A lot of times you can't avoid bringing up politics. For example, let's say you're a person whose rights are under attack in the US, like a trans person. Talking about the threats to your existence and how you're worried that it'll become legal to discriminate against you is "politics", so you're stuck in the position of "let these attacks happen and don't speak up about it, thus ensuring things get worse" or speak up and risk your job.

Chris Pappas is a piece of shit. He's the kind of gay guy who hits on other gay guys behind closed doors and when.they reject him, he's bigoted towards them. Very much Mr Respectability Politics and a spineless pick-me.

I'm not normally one for conspiracy theories, but there's a massive motivation for the US government to find anyone who looks about right and is disgruntled and then frame them, or plant evidence on someone they found through an illegal means. The US surveillance state uses parallel construction all the time to hide the actual (often illegal) ways they find someone.

Plus, if you don't have a suspect, the message to all the proles out there is that you can kill CEOs and get away with it. The internet just showed that the only reason the working class aren't doing The Purge on CEOs is fear of consequences. That's a critical threat to the ruling class, and they will 100% frame, pay to take the fall or blackmail someone into it rather than not convict somebody.

It doesn't line up at all that he brought a handwritten copy of his manifesto plus his fake IDs and his recently used murder weapon to a Macdonalds. Especially after being careful about escaping the city, and the amount of practice he had to smoothly clear the jams when he shot Thompson shows this was premeditated.

Unless he takes the jury stand and uses it to verbally blast the ruling class and try to incite more violence, this ain't the shooter IMO.

Actually, the opinion I see most often on .ml is that modern day Russia sucks, and is bad because they've turned into a capitalist warmongering empire similar to the US. People are pretty mixed on China, but legit if you just look at the technological advances coming out of China - just verified stuff that's been scientifically proven and then deployed - it's pretty impressive, especially surrounding batteries. So, if you're suspicious of China then any good news about China will come off as a conspiracy, but in reality things are pretty mixed and there's a lot of good and bad about nations, and no one state is all good or all bad. Anyone reducing the complexity of geopolitics down to one nation = good / other nation = bad is either dumb, trolling, not speaking in good faith, indoctrinated or just repeating propaganda.

Yes, exactly. The IDF intentionally attacks civilians in Palestine by shelling houses, for the purpose of demoralizing the population into surrendering to extermination. Sounds like terrorism to me!

For those of y'all who say that we don't have an antisemitism problem on the left - this seems to be another example showing that we do, and we need to deal with it. Similarly to how movements in the past have been sabotaged by excluding groups (like white-only unions excluding nonwhite people), this could similarly fracture us along identity lines.

Agreed - ideally we'd cut right to the source of the problem and ban investment ownership of housing, or at least put a massive progressive tax on owning any dwellings that you don't personally live in. Then use that tax to fund public/social housing developments (like Vienna?)

Do you want squatters? This is how you get squatters. Make it uncomfortable and unsafe to be outside, and it becomes less risky in comparison to breaking in somewhere and just living there. Plus, we should be addressing the root causes of homelessness (such as landlords) rather than trying to just push homeless people somewhere else.

Idk, I don't really agree with the "ASPD = apolitical" argument. I've been diagnosed with ASPD, and I think that it actually makes me more politically involved because I don't inherently have the same respect for laws and conventional morality, which allows me to more easily visualize changing the societal systems we live under. Also, the lack of remorse means it's easier for me to continually break rules I consider unjust, such as societal rules on gender expression. Lack of automatic empathy means it's also harder for me to be manipulated by a boss, IMO.

Obviously I can't speak for the entire ASPD population but for me, being "apolitical" would just be endorsing the status quo of society, which is unacceptable.

Overall it was an interesting and thought-provoking read, thanks for sharing!

Last time I looked there wasn't anything particularly associated with being queer, but the sample set of people who both have this and know that they do is pretty small so who knows! Could be, and we could just be missing the data. Or they could both be correlated with some other factor

I'm far left (anarcho-syndicalist) and I say vote. It's not that hard and buys us more time to do our organizing and try to build out unions and mutual aid networks while fascism is at least growing more slowly.

This is part of why women pick the bear.