It is almost like natural monopolies, such as primary power generation and supply, should be under the control of the Government and not private individuals.
Most places that are not Texas still have something resembling the old school utility model where the state effectively grants a license to a private company to operate and manage the grid, which is itself a public right of way. This is governed by a state appointed utility board.
For profit isn’t inherently a bad thing, but the more essential the service should warrant more and more regulations on safety security and pricing. They should not be given unlimited control over these.
Government agencies are more than capable of providing equally shitty service even without a profit motive, see: DMV. Any monopoly is. This is partially why regarding universal healthcare most people aren’t advocating for government owned healthcare facilities, but the government being the single payer to privately run facilities to control prices.
While government monopolies can absolutely create shitty services, the main difference between a government service and privately-controlled service is that the government (and hence, the people, in a democracy) has the power to direct the service on how to operate. The government can’t just shut down a private power supplier because their customer service is trash, and the individual consumer has no power as to how the service operates.
I assume the DMV being shitty is just a meme, like Taco Bell giving you diarrhea.
cause i’ve been in many DMVs, in several states, and never had a headache with it, and no one I know personally has had a problem either. Small sample base, of course.
No no… Checks the GOP playbook: we just need to offer a premium power support plan so if the power goes out they’ll provide you a backup generator. It just costs twice the normal rate.
I know your joking here, but this is actually the path forward and is being implemented in other states and countries.
The power company provides at a discount or for free a home backup battery to the residence. If not free, You pay off the battery at a very affordable rate but end up with a smaller power bill as the power company can access its power to balance the load, filling it up when power is cheap and the battery being used when power is expensive.
In a blackout, the home owner gets to use the battery and doesn’t suffer an outage.
It makes the grid more secure by dispersing it around thousands of homes instead of a large expensive failure points and gives them an improved ability to balance the overall load instead of needing a gas peaker plant.
I think it was recently announced that a Vermont power company was going to onboard 100% of their users in the next few years, but it’s happening elsewhere too. If a tree takes something down in a snow storm, people won’t lose power giving them time to fix it.
The right thing to do under a capitalist economy is to buy the government and give yourself a monopoly.
This isn’t a natural monopoly, it’s protected by legislature and cronyism.
A proper capitalist approach to utilities, then the pipes and wires need to be considered no different then the road they are installed on. Recoup money by selling metered wholesale access to the carriers and utilities.
But we don’t have proper capitalism. We have this bastardized American version that sucks.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
We settled it before the damn constitution even started. How these nitwits in DC don’t see how publicly run infrastructure doesn’t provide for the common defense or promote general welfare is beyond me. But I guess running water, heat, affordable healthcare, and an ability to communicate with each other and the rest of the world doesn’t count under that, somehow.
Maybe if the courts took the founders intent from the Prologue instead of the secret letters to their mistresses, we’d have a functional system. But that’s just my opinion.
I thought the sarcasm of my first two paragraphs was heavily laid on, but I suppose not.
I don’t disagree with you, however the majority of electoral college and senate voters agree with my first two paragraphs.
We are insistent that we must do things differently. This American Exceptionalism, as if there’s something fundamentally different between humans born inside its walls than the ones born out.
If we must be insistent that we’re different, we should at least be consistent in its application. The preamble basically implies that the ideal is exactly what you and the rest of my post is saying.
In the modern world a countries greatest strength is its ability to utilize its economies of scale. If for no other reason we should at least realize that the existing systems are unsustainably wasteful.
Many of them were either abolitionists or manumissionists. It’s hard to believe we had always been so conflicted since our founding (as many of the northern states had already abolished slavery before ratifying the constitution), yet still managed to have a reasonably functional government essentially made up entirely of rich white dudes who openly hated each others guts.
Also it’s easy to sit here and poo-poo the whole slavery thing now, 300 something years later. Washington got his first slaves from inheritance. When he was 11. That’s not me dismissing it, that’s just me demonstrating how normalized it was.
Why did it take me so long to finally realize that by privatizing services like these, governments are preemptively shifting the blame when the service fails? Voters who are angry at the energy company won’t be (as) angry with the politicians.
Production can be liberalised, but it requires good regulation. Regulation failed to include a rule for responsibility to provided a minimum of energy, the judge can’t do more than the regulation law. It works in EU, we didn’t have blackout past year even though the situation was dramatic mostly due to the Russian invasion, because the liberalised market allowed efficient sharing of energy where it was most needed.
I wouldn’t be so certain a public monopoly could have managed it in such an efficient way (in terms of finance, energy usage and service). People tend to idealize public administration.
“When it was my child, it just flipped a switch,” says Farr, who is suing the Platte County School District on Kansas City’s outskirts. “And it was like a wake-up.”
I’m really happy for his daughter to have the support of her father like this, but it disgusts me that people like him don’t understand bigotry until it happens to someone they care about. And there are so many millions like him who will never encounter it happening to anyone they care about.
Yeah dude I’m usually against forced drugging but some people literally need to be tied down, fed molly, and made to watch Titanic or something to kickstart their empathy drives. Maybe Sophie’s Choice…idk I haven’t seen it because I have the opposite problem.
They’d root for the iceberg and the Nazis. Because again, it wouldn’t be happening to anyone they care out. Of course, the biggest problem is the only person they care about is themselves. They’d have to go through a scenario like the first segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie if we would have even a hope of getting them to have any empathy.
Edit: apparently this is basically a snuff film because the director got the lead and some kids killed via negligence. I’m gunna skip it, on second thought…
<span style="color:#323232;">First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Because I was not a socialist.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Because I was not a trade unionist.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Because I was not a Jew.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
</span>
Very much so. Except he’s one of the lucky ones because he’s white, cis, probably heterosexual and male, so no one will ever need to speak out for him.
It’s that privilege that obligates us to speak for others. Because even though I can’t speak from personal experience, I’m more likely to be listened to. So I do the best I can to speak for those who go unheard, imperfect as my understanding is.
I haven’t seen it because I have the opposite problem.
I can relate to that. I’m one of those people who won’t even squash bugs, and even heavy-handed, poorly written emotional moments in movies can make me tear up because I’ll inevitably find something in there that speaks to me. Shits wild compared to my friends and family
A little further down the article goes into more detail about his turn around.
They bumped heads and argued, their relationship strained. In desperation, he turned to God, poring through the Bible, questioning teachings that he once took at face value that being transgender was an abomination. He prayed on it, too, replaying her childhood in his mind, seeing feminine qualities now that he had missed.
Then it hit him. “She’s a girl.”
“I got peace from God. Like, ‘This is how your daughter was born. I don’t make mistakes as God. So she was made this way. There’s a reason for it.’”
Regardless of how he got there, I am glad he did. His daughter’s words say it best.
“There was this electricity in me that was just, it felt like pure joy. Just seeing someone I thought would never support me, just being one of my biggest supporters,”
I found that encouraging. I saw it as a man willing to fight everything he is at his core for his kid. If it had been a flip of a switch then all that would have told me is that him being a bigot was him just being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole and that he really didn’t care that much.
It would be nice if empathy was an inherent trait, but it’s not. I think the general state of the world is testimony to that fact. Good people are not born, they are made. Sometimes the world doesn’t get the opportunity to teach you that lesson, or maybe it happens late in life, but it’s a boon to the world whenever it happens.
Likely anyone who holds empathy dear to their hearts has experienced this learned behavior, and benefited from it. To me this is melancholic, it just means that man probably never really experienced the real gift of empathy, at least not until later in life. And just based on his quotes, it does seem that he regrets that dearly.
I was raised Catholic and was even sent to Catholic school, which of course means that I inevitably grew up to be a hardcore atheist with a dislike of organized religion. Personally, I don’t care what mental gymnastics a raging bigot has to make in order to learn care and compassion for those different from him, as long as they stick the landing.
They interpret their religion and their religious texts to ultimately support whatever opinion they want to be able to justify. He wanted to be able to accept and support his daughter so he found a way for his religion to let him do that.
That’s the crux of the problem. Want to subjugate a group, no problem. want genital mutilation no worries. want to discriminate against a segment of the population, cool cool; I can make my god confirm every shitty thing I have in my heart. Luckily sometimes it works the other way.
This. The worst part is that they are somehow convinced that’s not what they’re doing. That is how you get a pope who calls trans women “daughters of God” but also turns around and says “gender ideology” is “colonizing the family” or some other bs.
Why have we accepted the standard of misleading headlines? “Oh well you didn’t read the article, I guess you and 90% of eyeballs get to be fundamentally misinformed” is an unhinged take.
I never said a misleading headline was acceptable. I said the publication is not misleading and that it covers the criticisms dude up above was leveling.
