Yes, I understand that. But on social media you aren’t necessarily getting right-wing propaganda, as there’s plenty of left-wing propaganda and misinformation as well. That’s why I’m saying that they’re low- or no-information voters that are working solely on feels.
Even if you’re a relatively disconnected right winger
I’m not talking about relatively disconnected right wingers; I’m talking about people that are largely centrist, and not paying attention to Fox, NBC, CNN, or any newspapers, and gets all of their ‘news’ from social media. I guess you’d call them the hoi poloi; they’re low-information voters (or no information voters), and mostly apathetic as long as they feel like they’re getting by. Policy won’t matter to them very much; they’re voting on feels.
any right winger that obsessively follows the news is literally ben shapiro or alex jones.
That depends. There are a number of people that are extremely fiscally conservative that have zero interest in culture wars issues. Most of them have defected from the Republican party entirely though, because they see that the current iteration of the Republican party is deeply harmful to the kind of conservatism that they stand for. But that kind of conservative hasn’t really been popular since about the time that Newt Gingritch was trying to stir up the country against a president that didn’t keep his dick in his pants.
We can probably tolerate a little more disinflation, as a treat.
No, not really, because deflation (not disinflation) tends to be self-sustaining, much like hyperinflation does. If the dollar I have today will buy two dollars worth of goods next week, then I’m going to hold onto my dollar to make any sort of discretionary purchase until next week. When everyone does that, all at the same time, it’s like building a dam; the flow of money just grinds to a halt. Companies don’t have money coming in, so they can’t pay workers, which leads to layoffs, and the people laid off have no income to buy anything now, which feeds right back into that cycle.
I agree with you that corporations need to be reined in, that executive salaries are out of control, and that things like stock-buybacks are the bane of a functional economy. But that’s literally going to take legislation in this country to fix, in the same way that it did when the economy crashed in the 1920’s, and I guarantee you that there’s going to be zero political interest in that for at least two years.
It’s not even a propaganda problem, per se, because most people aren’t obsessively following the news and economic reports.
It’s how they feel about money.
That was the biggest single issue.
People looked at grocery store prices and said, this is nuts, I was paying half this just four years ago.
It doesn’t matter to them that global inflation skyrocketed along with inflation in the US, or that we’re doing better than the rest of the world right now. They want to see prices go down, even though that would be deflation, which is incredibly bad for an economy.
TLA agencies would have no problem with a cover identity to “prove” who they are. Your average citizen is going to have a hard time buying a slightly used social security number that they can use to get an ID that will pass KYC laws.
Yeah, but does he like his step dad? Maybe he’s planning on ratting his dad out, ever think about that?
It’s out of their hands.
Uh, yeah, it literally was. Unless you’re saying that you want the president to be able to do whatever they want, even when a majority of congress and courts say no.
It’s not lying under any conventional definition of lying though. Saying something is a lie usually indicates deceptive intent, along with a knowledge–or a reasonable belief–that something you’re saying isn’t accurate. If I believe that the earth is flat, and I say so, am I lying? Or am I just wrong?
Biden said that he would cancel student loans; he’s done everything in his legal authority, and a few things that weren’t, to try an cancel them out. Do you think that the fact that SCOTUS prevented him from doing so makes it a lie? Or was he unable to follow through due to factors that he couldn’t directly control?
Obama was prevented from closing Gitmo by congress. IIRC, a big part of the problem was how to handle the criminal cases; all of the prisoners (“detainees”) in Gitmo have been tortured, the chain of evidence has multiple breaks in it, and it’s highly debatable that they can be tried in any kind of court. Yet intelligence agencies remain convinced that the remaining prisoners are guilty of terrorism. Congress didn’t want to move any of them to the US, because they didn’t want purported terrorists being held on US soil because ???
The president isn’t supposed to be able to act unilaterally, but we’ve allowed that Overton window to shift towards heavily authoritarian.
Republicans need young men to turn out; from what I can see, they are trending conservative. They don’t want young women to turn out, because they are trending overwhelmingly liberal.
Well. technically he was an ape rather than a monkey.
