Having worked on a programs that automatically generate and process data from excel spreadsheets for a large company, I shuddered when you said that.

This post literally reminded me I had my WiFi turned off and that I needed to turn it back on, thank you stranger.

My point wasn’t that attempting to gain political power was not a necessary part of swaying the political landscape, it was that it should not be the goal. More over, why the all out rejection of mutual aid on the parties part? As you stated mutual aid is good as a means of charity, but they rejected the ideal wholely on the lack of conversion. Yet again, to me that is evidence the goal is not betterment, it is political power. Does the party think that the only people who diserve betterment are party members? That is, as stated before, a sign of being no better than the Democrat or Republican parties in my eye. I reject In and out crowd poltics no matter who the peddler is.

I mean just reading through the first part of the article, it is pretty damning that they think mutual aid doesn’t work because it doesn’t convert enough people to due paying memebers. If the goal isn’t the betterment of people, but of furthering political power, then you are no better then the Democrats or Republicans.

Sorry some of us have empathy. You ever been in a room with someone dying an early death? Also thinking something is invalid because of spelling mistakes is incredibly childish.

No one is admitting defeat, they are just telling you to stop focusing in on the symptoms and start focusing in the problem. You want to address drug misuse problems in western society? Start by addressing the problems that actually highly correlated with it. Help for unhoused persons. Better mental health systems. Those two things alone could curb a huge majority of drug misuse. If you take care of the symptoms then the problem will be mostly solved without need for any criminalization, be it criminalizing supply or demand. For the rest of people I think more funding of rehabilitation and drug education (and no, just telling people to abstain from drugs is not good education, just like abstinence is not good sex education).

I’m so sick of this “nOtHiNg is fReE” retort. Yeah, no shit it isn’t. Most of us are aware of that. Like others have said, what we mean is taxes should be the means by which we pay for education. Taxes paying for education is not utopian. It exists as a means for paying for education in the USA already, K-12. I personally don’t think it is a stretch to change higher education to a tax drive model. Even in a world where it is “free” for the students there will still be people who don’t go, so it’s not like we have to collect taxes to account for all persons. College is not for everyone. Also if you try to use current college tuition as an excuse for it costing the tax payers too much, I don’t want to hear it. It is already well established that higher education costs have balloned faster that other products and services in the market and I think that is a symptom of the stupid profit models of modern universities and colleges. From personal experience at university, you get treated like a line item on there accounting sheets rather than a student and that alone is a huge factor in the enshittification of higher education.

Of course most of us don’t love it. A lot of us live in places where, due to concepts like gerrymandering, we have no political choice, so people have to resort to stuff like this. We love that people are fighting back, not that it has to be this way.

Something that always gets me is when people lump in anti-religion with these others. Reglion in any country with freedom of religion is a choice, these other things are not. Someone doesn’t choose to be a particular ethnic group. Someone doesn’t choose to be disabled. People don’t choose to be gay or have gender dysphoria People do choose to believe in things that I think are ridiculous and saying that I cannot call that out is just religious people saying you can’t call them out. If you can tell me I am burning in hell because I don’t believe in your pie man in the sky then I can tell you that you are stupid for believing in a pie man in the sky and comment on absurd actions that are caused by those beliefs.

Illegal according to who?

The US? Why would China care, they are their own country with their own laws.

International courts? Who is enforcing those judgments?

If you do, please know that it is possible the people at the booth are just low level employees with no say in the corporate policy and while these companies do deserve your ire, these individuals don’t deserve you yelling or screaming. By all means let them know your opinion and tell them that version is not welcome at the parade, but don’t attack or harass the employees.