I can’t read the full article (paywalled for me) but it references the National Ignition Facility so the way it goes is super lasers blast a tiny hydrogen thing and that creates a tiny bit of fusion that releases the energy. The energy of the laser blast is what’s being called the input and the fusion energy released the output. What is misleading is that a greater amount of energy was used create the laser blast than the laser blast itself outputs. If you consider the energy that went into creating the laser blast the input (rather than the laser blast itself), then it’s usually not a net positive energy release.
Remember when incandescent light bulbs were the norm? They worked by sending full line voltage through a tiny tungsten wire that would get so hot that it glows, making some light, but 95% of the energy that gets consumed is frittered away as heat? The high-power lasers needed to make fusion happen are a lot like that.
I believe all this article is saying is that 15% more energy than what came out of the lasers as useful laser light was liberated in the reaction.This completely ignores the energy it took to power those massively inefficient lasers.
I think it also ignores the fact that the 15% more energy liberated wasn’t actually, like, harnessed by a generator. I believe (and I may be wrong) this was testing only the reaction itself. Actually hooking that up to a turbine and using it to create energy that is cost competitive with contemporary sources is still a completely unsolved problem.
[email protected] got it, but basically lasers are pretty inefficient. The article I just found said (in a different run of this facility) they put 400MJ into the laser to get 2.5MJ out of it. So that makes the whole firing system what, 0.6% efficient? Your fusion reaction would have to give more than 400MJ to truly be in the positive for this particular setup/method, but again this facility is a research one and not meant to generate power - there isn’t even a way to harness/collect it here.
Oh so the laser’s generating mostly heat and a little coherent radiation, and they’re only referring to the coherent radiation as the “energy input” to the process.
Hmm. Kinda sketch.
Especially because that’s not trivial. If we have no way of obtaining laser light other than that process, and the laser is the only way to feed the fusion reactor, then that’s 100% on the balance books of this process.
From another article: “In an experiment on 5 December, the lab’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) fusion reactor generated a power output of 3.15 megajoules from a laser power output of 2.05 megajoules – a gain of around 150 per cent. However, this is far outweighed by the roughly 300 megajoules drawn from the electrical grid to power the lasers in the first place.”
Powering the laser takes 300 MJ but the actual laser power (the energy in the light) is only 2.05 MJ. The rest of the energy is lost to heat and other inefficiencies. If the laser could be created with 100% efficiency then the input energy would also be 2.05 MJ.
Energy can be measured as occurring in different physical phenomena. There is energy in sound waves/packets, energy in light waves/packets, energy in matter, etc.
The 300 MJ number refers to the electrical energy in the form of electromagnetic fields carried specifically through solid conductors via electron movement along the conductors.
The 2.05 MJ number refers to the radiative energy in the form of electromagnetic fields sent specifically through free space/a vacuum (I presume; I didn’t read the article, so maybe the laser medium was a vacuum or something else) via photons/waves. No electrons, aside from those in the lasers that create the photons in the first place.
So there is a conversion from electric to radiative energy here.
Start Edit:
And as another commenter said, in this conversion there are losses because materials aren’t perfect.
:End Edit
If the 3 MJ radiant energy from the nuclear material was then converted back into electric energy via steam processes, we’d get a comparable number compared to the 300 one.
This is also why you see nuclear/CSP plants quoted in MWt and MWe: there is a conversion that takes place from thermal energy (vibrations of atoms/compounds) into electric energy.
I want to add that experimental reactors used for scientific research might never become net energy positive and that would be fine. Their purpose isn’t to generate profit, it’s to learn more about the physics, so it will be more valuable for them to be adaptable than efficient.
However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t take a configuration that has been shown to have potential and make a reactor that is more efficient than adaptable and use that to generate power for the electrical grid.
Absolutely. Also, the fact that the reactor was only running for a short time plays a part. Usually there is a significant energy cost in starting and stopping, which is offset by running for a long time. However, these reactors are not designed for continued running.
It’s all a process of development, and even though the article is perhaps a little sensationalist, they’re making good progress.
If anything has been consistent about fusion its always them desperately trying to spin babysteps and monumental leaps forward and trying to make themselves seem super clean and safe especially compared to fission.
Fusion is not inherently safe. It has significantly higher rate of neutron discharge for the enegy produced which can damage the reactor vessel and potential to cause nonfuel material to become radioactive.
Ontop of any power disruption of the system has the potential for radioactive plasma to escape with nothing even remotely equivalent of a SCRAM to bring it back under control.
The only reason fusion appears safe right now is because its all still developmental phase and any issues are being handwaved as prototyping issues and not treated like the actual potential catastrophes they are.
The total mass of reactants in the fusion chamber is below milligram, some of which is bound in stable isotopes. Even if all of it escaped, it would be far from catastrophic.
The reaction itself cannot run away on its own because it requires a delicate balance in temperature and density, which will be immediately disturbed if there was a breach in containment.
The walls will be activated by neutrons, but short of blowing the reactor up, there’s not much chance of materials escaping in a significant amount to pose a danger.
Just for comparison: The nuclear safety requirements of a fusion reactor are ballpark those of the radiology department in your local hospital: An accident will give you, if you’re unlucky, a dose on the order of a dental x-ray. Decommissioning involves letting it sit there for 100years until it has cooled down to ambient radioactivity levels, if you’re cheeky you could send it to a place where the natural radiation levels are higher and declare it cool much faster.
Why does noone talk about those ludicrously strong magnet fields and gigantic vacuum vessels? You’re standing right next to a massive volume of practically nothing and are worried that something leaks out?
Anyone else remember, in the lead up to the ObamaCare vote, when the GOP used the idea of government officials (death panels) deciding who should get treatment and who should die as a fear mongering tactic?
They are not your friend. They are the reason your pill costs so much. Pharmacist can actually charge less for them if you say you want to pay in cash - you often pay MORE to use insurance on a lot of prescribed medication. They legally can not tell you that.
I’m always curious when this type of story comes up. Is it locale based? Certain states doing funny things? Certain chain pharmacy practices? From my almost 10 years experience as a pharmacy technician in Oregon and Washington, I still have yet to see the actual cash price (not wholesale price) be cheaper than insurance.
They legally can not tell you that
Got a source for that? Absolutely not true.
If you go to Walgreens, your prescription leaflet specifically tells you how much you “saved” over the cash price. That cash price is the most expensive price you could pay for the medication. Cash price of your drug is $297? If insurance pays nothing, you’ll pay $297. Ask to pay cash and you’ll pay $297.
Now there are some chains that do have a list of medications that they do have cheaper (Example is Walmart’s $4 Drug List, or Walgreens’ paid discount program), but that’s chain specific and the lists are pretty narrow in what’s covered. They’re loss leaders since they want to fill all your other drugs that aren’t on those lists.
The other alternative is Discount Cards. Can definitely save money over insurance prices, but it’s hard to know what those companies are doing with your data. You’re giving a random 3rd party access to your health information. They’ll give you a discount then turn around and sell your information to the highest bidder. Unfortunately sometimes a pharmacy will run your claims through one without telling you when you ask to pay cash (Some give kickbacks to the tech/pharmacist).
None of this is to say that I like the prices of drugs. Drug makers and insurance companies artificially raise prices and tell you you’re getting a good deal on your “million dollar” medication.
I had to go to the ER recently because my insurance decided to stop paying for the higher quality iron infusion formulation and switched to only being willing to pay for the cheapest options. Turns out the cheap, less popular options are more likely to have bad reactions.
Wish I could sue them, or at least have whoever made that decision suffer the pain that I did.
I can at least be somewhat comforted by the fact that that emergency visit cost them a lot more than the usual formulation would have. Try to save money on my health care? Fuck you, too.
Anytime someone says death panels I have a compulsive need to post this:
Frame Canada: Wendell Potter spent decades scaring Americans. About Canada. He worked for the health insurance industry, and he knew that if Americans understood Canadian-style health care, they might… like it. So he helped deploy an industry playbook for protecting the health insurance agency. www.npr.org/2020/10/19/925354134/frame-canada
This explains so freaking much about how everyone is always terrified of Canadian health care when it works decently well. (Perfect? No!) But so many of their problems in accessing specialists are identical to ours. (Most common argument I hear.)
And it was just so much easier getting on antidepressants and switching up my birth control methods while I was in Canada than if I had tried the same in the US.
That back then, as everything they say now, is pure projection of things they did or plan to do.
And then again I seriously have to ask why nobody is looking into New York Trump properties that have a pizza place or other food joint in it, because there's children being sextrafficed in its basement.
