One of the first things I always consider with a law, or potential law, is “how hard is this to enforce and what would be likely to occur in order to enforce it?” I learned it from abortion laws because it’s important for swaying people who are morally opposed to abortion, but can still see that laws against abortion directly harm women’s health overall.

With driving under the influence, my understanding is one method is setting up checkpoints. Considering how deadly serious the consequences of drunk driving can be for everyone on the road, this seems fair, provided there’s no racial profiling or the like going on.

Some of the rest of it I assume can be caught with cameras, like at certain stop signs. However, might be tricky depending on the kind of road and how it tends to be, and whether the offense is considered to be not stopping at all or also slowing and continuing. To be clear, I think in 99% of cases, the safe thing to do is always to stop completely as you are supposed to. There can be edge cases where there is no traffic anyway and the design of the road is such that slowing down a lot gives you plenty of time to check. I don’t condone driving based on what you personally think will be safe, but the point is that it edges onto difference of letter of the law vs. preventing harm and if this is enforced purely on letter of the law without any consideration of harm done or lack of harm done, that can be a problem.

The using your phone, I’m not sure how they’d catch that. Maybe with certain cameras? I don’t know. It is probably about on par with drunk driving in terms of danger to everyone on the road, but it may be hard to enforce unless someone gets in an accident and there is evidence they were on their phone.

I don’t want to go through all of them, but those are some thoughts. Another thing to consider is, what is the enforcement like, historically, where you live. Is there a history of racial profiling, for example? Or of poor people being targeted? Is that where these anarchists are coming from?

The other thing about poor vs. not, is not so much about who is targeted and whether it’s legit as it is, what the penalty means for them. A poor person loses a lot more from a fine, they lose a lot more if they lose their main means of getting around. A rich person can just take the fine and (if they are losing their license too) hire someone to drive them around. In this context, the road is arguably safer either way, if the offense was a danger to others, but the end result is class stratified. The rich person will not be much inconvenienced by it, but the poor person’s life could be made significantly worse by it.

I’m in a similar kind of situation, early thirties, still living with parents. Without going into a bunch of personal detail, I will say for various reasons it has been difficult over the years to have done differently. Given the forum we’re on, I feel compelled to point out the larger context of a thing like this. I live in the US, for example, and given how many people are struggling, how bad rent is, how much of “people don’t want to work”, yet “we won’t give them jobs to work at, much less ones that pay a fair wage, so maybe we’re a little full of shit”… in that context, it shouldn’t be surprising that someone like me is a thing. I could view it as a source of shame and have plenty of times over the years, but is that being fair to me?

If I were actively refusing to take responsibility for things, refusing to contribute anything where I can, or generally being a combative problem for those I live with, at that point, I’d say yeah, go ahead and judge. But I’m not like that and you probably aren’t either, and I don’t know which country you live in, but if it’s anything like the US, it is a shameful system. I still remember all the stuff about evictions that was going on during the height of covid. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the stories I’ve read about homeless encampments being bulldozed. The capitalist treatment is brutal and the people who do “succeed” in the stereotypical sense of stable job and family are often struggling even within their “success”, whether because of finances or relationships issues or health problems.

So there is how people perceive you, or potentially perceive you, and then there is who you actually are, in context. And sometimes the people who are judging you are not in any position to judge in the first place. There are liberals and conservatives alike who would no doubt judge me for my political views, but I have strong conviction about them and so they can shove it. I don’t have “conviction” about my housing and finances situation and would rather it be different, so it’s easy to feel insecure about it, but that’s the difference, is how vulnerable I feel and how inclined I am already to be down on myself about it, not that others are suddenly more qualified to judge me about it compared to my political views.

Thought I had about liberal individualism: It’s well-illustrated by the scene from the movie Office Space, where the boss is chastising the employee about her flair and people who do the “bare minimum.” Because of policy, he can’t just tell her to wear more flair than the minimum, but he still very much wants her to do so, so rather than getting the policy changed (which would be “restrictive” and go against the concept of “being yourself”), he tries to convince her through repeated shaming and browbeating and talking around it. The whole thing centers around him trying to convince her that she wants to be someone who wears more flair and comes off very passive-aggressive because it has no real understanding or respect for her as a person, only this sort of facade of respect that is grudgingly given.

