in middle east i wish everyone involved regime change, situation is fucked with any of current people in power staying in power. Put Netanyahu, Assad, Erdogan, Khamenei and their cabinets and top people from Hezbollah in Hague then we can talk.

Great man theory doesn’t stop being great man theory if you add “and their cabinets” after.

At some point you need to engage with the problem of why things are the way they are, and the answer isn’t “The bad guy is in charge (and his cabinet)”

I appreciate your good humor since I think I came off as hostile

IMO the fact that fastfood jobs are considered temporary bootstrap jobs that you’re expected to be exploited to hell is bullshit and an indication of the absolutely broken moral compass of the corporate world. We could do without fast food, but that doesn’t mean we should pay them them minimum wage. Everyone deserves a livable wage no matter what they do.

I guess my perspective is that we’re talking about what OP wants to do in the present world, not what she could do in a hypothetical utopia (or just fairer society). So yeah, fast food jobs could be less terrible and should be, but at the moment they are absolutely not something to aspire to or even to recommend in many places because, again, they don’t even pay enough to live. Maybe OP is still living for free with a friend, in which case I guess it’s better than nothing, but in general it seems bad as a survival strategy.

Speaking for myself as someone who was dismissive, my best contribution to the answers here is that it’s reductionist to a seriously misleading extent. It seems like you have a couple of conditions contributing to your struggle, but it all gets reduced to “your number is too low.” As others have alluded to, how much of that is your adhd? How much is from some condition you may have that hasn’t been diagnosed because you have been unsupported throughout your life? I don’t think anyone is denying that you have real neurological conditions that hinder you, they just doubt low IQ as being a meaningful description of what you’re facing compared to something that gives a better causal explanation.

I’m sorry about how you were treated. That was fucked up and you didn’t deserve it.

I don’t think it’s over for you, it’ll just be difficult. You’re clearly able to overcome (presumably with effort and time) some of what you talk about since this is pretty well written.

Alcohol is pretty hazardous on all levels (I assume that’s what you cite as an addiction) but if you need pot to function, I see no problem with that besides it being another expense. It’s probably worth finding a support group in your area with respect to the alcoholism, though.

As far as I know, low IQ, insofar as we treat it as a credible concept at all, doesn’t correspond to not being able to do things, but it just taking longer to learn them. That’s probably not much of a consolation with respect to all that you’ve been through, but it’s relevant for looking forward because it means you don’t need to write things off as being something “for smarter people,” though there are definitely circumstances where the extra time it takes could make something not viable (like needing more time in college representing a significantly greater financial burden, possibly).

I think you can do it. Just remember that there is no shame in leaning on others; We’re a social, cooperative species.

If everyone was engineers and lawyers we’d have major problems keeping shops and fastfood open.

Alright, this is a little condescending. I think OP can aim a little higher than that and frankly probably will need to if she wants a living wage.

The fast food industry is basically a way for corporations to extract a pretty significant amount of labor value out of teenagers and the most desperate in society and all for the end result of contributing to society’s bad health. It’s not like society would collapse without it, unlike something like carpentry.

Lastly, insofar as IQ is a valid concept at all, studies say low IQ alone doesn’t prevent you from learning anything, it just makes it take longer to learn.

Edit: I apologize if it comes off like I’m going off on you, I just felt some things were worth noting. I like the rest of your comment.

I didn’t realize Mohammed bin Salman is part of KHamas.

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Writing on hexbear, if you don’t want to get as many people jumping down your throat, it’s good to use the term that is closer to technically accurate, “the porn industry,” since exhibitionists do exist. That still doesn’t cover it either because there are various sorts of exploitative porn production outside of “the porn industry” but if you err on the side of rejecting acceptable practices rather than accepting unacceptable ones, they’ll call you a “SWERF” or a puritan or whatever happens to come to their mind at the moment.

Thanks for clearing things up.

*One edit: regarding your chapter/national split, I mostly agree, but I think a situation poorly handled by a local chapter still does reflect poorly on the national org. They’re the local representative of the national org.

Yeah, I probably should have specified that this is true, but I was trying to avoid getting too in the weeds and made an error. My thing is that a chapter going to hell without the direct worsening of things by the national org is more a problem of negligence or poor construction of their onboarding systems, etc. rather than being culpable themselves of harboring abusers. Both are still harmful behaviors and should be treated as such and it’s possible PSL did both (the case is very murky, as you say), but I just want to be clear on the standards I’m asserting for guilt since it isn’t something one should speak lightly on.

Sure, that’s more like the “Catholic Church method”, as I called it, so then insinuations about the whole organization on the basis of that case are warranted.

