@kalayaan Some great tributes here:

https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/sinead-oconnor-dead-tributes-reactions-1235379463/

She was fierce, but also tender and was ultimately broken by a world that couldn't handle the truth.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/target-remove-some-lbgtq-merchandise-after-facing-customer-backlash-2023-05-23/

Certain conservatives fully abandon libertarian ideals and decide they have the right to control what others do, read and, apparently now, purchase. So much for their opposition to "cancel culture."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201003/why-liberals-are-more-intelligent-conservatives

"...more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be liberals than less intelligent children. For example, among the American sample, those who identify themselves as “very liberal” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 106.4, whereas those who identify themselves as “very conservative” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 94.8."

"Liberals do control the media, show business, and academia, among other institutions, because, apart from a few areas in life (such as business) where countervailing circumstances may prevail, liberals control all institutions. They control the institutions because liberals are on average more intelligent than conservatives and thus they are more likely to attain the highest status in any area of (evolutionarily novel) modern life."

No surprises here.

@blablarg18 I assume most of the graded materials you read have pictures.

@blablarg18 He is also loves to flirt with racism, misogyny and homophobia, so I completely understand why you have such a hardon for him.

@manrmen-0

@lololulu19 And why was the "evidence" never heard Clarence Darrow? Your lack of knowledge of law is on par with your general ignorance of most things.

I have a problem with Vuze seeding (and I have made the changes recommended in the FAQ). When I upload to or download a file from this site, the seeding stops once the it has been grabbed once or the download finishes. As a result, despite the fact I am almost constantly online, my ratio is getting worse. What really confuses me is that this only happens here. Torrents I download from other sites seed normally.

Does anyone know if this is a Vuze problem, or is there something abnormal about my connection to the tracker here? Any advice will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

@Apothos The first victim of hypocrisy is irony.

@raphjd I don't watch the news on TV. I read ALL sources, left, right and in between. Videos of Trump's speeches are available on YouTube. The idea that you are now trying to say that he hasn't said the things he has is huge fucking lie and you know it. Just stop. You are embarrassing yourself.

Close the border
Deport all undocumented immigrants
Bring prices down to 2020 levels
End the war in Gaza
End the war in Ukraine
Throw the entire DNC in prison
Pardon all the Jan6 criminals
Good luck!

