When will you learn that Democrats are not real opposition? They exist to give you the illusion that someone is fighting on your behalf, when they’re in power they fund genocides and war crimes while gaslighting you and backing off on most of their top issues, when Republicans are in power suddenly they care about minorities and women and healthcare again. Rinse and repeat.

Run on single-payer healthcare; when in power, establish and defend a Republican healthcare plan. Run on protecting Roe; let it get shredded after decades of fundraising off the threat. Run on student debt relief; deliver a means-tested maze and call it historic. Run on climate action; approve drilling, pipelines, and record military budgets while telling you to recycle harder. Run on labor rights; break strikes when workers become inconvenient. Run on immigrant justice; expand deportation machinery, cages, surveillance, and border militarization, then act horrified when Republicans use the same tools more openly. Run on criminal justice reform; fund more cops. Run on democracy; crush third parties, sue to keep opponents off ballots, and tell you there is no alternative.

And every election, the pitch is the same: “This is the most important election of your life.” Not because they intend to transform anything, but because fear is the only thing they have left to sell. They point at Republicans and say, “Look how bad they are,” as if being slightly less openly cruel is a political vision.

The function of the Democratic Party is not to defeat the right. It is to absorb anger, neutralize movements, discipline the left, and protect the ruling class from any genuine alternative. They take the language of justice, diversity, feminism, labor, climate, and peace, strip it of any threat to capital or empire, and sell it back to you as branding.

They do not fail because they are weak. They fail because their donors, consultants, lobbyists, and institutions are getting exactly what they paid for: no universal healthcare, no end to empire, no serious redistribution, no confrontation with capital, no real democracy in the workplace, no liberation from police violence, no break with apartheid, no politics beyond managed decline.

Republicans tell you they are your enemy. Democrats tell you they are your friend while helping your enemy build the cage.

At some point, we have to stop mistaking betrayal for incompetence.

https://www.home-assistant.io/

Home Assistant IS the state of the art. Local and privacy first, very powerful and has a huge community that provides a huge catalog of integrations that fill the gap that official integrations don’t cover. Incredibly customizable and capable.

You can buy their official hardware, install it on a raspberry pi to make a dedicated hardware yourself, or install it on any computer.

Their hardware has matured and is now in the polished luxury category, so I would only consider it if you start using it and know you’re going to use it enough to justify it, just install it on a computer or Nas/(docker) if you have one and try it out.

There is a learning curve, plenty of good YouTube tutorials and a very helpful community online though. Have fun!

No… It’s a soft metal, but its melting point is 180.50 °C (Mercury’s is −38.8290 °C)

Fun fact, people often use css frameworks as a starting point and override a lot of built in classes to add their own look.

It is. I don’t understand how they thought any of that was sarcasm…

Except the Ukrainian rulers are bending over backwards to suck up to and support the US and Israel in this war and everything else.

If you’re going to fact check someone in defense of a corporation, at least check the facts your self. https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war

Anthropic absolutely is in bed with fascists, their objection isn’t about the use of Claude to identify targets, it is explicitly about it being able to engage targets. They are totally fine with their AI identifying a school full of children as a terrorist command base as long as a human Nazi pushes the “fire” button. They’re well aware the human Nazis aren’t checking the AI’s work and the purpose of the AI is to identify targets that lead to heavy casualties, so the human Nazis don’t have to manually scan a map and cross reference it with Intel, the point is speed and they get to say AI did it when they blow up a school.

Anthropic is proud to be part of the genocide in Gaza, and wants to be part of future wars and genocides. “Anthropic has supported American warfighters since June 2024 and has every intention of continuing to do so.” https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-comments-secretary-war

And their objection is that their AI isn’t reliable enough not to engage American fighters by accident. They want fully autonomous weapons: “Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk.” https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war

You feel free to believe it’s all about civilians, but they didn’t make a fuss or pull out of using AI for war when it repeatedly identified children as targets, they only object to allowing Claude to also engage.

The fascists aren’t upset anthropic’s ai won’t let them identify children as targets, they’re upset it won’t also execute them.

You’re disingenuously portraying them as refusing to choose targets, which is exactly what they wanted from this whole drama.

They wanted confusion in the air and people to defend them, because they have their manufactured reputation to protect. They’re not a moral AI company, they just want people to think (and repeat) that they are.

Are Trump supporters part of the intellectual debate on democracy?

