damn tankie!!! lol

it’s more fun for me over here. lol

the wolf is right

i used to answer honestly like because this and i never understood; and still don’t (i’m on the spectrum); why some people got angry/frustrated and it almost always eventually germinated into a full blown fire-this-asshole-already movement in the places i worked at until my therapist made me aware that people don’t really expect a true answer and will only accept certain responses.

i call it the social handshake now and i allot an extra 10 minutes every single time i schedule a work meeting an wait to hear certain key words/phrases before continuing on for the actual reason why i scheduled the meeting. lol

my old managers used to call it “being productive” and i’ve been catching myself saying it lately.

it makes me feel like it need to wash our my mouth with soap. :p

is the point of this comic to express how a single point of failure can bring a system down and the dns here definitely feels like a single point.

pure grade colOmbian shit! lol

why wait; i’m doing them now. lol

i suspect that “messaging” only works if you’re sufficiently conservative.

liberals and leftists alike agree (to different levels) that conservatives; especially maga; are less educated and entitled and that’s why easy messaging slogans like “stop the steal” and “there are only 2 genders” works so well for them since it doesn’t require them to get off their asses to do sufficientlyvigorous research to educate themselves on how that messaging oversimplifies the issue.

also, liberals complain that the democratic party needs to improve it’s messaging to broaden their appeal to american voters. the problem with this seems to be that that american voters share some degree of academic laziness when it comes to understanding the issues, but they’re still generally more educated than maga so slogans don’t work as well. you can see examples of this over and over again on social media when people complain that nobody “reads beyond the headlines.”

i’m learning that one of the key differences between leftists and liberals is the effort to self-educate with ANY kind of academic rigor (ie more than google searches) and doing so enables them to see past any sort of messaging and that most of the messaging that has been successfully adopted has been created by people with with a political agenda in mind.

i think that pushing the democrats to improve their messaging is a misdirection because any messaging for liberals is going to automatically contradict the education any better educated crowd (compared to maga) has received.

i also think that the biggest barrier for any liberal to understand why they’re stuck in neo-liberal fascist late-stage capitalist world is doing their own research with SOME kind of academic rigor since it take A LOT of effort to not only change the way most of us have been taught to live, but also been educated and inculcated since birth.

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party… and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.

— Gore Vidal

part of me wishes i hadn’t read through this because the way you’re taught to read-between-the-lines in any literature in the west combined with the american narrative of chinese authoritarianism that all of us have been swallowing since birth makes some of the wording read like copy-pastes from some propaganda that you would expect to encounter from a dystopian novel like 1984.

these in particular are cringe worthy::

Nearly 60,000 participants attended the sessions, including … susceptible individuals aged 16-45 …

Director Abduwaiiti actively guided them to bear in mind the General Secretary’s instructions, focusing on the overarching goal of social stability and lasting peace. He emphasized taking the lead in four areas: loving the country and its people, enhancing religious knowledge, abiding by laws and regulations, and resisting extremism.

Subsequently, two inmates took the stage to share their personal stories of repentance, recounting their journey of remorse.

the entire basis of 60,000 people willing taking in a lecture from government officials also sounds suspicious AF to westerners. we popular regard anyone willingly doing so as subversively intellectual or socially bizarre in some way because it’s assumed that any “normal person” would naturally rather pursue something more entertaining if they’re not coerced to do so otherwise.

this is a bit of cultural double standard because all western cultures universally regard these sorts of lectures as fundamental and important; but at the same time we popularly only expect people with an agenda or “odd balls” to engage with it willingly.

it’s pretty clear to me that there’s a cultural disconnect between westerners and the chinese; with the latter exhibiting cultural norms so lofty that westerners regard it as unrealistic or unachievable and that makes the entire episode seem suspicious to us and now i think i can now understand how the “Uyghur genocide” propaganda took root.

i wish he did that 25 years ago; this world would be a better state if he had.

it’s missing the words “authoritarian” and “dictator” lol

my own family is a microcosm of this: half of us are white passing and that half married white people, so now they’ve voting maga and somehow refuse to believe that their own mexican heritage and surnames won’t have any impact on how they’ll be treated after they’re done with the rest of us brown people. it gets much worse when you consider that they have closeted queer children/grandchildren; they’ve put in efforts to eschew the customs that we all grew up with; and even one of them still isn’t an american citizen.

the in/out-crowd mindset is also infectious; my parents stayed true to their leftist/liberal political leanings until my white passing siblings were able to influence them w the relative affluence afforded from my siblings’ small business owning in-laws. it took a come to jesus talk with my mother to convince her not to vote for trump in 2016 and it was a lost cause for my father; both told me that we’re no longer mexican because we’re “better off” than my cousins/aunts/uncles.

last xmas was the feather that broke the camel’s back for me: my siblings’ abandonment of our xmas customs allowed me to visit those cousins/aunts/uncles (who were not at all white passing) and the main topic of discussion was how crazy republicans have gotten and how white people are becoming that way too; meanwhile i had to learn the hard way w my sister that night that these subjects are “not appreciated” with my immediate family and part of me feels stupid/slow for not picking up on it as quickly as my siblings did.

now i’m able to recognize that my brown siblings have been using their in-laws living in latin-america as an excuse for not visiting for holidays in the last decade+ and i’m going to have to cook up an excuse of my own since i’m no longer married. lol

npr did a short segment a few years ago of people with smart homes that had problems like this, water stopped running; lights wouldn’t turn on; people forgot passwords to security systems and entry ways.

some things shouldn’t be connected like this.

OMFG I wished I knew about this years ago! Thank you!

and now you spend all day penned up and eating feed and wondering what happened to your favorite being who disspeared yesterday. lol

the reality is that another effectively 2 party system at the united state’s southern border went third party in almost 10 years ago and things got better.

it’s odd that you dismiss a political voting system change that literally happened in the real world within our lifetimes; but advocate for another shift that has never been permitted by a political duopoly.

your school sounds lit; i wish i had gone. lol

stay away from canned soylent green. lol