It’s time to extinguish the lone star. When you take up arms against the country… it’s SHERMAN TIME!
Joking aside, though, this is treason and literally taking up arms against the country. The insurrection needs to be put down, and the courtrooms filled with these traitors on trial, especially Abbot and his cronies.
Even simpler than that. Biden is the Commander in Chief. Abbot can mobilize the National Guard in his state, but at the end of the day if their commander receives a stand down order direct from the President, they MUST obey, or it’s insubordination and the penalty for insubordination within the military is much higher than in the private sector.
That… assumes they listen. these fuckwits are already overstepping their legal authority. But yes, anyone in the Nat Guard should get a stand-down order and told to fuck off, and refusal… well FAFO applies.
The problem is that Abbot is not just using Nat Guard, but also local cops. (and park rangers,). Those lot should get hit with federal obstruction charges.
The ol’ Eisenhower special, “fuck your segregation supporting national guard, now they’re my integration enforcing national guard.”
Genuinely shocked more presidents haven’t whipped that one out against insubordinate governors, by now I’d have made a show of having them arrest Abbott on charges of human trafficking for the bus shit.
That’s sort of their shtick. They need the Republicans to exist so they are the only option for anyone capable of critical thinking. We have a right wing party and a religious, extremist party. I’m never going to vote for anyone who wants to make laws based on what their imaginary friend tells them, so I’m stuck voting for a bunch of corporate shills… Hooray.
I’m saying they’re obstructing federal law enforcement. (BPC are federal LEOs,)
the FBI is probably going to be better equipped to handle dealing with arresting a shit load of idiots who think that obstructing FEDERAL agents is a good idea, than the BPC. Arrest everyone and nail them with all appropriate charges.
Yeah, fuck the Supreme Court. I want the FBI to raid the governor’s mansion and take Abbott into custody. Might as well snatch up Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton while they’re at it, put them on trial in…fuck it, Hawaii. I’d bet money a jury of Hawaii residents would vote to toss those three into the Molokai channel and let the waves have them.
100% an upper or “microdosing” on a hallucinogen. Just a nibble of psilocybin every day before impregnating a secretary and after bed.
This is entirely unrelated, aside from the stupidity of the subject, but I’m reminded of that fella who repeatedly injected mushrooms to try to get high. He sterilized the mushrooms by boiling, then blended, loaded into a hypo, and slowly plunged the mixture into his arm. He ended up with a complete systemic fungal infection but survived. I wish Musk would get creative with it.
I mean he had a half a puff of a joint. Not that alcohol is a particularly harmful drug but I’m sure plenty of CEOs enjoy a beer from time to time without becoming full blown drug addicts.
No. We’re saying the SpaceX board is not on enough of them. Because they’re going to light up the whole business by leaving him in place rather than figuring out what it’s going to take to launch him into the sun. I mean remove him.
I think public executions where the prisoner is tortured to death are more progressive than supposed “humane” methods.
Not because I like cruelty or think they deserve it, but I want the State to do it’s killing out in the open where citizens are exposed to what’s happening in their name. Hiding the act behind closed doors and beneath a cloak of “humane” methods allows the State to exercise ultimate authority in secret from the people from whom that authority is derived. It’s the State and the supporters of the death penalty that are being spared pain.
You highly overestimate the amount of compassion the average person has. If you torture people to death in public people will sell tickets for the best seats. The Romans built a whole damn arena for this purpose.
If anything, I think it would normalize killing (even more). But I guess I get where OP is coming from: Governments shouldn’t get away with killing a human by claiming it’s a humane act.
The job of corporations and media and politics is to divide people. And even more so it will make you think your neighbor is a savage. It keeps people alone and independent workers to exploit. When in reality, your neighbors are average people that aren’t bloodthirsty. Most people can hardly handle their own lives and are depressed enough as it is without having a sporting event dedicated to killing people. I didn’t realize how well this propaganda type stuff works but clearly it does.
We are historically a sundown state. The leading party is trying to ban books and change education curriculums. Our police showed up in riot gear for peaceful protests like when Roe v. Wade was turned, and those same police are literal klan members. We know this because during that Nazi rally I mentioned, the police in uniform were nowhere to be found. They were all photographed taking part in the rally. Yet these officers are happy to show up armed in riot gear at peaceful protests…
So yeah, I do feel that my state is politically extremist, and a number of people would absolutely welcome something like that. I wish it weren’t how I felt and I wish it weren’t the truth, but that’s just the byproduct of 2016 and years and years of Fox News and other propaganda “politicizing” peoples identity.