I think it also fits well with the notion about “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.” Because it helps show how underneath liberal individualism, there is this aggressive desire for conformity and adherence to a strict way of being. But the norms of liberalism say you’re not supposed to directly pursue that, lest you become “authoritarian”, so people find passive-aggressive ways to pursue it instead. End result being you get this confused cocktail of mixed messages, where you’re simultaneously being told you should live your life how you want to live it, while also being told you better only live it within a very narrow framework.

Terrorist state of the world that accuses everyone else of being terrorists.

Like imagine if this story was about Russia or something, the US would be saying forcible regime change is needed. The US behaves for real like the terrorist caricatures in their atrocity propaganda about other countries.

I only read the title at first and thought this was a metaphorical analysis of US foreign policy lol.

“Don’t you dare, material conditions! If I catch you doing stuff, I’m gonna be so mad!”

Yeah, that’s fair, though it seems like they’re more so dropping the facade under Trump. This isn’t exactly a covert action or taking the time to manufacture consent in the power structure, instead is Trump blasting stuff out on social media after just doing it.

So I know US “checks and balances” are kind of a joke and US laws aren’t exactly famous for being humanitarian in the first place, but is this even legal under US law? My understanding is congress voted for the infamous “Iraq war” and congress is supposed to be consulted for going to war, and has not been consulted for Iran. This action taken seems to be effectively an informal declaration of war. I don’t see how else one could interpret it. No matter what Trump posts on the internet, you can’t just bomb someone and then say you want peace and no consequences. And that’s on top of the fact that he obviously doesn’t want peace and neither does israel.

Not that it’s really a surprise, considering Trump behaves like the other branches of government don’t exist. But I guess what I’m getting at is, even at basement level US standards, this seems to be a violation of its own laws.

DARVO. So, so, so much DARVO. Endless DARVO and victimhood is the entire zionist media strategy. Zero shame.

Even if Iran were losing, it would make no sense for them to ever surrender. The zionist entity would, if it could, hound them and kill them like it has done with Palestine for decades, regardless of whether Iran is a sovereign state officially fighting back. The zionist entity has no conception of peace and neither does its master, the US, which has been in endless wars for decades after having been founded on genociding its indigenous population.

People joke in a self-effacing way about “leftist infighting”, but this kind of stuff is a good reminder that rightists do plenty of infighting of their own. USian rightists are, after all, a bunch of “survival of the fittest”, competition obsessed people. If memory serves, it’s actually kind of abnormal that so many of them rallied around Trump, without tearing each other apart about it. But this may be a sign that even rightists are starting to tire of the Trump cult. Tucker sidesteps on criticizing Trump directly, but is perfectly happy to humiliate him through Cruz. What it makes me suspect is that some of these rightists see Trump as a “useful idiot”, but don’t want to show their disdain directly for fear of angering his supporters or messing with the coalition somehow, so now it’s leaking out on one of his sycophants.

I bet Tucker would love to do this to Trump.

I don’t think this kind of sycophant understands the implications of using a nuke. This is not, in fact, 1945. The only reason the US got away with nukes in 1945 is because 1) the war was about to end anyway and 2) people did not have a suitable armed response for such an armageddon weapon, nor a very good understanding of them.

It is decades since, with plenty of nuclear proliferation across the globe. The idea of breaching that has no resemblance to Truman in 1945. Except for maybe that Truman was very racist and so is Trump.

