SoyViking [he/him]

There is a test suite. It tests that three lines are logged to the console. The tests all fail.

This is good for an American.

Good for an American is still really bad.

It happened in Denmark a few weeks ago. Someone flew a couple of drones near an airport and a military airstrip and everybody lost their shit.

All wood is edible if you have the correct attitude and determination

Study after study had shown that most tap water from a reasonably well-maintained public water supply has less microbes and pollutants than bottled water. Most of the time it also tastes better.

I think I agree with most of what you say. Sex work is horribly exploitative and most sex workers are driven into sex work from precarity.

On the other hand, who am I to tell someone who finds sex work to be the lesser evil compared to a grueling minimum wage job that they’re wrong?

I think it is important to be pro-sex worker. I think you can be this while acknowledging the harm of the sex industry. Personally I don’t think bans and cops are the right response. You can compare this to how doing drugs is obviously bad for you but sending cops to arrest people with substance abuse disorders is only making things worse.

My personal belief is that the best way forward is harm reduction. Both when it comes to the actual sex work (unionisation, labour safety standards, legal protections) but also when it comes to the social factors that promotes sex work. Nobody should be coerced into sex work because the alternative is poverty or mistreatment, any moral society should help people long before they get that desperate. That help should also include adequate and compassionate responses to substance abuse, such as providing patients with free, safe drugs so that they are not forced into crime or prostitution. I also think harm reduction includes social attitudes to sex work, it doesn’t make anything better that sex work is considered shameful and that terms for sex workers are used as misogynistic slurs.

I’m afraid that pushing for criminalisation acts as a bandaid that allows liberals to call it a day and avoid dealing with the harmful structural social factors that causes sex work and worse its outcomes

This year they didn’t give out a Nobel peace prize, they gave out a CIA employee of the month award

Hedgehog for scale

You’re giving the liberals too much credit by saying they admit that electoralism has never worked.

The liberal position is not only that electoralism works but that it is the only thing that works.

A closely related thing that has bothered me for quite some time is the way supposedly anti-racist liberals love to spread the trope of racists being “losers who have failed at life” and framing racism as a disease of the lower class.

It’s wrong on several levels. There are plenty of majority-ethnic poor people who are not racist. In fact, they are more likely to live and work among racialised people and be less susceptible to racist propaganda.

And at the other end of the scale, there are plenty of people who have been very successful under capitalism who hold racist beliefs. These people are a lot more dangerous than some shouting slurs and they are allowed to slip under the radar when every discussion about racism has to be about the racist “losers”.

The trope also exposes liberal class hatred. To the liberal mind, the most morally reprehensible thing you can be is not to be an exploiter, a parasite or an oppressor — it is to be poor.

Robot vacuum. We have pets and children and our floors used to be disgusting all the time. But then my partner had the smarts to buy a cheap robot vacuum and now our floors are mostly clean most of the time.

Cheap Chinese diamond grindstones. I can have razor sharp knives any time I want now, it makes cooking so much more enjoyable.

What is this sorcery?

Every time America does foreign policy someone gets bombed, every time China does foreign policy someone get a strongly worded letter.

As I see it one of the main impediments for the western left is the comprehensive miseducation of the working class. When the average worker thinks that the way to improve their lives is to work harder and become a capitalist themselves, that poor people deserve it, that bourgeois parliamentary politics is all politics there is, that communism always fails and that all societal ills are caused by the immigrants and the wokes, then organising a mass proletarian movement becomes impossible.

A leftist strategy that doesn’t somehow address the urgent need for basic education and ideological deprogramming on history, economics and politics, will never be able to succeed. Lenin had the newspaper, we need to find out what would be the similar tool in our day and age.

It’s true. I can’t afford the middle option but I’m doing the two others.

First victim of the general staff purges

I think the risk for you is neglible, especially if you are not going to visit the Great Satan. But I’m literally just some dude so don’t consider this expert advice.

Either way, your contribution here would be very welcome. I hope seeing you around more.

Terrorism has very little to do with the actual label and much more to do with who carries out the act and who they do it to.

Terrorism is nothing but a shorthand for violence (in the widest possible sense) that the ruling class dislikes.

It seems like a combination of racism (I bet they wouldn’t get worked up over two Norwegians communicating in their native language) and petty managerial tyranny.

Who could have thought that saying “fuck you and by the way my opponent is right” to voters would not be a winning electoral strategy