corruption syphons for the rich

"the problem is crony capitalism, sweety"

I was listening to Sia's Chandelier (one of the best pop songs of all time IMO) recently and it got me thinking about how different pop culture discourse has become in a post-Qanon world, because people would go absolutely fucking insane if the music video for Chandelier and especially Elastic Heart were released today.

I remember watching these videos roughly ten years ago when they came out and thinking they were poignant and beautiful, and that Maddie Ziegler was incredibly expressive and talented. Nowadays I feel legit uncomfortable watching the very same piece of media. Sometimes it blows my mind how much the world changed after 2016.

TLW has one of my favorite VFX shots of all time, which is that part where the T-Rex headbutts a bus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVIS31ghLNQ

Jean-Baptiste's Bellend

Found out today about the copepods in NYC's tap water and this is legit one of the weirdest facts I've learned of in a very long time lmao imagine having tap water that's not vegan and kosher

That's true. Still, I feel just fine after all these years, and my lung capacity is way better than it used to be when I smoked cigs. That's not to say that it's perfectly safe, absolutely nobody should ever start vaping unless it's for harm reduction.

My guess is that if you get a larger system with better quality parts, it’s going to be safer generally than smaller/and more disposable oriented stuff.

I'm a former smoker, vaping for the last ten years on rebuildable tanks with box mods. I had been smoking cigarettes for about ten years before I made the switch. Anecdotally, I can say that my vapes feel way way way less harmful than cigarettes.

I will not touch a disposable vape, and I think they are absolutely a harmful product. This study shows that it's harmful for your body, but I didn't need to know this problem in order to identify that casually throwing away a device with a battery in it is a big no-no. Disposable vapes are incredibly wasteful products.

robot dick gang still toking on my VHS tape sized mod over here, I fucking hate disposable vapes

there's one key amputation that's still missing

Yeah this fucking sucks but I can't say I'm surprised.

A couple of months ago he went on an interview and just completely lost his shit, hearing voices and talking absolute nonsense... there was a lot of talk on twitter about how he had just lost the election right there and then, surely it would not be possible to recover from such a disastrous public appearance...

I remember laughing in Brazilian back then, doing my best impression of the "first time?" meme, wondering if people have not been paying attention at all for the past five years. The same "silver bullet" kind of moment happened over and over and over again with Bolsonaro (and Trump for that matter), and guess what? Nothing fucking happens. These right wing lunatics can shit themselves live on TV however much they want, nothing's going to dissuade their voters.

And I think there's a reason for that: nothing makes fucking sense anymore. People just want change, they just want to fix this "nameless" despair, this emptiness and lack of purpose and hope. People intuitively understand that neoliberalism has nothing to offer except for abject failure and slow but certain decay, unless you're rich. The thing is, they don't know what to call it. Half a century of propaganda as well as an education completely unconcerned with a critical, materialist assessment of history has made it all but impossible to even begin to understand what's going wrong with the world.

The left is under constant surveillance and is browbeaten back into hiding every time it grows strong or even tries to. The right has no such limitations, and has the freedom to come out and "explain" to the people their own twisted version of reality. An exploited, uninformed, desperate, frustrated and angry working class believes that explanation, after all they have nobody else to explain things.

I'm certainly oversimplifying things, but I think that's the reason why I very often see stuff like delivery guys riding motorcycles adorned with "God, Nation and Family"-style fash stickers. It's the only way I can see the most exploited sympathizing with the exploiter and voting for the people who openly say that the exploiter should exploit more.

I'm very afraid of what comes next for the Palestinian people, but regardless of what happens next, Israel has been dealt a fucking incredible blow to its international reputation. This is a country whose main export is highly sophisticated systems of oppression. If you have a nagging problem with some pesky minority, Israel is your "consultant" of choice.

Now here we are, watching as some of the most violently oppressed, downtrodden people in the entire world do deftly orchestrated commando raids on lawnmower engine powered paragliders, surprising literally the entire world. They have been training to do this under Israel's watch for god knows how long, and the IDF was none the wiser. How did they pull this off?

How can you still claim to develop the most sophisticated surveillance systems and to have the best-trained military in the world, when shit like this happens? How do you even recover from this? This is unprecedented, a paradigm shift, we're watching history in the making here.

Absolutely uncritical support for the heroic Palestinian efforts.