mozz

Solid background in conflict resolution, that’s me, every time without fail

When they open up a position for chief arguer though I’ll be all over it

There’s a book called “Self Made Man” wherein a butch looking woman disguised herself as a man with the help of some professionals, back when this was a wild and uncommon thing to do, and then went and did extended lengths of time in exclusively male environments (bowling league, high pressure sales) to covertly observe men in their natural environment. It is in all seriousness the best book I have ever read on gender psychology and the differences and communication troubles between the main genders.

I won’t even try to summarize, but what she came away from it with is that the standard cliche of “on a different wavelength” is exactly the right metaphor. She wasn’t coming from any kind of deliberately ignorant perspective but she did have the pretty common perception that man are just sort of these cavemen, and was actually very shocked and surprised to discover that the average man has a whole complex emotional life of his own, but that it happens in a way and in a language that’s mostly invisible to the average woman unless she is very very deeply involved in his life.

Like I say, it sounds like a pretty corny premise especially in today’s supposedly more enlightened times, but to me it was extremely insightful and real.

You know what's weird? Trying to think about who are the people to line up in little pairings of who represents who, actually gave me a weird sense of hope, like it's very early in the whole process compared to looking back on the Nazis, and it's not going anywhere near as well as it did for them in Germany. Putting the two next to each other (Beer Hall Putsch vs January 6th, Goebbels vs Bannon, SA versus Oathkeepers, things like that) makes the MAGA people look pretty wimpy. People looked at the Nazis like a joke early on but they had real combat experience, organization, they got shit done, they weren't afraid to get in the streets by the thousands and fight this actual war that the Right on the internet keeps talking about but seems (a couple outliers aside) to be constantly waiting for someone else to instigate and then win, for them.

Himmler was like this suspectedly wimpy guy, like oh he never saw combat, he only single handedly oversaw the construction of and then commanded a million-strong paramilitary force and then supervised the extermination of six million people. If that's the bar for "we're not sure about this guy," then what the fuck are you going to say in the credit of Steve Bannon or Jared Kushner and their displayed abilities. Nothing, that's what.

On the other hand, the society they're trying to take over is itself a lot more vulnerable and less vigorous and more sitting-on-TikTok based, so maybe it's not any real assurance of safety.

Absolutely without fail, the arc is:

• We're so strong that no one can stop us
• Might makes right
• Buddy you better not mess with me, we can ruin and throw aside like garbage anyone who displeases us
• Ma they throwin me aside like garbage, please help, it's not fair

Somehow they never get the idea that maybe there's a better way, that they might not always be able to count on being the fuck-er and not the fuck-ee.

More specifically, for confirming that a story being negative about Biden was the main criteria they were using to select stories to post, that they wanted to select and post bad stories about Biden specifically.

I'm actually not convinced that ozma's participation here is actually hurting Biden, just because it's so blatant and has actually promoted on Lemmy the narrative "most criticism of Biden is made up from people trying to hurt him for political reasons, and here are a bunch of rebuttals to it" much more than it has promoted the face value narrative "Biden is bad and everyone thinks so."

I actually think what is a lot more harmful, is the flood of users who come from nowhere to post quick "Hey we all agree Biden hurt black voters and they shouldn't vote for him" comments (or whatever) on any story having anything to do with him, to create a sort of false impression of consensus. ozma's obvious enough with what he's doing that people can pretty clearly see it. The fake accounts are harder to spot (enough so that maybe I sound crazy from saying I think that's what's going on). So like e.g. one place where you can see it really clearly is in the beehaw politics subs -- most stories just get votes, and maybe like a couple of comments, but then anything Biden related gets this big dogpile of random accounts coming in to say more or less the exact same narrative about how he's bad for some particular reason. To me it is fairly clear that it's not just an organic population of people who care about Biden and Biden only and no other area of politics and mostly happen to have exactly the same opinion about him.

(And also, I don't think that confirming specifically that the reason you're posting a clearly bad faith flood of artificially slanted articles, is exactly what it clearly is, should be the bar for getting banned. I have no idea what the actual criteria should be, because it seems like it doesn't have an easy answer, but I don't think the bar for banning someone should be their self-described intent.)

Manufacturing jobs, climate change, growth in unions

IDK maybe it's an unimpressively short list but each one fits the brief in pretty large-scale fashion

The growth in 10th percentile wages is definitely going to disproportionately benefit black familes

To look specifically at the racial dimension, here's an overall graph of median income broken down by race. It's kind of not ideal that it cuts off before showing 2023, but enough that you can see that in recent years they're squeezing together (racial income inequality going down) for the first time in quite a while -- not like income at the top going down is a real great thing, but that is partly the result of Biden's deliberate policy decision to prioritize keeping employment high over keeping inflation low, so that the pain of the Covid recovery is shared among all segments of society instead of disproportionately focused on the most vulnerable as I think most US politicians would have done.

They will, sometimes, and they are. But one of the most notable things in the early days of the war was how even while people were dying, Ukraine attempted to make it clear to the Russian people that the fight wasn't with them; they set up hotlines for families of captured soldiers to find out information, dropped guidelines illustrating how any individual person could surrender and save their life, basically tried to defend themselves without passing from there into some cartoonish vindictiveness like hoping that a bunch of football fans get killed by an explosion. They're still doing what they can to let people in Russia know what is the reality of what their children are in for, if they sign up for the Russian army. Not like "yeah we hope you die" but more like the exact opposite, "please stay the fuck home because if you come here you might die alone in a muddy ditch."

I'm not sure why there is this perception on the Russian side that "we're super evil and we do terrible things" is this propaganda victory that's going to do good things for them if they just spread it far and wide enough. But you're far from the first person I've seen doing it. It's like, we can't actually win against the military forces; the only thing we have is the capacity to threaten to hurt the innocent if people don't do what we say. IDK man. Surely you can. Good luck with that.

As any good soldier would do

That’s not hatred. He’s a soldier, and a good one, doing what any soldier would do. Emotion doesn’t enter into it.

Unteroffizier Fäustlinge

I just wanna highlight the high quality of this joke

Cats exist beyond your puny dualistic conceptions

I think what they are trying to say is that the emotional experience they have when they look at a sunset is similar to the emotional experience that gives them conviction that there is a God. It's not a statement of objective fact about the universe and its processes; it's a statement about their mental and emotional life and how they want to feel inside their own head.

Although, maybe they are saying that no one knows how sunsets work and so therefore a wizard did it. I would hope it is that first thing though.