Don’t have much to say about Iran cause fog of war and not knowing much about what’s going on and all. But damn, it is hard not to have some anxiety about it. May this be a turning point for liberation from the colonizer in the region. 🙏

Why did you respond to me 3 different times to say variations on the same thing? All you show is that you’re the one who is obsessed with streamer personalities, while you write nonsense putting me in a box of caring about this way more than I ever have. My whole thing is just accurately assessing what people are, instead of doing shitty proclamations that trivialize what they are. It’s an important part of anti-imperialism and hey, look at that, it’s very relevant in this fucking thread of all things. A thread about Iran, who is far from a socialist utopia, but still deserves support for their anti-imperialist contributions in the region and for their basic efforts in self-determination and not being destroyed by the zionist colonizer. Perspective matters and so does context, and it will continue to no matter how much you browbeat.

I really have to remind myself sometimes that just cause “scientific socialism” has scientific thought and practice in it, it doesn’t magically make people any less prone to common human pettiness and errors in thinking, especially if they didn’t grow up with it and are just now learning the basics. Else my expectations will be unrealistically high, for others or for myself, and I’ll just get upset.

The context does matter. Even from 42 seconds of it (which is still out of context, since it shows nothing of what lead to him saying that), it syncs up almost exactly with the guesswork analysis I wrote.

3.) You people have spent years insisting that the country providing all the support to the resistance & its main geopolitical allies should be slathered with the most unhinged criticism which can be drawn from Western sources, while the content creators aggregating alternative media drivel to you must be entirely immune from all criticism of their beliefs or consequences from promoting crypto-Zionist Azov whitewashing rapists

What in the world even is this. I included criticism of Hasan in my post, pointing out that he’s probably falling for the “China is also imperialist” narrative. This paragraph is itself unhinged criticism of others, completely divorced from what I actually said.

That quote def looks taken out of context, like many things are that he says. I mean, you don’t have to like him, I hardly ever have watched him myself. But ffs, this is such a goofy, vague jab that trivializes all of the rest of what he has done and said over years. If that quote is real, the likelihood based on what I’ve seen is he’s a bit of an ultra and is falling for the “China is also imperialist” narrative in the context of that quote, and saying that if he’s going to be living under the shadow of an empire, he’d rather it be one that is (seemingly) less “conservative” in its laws for individuals. Though personally I think any such comparison is rather confused, as the US’s “liberties” are highly conditional and face a lot of reaction. Anyway, that’s all I can figure, since you provided no context for it.

But the implication of it at face value that he actively wants US hegemony, I’m pretty confident is pure nonsense. It is hard to pin down what he is exactly in substance (not what he calls himself, that matters little), but it seems clear that he is at the very least anti-imperialist.

Generative AI is the one people tend to hate, but it’s still not a grift; more like grifters are ancillary to it. Grifters try to jump on it like they jump on anything they can hype and make a quick buck, but the funny thing about it is if anyone is actually making easy money that way, it’s the ones who are popping up as fast businesses providing a frontend for an already-existing model (the cheapest way to attempt profiting). But even some of these crash and burn because they do a free tier to get users and attempt the “grow until you’re big then majorly monetize” thing, but can’t sustain this due to the high costs of generative AI and bleed investor money. And the major corps doing generative AI? They’re just burning money like it’s going out of style, training massive models with massive datasets.

So (in the western AI context, can’t speak for China) it’s a capitalist style race, but it’s more of a race to see who can position themself as market leader than it is some kind of easy cash infusion.

It’s not like crypto or NFTs where it can be called an actual scam. Generative AI does do something that can be functionally useful and/or entertaining. It’s just complicated because beyond a baseline of it not being total crap, there all kinds of questions about where it is actually useful and for what, and the ethics of pushing it in this or that area by whom.

Not really in this context. Your “white” status can evaporate in the moment if you are defying the will of white supremacy. Saw it plenty in 2020 protests. Which incidentally, is when this article was first published:

Editor’s Note (6/11/25): We are republishing this piece from 2020 in light of the recent protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles.

Bees I get, but Ants I don’t understand that one. I’ve long thought of them as a decent analogy for settlers, considering they seem to spread endlessly with no regard for what is already there and they take something akin to slaves: https://blog.entomologist.net/do-ants-hold-other-insects-as-slaves.html