It really depends on where you bury the body. Once you get out of developed areas, it gets very hard to track things down. Take this example; she was missing for two years, and her body was found in a tent, in a sleeping bag, just two miles off the Appalachian trail, which is one of the busiest hiking trails in the US. If someone was actually buried out there, the odds that they’d ever be found are very, very poor.
Admittedly, carrying a body off trails through fairly dense forests ain’t gonna be easy. If you were going to do it, I’d say start by getting an old car with no GPS, get some paper maps, make sure that you leave all of your electronics at home so that there’s no electronic trail of where you’ve been (especially your cell phone!), and only use cash for gas, etc. while you’re driving to your body dump site. Assuming that the body isn’t recovered for at least a year, you’re likely in the clear.
Example: roids. Used appropriately, they can help improve your body.
Correction: they can improve aspects of your body, at a very, very steep cost. Pretty much all oral anabolic steroids are C17α-alkylated, and they’re hepatotoxic (i.e., cause liver damage). All steroids will fuck up your lipid profile to one degree or another, and all of them can cause heart disease, specifically hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. While most AASs will increase red blood cell count, Boldenone in particular will sharply increase RBC production, which in turn increases blood pressure and can cause strokes. All of them will shut down the hypothalmus-pituitary-testicular axis (HPTA) feedback loop in men, leading to testicular atrophy. Most AASs will cause hair loss in men that are sensitive to DHT. AASs can fuck up your hormones enough that men can start lactating (!!!). High doses of testosterone can cause gynecomastia, because testosterone aromatizes into estradiol. In women, all AAS will cause some degree of virilization.
There are not very many IFBB pros that make it to 80; if you want your candle to burn brightly, it’s going to burn out fast.
Claiming that every victory every marginalized group has ever won
My dude. That’s the absolute truth. All the marches and riots in the world don’t win minority groups power unless they can get members of the majority group–members that have political power–to agree with them. You can talk about ‘human rights’ until you’re blue in the face, but rights only exist so long as they can be enforced. A powerless minority group can’t expect to enforce the rights that are supposed to be guaranteed to them, unless they have people with power that are willing to step up.
But again - by failing to be strategic, you will probably lose, and not just for yourself, but for everyone that’s even slightly marginalized.
Oh, I can say it to my own face, I’m trans.
Good luck, because you’re going to need it if Trump wins. Being trans is difficult in deep blue areas now, and it’s going to be a lot harder if Trump wins. The very few labor protections that you have now are likely to evaporate under a Republican gov’t. And perhaps you’re okay with this, but how many of your friends are willing to be your sacrifice? I saw exactly what happened to the black transwomen in my area under Trump, and it was… Bad.
An injury to one is an injury to all. If we don’t stand up for Palestinians, if we allow minorities to be picked off one by one, then we are doomed because there will be no one left to stand up for us.
Minorities will be picked off in this election, whether you stand up or not. You can save some–specifically the ones that are in this country–or you can save none. That’s the reality we live in. This is the reality unless and until you can build a coalition that can win elections on it’s own, because that’s politics. This has always been the reality; disadvantaged people need to build political power by courting the people that have political power; women needed to convince men in order to get the right to vote, non-white people needed to convince white people to pass the various civil rights acts. If you take a no-compromises position, you will always lose.
Lets say you see a massive car accident at an intersection that’s known to be dangerous,
The cause was already contained within the exercise.
You can either do what you can to help people now–knowing that there’s nothing you can say or do at this moment that will help the people of Gaza–or you can insist that you can help them and, in so doing, fail to save anyone at all. It’s your choice.
That is what triage is.
I’m going to be okay either way. I’m white, male, middle-aged, cis-, het-, and can pass as Christian and conservative if necessary. I own a home outright, have no significant debts other than student loans, and have sufficient savings and investments that I can survive the next four years regardless of who wins the election. Your choice to fuck everyone else over in this election won’t directly hurt me. It will hurt a lot of my friends, and I’m certain that at least a percentage of the LGBTQ+ people I know will die or be killed, I have no doubt that some of the undocumented people I know will be deported to countries they haven’t lived in for 30+ years, and I’m sure that my non-white friends will see a sharp uptick in violence directed at them. Meanwhile, the people in Gaza will still be murdered by Israel, because Trump and Netanyahu are both fascists.
