pjwestin

pjwestin , 1 day ago

I still get emails from my dormant account, and according to my Gmail, the sender is, "X (formerly Twitter)," so I don't think we're done with that yet.

pjwestin , 3 days ago

Yeah, I vote fatherverse, not only for the active mod but it has the best name.

pjwestin , 5 days ago

Arizona Iced Tea.

pjwestin , 4 days ago

I'm a Mucho Mango man myself, but they're all good choices.

pjwestin , 4 days ago

Oh no, did they? I haven't had one in a while...

pjwestin , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

This is a truly terrible take. If I run a restaurant, and it goes out of business, I don't get to blame my customers. If I ever want to run a successful restaurant, I have to look at my product, marketing, and service and figure out where I failed. If Biden loses, then the Dems need to look at where they failed; I'd start with the fact that they chose not to hold a primary when the majority of their own party didn't want Biden to be the candidate.

pjwestin , 5 days ago

You're right, it's not a good analogy. In this country, voting is not mandatory, election day isn't a holiday, and in many states, mail-in voting is not available and polling locations are sparse. Voting is a hardship for many Americans, especially lower income Americans. This isn't like asking someone to go to a restaurant; going to a restaurant is easier and has more tangible benefits.

However, my core point is the same. The most basic function of a political party is to get votes and win elections. If the party can't do that, the failure lies with the party, not the voters.

pjwestin , 5 days ago

...OK? Neither are restaurants.

pjwestin , 5 days ago

Let's fix your fixing of my analogy. Imagine the two restaurants you mentioned exist. Now imagine thinking the people who don't go out to eat are entitled.

And yeah, I know you're going to tell me that elections have consequences for everyone, whether they vote or not, but most people who don't vote don't see it that way. Sure, a small percentage of them are withholding their vote as a protest, but most of them are working class people that are barely getting by. They're not going waste what little free time they have voting for a candidate if they don't think it will help them. So stop trying to shame them into voting and give them something to vote for.

pjwestin , 5 days ago

Track 3 promises no death at all, but if collaborative action fails, Track 2 wins

Except this is not what happened in 2016. Even if every single Jill Stien voter had gone to Clinton, she still would have needed 50% of Gary Johnson's voters to win.. It's safe to say that most people voting for the Libertarian Party candidate would have picked Track 2.

pjwestin , 5 days ago

This post is citing data from 2016? So it's referencing something that didn't happen. Also, Bush beat Gore by 537 votes. Sure, if Nader hadn't run Gore would have won, but you could just as easily blame the loss on the Florida GOP, "accidently," purging thousands of legitimate voters by, "mistaking," them for felons, or on the Butterfly Ballot that caused an untold number of voters to select the wrong candidate. I guess my goal here lol is to point out when people are blaming their preferred candidate's loss on a mostly statistically insignificant portion of voters, and if you don't like hearing what other people have to say you don't have to post yknow.

pjwestin , 6 days ago

It really is astonishing how bad her political instincts are. A large majority of her party disapproves of what Israel is doing to Gaza, but she chooses now to call the protesters ignorant? A group of young progressives Biden will probably need in order to win? Who is this for?

Honestly, I'm not even mad about the stupid shit she says anymore, I'm fascinated. Does she know she's politically irrelevant going forward, so she's just on some sort of bitter, scorched-Earth tirade? Is the party encouraging her to say crap like this as some sort of testing ground for unpopular messaging? Or does she really just this detached from public opinion?

pjwestin , 9 days ago

More importantly, >!they just gave up on their relationship because one of them was leaving the country? For what, less than a year? After all that, they just threw it all away because they didn't want to deal with FaceTime for a couple of months? Bet they felt real fucking dumb when the pandemic hit.!<

pjwestin , 8 days ago

Well, millennials voted for Obama because he genuinely inspired hope. Then we saw how he governed and it killed our entire generation's sense of hope.

pjwestin , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

LOL, if that were answer, then Biden would be judged on the anti-drug legislation he spearheaded in '84, '86, and '88 that gave us expanded sentences for possession, civil asset forfeiture, and the racist sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine. He'd also be judged on the 1994 crime bill he co-authored that led to the largest increase in mass incarceration in 40 years. Oh, and let's not forget the time he teamed up with Robert Byrd, a Senator and Klansman, to pass anti-bussing legislation. Point is, Biden has benefited a lot from people listening to what he says and forgetting what he's done.

pjwestin , 7 days ago

I don't think you understand my point. You made a comment about how I should judge politicians on their actions, not their words. So I pointed out that Biden's actions before his election included anti-bussing legislation, several racist drug bills, and the worst expansion of the prison-industrial complex in history. I'm glad you're happy with Biden's performance as President, but you clearly ignored a lot of what he did as a Senator and listened to what he said as a presidential candidate (or you really like racist drug policies and mass incarceration).

pjwestin , 6 days ago

Your original comment:

Maybe the answer here is to pay more attention to what a politician does than what he says.

