The system is written and set up by guys like him.
It doesn't change itself. Voting won't make it change itself either.
We're either going to have to grind everything to halt or grind everything to dust. Those are the only two options left to us.
It was over 8 years ago that begged a foreign power for espionage help while running for pres. On live TV. He should have been locked up then.
We toppled Saddam because he wanted to ditch the dollar. I don't think this fuckstick or Elon Marshmallow man have the same level entourage.
All the Russian oligarchs what is like to have all your assets seized, and just me tell ya, Id suffocate from laughter before I ever gave one fuck about the obscenely rich.
I'm ready to Make America Great Again, by taxing any and all assets over 10million, annually, at 75%. The squeaky wheel gets it raised to 85% Back in the oft romanticized golden days the upper tax rate was 90%
Maybe I'm alone in this opinion but I don't think someone should be able to have one idea that sells and then never have to work again. Like, if we all worked 4 hrs a week then fine, but nowadays, with modern tax chattle slavery? Naw man. Edison, Tesla, those guys had to keep inventing. Mr Mypillow can go die under an overpass.
Fuck billionaires. We need a special forces team for the IRS, they can jump from helicopters with their calculator's ribbon.
Every single comment here is describing symptoms but not the cause.
Enshitification is the evolution to the final form, only possible after the company, thru merger/acquisition or stock manipulation (leveraged buy outs, acquiring controlling stake, shorting a company into insolvency, etc), has achieved a commanding monopoly.
Then it flexes it's monopoly powers, the buttons fly off its shirt and the monster shows it's true colors.
We have laws to prevent this. Lina Khan is the first FTC chair to start holding these companies to meaningful account in my lifetime (yea, Microsoft/netscape is exponentially smaller than todays issues). Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon all need to be broken up into a thousand different companies, same as we did with AT&T. Uber, Angieslist, homeaglow, all the contractors pretending they're just networking hubs (like some union hall) need to busted up and gigwork made to contend with employment law, which it can't, because it's all bad faith exploitation.
And for fucks sake we need to make the fine for white collar crime that extends state lines to necessitate the forfeiture of the entire C-suite's and board of directors assets, both domestically and internationally, upon threat of seal team 6. Empty their bank accounts and leave them with nothing, like they regularly do to employees. They're so fucking smart they can earn it all again, right? Right!? Corporations are the largest thief in the land, just in WAGE THEFT. Everything else they do that's slimy is all BONUS. The 2nd largest thief in all the land? the fucking Police force. The lunatics have taken over the asylum, democracy doesn't work in mental institutions. We don't need to defund the police, we need to fire all of them and start over with transparency. If casino employees can be video taped all day, so can cops. Fuck em.
What America truly needs is another Teddy Roosevelt. We need to revive the Progressive party with the Bull Moose as the symbol. Protect the environment, protect the family by protecting the workers, end legal loopholes and trustbust the 1% back down into the 10%.
And if we don't? The path ahead is obvious, I for one, don't want to live in Blade Runner, but that's where we're going until we stop fucking around and right ship.
Klanned Karenhood!
Wait til they got told Mexico is in America, they're gonna lose their shit.
Like the USA owns the continent, pffh.
The abbreviation for the US, due to what I think are dumb syntax rules in Spanish, is E.E.U.U.
For reals. I know, right?
But wait there's more! Mexicos official name is the United States of Mexico, or Estados Unidos de México in Spanglish.
And also in Spanish, I think
All across Europe McDs workers make 20-25/hr and their food costs LESS than ours.
Google the Big Mac index and see for yourself.
That is as perfect a description of Mom's for Liberty as could be imagined.
Peak
5 years hard time served before the board flirts with parole. 5 hard years before the governor can even entertain a pardon.
Rats in a sinking ship.
That couldve criticized them, but chose not to. But they knew and in Fascie Kansie that's apparently enough.
The judge should be disbarred and the police chief fired, stripped of any benefits and banned from working any job at any level of government.
It's creator owned. If they're on nebula, they have a stake in it, writ large
In my mind, if a company wants to set a generalized education requirement, above high school, that company should be required to pay off its employees student loans. Otherwise it's using the education system as a subsidized training program.
