porcupine

as stupid as this is right now, consider the absolute certainty that the next Democrat administration will treat "DOGE" as a totally normal and irreplaceable part of our sacred norms, just like Biden did with "space force" and the border wall. in 8 years or so, you will hear Democrats campaigning on the threat that the next Republican president will undermine the necessary work that the DOGE has been doing to implement "bipartisan social security reform".

It wasn't the most polished experience in the world when I used it, but it didn't require anyone using it to set up an account.

I used Jitsi meet for video calls

dems would be more successful if they tried to move more to the right than they already are. A shit ton of people in the US already think Kamala is too far left (somehow) so moving more right would literally get a lot of their vote because there’s a good amount of right-wingers who don’t like Trump. Plus, if you convince some republicans to vote democrat it’s like you’re getting two votes (you get one vote, and republicans lose one).

this was the exact strategy the Democrats just lost every branch of government with

Europeans would literally rather destroy the planet than share it with Chinese people

the only differences between Biden, Harris, and Trump on Gaza is domestic messaging strategy. They're 100% agreed that the policy of the United States government will be to continue colonization of west Asia and to exterminate any indigenous population that interferes with extracting wealth from the region. the differences in their messaging aimed at imperial citizens is totally divorced from what they actually believe or intent to do: it's just a short-term disagreement about which series of magic words will most effectively pacify domestic unrest so the government can get back to the bipartisan national mission of exterminating and expropriating.

Trump doesn't believe Biden and Harris "support Hamas", he just believes saying those words in that order will best pacify domestic unrest by inciting violent crackdowns against it. Harris doesn't entertain the idea of a "ceasefire" now any more than she did when she was explicitly condemning the people calling for it, she just believes that saying the right words in the right order will cause enough people to feel "seen and heard", then go home and not make trouble.

People have reasons to use it like activism

Posting has never been political action. Reducing politics down to consumption of entertainment products is one of the worst features of American liberalism. Voting in bourgeois elections is nearly worthless in most cases, and all the #resistance tweets in the history of time combined are still worth less than a single vote.

most rebrands don’t come as a result of a billionaire user on the platform buying it up, proceeding to fire most of its staff, complain about how much waste it has while showing no understanding of how any of it works

I'd wager that most botched corporate rebrands are a result of acquisitions by some rich dipshit who lays off staff and makes arbitrary changes driven by vanity. Elon Musk didn't do anything different than every other oligarch in the industry, he's just less skilled or invested in the PR flattery that most companies employ when they're actually trying to make a return on investment. Twitter was never a user-owned global town square for democratizing communication. It was always a Skinner box designed to maximize ad revenue.

I will shed no tears for the poor consumers who are now getting their treats from the rude vampire that makes them feel embarrassed instead of the polite vampire who let them pretend that indulging their addiction to looking at ads on their phone was actually politics. I will similarly shed no tears for the writers at CNN, a company so evil that OP intentionally posted an archive link to avoid giving them ad views, or any other privately owned imperial media outlet.

ne can look at this raw demonstration of the capitalist class treating people’s lives and the resources they have available like toy blocks to play with on a whim and have the takeaway that

It's a bit different with Meta and Alphabet where they changed the corporate names while keeping the existing product names (Facebook and Google), but after maybe the first week I don't think I saw any news outlets doing this kind of parenthetical every time they mentioned the new brand name, i.e. "the new Meta (formerly Facebook) Quest 2 (formerly Occulus Quest 2) is on sale now". When it comes to straight 1 to 1 product name changes, you don't see news outlets in 2024 unanimously using language like "Microsoft Teams (formerly Skype for Business) is a key part of Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) along with OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) and Copilot (formerly Bing Chat (formerly Cortana (formerly Clippy)))!"

If I were to speculate about what's different about Elon Musk's personal blog, it's that a disproportionate number of news writers made "being on twitter" a central part of their professional identity, and now they're embarrassed that a billionaire turned it into a joke overnight on a whim, but they're also too personally invested in the platform as part of their professional identity to just... not use the bad product they're embarrassed to name.

(formerly known as Twitter)

Everyone is doing this shit like Musk's ownership of the company is a temporary embarrassment that's going to be reversed by the celestial referee and Twitter will come back. They've all decided to do unpaid brand management in opposition to the literal brand owner. Yeah, X.com is stupid, but so is its owner and so is anyone who still uses it. Tech companies do stupid product rebrands all the time, but I've never seen everyone so continuously unanimously insist that the rebrand is somehow illegitimate or didn't actually happen. If Microsoft announced tomorrow that Windows was now called Grunglflorp, every journalistic outfit would start only calling it Grunglflorp overnight without any of this tortured "(formerly known as Windows)" nonsense. If you're using Elon Musks's X.com™ in 2024, you don't deserve the fig leaf of pretending you're actually a cool twitter user from 2014.

"actually, I'm a communist"

it isn't. "anti-China" everything is only big in the Anglophone world because the Anglosphere is is made up of colonial powers.

can't believe Iran would murder all those innocent military tanks and planes. those tanks and planes had families and bright futures ahead of them illegally shelling and bombing civilian population centers.