There have ALWAYS been death panels. There are death panels RIGHT NOW.
They’re occupied by insurance corporations balancing the profit from your premiums and the cost of your treatment. Is it cheaper to let someone die? Can we save the life so they will continue to pay premiums? Can we deny treatment without a media circus that makes us look bad? If there IS a media circus, will they die soon enough that everybody forgets?
I would rather take corporate profit out of the equation.
The truly hilarious thing is that in several states abortion bans were put on hold precisely because of medical freedom laws passed after Obamacare, which, of course, never had to be used against the fictitious government death panels.
What do you think health insurers are? Their business plan is literally “well, maybe you’ll die before we agree to pay for the treatment. We can always change the agreement tomorrow anyway.”
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
To be fair, “support” isn’t the exact word used, but “preserve, protect, and defend” is pretty unequivocal
the only one making a semantical argument, is Trump and his lawyers.
The problem is that the current Supreme Court clearly would support throwing that out, and they LOVE semantics like that to justify clearly bullshit decisions.
They also like using history to support their decisions. If it can be shown that the presidential oath is intended to go beyond “support” I would see the court being persuaded that “support” is implied by “protect, preserve, and defend”. It depends on whether the textualists or the phaux-historians win the day.
The five conservative “justices” are conservatives first and “justices” second. They will always rule however the standard, bigoted, Fox-News-loving white nationalist will rule. They do this by using wordplay and bad-faith semantics.
Every word uttered by a conservative is either deception or manipulation. Every word.
If interpreting laws is going to just turn into how much money a wealthy individual (or anyone wealthy enough to foot the bill) can argue the semantics of anything … what good and what use is any law?
We are long past the point where power and wealth buys better legal outcomes as evidenced by how few rich and powerful people over the last half century have spent any time in prison for their crimes compared to people with neither wealth nor power.
You can preserve, protect, and defend something you don’t support. Debate 101 at even a high school level is learning how to argue the side of an argument that you don’t support.
So while in office, he preserved/protected/defended something he didn’t support. He then lead some form of rebellion against it, causing him to be in violation of the spirit of the 14th but not the letter as it’s written, so he should still be qualified to serve.
The Supreme Court would love this wordplay, except, if they actually accept it, they’re not just invalidating the spirit of the 14th, but undermining it completely as it would never ever ever be relevant to anyone, ever again. And wouldn’t that also be against their oaths to uphold the constitution?
So most likely Trump will be eligible for re-election because I have no doubt that if they can get away with the Citizens United ruling, they can and will do whatever the hell they want.
Did he really preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution on January 6th though? (Spoiler alert: he didn’t). Perhaps that is the better question here than this semantics argument.
I think you can make an argument that if you preserve and protect something, you’re supporting it.
But the real issue, to me, is that no one takes an oath specifically to “support” the constitution. If the presidential oath isn’t an example of supporting it, then Article Ii makes no sense at all - why would it even be there?
Yeah I think the difference here is outcomes vs intentions (consequentialism vs virtue theory, if you want to be exact about ethics). Trump could support the constitution through his actions, but communicate his intentions otherwise: and vice versa.
I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God. (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).
But the real issue, to me, is that no one takes an oath specifically to “support” the constitution. If the presidential oath isn’t an example of supporting it, then Article Ii makes no sense at all - why would it even be there?
I’m sure the righter part of the SC will find a reason :|
I think you can make an argument that if you preserve and protect something, you’re supporting it.
But the real issue, to me, is that no one takes an oath specifically to “support” the constitution. If the presidential oath isn’t an example of supporting it, then Article Ii makes no sense at all - why would it even be there?
What a bad “cynicism is easier than engaging with reality” zero-brain take.
Many politicians just suck. Of course.
But some politicians are clearly trying, growing, learning, and improving. And throwing them out with the bathwater, giving them no support, and equating them to the ones that suck is terminally, suicidally stupid.
But hey, cynicism is easy. People think you’re cool, and you don’t have to put any effort in.
I hope Biden can grow and improve quicker, like preferably before election day so a bunch of voters won’t feel bad about voting for him. I really don’t want Trump.
Biden is easily the best president of my lifetime by a factor of 10, but good governance is boring and quiet, while propaganda is loud and distracting.
If just doing a good job isn’t enough, then what else is there?
He’s pretty good on most things, except the genocide issue. Which is unfortunate because that’s a big one for a whole lot of people. Which makes sense. No one will say Mussolini helped the trains run on time or Hitler’s wars helped the German economy. The other bad things they did make those things seem less consequential. Genocide is like that. A lot of people here are lucky because they live in the imperial core, but for others who knows those being affected by the foreign policy, then it’s priority rises even more.
It is also the lone issue that Repubs somehow aren’t oppositional defiant disorder about. “Let’s get the Muslim ban guy back in there, he’ll save Palestine.”
Turns out there are plenty of useful idiots who think they are insulated from the consequences of an election by campus security and daddy’s money.
But then others of them know what they’re up to. They want Donald to help speed the collapse so China can gain more ground. That’s hypocrisy, those guys don’t give a shit about human rights abuses as long as the nation committing them pretends to be socialist.
Nah, once you consider being for or against someone to be a “single issue”, then most votes through history get wrapped up in it, rendering it kind of moot.
Additionally, I can easily break down the actual issues behind why I’m voting against trump :)
I.e. russian trolls playing the “thoughtful liberal” telling a heartfelt story about how they cannot vote for Biden in good conscience because of this issue.
I like how you avoid saying what the issue is, because it sounds a lot worse when you say it’s genocide. I think that’s a fair line in the sand to draw for people. Hopefully Biden movies on that stance soon so we don’t get Trump. We all better keep pushing him.
What a cheap mother fucker Tesla and Elon are. Could have just paid for the pies and come out looking good. But instead nickel and dimes for just the ingredients. When you’re a billionaire. Fuck outta here.
Yeah but if Elon could make her look like the unreasonable one, he could essentially start a witch hunt from within his own cult. That can do worse things than just negatively impact the bottom line.
Tbf, this time it didn’t seem like Elon was behind this, probably some manager in the dealership. The article also said he commented they would pay her when he heard the news.
If there’s one thing Jesus was consistent about, it’s that poor refugees seeking shelter should be ruthlessly murdered by drowning in a river tangled in razor wire.
In various campaign biographies, a résumé and interviews, Mr. Santos said he graduated from Baruch College in New York City, where he was a volleyball star on a championship team. He boasted of working at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and amassing personal wealth. He claimed to be descended from Holocaust refugees; that his mother was in the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11 attacks; and that he lost four employees in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.
The real question is where tf were the journalists while Santos was running his campaign on these false claims?
Too busy playing horse race? Frantically trying to find something newsworthy about Hunter Biden's laptop? Credulously glorifying some billionaire's childish misconceptions?
Well, he’s a representative for New York, in a district for New York City itself. Long Island and “technically” a tiny bit of NYC. (I have been informed that his district is mostly Long Island)
Let’s break this down into two parts, okay?
Local journalism is dead, dead, dead, dead dead. Especially in big places like New York City, where everyone assumes that the New York Times will be covering things. They didn’t dig deep into Mayor Adams either, and that guy is under investigation now as well. They didn’t question his former police credentials after decades of police misconduct. Beyond that the NYT is more of a national newspaper than an actual local paper. I’m sure there are plenty of small independent news sources in New York City, but I’m also sure they’re mostly drowned out and ignored compared to how many people read something like the NYT.
Corruption in New York City is literally, completely nothing new. Journalists have been failing to uncover unscrupulous activity for decades in this city. As I referenced mayor Adams above, this city filled with the rich, egotistical, and greedy, is a city built on the kind of lies George Santos peddles. How do I know? Because that city allowed Donald Trump to be a successful real estate developer using similar tactics. People have known he’s corrupt since forever, but plenty of his corruption was just ignored until decades later. Same with Rudy Guiliani and so on.
Now I’m not saying we should just give up. Local journalism is important to fight for, and NYC being a corrupt hell-hole isn’t a permanent foregone conclusion. However, my point is that NYT employs far fewer reporters than you think to cover an entire country, and the dearth of real local news sources all over the country is contributing to these kind of people succeeding, because the local press is dead in the water and can’t afford to send someone researching local corruption.
Pay for your local news, is what I am saying, I guess, and things might marginally improve.
He was a representative of long island not NYC, specifically the district my dad resides in so I get to poke fun at him for electing this absolute joke of an asshat lol
Checking the map it looks like part of it might be in queens so “technically” some part of it is NYC, but it’s mostly rich long island assholes. (I wish my dad was rich, he’s just lucky to have had a house in that area for a long time) lol
You can tell I’m not from the area, because divisions like that are lost on me. I just know local news is hollowed out nationwide, and I somehow suspect it’s a similar situation for New York state as a whole. Thanks for the more detailed breakdown of his district for me.
