iie [they/them, he/him]

I go by “test” on live.hexbear.net, or “tset” or “tst” or some other variant when I’m not logged in.

We watch movies on the weekends and sometimes also hang out during the week, you should drop by.

  • 4 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2020

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  • first of all, props for organizing.

    denying genocide

    This is way too swift and easy a dismissal. Things are bad in Xinjiang, but there is undeniably also a lot of bullshit floating around on the topic. Even the UN concedes there is no mass killing or organ harvesting. A lot of claims come from known bullshitters like Adrien Zens, the folks at Radio Free Asia, the NED, and other sources connected to the US state department. Xinjiang is a complex topic and should be discussed in a complex way, not just “anyone who disputes any aspect of the prevailing western narrative is a genocide denying monster.”

    A million Iraqis died because Americans believed a fake story in 2003. More died in the 90s because Americans believed the Nayirah testimony. But if you had gone on an internet forum in 2003 and tried to debunk the Iraqi WMD reports, you would have looked like Charlie from IASIP with the red strings all over the wall.

    There were forged documents showing Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger. There was testimony from a fake Iraqi nuclear scientist named Khidir Hamza. There were accounts of stockpiles of chemical weapons in glass capsules. There were diagrams of mobile chemical weapons manufacturing systems. There were the aluminum tubes, alleged to be parts for uranium enrichment equipment. There were names and dates and purchasing records, interviews, witnesses, I mean the list goes on, I’m scratching the surface. And the politicians and the media for both parties all vouched for the information and relentlessly pushed the case.

    It seems trivial now, but the story was persuasive at the time, and debunking it was no easy task. If America didn’t drag multiple countries into an expensive war based on that story, the details never would have been scrutinized to such an extent, and we would probably still believe it.



  • I think competition — actual competition, not “5 megacorps own everything” competition — can be useful in some cases, but keep in mind that competition does not necessarily incentivize good products. With food, for example, competition incentivizes addictive, unhealthy shit. With social media, same thing. With labor, it incentivizes exploitation, because whichever company squeezes the most work out of people for the lowest pay outcompetes everyone else. You can ameliorate these shitty incentive structures by putting workers and communities in charge of production, rather than owners and shareholders who want to maximize profit at the expense of any other metric.







  • Study: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens:

    From the abstract:

    Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

    further down:

    In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

    What is it, like, 70% of Americans want single payer healthcare?