I never really felt Russia had much of a dog in the Syrian Civil War. I always assumed their interest in Assad was purely to grind American efforts in the region.

Willing to bet they’ll just as soon support the new regime or its opposition based on the same calculus.

In the one example with the grocery co-op: I can assure you, few if any, of the people involved with the co-op were Marxist-Leninists, let alone comfortable with Marxism or the ‘S’ word. So that was kind of a critical flaw in any Marxist-Leninist theory in practice.

A lot of people practice forms of community action without having any sort of class consciousness. A wealthy philanthropist can offer a bunch of money with strings attached and people will jump at the promises without second thought and rarely keep up with the follow-through.

Point I was making nonetheless was these operations tend to exist under seige from competing and profiteering interests. If I remember correctly the grocery co-op was having issues making the skyrocketing rent payments for the commercial lot. That was the problem the money solved: the one created by the landlord.

So in a sense I was saying ‘the pressures of capital tend to be too great’ than money being tempting or greed from the community.

They are run out of business, most simply.

The operation that does not focus their profits on building further capital and establishing monopoly will fail in the arms race of those that do.

For example: there are countless community and public efforts establishing childcare and pre-k through pooled resources. They are in direct competition with things like Bezos’ childcare academies. (Personal anecdote: they bought out my kids’ building for public pre-k and evicted them.)

And a successful co-op will get pressure to be bought out like a start-up. (Often starts as a great way to expand! Then the expansion changes the culture, the new location feels corporate and the original location is later shut down and left vacant. -Also personal anecdotes for a grocery co-op and an employee owned operation I once worked at.)

I did elder care facility maintenance work 20 years ago and am confident/hope all of my work has been rightfully undone and replaced by someone who gave more of a damn.

I still remember my sprinkler system wiring giving me a warm buzz every time I had to manually switch zones because my wiring was such ass.

God I hope they’ve fixed that.

A functional, coherent working class policy would’ve ticked some of those numbers in the campaign’s favor across the board without even having to divide by race or gender.

I found maintenance and repairing a rifle to be the more effective way to gesture towards balancing warfare for gaming.

NATO: 99% durability? JAM

AK? Here’s duct tape and a file, keep shooting.

Rules are defined by their exceptions, so I tend to welcome the obscure wildcards for a frame of reference.

Is it too political to suggest this may be considered a hatecrime to Gollum?

Unemployment is typically measured by people seeking unemployment benefits, not by volume of people out of work.

Similarly job creation is usually measured by job offerings and not positions filled.

As a result you can get what has been happening: low unemployment and high job creation where people aren’t getting jobs and jobs aren’t being filled.

Top-two mixed primary regardless of partisan affiliation.

One primary ballot held, all candidates declare a party ‘preference’, all votes counted together. Top two go onto the general election.

It varies by state election rules, but for me all the downballot third party candidates are eliminated in the primaries.

All local and state elections on my ballot are: Democrat v Republican, Democrat v Democrat, or Unopposed.

Electoral College with First Past The Post electors. Hundreds of millions of american votes are dumpstered for the presidential election. So a significant portion of protest voters in deep red OR deep blue states aren’t impacting the outcome. Only swing states decide the outcome and even then it is only a few districts within those states. And so the electoral outcome for the presidency gets reduced to the most salient wedge issues in those communities.

It just so happens some things are not so localized an issue. So the idea (or one of them) is to demonstrate whether there is a meaningful voting bloc to be had here that deserves to be listened to, or can continue to be ignored.

Mr. Garand was moved to America when he was a kid. I feel like it’s a stretch for the canuckians to claim his rifle outright.

some of us would rather only see the half of the conversation

Well I guess the only thing I could possibly say to that woul–

No, but I can almost always check the modlog when a user complains about how their thoughtful, insightful, accurate, and reasonable post or comment was arbitrarily, capriciously, and unjustly removed.

And that comparison rarely disappoints.

I see more content complaining about .ml than I see content on .ml worth complaining about.

I generally don’t block instances, communities, or users, either. I just know I am capable of recognizing a shit take on politics anywhere and can move on without existential or social crisis.

Friends? Sure.

Coworkers? No.

Notably ‘uisce’ is just the word for ‘water’, which tracks.

It might be if there was much effort to establish any tankie ideal beyond a user being registered on .ml. It’s a lot of ‘so you hate waffles’ level of reaction and discourse unfortunately.

MeanwhileOnGrad is a ‘just making lists’ community. The quality and credibility is closer to ToiletPaperUSA for the most part since they had users misrepresenting interactions for a while. Dunno if that’s still the case but it has been back with a vengeance the last month or so.