kestrel7

But! You could exchange it for stuff at the reddit store!! /s

I just watched several videos with adblock on and it didn't give me any messages or anything. Maybe it's regional?

Yeah, basically it has to do with interest rates & tech speculation on LLM's.

This isn't as much of a class thing as you think it is. Upper middle class and rich people with college degrees don't have student debt because their families paid for their college tuition. People from lower middle class and working class families have student debt.

Surprised Pikachu face

Yeah between this, abortion rights, and the affirmative action thing... it's gonna be a rough next few years, but in the long term the Republicans are toast. I think what we're experiencing now are their last spasms for power because they know they're on the way out.

Just look up the amount of registered democrats vs. registered republicans in this country. IIRC there's like half again as many democrats.

It's almost like the only reason republicans ever win elections right now is due to is voter suppression.

"Getting organized with your community" could mean things like volunteering to help register voters, giving people rides to polling sites, resisting voter suppression, etc. It could also mean things like setting up group panel discussions to help regular people articulate their needs to elected representatives, or organizing fundraisers for political candidates.

In my opinion these types of activist work have potential to be more helpful than just encouraging to people to vote in an abstract sense.

You can even sometimes organize groups of people to solve problems directly on their own. In a town I used to live in, people got sick of waiting on the government to provide better clinics, so they started a free clinic with donated money and labor. Later, they were easily able to secure government grants once it was operating. No voting, signs, or yelling required (I believe they did have a few benefit concerts). It was a win for the community, who got a free clinic, and a win for the local government, who got a longstanding problem off their plate with essentially no effort on their part, just a little ongoing funding.

Doing the work of calling people up & coordinating getting them to come to events (like, say, polling sites, or city council meetings, or benefit concerts) is basically 90% of what "political organizing" is.

Right like I don't particularly like Zuckerberg, I just want to see [someone] kick Musk's ass.

Police kill more Americans than active shooters do and should be disestablished for that reason alone. 1/3rd of all homicides are by police. Homicide by police is the largest single category of homicide. Yet, police have only 2% of all the firearms in this country. To me, those statistics are staggering. We have actually, by several objective metrics, reached the point where police commit more crimes than the "criminals" do. American society is just experiencing whiplash catching up to the numbers because many of us don't want them to be true. Which is understandable, we have put a huge amount of collective trust in these institutions and it sucks to be betrayed.

Defunding the police isn't about idyllic utopias, it's about stopping the ongoing racialized mass-murder that doesn't actually protect anyone's community. Where I live, the police are a bigger social problem than any gang or mafia.

Defund, disarm, disband.

Here's the thing though.

In the USA, police kill way, way, way more people than are ever taken hostage.

Police brutality is a much larger problem than hostage-taking and given that context, using the police as a tool against hostage taking doesn't make sense.

1/3rd of all homicides in the USA are committed by police. Police also kill far more Americans than active shooters do.

When has the SWAT team ever helped anyone?

This is not a rhetorical question. I'm genuinely curious as to how they have helped people because I don't really understand what they do besides steal drugs and resell them. They certainly don't seem to help with active shooters or domestic violence that I've ever heard of. Totally open to being wrong though.

Yeah this was my thought as well.

The problem here is pigs murdering people without evidence.

I'm not confident the FBI is going to solve that problem.