Your current comment:

I couldn't care less what Biden did in the 1970's.

Maybe the answer here is to not leave condescending replies to other people's comments if you're just going to completely contradict yourself and negate your own point.

pjwestin , 6 days ago

Dude what a politicians does NOW matters

Do you understand how insanely incoherent what you're saying is? You're saying that my mistake in voting for Obama was that I listened to what he said instead of paying attention to what he did. But I should only pay attention to what a politician doing NOW, not what they've done in the past. So I shouldn't just listen to what they say they'll do in the future, but I can't judge them based on what they've done in the past...so how am I supposed to pick a candidate? Use psychic powers to know what they're going to do in the future?!?!?!

Like, I could keep arguing about Biden; you're ignoring 20 additional years of racist legislation I brought up, and I didn't even get to his support for the Iraq War...but I don't even care about that. Explain how the hell your philosophy of ignoring what a candidate says and watching what they do while ignoring what they've done makes any kind of sense.

pjwestin , 6 days ago

OK, you're very clearly just avoiding all the things I say that you don't want to hear, and honestly, this feels like I'm just punching down now, so I'm just gonna stop. Good luck buddy.

pjwestin , 9 days ago

And so, after a 30 second speech, Mr. Hand turned the remaining hour of television into a free Town Hall for his opponent.

pjwestin , 12 days ago

Congratulations to the American electorate for maintaining the barest minimum standards! ...sorta...for now.

pjwestin , 13 days ago

Not exactly. This started yesterday, when a user accused mods on .ml of, "tankie censorship," (meaning censorship by tankies, not of tankies).
He also came with some pretty good receipts that appear to show .ml mods removing criticism of China that, whether you agree with it or not, didn't seem to violate any rules, and was well within the bounds of what most people would consider civil discourse. He also claims to have received bans from all of the .ml communities he'd ever participated in for pointing this bias out. It's possible he's presenting all of this with his own slant, but what he showed seems legit, and I'm not sure he could have provided more evidence without encouraging brigading.

This is now starting to snowball, with users starting to call for defederating from .ml. One .world user also posted on .cafe about Dessalines previous tankie comments, while another user has posted about finding replacements for the largest .ml communities.

So, saying what's happing on .world is anti-communist isn't accurate, as most the criticism has been anti-tankie. However, .world has a much higher level of liberals than most of Lemmy (they created a little echo chamber for themselves on Political Memes), and most of them are incapable or unwilling to understand the difference between a tankies and communists (or tankies and leftists...or tankies and criticism of Biden...). So, it will probably only be a matter of time before this group tries to blur the line between valid criticism of baised moderation from authoritarian apologists to general criticism of leftists.

So, tl;dr: .world isn't broadly anti-communist, but a large portion of the community is upset about what appears to be biased moderation from tankie .ml mods, and there is a small contingent of .world liberals who I'm sure will take this opportunity to bash anyone to their left.

pjwestin , 13 days ago

I really only started to see the meaning of tankie start sliding once I got to Lemmy, and it goes in two directions; tankies who swear they aren't tankies, they just have a lot of feelings about why the Uyghurs aren't being mistreated, and liberals who literally think tankie is a synonym for leftist. (Seriously, if Lemmy has one unforgivable sin, it's introducing the, "but her emails," crowd to the word tankie.) Personally, I don't care if I get tankies in my feed, but I'm not OK with instances that censor opinions they don't like (I mean, assuming they're not bigoted). Those mod logs are pretty damning, I'd like to hear from the .ml mods why they felt those weren't legitimate discourse.

