This isn’t a play Biden has really every done his entire time as a politician. Biden is the definition of a politician who identifies the status quo and builds their platform from it.
Whatever, most of the time it doesn’t matter, but it is truly incredible in this moment how much more politicians like Biden could be successful if they just promised to tax billionaires and then actually did it. Yes you would receive zero campaign funding from the rich for the rest of your life but you would also become extremely popular in the eyes of the public?
Small donation campaign financing works, this isn’t black magic.
He sure has done stuff. I’m not questioning his willingness to do it, honestly, but you know how politics can be bogged down by other factors like house seats etc. The only thing that can make it happen is voting!
Honestly, I think for many countries it might require very far reaching constitutional changes to actually tax the ultra wealthy.
For the USA, an amendment was needed to introduce the income tax.
Another amendment might be needed to introduce a wealth tax.
And a legal distinction would need to be made between the property of the common man vs. the ultra wealthy.
That 14th house, yacht and the hundreds of billions of the billionaire currently enjoy the same legal protections as the owner-occupied single family home and that family’s meagre savings account and the car they need to get to work.
His administration really needs better PR in general.
They’ve accomplished quite a bit but they don’t publicize it enough. They also need to quit making those silly ads like the one that was up on socials during the Super Bowl. Show us the clips of the man at work. It would work absolute wonders.
The defendants, listed as former mayor Haywood “Woody” Stokes III and his town council, held a secret, special election, preventing Braxton from appointing his town council. During their special election, the previous town council re-elected themselves, and ultimately reappointed the previous town mayor. They were aided, the lawsuit alleges, by the town’s bank and clerk. Newbern has effectively had two mayors since 2020.
I thought the FBI came in when these fucking inbreds pulled shit like this.
Actually I was thinking of the incredible number of integration issues they dealt with, but sure. When you look for shit, all you’ll see is shit. It’s not the best way of going through life. It’s incredibly easy, if lazy and intellectually dishonest, to see things binary.
The FBI isn’t exactly a small group of people and there probably aren’t too many people there now that were around in the MLK days.
If you’ve ever worked anywhere you’ll know there’s going to be good people in the workplace and also some really shit people. All companies, government institutions, educational institutions, political parties, and yes even non-profit organizations are like this. If you measure the value of an organization be the actions of the worst people in that organization through all history, then all organizations are horrible things, and you should just go live alone in a cabin in the woods because everything is terrible.
How does that old saying go. If you can’t attack the message, attack the messenger? Something like that. I guess if I were cut of that cloth I would accuse you of being against forced integration in 20th century US. But that would be idiotic and simple, no?
The FBI has actively been undermining activism for decades, they wiretap/spy on Americans. I’m honestly shocked that there are so many fans. Y’all are dumb as hell.
Is that because your perceptions of the world are so warped you have to look down on everyone for them to make any sense? Pathetic take my dude. Again, you’re the one simping for fucking law enforcement.
Well, yeah, when you take on a paternalistic mindset and mentally align yourself with Feds, you’re gonna think everyone who disagrees with you is a child.
As far as they’re concerned this is a state matter. Which is hilarious because it’s a denial of their basic rights. Which the feds respond to all the time.
I applaud SCOTUS for not allowing the Federal Government to retract Fikre’s listing and then claim the issue is “moot” to avoid a potentially unfavorable ruling.
The No Fly List needs to be de-invented. Immediately.
I think the concept has merit, the problem is the complete lack of accountability and transparency.
Fix those points and you have a fairly reasonable way to stop people with criminal histories from just skipping the country and running to a no extradition country to escape justice.
If you examine the situation very closely you may be able to spot a few differences between flying from Michigan to Las Vegas, versus flying from Idaho to Egypt.
There’s plenty of crimes that affect people inside your country and can be perpetrated by people outside your country. If the criminal happens to be inside your country, don’t let them leave.
