He said they had told him that although it was a hate crime, it was “unlikely” officers could pursue it further.

Next sentence:

The Met confirmed to the BBC that officers had visited Mr Bromley about the incident and that although no arrests had been made, the force took “reports of hate crime seriously”.

Pick one.

Publicly traded companies blow my mind a little bit.

It’s not enough to make steady, consistent profits. Give out reliable quarterly dividends and make it so your investors make their money back plus a little extra over time. Free money is not enough for the ownership class.

Growth isn’t enough either. Buying something for X and selling it for 1.1X so you make money even without a dividend isn’t enough for the investor class.

You have to grow infinitely. You have to grow faster than everyone else. You have to beat the projections. Make your product smaller and shittier & sell it for the same price. Lay off 10% of your workforce after record profits to cut costs. Force ads and subscriptions and data mining into every possible space. Undercut your smaller competitors until they fold, then jack up your prices. Break the law, fuck over your workers, buy out politicians, move your production lines to countries with no labor laws.

Being publicly traded actively rewards evil and anti-human behavior.

The purpose of my jellybean thought exercise was to show that “I don’t know” and “I don’t believe” are not mutually exclusive. Basically:

I do not believe [x] != I believe [not x]

I don’t believe in String Theory. String Theory may be correct for all I know: I am not a physicist, and my understanding of String Theory is cursory at best.

Because I do not have enough evidence to warrant belief, I cannot say I believe in String Theory. But that same lack of understanding means I must also say I don’t believe that String Theory is false.

Say you have a jar full of jellybeans. We know that the number of whole jellybeans in the jar must be either even or odd.

If someone asks you if you believe the number of jellybeans in the jar is even, you can and should say “no” if you haven’t counted them or otherwise gathered any evidence to support that conclusion. To believe something is to say you feel it is more likely true than false, and you can’t say that about the given proposition.

Importantly, this does not mean you do believe the number of jellybeans is odd. The fact that one of those two things must be true does not mean you have to pick one to believe and one to disbelieve. It is perfectly rational to reserve belief either way until you have evidence one way or the other. You do not believe it’s even, nor do you believe it’s odd.

So, if we define “atheist” as “someone who does not believe in any gods”, I think you meet the definition of atheist. Just like the person in the above example does not believe the jellybeans are even & also does not believe they are odd, you don’t need to believe “there are no gods anywhere” to not believe “there is at least one god”.

Abstaining does less than nothing for the actual victims of the genocide in question. You think the dems are going to change their stance on Palestine because a bunch of leftists are withholding their votes? Most of their corporate donors are most likely either pro-Israel or don’t care. They’re going to decide it’s a safer play for them to pivot right to try and scoop up lukewarm centrist dipshits, guaranteed. Things get worse for women, immigrants, LGBT people, and the working class in general but hey! At least your hands are clean!

The way to effect electoral change that may actually have a snowballs chance in hell of helping Palestinians is to support anti-genocide reps in primaries and local elections. Get your city to pass ordinances boycotting Israeli products, accepting Palestinian refugees, and supporting international aid organizations. Even if your good local reps can’t make any of that happen, you’re getting more anti-genocide policy makers in the system who may run for higher offices next cycle.

Leftist organizing has always been from the ground up. If you want an anti-genocide president (which I fucking do too!), then work on creating the infrastructure to produce one instead of stomping your feet and insisting the Overton Window move your way ex nihilo.

Didn’t know worms could vote!

The big divide in the US is not so much between Republicans and Democrats as between people who invest and people who don’t. For a man of his means who is running for America’s second-highest office, Tim Walz is on the wrong side.

God forbid a leadership position go to someone not in the ownership class!

In 2022, 58 per cent of Americans owned stock, either directly or indirectly through mutual funds. Based on his 2019 financial disclosures and his 2022 tax filings, the Democratic vice presidential nominee is not one of them.

So? The average American, who has maybe a 401k and some options thru their company, still has more shared class interests with someone who owns no stocks whatsoever than with someone who doesn’t have to work for a living.

The rest of the article fails to load, but looking at the author’s other pieces, we see she thinks price gouging is a myth and that another recession might actually be a good thing. She’s either so out of touch she may as well be from outer space, a soulless corporate sellout, or intentionally writing ragebait with an economic coat of paint.