Now I’m not saying we should just give up. Local journalism is important to fight for, and NYC being a corrupt hell-hole isn’t a permanent foregone conclusion.
Nice complete misrepresentation of what I said, chucklefuck.
EDIT: Also came back because like, you’re going to bitch about journalists not doing their job and then turn around and say its not our job to fund them. Pick a fucking lane. Do you care about journalism or not?
Oh I'm sorry, after re-reading it looks like you actually said we should fight for better journalism by skipping breakfast, or selling our plasma, and giving the money we save to the conglomerates providing our local news. Totally makes sense.
If you think journalists aren’t living the same way, you’re out of your mind. They need to be able to take care of themselves, too, to do their jobs.
But cool, I guess the answer is fuck all journalism then, because you can’t be fucked to care about how it’s funded. You’re expecting it to just be handed to you by people who do it for the love of it, and then wonder why that doesn’t happen, when you yourself understand exactly why it can’t and you just explained it.
What a fucking shitty crank. You don’t get what you want, so you want to tear down the whole thing, which is conveniently what you’ve accused me of. Do you do a lot of projection like this?
I don’t exactly see you considering solutions, just a lot of bitching.
Because you're obviously struggling, what I'm saying that objective & effective journalism is vital to informed decision-making in a democracy, and we're not getting it because journalism in the US is run as a business¸ which imo will always end with media focusing exclusively on whatever makes them the most money, irrespective of the truth. If we want real journalism we need to view it, and fund it, as a public service. The problem is systemic, and our news media will continue to fail us until the system is rectified.
I don’t disagree, but you’re skipping a lot of steps of how we fucking get there, man. You’re not going to start the revolution tomorrow by being an asshole on the internet. You’ll just get a lot of people quoting Lebowski at you: “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole.”
Sorry I’m busy living in the world as it currently exists instead of expending all my energy on lofty ideas that sadly most Americans are too toothlessly uneducated in understanding, yet supporting. I’d rather work on building coalitions, talking about how we can change things, and working within the system as it exists at the moment because we don’t have a lot of other choices.
But sure, be angry that you can’t magically snap your fingers to make it better overnight, that really helps us get there. It’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater type stupidity.
It’s not like non-profit journalistic outfits don’t exist, but they need funding. NPR used to be Publicly funded, but last I checked, the public funding dried the fuck up, because people don’t call to pledge money in telethons anymore, and surprise, now they’re corporate funded instead.
Where do you think the money comes from to fund public news? It comes from the public, either in donations, or in the case of something like the BBC, taxes and fees like a TV license. Either way, you’d be “selling plasma” to afford it. You don’t suddenly get to opt out of funding it because you’re too poor when its taxes.
Hey man, call me an asshole if it makes you feel better, I'm just pointing out the problems as I see them, and the giant gaping holes in your suggestions. Widespread political corruption isn't something we can safely ignore. The public can't crowdfund journalism in a sustainable way, unless they get a substantial increase in disposable wealth.
That's the world as it currently exists.
One Koch donation is worth more than the locals can ever give to local journalism, and most local outlets are just Sinclair Broadcast Group in a rubber mask anyway. But sure, be angry that you can't fix it by parroting a facile solution, that really helps us get there.
In response to your edit:
You're so close to getting it omg. Keep trying. It's almost like this is a problem that's been considered before, and had a solution. How could we ensure a public service is publicly funded? Should our poorest even be selling their plasma to pay taxes? That almost sounds like a whole other problem... If only we had a way to regulate these things. But of course, we can only consider solutions within a capitalist model, cuz 'merica, so obviously there's no solution.
One Koch donation is worth more than the locals can ever give to local journalism, and most local outlets are just Sinclair Broadcast Group in a rubber mask anyway.
So once again, short of total revolution, what’s your actual plan to get us there? You’ve made it clear the public is too poor to support publicly funded news, so what is your suggestion to make news publicly funded short of taxation that would increase the tax bill of the public that is too poor to afford it?
Seriously if you can’t bring an actual answer, then fuck off already. I know my answer isn’t good, but fuck me, it’s better than bitching and doing nothing.
Also, let’s not pretend that the fucking BBC is some paragon of virtue, publicly funded news can be conservative bullshit too.
In response to your edit: You realize the reason I called you an asshole is because people who want things to get better share information instead of acting like a smug prick because others don’t already know.
Like, way to channel Angelica from fucking Rugrats in the 90’s: “If you have to ask, you’ll never know!”
Saying shit like “since you’re struggling” to me when at no point before that had you mentioned “public funding” is literally the definition of being a smug asshole, chucklefuck. Sorry I can’t read your fucking mind because you want to dance around the fucking answer instead of just saying it.
You know what actually helps? Educating other people, not shitting on them because they’re not fucking already “enlightened” like you. “Keep trying” said no good teacher ever instead of helping the student understand the concept.
No wonder you’re obviously fucking miserable.
You still refused to answer the question, because you’re more concerned with lording your knowledge over others instead of sharing it. Kind of antithetical to your stated socialist ideals, isn’t it? Hoarding information is what capitalists do you fucking idiot.
So keep enjoying yourself by denying others information and acting like a smug prick about it, you’d fit in just fine with the Koch’s. Which, once again, is why I called you an asshole, asshole.
Lol, I'm not hoarding anything, just trying to get you to actually think critically about the problems inherent in your approach. And yep, I'm being smug, because you refuse to think seriously about your responses, while getting all huffy because someone dared to point out how unworkable the easy answers are. But calling me names totally strengthens your position though, good job there.
You keep mentioning 'total revolution' as the obvious solution, and I would like you to think about why that is. I think we need big structural changes if we want to claw back anything approximating a democracy. You keep saying I won't give you a solution, and it's baffling to me that you can't get there on your own, but if you need spoon-feeding, imo one of the most fundamental things we need do is go back to taxing the wealthy fairly, in order to pay for social services. gasp
It's just boggling to me that you apparently can't even begin to see taxes as something that would help the poor, rather than hurt them, a perspective I'd suspect you've picked up from our deeply biased news media. Turns out, instead of making the poor sell their plasma, we should actually be making billionaires sell their yachts and vacation homes.
I mean, it was always a lifestyle brand. Even back in the day you’d open the “Lifestyle” section of the paper, and it would be about how to afford that third house in the Hamptons. It’s always been clear who their market is aimed at.
In NYC construction, it’s well known that Trump businesses would get bids contracted, then call a meeting before kickoff and demand that the primes and subs lower there price or they won’t honor the contract. Some contractors would already have materials purchased and running the clock on the Net30s with their vendors. Trump Co. would basically tell them to go pound salt and try to sue if you want.
the NYT is more of a national newspaper than an actual local paper
These days, the NYT likes to think of itself as a tech company that also does some journalism. They’ve bought games like Wordle, they’re a podcasting company, they publish books…
Games and alternative media formats for journalists have always been a part of journalism. I’m not sure how embracing modern technology makes them any less of a news organization. Would you prefer only the crossword and only in print?
A newspaper having a word game, a radio presence, and publishing books is not really a gotcha.
The North Shore Leader, a small paper on Long Island, broke the scandal before the November election. By the time other outlets picked it up, Santos had been elected. Grant Lally joined Geoff Bennett to discuss.
Journalism as it used to exist has been absolutely gutted. There’s no time for investigation, we need endless content pumped out at faster and faster rates. Who cares what’s accurate as long as people click the link and give up that sweet, sweet ad revenue?
where tf were the journalists while Santos was running his campaign on these false claims?
There aren’t enough journalists to go around. There are hundreds of congresspeople and there definitely aren’t hundreds of journalists covering random unimportant congresspeople.
People have voted with their dollars, saying they don’t care enough about vetting congresspeople before they’re elected to actually pay the salaries of journalists to do that.
Look the incredibly rich people who own the media wish that us peasants would care enough about politics to force them to cover these things properly but unfortunately all their journalists are busy writing opinion pieces about how we need to get back in the office, how we shouldn’t even try to make ethical purchasing decisions, and how great whatever makes them the most money this week is.
Lauri Carleton’s career in fashion began early in her teens, working in the family business at Fred Segal Feet in Los Angeles while attending Art Center School of Design. From there she ran “the” top fashion shoe floor in the US at Joseph Magnin Century City. Eventually she joined Kenneth Cole almost from its inception and remained there for over fifteen years as an executive, building highly successful businesses, working with factories and design teams in Italy and Spain, and traveling 200 plus days a year.
