Teddy Roosevelt was shot point blank in the chest at a campaign stop. The bullet penetrated his chest after passing through a steal eyeglass case and his 50 page speech. Teddy noted he wasn’t coughing blood and knew he would survive. He calmed the lynch mod down that were going to murder the assassin and then did his speech.
He lost the election despite being a total badass.
Later, Teddy reluctantly ran as VP with McKinley who won the election and was quickly assassinated. Teddy became president and won a second term.
Anyway, attempted assassination isn’t the boost people think it is - even for awesome badasses like Teddy Roosevelt.
He famously started that speech with the line “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!”
They were gay children then professionals and furries. These hackers have been breathing operational security their whole lives. You probably find them when some Morpheus dude in assless chaps offers you two different brands of poppers.
Finally someone with the fucking stones to call this fascistic slow crawl out for what it is, we can still stop this. If I’m a single issue voter who’s only concern is not wanting to “live” under the yolk of a tyrannical monarch (me, but not single issue), then this has my attention. The clock is ticking, I hate it too.
Why not Federal prison? NOTHING they did was legal and at least the mayor (sic) and city council knew full well they were subverting the Democratic principles of the US.
No fine, no probation. Prison for these manipulative shits
Good post, but we really need to get out of the generational thinking.
I know rich and poor boomers. I know rich and poor millenials, and gen X/Z.
It’s a class struggle. Always has been.
Stop making it a generational battle. That only serves to divide the working class.
Yes, there is racism, ageism, sexism. We should debate those things and improve, but we can’t let those things divide us politically.
And since I’m ranting, let me end with a solution. We need to find themes that help all of us.
So perhaps we should say: for example, everyone with less than $1M in wealth gets a $20K tax deduction.
Who could oppose that? It doesn’t benefit home owners vs. renters. It doesn’t benefit students vs. retirees. It doesn’t benefit city dwellers vs. rural. Or white vs. black.
But it does benefit the class who owns nothing and gives them a better chance to own something.
Stop making it a generational battle. That only serves to divide the working class.
That’s difficult when a lot of the news media is owned by *checks notes… the Capital class… and they have vested interest in keeping the conversation about a generational battle.
But yes, 100% agreed. The problem is we’re all commenting on news articles that will never stop presenting it that way.
Someone else could write news then? People started doing that on YouTube - e.g. CPG Grey, Ian Danskin/Innuendo Studios, Hank & John Green, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Kurzgesagt, etc. It did not work out well I think, especially since people seek more immediate gratification i.e. Twitch dances or whatever rather than fully college-level subject matter provided entirely for free, oh except having to watch ads for the corporate overlords.
If we do not value i.e. take care of things, we will lose them. In this case - and here I will use a generational term, b/c it refers to the only people in charge at the time it occurred - the Boomer (+ Great) generations chose this for the legacy of everyone who came after. Which is only the history of how we came to be here, but it is our choice to continue forward this way.
Well exactly, it’s an uphill battle, sadly. I’ve been upset at how weak our media has been since the Bush years, when I was working in local television for an NBC affiliate. I got to see all the behind the scenes of the beginnings of the War on Terror and how much our media purposefully pumped up both the war in Afghanistan and in Iraq and how they helped promote the outright lies of the Bush administration. It was eye opening as a twenty-something to say the least and made me incredibly distrustful of government overreach that was being exhorted by patriotism and nationalism. “Spy and snitch on your fellow Americans to prove how patriotic you are!” It was also part of the beginning of dropping the facade of “racism being over” because holy fuck did brown skinned immigrants all get put in the “dangerous radical Islamist” basket, no matter their real nationality or religion. It deeply colored my view of mainstream media as consistently right-wing, even back then, because of how often they would capitulate to Republican lies to support wars intended to enrich a small elite.
I’ve been wanting to see more independently successful media organizations most of my life, but most of what I have seen is media consolidation, and it’s certainly not like I have the capital to get into the business myself. It’s brutal.
Finally, just as you said, we’re competing with Twitch and TikTok and a lot of these issues really require text documents and references that can be checked more easily than needing to sift through a three-hour-Youtube-video of the issue. The problem is we’ve raised a generation that really doesn’t want to read much at all if it isn’t a subtitle for a video. That’s… distressing. (But not to act like it was much better in my generation, it’s not, it’s part of why we have so many shitty kids: their shitty millennial parents who shove a phone into their hand like Boomers shoved us in front of TVs.)