You can become a gang leader and decide the fuz are getting too close to your trail, then move to Honduras and keep advising your gang members back home. You could also just scam people out of their money over the internet and the country in which the victims live is going to be interested prosecuting you, regardless of where you are.
Yes and no. It’s a crime committed across international borders. The US can’t go into the other country to go get the perpetrator, but if they step foot inside the US the feds can arrest and charge them. If their home country is decent the perpetrator will get charged at home or extradited to the US, but some countries don’t do either, for a variety of reasons.
Same as the sex offender registry in the US. If it was only for a very select group of high risk people… but they put people on there for so many small things, it has lost its purpose.
There’ve been stories of people landing on the list for mooning someone. I don’t know about you, but I was 18 once, and it’s a tough age for showing everyone your bum.
This! The American obsession with infinite punishment is weird. They should just clear out a nice rectangular state, fence it off and call it a prison.
Nikki Cimino, a 40-year-old recruiter living in Denver, said she finally saved up enough to buy a condo last year, but missed out on the ultra-low interest rates that had made homeownership more affordable in the early days of the pandemic. Her 5.25% interest rate pushed her monthly payments to $1,650. After a divorce in 2020, she’s shouldering $4,000 in credit card debt.
It’s the credit card debt…
Instead of paying that off since 2020, she saved a down payment and bought an expensive condo. She’s wasting a shit ton of money on interest because credit cards are all like 20-30%
Credit cards are predatory, if you ever carry a balance to the next month, that needs to be your highest priority.
Do a transfer to get 0% each year if you have to when recovering from emergencies. But paying credit interest for years is insane.
Holy crap! She was “saving up” to buy a condo instead of using that money to pay off the credit cards? That’s absolutely insane. I really feel like society would benefit immensely if there were mandatory financial literacy courses every 4 years, or at least before any major purchases (house, car, etc).
Or just common sense laws against predatory lending by capping interest rates.
Most people don’t have a safety net and live paycheck to paycheck.
A huge expense comes up, and rather than get a bank loan at even 8-10%, it goes on a credit card
Companies have a tiny “minimum payment” because they don’t want you to pay it off. They want that balance to grow while people ignore it. They don’t want it back now, they want thousands more later.
I’m all for interest caps but if the highest they could charge was say 9% they’d just deny credit to tons of people, not give them lower interest debt. I’m okay with that though.
Pretty sure every cc has the minimum payment higher than the interest. If you just stop buying shit you’ll pay it off eventually, even if you can only afford the minimum payment. The balance can’t grow unless you’re still buying shit.
They codified that so yes you will pay it off eventually. It will no longer continue to grow forever. However it will take an excessively long amount of time. Like taking a 30-year mortgage to buy a bag of fuckin McDonalds.
For example the couple above, 62 and 65, will almost assuredly be dead by the time they pay it off at minimum payment.
Also she was apparently planning on low interest rates, but when the rates went up she shrugged and didn't adjust her plans. It's kind of hard feeling sympathy for her. If she'd been hit with an unexpected but unavoidable expense that would be a different matter.
For Denise and Paul Nierzwicki, credit cards are the only way to make ends meet. The couple, ages 69 and 72, respectively, have about $20,000 in debt spread across multiple cards, all with interest rates above 20%.
The trouble started during the pandemic, when Denise lost her job and a business deal for a bar that they owned in their hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, went bad.
They applied for Social Security, which helped, and Denise now works 50 hours a week at a restaurant. Still, they’re barely scraping together the minimum payments for their credit card debt.
Jesus. I don’t see how this gets un-fucked without a massive wave of defaults. And that’ll just lead to a different kind of fucked.
No it’s not. There’s something else we’re supposed to do to traitors.
“You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now”
Compassion should not seen as a weakness after war. Traditionally it make long term allies. This time it did not work out. But many other times it has.
Yes but after WW2 we had the Nuremburg trials and the Nazi leaders were hanged. Show compassion to the society as a whole, but the leaders must still be held accountable in these situations.
