Billionaires have no legitimate right to exist.

Period.

It doesn’t matter if some of them “do nice things” maybe.

Billionaires should not exist.

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ACAB

ACAB but especially the NYPD

I 100% agree about the importance of learning doggie language, after all studies have shown domesticated dogs are extremely adept at learning human body language and are excited and motivated to learn human body language far past the point really any other animal gives a shit about doing. We owe them the same curiosity and interest in their language!

Simple things like a yawn usually means “hey I’m just here not trying to start anything” or a playbow is actually an invitation into playful energy most of the time, or how dogs evaluate how nervous to be about the threat of a nearby unfamiliar dog or person by whether the dog/human’s hips/shoulders are aiming towards them or not (a dog has to “aim” it’s shoulders at something it is about to attack, so aiming your hips and shoulders to the side is a form of de-escalating an immediate threat of violence for dogs).

Knowing how to differentiate the stress/pain pant from a normal pant is also CRUCIAL to picking up when your dog is suffering.

• Train your dog with a wait command before going through doors, big dogs that try to barge their way past you out of excitement to get out the door are sort of cute but also incredibly annoying it can honestly hurt someone who is frail.

• If it is a young dog you trust and you are raising them, touch their paws lots. Pick their paws up and shake em like a hand, don’t be rough but just handle their paws so they become comfortable with humans handling them as dogs can be really nervous about this and it makes it extremely hard to inspect your dogs paws for a cut that is making them limp or something.

• similarly if you are raising a dog and it is too small to hurt you, when you feed your dog hang out next to their dish, put your face near theirs (ONLY with a dog you trust), give them pets, make your dog used to the fact that humans might come near their food but that humans won’t take away their food so they don’t need to be defensive.

• the more dog time you give your dog (where you do dog stuff with your dog) the more human time your dog will give you (where you both do human stuff and behave according to human norms). Going on walks, throwing the ball, rough housing, all of these things give your dog the mental stimulation they need to relax and behave

• a good dog park where your dog can socialize with lots of different dogs and learn their doggy language is not only a fantastic way to get your dog exercise it gives your dog the opportunity to practice interacting with other dogs.

• periodically (gently) surprise your dog by nabbing their tail and giving a tiny tug, or poking them a bit on their rump when they aren’t looking. BE GENTLE and always transition to pets and praise after the initial surprise moment for your dog. If you have a large dog and some kid gets loose and runs up behind it and yanks your dogs tail for no reason and entirely takes your dog off guard, your dog will be used to this kind of bullshit and simply be surprised it is a tiny human annoying them rather than a full grown one. This can be a really dangerous moment if you have a huge dog like a german shepherd, because even if the dog isn’t normally aggressive towards kids, if the dog isn’t already well used to its owner frequently low leveling annoying it with boops, it might react in fear and self defense. If you extract enjoyment out of mildly annoying your dog for the goofs sometimes, you know tease them in a loving way…, they just aren’t going to react in fear and self defense when they are surprised by a human coming out of nowhere and abruptly surprising them.

• if you are raising a dog and you can figure out a way for your dog to meet cats, it can be helpful so that they don’t meet one in a situation you need them to behave and they go “WAIT WHAT IS THAT”. Same thing with human kids and babies.

• going away for the weekend and leaving your dog with a friend or someone else’s care is actually a really good thing for dogs that tend to get super attached to their owners (german shepherds are a classic example) as it stretches their mind a little bit encouraging them not to see their owners as the only thing in the universe, it gives them experience trying to relax without needing their One Human.

