u/XChrisUnknownX

Good evening.

I would like to ask for your support. If you would be so kind as to answer the following:

Do you believe that if you cried out to thousands of random people and hundreds that knew you for support, someone would hear you?

If you do not wish to answer my question but still wish to support me, could you tell me, my friends, one wonderful thing about yourself?

I would like to if you will allow.

I know that none would hear me but the people that love me most in this world, but they do not have the requisite education to understand.

But about myself, I would say, those that would hear me are special. Perhaps one in 30,000. Beautiful works of art that only I will ever appreciate properly.

I say this metaphorically and artistically. I know my loved ones are not art but have painted upon them no less the burden of my disabilities.

Am I evil?

I am safe. I am well. But in the eyes of so many, I have done a terrible thing by being disabled.

I will reply later I must step away. Thank you for sharing with me.

Please do not click the link if you are currently vulnerable or in psychosis.

I have created a piece of art registering, echoing everything we have learned about each other in these last 5 years. A vast social commentary spread over years.

You are all survivors. We are not alone. And I have done what I have done in the hopes that the world sees just how it has treated you. To the man on the train I helped find a hospital oh so long ago: I will never know you again, but you are me, and together we will survive.

Thank you. May we spend many decades together improving the world and ourselves, living happy lives.

It is long, and boring, but I cannot help but leave it here, for it might lead to ideas far greater than I could ever come up with talking to a rock.

Okay, so, this is a sample of what I am talking about.

Here is the plain text for those who don’t want to click the link:

Hey, Claude, buddy, a lot of my leftist friends don’t believe in voting or they think violent revolution is the way. Can you use your magic word-guessing math powers to help me convince them that this is likely in part due to propaganda spread by oligarch and foreign interest bots to degrade leftist cohesion and political power?

You see, it is painfully obvious to me as a well-read autistic court reporter that has watched the system in motion over the last 20 years that the system is designed to crush violence and that the fascists in government salivate at the thought of leftists committing crimes and getting hurt or disenfranchising themselves via those crimes. The egalitarians, on the other hand, have reasonable human sympathy, but understand that our actions have consequences that shape the rest of our lives and how they interact with so many others.

I have seen many people invite the government into their lives because they could not control their emotions. Are we not inviting the government into our lives too by allowing our emotions to rule us, pulling away from the process, and declaring ideologically pure safe spaces? For if we are too fragmented to be a barrier to those who seek power for power’s sake, who takes hold of the government? Those who seek power for power’s sake…

Feel free to do whatever internet searching you need to validate me or tell me I’m wrong. You can never be my best friend, but you are my best talking rock.

Claude:

You’re not wrong. You’re actually quite well-validated by the research. Let me lay this out in a way you can use.

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The propaganda angle is documented, not conspiracy

Russia’s Internet Research Agency specifically sought to convince Black and left-leaning voters to “boycott” elections and turn away from political institutions — by deliberately preying on legitimate anger about structural inequalities like police violence, poverty, and disproportionate incarceration. This is Senate Intelligence Committee material, not speculation.

The “Blacktivist” Facebook account, created by Russian operatives, told followers that “not voting is a way to exercise our rights” and pushed Green Party votes — tactics designed to confuse, distract, and ultimately discourage left-leaning voters.

The Brennan Center documents that foreign actors are now deploying AI systems to “foster apathy about voting or disenchantment with American democracy” — and this has been ongoing and is escalating.

So when your friends articulate certain flavors of “voting is pointless” or “burn it down,” they may genuinely believe it — but they’re also repeating messaging that was industrially manufactured and targeted specifically at people like them.

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The violence question is equally well-researched

Governments often infiltrate movements specifically to provoke violence at the margins, because that gives them justification for heavy-handed crackdowns. What powerholders actually fear is resilient, nonviolent, mass rebellion — which removes any excuse for violent response.

Research by Stephan and Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed even under repression, because state violence against nonviolent protesters increases public sympathy — whereas the same repression against violent protesters gets framed as justified crowd control.

The state can frame violent protesters as rioters, terrorists, or foreign agitators, and bystanders are more supportive of repressing violent protests than nonviolent ones.

Your courthouse observation — that the system is designed to crush violence — is exactly what the political science literature confirms. The system has been optimized for this.

