It’s literally the political equivalent of throwing a hissy fit about the amount of foam in a latte. Literal Karen voters.

Well enjoy our society as it is I guess, because that let’s find people to punish attitude is why we have a prison industrial complex.

The only way we beat fascism is with zero tolerance, and aggressive action. Anything else and you’re a lobster in a pot.

Absolutely. But that’s not the same thing as saying they’re not human. They are human. That’s what makes them dangerous.

And if your standards are that everyone bad isn’t human, you’re literally propping up fascism.

I agree that fascists are bad people, and I agree that fascists won’t go away by ignoring them or presuming their good intent.

But dehumanizing the people you decided are “bad” is literally the attitude that enables fascism. Not only does it set a low bar for what’s required to dehumanize someone, but it weakens the kind of self-reflection that helps people avoid falling into fascism. Think about all those MAGA folk who say they only wanted to deport the “bad” immigrants. How’s that working out?

People we feel are “bad” should be treated like human beings. Because what’s deemed bad depends on who’s doing the finger-pointing, and dehumanizing others isn’t a great way to bring the information that there’s something bad happening to those who don’t already agree with you.

The upside to all of this right-wing censorship is that every time they do it they sell a bit of their claim to being subversive rebels pushing against a stodgy set of norms around speech and independence. Which, like, is a large part of what they’ve built their base on.

We’re quickly getting back to that 90s era status quo of the right being whining church groups who don’t want to see anyone gay on TV or hear anyone say things that they don’t like politically. The result being that the left gets to look cool and subversive again, which swings the pendulum toward our side.

The biggest strategic mistake we ever made on the left was coming off as scolding moral purists. This is an opportunity to walk that back, and to reframe the push for our rights as rebellion. “I don’t care what you think, I’m doing what I want” is a much stronger position than “let me tell you why what you say and do is immoral”.

Such a weird mentality. Why would being small make us any less significant than something large? Why would being large make us any more significant than something small? Silly.

So… hierarchy based on perceived intelligence by whoever happens to have the power of physical force to take over? That doesn’t sound particularly helpful for developing a sustainable society or one that isn’t based on coercion. I’m also not sure how this perspective fits with the withering away of the state.

What you’re describing is setting up a revolving door for anyone with the might to enforce their will while assuming that everything will work out in your favor. Manipulating people into attacking your enemies for you so that you can retain totalitarian control and alienate the people from their labor, their autonomy, and their society isn’t really the same thing as freeing then from oppressive and wasteful social systems.

There’s also a moral component that’s being left out here, namely that humans ought to have the right to make decisions for themselves. Whether those decisions are good or bad, they should be able to make choices in their lives and work together to make choices at a larger scale when it’s necessary. They shouldn’t be dictated to by a political party any more than they should be by capitalists.

This is also a practical matter. What incentive for people to educate themselves is improved by rendering their input into their societies meaningless?

Have you tried using FiveM? Last I knew it didn’t require social club access.

Toxoplasmosis in action!

Maybe you mean white bread in America? We have good bread also. Plenty of rye breads and whole wheat, even if it’s sliced, but we also have like actual bakeries where you get get all sorts of fresh bread.

I feel like there’s a lot of mistaken assumptions that all the food in the US is garbage simply because some of the food in the US is garbage. You hear the same thing about beer. Like, yes, there are some terrible mass produced lagers and pilsners that taste absolutely disgusting, but we also have a thriving craft beer market with a huge variety of types and qualities of brews.

Not really. A bulletproof vest won’t protect your head. Meanwhile they’re standing directly on the other side of a door that they’re shooting through, while the home owner could have been anywhere on the other side of the door. They’re playing a guessing game, but the homeowner can just shoot the door at head-height and their bulletproof vests will mean nothing.

We could always just confiscate all fortunes over 900 million dollars.

The 5 richest billionaires have a combined $1.154 trillion, which divided by $340 million gives us $3,394 per American citizen. That’s literally just the top 5. According to Forbes there were 813 billionaires in 2024. Sounds pretty damned substantial to me. We’re talking life-altering amounts of money for every American without even glancing in the direction of mere hundred-millionaires. And all the billionaires could still be absurdly wealthy.

The thing is, though, that the behaviors that make up enshittification didn’t even start with network-based services. Companies do the same thing with physical products all the time, or with employment benefits, or basically anything where you can get a good reputation and then start shaving away value to increase short term profit.

Look at Starbucks. Here’s a company that in the early 00s was a great employer. They paid more than most companies looking for employees with similar experience, they provided benefits that were all but unheard of for a coffee shop or a similar chain, and they literally put very intentional focus on making their employees happy so their customers would be happy. Jump forward 20 years and the same company is working people to the bone, going out of their way to avoid giving people enough hours to get benefits, and doing anything they can to save on labor.

They already have the reputation and put a huge chunk of the competition out of business during the expansion phase (in 2005 they averaged 3 new stores a day according to training documents). Now that they are established they can cut corners.

The same thing has happened with appliances, with furniture, with clothes, food, bath and body products, even something as simple as tissues.

The useful part of the term enshittification is that it helps people point at something toxic, call it out, and figure out how to avoid it. If it can be applied to the larger pattern to let people see that things are getting worse as a result of powerful people raking back every scrap of value they can manage after expanding to take out the competition, I think we’ll be materially better off.

Having stuff at home is awesome, but if you’re doing anything with data you care about, it’s a really good idea to have offsite backups. I’ve seen someone lose years of work because a flood killed their computer and their backups.

Has the UK been spelling ‘tyres’ with a ‘y’ this whole time and I just didn’t notice?

I also have a CueCat! I ordered it back in the 90s when it was still being advertised!

Time to start making faraday clothes.

There may well be much healthier stuff in their dumpster than peanut butter and jelly. Why not offer to make an arrangement with the person in question to let them take stuff that’s about to expire? Or, like, separate food that’s being marked out into its own bag and maybe even put it in a cooler or something?

There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of this myself and I was mostly getting like prepared foods that had been marked out the same day I was getting them. Peanut butter and jelly would have been a downgrade from pulling a couple of days worth of meals with like meat and cheese and veggies and stuff rather than just sugar and nuts and bread.

Not to say that this isn’t nice, but it may well be a less viable option on its own in the long term. I suppose they could always do both.

Pretty damn good jobs too, tbh.

I do think there’s a sizeable difference between having deeply buried shame about what they’re doing and actually having doubts that make their way to the surface where they could actually change the behavior.