Note I said generalized. Engineers, doctors, etc who desire to ever be employed can't stop at a bachelor's anyways. Even still, their employees should have to pick up their training tab.
Business has gotten a free pass for 40 years and look at the society they've created with it. Maybe civilization needs more than a love of money to sustain it. Crazy huh.
They are thinking the got the customer by the balls because they're a state sanctioned monopoly. They're so big the CEO of Samsung has essentially the same power as the SK president.
Every major corp out of SK is a state sanctioned monopoly. The government tells Samsung "make washing machines now" and Samsung does.
I know it's been widely overlooked to allow South Korea to economically develop after the armistice, cold war and all, but at some point the rest of the free trading world is going to have to hit them with tariffs to protect native, or critical industries.
Frankly I'm really tired of looking the other way for any reason. Every other day it's a headline about how some government or multinational led the public on a 20 year gaslighting campaign. If I were to say, "hey did you hear that story about XXXY(any well known mega corp)?" Do you think I'd have a positive wholesome story to share? No. Because there never is. The structure of a corporation is set up to protect financiers from liability from the crimes theyre guaranteed to commit thru abusive, shortsighted, toxic business. It's literally the fucking point. But we don't have to accept that, and we don't have to choke back and somehow keep down our sense of justice, or be passively complicit, which is to nueter your morality, your sense of self
Our individual actions do matter in this case. Like don't buy shit off Temu, theyre using slave labor. Don't endorse that. Don't buy anything out of Dubai or Saudi Arabia, they, also, keep slaves. Don't support slavery. Including wage slavery. Don't do business with Israel until an non Zionist coalition is back in charge. Don't buy anything Russian. Genocide is not an acceptable modern practice. It CAN'T be. Boycott Mississippi and Louisiana as well, since they like to let their prisoners die of treatable conditions and bury them in unmarked graves. That is ALSO a genocide. Don't fucking fund crimes against humanity. This is kindergarten levels of sophistication.
And hopefully enough people will actually live their morals and gain seats of power, because we have to. Otherwise waves hands THIS.
State senators make $60k/yr.
Over 50 SPD cops last year made over $250,000
We aren't getting what we're paying for.
Dissolve and restart the force using a different psych profile and ban the one currently used.
I witnessed 5 police officers all hit a man on the ground with their tasers. Broad daylight.
Died on the scene of a heart attack. Apparently natural causes. The polices internal investigations found the police did no wrong, imagine that.
Unless you make enough money that you can regularly "donate" to the force, I suggest that you assume they are not there to help you and you protect yourself accordingly
He was too good for this world, and we are all lesser for his absence.
As much freedom as you can afford.
Law applied unequally means those in privilege will flaunt it and those still wanting, correctly, have no respect for it.
Fuck the law. Fuck the judges. Fuck the lawyers. Fuck the police. Might equals right in America. The winners will, and currently are, rewriting the histories to absolve them and their ancestors any wrongdoing.
Stop acting like there's some kind of decorum to uphold. If only one side is upholding it, news flash, it doesn't exist. You're just allowing yourself to be outmaneuvered. While any of y'all are up there on the high road, look down and witness the cruelty you arent protecting against. Keep clutching them pearls, cuz every minute more of us are being murdered by those sworn to protect and serve, or medicines that demand the culmination of your entire life's work. The law ≠ morality. This immoral, institutionalized, embodiment of corruption we're in can be summed up with this fact. Footage of whatever crime you are accused of, from police cams, citizens dash cams, private business security cams, the state will leverage it's power to use against you - but that power will actively be used against you if it exonerates you
So what I'm saying, is if your toes are dipped into the criminal courts, there is absolutely zero incentive to not go full cartel. Just wear a suit, sponsor a little league team, donate to both parties, the mayor and the police union and remember to let your obstacles well enough for an open casket, have some class after all, and you'll never see the inside of a cell.
Under a government that imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison - Thoreau
Naw, split up the state into 4 states, with Houston, Austin, Dallas and San Antonio as capitals. Cut state lines and populations up to ensure that as the main city votes so goes the state.