I wouldn’t even know where to start on how to fix it. I’m with Marshall McLuhan, we’re spitting out new communications mediums before we’ve even really understood the social impacts of the previous mediums. He argued we still didn’t understand writing and we had already jumped headlong into radio and television… Well, look at us now baybeee, shit’s spiraling with the internet, McLuhan. Maybe he’s spinning in his grave to match.
I guess I spoke too quickly as well. Probably people do write the news, but (a) how do you even find things these days, when searching is crap; and (b) it would perhaps do little to counteract the mis- (neutral), even active dis-information that is out there now. Also those sources I mentioned tend to be rather high-end, e.g. of the scale of intelligence required to make use of and especially to really enjoy watching them.
Speaking of the Bush administration, I recall hearing about the event where they pulled down Sadam Hussein’s statue (iirc?) but later when I watched it happen with my own eyes - with the audio ON mind you - it told a 100% different story. Crowds cheering, or booing, or something, but the important thing is that with the audio OFF they can say whatever they wish to, and we’d believe it b/c how else could we know the reality? Unless someone happened to have the original source… except even then, what if they swapped the audio out, how could we tell!?
The only real way to tell a counterfeit is to know the real thing so well that nobody can tell you otherwise. So what, I am supposed to know about the entire history of the Middle East, and all of the machinations of the US government within that!? I have a fucking job you know, and as a not-Boomer, may never see retirement or own a home even then - who has time to add all of that to their schedule, on top of every single other thing like climate change, ThE eCoNoMy ThO, Covid and/or vaccines, and all of the other myriad things out there (like gay frogs for some damn reason, I dunno)?!
Highly ironically then, the internet may have slowed down the pace of systemic and active disinformation - by providing an “alternate” source of real, true facts - even as in other ways it also sped it up (by providing a source of “alternative facts” that are not true).
And in response to all of that, the Democrats choose to nominate… HRC, smdh. Remember, Trump did not win, so much as she lost - worse than any candidate in modern history, and the second-worst btw was… him. Conservatives, liberals, voters, apathetic people - we brought this upon ourselves. I really hope that we get to live, but if we die, I cannot really blame anyone else? The wealthy elites, ahem excuse me, the Democrat politicians, don’t really exist within the same world as 99.999999% of the rest of Americans, which might be fine except neither do they seem to bother even so much as learning about them - except, you know, enough to carry hot sauce in her purse I suppose.
What you are describing sounds an awful lot to me like the mantra of “move fast and break things”, which as I understand it was popularized by Mark Zuckerberg of Facism FaceBook, and refers basically to the fact that we can move so quickly nowadays - with the abilities of code monkies hopped up on crack (one presumes, this on top of the Red Bull and Dorritos combo:-P) that even if we screw up, we can still move quickly enough to fix it. Now, you might say that even one second’s thought would be enough to dispell that rumor, however my counter to that is… he’s rich. (and!? WTF does that even have to do with anything!? oh wait, he took all that money from society regardless of the harm that it did to us all, okay then)
Anyway, there have always been the elites - the idea of the Illuminati, regardless of whether they are “really” real or not, like seriously, how could they not be, that’s simply how the world works!? - who have controlled society. The problem is, the elites feel like they no longer need the backing of irl human beings, b/c of (a) globalism (so humans here don’t need educating, if you can get sufficient number of coders somewhere, who are willing to work for bananas and cocaine), and (b) automation (so… do we really need human beings at all? and also climate change makes it unlikely that we’ll all survive? welp, better start killing them off in mass numbers, or better yet just let them do it to themselves, whilst I simply accumulate all of the wealth that I possibly can until then).
We are all so damn naive - and yes I include myself first and foremost among that set.:-P I am not sure that this problem even is fixable, but if it were, it would take an amount of collective effort that… I am not certain exists any longer. Or the backing of an elite. I guess we’ll see what happens. :-|
with the abilities of code monkies hopped up on crack (one presumes, this on top of the Red Bull and Dorritos combo:-P)
You underestimate coffee and power of Ballmer’s Peak.
automation (so… do we really need human beings at all? and also climate change makes it unlikely that we’ll all survive? welp, better start killing them off in mass numbers, or better yet just let them do it to themselves, whilst I simply accumulate all of the wealth that I possibly can until then).
I hate neofeudalism. They use what can be used for societal progress for social regress.
Their decision, whether they have spent even one second’s thought about it or not, is “strategic” as in one that will get them personally some benefits, but it is also short-sighted as in one that may doom us all. On the other hand, my naivite is perhaps far worse so I should be careful throwing stones in glass houses.