You will accomplish nothing except causing more harm.
Tell your non-white friends, your LGBTQ+ friends, you female friends, that you didn’t care enough about their rights and their safety to help them. Say it to their faces. Tell them that it was more important for you to send a message than it was to prevent them from being harmed.
Good luck. You’ll need it. Hopefully we still get to vote in two years, and in four years.
So, um, 400M rockets.
Yeah, that ain’t happenin’.
Democrats aren’t attacking Jill Stein because they think she is taking votes from Kamala Harris.
This is an incredibly dumb take.
This election is about triage. If you want elections to not be triage, you need to fix the conditions that make it triage before the elections ever happen.
What triage means:
Lets say you see a massive car accident at an intersection that’s known to be dangerous, and you have a medical kit in your car. (You have a medical kit in your car, right?) You have some basic trauma first aid experience. You have two tourniquets, two chest seals, a few packs of QuikClot z-fold gauze, and a combat bandage, along with EMS shears and a rescue hook. There are four people that have serious injuries. The first is conscious, has had both legs severed above the knees, and is blood is spurting from the severed limbs. The second is also conscious, and has a massive laceration on their left arm; a fractured bone is protruding from the laceration, and they are bleeding profusely. The third is not conscious; they have lost an arm and blood is spurting from the severed limb, have a penetrating chest wound, have a massive and profusely bleeding laceration on a leg, and significant head trauma. They are breathing in short, erratic breaths. The fourth person is conscious, and has a clearly broken lower leg with a laceration; they’re holding on to the laceration, and blood is seeping out between their fingers.
What do you do? Who do you help, in what order?
The person with the severed legs gets the tourniquets; they will bleed to death in less than two minutes without them. The person with the compound fracture gets the z-fold gauze and the combat bandage; unless the brachial artery is severed, they don’t need a tourniquet. You ignore the person with the head injury; you can’t treat the head injury, and the erratic breathing is likely agonal breathing from the head trauma. Using a tourniquet on them means that you won’t be able to use a tourniquet on the first person, which–in turn–means the first person dies from blood loss. Regardless of anything you do or don’t do, the third person will likely die. The fourth person does not need immediate care; their blood loss is not significant enough to kill them before paramedics arrive.
Triage is recognizing that you can’t help the third person–even though they will very likely die before paramedics arrive–and that the fourth person can wait until you’ve helped the first and second people.
The best you can do is help two people while a third dies. If you walk away, three people die. If you treat the person with the head wound, three people die. If you worry about the broken leg first, then three people die while you’re trying to help the one person that didn’t need emergency trauma care. Maybe you’ve been advocating for years to fix the intersection, while the city council has ignored you; that does nothing to address the immediate needs of the people in front of you.
This is where we are. There is no vote you can cast that is going to save everyone. No matter who you vote for, the genocide in Gaza isn’t going to stop. Stein won’t win, so she can’t stop it. Trump will accelerate it. Harris appears to mostly take the side of Israel. But by focusing on that, you fail to act in a way that can prevent other harms.
Most people don’t like how we’ve gotten to where we are now. But this is where we are, and railing against the system now doesn’t do anything to help the people that need help.
I think you wildly underestimate the amount of trash we’re be talking about here. This wouldn’t be a rocket, this would be thousands, or hundreds of thousands of rockets. And that’s just the start.
It is, yeah. When you look at accounts like Occupy Democrats and start fact checking them, there’s a lot of bullshit that they post. Like, pants on fire kind of bullshit. I knew a lot of people that followed them. In order to get engagement, accounts need to stir up emotions and get people to react and comment; it’s easier to do that with things that outrage rather than dense policy positions.
I want to believe that the political left is more intellectually honest than the right, but that’s because I’m mostly on the political left. (I’m an anarchist at heart, but with a cynical disbelief in the ability of people to work together in a country the size of the US without some degree of authoritarian control.) So I try to fact-check all of the sources that I use for both factual information, as well as ideological biases.