• get a collar that helps with walking better than a normal collar that just chokes out dogs when they pull, if you get the right collar/harness it will feel like you are walking an entirely different dog

• big dogs can absolutely learn how to “be mouthy” while also being incredibly gentle even though they have a mouth full of knives that can crunch through bone. Remember, dogs will carry puppies by their scruff. Dogs like humans have to learn the language of play, and they have to learn when they are being too rough with their mouth when they play with you. Many people train their big dogs to NEVER be mouthy which is understandable but if you know what you are doing your dog can absolutely learn how to play wrestle with you on the ground with their big scary mouth “chomping” (extremely gently) on your arm and both of you going at it having fun and being careful not to hurt each other. A dog can also be easily trained to get the signal for “ok playtime is over now, let’s wind down this energy” or “this is not the correct social situation to go nuts and want to play”. I tend to use the loose command “gentle” with my dogs, and I say it with a calming intonation. I have found practicing playing with a dog and then giving the command/signal that playtime is over is extremely effective over time at getting dogs to learn to become aware when they can be crazy tornadoes of chaos and when they need to chill the fuck out. If you do this right, your dog won’t ever play too rough with anybody because they aren’t going to be getting the right body language signals from those people that now is supposed to be playtime and they are invited to play,

• all dogs love it when you scratch just above their tail on their rump, it is like a cheat code for making a dog stop worrying about who you are as a stranger

• have friends over to normalize humans coming in your house, if you don’t your dog can easily fall into the habit of barking like a maniac every time friends come over and it can be scary and disorienting for guests

• the way you keep your dog from barking way too much (and jumping up on people) is literally just making the commitment to be more patient than your dog in making sure to always give feedback to your dog when they do those things (whatever your training style is).

• take your dog for dumb trips in the car to the store and back sometimes, definitely try to make it fun for them (and definitely don’t leave them in your car in the sun when it is hot for really any amount of time) but your dog will likely enjoy the stimulation of all the sights even if it is just a boring car trip and assuming you don’t have to go in wherever you are going for too long they will see it as a fun adventure. This helps train your dog to be chill about car rights and not loose their damn mind every time you are actually going on an adventure with them.

• if you have a big dog it is worth getting them used to being picked up in a bear hug occasionally as this can make dogs really nervous if they aren’t used to it and you don’t want to try to make them used to it in an emergency where they can’t walk or you need to lift them onto something. Make sure to support their rib cage (and back legs if possible) when you lift.

• Dogs are like people in that most of them want a job, they want something they can do for the pack that they are good at. Understand dog tricks from this perspective, you are giving your dog a job that they can do that gets them praise from you and other people and stimulates their brain.

Hell yeah! Go play some videooooo gamesss

Nah I think they work too hard and we should give them a complimentary vacation where they can lay by the sea in the shade of the guill Otine trees with their shiny leaves hanging vertically, in wait for the perfect person to pass below so that they can detach themselves with a soft sigh and float down to and catch the passerby by surprise, reminding the relaxing CEOs with the lightest touch that forces are at work that even they cannot control.

🌴 🌴 🏖️ 😎 🌴 🌴

You know what destroys people’s productivity in the longterm? A sustained period of crisis and overwork.

I know in steam you can set the order of controllers (player 1, 2, 3, 4) but I can’t remember if you can set controllers to the same player.

At any rate you can map both controllers to output keyboard commands and then have the game receive input from mouse and keyboard and then the game will think it is receiving input from only one device.

Hmm I wonder if antimicrox would allow you to combine two inputs into one composite input, I don’t have experience with it so I can’t say for sure but it seems like the kind of utility that would.

https://github.com/AntiMicroX/antimicrox

What I would do in this situation is map the controls to keyboard, then use a Controller-to-Keyboard mapping program to map all the controller buttons to the keyboard buttons. So map both controllers D-Pads to W-A-S-D (or arrows, or whatever really) then set those keyboard controls to your movement controls in the emulator.

https://www.reddit.com/r/EmulationOnPC/comments/165tewk/mapping_multiple_controllers_to_the_same_input/

Quick! Take your seatbelt off! Move your body as close to the part of the automobile that will explode on impact as possible!

What you are missing is that you think I am suggesting stochastic terrorism or something. That doesn’t scare the rich, they can always build a bigger fence and pay more security guards.

