I think that’s the absolute worst reason possible. None of my homies remember anything about trigonometry other than that it exists and some of the more relatable concepts like the literal meaning of tangential and the name of the shape created when you shake a jump rope.

No, it’s not actually good to teach things to children that are so abstract that it doesn’t stay in memory without hardcore drilling. It is MUCH smarter to study trigonometry when you need it.

Start with non-computer protocols. What’s the protocol at a restaurant?

Patron: Open the door and enter. Wait 1.
If host currently busy Restaurant (Host): please wait. I will be right with you.
If host currently not present Restaurant (anyone): please wait, the host will be right with you.
If wait 1 times out Patron: excuse me, we’d like a table.
If host available and not busy Restaurant (Host): Hello and welcome. Wait 2.
if wait 2 times out Restaurant (Host): how many are in your party?
Patron: Hello. We would like a table state number of guests.

Or think about parliamentary procedure for bringing a motion to vote and voting on it.

These are protocols. They are all around us.

Computer networking protocols are so named because they are analogous. They define how to exchange information to accomplish a specific task. For IP, it’s a protocol for routing information packets across an unknown number of computers to a destination computer. For TCP, it’s a protocol for how a computer should send information packets and how a computer who is receiving those packets should acknowledge them.

No, the networking layer connects the backend to the front end.

Think of it like a restaurant. You have back of house and front of house. Back of house is where the food is stored, prepared, and plated. Front of house is where customers enter, make a reservation, sit down, and place their orders. Waitstaff move orders from front of house to back of house and they move plates of food from back of house to front of house.

Maybe we’re talking past each other. Spanish is a white language. Latin is a white language. It’s exactly as white as English. It’s totally fine for white people to tell other white people to wrestle with undoing the harm of the oppression that white people caused.

Just because non-white people also speak it doesn’t mean it’s not a white language. Jamaicans speak English. Haitians speak French. Arubans speak Dutch.

Azov stopped being a volunteer militia when they were formally incorporated into the Ukraine military, given funding, training, and operational support. The government prior to 2014 was very very clear who the bad guys were (Nazis) and who rescued them from the Nazis (Soviets). Since 2014, the government has changed their stance. Now the Soviets were the bad guys and the “Ukrainian nationalists” were the good guys. Except the nationalists were Nazis.

Right, so, in the case of the proxy war between the West (helmed by the US) and Russia, it also makes sense that we want the US to lose in Ukraine. Not because in that case the US fired the first shot and crossed the border, but be sure the conflict is fundamentally predicated on US hegemony and the fight against it. Ukraine is only still at war because the West is pumping billions of support into it. And the West only does that to support its own interests. If Ukraine had lost after their 3rd complete military loss, instead of more and more tanks, planes, missiles, artillery, training, mercenaries, and logistics being pumped in to prolong the conflict, there would have been far more peace and far less destruction. Ukraine needs to lose for the US to lose.

That’s a total fair, reasonable, and thoughtful position. I encourage you to expand that thoughtfulness just an inch more to imperialism/anti-imperialism and don’t assume that fighting for non-binary linguistics is analogous to imperialism. Like you said here, just say you don’t really understand the problem fully and since you’re an outsider you’re following the lead of the people you’ve connected with that have lived experiences. I agree you shouldn’t listen to me and my lived experiences as a cis het white anglophonic man. I will encourage you to study the academics on these topics when you do have the time and energy. We have a lot of work to do to undo the harm of our ancestors and our societies and we should continue having these discussions to ensure we are working through our own processes so we can show up more fully and more effectively to follow the lead of or siblings and allies.

So then you want the US to lose? Or are you limiting all of your thinking to this one specific location and time? Because if you want the attacker to lose, then you want the US to lose. Since 1992, the US has attacked over 14 countries. Russia has attacked 3, all of them border conflicts. The US is the attacker, pushing people out of their countries all over the world.

And let’s be very clear here. The Russians see this as a proxy war with the US. The US sees this as a proxy war with Russia. Both sides have said so. Ukraine doesn’t deserve to be a US proxy, because US proxies get shredded in the name of advancing the interests of the US.

I’m not trans. I am Hispanic. But I’m a white Hispanic. And a group never told you anything. People tell you things, and they belong to groups. Within the groups themselves are contradictory beliefs and positions.

Latinidad is particularly vexing. The language of Latin America is a Christian white supremacist patriarchal settler colonists genocidal language. If there were any justice in the world, it would be eradicated and the languages of the dead would be heard from Alaska to what we call Tierra del Fuego.

