.
Yeah. A centrist.
BrikoX doesn't like this.
BrikoX
in reply to Ensign_Crab • • •