No, they do. They don’t die, but they lose their current life

See, I came prepared. I actually knew what the Mona Lisa looked like already

And so when I came to see the Mona Lisa, I came to see the madness surrounding a tiny, kind of mid painting

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Yep, pretty much. Although there’s a noticable lack of opposition from Democratic leadership… There’s a lot of “we’re going to watch the situation closely”

It’s not a sure thing, but it’s worrisome

Weirdly enough, the military might be one of the biggest sources of resistance. Watching them walk instead of march in the parade was very interesting… So was their choice in music.

We’re in the bizzaro timeline for sure

I didn’t look past that, it’s the whole point

It’s a shitty people becoming better. But it’s a people trying to be better. It’s people who believe they are better, and when it’s pointed out to them that they’re actually assholes they’re humbled enough to listen to the person calling them out. They glorified them as wise men blessed by their god

They were proud of themselves for treating their slaves better than the civilizations around them, they prided themselves on being conflicted about going to war. These are good things… But you’re not supposed to copy them. You’re not supposed to go back.

You’re supposed to also strive to be better

Well, just to follow up…

US President Donald Trump said in a Sunday interview wih ABC News that the United States might get involved in the Iran-Israel conflict and expressed openness to having Russian President Vladimir Putin act as a mediator.

Huh… Yeah, that makes sense.

I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I think you dropped this: .com.ru

No no no… It’s not democracy, it’s abstraction

Democracy would be a worker owned business. Where the people who do the thing decide how it should be done. And it’s great, it makes sense, it’s ethical, and the decisions are made democratically by the most informed people

Stock markets don’t work like that. At one point you had voting, but now it’s all speculation and layers of abstraction

Do you think the shareholders know or care how the business is being run? No, they just want line go up, because they’ve got a dozen other places to shift the money to if it’s not going up fast enough

They don’t know or care if the company is dumping chemicals into the lake until the rest of us do. They don’t know that the cars are dangerous, but it was cheaper to set aside money for damages.

They aren’t part of the company at all - they have no responsibility for what the company does. They have no control… Except, collectively. Maybe they could join together to replace a board member or sell to lower the price negligably. And the board has a responsibility to the shareholders. And the CEO just listens to the same consultant the shareholders do

So really, it’s no one’s fault.

Chick fila donates to hate groups, but they also front the money for new franchise owners. Costco pays well. Arizona iced tea doesn’t raise their prices because they have no debt and the guy says he’s making enough money.

Yes, you’re going to have shit heads and good people… But as bad as my pillow guy is I’d be shocked if he was knowingly poisoning people… That usually weighs on a person’s conscience, but not so much if they can diffuse the responsibility

It made me a leftist lol.

The old testament is all about a people who keep fucking up by adopting the shitty practices of the people around them, then being shamed into being better for a while. And then the person who called them out dies or leaves… But if they stay they get too comfortable with power and abuse it. Some of them are assholes the whole way through… It’s about history and notable figures, it’s not aspirational at all

Then the gospels are a how to guide to living under an occupying state.

No temples, we just share meals now. No relics, water is holy now. No leaders, we all serve each other. No money, no stock piles, no rich people - let the tax man have nothing to take. No open resistance to invite a crackdown, instead we’re going to just be really, really obnoxious to deal with through third path shit

It worked so well Rome straight up massacred the communes to stop the spread, and it was still spreading underground until Constantine slapped Jesus branding on the Roman religion.

Finally, I’m not sure what Revelations is about, but it has cool imagery

The Bible really hits different when you don’t have someone explaining each passage one by one going “oh, that wasn’t mutual aid, that was magic”

I tore into someone about how I don’t respect economics (specifically, micro and macro that they push like a religion) because it’s constantly disproven.

And for how they treat you like a child and tell you “you just don’t understand economics” whenever you point out a contradiction, which they obviously then proceeded to do several times instead of answering any of my points

So after that, they apparently went through my old posts to try to poke holes in my other arguments - it wasn’t until the third or fourth one when I realized it was the same username, which I found deeply funny

I mean… You could probably disperse any amount, but a lot of people are going to die from crowd crush

That tends to upset people. One or two picked off by the cops and beaten to death? They were just having fun, they can spin that as an outlier and victim blame

Hundreds trampled to death because you made a full block of people try to run screaming all at once? It’s a lot harder to spin or hide that

Yes. His brain is soup. It’s a real clam chowder situation.