Honestly, my real takeaway from this whole mess is that it's really dispelled the myth of federation as a silver bullet for all of social media's ills. Federation was sold to me as a solution to overly-large internet communities, since federation would stop single communities from becoming too powerful, and communities could simply be defederated if they didn't get along. Meanwhile, .world is whining that .ml's communities are too large and important to lose, while .ml is bitching that .world defederating would be egregious and unreasonable. The whole thing feels more like a flame war between some large subreddits than the glorious online utopia that I was told federation would bring us. Actually, it feels a lot like the schism that started when r/antiwork fell apart.

pjwestin , 14 days ago

He is. Check the Mod Logs. He can't go a week without getting a comment removed or a temporary ban. He's honestly one of the most toxic accounts on Lemmy.

pjwestin , 14 days ago

Yes, but I use it over Bing because Bing filters most of its news articles through MSN and then pressures you to download the app. Either way, both are giving me better results than Google at this point.

pjwestin , 14 days ago

The worst thing for a tankie like me was running here to get away from the insane msn-pilled discourse, finding some actual leftists, only to have have leredditors chase me down sayin' i am following them.

Uh...tankies and leftists are not the same thing (though the liberals on Political Memes don't seem to understand the difference). Tankies are authoritarian-apologists. It was coined by British communists who wanted to differentiate themselves from pro-Soviet communists (specifically, communists who were defending the Soviets sending tanks into Hungary). In the modern sense, it's used to describe communists who defend authoritarian socialist or communist states. If you don't feel compelled to justify Stalinism, the Tiananmen Square massacre, or the Uyghur genocide, you're probably not a tankie.

pjwestin , 14 days ago

I mean, fair enough, but I've never heard anyone use tankie as...well, not a pejorative. Like, I've never heard a liberal call themselves a, "libtard."

pjwestin , 15 days ago

Later on Tuesday, Biden appeared to tone down his criticism of Netanyahu. Asked whether Netanyahu was “playing politics with the war”, Biden said: “I don’t think so. He’s trying to work out a serious problem he has.”

Every time he starts to give something halfway close to a good response to something insane happening in Gaza, he walks it back within days.

pjwestin , 15 days ago

This is from Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. It is mind-numbingly stupid, makes a vague attempt at being educational, has the cheapest animation I've ever seen in a children's show, and it is basically crack for toddlers.

pjwestin , 15 days ago

Oh that's just the tip of the iceberg. David Tennant inexplicably has a cameo as a talking door that only has 5 lines. Dick Van Dyke appears in what will almost certainly be one of his last roles. Yet they also put something like this horrifying, cross-eyed elephant onscreen.
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/67504919-a102-4d2d-9b15-2bdf29941d0e.jpeg

pjwestin , 20 days ago

Yup. Sly Cooper still looks great as well.

pjwestin , 19 days ago

Trumps conviction is the best news we've had in months, if not years, and she ruined it in 48 hours.

pjwestin , 19 days ago

By turning a victory for Alvin Bragg and the criminal justice system into a fundraising opportunity for a smug, self-centered narcissist.

pjwestin , 19 days ago

Hillary Clinton makes every piece of news about Trump into an excuse to relitigate an election she lost due to her campaign's spectacular incompetence

Clinton chuds: wHy ArE YoU oBseSseD wItH hEr?!?!?

pjwestin , 19 days ago (edited 19 days ago)

I do. I also remember her campaign intentionally elevating Trump in the primaries and ignoring Michigan organizers who begged her campaign to focus on the rust belt. I think I'll reserve my sympathy for all the election officials, prosecutors, judges, jurors and even assault victims who became Trump's punching bags without helping him ascend to the highest office in the country through their own hubris, and not worry about what Clinton might feel she's owed.

pjwestin , 26 days ago

She didn't even really fall. Clinton gave her a job on her campaign immediately after she stepped down as DNC chair. She couldn't even wait until after the election to bail her out. She had to immediately give her a job she clearly made up for her (I think it was something like Honorary 50 State Outreach Chair), just to give Sanders voters a giant middle finger before the election.

pjwestin , 28 days ago

Patent abuse is certainly part of it. The taxpayers have also subsidized every major pharmaceutical in recent history, while the drug companies sell them back to us at exorbitant prices and keep 100% of the profits. It kinda feels like the problem is just...capitalism. It's almost like a profit driven system is antithetical to the goals of the healthcare industry.

pjwestin , 28 days ago

Also, I in 10 children are diagnosed with ADHD, but 1 in 20 have symptoms? Does that mean we're diagnosing a bunch of asymptomatic kids?

