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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Biden spent 4 years cleaning up Trump’s mess

    I mean, I’d argue one of the reasons Dems lost was that they didn’t clean up the mess. He focused primarily on relieving tensions in the private business sector while largely neglecting the public sector - leaving Dejoy to ransack the Post Office, failing to boost SS COLAs to match record inflation, focusing more energy on funding conflict in Ukraine than financing debt relief for student borrowers or underwater home owners, leaving a litany of crooks and cranks unprosecuted and unjailed so that they could go on to prop up the next fascist administration - which was great for the banking and tech sector but miserable for everyone else.

    That’s actually a trend for Republican presidents in general.

    Well, its been a common baton pass since the Nixon/Ford Administration. Republicans fuck up the economy on a national scale. Democrats bail out private business at the expense of the public sector, then privatize the parts of the public sector that are failing in order to justify the next generation of private bailouts.

    The housing sector reveals this in spades. From Nixon/Ford to Carter to Reagan/Bush 41 to Clinton to Bush 43 to Obama to Trump to Biden, we see a very obvious pattern of public housing becoming public lending becoming private lending becoming private bailouts and foreclosures. And the end result is a steady collapse in the share of homes owned by the people who live in them, while the debts these people owe to private banks (along with the interest revenue on those loans) inflates to turn the FIRE sector into the backbone of the national economy.

    Democrats have their role to play in this, but it largely boils down to bailing out failed businesses and “innovating” public-private partnerships, saving capitalism from itself. They’re medics who resuscitate a dying man, stuff him pockets full of cash, and then send him back out to have another bender.





  • That’s fine, because they’re situated inside one of our many media monopoly zones and only have access to the outside world through far-right syndicated radio and TV. They won’t understand what happened or why, but will have Woke Liberalism presented as the cause of all their problems as soon as they ask.

    And then, if any of them get too curious, a local Sheriff’s deputy will discover that this dissident wasn’t a real citizen anyway, so they can be quickly and quietly removed from view.



  • The problem with these systems is that the more they are bureaucratized and legalized, the more publishing houses and attorney’s offices will ultimately dictate the flow of lending and revenue. Ideally, copywrite is as straighforward as submitting a copy of your book to the Library of Congress and getting a big “Don’t plagiarize this” stamp on it, such that works can’t be lifted straight from one author by another. But because there’s all sorts of shades of gray - were Dan Brown and JK Rowling ripping off the core conceits of their works, or were religious murder thrillers and YA wizard high school books simply done to death by the time they went mainstream? - a lot of what constitutes plagarism really boils down to whether or not you can afford extensive litigation.

    And that’s before you get into the industrialization of ghostwriters that end up supporting “prolific” writers like Danielle Steele or Brian Sanderson or R.L. Stein. There’s no real legal protection for staff writers, editors, and the like. The closest we’ve got is the WGA, and that’s more exclusive to Hollywood.




  • “I’m an unlikable piece of shit who spent half his life padding a resume full of hollow accolades and corporate yes-man gigs,” Mr. Buttigieg continued. “My home state won’t touch me and I’m worried residents of Michigan are far too familiar with my reputation to give me a free pass into a do-nothing minority party’s safe seat. Better to stick with my role as campaign donation bundler and political hatchet man, until I can find another cushy federal appointment or perhaps a board I can sit on or some new way to fix bread prices in Canada.”

    The he let out a loud squeak and began dragging away a large piece of pizza.



  • It absolutely won’t. What we will get is a bunch of kids profiled and harassed by an administration that sees “Suspected School Shooter!!! ALERT!! ALERT!!” popping up based on vague suspicions and poorly conceived correlations.

    The argument I saw one fascist use on a Facebook thread some years back was “If you were handed a bowl of M&Ms and you were told one of the brown ones was poisoned, how many would you leave in your bowl?” That’s the logic behind these algorithmic surveillance programs. Just grab known data points and draw a line through them. And the data points they lean into - age, race, gender, zip code - are what the system can grab rather than what might conceivably inform you of a person’s psychological state.




  • Harris picked up a flagged campaign from Biden after he shit the bed in the first debate and made a big fanfare of diverging from the current administration. For a week or two, people got genuinely excited. They started talking about student loan forgiveness again. They started talking about Single Payer again. They started talking about changing the course on our sponsorship of genocide in Gaza and our brutal treatment of refugees on the southern border and our inability to hit climate goals. They started talking about reversing out the increasingly fascist SCOTUS and restoring civil rights to our police-state of a nation.

    Then Harris began to campaign in earnest. She leaned more and more on the Techbros for fundraising. She brought more AIPAC lobbyists in as bundlers. She weedled and hedged on climate change, as guys like Eric Schmitt outright announced AI was more important than cutting carbon emissions. She began rolling out arch-conservatives from the Bush Era as her spokespeople and major sponsors. Jeff Flake was the featured speaker at the national convention. Dick and Liz Cheney started showing up at Harris campaign events. John fucking Negroponte endorsed her. Harris went on the view and outright stated she’d be in line with Biden, with the singular exception of including more Republicans in her cabinet.

    What does anyone think this is doing to her enthusiasm among base voters? That critical block of Muslim refugees in the Midwest she needs to win in order to hold those states… how are they feeling right now? The college kids who had their campuses raided by police at the end of last semester, how excited are they feeling right now? Folks down in Florida who just got their state sliced in half by a hurricane, how excited are they to hear a candidate say we need more emissions-belching AI data centers?

    We know Trump’s ceiling from 2020. He pulled in 74M voters. He came within 40k votes across three swing states to beating Biden. And that was with a guy who was shoulder-to-shoulder with Bernie Sanders on election day.

    Now Harris is playing footsy with the fucking Cheneys, Republicans so out of their element that they lost in Wyoming, as state that family practically owns wholesale. Absolutely clueless pack of fucking losers. If they cock this up, they have nobody to blame but themselves.