Pressure him to act, as impulsively as possible

Trump genuinely doesn’t like violence. He doesn’t like war. If you give it time for others to convince him, he’ll support anything

Ignore it all you like, sadly it will affect you too

She married into it, that’s how she inherited it. I’m not even making a moral stance on exploitation - I’m saying that to be a billionaire, to continue to exist as one, you become an avatar for your hoard

Every sane billionaire is living like a normal person. They’re working the job they love, living in a nice but practical house, and no one (sometimes not even their spouse or children) knows their bank account is endless

I’m not dying on a hill for her or against her. She’s free to do all the good things she likes. I hope she does. I’m not going to interrupt someone doing something I agree with

But she’s still a fucking dragon. Make no mistake. Let her do all the good things in the world, but if the winds change and her hoard is threatened she’ll turn on you. Never forget that

I’m not writing off nonviolent means - I’m a strong believer in the third path. But you have to understand what you’re doing… It is not enough to hold signs and march. It matters where and how you march, when you march, and the physical consequences of you marching

Is persuasion violence? Sometimes. When there’s any degree of coercion, it’s violence

You need the coercion. You need to wake people the fuck up and make them pay attention.

They want to live their lives and ignore the scary reality of this takeover of society. They want to stop watching the news. I understand it… This shit is terrifying to live through. I feel the urge to put my head in the sand too

We cannot let them. And that is coercion. That is violence… Just a far better kind of violence

I mean, here’s the start of a NYT article

Israel’s overnight missile strike against Iran divided Congress, drawing praise and strong support from members of both parties, but some lawmakers, most of them Democrats, expressed concern about regional instability and the risk the United States might be drawn directly into the conflict.

Many members of Congress were quick to cheer Israel’s actions and framed them as a justified response to Tehran’s refusal to abandon its ambition to obtain nuclear weapons. Others, including several leading Democrats, urged restraint, warning about the potential for escalation.

And later on

“There is no circumstance where Iran can be permitted to become a nuclear power,” Mr. Jeffries said in a statement, adding an urgent call for international leaders to “find a rigorous diplomatic path forward and avoid any situation where U.S. troops are put in harm’s way.”

Search is basically unusable at this point, but here’s fetterman calling for strikes a couple months back, he’s been consistently one of the loudest

My point is, no one is explicitly saying we should go to war with Iran… But there’s a lot of talk of strikes. No one is saying we should give Israel troops… Just “everything they need, intelligence, arms, everything”

What I’m hearing is a whole lot of not ruling out troops on the ground. From both parties, with not nearly enough resistance

I do hope you’re right, but I’m getting very concerned. Not so much on the draft (I think we’re a good ways off from there) but from us going to war, and if that goes well doing it again.

If it happens and the resistance isn’t strong enough… Well, authoritarians often use war to stay in power

They can’t have nukes, they’re close to having nukes, general nuke hysteria, “we couldn’t make a deal”, going over the history of Iran and Israel (obviously not mentioning how Israel blew up their negotiator just now or Iran’s attempts to deescalate and normalize global relations for years now), reminding everyone Iran sponsors terrorist groups, etc etc

I mean there’s congress members calling for us to launch an attack on them explicitly, some wanted us to launch the first strike on the enrichment facilities while we were still trying to make a deal

We’re in the “feel out the room” stage, they’ve had a carrier group in the area since like January. The next stage is announcing they’ve already attacked

We don’t have an active draft in that they’re not drafting people, but I think having the ability to call a draft is generally what people mean by draft

And I certainly hope you’re right… They’re trying to drum up support for war with Iran, and if that goes ok for them we’re not going to have less war

Yes. Unambigiously.

What would you rather have, one person with a ton of power making decisions, or abstract it out over a group and diffuse all responsibility?

Both are bad, but one of them has a (likely not morally great) person at the top, the other has lots of robber barons sharing ownership and collectively demanding line go up

A person isn’t usually dumb enough to fire half their workforce, because they know their bread and butter comes from that workforce. A consulting company advising the business and shareholders at the same time can easily do such stupidity for short term profits