Most of the state? As individuals definitely not, there are many against our state government who actively campaign. We get targeted, followed home, and assaulted for being queer, for being activists who dare try and speak out against hatred at peaceful protests. And yet despite all of us, somehow all those asshats are still getting elected with no policies made to protect these citizens.
I’m not trying to be facetious here. I believe in goodwill first and foremost and doing the right thing over doing nothing, and I always have hope for the best in people. But after 2016, fuck, after January 6th we have to be better than optimistic. We have to hold people accountable, and that means recognizing the actual state of the world we are in, which means recognizing that yes, there are people right now who would argue for a bloodsport. To them it would be bonus points if it was LGBT+ and POC participants.
The only way to come close to changing is by acknowledging our faults as a whole and do as much as we can to remedy them. We have to be compassionate while being completely intolerant of their hateful bullshit and insane rhetoric.
Tell me you’ve never watched a Republican primary debate without telling me.
Nearly every election cycle there’s at least one debate where the death penalty comes up and you have governors competing with each other over body counts to an audience cheering them on.
Saying that people would enjoy public violence is a pure fantasy. No average person is going to go to an execution, they’re barely even favorable and only because it’s “humane”. Most people are nonviolent. Most people will never see anyone die unexpectedly or intentionally. Most people wont ever seriously injure someone.
Most people are only non-violent because the violence is socially frowned-upon. When given an acceptable outlet for savagery, humans have no problem being savage.
It’s easy to forget, but we have the same brains as back then. Societal values may have changed, but there will be those with a sick fascination who want to see. When the bath school massacre happened (1920s I think?) People took home souvenirs.
Nothing suggests to us that the morality of Roman times is capable of existing now. You say “societal values may have changed” but that’s the entire thing. They’ve changed. We have shifted the society to where this kind of public torture would never happen. It can happen again and people are capable, but not unless society shifts.
And the trends show that while people are divisive, their morals are very closely related. You may not agree on abortion but most people agree we shouldn’t kill prisoners inhumanely.
People completely misunderstand morality. People are not currently capable of tolerating this kind of thing. If you think so, do a survey and I’ll eat my hat.
r/watchpeopledie was popular enough to reach the top of r/all quite regularly before NFSW was filtered from it, and had half a million subscribers. There’s still plenty people in today’s society that would enjoy a medieval style public torture and execution.
Not so much that last one. Nobody that’s not already ridiculously wealthy (like 0.1% wealthy) is going to profit under the GOP, it’s just a question of how far back in the queue you are to get fleeced. All their policies are based around concentrating all the nations wealth into as few hands as possible. It’s why the GOP has such a love affair with Russia of late, they want to emulate Putin and his oligarch minions.
They think they will lower taxes and the market will do better. So they save an extra thousand on federal tax and their 401k goes up a bit. Which isn’t true, but that’s what they think.
Ah yes, the most quintessential of Republican voter, the moron. Reagan caused so much damage to the US with his trickledown economics fantasy, and the worst part is I’m not even sure he intended to. At least Trump is legitimately a terrible human being that I can feel perfectly justified in hating as the walking pond scum he is.
Maybe he’s racist against immigrants? Alternatively, maybe he’s hoping that they’ll care more about him being a fellow rich person (if he is in fact rich) than about his gay blackness (they don’t).
Maybe he bought the lie that the ideology that belies Conservative platform isn’t racist (or is an acceptable parameter of racist) or homophobic… Or maybe he just feels like he’s been accepted into the club when he gets cheered on by his Conservative buddies for slaging on trans folk and other POCs because they lift him up as an exception. " Here’s what a “good” gay black guy looks like. See we’re not racist and our platform has merit we got one of them on our side! Buy him a drink! "… This holds up until you get into company that doesn’t have to lie to themselves that they aren’t trying to oppress you and want you to just not be an uncomfortable problem anymore.
Every genocide has idiots who join the other side in a bid to be a pet for safety and sell out their own communities in hope they will be respectable and safe… It’s a gambit that only proves you’re scum before it gets you get killed.
Last job, the gay Hispanic receptionist was a Trump man. My Philippina wife was too. Past tense, once I showed her a few things. She had only seen Fox News in her 2-years in America.
