Victim of Communism
Trump ran on Stopping the Pedos and Ending the Wars. Not unlike Nixon, in that regard.
Very easy to get up on a pedestal and scream invectives at the Bad People on The Other Side. Any degenerate asshole can do it. You don’t even have to be on the other side. You can, for instance, be a stalking horse for your good friends the Clintons, who just overshoots his role and ends up in the Presidency rather than back on TV as the host of another four seasons of The Apprentice.
Better than the alternative
The eternal problem with “Better than the alternative” is that it inevitably cuts both ways.
Keir Starmer was better than the alternative of Rishi Sunak.
And now I guess Nigel Farrage is better than the alternative of whatever hack Labour MP (probably Streeting) replaces Starmer.
Trump was the “better than” alternative to Hillary and then Harris just like Biden was forced down folks’ throats as the “better than” of another Trump term. From world leaders to city dog catchers, you’re constantly getting served up two shitty options and told to pick the least-worst one. And if you pick wrong (we somehow always do), the fanatics on the losing end of the spectrum scream at you for being the reason the country is falling apart.
Amazon’s service model, for example, is to twiddle the knobs to just under the point where the majority ragequit
I mean, I get Amazon Prime via their shopping service whether I want it or not. And half of their “library” such that it exists is just links out to other paid premium services. Nevermind their Netflix-esque habit of cancelling or delaying popular shows while churning out lots of AI slop to fill in the gaps.
There’s no strong incentive to drop Prime Shipping (because it’s dirt cheap and I still do plenty of retail shopping on Amazon). But I find myself going to their TV / Movies selection less and less frequently. Occasionally just pirate the Amazon show I already have access to out of convenience.
Can’t say the same of Netflix, though. Cancelled that shit a few years ago. Barely anything left worth pirating from it anymore.
Let me know when they find a way to get ads into the torrented copies of their shows.
The problem with fascism is that it is very difficult to campaign against it before it arrives, because you just sound hysterical.
And it is even more difficult to campaign against it after it arrives, because… well… you know. The fascism.
But also, The Ad Council was really great at spending small fortunes on pithy ads. Really terrible at actually organizing community groups in defiance of any of these policies. Like, it was a cornerstone of the Bush Era brand of non-partisan liberalism. It operated under the theory “If we just tell people there’s a problem then they’ll figure out the solution”. And the leadership was so deep in bed with the federal government that messaging failed to do more than echo the views of the prevailing administration.
Incidentally, there’s a reason you need to throw back to a clip from 2002 to talk about censorship in libraries. You’re not going to see a ton of Ad Council work on government censorship OR libraries under the current government.
Kamala lost because her policies were fascism light
Okay, but that’s better than fascism, right? So stop criticizing fascism lite! It’s only hurting the opponents of fascism!
Well… okay, maybe the police and prosecutors that Kamala Harris organized during her time as California AG hurt the opponents of fascism a bit more. But that was before we had a dang Cheeto in the White House. So, let bygones be bygones and focus on the future.
I voted blue but completely get why people wouldn’t
I will be very angry at you anyway. If you upset even a single independent voter on the fence about voting for Kamala, you have committed Word Crime against the cause of the Stopping Trump.
lessor of two evils is still evil
That’s exactly what a Russian would say. I’ve outed you as a nefarious FSB superagent here to bring down American Democracy and turn us into a nightmare hellscape of Soviet Style Communism, which is what Russia is right now.
Yeah, it’s crazy to find out a CIA operative would just lie to folks like that.
Where’s the “Yes, but I’ll be really annoying and stressful” bubble?
“teenage/school years are the best years of your life”
I think it’s a point in your life when you are old enough to do things you’ve never done before but young enough to still have plenty of room to take risks, fuck up, and come out better for it.
Not the apex of your career or the peak of your romance life or anything. But the moment when anything is possible and you shouldn’t feel hedged in by obligations or fear of failure.
“What’s your allowance?”
“Over $20/week”
“Wow, that’s a lot of money”
Compare like for like. How much more expensive are the detached single family homes in those downtown areas?
The townhomes down the street from the Ensamble stop on the Houston Red Line are selling for less than the condos a few blocks away
And India.
Building 5x the number of fossil fuel plants as nuclear plants.
If you believe nuclear is preventing climate change, you need to square these figures
1/3 of humanity coming into existence
It’s not 1/3rd of humanity, it’s 1/3rd of Americans - a community of people who are exceptionally reactionary around contraception and abortion
Under Communism the legislature will be an API.
Please, for the love of god, I am begging you. Read Fanshen
Noooooooooo! STOP SAYING THIS! YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE THE REPUBLICANS WIN!!!
STOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP! THIS IS WHY KAMALA LOST!
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!
I have traced your IP Address and confirmed you are a Russian Bot! MODS! MODS! BAN THIS ACCOUNT!
The surprising climate fix that Democrats and Republicans both love
Landlords.
Nothing against single-family homes, but apartment buildings and condos are much more efficient for a number of reasons.
Communal structures have the benefit of efficiencies of scale but the difficulties of managing a shared social space. Consequently, they are attractive on paper but only really appealing when the financial benefits of dense urban living outweigh the perceived risks and costs.
Ideally, robust public transportation systems can get those apartment-dwellers anywhere they can’t walk to.
I got to watch the Red, Green, and Purple lines installed in downtown Houston, in anticipation of an Olympics that never arrived. One of the secondary consequences of these lines was a massive private investment in the old housing stock south of downtown. Within a decade, enormous high rise condos and dense urban living spaces were either refitted, expanded, or fully constructed from scratch all along the transit corridors.
But the rent in these units was significantly higher than what could be found on the perimeter - from my experience it was $500-$1500 more expensive than the cheaper units out on Westheimer and Beltway 8, with some downtown luxury units going for $2500 to $4500/mo more.
Meanwhile, on the condo side, you’re talking about 1200-2000 sqft units going for McMansion prices - $700k to $2.5M. Way outside the range of the average home buyer. Plus condo fees and taxes and higher utilities/groceries/etc. And good luck finding public education or childcare in the downtown districts.
If you were pulling a six-figure salary in a downtown office job, you could talk about living here. But I still know plenty of people commuting in all the way from Sugar Land or Katy or Spring, simply because a daily bus ticket or tollway pass was way cheaper than downtown rents. I also know more than a few junior professionals in their mid-20s who still live with their parents to save money.
So the ecological benefits are there. But the utility of these high rise units is heavily predicated on wages that match the sky high rents. The private sector demand for double-digit ROI makes all of these housing expansions of dubious benefit at scale. They might operate as a model for the future, but without public subsidies and rent caps, only the highest paid households are going to be able to participate.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has reportedly chosen a data analysis system from France
Okay, so they’re still doing mass surveillance on their citizenry. They’re just doing it with the Le Woke DeGuallist firm rather than the Based Trad Amerifascists
“No, that book was banned and asking for it means I have to add you to a Terrorist Watchlist”
Trump was the stalking horse of the Hilary campaign, via her Pied Piper Strategy.
He would not have even been on the ballot had she not sponsored his run.
Now we’re seeing the same dynamic in the LA mayor race, with the incumbent Karen Bass sending her donors to Spencer Pratt in order to keep a DSA rival off the final ballot.