I want to also note that this is something that actually happened in the show. There’s a particular Pikachu (not Ash’s) that shows up with a paper heart taped to their tail.

So, the show was already saying trans rights, this dumbass just didn’t notice.

For real though, the NORAD Santa tracker actually did start with a wrong number.

Specifically, a wrong number in an ad by Sears.

They set up a Santa hotline where you could call and talk to a bunch of people being paid to pretend to be Santa. Only they printed the number wrong in the ad, and the number they printed, by some sheer cosmic insanity, was the number of the red phone on the desk of the head of NORAD. A phone that only the president and a handful of five star generals were authorized to call.

So this dude gets a call, and there’s this kid on the line asking to talk to Santa. He starts interrogating thy kid, the kid naturally starts crying… So the fucking head of NORAD starts going “Ho ho ho, merry Christmas little boy. Have you been good this year?” and all that. Eventually gets the story from the kids mother.

So he gets a bunch of junior NCOs to man the phones, because their lines are absolutely slammed now. Tells them all to fucking pretend to be Santa. This dude has a rep for being super straight laced, and everyone thinks he’s lost it. Whole base is in uproar. At some point some joker makes a little paper cutout of a sleigh and sticks it to the tracker display. Commander comes in, demands to know what it is. The person responsible apologizes, but instead of chewing him out the commander picks up the phone and dials a local radio station. Tells them it’s the head of NORAD, and they’re tracking an unidentified flying object that looks a lot like a sleigh. And a new tradition is born.

The best part? According to his children, after he retired this guy carried around a locked attache case with him everywhere he went. It was full of all the letters he got from kids and parents thanking him. He never went anywhere without them.

http://www.npr.org/2014/12/19/371647099/norads-santa-tracker-began-with-a-typo-and-a-good-sport

Bingo. They’re gonna be doing the flights anyway, might as well get some public goodwill out of it.

You can still teach people theory. Theory is important. But it makes no sense to open with it. That’s like being asked to teach someone how to use a computer and opening with an explanation of how a CPU works.

No one is going to pay attention to all your theory if they can’t understand how it meaningfully relates to their circumstances.

And, frankly, the term Marxism comes with so much cultural baggage at this point that you’re far better off focusing on what it actually means rather than what it says. You need to get people out of their preconceptions and help people understand what Marx really meant.

I think the framing in the meme is actually more helpful. Marxists would do well to update their language instead of constantly speaking in terms that sound utterly archaic to modern ears.

I would in fact prefer “Owners vs Workers” because “Laborers” still implies specifically forms of physical labour in a way that makes a lot of people feel excluded from the movement we’re trying to build.

Is it hypocritical though?

Dishonest, absolutely. But in a certain sense what they’re doing is more true to their values. They believe they are in a war over the future course of their nation. They’re not interested in being nice, and they’re not willing to sacrifice the things they care about for some pretence of honesty and decency.

There’s a consistency to their ideals there that liberals often lack. McConnell blocked Obama’s supreme court picks because he could, and because it would help advance his agenda. Obama meanwhile had many options for simply steamrollering over the senate, but refused to explore any of them because it was more important to respect the process than it was to achieve results. Biden got huge swathes of his agenda blocked by Trump’s supreme court picks, but never contemplated packing the court to solve this problem, because it was more important to respect the process. You can argue that they were protecting these institutions, but when the institutions have already been so utterly perverted what value is there in protecting them? The senate and the supreme court are now less trusted than ever, all thanks to Obama and Biden “protecting” them while Republicans corrupted them.

This is devious, underhanded, scummy, and selfish. But it’s true to their ideals. They believe in the world they want, and they’ll do whatever it takes to get it. The left could learn from that.

This already exists.

In New York wealthy business people pay small town sheriffs to deputize them. As deputies they now have a right to concealed carry, even in places like NYC that have very strict gun laws.

Realistically, if all the school shooters start going after CEOs instead (I certainly wouldn’t complain if they did) you’d very quickly see gun violence go from “unsolvable” to “very solvable”.

Did you expect some kind of mass uprising to happen the very next day? A hundred million people out in the streets, all armed to the teeth, hunting CEOs for sport?

In this cartoon fantasy world of yours, what does “something coming from this” look like? Was his next stop going to be the White House where he would hold Biden at gunpoint until M4A is implemented?

