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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Luxury is a choice. I’ve never owned a “new” car. I could afford new cars eventually, but the reality is the world meant that I was never going to put myself close enough to a potential edge, that the purchase of a nicer car could lead to future discomfort for me or my family.

    You really have no idea how out of touch you are. Your next point is, “Getting a gold foil wrap on a cybertruck is an investment! You don’t get the full value of that investment on resale… Do you expect me to just take that loss?”

    You are tone deaf. You doing see it at all, and that’s really the point.





  • “You see,” my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

    "Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

    "And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

    "But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

    "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

    "And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

    Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer




  • It’s basic BAD FAITH economics. Your point about “less money going in” is a self fulfilling prophecy by the GOP - They dismantle finding sources for the social safety net programs actively and then loudly complain that those programs are doomed.

    In the “America great again” years that the lead poisoned boomers are longing for, we had income tax for the highest earners around 90%. So Reagan, bushes and trump give out huge tax cuts to the wealthy, gut the IRS so that money isn’t coming in and then ignorant and/or deceptive little foot soldiers like yourself rush in to carry water for the lie and try to create fact through repetition. You are wrong, period, end of story. The only Epsom is of you ate being used and are unaware or if you are willingly perpetuating this bullshit in bad faith.

    Your bad position is SO played out in fact, that here is a clip that is a decade old explaining how you are wrong and trying to prop up an old, tired lie. https://youtu.be/k3dK-z9F4C0

    Shame on you, bud. You seem smart enough to know better.





  • Social security is never going to “run out” it’s continuously funded, that’s how it works. America lacks curiosity and an attention span beyond a couple seconds. Conservatives loudly accuse (while projecting), demand detailed explanation and then immediately become disinterested in the explanation they demanded - mostly because they can’t comprehend the basic concepts and their eyes glaze over. For the most part they are unserious, homicidal and suicidal and just looking for an excuse to have an outburst.

    Don’t let them leech your energy trying to explain or debate. They don’t know or care what you are talking about.