That'd be 8 democratic senators.
Add DC, PR, American Virgin Islands American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands and that's potentially another 12.
Regardless of politics the territories, and DC, should have statehood and equal rights and representation as the rest of us or they should have independence. It's part of our national identity. No more colonialism or secondclass sub citizens.
This would be setting fire to the first amendment.
Besides freedom of speech, of and from religion, the 1st recognizes our right to get redress from the government for grievance.
The government CAN NOT do whatever they want to us. That rule has been there the whole fucking time.
2008 financial crisis ripped the last vaneer off.
The rich won't be allowed to lose. The whole system is bullshit. You can do everything right, get sick cuz fuknature,, have to sell everything off for medicine and still die, younger than you should, in debt and penniless. It's not even necessary, the Cruelty is the point. That's capitalism. It's about control, and capitalists need to be looked at like they have a mental illness. Most our jobs are bullshit and don't matter. The national debt doesn't matter. Money isn't real, it's a vehicle for resource allocation, not a store of value, but try getting someone not ready to hear that to even think about our social systems as something mutable and not organic or ordained. Nope. Society was designed, by people, and it's working exactly as it's intended, which is, fucking great for them and fuck everyone else.
At the end of the day, your physical body has had just one goal. Survive. Everything I have to do to achieve that end is justified by existence itself. Building a system that puts itself in the way of people simply surviving is building a system to fail. When it comes to politics, and by that I mean, do-whatever-you-want-as-long-as-it-doesn't-hurt-someone-else and then policies, and for policy I just ask "is this the best we can do?"
I don't think I see the best we can do anywhere.
While I question the intelligence of the MAGA crowd as well, I feel like I have to constantly remind people that the other half of the people who would vote for him are really voting against neoliberalism, even tho they can't describe it as such.
They'll say globalism, they might even take a swipe at wall street or corporations. NAFTA, "Elites" etc etc.
They're struggling just like everyone else due to late stage capitalism and they don't care how it ends, just that it does.
Mind you theyre also statistically white and think they'll be in the in group when our money becomes less valuable than toilet paper and weather it all fine, which is delusional.
There's the haves and the have nots. Even security for the rich, after the walls fell, will still be servants, not equals.
I say all this so those inclined can see there is actually a good amount of material we all agree on, and if you can approach it without instigating their pearl clutch reflex, some can even be brought into the light.
You don't drown inside yourself from yourself from covid.
Your lungs rupture and are unable to uptake oxygen. You breathe like always, it just doesn't matter, you can barely get any O².
So you breathe faster. It becomes all you can do. You can't even talk it's so laborious, you just sit there, panting. Your chest on fire.
And then the unthinkable happens. Something youve likely never experienced. The muscles involved in breathing are too tapped out to go on. You tell yourself to breathe, but your body starts not responding. And your breathing slows, your O² levels fall further. You take one last gasp with all your will to live, then pass out and die.
It's lonely; utterly tragic. A terrifying, miserable way to die.
Any good cop left on the force knows all about this shit, calling into question how 'good' they are.
The police say the same thing about everyone who isn't them. "Fuck 'em". And that's exactly how I feel whenever I hear anything bad happening to them.
They're all guilty. Shutter the doors, fire them all and hire from a different psych profile, barring the current one, forevermore.
I am in the most dangerous for my life when I am in the presence of a cop, plain and simple, no context needed. These are stats. Facts not feelings. Since 2000 the police have stolen more from the public thru civil asset forfeiture than all other crime combined.
All cops are bad. All. Complicity is condoning. Criminals have invaded and took over the civic institution. Acknowledgement of this isn't a call for social anarchy. Acknowledgement of this is recognizing that anarchy is already here. The law applied unequally deserves no respect. Those on the top know they'll never see a cell. Those on the bottom know they will no matter their innocence, and that's a best case scenario. No respect is warrented. The lack of respect is entirely earned.
Ban them from public positions and office. Seize their pensions to pay a pittance towards restitution. They broke the public trust, I am not responsible for their public disdain. No one ever wrote a song called 'Fuck the firefighters'. Fuck 'em.