A conservative is not capable of entering into a negotiation in good faith.
Compassion at the end of the civil war was the wrong move. A conservative will always see compassion as weakness to exploit. They truly are unable to perceive compassion as anything other than a weakness. That is just who they are at their core.
Interesting take, but such an absolutist stance suggests that you also see compassion as a weakness. Fact is, as evil as the GOP may now be... they are not the whole of conservative thought.
If you want to see an example of where your desired approach leads, look at post WW I Germany and what Europe's need for vengeance gave birth to.
I agree and I think it’s important to review why that didn’t work, because I think it’s relevant today.
Under normal circumstances, I would agree that compassion is the best course of action. However the Confederacy largely left the union and then went to war over the ability to own people, claiming it was a “right”. There was a whole world doing away with the practice, with abolitionists saying their peace for a long time up until war broke out. And rather than change tact, and do away with the inherently immoral practice of slavery, these guys doubled-down. To me, that’s exactly the kind of situation where you must withhold compassion, because it demonstrates both a track record and a potential future willingness to break the social contract.
Like the people in Ohio who started screaming “WHERE IS THE GOVERNMENT” when the train derailed. Well, actually, you got precisely what you asked for. Why are you surprised?
So are you from Minnesota, West Virginia, Maryland, Rhode Island, or Hawaii? Or are you from a state that voted for Reagan twice too. Minnesota gets a full pass as the only state to not go to him in 84.
Ohio was a swing state until recently. Like Obama won us twice recently.
Ohio? The state that recently went red after decades as one of the most important swing states? The one that is so gerrymandered we barely have a vote and yet still manage to have union protections that are damn near unique in the country?
We weren’t conservative when the railroad was deregulated.
FEMA should respond by putting razor wire around all the affected areas. You know , to keep out undesirables like the Governor. They won’t, though, because they are not assholes and take their mission seriously.
Name one time that FEMA was an asshole? I would love to know. FEMA distribution gets fucked up by district politics, but I assume you are saying that FEMA activily told a group of people to go fuck themselves.
That sounds great, but it just means rising costs for the rest of us to cover the revenue loss from those states. An interesting consequence could be states removing insurance requirements, though…
I can’t imagine – don’t want to imagine losing a child. I had no idea until I had a kid but… Nothing in the universe matters more to me than my kid and I would be destroyed forever if anything ever happened.
To lose a kid (very likely) due to bullying? I can’t imagine the blind rage mixed in with the universe shattering grief.
What sick fucked world do we live in where school bullying turns into violence that turns into death? Just for being different from most? Jesus Christ. These psychopaths should be in jail getting intensive therapy to try to unfuck their twisted minds.
This child could have lived a full life but instead because of fearful, hateful monsters, the kid is dead.
Fuck Oklahoma and fuck this school and the parents of the murderers.
It’s only going to get worse if Trump gets back in power. As if it isn’t bad enough now.
Boy, girl, non binary, whatever WHO GIVES A FUCKING SHIT?! Mind your own goddamn business and don’t be a fucking evil piece of shit. Let people fucking exist as they are.
My biggest fear is to outlive my daughter. And since she’s queer (not trans, but queer), I worry about her being assaulted or even killed because of it, especially as people like Trump foster bigotry. Also, one of her closest friends is trans and I’m very worried about him. I know he’s being bullied in school and he already has self-harm issues. Thankfully, his parents support his transition, but he’s still not getting the support he needs and the school makes him use the girls bathroom and locker room. I hope he makes it through school okay. He’s only 12 and he’s already cutting himself, vaping and smoking weed.
I hope he finds the strength to get through this. Besides support from his family and having supportive friends, which no one should take for granted, there’s overcoming the bullying and finally, the hardest of all, the inner conflict. Topple this with puberty’s own ordeal, so everything gets even more confusing. But it’s also the one task, that drops the most loot, if you solve it. There’s nothing more rewarding than feeling inner peace, love yourself and coming of age strong and prosperous.
