I kind of doubt that Zohran will have the same arc, since he’s campaigning directly against the vested interests of the owners of our major media outlets. I could see him becoming an outside force too large for them to ignore, who ultimately forces them to change tactics, though.

At the moment, he’s an outlier of a candidate for them to try and beat down, and the mainstream media will fight tooth and nail to keep him that way, since him inspiring a broader insurgency of proper leftwing candidates to challenge “progressive” establishment Dems represents an existential crisis for them.

A successful term as mayor for Zohran could well sound the death knell for them if it leads to either a Tea Party style takeover of the Democrats, or produces enough momentum to lead to a proper third party that unseats the Democrats from their position as the GOP-lite party of controlled opposition. Imagine what could happen if those media organizations had to face a properly funded public broadcasting service, for example, that gained broad purchase amongst the public.

I don’t know, you get different vibes in different cities. Not exactly the same thing, but I (a pasty white guy) wear a Brujería hat I bought at a concert around NYC all the time, and the most that will ever happen is somebody asking me if I know what it is/about the band, then telling me how much they like them, or some old religious ladies freaking out about it being the Spanish word for witchcraft. Wearing the same hat in Los Angeles earlier this year, in different subway stations, I had a few cholos just glaring at me the whole time I was there and looking for a fight.

Some cities are a lot more segregated than others to this day, and you get places where you won’t be treated well if you’re not from the right group. Others, people just stick to themselves, for one reason or another. Like, if your car breaks down in Newburgh, NY, or the wrong part of Newark, NJ, you’re probably not getting any help from strangers, and if someone does come to help you, there’s a decent enough chance they’re trying to either rob you or carjack you. In some cities, about the most someone will do to help you out if you’re in trouble is to suggest that you don’t belong where you are, and that you ought to reconsider what you’re doing there.

They aren’t required to fund him, that’s true,

It’s not just about the funding. You also have key figures in the party actively fearmongering against him. A NY senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, did an interview the other day, playing him up as some sort of rabid antisemite and refusing to endorse him. Same with party leadership. If Cuomo or Adams had won, they would have had their endorsements announced and posted everywhere within minutes of the primaries being called, but when a progressive who uses the big, scary s-word wins, they sit on their hands and offer lukewarm statements about how they’ll work with him if he wins the election, but they have reservations and don’t want to commit to endorsing him. When you have Democrat public officials and high ranking figures in the party refusing to endorse “their” candidate, that can do a lot of damage to their chances amongst those who aren’t very politically engaged, or who lack media literacy.

Out of Hochul, Gillibrand, Schumer and Pelosi, I’m not aware of a single one who has actually endorsed him in the race. What happened to the calls for party unity and voting blue no matter who in order to defeat fascism they loved to trot out so much when they recently fielded unpopular, establishment candidates? I guess a little fascism is okay, as long as it’s just one city, now?

These sorts of Dems would rather see Sliwa win and start goose-stepping through the streets of NYC with his brownshirt losers than see Zohran win. They know that Zohran winning and having a successful term would be a damning indictment of their own failure to lead and step up to the moment, and the gears are spinning once again for them to do their best to make sure they don’t have to deal with that.

Edit: misattributed the interview to Hochul, but the point remains with it being Democratic Senator from NY, rather than the governor.

It really depends, there’s just a huge variance in city layout and regional cultures, so going from one to another can completely change things. Someone who likes the way things are in NYC isn’t necessarily going to like living in Orlando, Houston or Los Angeles, and won’t find the same culture. Heck, even within the same state, they can be pretty different.

That’s definitely true for many Republicans, but I think a successful term as mayor for Zohran has potential to really change things for the Democrats. If, after hearing from establishment Democrats for decades that the only way we can change things is so incrementally, not only can we not make progress, but we actually have to accept going backwards pretty often, you have a mayor who delivers some fairly sweeping changes, it could open the eyes of many Democrat voters to the lies that they’ve been fed by party leadership to excuse themselves for sitting on their hands while things fall apart around them.