With a penchant for longevity, she has been married to the same man for 28 years and is the mother of a blended family of nine children, the youngest being identical twin girls. She and her husband have traveled the greater part of the US, Europe and South America. From these travels they have nourished a passion for architecture, design, fine art, food, fashion, and have consequently learned to drink in and appreciate the beauty, style and brilliance of life. Their home of thirty years in Studio City is a reflection of this passion, as well as their getaway- a restored 1920’s Fisherman’s Cabin in Lake Arrowhead. Coveting the simpler lifestyle with family, friends and animals at the lake is enhanced greatly by their 1946 all mahogany Chris-Craft; the ultimate in cultivating a well appreciated and honed lifestyle.
Mag.Pi for Lauri is all about tackling everyday life with grace and ease and continuing to dream…
What a waste. A tragedy for that whole family for literally nothing. No reason at all other than small minded assholes.
We’re literally already in one. We’ve been in a cold civil war for about a decade now (arguably the past few decades), and the war’s been growing hotter with every mass shooting and tragedy like this one.
This is how civil wars are fought in the modern age. It’s not all fancy suits and muskets. It’s large swaths of people with opposing views killing each other over it at every opportunity, like this one.
Why do you think school shootings happen? Or mass shootings in general? The vast majority of them are committed by members of right-wing hate groups and it’s part of this civil war they’ve been waging against the left. The whole point is to eradicate the left or force them to submit to their will.
A viewpoint like that is very subject to confirmation bias. Literally any crime is held up as evidence that it is correct. Look at the terms you are using “cold” “about a decade”. It isn’t a who, what, where, why, and how. It is vague.
Reverse it for a moment. Treat it like a claim in science. What evidence would you use to try to prove your hypothesis wrong?
My guy, it’s obvious to the rest of us what’s going on and if you can’t observe current events for five seconds and see it for yourself, nothing I ever tell you will change your mind.
The truth doesn’t depend on you believing it. All I have to do is express it. It’s up to you what you decide what you’re going to do with it. Listen to it and you have a chance to prepare and you might survive when it all blows up next year. Don’t and you won’t unless you get lucky – at the very least, you’ll suffer the way refugees of civil wars always do. It’s your choice.
It’s the truth. It’s like asserting that because I can’t give the scientific explanation for why the grass is green, it must not be, while I am pointing at the grass on the ground and showing you its color.
Again, it’s up to you to be willing to accept the reality in front of you and what has been happening innthis country for decades together. It’s up to you to be willing to overcome your own pride to save yourself and your family from what’s coming. I can only lead you to water. It is you who must choose to drink. Choose wisely. Your family depends on it.
’s like asserting that because I can’t give the scientific explanation for why the grass is green, it must not be, while I am pointing at the grass on the ground and showing you its color.
Your analogy is false. We have as much data as we want that grass is green. We have no data about the future since it hasn’t happened yet. To predict the future to any degree we have to look at trends of the past and apply the scientific method to it.
Again, it’s up to you to be willing to accept the reality in front of you
Forgot the name for this one. It is when you assume the conclusion to get the conclusion. I know it’s a basic logical fallacy.
I can only lead you to water.
Ok your Cassandra/Jeremiah routine is wearing thin.
I’m giving an analogy to demonstrate why his basis for denialism is wrong. He demands a scientific explanation for why an easily observable phenomenon is the way it is in order to accept what his eyes see. It’s not enough for him to look at something and see it for what it is.
As in he needs to be told why the grass is green to accept that it is green. It’s not enough for him to just look at it and see for himself that it is, in fact, green.
Replace “grass is green” with “civil war is happening”, and you’ll understand.
…Right. So, based entirely on faith, with nothing to substantiate it, and with a healthy dose of some weird Messianic complex.
Also, as another commenter pointed out, we actually have surprisingly robust data affirming that yes, indeed, the spectral albedo of grass does show peaks in the 530-550nm range correlating to M-type cone photoreceptor cells— I.E., Is green. Civil war isn’t the sort of thing you’re going to be able to pass off as self-evident.
Here’s a podcast where the first handful of episodes lays out what it’d look like if a civil war were to happen and why the author thinks there’s a reasonable chance that it could happen.
I do really like Robert Evans, but this is something I wholeheartedly disagree with. Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo could definitely happen, but I think it’s far more likely that we’ll see an American version of The Troubles. I don’t think there are enough people who would truly be willing to fight and die over this; but there’s plenty of people willing to commit terrorist bombings or acts of sabotage if they think they can get away with it.
While I agree that is what should happen, there is literally nothing about current day Democrats that makes me think they’ll actually take the hard stance and punish people for their actions. We’ll have Biden or whoever is in charge at the time saying some bullshit “we need to heal now. We’ve been though rough times, let’s welcome our neighbors back home. Blah blah blah no repercussions other than for the ring leaders.”
These same people couldn’t go three weeks without a haircut in 2020. There are some who’ll shoot someone over a pride flag, but not enough to fight a war. They’d be begging to surrender the first time their grocery order doesn’t arrive.
Actually American gun owners have about 78-157 billion bullets stockpiled between them, most of them right-wing. They regularly train with their weapons and have made this second civil war into an important aspect of their culture. A lot of them believe it’s the end times because the book of revelations talks of brother turning against brother.
The left is actually woefully untrained and outmatched, and that’s because of years of nonviolence being browbeaten over their heads and used to propagandize them to do nothing to meaningfully advance any of their causes. The left was fattened up with decades of propaganda and are now ready for the slaughter.
So is the right, really. The only ones who are going to win this coming civil war are the BRICS countries.
Statistical averages are, however. 47% of Americans own a gun. They have on average 500-1000 bullets on hand at any one time, enough for one or two trips to their gun ranges, which totals up to 78 to 157 billion bullets.
Just because you are insulted when faced with the fact that the left is woefully unprepared for that does not make it not true. Reality does not bend to your wishes.
You can either accept the facts as I present them to you and prepare yourself, or when this whole thing blows up next year, suffer. Your choice.
Jesus Christ, you actually are offended 🤦 Look, if you care about ensuring the right wing loses, which you’ll need to do to prevent fascism and genocide, you’ll put aside your pride and fix the problem. You don’t, and everyone suffers. It’s as simple as that.
And you’re really bad at hiding it, too. But the reality of my words is there whether you want to believe it or not. I can only lead you to water, you’re the one who has to make the choice to drink. The only one who’s gonna suffer from it is you and your family if you don’t. 🤷
500-1k rounds is nothing. Most of us have usually 10-20k rounds. 500 rounds is what I burn through in a range day. Hell I’ve got probably 50k 22lr at this point alone. And that’s just for plinking. 9mm/308/x39/556/54r/20g/12g/45 combined that’s probably another 40k rounds.
Most of us buy in bulk, ammo isn’t cheap, so when deals come around you buy as much as you can afford.
Huh? Having ammo doesn’t make anything worse. People have been stock piling it for decades now. Ammo doesn’t expire if it’s properly stored. I don’t see how having it magically makes anything worse.
As a left leaning individual with multiple firearms and plenty of ammunition for them, might want to consider there are plenty of us are part of that 47%.
Obviously a sample bias, but quite a few fellow veterans that I went to college with could put my meager collection to shame and share similar viewpoints.
That being said, your doomer outlook and gross oversimplification/assumptions are a joke. There will be no civil war, assholes will continue to be assholes, and you are still making this shit up as you type. Most of these Meal Team 6, cosplaying motherfuckers are too chickenshit to have an altercation where they aren’t the only one with the scary broomstick, and 99% of the blowhards wouldn’t last a day in an actual combat scenario let alone a “war”.
Bigots are bigots and will constantly attempt to suppress that which doesn’t align with their narrow minded worldview, however a civil war is not on the horizon… JFC get over yourself.
There’s no real evidence to substantiate that claim, but a whole lot of right wingers are open about their gun ownership. Which I agree is stupid, but that’s just how reality is.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a stark partisan divide in gun ownership. About 44% of adults who identify as Republican or lean Republican say they own a gun, while just 20% of those who identify as Democrat or lean Democrat say they do, according to Pew.
Where a person lives also plays a role. The Pew survey found that 46% of those who lived in rural areas said they owned a gun, while only 28% of suburbanites and 19% of city dwellers owned a gun. The Northeast has the lowest rates of gun ownership at 16%, while roughly a third of people in the South, Midwest and West report personally owning a gun.
So clearly right wingers are twice as likely to own guns as left wingers, meaning they will likeky win a civil war when it comes down to it, and given what they want, you can’t afford to continue being in denial about this. Your life is at stake here.
