And the voices. “Billy…”

“You fucked the whole thing up.”

“Billy, your time is up.”

“Your time… is up.”

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • ITT are a bunch of bad explanations; some are ok but here’s more detail:

    Imagine a transparent sheet of glass with words printed on it. Hold it up so you can read it. Now stand in front of a mirror. You can read the words, both in the mirror and on the glass in front of you. Neither set of words is flipped.

    Now imagine turning the glass around so the words face the mirror. As you rotate the glass 180 degrees horizontally, it flips around mirror image. Both in the glass in front of you, and in the mirror, you can now see a “mirror image” view of the text. But the mirror didn’t do anything – you did, when you chose to flip the glass around horizontally instead of vertically to face the mirror. If you’d tumbled it top over bottom to face the mirror, then the text wouldn’t have flipped left and right, but it would have flipped high and low.

    Your head is similar to the text, except you can’t see through it. But, if you rotated yourself to face away from the mirror, and your head was transparent, someone looking at you would see a not-mirror-image face of yours, both looking at them and in the mirror from the other side. Same as the text. Nothing is flipped. When you chose to spin yourself horizontally to face the mirror, instead of doing a headstand, you chose the transformation that will led to seeing the mirror image instead of the high-and-low flipped image of your face. If you face away from the mirror, and do a handstand instead of spinning horizontally, you’ll see a vertically flipped face with its left and right preserved.

    Hopefully that makes sense.




  • Three things are happening:

    1. It is easier to dismiss someone’s argument outright if you can put them in a box without needing to engage with anything they’re saying
    2. Historically and particularly in the 1990s, Democrats were sort of corporate dogshit, so a lot of the left got used to opposing them (often bringing up MLK’s “white moderates” speech)
    3. There are a lot of shills on Lemmy who really want Trump to get elected, and do it by attacking the Democrats “from the left” with various dishonest talking points, and if you point out that any of what they’re saying is objectively false, they will call you a centrist as a way of dismissing you (see point #1)

    The center isn’t automatically right (often in the American political spectrum it works out as the average of killing all the immgrants and free school lunch, which is not a happy central point to reach). But also, simply applying a label to someone and dismissing them doesn’t automatically mean you’re right either, no matter how popular it may be.


  • I feel a little weird about being your dancing monkey in terms of answering this question just because you singled me out and told me to, but sure:

    The platform is a pretty good start; there’s a lot in there about economic inequality and working on climate change which are two key priorities.

    Most urgent things I would add to that:

    • Peacekeeping in Israel + Palestine backed up by force of US troops and/or UN peacekeepers. Y’all (meaning Israel) have had your chance at running things and you failed. Be thankful you’re not in the dock in the Hague, now get the fuck out of Gaza; we start shooting in 6 hours if you’re still here
    • Attempts to tamper with the ability of people to vote, or for their vote to count like it’s supposed to (meaning having an impact in an unbiased and reasonable fashion), is a felony. Doesn’t matter if you were a guy with a gun outside a drop box, a congressperson trying to pass a law, or a Supreme Court justice.
    • Speaking of which, there are some justices we should be impeaching. If we win enough of congress we can put them on trial at least; we may not be able to remove them but fuckin’ hassle them. Absolutely nonstop. Make it a priority to make people’s lives miserable if they’re trying to destroy democracy. That is a dead serious statement.
    • Use the pre-Thatcher British solution for high rents: The government buys up a huge amount of property, rents it out at reasonable rates, which pierces the bubble so the rates from private landlords have to reduce also to stay competitive.

    There are some other big things but that all is the most urgent I think. Even that is a pretty fuckin big list to be able to do.

    Maybe something about internet propaganda, but I honestly don’t see a real clear government-involved solution to that that I have any confidence in, is the only reason it’s not on the list.