But, because the Spanish ultimately lost to the English in the grand game of empire, Spanish is a signifier of lower social status. So white European Hispanics who’s families were settlers, like mine were, feel like they are actually the oppressed people, not the oppressors, because the USA discriminates against them. White supremacy and victimhood simultaneously run rampant throughout latinidad. We see it the most in the white Cubans and Venezuelans who want nothing more than for the US to invade their former countries of residence and exact divine vengeance on those who would rather uplift black people and women than maintain the genocidal settler colonial project.

It is not imperialism to tell all of the latinate languages that they have to break the gender binary. It is anti-imperialism. After all, Latin was the language of the Roman empire, so chosen and designed to propagate their ideology.

I also latiné but yeah, but yes the people who insist on misgendering others simply because their language has a gender binary in it are not in the right

No, seriously, working to degender the languages of European patriarchal white Christian supremacist genocidal nations is not “doing an imperialism” on them. Yes, you can impose on them. No it’s not oppression.

It means that their enemies are fighting fucking evil. Don’t you want people to fight fucking evil? Or would you rather the people fighting fucking evil lose to the fucking evil?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/11/ultranationalism-in-ukraine-a-photo-essay

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ukraine-has-nazi-problem-vladimir-putin-s-denazification-claim-war-ncna1290946

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-06-12/ukraine-s-neo-nazis-won-t-get-u-s-money

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/azov-far-right-fighters-ukraine-neo-nazis

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/world/europe/nazi-symbols-ukraine.html

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/in-ukraine-nationalists-gain-influence-and-scrutiny-idUSBREA2618D/

https://truthout.org/articles/nyt-discovers-ukraines-neo-nazis-at-war/

https://www.reuters.com/article/opinion/commentary-ukraines-neo-nazi-problem-idUSKBN1GV2TC/

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-s-got-a-real-problem-with-far-right-violence-and-no-rt-didn-t-write-this-headline/

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/359609-the-reality-of-neo-nazis-in-the-ukraine-is-far-from-kremlin-propaganda/

Hey, look, a real world example demonstrating why your worldview is not up to the task of dealing with reality!

Patriarchy is a huge ancient oppressive system. One of the domains of patriarchy is language, specifically embedding the gender binary and misogyny into both denotative and connotative meaning. Hysterical literally means “crazy the way a woman is crazy”.

Addressing the oppression of patriarchy and its effects on language by working to move beyond the gendered binary and the misogyny is not in any way, shape, or form imperialism or analogous to imperialism.

When you undo the harm of oppression, that it not doing an oppression. When you fight back against imperialists, that is not imperialism. When you work against racism, that is not racism. And when you fight against patriarchy, it’s not feminine patriarchy.

It’s almost like the political system incentivizes and relies on its presidents committing mass atrocities in order to exist!

This is why the Democrats will never save us. The Democrats need these wars, and war crimes, and corruption, and over policing, and the most authoritarian criminal justice system on the planet, and the military spying on citizens, and international drug running, and black market arms selling, and genocide, and millions of deaths by depravation. They need just as much as the Republicans need them.

And that’s because the US government, like all liberal governments (which is most of the world’s governments), are actually systems for managing the interests and conflicts of the powerful. The masses are powerful, the billionaires/merchants are powerful, the military is powerful. There are factions within all of these power centers and the government’s function is to prevent civil war at any scale to prevent the destruction of capital assets and to create the conditions for the success of these factions.

The masses aren’t in power. So the government’s function relative to the masses is to prevent them from revolting and keep them laboring for profit and filling the ranks of the military

The military’s primary function after ensuring no domestic revolt is to destroy the capital of competitors in other countries and to prevent coalition building against the enemies of the American billionaires and, because kf historical relationships, the Western European billionaires.

The billionaires are the ones that fight amongst themselves the most. The tech faction, the industrial faction, the finance faction - these faction has different theories about how to remain in power and wealth. And the problem is that the entire world system that made them powerful and rich is waning. The ecosystem is under immense pressure. Many nations have established effective resistance against both US military power and US financial power, and more are developing them and forming coalitions. The Chinese outmaneuvered the American billionaires and created a situation where destroying Chinese capital results in the destruction of America and European wealth and the ability of the government to keep the masses docile with cheap commodities.