I know so. I used to be a centrist who ran with them for several years, so I know their ways and habits, and how and what they think. They are just waiting for some kind of signal to start, and that signal will likely be Trump going to jail or being barred from the presidency under the Constitution upon conviction.
It kinda sounds like you listened to the original run of the “It Could Happen Here” podcast series a few too many times. It could happen here, but the probability of it sparking is very low, and even then the probability of that spark growing beyond anything more than localized/isolated incidents is even lower.
They’re really, really not as stupid as you think and underestimating them to make yourself feel better will only result in suffering for you and yours. It’s enabled them to do so much damage already.
If they’re really so stupid, how did they manage to pack the courts and get abortion banned? Get Trump elected?
I’d say there are more gun-owning Democrats than there are critically thinking Republicans. Trump voters are the kind of people that fall for Nigerian prince email scams…twice.
You’re confusing normal Americans with the owners of the country. Also, plenty of militant leftists are armed in the US and not all gun owners are crazy fascists.
The ones that think they can win a civil war are pretty fucking dumb. They do have a lot of weaponry though and that is something we should be concerned about and needs to be acted on.
A bunch of Dems arming up isn’t the answer though. We need to make sure the war mongers don’t get back in charge and we need to keep hunting down the dangerous threats and arresting there asses.
I’ve seen enough Doomsday Peppers to know that these “prepared” right wingers will be gasping for breath on the floor when it actually comes time to run and do something physically strenuous. Fat fucks couldn’t even breath through a thin mask, their brain cells are the only thing they’ll slaughter due to lack of oxygen.
Are you confusing Y’all Quaeda with the Gestapo? Wtf. Even if 100 militias somehow defied everything we’ve been seeing for decades and somehow evaded getting caught early in the planning phase due to the surveillance state, what makes you think anything they’d do wouldn’t be shut down by military police within a week?
It sounds almost like you’re getting off on a weird horror fantasy from a super shitty movie.
A lot of the people brigading are actually alt-right dipshits from other servers. Some are left-wingers in denial … and when this thing blows up next year, they might die. :(
Oh look, found an antifascist. Yeah, you guys are way too little in number to really be able to do anything about them and you guys know it. There is over a hundred million of them armed to the teeth and a few thousand of you, tops.
Look in the thread. A lot of these motherfuckers even deny that a second civil war is starting or has been going on. They cling too closely to their narrative that it’s just hopelessly misguided brainwashed chumps committing random acts of violence instead of seeing it for what it really is: a collective act from a fascist political faction, and they cling to it because letting it go would send them down a spiral of fear because they cannot cope with the very real possibility they’ll likely die at the hands of one of those cultists unless they change their perceptions and prepare.
So what makes you think you’ll get the manpower to really stop the right? Can you convince enough left wingers that using violence against those scumfucks is okay in time? Can you convince the denialists in the thread to change their minds?
The right seems to be blinded by the thought that the US Military would support them, but luckily the modern US military would never support any side of a civil war and would simply squash any serious attempt of a fascist rebellion. What are they even going to be able to do? They can’t shoot down drones with their AR-15s.
Actually a lot of veterans are right wingers and right wing regulatory capture is so extensive, including in the military, that some of it would, in fact, help them. But not one inch of it would help the left, in fact, all of it would only harm them under guise of keeping order like they did back in the 2020 uprising.
They would quash any serious attempt at civil war or revolt of or between any political extreme in order to maintain the current status quo. The government and the military are both owned by the corporate class. The left is a very very small minority in the US and they don’t even have a mainstream political influence or party. The US just has the socially liberal right-of-center Democrat party and the far-right conservative Republican party.
The right wing has succeeded at enough regulatory capture that they only stand to benefit from the military “intervening” AKA helping them.
There was a skirmish of left vs. right protesters a couple of months ago at some school board meeting. The right wingers were the clear aggressors, but the police only arrested the left wingers.
That’s what the military would actually do, accomplishing the goal of slapping down the left, all under the guise of legality and status quo.
Well, I suppose we’ll just have to disagree, but even though I find your opinions and perspectives to be mostly generalized embellishments and without nuance I still appreciate you for providing them.
Well, I find your denialism stupid, dangerous and harmful for this country too, but we’re pretending to agree to disagree so we can be sarcastic and fire emotional barbs at each other on the down low, so who am I to judge?
Imagine calling yourself an antifascist while refusing to acknowledge basic and obvious problems your group has that can and will be exploited by the right wing when they snap and try to kill you all next year.
Could you possibly stop being arrogant for five minutes and genuinely look at the situation objectively?
They would have been correct as far as Germany not having a civil war. However, it was because too few opposed the Nazis, not because the country did not contain enough “psychopaths”.
That’s really not what he was saying. If you read the article, you’ll find the title is pretty misleading. He’s trying to act like Florida has all but “won” the lawsuit, and that Disney should, therefore, just give up. It’s obviously a bluff, but he’s not really saying “please stop.”
I don’t like Harris, mainly because of her time as a prosecutor. I’m also not going to lie, I was having a really really hard time grappling with voting for Biden, I was begrudgingly willing to before the debate but when I watched it I was so outraged. I genuinely feel like his administration has been deceitful with his condition for a while. I’m not saying I wasn’t going to vote for Biden, I understand the stakes, but I kept watching his interviews trying to get any genuine motivation for Biden. All I saw was a stubborn old man who refused to even acknowledge reality.
I’ve been following Biden news and this week I was convinced that he would drop out and so I wondered who would replace him. Harris immediately came to mind. Now as I said I don’t care for Harris but before Biden announced this today I personally decided I would be willing to support Harris.
She isn’t ancient, I believe she’s more progressive, and I think she will be good in the debates. She isn’t my 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th pick, but I have far fewer hangups voting for Harris compared to Biden, and of course over Trump.
She isn’t the best candidate in terms of absolute popularity, but when you factor in funding logistics and the fact that I think many good Dems picks would want to run in '28 when the timing isn’t fucked, I think Harris is the most realistic pick. I’ll happily take her compared to Biden.
Fighting universal healthcare. Refusing to revoke Citizens United. Refusing the Right to Repair.
The Patriot Act. The Iraq War. Enabling The Genocide of Palestine. The continuous decline into corporatocracy.
All bipartisan efforts.
You shitlibs genuinely do not understand the conversation happening in front of you. We know you don’t, or you wouldn’t be a shitlib, you’d be a social democrat at worst.
What an embarrassing response after your own “BOtH SiDEs” and “yeah they’ll totally respond with facts” comments. You can’t even address the numerous examples they listed?
Seems you had no issue arguing up until getting your bluff called a few comments ago even though you ‘tagged me’ long ago. Now you suddenly don’t want to discuss facts and instead deflect to talking crap in typical blue MAGA fashion.
They didn’t say anything worth countering and they said it with a flurry of insults. People who cannot even speak without derisively labelling others without any understanding of anything but their own extreme positions can get bent. Not worth anyone’s time.
You’re expending a lot of effort trying to convince people that your interlocutor isn’t worth the effort. The more effort you expend, the more it looks like you’re interested in dismissing things for which you have no good answer than you are in saving effort.
Also, it’s cute seeing you of all people whining about insults.
Right, writing two times it’s not worth it is just as wasteful as getting drawn into a moronic back and forth for hours. Also wah, I insulted you at some point for being a fraud.
I think your conflating Right and Left with Republican and Democrat.
They aren’t the same thing.
Both parties have been pro-corporate oligopoly. The Republicans, just more so.
Both parties have been catering to the same class of big corporate donors. The Republicans, just more so.
Both parties have been pro-military-industrial-complex. The Republicans, just more so.
Both parties have been pro-Israli genocide. The Republicans, just more so.
Both parties have shown a little movement toward economic populism. The Democrats, just more so.
They might not vote together on many bills. Because it would look bad to their respective bases if they did.
But they’ve both been pushing in similar directions on a number of topics for decades.
And that’s how we get pulled further to the right. When did I say I had chosen anyone for the lulz. What the fuck is wrong with you jumping to conclusions?
I have yet to meet a forum poster who unironically used the phrase ‘and that’s how we get pulled further to the right’ in response to a reply about not voting for a fucking convicted felon pedophile fascist that wasn’t a fucking fascist themselves.
Appropriate username. I never stated in any way who I was voting for now fuck off. I don’t have the time or energy to deal with your childish emotional outbursts.
You know what? I felt the same way before today. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot since the announcement, and the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Harris is the best possible presidential candidate.
