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.

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.

I think the whole authoritarian vs antiauthoritarian split is kinda BS - IMO it's more about who's dictating terms to who. We really badly need land reform, and landlords aren't going to willingly give that up, so we have to be a bit "authoritarian" in order to make them do so. Same thing goes with wealth redistribution, and land back. If you give up on using force to get what you want, how do you get land back to indigenous populations, or stop the genocide in Gaza?

I think we'll be more free if we work together to build socialism than we would be if we keep shitting on each others approaches towards building it. Then we'll just keep refining it until there's a minimum amount of hierarchy or control in society that's used to prevent re-privatisation, exploitation, and the re-establishment of Capitalism.

Signed, a "tankie"

I believe I'm one of those knowledge workers. I do cybersecurity and I'm actively working on trying to unionize the sector. I'm not management, and I don't have hiring or firing power, and I'm reliant on wages to survive.

Actually, I can see the comparison. Many cybersecurity people don't challenge the power relations in their workplace and instead act as enforcers of corporate policy. That always disappoints me, and I can see the pattern of how even our relative privilege is being actively reduced. I just hope more cybersecurity people will recognize the class struggle we have to wage and organize in solidarity with the rest of the working class.

There's also a significant percentage of people there for the patriarchy and misogyny, and just think they're "one of the good ones so the leopards won't eat MY face", so they ignore the parts of the MAGA platform that target them. For example, women who vote for Trump usually aren't doing it because they're misogynistic, the racism and transphobia might be bigger draws but they believe the misogyny won't be applied to them. Same with Black and Latino men who are there for the patriarchy, misogyny, transphobia, but think the old white guys will accept them. Same again with the "Gays for Trump" folks, and the TERFS who support him.

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?)

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 really feel for the inevitable handful of trans men with Androgen Insensitivity syndrome. Imagine how bad it'd be if you were born with the wrong body, and couldn't change it through hormones - it'd be an actual nightmare.

This is part of why women pick the bear.