I do too. So much. I wish I could do something to help him, but I’ve only met him one time. I know the school he’s in is utter shit. We pulled my daughter out and put her in online school because of how much she was bullied. The administration actually made her apologize to her bullies after they doxxed her on Discord and prank called her repeatedly. Fuck that school. If I could get her friend to do online school with her, I’d drive him to my house every day just to keep him away from that shit. I really wish I could.
I wouldn’t even know how to get in touch with them. My daughter sure wouldn’t give me the details. She’s very closed about that sort of thing. I don’t even know his last name.
What sick fucked world do we live in where school bullying turns into violence that turns into death?
It probably happens more often than you think. Without the nonbinary angle and excuse to invoke bathroom bills this wouldn’t have got nearly the attention that it did. In the US, most bullying related deaths are suicide and a couple hundred thousand kids get physically attacked by fellow students every year in addition (most recent number I’d found was a few years old and around 288k). If you piece together the various statistics, an estimate of around 3500 kids per year dying to bullying-related suicide is probably reasonable. Bullying-related homicide is harder to get a decent number on, but it’s probably significantly lower.
That they can say the autopsy showed CoD was not trauma from the attack but were awaiting toxicology and other ancillary results before naming an official CoD makes me curious if they suspect CoD is overdose and are waiting for results to confirm. I guess we’ll see when the report is finished.
Zuckerberg made 2,000 times more in one morning for doing basically nothing, vs. what DuBoise made in almost four decades in a settlement for a wrongful conviction and imprisonment.
It’s pretty easy to grasp if you don’t overthink it.
He built a successful company, that’s what he did :)
But still, it doesn’t matter, sucks that it happened to the lad, but comparing him to Zuckerberg doesn’t do absolutely anything for him, it’s completely unrelated to his case.
If you want to push your agenda, that’s fine, but piggybacking off of a ruined life (in quite exceptional circumstances all things considered) doesn’t do absolutely anything.
What’s the point? Should the guy have gotten more? He can live like a king without a care for the rest of his life. If he has children, those can, too.
Or is it that Zuckerberg shouldn’t be “allowed” to own his own company, which coincidentally is pretty successful?
Because if it’s the latter, it’s unrelated to this specific person, you could post it under a cute kitty vid and it’d have the same value.
“We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.” - Leona Helmsley. (~ 1989)
(Convicted of extortion; sentenced to 16 years; released after months.) Her husband’s death left her with the Helmsley hotels, the Helmsley Palace and the Empire State Building. (Yes, that one.)
I still very clearly remember reading Harrison Bergeron in school and having some idiot school teacher act like “that’s that socialism kids!”
How the hell is that socialism? A reference to income based taxation? If anything, following the big scary Soviet and PRC model, they’d have pumped Harrison full of roids and told him to rip a capitalist pig dog in half for his landing.
And, of course, Vonnegut agrees it isn’t about socialism, no matter what American school teachers have been ordered to teach.
I mean you wanna be technical about it socialism is a much wider spectrum of ideas than Communism. There are definitely people who define it strictly by the presence of the worker co-op or as anti-capitalist but that’s one floating idea in a nebula. Market Socialism for instance is basically a blend of capitalism and socialism where things like capitalist incentives are still maintained but regulated and systems of social support are expanded to make up for the gap of the whole capitalist “not my monkey not my circus” washing of hands of social responsibility to be an active part of a community. It’s basically anti-capitalist in the same way putting up a privacy fence is anti-neighbor… So a wide spanning income based taxation could be construed as sort of Socialist but its basically the air we breathe as far as a norm goes.