Like you, I don’t think she’d make the best president. Hell, she wasn’t even in my top 10. I’d have vastly preferred someone like Hakeem Jeffries. But here’s the thing: the person best suited for the office of president isn’t necessarily the best person to run for president.
Harris has all of the advantages Biden had: she can run on this administration’s record, since it was her administration too. Every positive talking point about the stuff that Biden’s done for the country can equally apply to Harris. Additionally, she gets his entire war chest, and with the president’s blessing today, she’s likely going to have 100% party support as well. To make matters even better, she doesn’t have any of the flaws he sported: she’s young, she’s sharp, she’s great in debates, and because she’s the antithesis of Biden in all of these respects, all of the criticisms pointed at Biden (which could also 100% be applied to Trump) will now all be applied to Trump and Trump alone.
Lastly, I think that now is the most favorable moment in our country’s history for a non-white, non-male person to become president. She’s got the built-in support of everybody who dreads another Trump presidency. A significant number of people who would vote for Biden but not Harris due to sexism or racism will be rethinking that position when the opposition is Donald Trump. Also, something like 40% of people in the US just simply don’t vote. Biden would never appeal to those people, but a black / asian woman who has succeeded in a mostly male dominated field could be very inspirational to a large number of otherwise apathetic non-voters.
I honestly think that Harris being endorsed for President is just an unalloyed good. I don’t see any realistic downsides, and an incredible number of upsides. It actually has me excited, which is a feeling I haven’t felt since 2008.
Don’t forget that the fascists will push away moderates everywhere because they have no idea how racist and sexist they are, nor how to hide it, because it’s their entire platform.
the most favorable moment in our country’s history for a non-white, non-male person to become president
Look, I cried tears of joy when Obama won. I mean that literally. But guess when the conservative hate machine got dialed to 11?
Some will say it started earlier, but I disagree. Back then I occasionally listened to Limbaugh and Hannity on the radio while running errands at work. They actually had some sane takes now and again. Wasn’t very political, but I had my ear to the ground. The entire machine, especially Fox News, went so far off the rails in response to a black President, I simply couldn’t listen to any of them, not for a second.
Conservative brains take time to assimilate new social conditions, gotta chip away at 'em. I’m already hearing the, “Fuck them!” replies, but that doesn’t change the fact that these people exist and vote. And they’re going to get more and more violent.
Look at LGBT rights. We got them to begrudgingly accept gay marriage. Fresh off that victory, liberals asked for more and more acceptance. Too much, too fast, they went full-on berserk. Now I feel gay rights are perhaps worse than before.
Scared to see what a double-whammy of a black woman does to their brains. I used to laugh about conservatives choking on their outrage, same with Christians. “Ha! Losing ain’t ya!” But now it isn’t so funny. They’re in a corner and lashing out. What next?
All, or at least the vast majority, of those people you’re talking about are already Trump voters. They’re going to continue backing Trump no matter who the Democratic party picks. They saw a black guy get elected president, and that radicalized them. They aren’t coming back. Pandering to the imaginary demographic of racists who will surely see the light if we elect the right candidate is simply a losing proposition.
Will there be right wing violence in response to a Harris presidency? Of course there will be. Is there right wing violence now? Of course there is. I understand that you’re tired of hearing the “fuck them” replies, but seriously: fuck them. They are a cancer on this nation. Holding back on doing something good just because you’re afraid that the fucking awful people you share a country with will do something awful just means that you never make any progress.
How should we act if we know fighting for certain rights means fascists have an easier time in elections?
Should we…:
A. Be publicly on the right side of history at risk of losing an election to the detriment of all.
B. Be publicly on the wrong side of a human rights issue in order to win, then try to privately backchannel to make up for the sin.
(Perhaps a false binary here, so ready to be corrected.)
Idealist in me says fight at all costs, maybe it’ll work out. Pragmatist in me says “win the damn election & backchannel the heck out of your term.” Feel guilty either way.
I’m personally a little nervous about Harris–I remember the 2020 primary where her only notable accomplishments were accusing Biden of being racist over opposition to federal busing policies, and then flaming out shortly after and shuttering her campaign two months before the first caucus and polling single digits in California. Admittedly, she doesn’t have the same headwinds now that she had in 2020–she doesn’t have to differentiate herself from over a dozen other candidates and she won’t struggle to raise money–but she also made some unforced errors (e.g. coming out for total elimination of private insurance before revealing a plan that included private plans, or admitting her own policy on busing was essentially identical to Biden’s).
Hopefully, she’ll run a much tighter campaign now since she’ll inherit Biden’s staff and can focus solely on attacking Trump, but I do have some concerns.
Polling single digits in California might actually be indicative of her having a better chance. The same reasons why she want the top choice in a deeply blue state may make her a stronger choice in more “on the fence” voters.
I don’t know where all this “I don’t like Harris” stuff comes from. Considering the presidents we’ve had lately, hahaha… if she won, it would be amazing. I’m sure there are better people in the world, but they don’t even get close to the White House. We have to be realistic. She’s a great pick considering current political realities.
Oh for sure. Don’t get me wrong; she’s not my ideal president, but she’d still probably be in the top 5 presidents we’ve ever had. That’s not necessarily making a judgment about her without seeing her performance first, it’s more of a statement about how bad most US presidents are. Still, I have high hopes for a Harris presidency. I think she’ll do a great job. She’s just not my #1 draft pick.
It’s attitudes exactly like this why American Democrats are center right, and why we have had almost zero meaningful legislation to help the normal people for 40 years.
If your family survives this coming shitshow of a fasist coup, I hope you beg their forgiveness and tell them your small part in helping start it.
So the DNC gets to make this decision not me. This is a last minute situation that hasn’t happened since the 60s, every ounce of divisiveness will only embolden the “facist coup”. The time is up, whoever they pick we’ve got to unite behind and hopefully rally voters to the booths. Honestly the presidency needs to be D so it can’t veto/ can veto, the VP can tie break, and executive orders. She will hopefully be a beacon to encourage voters to get more D in the senate and house. The house/senate flips and your meaningful legislation point becomes moot. Lastly I have no clue what you are saying in the 2nd paragraph, somehow voting for Harris makes a facist coup? No clue what middle steps are included to achieve that outcome but you must know something I don’t. Regardless I have no worries about my family but I appreciate the concern!
Dude, take a breath. You’re coming off as unhinged. You’ll probably call me a shill or something, then continue to ignore people it. It isn’t all a grand conspiracy against you.
Well I’m glad you have then, you sounded like you may be in an emotional crisis and crying out to the internet for help that we aren’t able to give effectively
SCOTUS, Congress, and POTUS have all, regardless of party have catered to corporate interest over the citizenry an OVERWHELMING amount my entire life, and I remember life before the internet.
Sure we get a few crumbs, cars for clunkers, a crippled ACA, a constant ‘will they, won’t they’ over college loans.
Meanwhile Citizens United gave corporations near unlimited influence, the repeal of Glass-Steagall led to the housing collapse in 2008 and the banks were bailed out. Even recently in COVID those most benefitted were the corporations and ultra wealthy who netted a 1.3 FUCKINGTRILLION dollar payday with almost no oversight or pressure to pay back, and we are STILL seeing fraud cases from that show up.
So was your little 3k ‘gift’ that was meant for relief during A FUCKING PANDEMIC in any way commesurate with the HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS the owner class (who was at no financial risk at any time) got to keep?
Do you feel all these little crumbs of social support they have doled out in meager and begrudging ways makes up for the fact that no matter what their party, NEARLY EVERY MEMBER of our top seats in government are more concerned about the interests of the wealthy than they are in normal people?
why we have had almost zero meaningful legislation to help the normal people for 40 years.
The Affordable Care Act is why I was able to take a year off work to focus on my mental health after the pandemic crushed it. The Inflation Reduction Act is helping keep the renewable energy company I work for afloat and offering an optimistic future.
No one expects to end up on government assistance or using FMLA to take a few months off for an illness. We support it on the left because we know it’s the fucking right thing to do.
It’s all good and fine to criticize programs as useless theoretically when you don’t rely on them. But when you’ve actually experienced them and needed them, your perspective changes heavily.
Democrats have gotten good shit done for the average person, and I’ve personally benefited from it when I really needed it.
And there’s actually only one person to blame – Lieberman’s vote was required to pass the legislation, and he refused to vote for it unless single payer was removed.
As to that 2028 topic…If Harris wins, it pushes all of them all the way back to 2032. Many of those hopefulf may like their odds right now, as opposed to 8 years later, unless those same people are confident Harris will lose against Trump.
If Harris wins, this election is proof that a competitive primary that knocks out the incumbent isn’t a death knell for the general. I promise you, Harris will have opponents.