No, we’re not a monolith, but not everyone can contribute intellectually. Yes, Fateh and Mahmoud Abbas are widely seen as collaborators, and have been for a long time now, but especially what they’ve done to oppress Palestinians since the Gaza genocide started.

I think Marwan Bargouti has potential to unite people, and if anything radicalizes you to not collaborate with Israel it’s Israeli prison. And he has spoken more recently in support of a one state solution so I think he has potential, but the narrative that he’s our Mandela is a romantic myth; imagine if Mandela fought for a black only ghettos as a state within South Africa instead of pushing for economic sanctions against the apartheid government.

That said, his children arguing for his release using the two state solution rhetoric doesn’t have as much weight as you’re implying it does.

So, I am also not going to start going around like a western asshole shitting on people on the ground who risk their safety, going against the genocidal Israeli right on a project of shared grief like this. In the exact same way that I don’t go around blanketly condemning groups that take on armed struggle to exercise the Palestian people’s legal right to armed resistance to occupation under international law.

False equivalence.

And for the same reason, I’m going to call the other commenter out, just like I would (and have) call out someone for blanketly denouncing Palestinian armed resistance.

Stick to the latter. “this kind of attitude is ridiculous and disconnected from the reality of Palestinians” this is you engaging in an argument on behalf of Palestinians and their reality, and you should expect to be called out in the same manner as the user you called out, who expressed an opposing Palestinian viewpoint.

Why do you feel entitled to express a Palestinian viewpoint but they aren’t? Have a measure of consistency in applying your criticism.

to recreate a kind of monolith that you can call “a very mature body of literature” (and whoever is outside that is “not part of the debate”, i.e., outside the monolith).

I didn’t exclude them from the intellectual argument and literature, they are absent from it.

Not every Palestinian wants Marwan released, and not for the reason you might think, some view him as a violent murderer who stands in the way of peace, believe it or not a lot of Palestinians oppose armed resistance, which you rightfully said shouldn’t be condemned.

I hope I’m not being repetitive and I hope I’m getting my point across. We’re not a monolith, but not every opinion deserves to be entertained respectfully by the simple merit of coming from a Palestinian’s mouth. I’ll bring up Trump supporters as an analog, a lot of them genuinely believe they are supporting the best future for their country and people (we’ll ignore the truly racist and just want others to suffer portion for now), does their view that Trump is protecting democracy and freedom need to be amplified and given equal weight because Americans are not a monolith?

It’s a stretchy analogy, I know, we live in Idiocracy now, but you understand what I’m saying?

I think you mean well, but I think you consume too much liberal Zionist propaganda, which is really convincing if you don’t interrogate it strongly.

How do you justify that claim with that link? What in that article supports the idea that it was debunked?

Yes, they’re tactics. Tactics to create a false equivalency of suffering between the occupied and the occupier.

These groups don’t call for ending occupation as those words mean, they mean leaving the West Bank. If Israel exists as a Jewish supremacist ethno-religous state on stolen Palestian land, the occupation isn’t over. If they dismantle all their checkpoints, if they tear down the wall on Palestinian territory, if they remove their soldiers and stop shooting out children for sport, they’re still occupying our land, our only access to the ocean, our oil, our fresh water sources, our fertile lands, our grandparents’ graveyards, and our homes to which we still have keys. The “two state solution” is a liberal Zionist tool used to make the colonization of Palestine palatable for western audiences.

Ending occupation means a free Palestine from the river to the sea, and these groups aim to twist the meaning of words to make forcing us into a small land with no military and choking us economically so we continue to leave in search of better life. They want to end “occupation” so they can focus on colonization.

Of course the more extreme don’t like that plan, they want to exterminate Palestinians and get it over with as quickly as possible. That’s where their opposition comes from, not from a principal disagreement on the existence of a Jewish only state on colonized land, they all agree on that part.

And you can meaningfully debate with other Palestinians their efficacy or on diversity of tactics but I don’t think the jury is out on that debate

You know, we aren’t just sitting around debating these issues a few times a year when Israel is in the news. We spent decades thinking about this, and we have a very mature body of literature on the topic. Ghada Karmi, Ali Abunimah, Yousef Munayyer, Mouin Rabbani, Hani Faris, Edward Said, and Ghassan Kanafani are just a few Palestinian intellectuals/authors you could read to better understand this very much settled debate.