If you think this person is a “moderate” voter then you really, really haven’t been paying attention to what they’re actually saying.

Where on earth did you get the impression that I was talking appealling to moderates?

People who are watching half their buying power disappear over four years aren’t moderates, they’re people begging to be radicalized. They’ll turn to wherever they are offered convincing solutions. A lot of these people voted for both Trump and AOC. They’re angry, and they want to burn the whole fucking system down. They like Trump precisely because they think he’s a molotov cocktail for them to hurl at Washington. There is nothing moderate about them.

I’m not talking about compromise, I’m talking about exactly the opposite. These people want a party that promises to fuck shit up. They’re really not particular about how. Fascism, hardcore anti-capitalism, whatever. They’ll take anything that promises to smash this status quo.

That’s exactly the problem the Dems have right now. Outside of a few members who are trying to push for more extreme rhetoric, they’re a party that basically doesn’t know how to be anything but moderate, when what they really, really need to be, if they’re going to capture the mood of the public at large, is angry.

Just look at the response to that CEO getting murdered. Across the spectrum, self-identified right and left, people are cheering, applauding, celebrating.

We are so far past moderate. We are literally at guillotines. If the Dems cannot recognize and harness that fact, they are doomed to be irrelevant.

Again, this kind of reductive thinking isn’t helpful. I’m not saying that everything that happened is Biden’s fault, but the reality is that people are, by and large, poorer today then they were four years ago. And Harris’ response to that was “We did a great job and I wouldn’t change a single thing.”

Promising “four more years of this” when “this” is utter shit is not a compelling argument.

I’m actually one of Biden’s biggest defenders. I genuinely think that he made a lot of very good choices, many of which could have yielded powerful long term gains for the left. His government’s stance on labour rights, consumer protections and anti-monopoly action was fantastic.

But none of that matters when voters scream at you that they’re starving and you reply “No you’re not.”

It’s easy to point and laugh at this, but the fact is that the Dems ran a poor campaign because they completely failed to reach out to voters like this.

This person is exactly why Trump won. They don’t understand or care why things have gotten worse over the last four years, they just know that they have gotten worse, and that’s all that matters.

And rather than acknowledge that and offer solutions, the Dems told these people to disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes, and claimed that the last four years had been great for the economy. That’s true if you judge the economy by measures like GDP, but when all of that growth is going into the pockets of billionaires while everyone else is paying more for less, that creates a lot of very angry voters.

The left need to figure out how to harness this anger rather than laughing at it. Otherwise we’re (even more) fucked.

He actually did have the backing of a lot of the military top brass. The problem is that the rank and file wouldn’t back the brass in clearly violating lawful orders from the government. A big part of why those soldiers sent into parliament did such a shit job is because they obviously weren’t even sure they were supposed to be there.

The magic words worked because they were backed by the power of institutions that people trust.

The mistake this guy made - the mistake that the US Republicans are absolutely not making - is that he did not sufficiently erode public faith in those institutions first.

Obviously, the real goal here is to replace fighter planes with Tesla cybertrucks which will be strategically dropped from orbit onto the target, and then drive themselves back to base using their world class autopilot that definitely doesn’t ever try to drive under a flatbed truck.

It doesn’t actually take any expertise to figure out that Musk’s idea is moronic.

You just have to understand what the words “Beyond visual horizon” / “Beyond visual range” actually mean.

The F-35 is designed to eliminate targets that it literally cannot see, in some cases because the curvature of the Earth is in the way.

No camera can solve that. Even if you get the Earth out of the way, no camera small enough to mount on a combat vehicle or weapon exists that can identify something the size of an F-35 at modern engagement distances.

Musk claims they’re “not invisible” but at the distance they can kill you at, functionally, they are.

Yes, because their definition of anti-Semitic is “Pointed out that we’re doing a genocide.”

There’s a secret co-op mode they never tell you about where you and all the other workers in the company team up and fight your way through together. It’s way easier, because the enemy entity count and strength don’t increase to scale with the numbers on your side.

It is especially important to understand that Tesla’s struggles with navigation are entirely a result of Elon refusing to equip them with LiDAR. This isn’t some “The tech is really new and really complicated and we’re still figuring it out” problem. There is a very good solution to most collision avoidance scenarios, but Elon refuses to let them use it because he’s an idiot.