It’s tough because I don’t actually want all the redditors here because of the low effort pun comment chains, constant bot comments, pervasive echo chambers and pop culture drivel. But on the other hand, I do miss the discussion in some of the more niche subreddits here.

The dichotomy of man.

Time to revive it!

Thanks, I dislike that, too. The difference between this genocide and others, is that the US is directly involved in this one. Palestinian children are being killed by our bombs, dropped by equipment based on our technology, from deals we’ve given them, and ordered by politicians we are supporting. If the US wasn’t involved, I wouldn’t care as much. But they are. Blinken runs interference for them, defending Israel at every opportunity. We block resolutions against them in the UN. The press uses loaded language with Hamas and the passive voice with Israel caused tragedies and massacres. We promise retribution against the ICC if they prosecute Netanyahu (if you ever need proof we’re the baddies, look at that. Threatening vengeance against international court when they are trying to punish a genocide). Biden has gone around Congress to give stuff to Israel multiple times. They avoid applying any pressure to Israel to let in aid, instead using the vastly inefficient and more expensive failure of a pier. He keeps saying it’s not a genocide despite a bunch of other countries saying it is. They block news of bad things Israel does and actively lie about it. People in his administration have left over these things. I agree with you that the US should be less involved and not be the World Police. But you seem to think this means I want us to go in. If we were not involved, that would be a VAST improvement over the status of quo, of being involved in purely bad ways. At least if we weren’t involved, I wouldn’t feel responsible as an American in a democracy to use my vote to affect change in some way, to do good, agonizing over whether to vote for a “Hitler” because his holocaust is abroad and he’s got better domestic policies. I hate the DNC for putting those of us with a conscience in this position.

Now, this doesn’t mean I think people should vote for Trump. Maybe I should’ve emphasized that more. He’s obviously worse. But he’s not causing this right now, Biden is. So he’s a bad President. I can acknowledge he’s better than Trump on this and all other issues, and still criticize him for that.

I agree some explanation would be nice at least.

Any President who encourages a genocide is by definition a bad President I’m sorry to say. The ethnic cleansing campaign is already almost complete, all on his watch with his defending Israel and giving them weapons and cover in the UN and in public. Hell, he even lied about the reason on the debate (the one thing he lied about and Trump told the truth about lol). People should still feel free to vote for him, especially if you live in a swing state, but we shouldn’t minimize that millions of Gazans are currently refugees. I hope he fucking shapes up on this issue by November. I don’t want him to take all these votes for him as an endorsement of his pro genocide policies.

Ohio used to be a swing state, too, right? Not sure of it still is or if it isn’t, how that turned around. But maybe they should be in the list?

Great talk! I’m really going to be thinking about this one for a long time. Thanks for the link!

The original use is specifically a service platform that’s made worse by the owners to get more money after first being good to everyone to collect a large user base, then by squeezing the general end users, then by squeezing the business customers to collect value for themselves.

It sounds like a really specific definition, but you’d be surprised by how often it applies. He originally thought of it to apply to Tik Tok after noticing it following a similar pattern as Facebook, Amazon, and I think Google. Then the internet realized it could keep applying his term to so many more companies, like Spotify, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Reddit, Microsoft, Apple, all streaming companies, and even physical product companies like car companies or John Deere, etc and it’s shot up in popularity and use since then.

Not sure of the general use case you describe, but the person who invented the term in that article I linked sounds like he doesn’t mind if it’s used in a more general case for things getting worse from greed, so feel free to go ahead and keep using it I guess lol. Although maybe we should come up with a different, more general term for that if there isn’t already one? I’ve got nothing, but if anyone has suggestions lol.

That’s true, but it’s just not enshittification because it’s not done by the platform itself. It’s a different word.

Their community came over here long before all us old Redditors and it seems like they’ve cultivated their own culture and in-jokes and such. It can get confusing to pierce all the irony and sarcasm to figure out what they’re saying sometimes.

Thanks! Can’t wait to watch this.

Was it too easy or something? I never played that one, stopped after 4, but I love learning video game history.

Same. I forgot to mention that I like to buy cheaper games through second hand rather than paying full price on electronic stores. Often even their big sales aren’t as cheap as secondhand.

I still buy physical whenever I can. I’d hate to have my entire collection beholden to one account, although I know people do that with the PS Store, or Game Pass, or Steam. I don’t trust corporations, I guess. I really hope they don’t make disc-less consoles the standard.

Exploding heads, too, but everyone defederated from that.

And if you can convince someone else to watch it with you, even better! Unfortunately, it’s so hard to get my partner to watch new shows and movies lol.

I think there was crazy inflation in some countries during the Arab Spring, too. Which also makes it hard to get food.

I’m probably going to have to watch it again. There was so much going on, so many mysteries and conspiracies, that I’ve forgotten most of it by this time.

There’s hypothetically a bunch of different version of communism for everyone. The thing is, Marx described the problems with capitalism, and some vague sense of what socialism could be, some guidelines of what it should aim for, then kind of left the details up to each individual society to get there how they think is best based on their individual material conditions. He gave his own guesses, but didn’t think he could predict that part fully, it would be up to the people of the future to figure it out and build on. A third world country, rural serf based near fuedal society, like Russia, would have completely different needs from some post-industrial country, like if Germany turned communist, for example. If the world’s sole superpower, the US, turned communist, it would probably be a lot different than communist countries that had to transition under siege neighboring imperialism, like Cuba, North Korea, or Vietnam.

This is just to answer your last question. Don’t think this really addresses your other questions, but just wanted to explain that part, as I’ve had it explained to me before. But I generally agree with you. There should still be some form of democracy but it might look different than what we are used to here in the US or liberal west.

I’d be scared of ending up in the splits lol

Literature Cafe also looks like it has a community for that if we want to spread things out from world a bit. (Which I think we should at some point.)

!writingprompts@literature.cafe