The whole American system, and by historical process, the whole European system, is facing down a fundamental shift in global economics that threatens to completely undo their entire power structure. They don’t give a flying fuck about abortions or trans people or voting rights or whatever wedge issue they pick next. They are doing that to manage the masses, keep them scared, keep them fighting amongst themselves, and keep them collaborating with the “good cop” faction (the Democrats). They have never cared to hold their leaders accountable for crimes because they all fundamentally agree with the motivation and outcomes of those crimes. They are scrambling to figure out how to keep their gravy train running and they do not have an answer. They need to take drastic actions and they don’t know if they’ll work, so they need lightning rod presidents to absorb all the negativity and so they can perform “resistance” to maintain the allegiance of those they oppress.

The Rs are the bad cop and the Ds are the good cop. You do not work with the good cop just because they perform higher moral positioning or because they soothe your anxieties about or claim to be protecting you from the bad cop. They are collaborators. They are working for the same department, they have the same goals, they just need you to participate.

Platner has presented zero class analysis. 90% of his anti-war position is “we should spend that money at home”. And best he’s a sheep dog social Democrat like Bernie and AOC. At worst he’ll just slide right over his career because he won’t actually address his past.

Billionaire is a role. They don’t deserve to die. The role deserves to be abolished

They can’t actually resist appropriation personally. That would be like one person trying to stop all of 1000 people from crossing an imaginary line that’s 10 miles long.

The problem isn’t that they’ll personally resist but that they will spend their resources on a private military to protect their assets.

I love how you literally cannot fathom the idea that it is a SUBSTANTIVE critique that the man joined the military, went out to kill brown people, re-enlisted, then joined a mercenary group to provide security details in that same theater, then came home and became a luxury food farmer and then while married sexted with a bunch of thirst trap TikTokers all while spending 20 years with a literal Tottenkopf tattooed on his chest that he proudly displayed for years.

As though what I am actually saying is “you can’t trust him. He’s white.” It would be comical if it wasn’t so sad that I share a country with you. Get it through your fake victim complex. This has nothing to do with him being white and everything to do with the fact that he has not done anything that would indicate he’s not a fucking jarhead who’s only concern about military adventurism is America First politics, where his anti-war stance is primarily economic (though he has specific ethical problems with specific wars).

Try not to make everything about your own insecurities.

Not for nothing, but the Nazi Party adopted a progressive, worker-first, anti-capitalist, populist aesthetic to rise to power. It’s not enough to put up a web page that says “this is my platform, isn’t it great”. That’s aesthetics. He actually needs to DO something. And what he’s done is self-isolate as an oyster farmer and get involved in local politics around the economics of oyster farming. That’s it. He hasn’t done anything progressive. He just says progressive things. We’ve seen that before.

Do you know what sheepdogging is? It’s the use of an aesthetically anti-establishment candidate to attract the attention and energy of the disaffected, the alienated, and the oppositional for the explicit purpose of bringing that energy back into the fold of the mainstream power structure. That’s exactly what’s happening here. The Democrats don’t care if Collins or Platner win. They are super happy with the controversy because it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing - getting Democrats fighting about which Democrat to vote for instead of letting them become disaffected with the party and seek to actually challenge its power.

Platner’s a sheepdog. He may not know it himself, but that’s his role. It’s obvious he has no interest in class analysis. He’s a petite bourgeois liberal who wants to maintain the status quo that allows him to own and run a small luxury food farm. He’s basically Biden 50 years ago, or maybe Fetterman or Sinema. He’s never going to turn against the military. AOC campaigned on the same positions of not expanding the military and getting out of forever wars, and yet, she has voted to expand military spending at least twice. Not because she’s evil or because she was fooling us this whole time, but because that’s the reality of the US government and the Democrat party isn’t interested, as a party, in changing it. And the evidence is right there. Not only do your favored candidates constantly have to compromise with the actual power structure, the history of progressive politicians shows that they slide right every term. There’s no way to build a progressive bulwark voting in people one at a time over decades when you have things like Biden getting elected on his opposition to the Vietnam war only to then to architect the Crime Bill and unrelentingly support Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

Platner MIGHT actually have a spine for a couple terms and vote the way he said he would - most of the time, anyway. But even if he does it won’t matter in the short term because of the power structure of the US. But once he’s in, all the evidence says he’s just gonna keep sliding right, and voting in someone so obviously tainted by incredibly bad decision making is just a signal to EVERYONE in the Democrat party that we’ll eat shit as long they tell us it’s chocolate.