He likely bought into the idea of “well, there’s bigots on both sides, but at least the GOP will help me keep more of my money.”
The problem, however, is that the GOP have doubled down on social issues that shouldn’t really be part of the platform, and in doing so, the GOP have turned away from anything that was remotely useful in them.
This idea of the “self-made” person and pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps sounds appealing on paper and can be inviting at first. My grandmother received her Master’s in Nursing at a time when the vast majority of blacks, let alone black women, in a medical field weren’t doing much more than the laundry. It’s easy to be proud of such things and attribute this to conservative ideals of doing “more” out of pure determination and strength of will, and then admonishing those who have neither the drive nor intelligence to do the same.
And then…there was Trump.
Under his umbrella, it seemed as if overnight, the party that was about doing for “self” was more about removing options for anyone who wasn’t a straight white Christian and ensuring that the “others” stayed in their place. What could once be ignored with the dismissive of “well, there’s plenty of liberals who are racist too”, was no longer applicable. The Left turned from the racists who pretended to care for show to just the people who’d rather let a few so-called “undeserving” folks get fed, clothed, and housed to ensuring that the hundred who really need help would be able to get it. Meanwhile, the Right continued down the path of being anti-everything; anti-anyone not white, not male, not Christian, and they weren’t even remotely concerned about the deficit or lowering taxes across the board for the people instead of just for major corporations and the top 1% of the 1%.
I don’t blame this man for having been a gay black Republican at some point, and trying to hold onto what he thought made sense in the past. I do, however, raise an eyebrow at any rational person who has watched the GOP’s descent and yet has still marched with them while they refuse to back away from white nationalism and show approval of outright hatred of all women, and non-Christians, and all people of color, and all those who aren’t cis-heteronormative.
Maybe they’re one of Hillary’s other mentioned deplorables. Or maybe they’re like the other half that are just disconnected from reality and don’t feel like any of Trump’s shit will impact them (until it does). And to be fair, Democrats have worked hard to make sure people aren’t impacted by the things Trump did.
Just tell the banks and government to write it off, which can also be described as payback for bailing out banks in the past on more than one occasion and the beginning of free higher education. Then we can all high five for having done something nice for the country.
The government made a nominal profit on the bank bailout.
Early estimates for the bailout's risk cost were as much as $700 billion; however, TARP recovered $441.7 billion from $426.4 billion invested, earning a $15.3 billion profit or an annualized rate of return of 0.6%, and perhaps a loss when adjusted for inflation.
You can call it an inefficient use of money if you want to account for inflation, but all in all, preventing a complete collapse of the banking industry while not directly losing any money isn't the worst deal in the world, and certainly wasn't the runaway heist by the banks.
So the banks basically paid a .6% interest rate on a $426b loan? I'd say they got the better end of the deal.
I'd hardly call the safeguarding of an establishment that has, and continues to, provide predatory services to the American people a resounding success. At best its a minor victory of the shareholders of the banks.
Change is painful. But is quickly painful, like the setting of a broken bone. As it stands we have the aching pain of an improperly healed bone, as these institutions continue to break them unabated. Are we meant to thank them for the privilege?
I think not. I'd rather we fix the root cause of the problem and see a little short term pain than to maintain the status quo of slower more enduring suffering.
Except they didn’t fix the root of the problem, they just kicked the can down the road and made big banks even bigger. Some bigger than the Treasury itself. They set up a bigger ticking time bomb for someone else to worry about when they’re gone.
Any more poor kids we can steal school lunches from though?
Maybe a homeless tent city we can send police in to tear down and fuck with?
This system is working exactly as intended and should be destroyed for there to be hope for a decent future for most, but lets face it, we’re a bunch of cowards and beaten dogs. So lets sacrifice any and all to keep the banks going!
Collapse would be painful. This system is pain by design. Generational, increasing pain without end for the people the owners don’t consider people. They feel their ego scores aren’t metastasizing fast enough, they use their levers of power to turn the screws harder. We must protect our beloved society economy!
My problem with the bailout isn’t the fact that they kept banks open, but that they didn’t require the firing and legal prosecution of those who caused the issues
What a weird quote to use for your argument. The quote says it is a loss when adjusted for inflation. That is not a profit in any meaningful sense. When money is leant with interest below the inflation rate that is not making profit.
Christ, you aren’t kidding. The article is clear that he is saying it’s too easy for higher ups to forget that employees don’t have an investment in the success of the company overall, and that they need to try to empathize with their employees more.
