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if you concede that the new york times is a genocidal state propaganda mouthpiece regarding palestine but surely is mostly trustworthy about syria, ukraine, venezuela etc then i don’t know what to tell you at this point

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lmao, libs are dealing with it well i see

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The most common mistake people make when thinking about prehistory and how to avoid it.

In "The Dawn of Everything, A New History for Humanity" David Graeber gives what I think might be the best piece of advice I've ever heard for understanding deep human history, and that is to get your mind out of the Garden of Eden.

People speculating about prehistory before modern archeology were quick to frame early humanity as existing in a "state of nature", either with pure innocent tribal communism, or being brutish barbarous cavemen, then something happened to bring us from the state of nature into "society". Did we make a Faustian bargain by domesticating plants and animals? Why is evidence of intergroup violence in prehistory so rare? How did we fall from the innocent state of nature? This, of course, smacks of the biblical creation story, so even if people don't believe it literally, they seem to have a hard time letting go of it spiritually even in a secular context.

This is pretty much nonsense, of course. Humans have existed for over 2 million years. Anatomically modern humans have existed for at least 300 thousand years. Behaviourally modern humans (with symbolism, art, long distance trade, political awareness) have existed for at least 50 thousand years, from our best evidence, but possibly a lot longer. The time between the Sumerians inventing writing and urban living 5,000 years ago and now is only a narrow slice of human history.

If we want to understand human history properly, we shouldn't understand people of the past as fundamentally different from us. They were intelligent, politically aware people doing their best in the world they found themselves in, just like we are today. We didn't fall from innocence with the development of behavioral modernity, religion, farming, war, money, capitalism, computers, or anything else. The world has changed a lot, but people have been experimenting with different ways to live for as long as there have been people, like this example I've posted before about disabled people's role in late pleistocene Eurasian society.

People have been the same as we are now for at least the last 50 thousand years. We have lived in countless different ways and will continue to experiment. There was no fall, and we don't live at the end of history.

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This really makes the Studios costing themselves even more money (and getting more unions involved) by prolonging the strike for the promise of free ai labor even more fucking funny. you dumb fucking bastards lol

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If you don't know what's happening in Romania, basically everyone is losing their minds over this presidential election. People have had SRI (Romanian Intelligence Service) knock on their door over incredibly mild jokes about the elections. The platform of most of the candidates has been jacking off about how good the US and EU are, and how we need to give them more access to our resources right now. This one independent guy (some guy who left AUR because he was too anti-NATO) won the first round of presidential elections very unexpectedly (and by a significant amount). People are resigning over it. The candidate from his old party endorsed him, while the vice president of the same party condemned him. Everyone is blaming tiktok, AI, Russia, or the diaspora for this. PNL and PSD (the two biggest parties) have started bickering over this (and might shut down the government again who knows lol). A lot of people have no idea who the fuck he is. Liberal political analysts are making unhinged articles about this guy etc.

And like. This guy is fashy but 90% of the criticism against him is that he's anti-NATO.

It's gonna be the first time in 30 years a candidate from PNL or PSD didn't make it into the second round.

Like it's not even surpsising that this guy and the AUR candidate had a lot of success. They're the only ones that address even slightly the effects of imperialism on Romania and the conditions that the average Romanian lives in, while all the other ones talk about vague wank and push for more privatisation and more NATO shit. Really sucks that it's the fascists, but that's what happens when you heavily suppress communists for 30 years.

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every time i see someone call kirk and spock the oldest ship, i'm filled with the urge to go "hmm actually the holmes and watson girlies have been here for a hundred years now", and i refrain because i know the natural conclusion of this game is gilgamesh and enkidu

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Do y’all hear yourselves? Hungering for war because of a fanfic about how Russia is gonna take over the world?

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Dick Cheney is a war criminal idk why the fuck Harris thought bringing out any Cheneys was a good idea

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They gave us a big glass butt plug for being so good at politics we kept 300 people from eviction this year. Also I got to laugh at glen jacobs

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big fan of inversions of symbols of power. the leash claims ownership over the one who holds the chain as much as the one who wears it. the one who places the crown upon your head can also take it from you. with age comes experience but with youth the superior physical strength to overpower you. the sword is double-edged and cuts both ways.

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This shit is why I can’t take the libs too seriously when they come out of their hole to protest again every 4 years. Tennessee has been under these conditions for YEARS under a Biden presidency. Where was the outrage for us? People are dying here and have been since 2022

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I just found the earliest email I ever sent from my email address, and it’s the funniest goddamn thing I can possibly imagine a fourth grader sending her teacher:

(Context - my fourth grade teacher was on maternity leave, and the state of the classroom fish tank was dire under the substitute teacher’s tyrannical rule. The class convened at recess, and decided to inform our (24yo, new mother) former teacher of the situation. I was selected as the duly appointed representative for this solemn communication.)

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I need to be as clear as possible that I’m not being smug or saying I told you so when I say this, but what every solidly pro-Palestinian analyzing the Harris campaign said would happen in Michigan happened. I’ve been saying it for months. She completely alienated her voter base of Arabs and Muslims in Michigan, dismissed them at every turn, communicated that they didn’t matter to her, and she still expected them to line up enthusiastically to vote for her. This was entirely avoidable if she’d made even token efforts to gain their support instead of openly disregarding them

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Maybe if a democrat had a popular platform and actually kept it for once…. Maybe if she had pledged to end the genocide…. Hell maybe if she even tried to pretend…

Capitalism will produce its own gravediggers

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will yanqui liberals pretend to oppose genocide now that the other team is the one in charge of running the genocide machine

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i can never take it seriously when usamericans talk about "authoritarianism". you people have HOAs