This isn’t a concept vehicle, it’s the Cadillac Celestiq. Got to test drive one once; feels great, handles great. Emphasis on “rich” Shadowrun villain though. Lucky for you, if you have a spare 350K lying around, it can be yours today!

(obligatory fuck GM, they as a company are personally responsible for this car-dependent hellscape we live in, for the destruction of many communities, and of course they are happy to provide luxury vehicles for the wealthy to navigate it as painlessly as possible. This is not an ad and my knowledge of this vehicle was acquired involuntarily. The least I could get out of it was a turn at the wheel.)

Also, consider this an official petition to bring back (affordable) station wagons (yes, that is what this is) in the EV age instead of bending over backwards to get any sort of useful range out of trucks (including the ones masquerading as SUVs.)

Musk got involved

Most pickups are far larger than their use cases call for

“The Department’s seizure of 32 internet domains secretly deployed to spread foreign malign influence demonstrates once again that Russia remains a predominant foreign threat to our elections,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. “At Putin’s direction, Russian companies SDA, Structura, and ANO Dialog used cybersquatting, fabricated influencers, and fake profiles to covertly promote AI-generated false narratives on social media. Those narratives targeted specific American demographics and regions in a calculated effort to subvert our election. Our republic depends on elections that are free from foreign interference, and we will not rest in our efforts to expose foreign malign influence operations and protect our democracy, without fear or favor.”

The propaganda did not identify, and in fact purposefully obfuscated, the Russian government or its agents as the source of the content. The perpetrators extensively utilized “cybersquatted” domains, a method of registering a domain intended to mimic another person or company’s website (e.g., registering washingtonpost.pm to mimic washingtonpost.com), to publish Russian government messaging falsely presented as content from legitimate news media organizations. In other instances, the perpetrators sought to create their own unique media brands to promote Doppelganger content (e.g., Recent Reliable News). Among the methods Doppelganger used to drive viewership to the cybersquatted and unique media domains was the deployment of “influencers” worldwide, paid social media advertisements (in some cases created using artificial intelligence tools), and the creation of social media profiles posing as U.S. (or other non-Russian) citizens to post comments on social media platforms with links to the cybersquatted domains, all of which attempted to trick viewers into believing they were being directed to a legitimate news media outlet’s website.

As far as I can tell this has diddly squat to do with Kirk? He’s been around long enough that I’m gonna need you to clear a pretty high bar of evidence to call him an entirely Russian fabrication (in fact this would suggest that he is entirely AI generated).

Another thing, why would you absolve American media organizations of their interests in a guy like Kirk? Like you said, our media has parroted the types of things that Kirk did since long before the internet age, but there’s a good number of folks like him in the modern day. Are you saying they are all built from the ground up by russian crypto? Are we ignoring the interests of American corporations, billionaires, religious zealots, and their related super PACs in election meddling and dark money?

Upvoting for the first reasonable thing you’ve said in this entire exchange.

Real mature lmao. You got me. You must have done some real deep historical analysis and gotten a whole lot done over there to feel so much authority to say what works and what doesn’t. I can’t believe your city doesn’t listen to you! You clearly have all the answers… I guess they’re just stinky meany heads and there’s no systemic reason for that whatsoever, at least not one worth questioning.

Man, gee whiz, you really set me straight!! I can’t believe leftists aren’t out there handing out pamphlets!! How can they expect any change or crumbs to fall out of our unflinchingly static system if they aren’t handing out pamphlets!? If we just vote for the right politician, and hand out enough of the right pamphlets, surely they will betray their own class interests simply out of selflessness and a strong sense of moral duty!

The carrot’s right there, I even got a taste of it once! Hey, stupid leftists, stop going after the guy with the stick. I can’t get the carrot while he’s beating us with the stick!!! The stick guy said we might even get the whole carrot if we just jump high enough!! They’re simple rules, why don’t you just follow them?!

edit: also, sorry, I just can’t get over how silly you’re being over very minor transgressions. It’s very funny to me that you decided to equate “actual organizing, direct action, education, mobilization” with not engaging with community at all or pressing government for change, because I gave support with very minimal critique of mutual aid specifically.

I guess nothing else matters if I’m not committing time and money I don’t have to do chores for my neighbors. Anyways, why bother fighting for a world where as-needed aid is baked into the system? If we just do enough mutual aid then we’ll never need the government to respond to our demands! Is that the logic? I guess anyone living paycheck-to-paycheck can forget about doing any resistance whatsoever. Lmfao. Very serious and hopeful person over here.

Thank you for making my point. You can think what you want. Mutual aid is great, and it’s great you have the means for it, but it’s a band aid at best and it isn’t an organized movement aimed at addressing the fact that our system is more dedicated to the needs of capital than it is to the needs of people. That’s why the city won’t do shit, because they aren’t serving you.

Sure, and you let me know when your city council; or any politician at any level of government for that matter; does anything to materially improve conditions for the working class, completely unprompted by working class people organizing and making demands. And you let me know too if they are faithful to those demands and give any credit to the organizations that pushed it through, or give just enough to shut people up and present it as if it was all part of their plan the whole time.

Sure, we have leftists in America; we just removed on Lemmy instead of actually stand on street corners handing out pamphlets.

lmao, speak for yourself dude. There are plenty organizations doing this work; not just handing out pamphlets but actual organizing, direct action, education, mobilization, etc; you just haven’t gone looking for them and by default you exist in an ecosystem that suppresses them from your view.

All american cities were built that way until the suburbs were deliberately built to destroy that, because there was more profit in the system of private vehicles. (Along with everything else that falls on each individual in the suburbs, which also prevents us from organizing, which benefits the designers of this system)

Your problem is assuming if it can’t be done by one person, single-handedly, then it can’t be done at all. For every person that thinks like this, our capacity as a class is reduced.