What scares the rich is when they see that the fault lines they are using to vent steam (redirect the suffering and anger) are beginning to close into a wall of solidarity, and we are beginning to realize that as much as we despise each other and can’t agree on religion, ideologies, values… whatever… that we realize that none of that matters until we all deal with the rich people problem.

Solidarity and a direct understanding of the class war we are in is what scares the rich.

I think anything meaningful has to start from local mutual aid networks, creates connections with your neighbors under the assumption that we need to take care of each other, we can’t assume the system will be functional.

Even if your goal isn’t directly to organize locally, it is a prerequisite to getting pretty much anything meaningful done (which I kind of hate because when people call it “organizing” they aren’t kidding, and I hate organizing things lol) because whatever meaningful thing you want to happen will inevitably be implemented on a human level through those local connections.

Better shower thought: When the rich push the cost of housing high enough that a good portion of a society is one or two crises away from being homeless the best economic policy for fixing the situation is making the rich scared as fuck so whatever compromise we put on the table looks much more appealing than what the general public is threatening to do to the rich in the streets.

It’s not nice to beat yourself up like that, a shower should be a place to unwind not judge yourself.

Does giving to a panhandler help them or are you just enabling their lifestyle and making them dependent on that form of income which may prevent them from getting a real job?

Criminalizing homelessness and making it a sign of essentially being a pariah in society does far more to ensure homeless people become dependent on begging for money than giving money to homeless people does.

Most societies in history have had codified ways of beggars receiving food or basic needs from vendors, the current situation in at least the US is horrendously cruel.

If panhandling was 100% illegal with a felony charge for those panhandling and for those giving do you think more people would pull themselves out of being homeless or would they just suffer more?

Homelessness is not caused by laziness as the state of being homeless is exhausting both mentally and physically, thus codifying the act of being homeless and needing money as even more criminal doesn’t do anything to stop people from falling into homelessness and getting stuck there. What causes people to fall into homelessness and extreme poverty and get stuck there is how obscenely cruel our society is structured and how if you fall down everybody around you starts kicking you because that is just what we do when people fall down.

It doesn’t really matter what a homeless person uses the money for that you give them or that the homeless person might think “oh this is a good spot to panhandle” if you give them money in that spot, these are trivial little details of the day, they have nothing to do with what is crushing that human being down (especially when you live in the richest country on earth like I do, and we have plenty enough resources to go around if we cared to tackle wealth inequality).

NYC and other cities briefly dropped some cop funding and all that did in the end was for crime to go up. NYC subway now needs metal detectors and the national guard was called in recently due to the uptick in violent crime.

I am sorry, but you viewpoints are clearly based on your desire to engage with a narrative rather than the facts

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2023/manhattan-violent-crime-record-levels-trump-fact-check/

https://www.ahdatalytics.com/dashboards/ytd-murder-comparison/

The only spike in violence New York City saw was from the pandemic making desperate people even more desperate. There was a spike and then it subsided because people got less desperate.

At best some shallow, meaningless changes like a mural or a rainbow or BLM flag painted on a street, hell, maybe even a street name change or something akin to that, and in some cases, it just increased crime and looting statistics in the aggregate in numerous cities. Sorry bro, this is reality.

The reality is that the people with the power in the US political system are like you and will categorically not accept less police violence, it is a feature not a bug. Meanwhile, crime has been decreasing and will keep decreasing no matter how much rightwing figures make a bunch of noise about crime and scary immigrants to try to distract people from noticing they aren’t actually doing their jobs and passing legislation to meaningfully improve people’s lives (that addresses REAL problems like unaffordable healthcare or lack of access to affordable housing, not whether hypothetically a transgender person might have a slighttttt advantage in sports??)

It also increase social tension and some distrust between races, which ain’t good, either. I dare say that racism, from all races went up since 2016. Won’t fully blame BLM for this but the movement sure did not help.