I rarely like popular TV shows but one that does make me think is The 100 that illustrates thougher choices needing to be made and all the gamesmanship going on surrounding those. e.g. will neoliberals survive whereas progressivism was too impractical to ever have a chance? I don’t know the answer but those seem like the kinds of questions that needed to be explored by people far smarter in such matters than I. Unfortunately, they instead have been explored by people who are fairly smart but whose defining characteristic may be a desire to become personally richer, which again far exceeds my own.
It did not work out well I think, especially since people seek more immediate gratification i.e. Twitch dances or whatever rather than fully college-level subject matter provided entirely for free, oh except having to watch ads for the corporate overlords.
I can’t completely agree with it. There are a lot of college-level-only channels. From English youtube I know only The Efficient Engieneer(engieneering), Thought Emporium(molecular biology, close to popsci), Marco Reps(engieneering), Breaking Taps(engieneering, close to popsci). From popsci Veritasium(mix), Practical Engieneering(engieneering), numberphile(math), computerphile(applied math).
From Russian youtube I can only think of popsci mixed with college-level: Ekaterina Shulman(politology, mix), Chemistry - Easy(chemistry, mostly college-level). From popsci: Physics with Pobedinsky(physics), SciOne(multiple hosts), QWERTY(multiple hosts, originally was about astronomy), Alexandr Panchin(biology), Vert Dider(mix, only translated from english), Artur Sharifov(mix).
Perhaps I am being unfair with my language, so here’s an example if it helps clarify: this is a video combating vaccine disinformation campaigns. It is cute, slow paced enough, but also keeps moving fast enough, it aims low but at the same time it contains high levels of content, and basically answers anyone’s questions about the situation. It is as perfect a video as I think can possibly exist - extremely bold words, but… accurate imho? Edit: oops, this is the one I meant, but notably the fact that there are multiple that fit this criteria also serves a different point as well!?:-)
However, instead of watching this, more people died in the USA from the pandemic than from all wars combined, and like so many other scenarios (e.g. gun violence) we will forever be ignorant of the true numbers because we are actively prevented from counting them.
This is literally, actually, full-on life vs. death, but people cannot be bothered to watch even so much as a 10-minute video to save their life, or the life of everyone around them including their entire family. And the nation that they claim to love and be patriotic for.
Knowledge can easily cure ignorance, but not much if anything can be done about obstinacy. Maybe if they suffer enough pain they may finally start to care enough to open up to listen a real answer, but brainwashing is so tough to attempt to break through.
That channel also deals with climate change, technology, etc. But to switch to a very different example, another one is the rise of fascism all around the world. Ian Danskin’s Innuendo Studios has a playlist for his series on The Alt Right Playbook that is as comprehensive and deep a collection on that topic as I have ever seen. One example of the series is I hate Mondays and another is There’s always a bigger fish. These in some ways are more important than knowledge about climate change or vaccines or gun control or whatever, bc it discusses what we as a society will do about those matters. But instead of watching such, and/or even reading the Constitution that they claim to love, people instead show up at the White House with the idea to literally behead people (January 6), and on the other side liberals always seem shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED!?! at the actions of conservatives, despite how remarkably consistent they are.
With so much free, virtually instant knowledge (okay so less than an hour?) available to us all, and with an ad blocker needs nothing at all in return but even without one having to watch a handful of ads is nothing in the grand scheme of things - with all that is available, I can only conclude that people do not want that knowledge. i.e. people in both sides - liberal and conservative - remain in their ignorance by choice, bc it’s easier to watch something akin to a TikTok dance.
It is cute, slow paced enough, but also keeps moving fast enough, it aims low but at the same time it contains high levels of content, and basically answers anyone’s questions about the situation.
That I call Kurzgesagt popsci, not college-level. Not that their video lacks research, just I think such format is not collage level. I consider even this(has autotranslated subtitles, I recommend watching) to be popsci.
Yes the purpose of Kurzgesagt is pop-sci. Hank and John Green are more college level (remember: American college is often equivalent to high school elsewhere in the world) and the likes of Innuendo Studios and CGP Grey can get fairly far away from dancing and deeper into philosophy.
The reason I brought up Kurzgesagt was that even that level is beyond what people want to see.
First note that it’s enormously variable, with some college preparatory high schools being better than some colleges. The main thing is that education is a for-profit exercise, and now even government-funded ones behave like that too after No Child Left Behind. So like anything else, it’s whatever they can get away with selling their product with minimal input into in order to maximize the margin:-(.
Then above and beyond that, schools are partly paid for by the government, but also by the local district they are in, so schools in richer areas are going to be 1000x better than those in poorer ones. See e.g. this older John Oliver (Last Week Tonight) special: youtu.be/o8yiYCHMAlM.