Depends on how much you mind restoration/cleaning work for fountain pens. I’ve already got all the entry tier stuff covered, so buying new pens at MSRP would probably mean somewhere between 1-3 pens, depending on how fancy I’m looking to get. I already have an ultrasonic cleaner and plenty of repair supplies, so I’d be hitting up auctions, personally. Depending on what’s in the lots and how many people notice the contents, 1000€ would probably get me somewhere between 200-400 pens. Probably another 200 or so if I get to count what I could buy with the proceeds of selling off the ones I’m not interested in.

Kindly refrain from putting such stupid words in my mouth, and keep them in your own, where it seems they rightly belong, thank you.

You asked about Israel and Hamas, then instantly conflated this particular conflict with a broader conflict to come between Israel and Iran, which are not the same thing. That’s beyond moving the goal posts, we’re no longer even discussing the same events. You’re also conflating Israel with Jews as a whole here. Calling for the state of Israel to no longer exist and calling for all Jewish residents within its borders to be either killed or displaced are two rather distinct things.

I know of no definition in which a single attack in isolation, or merely killing civilians during a war, is considered to constitute genocide. Even if this were the case, the civilian casualties in the many conflicts between Israel, Hamas, and more or less all of Israel’s neighbors in the region have been decidedly lopsided. Israel suffers far fewer civilian deaths than those they inflict on others, so even if we were to entertain the notion that Hamas’ resistance to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories constitutes a genocide and we accept that the Iranian regime is in some major capacity responsible for such actions because they provide funding and support to Hamas (which, lol, even Israeli media admits Israel did, too), just going by the casualties, we’d have to conclude that Israel is either a decidedly more genocidal regime, better at genocide, or both.

Israel continues to interfere in the affairs of other sovereign nations, support settlers stealing other peoples’ land and is actively engaging in a brutal genocide. If the Israeli state were to be dismantled and Israel ceased to exist as a nation, I could only say that it’s past time for it to happen. And before you put more hysterical words in my mouth, note well: Israel no longer existing as a sovereign theocratic ethnostate and the Jews who currently live in the region being in any way harmed are two entirely separate things. Calling for a particular state to no longer exist is not a call for genocide, in and of itself.

Tl;dr: Get lost with your hasbara attempts, they’re woefully transparent.

What makes the Israel-Hamas war a genocide and for example, the Vietnam war not be considered a genocide?

Because Vietnam was a war of ideologies, not a land grab intended to wipe out the current occupants so they could be entirely replaced by a “superior, chosen” people not of the ethnicity of the current residents.

This is such a mindblowingly stupid attempt at a gotcha question. Ffs, you literally had over a million Vietnamese fighting on the same side as the US in the ARVN during the course of the war. The belligerent parties in a conflict both being composed of largely the same peoples fighting each other tends to preclude it being described as a genocide.

They turn both directions in most series, in fairness. Like, I never really found NASCAR interesting to watch and grew up hearing “Make another left now, Dale!” from my father making run of it growing up, but even they’ve had plenty of non-oval tracks over the years. It’s just a lazy joke to be made by people who have never given any sort of motorsport a shot and dismiss them as real sports.

Hell, NASCAR will be racing this track this year, apparently. Plenty of turns in either direction there.

I wouldn’t rule that out, but I also wouldn’t jump straight to that conclusion. Spanish news media in this country is beyond screwed, it skews even more right-wing as a rule than English mainstream media, in my opinion. During the 2020 election, I would watch the news on Univision with my mother-in-law sometimes, and would see them just not translate something a democrat said in English that didn’t fit their agenda, misrepresent what they said in the translation, or selectively omit things they said to make their remarks sound much more sinister and authoritarian than what they actually said. They were also constantly pushing right-wing conspiracies that had been debunked weeks or months prior, with no mention of their having been disproven.

