I thought Epstein introduced them?

In theory, if we all stopped working and spending, it would stop within days. The system is set up to make that extremely difficult, risky and painful, but in theory we could get change through overwhelming collective action.

The problem is that it isn’t just ancient history. There is a lot of fucked up shit happening today that is directly related to shit that’s been going on during our lifetimes. And that shit is all directly related to shit that has been happening over the last 100, 200, 300 years.

When I was a child in a large modern “liberal” city in the US, adults would get up in the morning to throw bricks at school buses of children because they didn’t want black children attending their neighborhood schools. This wasn’t in some tiny southern backwater where everyone was some convenient stereotype and this wasn’t 100 years ago. My parents lived through segregation. The last known child of enslaved black Americans died 4 years ago. There are people alive today whose grandparents were slaves.

People here like to pretend that “Lincoln freed the slaves and then it was all better and everyone needs to move on”. The fact of the matter is that the US is not very old, it’s been super fucked up since day one (really, since before day one), we have made a lot of progress but that progress is very recent and no where close to sufficient. No one is saying to punish random white people. But we should absolutely call bullshit when gaslighters try to tell us that there is no systemic racism in the US and knowing our recent history can help inform those conversations.

Also, if I “diminished…American white supremacist attitude” that’s a good thing, right? They should be diminished.

They are trying to say that you are ignoring the serious issues that the US has with white supremacy. Your comment obviously isn’t taking away any power from the fucking Nazis running the US government, and no one is claiming otherwise. In this context “diminishing” means “disregarding, downplaying, ignoring”. They are saying that you are pretending that it is not a real and serious issue.

For example, in the US, our president regularly says wildly racist things. His supporters then diminish the incidents, saying that the President isn’t racist and we’re just overreacting.

I’m not American, so I’ll just ignore the first sentence. The 2nd sentence is on another lavel, as I haven’t attacked black people, native people, or their ancestors or my feelings.

Yeah, so the original post is clearly about the US and may require some US specific context to understand. What you’re doing is equivalent to me going into a thread in “Ich el” and complaining that a German language joke about German society (that I don’t actually understand) is flawed for not including Brazil. Or going to a “Black Lives Matter “ protest with an “All Lives Matter “ sign.

Everyone is welcome in the conversation but when multiple people are telling you that you don’t understand what’s going on and are being offensive, take the hint and try listening more and talking less for a bit. We all know that there has been slavery in many different systems in many different countries. This post was not about that. Everyone isn’t knowledgeable enough to make insightful posts about that (myself included).

I happen to know enough about the US to assert: the US currently has some deeply fucked up racial issues including actual racists running our government. The original post is pointing out that we should not be surprised since this has been a deliberate policy since the founding of the country all the way through my parents teenage years. After over 400 years of white supremacist policy, we’ve had about 50 years of trying to not have actively, aggressively racist laws and now there are dickbags on major news networks claiming that “whITe mEn aRe tHe ReAl vIcTiMs”.

But individuals do have power to make Twitter less important. Well, maybe not Twitter, just because it’s 95% bots, but social media companies are usually only valuable if they have users. There are people who depend on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram for their business but 99% of users absolutely do not need to use those services. The analogy with recycling and climate fall flat because it takes many orders of magnitude more effort to avoid most/all plastics/packaging/fossil fuels than it does to just avoid IG/FB/X. The biggest barriers to getting rid of these shit companies is 1) too many people don’t realize how awful they are 2) too many people just don’t give a shit and 3) too many people are addicted to the dopamine hits from these trash sites.

Seriously, just don’t use them. When you’re presented with something that tries to force you to use them, say “sorry, I don’t use Meta products, do you have another way for me to get [the pop-up dates, the invite, etc]”

It’s rainy here today and my dogs aren’t happy about the whole walk situation. It’s nice to have a reminder to try and enjoy it.

I thought that the LAPD wasn’t supposed to be assisting ICE? All these LAPD assholes need to be fired. And the ICE agents need to be fired, out of a canon, into the sun.