This is an incredibly important point. Unless rich donors said they’d fully make up the current campaign war chest for the new candidate, there would be a significant funding issue. Being able to use the existing funds is extremely important.
She wasn’t anyone’s top 4 even in 2020. Between what they did before Super Tuesday then, and now this, this isn’t democracy. This is DNC controlling what happens to prevent something like Bernie. People aren’t getting choice and primaries are pointless.
People could have voted for someone other than Biden in the primaries. That was always an option. Just because the incumbent was running again didn’t mean the voters HAD to vote for him.
I really think it’s there’s a few lobbies that keeps our election cycles so goddamn long. They need the horserace and the controversy for as long as possible to get ratings. News organizations, election consultants, advertisers, etc.
France had two elections within weeks of each other. Britain called a snap election and got it done in under two months. These things can be done quickly and efficiently, but nobody wants to run afoul of two groups required to get re-elected, so they keep us slogging through the mudslinging.
From my understanding, the reason for this is to give candidates with less funds and less name recognition an opportunity to bubble up. Imagine that if the primary consisted of all states at the same time, candidates would need to campaign nationally, or only in the most populous states, either of which would cost tons of money. This would make it so that only candidates already starting off with massive campaign funds would have any chance.
One possible alternative approach would be to start with the smallest states (either by population or by area), one at a time, and ramp up to multiple largest states at the end of the primary cycle. This would give candidates a viable way to ramp up their campaign funds and name recognition. The only problem with this approach would be that the smallest states tend to be very white, so perhaps some adjustments would need to be made to make it more representative of the demographics of the country as a whole from the beginning.
Voted for Marianne Williamson who had already withdrawn because A) she was the only other choice on the ballot and B) She is actually great in interviews. Dont agree with some of her conclusions but you can tell she is studied on political theory…
Dont think that really counts. The primary was yet another illusion of choice by the DNC who has proven they will make backdoor moves to nominate whoever they want since the days of Debbie Wasserman shultz and hillary
Convince me brother. I think we just sentenced ourselves to 8 years of “we’ll still move to the right, just more slowly than Trump.” Yes I’m going to vote for her, but would have loved for someone actually progressive to have a chance prior to 2032. If you run the calculus differently, tell me how.
She’s Pro-Weed legalization, Pro-Medicare for All, and Pro-PRO Act. By all measures, she’s significantly more left wing than Obama, so I don’t exactly know how she could be “moving us to the right” at all.
Because sometimes people change their views because of personal growth and other times they say they have changed them for political expediency, which is the viewpoint considered by the article I linked. You are aware she was a prosecutor who made a career out of locking people up, right?
I can forgive a politician a vote on a crime bill that looks ill-conceived two decades later, or a too-slow evolution toward marijuana legalization, or even a principled belief in the death penalty, something I adamantly oppose. I find it far harder to forgive fighting to keep a man in jail in the face of strong evidence of innocence, running a team of prosecutors that withholds potentially exculpatory evidence from defense attorneys, and utterly failing as the state’s top prosecutor to rein in glaringly corrupt district attorneys and law enforcement.
At best, Harris displayed a pattern of striking ignorance about scandalous misconduct in hierarchies that she oversaw. And she is now asking the public to place her atop a bigger, more complicated, more powerful hierarchy, where abuses and unaccountable officials would do even more to subvert liberty and justice for all.
I do wish he had been president, but I also wonder how much of his agenda he could have gotten past congress, even if Democrats were in charge. Most Democrats are, at best, about preserving the status quo and I hate having to vote for them just to stop the people who will make things even worse.
I voted for Bernie every chance I’ve had, but I genuinely doubt he could have achieved the current level of success much less something better.
Without a Congress full of like-minded people, it would have been a struggle. I think we can have someone like Bernie for president one day, but it’s people being passionate and engaging with every vote and every election.
Undoubtedly they would’ve sabotaged Bernie every chance they got, just like the labour party sabotaged Corbyn in the UK. Both of those parties are glad they only had to sabotage during the elections.
I voted for Bernie and he would have been great, I always find myself thinking about Gore winning more often. I have more respect for Bernie for sure but we’d have been in such a better place by 2016. Jesus, there’s a non-zero chance that the 9/11 warnings don’t get ignored and the US definitely doesn’t invade Iraq or Afghanistan. The housing bubble would probably still have burst in a bad way but I doubt it goes down the same way. Supreme Court wouldn’t be as full of neocons and zealots.
Yeah, this was always my big one too. I’m a green at heart, but I learned a brutal lesson then, that I’ll carry inside of me forever. A lesson that has only gotten reinforced by the slow march of modern fascism.
Democracy requires dialogue, patience, empathy and compromise. The alternative is authoritarianism, and the unavoidable power struggles that come from too much centralized power in a world with ambitious humans. We need to remember that, and dialogue and compromise with our, in many ways younger-self progressives, instead of trying to corral them. We can do this. We are not too afraid.
DNC lawyers argued that the Democratic Party doesn’t owe anyone a fair process and that it has every right to disregard its own rules or interpret its rules how it wants because it is a private organization.
Not just that if Gore had won and 9-11 would have still happened we would have likely seen a push away from oil starting in the early 2000s. I think Gore could’ve turned that into an opportunity to say “to hell with these middle east authoritarians and their oil, we can do better for ourselves and better for the planet.”
Unfortunately I was 6 when 9-11 happened so I didn’t have much say in these matters.
It's possible we'd be in a better situation now. Lots of obvious things like not tossing out known facts about terrorism efforts and having a climate change awareness leadership. There's much that would still be the same, like the system of consumerism that is the core of much of our problems. One person in a limited power seat can't fix that, I'm not sure anything can outside of failure of the system itself. But I do think we would have at least avoided that one historic turning point that revved back up the military drive of the US. Even GWB's administration was looking into ways of reducing the military into smaller, more mobile parts until suddenly we went into revenge mode. Or useful crisis mode.
With an election coming up, the Schrodingers Leftist dilemma is in full force, even on Lemmy -
Where we’re simultaneously both powerful enough to be personally behind every Republican win of the past 20 years, and also so insignificant that we must be ridiculed and bullied at every turn to remind us that we have NO PLACE in their party they blame us for not backing.
The best part is that most of the time people hit both sides of the coin in the same comment.
Centerists, or people who voted for Biden in the primaries tell progressives and leftists we’re minority viewpoints within the Democrat party. Implying that we have no business trying to influence the direction of the party. These same centerists also blame us when their garbage candidates don’t win in the general election and tell us things like “Biden was a good compromise” or “You got pretty much everything you wanted” despite neither of those things being true.
Centerists got so comfortable winning elections on their own they forgot how to compromise and accuse anyone else trying to negotiate as “throwing a tantrum”.
It wasn’t just Bernie who got the screws from Democrats. Henry Wallace got the same shaft from Democrats. On the other hand, Republicans don’t have populist fliers, they have fascists fliers who are promoted to the top.
“This man has got to face his maker and explain why he can’t say ‘Jesus Christ’ is my Lord and savior and I will run my country under his guidelines,” he said during a Newsmax interview at the time.
This line sent shivers down my spine. Fucking religious zealots.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”
Because they want to control people. Religion has always existed to control the masses and the GOP is more desperate than ever before to maintain their control over their dwindling voters.
They want a dictatorship and religion is just another means for them to seize it.
Certain conservative men will visit prostitutes, and claim to stand for family values, which is laughable but if you do good at mental gymnastics you could always say that you’re ready to change because you now believe in “insert conservative shit” here, or bad experiences etc.
But if you asked me, you’re better off believing that anarchy is the natural order and everything from government to the police force, including your own circumstances is based off a mix of luck, non compliance, misunderstandings and merit rather than any conservativism.
Just consider that even if you believe in “planned parenthood” technically a lot of accidents had to have happened for both Usain Bolt and for you to be born, nobody’s life was planned out when while you were being pushed out the end of your mothers pussy.
The scary part is that there’s arguably hundreds of mini accidental Usain Bolts which you’re competing with every day, even if you’re one of them that was planned
Conservatives are authoritarian always, many of them wouldn’t blink at reestablishing the monarchy, so long as a certain orange individual and his line of bastards were in power
Just to make it crystal clear, a Christian who is being inaugurated as President will swear a solemn oath, almost certainly with their hand on the Bible, to defend the Constitution.
Joe Biden, like every President before him, including Trump, swore a solemn oath not to do what John Schneider is insisting upon.
If a President elect believed what Schneider is suggesting, he would either be unable to take the oath of office, and thus could not ever be President, or he would swear to God that he was telling the truth when he was lying.
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