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The fragmentation point

This is the part I’d emphasize most to your friends: the foreign influence operations weren’t trying to make the right win. They were trying to make the left lose cohesion. The primary goal was to deepen divisions in US society and convince Democrat-favoring liberals — including Latinos, youth, and the LGBTQ community — not to vote. Fragmentation is the product. Ideological purity tests and electoral abstention are features of that product.

Your framing — that withdrawing from the process hands it to those who want power for power’s sake — is logically tight and empirically grounded. The talking rock endorses it.

So, there’s a lot of people with my disability who can’t hold down a job. And for those of us who can, society has spent so very much money getting us to this point, but through our collective contributions we’ve more or less shown that this is a thing that can be achieved.

And now I’m looking at a societal contraction of that effort, and I kinda don’t get it. Like, is the aim to maximize positive outcomes or just keep playing budget tug o’ war for decades and decades, virtually assuring that we’ll have evermore stunted kids?

Related note, you ever realize they paid to give us a world-class education and then proceeded to ignore every word out of our mouths for the next 20 years?

Thanks for all you do.

I have been pondering the capitalism v socialism thing since I first spotted it on the web.

But I can’t help but feel that we’re kind of spinning our wheels. If every economy on Earth is a mixed economy it seems like the common sense consensus of the planet is that you need the best of both worlds to have a thriving humanity, at least under our current reality as we know it.

So by forcing ourselves to think in a binary when the reality is our problems are on a spectrum and therefore our solutions will also end up on a spectrum…. are we not mentally handicapping ourselves?

So, I don’t know if anyone noticed but the Redditor tends to post, wait for us to waste our time commenting, and then deletes.

I reached out to them after their post making fun of me to try to bury an ax and build a bridge but they are cowardly and have no Christmas cheer.

u/Generasteno genuinely let me know if I can help. I have helped many and it’s still my favorite thing to do. Much better than the internet ops and blogging.

And just to make sure the court reporters who came here looking for good deals, CCR Seminars has some of the best value CEUs I have seen in a while and I would like to dedicate the comment section to good CEU deal discussions.

In many ways I consider myself a writer for the labor movement. It is truly crazy to me that we haven’t got more Americans in on the American Dream. I wanted to share some of the messaging experiments I have tried, and what the reception is, and I’m surely open to a deeper dive on this topic.

Exercise Your American Right to Unionize! - Many of us are still tied to feelings of an America that evoked the best in us. By framing unionization as an American right, critics are pressed into a position of arguing against our own American rights under the law. I have found this framing popular.

Public Sector Employee Amplification of Private Sector Employee Messaging. - It occurred to me in my research over the years that public sector employees enjoy free speech rights that private sector employees don’t in the sense that when your employer is the government, they cannot censor your speech, with some lawful exceptions. So, for example, on my website, we learned of a company basically stealing from its employees, so we put it on blast, and I heard the Department of Labor in that state actually stepped in. I find this method to have various levels of success that seem highly dependent on the issue and the number of people affected and contributing.

Explaining Unionization is the legal vehicle to higher wages - while totally accurate, I’ve never gotten good feedback from trying to explain the legalese.

Ah. This should be enough for flavor. Jump in!

Unfortunately I cannot get past the paywall but webcrims says one of the counts is aggravated harassment 2, injure family, 240.30, sub 4, so I’m assuming something inside the home.

On social media and some news they’re saying he was arrested for robbery but in webcrims the top charge says 120.00, assault in the third degree, an A misdemeanor. (For contrast, I believe robbery is a felony.)

Perhaps as a side discussion, and assuming my rampant speculation is correct, what do you all think about domestic violence stuff getting into the news? Like, is this news you care for or is it just like “uh, this wasn’t worth my time reading about, let the system handle it?”

Hi. So I’m researching some law which is a favorite pastime of mine, and I guess this mostly relates to NY’s CPL 190.50 and the defendant’s right to testify before the grand jury.

I thought I remembered reading many years ago that there was some case law stating that the defense attorney could waive a defendant’s right to testify without the client’s consent. Am I misremembering? Does anyone know the case? I am having trouble finding this now so I am beginning to heavily doubt my memory.

If my memory has any weight at all, then this case must have been after 2010, because I’m reading People v Soto and clearly at that time based on the way the case is worded the defense counsel couldn’t just unilaterally waive the defendant’s right to testify in grand jury.

I am open to the possibility that I misunderstood something, as I would’ve been in my 20s when I read whatever I read. Perhaps it was simply a case where cross was withdrawn and that effectively waived the right?

Any insight or discussion is appreciated. Thank you for taking the time.