His video on First Past the Post voting should be mandatory to watch.
he doesn’t actually state in that video what should be the biggest takeaway: strategic voting is what leads to consolidation of parties, so your best interest longterm is to vote your values, even if doing so has a likelihood of losing short term.
The word “think” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there… plus how many conservative voters these days even have college degrees? The TV (or radio) man says to vote one way, so they do, end of the matter as far as they are concerned. (extraordinarily sadly, no /s on this one)
Exactly ^this. It makes sense to them that they “worked their way through college”, ignoring how that is no longer possible.
Tbh I’m not a fan of just handing out money to the predatory banks who screwed students over with those loans either, but damn we should do something. Like maybe educate ourselves on a topic prior to banning people from doing it, possibly, hopefully?
And then they go and say “that’s not how democracy works”, except when you win the majority so hard that you even overcome the electoral college effect then they simply overthrow democracy itself.:-(
There are indeed real facts, and real people, behind all those pithy sayings.
I think you know who… there is one class that seems to go FAR out of their way to control the conversation to the end of “there is no class struggle” (or even “there is no such thing as class”?).
So perhaps we should say: for example, everyone with less than $1M in wealth gets a $20K tax deduction.
As long as you a) have a robust enforcement mechanism (otherwise it will just be another PPP scenario), and b) offset that tax break with new taxes on the wealthy.
Electoral reform is needed to do away with First Past The Post voting so people can be free to vote outside the two party system with no spoiler effect.
I swear the US is fucked at this point. We’re watching the collapse of the American empire in real-time. I expect a USSR style split in my lifetime, and a whole lot of upset rubes who thought that they could just pretend reality didn’t exist and things would go well for them.
I just don’t know which state(s) are going to split off first. Will it be the western states together, a handful of north eastern states, or will some bastard grouping of southern states decide they’ve had enough. Stay tuned!
We can’t split up, all too interdependent. For example, I see people on here telling the red states to fuck off to themselves. Good luck eating food.
How about military presence? Trying to split down on that is a hard stop, not even thinkable. The federal government ain’t going to allow it, no matter what.
Any Southerners wanting to try again are getting stomped far faster than last time. Even then, you got armed libs like me embedded in the countryside. And yes, it’s worth my life to shoot “red shirts”. (And that’s easy for me to say. I’m older and understood my history classes.)
Good luck growing anything after succeeding. It would severely limit California’s access to the Colorado river and considering California is already in a water crisis being self sustainable wouldn’t last very long
Eh I doubt Colorado would block water rights to CA. AZ and UT are kind of the wild cats. I would expect them all to just let it keep flowing because someone up stream of them could do the same. It’s kind of like having nukes and having alliances.
But is the same sort of thoughts when I lived in the Great Lakes area. It was thought to be a good area for dirty bombs and to pollute the hell out of it because it feeds the rest of the country’s water.
Was always told The Perry nuclear power plant was a target because of that
Yep. Though until California can pull pure water from salt water, Utah will stop water from coming in. Though in Colorado, we’ll just block it off before it gets there as we battle out our own red vs blue. Fuckem.
You’re assuming that if they break apart, they wouldn’t trade with each other anymore. That’s not what happened with the USSR, and it’s not what happened with Brexit, and it’s not what would happen if the US split apart.
The federal government won’t be able to do jack shit if California, Oregon(maybe not), and Washington decide to stop giving it money. Sending in the military wouldn’t work, there’s far too many conflicts of interest within the troops. People who were born there, or have family there, or friends.
Seceding from the union is illegal. They would just arrest the organizers in the state government and replace them with acceptable politicians to bring them back in line.
Yeah, it stopped the United States from breaking up before. What better case study than the exact same scenario. Just this time its a much much stronger union army against a much much poorer economic system for the seceding army.
Other countries would not supply the secessionists with any military equipment and they almost certainly wouldn’t purchase any products from them either. International sanctions against the seceding states would end the “war” before it even began.
I think you fail to realize how big and important of a country the west coast of the US would be if it broke off. Countries wouldn’t have an option on sanctions, because the headquarters of some pretty foundational companies are located there (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Netflix, etc.)
California, Oregon, Washington together could split off, and it would be the third largest economy in the world behind only the remaining US and China.
It wouldn’t be as ugly as you assume, the rest of the country would kind of be forced to accept it. It would look far more like Brexit than the US civil war.