Except it dances around it and has this idiotic title. Fucking trash website.
The fun thing about articles like this is skimming the comments and seeing just how many people absolutely will not read articles under any circumstances.
When you've spent literally decades trying to bury your past self with philanthropic acts and good PR, it becomes quite easy for people to think you're at least nicer than the steaming turd in a dumpster fire that is Elon Musk.
Gates may be nice compared to some of his billionaire compatriots, but understand that's a very low bar to pass.
“My firstborn child died in my arms,” Musk wrote in another post. “I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”
Tech legal expert Eric Goldman wrote that a victory for the plaintiff could be considered “a dangerous ruling for the spy cam industry and for Amazon,” because “the court’s analysis could indicate that all surreptitious hook cameras are categorically illegal to sell.” That could prevent completely legal uses of cameras designed to look like clothes hooks, Goldman wrote, such as hypothetical in-home surveillance uses.
In what reality is there any need for a door-hook camera except to spy on someone who has not given consent???
Jayzuz. That was some poor mind gymnastics right there.
Maybe if it was designed to look like a book or something, you could argue it has legitimate uses for home surveillance. But towel hooks are almost exclusively found in bathrooms.
Now, maybe I’m making assumptions here, but I don’t think most people keep valuables in their bathrooms, so that leaves exactly one use case this could have, and it’s not home protection.
As a counterpoint, I have clothes hooks in my front foyer. So that's one place that it would make a lot of sense to use one of these.
I still don't see why I'd want to hide a camera in something that's explicitly designed to have clothing draped over it, though. Seems like there are better things in my foyer to disguise a camera in.
For what little it’s worth… consent is not needed if there’s no expectation of privacy… if your visiting somebody else’s house… Bathrooms- yes, bedrooms (where you’re sleeping,) yes…
But a hidden camera in, say, the hallway outside, is perfectly legal. Now if the person is a resident (or, like Airbnb,) they have much higher expectations of privacy.
Also… I would suggest that cameras inside residences generally serve no real purpose at all- and are almost universally employed by creeps. (Exception being apartment entryways… if peephole cameras on the apartment door are not allowed.)
the camera’s position isn’t itself illegal… and they don’t have to ask for consent for it to be recording. at least, not in the US.
now, that doesn’t mean they’re not breaking other laws- and that’s really going to come down on jurisdiction. ultimately, it’s likely going to come down to what happens with those recordings; and if there’s laws specifically against taking such images/recordings in the first place; and if your state considers that act breaking normal expectations of privacy.
definitely not saying it’s right- its wrong and creepy- but private property owners have never had to inform people that there were cameras recording… all those “CCTV” warning signs weren’t about consent. It was a foolishly misguided system of deterring shoplifting… a hyper-passive-aggressive “WE’RE WATCHING YOU!!!” that actually informed the would-be thieves… they’re not actually… watching…
My jokes aside, I absolutely have towel hooks in non bathrooms. It’s turns out there also capable of holding jackets and other things, despite the name.
but once you advertise it as a surreptitious towel hook and show pictures of it being used as a surreptitious towel hook, it becomes not just any kind of hook. one of the use cases proposed by the manufacturer has become manufacturing illegal pornography by setting up a hidden cam in the bathroom.
they advertised it as a towel hook AND if they used it to hang hats or whatever it could block the camera. I think its fair to say this is a very creepy camera.
Deterrence is always preferable. Clear monitoring may stop crimes in addition to capturing wanton disregard. A disguised bathroom cam is clearly designed to capture illegal footage. It isn’t a deterrent to crime, it’s a tool to commit it. Spy cams in general are sleazy and disgusting.
Even a nanny cam, despite the clearly just intentions, allow a crime to happen more so than clear security cameras and can be used for less lawful things due to their design.
Deterrence stops people from doing bad things in front of the camera. Useful if you have physical choke points that funnel people to the camera itself of course. But if you put up an obvious nanny cam in one room, all you guarantee is that the abuse happens in another.
For anyone not in the know, Afroman, famous for the songs Crazy Rap (Colt 45) and Because I got High had his house raided by police. He got most of the raid on film and made the video into a music video.
None of the police actually ate Afroman’s lemon pound cake, just one stared longingly at it for an awkwardly long amount of time, lol. Let’s not muddy the waters by accusing those police of something they didn’t do, and focus on the blatantly provable (lack of real probable cause, intentionally sabotaging his cameras) and the alleged but highly plausible (“miscounting” some of his cash into their own pockets).
