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Cake day: April 30th, 2024

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  • Amazing. So because the NRA met with Russian weapon manufacturers to try to get rich, it means every one of the 5.5 million NRA members has been swayed by Russian propaganda. Absolutely zero of them were legitimately just gun nuts who were always going to vote Republican because they oppose gun control, 100% of the members were swayed by Russia the moment someone on the board met with a Russian arms dealer.

    I guess it becomes very easy to show that a large number of Americans have been influenced by Russia if you’re allowed to play like 6 degrees of separation like that. Why don’t we count anyone who ever used Facebook too, while we’re at it? What percentage of Americans bought a coke in 2020, while Coca-Cola was doing business in Russia? This goes way deeper than I ever imagined.




  • That’s wild. Like, to think all it takes is a handful of Twitter bots to instantly sway like half the population of a country.

    Say, why doesn’t anyone else try this? Just set up some bot accounts to spread misinformation in favor of Biden, and it should be just as effective right? I mean, it can’t be that people have different beliefs and different material interests or anything like that. Everyone who disagrees with you is simply so stupid that they just instantly believe anything they see. Shouldn’t you be able to use that to your advantage?








  • Skill issue.

    Of course the opponent is always going to claim you’re wrong, that doesn’t mean you can’t mount a competent response. If their tactics are so incredibly effective that there’s no way to counter them, then steal those tactics and throw them right back at their face. Trump isn’t even an unknown quantity, they’ve got teams of people working for 8 years to come up with an answer to his approach, if Biden still isn’t up to the task then he needs to step aside and let someone else handle it.


  • You shouldn’t be. The rich supporting fascists (and vice versa) is nothing new.

    Excerpts from Blackshirts and Reds, by Michael Parenti

    To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.

    In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusiness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the “March on Rome,” contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy’s top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist “revolution”—really a coup d’état—took place. . .

    In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.

    During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown-shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had concluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with generous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.

    In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bourgeoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end. . .

    Here were two peoples, the Italians and Germans, with different histories, cultures, and languages, and supposedly different temperaments, who ended up with the same repressive solutions because of the compelling similarities of economic power and class conflict that prevailed in their respective countries. In such diverse countries as Lithuania, Croatia, Rumania, Hungary, and Spain, a similar fascist pattern emerged to do its utmost to save big capital from the impositions of democracy. . .

    Both Mussolini and Hitler showed their gratitude to their big business patrons by privatizing many perfectly solvent state-owned steel mills, power plants, banks, and steamship companies. Both regimes dipped heavily into the public treasury to refloat or subsidize heavy industry. Agribusiness farming was expanded and heavily subsidized. Both states guaranteed a return on the capital invested by giant corporations while assuming most of the risks and losses on investments. As is often the case with reactionary regimes, public capital was raided by private capital.

    At the same time, taxes were increased for the general populace but lowered or eliminated for the rich and big business. Inheritance taxes on the wealthy were greatly reduced or abolished altogether.


  • From the perspective of the ruling class, a draft would be an absolutely terrible idea. Many Americans do not care at all what the military does because the victims are mostly PoC foreigners, and if some American soldiers die they might care a little bit, but they chose to be there and knew the risks so it’s whatever. This apathy allows the ruling class to do whatever they want, to go on these random, decades-long invasions that leave hundreds of thousands dead, and nobody actually gives a shit at all, and the handful that do can be written off as traitors and foreign agents.

    Nothing would get Americans to start paying attention and caring about foreign policy like forcing them to get involved and potentially risking their own lives. From the ruling class’s perspective, they’ve got a good thing going. They’d have to be truly desperate for manpower to fuck that up, and they’re not.

    I won’t say they won’t do it because I don’t want to underestimate their stupidity. But if they do decide to start bringing people in who don’t wanna be there, away from their bread and circuses, to get front row seats to all the horrors and atrocities the media doesn’t like talking about, and give them guns and training, well, all I can say is that’s a bold strategy, Cotton, let’s see if it pays off for them.





  • I’m very confused why you think my username would indicate that I’m a bot. I am, however, entirely unsurprised that you’d make that allegation without a shred of evidence, as evidence doesn’t really seem to be your thing.

    I picked it because I’d recently gotten into the Ace Attorney games, and also like to ground my beliefs in evidence and expect other to as well. For a while, I was channelling Phoenix Wright’s voice, as a bit, but then I got bored of it.

    If I am a bot, then whoever programmed me deserves a promotion, because I think I sound very human. But I’m not really sure how I could go about proving that I’m not a bot. Let’s see, punching Nazis is cool and you should do it, does that work? Ah, but maybe I’m a bot with safety restrictions turned off. Probably there’s nothing I could say to prove it to you, it’s utterly unfalsifiable.

    At that point, how do I know you’re not a bot? Maybe this whole thread full of bots! Oooooohhhhh~ spooky spooky. Can we return to reality now, please?