Exactly, he still has to put the money up/loses access to it until the appeals are over. Nobody's giving this man a bond, lol
Verbals binding. Hope there's audio of that conversation.
And any gumption to hold them to their word. Both of them.
Yo OP. We're carbon based, which you accept. Diamond is stronger than almost all metal, and it's pure carbon. Why wouldn't we have metal in our veins? We atomically won that round before inflation was even over.
I'm just playin, carbon under high enough pressure is metal too.
Twice over, my favorite fact is that humanity has only existed during the time frames that the moon and the sun have been the same size in our sky, this allowing total eclipse - which is so obviously ridiculously rare I don't see the point in quantifying with maths.
I think it's bizarre to think we have free will. Everywhere around us, in all our tech, tools, toys we see the realities of determinism. Cause and effect. To think that our minds are somehow not governed by this in a universe that unequivocally is is beyond Babel levels of arrogance.
Beyond that, the idea that's gaining ground about shared consciousness I find really intriguing. Rather fascinating stuff.
Consciousness is the biggest mystery of the all, after all.
I agree with what yr saying but it all makes me think you've never tried, whether on purpose or not, fentanyl.
Fent...makes you absolutely retarded when yr on it, but when you are, you are transported to the warm busom of God til you snap out of it. You don't care about anything, hunger, cold, any trauma, any worries, any stressors. It all melts away for that short amount of time.
Besides the physical addiction sending a need as strong as thirst in the desert, that reprieve from pain is addicting all it's own. A good majority of people actively using and seeking out fent assume they'll die from it, and they're fine with that.
I've never been on the ban drugs train, I think the subjective exploration of consciousness and meta-reality are incredibly important for people, be that in personal mental health and growth, artistically and spiritually. At the same time, I think letting Shamans control the flow isn't a terrible idea, but if implemented should also come with an end date after society comes to terms with itself. I think terminal patients should be given as much DMT as they want for as long as they want it, it's like making practice runs at the other side. I think ibogaine should be widely available for resetting addictions back to null, but that should prob be a guided trip, same thing with ayehuasca.
But fent shouldn't be allowed outside a medical setting. The opioid receptor is devil in a red dress; dance with the devil, devil don't change, devil changes you.
In a kinder society we would prescribe meds that turn off pain receptors, like the ones developed from jellyfish and other neurotoxins, but that would prob be stipulated with forced, active restraint bed rest. We don't use those now because pain let's us know when we push too far, otherwise we'd just keep reinjuring ourselves. But fent gives that absence of pain too, and coupled with the i-cant-stress-how-extreme-cravings people will look at the work necessary to holistically end their pains and just say, nah man. At the cost of everything. Parents abandoning children. Cuz once their high, they don't care. So they just plan to stay forever high.
I'm all for banning fent.
It's the embodiment of my second favorite malaphor "build a man a fire and he's warm for a night, but set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life"
"even with selling his most valuable property our nations nuclear secrets to the Saudi's".
I fixed that for you
The same fucks as always. Peter Theil, the Kochs, the Davos', pick your billionaire. They didn't become billionaires by being awesome people and y'know, bringing everyone up with them. More like, when their tide was rising, they paid goons to short leash the marina to the docks (which would sink them if the tide rose high enough).
Who's the squeaky wheel, who pays them and who stands to benefit.
Its always the rich behind fascists, because 1. They don't want the system they're so capable of gaming to change (unless it cements their position) and B. They are assuming they'll be above reproach if the fascists win.
Make no mistake, every billionaire alive would sell us all, and our children, out rather than become a $900 millionaire.
Buddy, that's every job where someone earns a paycheck.
If someone pays you a paycheck, you are labor. If you depend on that paycheck, they are capital, you are the proletariat.
We've been in the midst of a capital strike for 4 decades now, rebranded as neoliberalism, where capital only reinvests capital if it absolutely must, and then just the minimum. Every personal passion, every altruistic drive, or careers that give a sense of meaning will that same meaning held hostage and weaponized to silent dissent.
