real this house has people in it hours

So how close to losing and being forced into an unconditional surrender does Ukraine need to be before Europe stops sending aid at their own huge expense?

And yet the United States continues to slide into fascism despite having elected Biden. What horrific Trump era policies did the Democrats even bother to repeal after they won in 2020 and held both the senate and the house?

They are still funding the construction of border wall segments. They never repealed the Republican tax cuts. They have done nothing about the concentration camps on the southern border for fuck’s sake. They never codified Roe v. Wade, we literally lost the right to abortions while Biden was in office. They could have stacked the supreme court but they didn’t.

The Democrats and the Republicans form an obfuscated one party system in the US. Republican leadership aggressively ramps up the oppression of marginalized people, then Democratic leadership does nothing to restore our rights nor proactively prevent the same thing from happening again. Instead they just use their time in office to suck all of the energy out of people’s movements that could actually effect change.

And much more importantly than all of that, Republicans and Democrats are virtually identically evil when it comes to foreign policy. When the US is dropping bombs on you and destroying your country, you’ll tend not to care whether it was a Red MAGA or Blue MAGA administration pulling the trigger.

In some specific cases it might be worthwhile to vote for Democrats in local elections where there exists much more leeway for politicians to stray from the party line, but voting for them in national elections is just lending your voice to legitimizing their bullshit good cop/bad cop routine they play with the Republicans.

Veritasium

Sucks about this guy, he used to actually make interesting pop-sci videos without mangling the concepts and conclusions too badly. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the bullshit other science popularizers like Michio Kaku were dreaming up at the time. But nowadays his videos all have these extremely vague clickbait titles. And much worse than that: he clearly shills tech from sponsored companies. Not with marked sponsorship segments, but with entire videos that are essentially long form advertisements with all of the disinformation marketing entails. Other than the word sponsor being highlighted and placed before the title, there is no indication for his audience that they shouldn’t view such sponsored videos as normal Veritasium videos.

The most blatant example of this was when he shilled for Waymo self driving ride share cars in an 18 minute video they sponsored. It was about two years ago, the title:

Why You Should Want Driverless Cars On Roads Now

Here’s a video detailing the ways in which Veritasium misleads his audience to produce corporate propaganda using the driverless car video as its main example. It’s an hour long, but I still recommend giving it a watch because it’s so thorough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc

I’m sure Veritasium does still make good, well researched and well intentioned videos, but after seeing the way he intentionally manipulates his audience in certain videos, I can’t help but be distrustful of everything he says elsewhere.

Yep, and it’s a lot more successful than you’d think. I’ve been using it for over a year now and I literally have not come across a sponsored video yet that hasn’t had its sponsored segments reported. Not even on videos that were uploaded literally 10 minutes ago. Highly recommend

Congrats, that already exists as a browser addon and it’s free. Look up sponsorblock.

Hard embedding ads works for live streams since you can’t know when exactly any given ad will start or end. If Youtube were to do this, it would be very trivial for sponsorblock to simply take on the role of adblocker since the community would be able to report the location of the ads.

I don’t have much experience with cocaine or stimulants in general, but I have gone through the ringer of opioid addiction. I’m five years clean now thanks to Buprenorphine.

From that horrific experience, my gut feeling is that there is no possible way sugar is anywhere near as addictive as opioids. At least not for anyone predisposed to enjoying opioids, of course. Going through opioid withdrawal is a horror I will wish on very few people. It has broken me before, and it has broken some of the strongest people I’ve ever known. I have never felt an incredible urge to steal from my own family to satisfy a sweet tooth, that’s for sure.

Please walk into the sea.

I really wish I could have a permanent record of everything every liberal has ever said so I could easily demonstrate how full of shit they are in 10 to 20 years when they all collectively deny ever having supported Israel through the Palestinian genocide.

Advertising. Literally all of it.

That’s such a great idea that I’m sure anyone who did this would end up charged with some type of fraud, unfortunately

Pay off my debt, buy a modest home, go back to school, never work a shit job for minimum wage ever again.

But I don’t need anywhere near 20,000,000 dollars a year to do that.

After some large donations to communist organizations, I’d put the remaining few million per year into buying commercial slots on every major TV network in the US. Then I’d create Jury Nullification PSAs and blast them over the airways continuously until the message sinks in universally that juries are under no obligation at all to respect the laws currently grinding marginalized people into dust.

Earth is the most hospitable planet to human life in the entire universe, and we seemingly can’t even put in the meager effort to keep it habitable. What makes you think we’ll be any better at making Mars habitable? Not just keeping it habitable as we’ve failed to do on Earth, but making it habitable in the first place.

Are you familiar with the sheer scale of destruction and death the United States has wrought on the rest of the world in its imperialist adventures? Nothing anywhere else in the modern day even comes close.

Someone on Hexbear once called this phenomenon “liberal solipsism”. I don’t remember who originally said it, but it’s a very apt description of the way western liberals seem to believe that their particular understanding of politics is secretly universal.

Not defending cigarette companies, but it really actually does suck that meth is illegal in all 50 states. The United States has the world’s largest prison population, it’s the most authoritarian country on the planet, and that is heavily facilitated by throwing people into prison for using drugs.

Hexbear is literally the only place on the entirety of the internet where I can be vulnerable in my posts without worry it’s going to be used in harassment against me by some reactionary freak.

r/chapotraphouse was one of the most accepting and inclusive subreddits of all time on reddit when it came to not punching down, and Hexbear is orders of magnitude better than even that.

I think it’s most to do with exactly how much wealth a person was born into.

Someone who is constantly on the verge of being homeless, possibly even starving, will very soon get desperate enough to do things they aren’t proud of to survive.

On the other hand, someone born into immense wealth will have very little understanding of people who are struggling. That’ll make it very hard for them to empathize. And with all that power, their sheer indifference will have them crushing the poor under their boots like ants. This is highly exacerbated by the fact that it is in their best interest to support policy that transfers wealth upwards.

I like that North Korea has turned the Truman Show into a real thing all for the sake of western tourists. It takes a serious dedication to the art of theater and acting to transform an entire country of 26 million people into an endless and infinitely deep stage production. They’ve built full skyscrapers just as back drops for their sets. They painstakingly carved and painted millions upon millions of wooden props to resemble food items such as fruit, vegetables, and grains to place in store sets ubiquitously since real food no longer exists there. The wide assortment of actors walking the streets and pretending to go to work and do their jobs, each of them with their own unique backstory handcrafted to resemble the life of a real person. The fact that they’ve maintained the illusions of functioning trains by using clever line of sight techniques to hide the dozens of stage crew that need to push the cars along the tracks.

This is a very impressive accomplishment once you consider 90% of the country is currently being held in concentration camps for disrespecting the Kim dynasty by not maintaining the same haircut as their supreme leader. That the remaining 10 percent can put on this kind of show is spectacular without any kind of monetary compensation or even food. Everyone there is starving to death, but they’ve managed to hide such inadequacies through industrious makeup and lighting techniques. The country’s dedication is so intense even that these actors are allowed to have their own haircuts so as to not hurt immersion.