I feel you in a big way, but to be totally fair: corporations becoming states has probably trended towards the better from a zoomed-out perspective, and political leaders lying all the time has probably only become more visible than ever.

The entities that were doing all the colonialism for the past several hundred years have been private companies, and they did huge amounts of slavery and genocide. Blackwater is bad, but the East India Company was worse. This is not to say that things are good now, only that they aren’t like worse than they’ve ever been.

And I think the present day has a greater expectation of political leaders being accountable to the people they govern than most of history. Back in the days of monarchs and oligarchs, there was no mass media to tell everyone they were lying and no likely consequences for the liars even if there were.

Again, I empathize a huge amount with what you’ve said & I am also disappointed that the world we’ve created isn’t better than it is. I just personally think that the above two are trending in a more optimistic direction, even if they’re still objectively pretty bad.

Fifty-three percent of respondents hold a “very or somewhat” unfavorable view of the system, while 40 percent hold a “very or somewhat” favorable view.

I swear to God, you could ask “Do you enjoy being hit in the face with a hammer?” in a poll and 30% - 50% of my countrymen would answer “yes”. At least one third of this country lives in a completely different reality.

Well yeah. Who gives a fuck about a 2% increase in the GDP? Prices are high and wages are low.

Maybe not the best decision in the world.

HOWEVER:

1. Many DSA folks (at least in my local branch) are not happy with many of national’s decisions lately.

2. Fuck you if you’re looking down your nose at the DSA while the extent of your political involvement is only just voting every once in a while.

This was a tactical misstep, sure. But my local DSA is still out there showing up for protests and strikes and unions. They’re getting bills passed in through the city council and getting open socialists elected. If the DSA is the only leftist group near you and you let this blunder stop you from doing any real activism, you’re guilty of the exact same purity testing bullshit.

When you throw darts with the crossbow equipped, its special effect takes place. You just use the darts like you would any other throwing weapon. IIRC every shop should have at least a couple darts for sale.

1. Rape does not always involve physically overpowering someone. Someone may coerce someone else into sex with blackmail, lies, threats, or abuse of a position of power.

2. Erections are controlled by a person’s autonomic nervous system. A man can get hard even when he is not turned on or consenting to what is happening.

3. Not all rape involves a penis. A woman who sticks an object into a man without his consent is committing rape. Rape is about power and control over another person, and the rapist need not be directly stimulated for rape to occur.

Welcome to the club! I love my P1S. Biggest problem so far has been some squeaky pulleys, but a little bit of oil fixed that right up.

I’m glad I’m not the only one with that criticism. I enjoyed the first game so much more because of that.

They are mortal. They do what they do because they do not fear consequences.

This has been two statements of fact, with no implied conclusions or sub-text.

Silly me, I thought you were trying to make a picture of an animal with a gun!

The receiver is backwards and there are two ejection ports.

They’re a part of the rapidly expanding world of so-called less lethal weapons, named such as they are because they are ostensibly less likely to send you to the ancestors when used against you. These weapons come in many different varieties, ranging from “smaller” 9 mm rounds designed to be fired at a person’s legs or torso, to the much bigger, pop-can-sized 40 mm rounds that are designed to be “skip fired” by ricocheting off pavement or other hard surfaces towards their target (police historically do not do this, and simply fire at the target).

I do not for one second buy that they were “designed” to be bounced off the ground. It’s an idiotic concept from the get-go: it’s hard enough to aim a conventional firearm. Expecting any kind of accuracy from a ricochet fired by an untrained and easily frightened moron is a fever dream. Fucking no one expected rubber bullets to be bounced into people’s legs; it was always an excuse for pigs to shoot into crowds. The casualties are a feature, not a bug.

In the US, there is a history of white performers using blackface to play caricatures of black people, leaning hard on racist ethnic stereotypes. From Wikipedia:

The minstrel show, also called minstrelsy, was an American form of theater developed in the early 19th century.[1] The shows were performed by mostly white actors wearing blackface makeup for the purpose of comically portraying racial stereotypes of African Americans. There were also some African-American performers and black-only minstrel groups that formed and toured. Minstrel shows stereotyped blacks as dimwitted, lazy, buffoonish, cowardly, superstitious, and happy-go-lucky.[2][3] Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that depicted people specifically of African descent.