Complacency is complicity. The rallying cries have been handed down thru all of history
As long as one free man is jailed .... First they came for ....
Society, writ large, is a partnership. Highly specialized fields of study only exist because the cost to bring them in existence can be spread out amongst the bottom of the pyramid. If you're worked hard, learned hard and lucky enough you might be able to be at the top of it.
But you're just a part of the machine, not the driver or designer of it. The proper attitude at heights is gratitude and humility, being honored to have the chance to follow your passions, because how many below you, for whatever reason, had theirs compromised, stolen or confiscated. The brain outside the body isn't even worth its caloric density.
I'm proud you're fighting back and I'll stand in a protest line with you - even if that means state violence, and it often does. The police are mercenaries for the wealthy, whom you're at odds with, that means the police are not your allies here (some random cool sheriff notwithstanding).
We are all people here. We all have value independent of what capitalism rewards. No one is inherently better than anyone else. We are all just trying to live and be decent people. Don't forget that.
They lose that exchange of wits.
Bidens just got to show open hands and say, we gave you the concessions you asked for, i said id close the border that day, i was ready to close the border and you said no, choosing politicking over security.
And then spit a fat wad of chew spit in Ted Cruz's face.
He'd win reelection right there.
I keep seeing report after report that Gen Z keeps falling for internet scams at an alarmingly high rate
...which, I mean, idk, maaaybe?
Media literacy and scam discernment, I feel like we as millennials grew up alongside the rise of disinformation and the greater Enshitification of the internet, like this is our wheelhouse.
I remember icq, yahoo chat rooms, Napster and limewire, playing MUDS and ADOM, then digg, myspace. I remember when the Internet was fun, now, it's just advertisers. I quit Facebook 7 years ago. I quit reddit with the API dick punch. I've been advertised to so much in my life that if I see a movie trailer it makes me not want to see it.
The internet can be great. Getting knowledge off it is amazing. I personal feel like the library of Congress should be made available online for free and all this knowledge thats hiding behind pay gates needs to be visited by the freedom fairy. I hope I can help facilitate this in my lifetime.
With media, I can only speak for myself, but I quit watching news in 2008. Ill read my news and not have some talking head attempt to emotionally manipulate me while they leave out key facts that don't fit their narrative, thanks. Televised news has been more detrimental to us as a whole, imo.
My bullshit meter is simple. If whom or whatever is saying something that makes it an us vs them issue, dividing the people up, then they're wrong. Almost universally. If your answer is only found down around the fallen, you aren't bringing an answer, yr bringing an excuse to violence.
Real leadership, real progress, lifts up those it encounters. The rising tide is supposed to lift all ships. Cept in this dystopic reality, motherfuckers chained everyone's ships to the dock and the rising tide just overcame and sank them. Rich get richer, poor get poorer, until the poor get even.
I'm dismayed we have to keep repeating this pattern. America had the same problems 100 years ago. We've had an entire century to do something about it, but fucking NOPE. An entire century wasted in my opinion. Better tech is cool, but if it doesn't improve the lives of us all, than it fails the reasoning for tools existing in the first place, which is to relieve society if the many necessary hours of labor.
That's what I do being off-grid. I have my battery bank then a series of Supercaps to essentially act as an on/off ramp//drawbridge and temper quick demands. Kinda like an inverse soft starter so this is suuuuper interesting to me.
Insurance
The one purpose built industry that not only improves exponentially with but can only function by being at scale. That.is.it's.whole.reason.to.exist.
Every argument against M4A is a known lie consciously being said to our faces. It's parasites squirming in where they don't belong, to steal whatever value they can connive, instead of producing anything of value and actually contributing to society
Just like landlords, it's inherited generational bloatware. Like herpes, I think...um, kinda?? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Landlords = herpes.
I'm rolling with it. I don't need any clarification on that.
You have the left and right confused there.
The right has abandoned any position of moral authority. Morality, to be absolutely clear, are the historically, and culturally, accepted rules for social behavior.
You want to be part of the group? You gots to be moral.