The existence of collaborators and propagandized Palestinians who aren’t well read on their own history (as a product of the ongoing colonization) doesn’t mean the “jury is out on the debate”, they aren’t part of the debate.

such that would compel outsiders to declare something like this a meaningless joke.

Yet you feel compelled as an outsider to speak with such authority and conviction.

Palestinian here. FUCK that shit.

Israelis are occupying our land and genociding us in the open. These attempts to paint them as equal victims only perpetuate the genocide and colonization of Palestine.

Anything less than allowing us our legal right of return and giving us reparations is just letting them get away with their decades of crimes because some of us dared to fight back.

We call Palestinians engaging in these events collaborators, or generously we could use the Zionist/American favorable term “useful idiots.”

Imagine a woman being publicly beat by her husband for decades and finally decides enough is enough and gouges his eye, and then holds an event to mourn both her scars/wounds and his eye. Would you be celebrating it, or would you say “hold up, something isn’t right here”?

You could also read the article you shame people and declare they haven’t read:

On the other hand, some pro-Palestinian voices have suggested that the ceremony advances a liberal Zionist narrative of false equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian suffering.

Trump should’ve stopped sending weapons to Israel as soon as The Hague put out an arrest warrant for Netanyahu.

That would have been challenging, since the arrest warrant was issued in November 21, 2024 and it was Genocide Joe sending significantly more weapons to Israel than Trump ever did.

In the context of this thread, you are defending their position, not simply posting what they said.

Your friend’s anecdote or the victims testimony… That’s a tough one.

Because of awareness, social stigma, and government bans on tobacco propaganda advertising, not government sales bans.

Look at the middle east and south asia, smoking is bigger than ever, it’s like the US in 60s, but worse.

If people want to smoke, government bans won’t stop them. Yes, being easy and legal to get makes more people likely to get it, but you won’t achieve zero smoking by banning it, you’ll just increase black market sales.

Is the illegal sale and organized crime that comes with it worth the reduction of legal consumers?

And Israeli broadcasters are widely considered to be what?

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/uhd-graphics-770.c3844

It’s decent for most usecases. The motherboard has two gen5 pcie ports, and it comes with a 1,000W power supply, so you should be able to add a discrete card if you need it.

https://www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/Server-Motherboard/MW34-SP0-rev-10

Sure, you could build your own comparable system, but it’s a nice package at a fair price, assuming it doesn’t go up.

I don’t know, it’s a solid package, 15 bays, decent CPU with good integrated graphics, and not much more than much smaller and weaker NAS offerings.

Can’t get it to connect to Plex, it just fails after authenticating.

Or you just want to keep spewing tankie shit to fit russias narrative?

I have not once defended Russia or their war on Ukraine, I simply said Ukraine is not perfect, and that it’s really stupid to keep calling people tankies simply for criticizing it.

So does russia also have a nazi problem then?

Not particularly. Russia/the RSFSR is generally understood as a major victim of Nazi Germany, even though some Russians did collaborate. That is different from saying Russia had the same kind of widespread Nazi collaboration problem seen in some other occupied regions.

https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/2015

Where they allied with hitler?

The USSR was, temporarily. The Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 was a real agreement, and it helped enable the joint destruction of Poland. But that does not erase the fact that the RSFSR was later invaded by Nazi Germany and suffered enormously, including over 119,000 Jewish victims in the occupied parts of Soviet Russia. So no, “Russians suffered under Nazism” and “the USSR collaborated with Hitler before 1941” are both true.

Is it tankie shit to read history books? The Red Army liberated Auschwitz!

You calling me a tankie doesn’t change facts or history. Russia invading Ukraine is bad.

Historically, there was substantial Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazi occupation, including the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, which Yad Vashem says assisted German forces in anti-Jewish operations and other repressive actions, while the Holocaust in Ukraine was one of the main killing grounds of the entire genocide.

FSR was mainly on the receiving end of Nazi occupation and mass murder. Ukraine, by contrast, was not only a major killing ground of the Holocaust but also saw meaningful local collaboration, and it still has a real far-right problem today. Freedom House has explicitly described far-right extremism in Ukraine as a threat to Ukrainian democracy and documented violent intimidation by right-wing radical groups.

That doesn’t make all Ukrainians Nazis; it just means the history and the present are uglier than the usual clean nationalist story. And calling people tankies for criticizing Ukraine or Zelenski is really, really, stupid.