Speech and debate clause.

Someone should read that on the floor

Republicans love a good scam

Next up is the dismantling of the ACA. They will roll out these amazingly cheap alternatives. Health insurance for $10 a month!

So the poor and the stupid will sign up. They’ll go to the bar and saunter up to a “libtard” and tell them that trump fixed everything.

Then when they get sick and try to use MAGA super plan plus premium they won’t be able to find a doctor. The $10/month plan only covers an annual trip to a CVS minute clinic. They’ll go on Facebook and write up how the goddamn liberals tricked him. Other faithful republicans will pray for them and tell them that it must be a glitch because trump made things better.

The con will win because it’ll only hurt those without power.

The Dems also keep running as Republican Light. But if you are interested in Republican Light you’ll probably just vote Republican.

I think Jon Stewart had a good assessment of this the other night and the fact that the messaging coming out of the DNC is “we lost for running too far left” means they will try again next time too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKBJoj4XyFc

That was also Biden’s platform. It worked then because we were still in the grips of covid

I do sometimes wonder if it’s a skill issue, but that feels like a really dangerously self serving position to take, that people that disagree with me are just too dumb.

I like to think that I’m a relatively smart person, I have a very technical job and there’s very few situations where I don’t understand what’s going on (although there’s definitely plenty). Sometime though I’ll be out and about in my life and meet people that just don’t seem to have any idea how extremely basic, to me at least, things work. How does compounding interest work, how does insurance work, why should I put money into a retirement account. Not fresh adults either, people in their 30s / 40s / 50s who just seem content not understanding relatively basic things.

The world preys on these people, if someone doesn’t understand compound interest then you can really bamboozle them. If you don’t see the value of having insurance because you work out and are “healthy” and then suddenly get cancer or some other disease that doesn’t give a shit about how much you can bench, you are fucked.

There is a part of me that thinks that for a lot of people the world is a confusing and unknowable mystery. I mean, it’s not really, but the amount of effort to figure those things out is just too high for them to give a shit. And I think about how weird it would be to go through life like that. At the mercy of forces you don’t understand, and then some guy comes up and says “everything’s fucked up but I can make it great” and because you already don’t know how shit works you think “awesome, because I’m drowning in medical debt because I didn’t think I needed insurance and got screwed over”

I think about this person I met once, I was building planning and projection software and their job was to perform projection calculations for inventory ordering. I watched, in horror, as they tabbed away from excel to manually add up some figures. This is excel, what are you doing?! I showed them the sum function thinking that they would be happy. Then they looked at me and said “that’s too complicated, I’ll just do it myself”

Wild, that was too complicated. It taught me an important lesson though about how everyone’s bar for complicated is different. I think for a lot of people “how does insurance work” is too complicated. “What’s a tariff and how does it work” is too complicated. So it just comes down to “do I trust the person talking”

Yea I remember this same thing. He won and they were even angrier.

Because it’s not like trump being in the White House is suddenly going to make women not be immediately repelled when they show up, mansplain Joe Rogan, and call her a femoid.

They fell for it again. This time he’s really really gonna make it great. Him and jd Vance have some really novel ideas about lowering the age women can get married and making it impossible to get divorced, so finally they can have a child bride or some shit.

It’s super gross and I hope they end up jerking it to trump fanfic every night crying themselves to sleep.

I have to imagine that media understands this and doesn’t care.

A responsible media, one that cares about the outcomes, would zero in on the salient dangerous parts of trumps agenda. If we had a media ecosystem that actually cared about informing people, they would have actually explained what Project 2025 is, they could have even read parts of it stopping to let experts weigh in.

We don’t have that. We have a capitalist media which like all actors in capitalism chase profits. The media companies know that trump is going to do some weird shit everyday and that by reporting on that weird shit they can get the eyeballs on the cialis commercials, because that’s their real goal. Selling ad inventory and making that ad inventory as profitable as possible, if news or information happens as a side effect, fine, but it’s not the goal.

During trumps first term I used to watch msnbc most evenings, it was the same 4 stories first told by the news, then by Rachel Maddow, then by Lawrence O’Donnell, then by whatever was on after Lawrence O’Donnell. Looking back it was the least information dense thing you could imagine. 4 facts repeated ad nauseam over 4 hours. Now they all had different guests on but the guests job was to do a few things. One, reassure you that this is important and you should pay attention. Two, tell you how outrageous it is so that you’ll pay attention. Three, prognosticate wildly about the ramifications so that you’ll stay tuned for more information.

The populace largely follows this drum beat, but the populace is also to blame. You see it outside the realm of politics too, the average person likes novelty and scandal and gossip. You can see this in things like twitter trends. Something happens, there is a viral video, and suddenly for millions of people it’s the most important thing in the world. It’s new, it’s outrageous, it’s exciting to talk about and be listened to. In some ways corporate media, whose goal is to generate profits, just realized “this is what people want” they want us to cover the story of the day or week and give them that salacious novelty.

Trump just happens to be extremely good at generating the kind of events that are perfect for this formula. He’s a man that will do or say anything to make his base cheer, and often those things are batshit crazy and he doesn’t care that they are batshit crazy because people are clapping.

The story there is that there is a man with a lot of power with no externally observable moral center that is willing to do or say anything to increase his power. But that’s a complicated story, that would take a lot of time and effort and dot connecting, what if someone gets confused or bored and turns away. Then the ad inventory won’t be as valuable because there’s fewer eyeballs. Better to go with whatever weird thing he did or said today, simple, understandable, and it will cause the emotional reactions we know keep people tuning in making our ad inventory highly profitable.

