editorially? yea there’s still investigative pieces that are worth reading on there sometimes

I use https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean and I almost never reach a paywall, not sure if there’s a chrome version

I dont understand where you found that in what I said

I dont care about the difference between “propagandized” and “idiot”. You attacked me instead of my argument.

Its not the hypothetical removal of the evil and waste of a system, it’d about the process of removing the undesired elements. The problem wasnt just with Brian Johnson was an interchangable empty suit, the problem is with the entire culture and system of incentives. Killing one bad person doesn’t do enough to fix things, targeting enough people to make the change that’s really needed will need a bureaucratic structure to actually get done, target selection, weapons supply, training, validation, paperwork. Very rare for breaucratically enabled violence to ever be good.

For healthcare in particular is pretty much is just as simple as nationalizating health insurance and have everything done by medicare (or state/local govt health plan) But targeted assassination doesn’t automatically translate into an act of congress.

Wow very convincing. thank you, directly calling me an idiot without addressing the core of my argument really has brought me over to your way of thinking

I very deliberately said “in general”, i did not say “in all cases whatsoever”.

For health insurance there is a replacement ready, the answer is to have Medicare do everything.

I didn’t make any arguements about this specific situation? Murder in general is bad

The problem is that there’s no clear endpoint of that thought process. The number of people that exact thought process applies to would require a level of violence that I doubt anybody sane wants.

Edit: to be more precise here. I’m leery about trying to apply the logic of individual self-defense to broader questions about social murder. The entire system is complicit, but if we go to burn the system down without a replacement ready we’ll end up sorrounded by nothing but ash and corpses

I agree is justified in many situations, the French revolution ain’t a good example for that, namely that it didn’t work in the long run with all the Napoleon-ing. The people most adept at violence, who will be most empowered by violence as normalized political tactic mostly don’t promote the interests of most people if they get into power. Napoleon and such

also every time there’s been prominent “propaganda of the deed” it’s backfired by inciting a HUGE state crackdown, Tsar Alexander II and William Mckinley come to mind though both were relative reformers, which would make this about target selection and not alienating potential allies rather than the use of the tactic in general

murder is in general bad, fed-posting is inadvisable

also there’s a broader boring argument about the dangers of violence being normalized as means of political change, but those arguments are boring

Fascists think they do

I can’t really imagine danger being particularly extreme for anyone other than trans people, for trans folk updating passports is likely a good idea. But keep in mind that blue states would still be relatively safe.

If shit truly gets to the point where it’s death squads and fascist street gangs, realistically there would not be anywhere in the world that would be safe.

I don’t think we need to be worried about full-blown civil war, but preparing for an increase in stochastic terrorism probably isn’t the worst idea.

truth is dead

Douchey rant?

new skill learned: “investigative journalism”

That doesn’t really respond to what I said

but it applies to voting, we can argue about the effectiveness of voting as a tactic but people who vote are more politically engaged than the type of person described in the quote

There are many people who vote, and do nothing else, and that is condemnible. But unless you have direct evidence that the quote originates with someone who explicitly denied the effectiveness of voting in totality I see no reason why the quote would not apply to forms of political advocacy you happen consider ineffective

I don’t particularly want to argue about the effectiveness of voting, beyond to say that I strongly disagree with any bright-line distinction between “electoralism” and whatever other strategies you would care to mention, and that EVERY successful movement (leftist or otherwise) that had the option had the ballot as part of their strategy.

but it applies to voting, we can argue about the effectiveness of voting as a tactic but people who vote are more politically engaged than the type of person described in the quote

An important aspect of the success of D&D/40k has been fan creations and lore explainers. A challenge for growing a creative commons (alternatives is that there isn’t a unified set of “cannon” stories for independent creators to make “TOP 10 WACKIEST THINGS IN [franchise]” which are the intellectual equivalent to baby food (which I don’t mean as an insult).

then again, d&d and 40k are popular because the companies that own them decided to let smaller creators do the work of reprocessing the decades worth of lore into easily consumable and marketable chunks. Both the small creators and the central company got to symbiotically feed off of the brand value of the other. Then begins the enshitification once the brand reaches the mainstream

The problem for less centrally controlled media isn’t just that there isn’t decades worth interconnected lore within one overarching franchise, it’s that stories that aren’t centrally controlled will mutate and be remixed too much to have the sort of symbiotic brand growth of 40k and d&d