@zullu November 8. 2024 (Friday)
Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil.
There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Indiana Republican senator-elect Jim Banks if undocumented immigrants who had been here for a long time and integrated into the community would be deported, Banks answered that deportation should include “every illegal in this country that we can find.” Yesterday a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a policy established by the Biden administration that was designed to create an easier path to citizenship for about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens.
Meanwhile, Trump’s advisors told Jim VandeHei and MIke Allen of Axios that Trump wasted valuable time at the beginning of his first term and that they will not make that mistake again. They plan to hit the ground running with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, deregulation, and increased gas and oil production. Trump is looking to fill the top ranks of the government with “billionaires, former CEOs, tech leaders and loyalists.”
After the election, the wealth of Trump-backer Elon Musk jumped about $13 billion, making him worth $300 billion. Musk, who has been in frequent contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin, joined a phone call today between President-elect Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.
In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.
Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”
In The New Republic today, Michael Tomasky reinforced that voters chose Trump in 2024 not because of the economy or inflation, or anything else, but because of how they perceived those issues—which is not the same thing. Right-wing media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky wrote. Right-wing media has overtaken legacy media to set the country’s political agenda not only because it’s bigger, but because it speaks with one voice, “and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.”
Tomasky noted how the work of Matthew Gertz of Media Matters shows that nearly all the crazy memes that became central campaign issues—the pet-eating story, for example, or the idea that the booming economy was terrible—came from right-wing media. In those circles, Vice President Kamala Harris was a stupid, crazed extremist who orchestrated a coup against President Joe Biden and doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, while Trump is under assault and has been for years, and he’s “doing it all for you.”
Investigative reporter Miranda Green outlined how “pink slime” newspapers, which are AI generated from right-wing sites, turned voters to Trump in key swing state counties. Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’”
In a social media post, Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”
In the 1850s, white southern leaders made sure that voters did not have access to news that came from outside the American South, and instead steeped them in white supremacist information. They stopped the mail from carrying abolitionist pamphlets, destroyed presses of antislavery newspapers, and drove antislavery southerners out of their region.
Elite enslavers had reason to be concerned about the survival of their system of human enslavement. The land boom of the 1840s, when removal of Indigenous peoples had opened up rich new lands for settlement, had priced many white men out of the market. They had become economically unstable, roving around the country working for wages or stealing to survive. And they deeply resented the fabulously wealthy enslavers who they knew looked down on them.
In 1857, North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper wrote a book attacking enslavement. No friend to his Black neighbors, Helper was a virulent white supremacist. But in The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, he used modern statistics to prove that slavery destroyed economic opportunity for white men, and assailed “the illbreeding and ruffianism of the slaveholding officials.” He noted that voters in the South who did not own slaves outnumbered by far those who did. "Give us fair play, secure to us the right of discussion, the freedom of speech, and we will settle the difficulty at the ballot-box,” he wrote.
In the North the book sold like hotcakes—142,000 copies by fall 1860. But southern leaders banned the book, and burned it, too. They arrested men for selling it and accused northerners of making war on the South. Politicians, newspaper editors, and ministers reinforced white supremacy, warned that the end of slavery would mean race war, and preached that enslavement was God’s law.
When northern voters elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 on a platform of containing enslavement in the South, where the sapped soil would soon cut into production, southern leaders decided—usually without the input of voters—to secede from the Union. As leaders promised either that there wouldn’t be a fight, or that if a fight happened it would be quick and painless, poor southern whites rallied to the cause of creating a nation based on white supremacy, reassured by South Carolina senator James Chesnut’s vow that he would personally drink all the blood shed in any threatened civil war.
When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, poor white men set out for what they had come to believe was an imperative cause to protect their families and their way of life. By 1862 their enthusiasm had waned, and leaders passed a conscription law. That law permitted wealthy men to hire a substitute and exempted one man to oversee every 20 enslaved men, providing another way for rich men to keep their sons out of danger. Soldiers complained it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”
By 1865 the Civil War had killed or wounded 483,026 men out of a southern white population of about five and a half million people. U.S. armies had pushed families off their lands, and wartime inflation drove ordinary people to starvation. By 1865, wives wrote to their soldier husbands to come home or there would be no one left to come home to.
Even those poor white men who survived the war could not rebuild into prosperity. The war took from the South its monopoly of global cotton production, locking poor southerners into profound poverty from which they would not begin to recover until the 1930s, when the New Deal began to pour federal money into the region.
Today, when I received a slew of messages gloating that Trump had won the election and that Republican voters had owned the libs, I could not help but think of that earlier era when ordinary white men sold generations of economic aspirations for white supremacy and bragging rights.

-Heather Cox Richardson

@raphjd said in Hell on earth:

I guess your beloved "true Journalism" also faked those videos.

You are not that stupid. Get real.

@raphjd said in Hell on earth:

Did he though? Or did you hear that from your beloved "true journalism" who have been proven to lie at every turn?

He did. Unless you are suggesting that they use ventriloquists. And am still waiting for this list of harmful liberal policies he is going to dismantle? Health care? Gay marriage? Abortion? Social Security? Environmental protections? Green policies?

I've been listening to interviews with his voters and there is one underlying message: I voted with my own interests in mind and fuck everybody else. Well, you get the world you create. Can't wait to see Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk coming up with policy.

@raphjd I deleted it because when I edited it, both posts appeared. I changed nothing in the original post - if that is what is important to you.

@raphjd That's what I thought. It's all about winning and power. You don't give a shit about actually trying to make people's lives better.

He's had to make a lot of promises to a lot of different people who want very different things. Good luck with satisfying them all.

@raphjd Such as?

@zullu

Don't despair. And, yes, a lot of people really are that stupid.

@raphjd Trump's to-do list for 21/01/2025:

1. Close the border
2. Deport all undocumented immigrants
3. Bring prices down to 2020 levels
4. End the war in Gaza
5. End the war in Ukraine
6. Throw the entire DNC in prison
7. Pardon all the Jan6 criminals

Good luck!