That said, doesn’t the denial dox use the (potentially) real name of the girl who the boyfriend cheated on the alleged victim with, who the alleged victim alleged was another victim? The article only mentions that person by name in one place and doesn’t mention outing or doxxing. I don’t know, this is hard to follow.

I do need to defend myself though that I absolutely did not say anything should be ignored, I was simply saying that the scope of the claims and people’s actions should be kept in mind. It was PSL stepping in to deny this that is potentially the problem with “PSL” as an organization rather than “PSL Philadelphia” or whichever other chapter. Am I making sense? If some guy commits a murder, that doesn’t mean his whole household was complicit in it unless they actually do things to help him (accomplish it, get away with it, etc.). What I am saying is that if it was the guy (chapter) acting on his own, put him on trial and sentence him appropriately. It’s only if the household (overall organization) seemingly intervened at some point in the process that pronouncements like “the household is guilty” becomes relevant. And then you kindly provided evidence toward that latter end, so I agree with you that such pronouncements are relevant.

What he said was “the entire PSL”, not a branch, and that’s kind of the thing about these accusations, that they are raised to try to claim that the entire Party participated or even had any awareness of the reality of the situation in whichever specific chapter, which is not true. Maupin is a real example of what is being insinuated here, with the central leadership being aware of and covering up his actions, among other complicit acts.

I’m not batting for the branch here, cut it off and burn it for all I care, but we need to be clear about the real scope of what happened, and the implicit meaning of “PSL shields predators” is that a Maupin-like situation is happening or something else (like the Catholic Church method) where the PSL has any involvement. No such accusation has been made concretely that I have ever seen, even though insinuations to that effect get made all the time.

Please call Tara Reade a Russian asset, just so we’re clear on everything

Among the most-viewed misleading claims where X failed to add accurate notes were posts spreading lies that “welfare offices in 49 states are handing out voter registration applications to illegal aliens,” the Democratic party is importing voters, most states don’t require ID to vote, and both electronic and mail-in voting are “too risky.”

This is just normal Republican lies. There’s no particular reason to attribute it to foreign influence. In fact:

One false narrative—that Dems import voters—was amplified in a post from Elon Musk that got 51 million views. In the background, proposed notes sought to correct the disinformation by noting that “lawful permanent residents (green card holders)” cannot vote in US elections until they’re granted citizenship after living in the US for five years. But even these seemingly straightforward citations to government resources did not pass muster for users politically motivated to hide the note.

This appears to be a common pattern on X, the CCDH suggested, and Musk is seemingly a multiplier. In July, the CCDH reported that Musk’s misleading posts about the 2024 election in particular were viewed more than a billion times without any notes ever added.

It seems like some of it is nearly-openly lead by the platform owner, with judgements on veracity handed down from him to his fanboys.

The calls are coming from inside the house. You can’t pin everything on foreigners, least of all things where you have no specific information on them being to blame.

“But bots!”

Even setting aside that the article doesn’t attribute even most of what’s happening to bots (hence its title), that’s not an adequate counterclaim. Do you really, really think that among the mountain of Republican think tanks and other organizations, none of them are running a bot farm of even a few dozen accounts, like the 45 cited in the article? Granted, it could be Russia (logically, it probably isn’t China, which Republicans are usually harder on), but there have also been domestic operations, haven’t there?

Here’s an easy example that does not directly “prove” the above case is not foreign interference (again, it’s at an overlap point of the interest of different groups) but demonstrates that it clearly seems that there are domestic bot nets doing numbers and thus that such a possibility needs to be considered for other cases where a Republican bot net might have an interest.

Defensible sentence technically, but I think it’s actually plausible with three hads and the second past perfect makes the sentence unnatural.

Time is running out for this lion to stop eating me alive

any injuries sustained will heal in time.

This just isn’t true, that shit can be permanent depending on what it is.

I dislike that framing unless you mean “the Ukrainian government”, in which case they are certainly pro-.

I think they’ve got dedicated communism comms, but those are probably the only ones. c/Palestine is gonna be better than average, but don’t ever bring up Ukraine there.

I’m not sure where they are but they were really just what I said without any additional details. I remember one of them said something to the effect of “We should give them to a group being eradicated rather than a group doing eradicating” but that’s about it.

Ukraine - Palestine seems good to me. I’ve recently seen multiple lemmitors bemoaning all the military supplies sent to Israel, saying it should instead be sent to Ukraine.

I’d vote for the Korea one if it wasn’t redundant. Also “Why shouldn’t a Jewish state exist?”, A History of Media Manipulation, and Hitler Didn’t Come from Nowhere all seem particularly interesting.