The right is only concerned with power, and that's it. Theyve given up on publishing positions on current issues. They have no solutions. They don't want to innovate, they want to change everything to a subscription service and extract as much wealth out as possible, all while legislating away any threatening start ups. They punch down, my guy. They punch down.
They believe in restricting freedom, restricting our rights to vote, our women's bodily autonomy, policies that put our collective social costs onto the shoulders of the lower and middle classes. They don't have a single policy that has broad public support, and they know it. Instead of adapting and using their 5th wing of government to bring their "base" up to speed with the times, theyve chosen subversion and court hostile foreign actors to attack their opposition. That's also known as sedition, btw.
They're out of touch corporate cocksuckers. Ted Cruz, pick any single one of them - not one has a single principle, spends all day fallatiating anyone with money. Metaphorically or not, a whores a whore, end of story.
Now I got no beef with whores, make yr money y'all. But I take umbrage with a whore trying to pass off as a slut. You ain't no non-profit. Motherfuckers need to come to Jesus, act right and be honest about shit. Jesus got down with the whores. Throwing his arm around Mary like, "yo, wanna break some bread, baby?" (Cuz she looked skinny, simmerdown folks).
Even a whore can be moral. If that is too mindbending for you to wrap your head around, or if you scoffed reading that, your worldview is myopic, and frankly, I would consider you sus and half expecting you to filter information to fit your world view, turn a blind eye to conflicting info, and by what's become a trope nowadays, more likely to double down than reevaluate the reality of your imaginary friend (or worldview). Not changing your mind based on new information - which is rooted in rationality/cause and effect, doesn't make you look principled, smart or confident. It makes you look like a scared toddler throwing a tantrum. It's immoral, it's shameful. And the rights fucking fantasy of realizing the Handmaid's Tale is, objectively, relinquishing our role as a global leader and a national security threat.
You cut funding to all education -> people get dumber -> we fall behind in tech -> your grandkids are gonna be learning Mandarin.
That's a guarantee. It takes 2° of foresight to work that out.
Now, if by left you mean the Democratic party, so, NOT the left at all. Dems are center-right. And Dems have the same problem with messaging that Republicans do. Neoliberalism (which both Dems and Reps are) don't have solutions to our problems. Neoliberalism doesn't invest in itself. It extracts money from the system and thinks the free market will fix our roads, keep our police from being infiltrated by the klan, and add all the trains we're gonna need to drop our carbon footprint. None of which neoliberalism has an answer for. Capitalism will not change anything. It does not innovate. It exploits and extracts.
It tells us we can have a red delicious apple or an off-season navel orange and calls that freedom. Then it calls your kid a commie for eating a mandarin and calls you a queer for eating an applepear.
That might be the best analogy I've ever given on neoliberalism.
All those companies refuse to make the "medicines" used in it, actually. In this rare instance, the private sector pushed back and effectively ended lethal injection as an option.
Hence AL looking elsewhere.
I'm with you guys tho, N asphyxiation is peaceful...but as we all know, the cruelty is inherent and fundamental to capitalism. Hence the propaganda campaigns.
I love it.
If there's no respect for the law at the top, why the fuck should any of us have any respect for it?
If you wanna be rich you gotta do what the rich do right? Bring on some fucking anarchy, America's been getting primed since Newt Gingrich for a purge, dumb motherfucking out of touch 1% think they're gonna survive it. How'd that work for em in the movies?
It's not just celebrities, it's politicians, it's inherited wealth.
It's everyone who meets up at Davos, the corporate side, the business side, the governmental side.
Private jets, yachts, need to be banned outright. We have zoom. This ain't the 1950s anymore.
In E Jean Carrolls case against Trump, after the judge awarded her $5mil, Trump walked out of the courtroom and lied to the camera, again, even having just lost on it.
The attorney filed a motion against Trump the next day asking for double damages and was promptly awarded it. $10mil total.
So yea, the judge has some discretion.
I'm with you. If the RNC blows it's load on the main attraction then there's nothing left to help anyone down ticket.
The correct answer is
Fuck Pavlov
Motherfucker is like the Hitler of dogs. It's a shame his name is remembered for the conditioning and not the mutilation. Dude was a monster.