If Biden were more interesting they would do it to him, they try from time to time, oh look he bit a baby dressed as a chicken on Halloween. He just isn’t out in public doing 3 hour rallies daily that the news can sift through for best hits.

Finally there is the staying power. Why does trump end up in this cycle more than others. The way the cycle is supposed to play out is

1. Powerful person does weird / bad thing
2. People are outraged
3. Person is shamed or loses support and then the news can report on the fallout.

Step 3 never happens for trump. His supporters do not care about the thing that’s outraging people today. They will never stop supporting him and he will never feel shame, he feels the opposite, he’s proud of the way he can manipulate this machine.

So the news doesn’t get a step three, but this is the formula, so back to step 1. So for trump you do get this unique media cycle of weird / bad thing -> outrage -> nothing. And that nothing sits in the air like an unresolved chord at the end of a music piece, it’s discordant and unsettling and there is no resolution coming. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that might make people stop watching the news. Better spin up the next thing so people will forget about last weeks outrage and start fresh.

In this we agree.

The democrats are just the blue colored boot of the oligarchs.

Have company that completely depends on people using their brains to solve problems.

Give these people free stimulants for years so you can extract extra value out of their brains.

Stop giving them stimulants.

Brain workers are now cranky and stimulant deprived. Surely this will make them more effective…

Give brain workers stimulants again, because fucking obviously.

Naive is the Democratic party’s current position of favoring those donors over voters.

I understand that they’ve done a cynical calculus and decided to leave those voters on the sidelines. It is a failing strategy that successfully got them billions of dollars and lost the election.

It is not that I do not understand the deeper reason, it is that I reject it as a failure.

The thing that has driven me crazy for so long is this is the situation in America.

There are 70M Americans that will vote Republican and nothing will ever change their minds

There are 70M Americans that will vote Democrat and nothing will ever change their minds

There are a couple million independent undecided voters that everyone goes after

Then there are 100M+ people that sit out the election and no one seems to try to understand what would make them vote. It’s so crazy that we have just decided that there are red states and blue states and that’s how it is. A party that could retain some of either party while activating half the people that sit out would be a force to reckon with.

As the Democratic Party has tried to find some way to win again they have gone after which group? The handful of independents and the 70M republicans that aren’t going to vote for them ever. And the people sitting it out probably aren’t looking for them to shift right, if so they would be republicans.

Honestly I’m not sure American businesses are very smart.

I imagine corpos do want trump, but it seems as short sighted as going after quarterly profits ahead of all else.

Ok, so you own a corporation and want those pesky “water break” regulations that are really cutting into your profits to go away. So you back trump. He tweets out “WORKERS DRINKING WATER ON THE CLOCK, SAD AND BIGLY BAD” and they decide that’s an official act and you can squeeze an extra 15 minutes out of your workers.

Meanwhile, he puts a 20% tariff on all your inputs.

I don’t support, but could at least understand, companies wanting this guy out of some rank greed. But he’s articulated positions that would be awful for most businesses. Every serious economist has looked at his tariff plan and gone “oh yea, that would destroy the economy”

The man personally probably doesn’t give a shit. He wants power and admiration and if someone like Stephen Miller says “hey this plan I have for changing how divorce and abortion work is good for your campaign / presidency” then he will go along with it.

The threat of a man like trump is not that he personally wants to do a bunch of bad things (although he does seem to think a lot of awful ideas with clear history and mechanism of not working, like tariffs, are smart and good). It’s that he doesn’t care about the people around him that want to do awful things.

I went through a round of layoffs at my last company. They laid off around 15% and then went hiring, people who just had their teams cut in half and their workload doubled and had to say goodbye to colleagues with years of experience were then told to do 3-4 interviews a week to hire new talent.

It was all just a yank of the choke chain. Management wanted labor to know that they could replace you. Our most senior people burned out and I left after staying longer than I really should have to try to help out my teammates.

Layoffs like this are about obedience and control and showing the investors that you are willing to break people to return them a healthy profit.

Bernie supporters also ended up being one of the most loyal voting blocks for Clinton.

A higher percentage of his voters backed Clinton than her voters backed Obama in 2008

From https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/did-bernie-sanders-cost-hillary-clinton-the-presidency/

As a Bernie bro that voted for Clinton in 2016, there is this very small number of very voca Bernie supporters that screech the loudest and give everyone else a bad name.

Yes, I think that’s part of it, I shouldn’t be able to read every letter in your signature. I don’t trust that :D

There’s a reason there’s a print line under the signature line, your signature should be some vague squiggle.

I always hated how I was taught to write the capital letters in my name and then I was sitting in civics class and looking at the Declaration of Independence and stole big parts of my current signature from our founding fathers.

They knew how to write their names with style.

Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.

Look at this madness https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

Read the sticker, he doesn’t own a franchise he owns the “DG Empire” what a dork

Ok it shouldn’t be a big deal, but I’ve found that you can tell a lot by a signature.

This guys signature looks like a 7th graders.

Edit: wow I just noticed the “DG Empire” on the sticker. Emperor Axe Body Spray over here

Why is that important? I mean it’s not really, I’ll fully admit I’m being petty. But I’ve found that people that write like they’ve just learned cursive do so because they seldom write things. Now this observation is likely less true today than it was in the Jurassic period when I grew up and had to write out schoolwork, but given that this guy owns a McDonald’s franchise I’m gonna guess he had to handwrite schoolwork too.

There is just something visceral about this signature, it’s a sloppy and bad version of textbook cursive. One of the things that happens when people write a lot is that they develop their own handwriting style.

Anyways, the sentiment in this letter and the stupid stunt are enough to hate, but this signature is just awful 1 / 10 please try harder.