I recognize that, but even if they were to still somehow navigate the economic situation, the government officials would immediately be charged with sedition and a warrant would be issued for their arrest. They wouldn’t be able to flee the country because any allied country would extradite them to the formal United States government. So the only other option would be to stay and forcefully defend their arrest. That brings in the national guard and any escalation would drive us toward a true civil war. MAYBE secession becomes so popular amongst the population that they also are willing to defend their secessionists political leaders with force, but I doubt it. Even in the event of it becoming a true civil war, the rest of the United States is absolutely massive. There’d be no way of defending against all of the avenues of attack. Air superiority would be established immediately by surrounding AFBs, mobile AA systems, and returning aircraft carriers. Naval blockade would prevent any foreign aid from reaching the West Coast. Lack of any real microchip processing plants would make the proliferation of modern arms impossible…
I just can’t see any other outcome than those government leaders being arrested, replaced, then any secession being nullified and reversed by the newly installed government officials. Though if you are able to think of something, I’d be open to thinking of a potential rebuttal.
Its not going to be a couple of politicians doing it on their own. It would likely be a referendum with popular support from the citizens (again like Brexit)
The Federal government really has no recourse against “we aren’t sending you money any more” they can’t send in the military to make sure the money gets transferred. The military can’t achieve that particular objective.
They could try to make an example of some key politicians, but with popular support for such a split that would likely lead to some bad outcomes for anyone who tried to enforce it.
They don’t have any sort of legal method of replacing those people either. Anyone appointed from out of state would just promptly be ignored.
This isn’t the same as a lot of situations where there would need to be hard borders right away that need to be defended or objectives that could be captured. There’s no need for military anything. Not that military intervention would work very well anyways, far too many soldiers would refuse orders. You’d see a lot of people refusing, walking away, or even subverting. Those states make up something like 20% of the US population, and if you add in people who have friends or families there it’s probably 30-40% of the military that wouldn’t be okay with attacking anything.
Starving them out with a blockade? Lol, not happening. Besides, both Mexico and Canada (both massive food suppliers) have direct land connections to those states. The rest of the US is going to threaten those two countries if they send in food? No way either of them listens to that threat. The remaining US doesn’t have as much global power as you’d think.
When the USSR broke apart, the Russians made an international agreement to pay back some of the debt. Pretty much entirely so that at least some creditors would have confidence enough to put more money in.
That’s what I mean, the states would have to come to an agreement on what everyone’s share is. I don’t expect every state to agree to pay $680 billion.
One of the problems I see is that distilling it down more granularly at a state level is you have a huge urban/rural divide. That’s something you just can’t draw a clean line around. You would see a much messier civil war because it’d be “cities against farms”, not just state against state. That’s just one of the many, many issues that would arise.
The divide isn’t between states, though. It’s more rural vs urban, and that doesn’t divide up well into individual countries. Illinois and New York, for example, will still be a core liberal city dominating their conservative rural areas. Likewise, Texas will still be a few core liberal cities dominated by conservative rural areas. There’s not a good way to break any of those cases up.
2 years ago I was certain a long range Model 3 would be our family’s first electric vehicle. I am now certain that a Rivian R2 will be that vehicle instead. As long as Musk is in the pipeline, making terrible decisions I have no interest in Tesla.
Model Y is the best car I’ve ever had. I suppose in spite of, not thanks to the ketamine man. Probably not my next car if Tesla doesn’t do something smart about Musk.
I don’t think she is calling herself a free market capitalist.
Though I agree, she is being cheeky. This isn’t a free market, it’s the opposite of it. It is insider trading and she and no one in Congress should be allowed to do that.
It’s unfair to blame the restaurant when the private equity firm that bought them deliberately stripped the restaurant’s assets, hoping to rip off some later buyer. nbcnews.com/…/private-equity-rolled-red-lobster-r…
Yes, but the article makes it seem like their failure was based on mistakes. This was exactly what they intended.
A private equity firm bought them to naked short the stock, while running the business into the ground, so they never have to replace the holdings they never borrowed in the first place. It’s the same as what investors tried to do with GameStop before r/wallstreetbets caught on and held them out of bankruptcy. It’s called predatory naked shorting.
A private equity firm bought them to naked short the stock
You just like throwing around words regardless of meaning?
They owned equity, so they were long, not short. They owned a stake so they weren’t naked.
What they did was a simple extraction of value from something they owned, destroying it. It has nothing to do with short selling, and has nothing to do with manipulation of stock trading (after all, they took it private so that it wouldn’t be publicly traded, so there were no public traders to manipulate).
Shhhhhhhhhh, we read headlines. Not articles. And we need the headline to be presented on tiktok, with overlaying captions which are only one one at a time, but big enough to cover the whole screen. Also, throw in half a dozen unrelated things, like birds dancing, and some guy skate boarding. All for no reason. This is how things are now.
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