I would constantly have my mother-in-law coming to me asking about these old ass conspiracies, because with her only knowing Spanish, that would be the first time she heard of them, and she was shocked we weren’t freaking out about it.

More leaning to the morons side, despite how Fox likes to portray immigrants as a monolithic group of rabid socialist and commies backing the Dems so they can destroy the constitution and get gulags up and running, a lot of immigrants from Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean have been fairly conservative, in my experience. A lot of them grew up heavily propagandized by right wing regimes in their home countries, many are much more religious than your average American by birth, and others have had negative experiences with nominally left-wing regimes in their home country that they can’t get over. The last one can be kind of understandable, but the other two drive me crazy.

There’s also another category, “I can leave, but I don’t want to leave behind people important to me that would be at significantly more risk than I am.” I’ve got the work experience to head off to any of several fairly comfortable and stable countries on a skilled work visa, and hope that, if push comes to shove, none of my debts I currently have in the US would become obstacles to my permanently settling there. I can more or less fluently speak Spanish and Portuguese, and I can get by fine in French. Within a couple more years, I’ll have a degree from a European university completed, and I continue to study other languages, with varying degrees of success.

I’m still hanging around, waiting for my sister-in-law to finish up her degree in another two years so that the three of us could all get out at once, as, despite being a naturalized citizen for more than 20 years, I wouldn’t put it past ICE and the current administration to target her just for having darker skin and a slight accent to her English. I’d rather be here where I can watch out for her and raise hell ASAP if something were to happen, than be posted up in a new flat in France or something, and suddenly realize I can’t get in contact with her at all.

There’s also the simple fact that, for those who don’t have the means to legally obtain a visa, I’m unaware of any nation that has started accepting asylum cases from the US on the grounds of the current administration’s actions and policies. Yeah, I could walk to the border with Canada, or overstay on a tourist trip in Europe, but then you face the very real possibility of being caught and sent back, straight into the hands of the very people you are trying to escape, clearly marking yourself out as a dissident of some form. This is leaving aside all the issues you would face as an undocumented immigrant in a foreign nation. I sure don’t have the funds to just show up in Ireland or Portugal and be able to get myself somewhere to stay indefinitely, clothe and feed myself, even assuming I find work within the first few months. I don’t know anyone there that could help me land on my feet.

Getting out, and more importantly, being able to assure you can stay out, is not as simple a task as people who haven’t seriously looked into it might think.

Lots of people in Brazil and many Spanish a speaking companies would disagree with you unfortunately. It’s incredibly embedded in those countries, to the point where WhatsApp will often be the primary, and sometimes only, point of contact for a business. At least it’s not that bad here.

I had a similar situation at my previous two jobs, but I just told people I wasn’t installing WhatsApp, if they asked, and nothing ever came of it. If it’s that important, they could text me or use my work email.

Hey, if they want to put themselves through looking at me in the nude, they can inflict that pain on themselves. I’d be more worried about them tracking everything else someone does day to day, and who could get their hands on that data.

Mostly just sports communities. They tend to post a lot, and I just don’t really care about sports outside of Motorsport. If Arsenal has some insane game, or gets a great player signed, I’ll hear about it at work sooner or later, either from coworkers or a customer. I would say the only big sport that doesn’t apply to between those played in North America and Europe is probably cricket, cause nobody has time for it. Then again, haven’t seen a single cricket post, either.

I can stay current on what’s going on with the NFL, NBA, MLB, Premier League, rugby and even hurling, just by showing up to work, so there’s no real benefit to seeing it here, too.

Also, AI communities get blocked pretty much as soon as they pop up in my feed. The novelty of “Hah, that’s crazy that a computer made this image” has long since worn off, and I have no interest in seeing the umpteenth iteration of some AI take on art or photography.

I don’t have the option ticked to show nsfw content, and people have generally been good about tagging such content, so I haven’t had to block anything there.