He could’ve used literally any other example, but of course he chose the creepy one. Could’ve stood on the stance that businesses would need them for shoplifting ffs.
Except any place where it would make sense to place one within a business would be illegal. You are not allowed to place cameras hidden or not in places where one could have an expectation of privacy.
Looking at companies like Blackstone, who buy up houses at auction, lightly flip them and put them back on the market as high-priced rentals. THEY’RE the big reason for the lack of affordable housing.
I mean, would it be better if we had a thousand mid-sized car dealership style house flippers rather than one singular monolith doing the same thing?
Blackstone agents are operating at a national scale in a market that’s been flush with speculators and flippers going straight back to the colonial era. The high price of real estate is the consequence of housing as a commodity. There’s no more free land to develop on the cheap and no more suburbs for young people to push out into searching for cheap new constructions. Take everyone at Blackstone out of the market tomorrow and you’ll have a hundred smaller banks lining up to repeat their formula by the end of the month.
So long as cash is cheap, housing is in demand, and REITs are a thing, you’re going to have businesses looking to profit off the difference between sale rates and rental rates as well as the gap between the prime rate and the going mortgage rate.
Well said, people think that making certain companies go poof will suddenly resolve issues for a long time, without thinking about resource availability, the circumstances which led to the sutuation and the customers who enable them.
Which is the exact reason the government is supposed to step in when there’s this kind of excess in the sector. Especially regarding a need like housing.
Yes it would be better. Monopolies are bad. Near monopolies are bad. The more market power a company gains the more they can charge for no reason at all except “fuck you pay me”.
Cartels are equally bad. Unless you change the economic incentives in home building and real estate speculation, you are - at best - changing the discrete number of people who get to participate in the profiteering. I don’t particularly care if one national guy or fifty state guys get to ratchet up my housing prices. Big Number Goes Up all the same.
There WOULD be more suburbs to develop if we were allowed to work remotely. I would gladly move to the developing suburb of bumfuck-nowheresville if I could go there and keep my job, but I have to stay within a reasonable commuting distance of the nearest metropolis.
One big monopoly looks no different to the consumer than a cartel of mid-sized dealerships. You’re not fixing the underlying speculative demand issue, just changing the number of participants in the speculative racket.
The solution is to make hoarding rental properties an unattractive investment. Put an escalating tax on owning multiple residences. If the 5th property is at 40% tax every year it’s no longer a money maker in a competitive market. Put the money towards tax rebates for single mortgage interest. Now you have buyers back in the market and landlords looking to sell.
Remember that Blackstone and the other institutions are only financing it. These companies have names; like American Homes/AMH, invitation, opendoor and so on. There are a lot of them and they are all given billions to go buy as many houses as they can get their hands on… essentially bottomless pockets. And those are just the large ones. There’s plenty of people churning 100s of homes and letting property management companies do all the work, financing new deals with existing rentals as leverage.
The fact that people look at Biden and go “Yeah but he sucks!” when you have an opponent literally saying he is attacking American democracy and wants to be a dictator on day one.
A wave of lava lapping at you’re feet and y’all are worried that the raft trying to save you is a lil old. Motherfucker it is your only option.
I’m not pretending like I respect anyone anymore who isnt voting for biden. Does it suck that this situation happened? Yep. But it happened from decades of Americans not giving a fuck. You don’t get to whine now when it matters more than anything else.
No. You said something that indicates anything other than utter orgasmic delight at the prospect of Biden being the best the party will ever be willing to do. That means you’re a trumpist.
You do know if Biden died a new vice president would then be appointed, right? I could see congress trying to hold that up but I think the Republicans would face an uphill battle, and that’s only presuming they don’t lose their house majority like they did in 2020.
Either we vote for the guy who wants to murder innocent americans or we vote for the guy who wants to murder innocent non-americans like the last twenty presidents.
Your original comment implied that you’re choosing one kind of death or the other, the fact is Trump will cause more suffering and to handwave it to be the same as Biden is dangerous.
I’m voting for the geezer in 2024, but let’s be real - Dems will never give us a better option. Biden is genuinely a pretty good president comparatively (imo), but real change will not come from either mainstream party. Don’t forget what they did to Bernie in 2020, or why Buttigieg is the Secretary of Transportation. (They’re the same)
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