Cite your sources bro. If anything has changed it is that rightwing extremists have become less capable of hiding their racism under a veneer of acceptability politics and have become more openly violent as they realize the general public is beginning to see rightwing extremists (which is effectively the whole damn party, since it is a party of cowards that just follows the loudest, angriest person) for the losers they are. In this sense, yes maybe tensions have increased, but if they have the overwhelming evidence points to conservative rightwing extremists specifically escalating tensions in the vast majority of cases.

Perhaps more existentially for the conservative movement in the US, the general public is also beginning to realize how irresponsibly rightwing extremists behave in policy making (again which is essentially every Republican in office because they all just fall in line no matter how hateful their leader is) because their basic sense of empathy was utterly lobotomized by spending too many hours in front of the tv watching the likes of New Gingrich and Bill O’Reilly. Republicans are the dog chasing the car and the car is hate, and we can only hope that they have finally caught the car in banning abortions and overturning roe vs wade (which the numbers are looking promising, my fingers are crossed :) ).

I think there is a big piece missing if we want to make lasting change. Protests should be the first part and we have missed many opportunities by skipping the second part.

Certainly so, but also I think an important difference between the civil rights movement with MLK and current day is the public is actually much closer to siding with the civil rights protestors now, MLK and others were not necessarily anywhere near as accepted during their time as a political activist figures though their ideas may have won out in the long term. We forget this when we see people like MLK as “popular figures” now.

I think the current problem is not that the majority believes in defending the racist structures of society, we don’t need an MLK to convince us that systematic and direct racism are abhorrent. The majority of us know, but the other difference between the civil rights movements of the MLK era and now is that we are far more powerless as a public body of normal people to actually wield power politically and enact the changes Black Lives Matter advocated for. We can’t change the laws, the rich and powerful WILL NOT let it happen, and we live in a time period where their power is near absolute.

We can’t judge the BLM or Occupy movement for failing to create policy changes when both movements were specifically born out of a desire to directly express the unsustainable nature of disempowerment in the US of the average person. We have reached a maximum point of powerlessness against an entrenched, corrupt political system and at this point policy just isn’t going to happen unless we all collectively keeping threatening to shut it all down.

Exactly and as time goes on I have shifted from a perspective that Occupy Wall Street was an unfocused failure to a perspective that the control of the finance industry and money on politics is absolute and those in power will not tolerate it being questioned, so Occupy Wall Street could never have resulted in immediate policy changes, Wall Street would have prevented it any cost even if it meant physically walking into the street and shooting protestors until they went back to work. Of course “financial instruments” would probably be used instead of guns, but murder is murder and the weapons the finance industry uses to make their living make mass shooters with assault rifles look like amateurs playing around with toys, see the 2008 financial crash as example A.

The role of Occupy Wall Street was thus to lay bare this power relationship and the associated threat of violence towards those who seek to modify it. The impact of Occupy must be understood in terms of how the internal psyche of the US was irrevocably radicalized from a collective witnessing of this truth.

In the same way that a crowd of fans will remember a ref on the soccer field making horrible calls that screw their team over (…and even though the crowd has no actual codified power to stop the ref from making bad calls and swinging the game), the crowd will remember:

the injustice itself

the collective shared awareness of the injustice among fellow strangers in the crowd

the disempowerment forced upon the crowd in that moment to preserve the status quo of the injustice

These are not things that crowds forget easily, in sports or in broader political contexts. Movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have to be understood as acts of reality crafting that first and foremost validate individual’s feeling that the majority of the public understands the power structure of the status quo as an existential threat to the common good.

Once people have seen the validation from essentially 1 out of every 10 people in the country showing up to Black Lives Matter with them it flips a switch in their head and talking heads on tv permanently lose a degree of power to manipulate people into believing their feelings are fringe in regards to rejecting police violence and systematic racism.