But Harrison Bergeron is more like the Conservative satire of what “Cultural Marxism” looks like in practice. The strawman idea that is designed to make people clutch their individuality and random blessings like something someone wants to forcefully take away from them… It’s a metaphor for things like social programs and inequality conscious measures that lift up disadvantaged people to allow them access to participate in society but not a particularly good one as it pre-supposes that lifting someone up is the same thing as crushing persecution of the naturally gifted.
Your teacher was half right, the story is about Socialism but it’s a hostile framing of Socialism in complete bad faith using the conventions of science fiction to paint an overblown dystopia with hyperbolic absurd metaphors that underline the anxieties anti-civil rights advocates had when it was written.
The whole thing makes more sense when you consider that hardcore disability advocacy groups that started the path to creating the ADA basically was beginning to gain traction when the book was being written.
I am not saying the author is a conservative making a bad faith arguement about Socialism. Quite the opposite. He’s a leftist making the strawman cold war anti socialist rhetoric and turning it up to 11 to be absurd. But this actually has nothing to do with the intention of the author. While Vonnegut was for the most part was known for his anti-war anti McCarthist bent not all of his catelog is cohesive. Harrison is one where his intentions, at least in his writing execution, were fairly grey. He was writing the Conservative conception of Cold War depictions of Socialism and civil rights advocacy but its one of those death of the author moments where the satire struck some perceived “truth” with a conservative audience. Knowing the author it is generally leftist is what allows you to unlock the actual possible intentions of the satire but that effect is sometimes negated due to an unfortunate habit of the polarized audience.
Think of it as a Steven Colbert Report effect of satire. You expect absurdism to be recognized in a work based on external knowledge of the author and the level of over the top tricks you employ but your audience… If they exist on the other end of the spectrum doesn’t recognize who you’re making fun of because you instead miss the mark and create a warped mirror that makes you popular on both sides. Colbert, in character, was extremely popular in conservative spaces because he essentially masqueraded as an over the top demagogue and they took his satire as their own “sticking it to the libs”. This particular story ended up being so on the nose to conservative belief at the time that they took it and literally and are using it as their own propaganda.
Yeah, definitely missed your meaning towards Vonnegut’s intent.
And you would think he made it a bit obvious when Bergeron rips off his weights and declares himself Emperor, but as you say the conservatives typically don’t see that as an unreasonable attitude.
It is my fault for being too ambiguous in my phrasing.
But yeah… Dude’s teacher going “and THAT’S Socialism” is essentially the effect at play. When you hit all the reinforced points of Conservative emotional reactive training with just a bigger hammer they don’t know to look for the cues that the author and the message are at odds. . A lot of the rhetoric of Conservativism is based more on vibe than on solid social or media literacy so if you just replicate the vibe the programming kicks in to stop thinking critically. They do recognize it as hyperbole… Most of the time. I have known some spectacular idiots
You’ve probably noticed but all but the absolute most obtuse satire does not work on conservative audiences.
Yeah, especially considering how the border goes through communities and we’ve relied on the labor of these immigrants since we stole that land from Mexico. Also complaining about people coming from Mexico to land that we stole from Mexico feels ironic.
Yeah nah it’s theft. It doesn’t matter how it’s framed. In the middle ages and before, where what side of the border you lived on was pretty much irrelevant to your life, it’d make sense to think of it the way you are. But in the modern day, where taking land often means completely altering and destroying the lives of the people that live on it, forcibly removing it from them is theft. The implications that come from it being theft is a completely different conversation.
I’m sorry that their country was destroyed by US policies and they were forced to abandon their homes, I’m sorry that they’re coming here to be superexploited by brutal farming operations and meatpackers and slaughterhouses, and I’m sorry they’re going to have to find out how bad this country is in-person.
Not attacking you or anything. But people can’t be illegal. They’re undocumented. And we should actively seek to reframe it as such. They are just immigrants. Regardless of whether they came here illegally or not. The term illegal immigrants has been popularized and pushed by fascist/conservatives as a way to frighten people and “other” immigrants.
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