pjwestin , 29 days ago

The reason this meme works is that it's vague. If you zero in on a specific issue, you usually find the Dems helped drill the holes. Mass incarceration? Biden and Clinton led the charge on the largest expansion of prison-industrial complex in my lifetime. 2008 financial collapse? Clinton eliminated Glass-Steagall, which allowed banks to bundle and sell mortgages-backed securities. Iraq and Afghanistan? Bush may have started the wars, but Obama not only failed to end them, he created an unaccountable drone assassination program that killed thousands of civilians. Biden is rescheduling Marijuana, and that's great, but he also co-sponsored anti-drug legislation in '86 and '88 that gave us draconian mandatory minimums. Are we gonna pretend he didn't drill that hole?

Anyway, I'm not gonna sit here and pretend the parties are the same; the Republicans have been complete ghouls for my entire life, and now they're fascist ghouls. But let's not pretend that the Democrats are just well meaning idealists fighting against the Republicans and apathetic voters. They've done plenty to help sink the ship.

pjwestin , 30 days ago

On a similar note, I get irate when people call the Business Plot a conspiracy theory. It's just a conspiracy. We know it happened.

pjwestin , 30 days ago

I've been hearing that it's the most important election of my lifetime since at least 2008. The problem is that this kind of rhetoric becomes meaningless over time. The Democrats need to stop telling people it's the most important election of their lives and starting telling them why it's important. "The policies that Trump is advocating for are literally fascism, and the right-wing extremists in the Supreme Court won't stop him," carries a lot more weight than, "Hey, I know I say this a lot, but this is actually a once in a lifetime, super important election."

pjwestin , 30 days ago (edited 30 days ago)

LOL, name a single sitting Democrat that has said that. Every day I listen to left-leaning pundits avoid the word fascism or talk about Trump's batshit policies like he's just another Republican. When is Nancy Pelosi going to go on Meet the Press and say, "Donald Trump is preparing a fascist movement that will end American democracy?" It's great that Liberals and Leftists of Lemmy agree on this one, but somebody should tell the party leadership.

pjwestin , 1 month ago

A) There is no fucking way that camera costs so much that no one can get raises. B) It you're doing whip-its at work, you should probably be fired. C) If you can't figure out which one of your employees is high on whip-its, you probably shouldn't be running a business.

pjwestin , 30 days ago

Yeah, I've never actually done Whippets, but from what I understand it's like Salvia, where the high only lasts a few minutes but you're left kinda loopy for a while afterward. Also, anyone I've ever met who was a heavy user (like the kind of person who would need to do them in the walk-in to get through a shift) was pretty fried.

pjwestin , 1 month ago

Just to remind everyone, the issue is that we're funding a genocide. FFS, I don't want Trump to beat Biden either, but how warped and hollow is your worldview that you can look at kids getting their skulls cracked open for protesting a genocide and think, "Wow, look at those entitled single-issue voters." Truly a deranged take.

pjwestin , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Well, first of all, that is abso-fucking-lutely not my take, thanks. Secondly, if it's just about third party voters, why is that young person sitting front of tent? Could have gotten the anti-Biden point across with a Genocide Joe shirt. Could have really driven the third-party thing home with a Jill Stien shirt. But no, the artist depicted a white kid in a Palestinian keffiyeh, holding a Palestinian protest sign, and placed them in front of a tent. The artist is clearly pointing at the campus protesters, who've been on the receiving end of an extraordinary amount of state-sponsored violence for their activism, and saying, "look how unreasonable these people are."

pjwestin , 1 month ago

I'm on the left, but I'm far from a communist, much less an authoritarian one, and I 100% use lib or liberal as an insult. I think to most people younger than 50, Liberal refers to a certain type of Democratic voter. They'll hang a BLM sign in their window but support NIMBY policies that keep people of color out of their neighborhoods. They'll talk a good game about labor rights and unions, but still go to Starbucks and throw a shit-fit if their order is wrong. They cared very deeply about Iraq and Guantanamo when Bush was President, but stopped bringing it up once Obama was in office.

The Third Way Democrats of the 90s basically turned American Liberals into Neo-Liberals. I will still support them when I have to, since they hold all the levers of power over the only ostensibly progressive party in America, and not siding with them at this point basically ensures the rise of fascism, but I have no love for Liberals.

pjwestin , 1 month ago

Seriously, I'm begging you to learn what a Tankie is