Prelude to the Apocalypse

[BryanM]

Ah, this reminds me I came across an anarchist reddit the other day where they disown Karl Marx completely, calling him a racist doo-doo head and hierarchy apologist. People's Front of Judea kind of stuff.

I prefer the reddit where they try to get a neural net to generate anime girls. Amazing how quickly Stable Diffusion's overthrown the lobotomized DAL-E. It's the grill and chill era of the apocalypse, guys. Going to suck when the deniers have to cope with the troughs running dry, they're going to be so hysterical and unchill man : (

In any case this doesn't matter one way or another. Leftists pretending that primarying incumbent Dems in an ultra-saturated Dem district is going to make the difference seems like an excuse not to face up to the hard lifting that has to be done in places like, say, West Virginia. But that's the center of the universe for the grifting-news-industrial complex.

Trying to take control of the democrats while also having Swearengin and Ojeda get crushed are not mutually exclusive. We can fail at both things, whether you want us to or not.

It's the final chapters of history, after all.

[Ed Oscuro]

In state and local races, as a matter of course, that's true. My comment is more about NY and CA Dems being wildly overrepresented in national media.

As far as WV goes, they get points for trying. I don't fault Swearingin for taking swings at both seats. Ojeda gets my support for just trying, but it's noteworthy that he voted for Trump, which is the kind of political triangulation that makes Berners (and me) get super mad at Manchin, but it probably is necessary to get over the top in WV. There's probably some issues that we should talk about which cable news and the podcasters don't know much about. Hell, I live next door to 'em and I don't get WV's thing some of the time.

[BryanM]

That's true of all media. California, Florida, Texas and New York are the only places that exist. (I've mentioned before that this kind of city-elitism probably bled into parts of our strategy of conquest of Afghanistan; the actual amount of manpower and sacrifice that would have been required to do it for real was a lot more unappealing than just tossing a couple thou people around the cities.)

West Virginia isn't too hard to understand, they don't want change. They want to go into a coal mine, hit a wall with a stick for a few hours, and get paid. Anyone who wanted to do anything else with their lives had to leave the place; being abandoned by their friends and children while they stayed certainly creates a feeling of bitterness. Worse is changes in the world (fracking being cheaper energy is a big one) means their way of getting a share of the loot has been going away - much like factory work leaving Detroit and Camden. They want their security blanket and someone to tell them everything will always stay the same.

Literally the only alternative they have is to add more people to the dole, Yang UBI style. Something so entirely alien to what our breeding and brainwashing allows us to think. Completely antithetical to the idea that you have to prove yourself worthy of life by working as hard as you can and making Mr.Burns a lot of money.

As for turning states from the red capitalist party to the blue one... back when I was more of a lib (I was such a lesser evil scrub!) I used to be really into the whole Battleground Texas thing, which was going to speed up turning Texas into a swing state, which was going to happen naturally by 2020 through demographic changes. I don't think they helped much, but Texas is certainly as much of a swing state as Florida is now. ... ... (You can interpret that statement as Florida becoming staunch republican now, both interpretations are as likely to be as valid from what we know from here.)

West Virginia is going to stay fucked until an FDR manages initiatives that shoves money down their throats. They're too deep into our faith, we're all on the boat going over the edge together, that's our ninja way.

[Ed Oscuro]

Well, Manchin seems - surprise - to be doing a bit of the ole' FDR on the down-low. I think one of the major differences between Lefties and Normie Dems is just how much emphasis people put on dealing with the hand we're given, versus wanting to change the rules. There's a time and a place for both.

Incidentally, the "people want to hit things with a stick" idea is...probably not true? Some random right-wing podcaster put out a video the other day of some roughnecks slinging around a pipe in the mud, apparently without PPE, as a way to troll women's lib. But I think most oil field / coal guys actually want very much to escape that job. They just don't know how. Certainly they don't want their kids to work that job (hell this is such an old trope that the mine is the villain in 1999's October Sky, set at the end of the 50s). Manchin has some *interesting* positions on how to get that done. Personally I was just about ready to have him thrown out of the Dem caucus, except...we can't. He ended up getting the IRA done after all, though.

[orange808]

Well, Manchin seems - surprise - to be doing a bit of the ole' FDR on the down-low

Fuck.

[Ed Oscuro]

It sure as hell wasn't Bernie showing up late with his amendments to make everybody else look bad.

[orange808]

...mak(ing) everybody else look bad...

Uh-huh! That wasn't **Manchin** at all! He didn't embarrass anyone!!



Ha! He's not a grifter, either!! Oh, fuck!! ROTFLMFAO!!!!!

[Ed Oscuro]

We literally just had the discussion about how even "Progressives" in WV can be Trump voters. Other Senators voting "harder" wouldn't have magically overcome the math that meant Manchin and Sinema had holdout powers. Theoretically Bernie could have held his vote back, just like Manchin and Sinema. Don't think making the IRA smaller was what Bernie wanted, though.

Sending millions of dollars to Bernie-supported NY Dem primary candidates wouldn't solve this problem.

[orange808]

Sending millions of dollars to Bernie-supported NY Dem primary candidates wouldn't solve this problem.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I never said it would.

Although, it's hard to stop laughing long enough to speak. That "down low FDR" shit was hilarious.

[Hoagtech]

Let’s all get together and give the institutions that were screwing over scholars and parents with bad loans a relief with our tax dollars..

I’m sure with money in their pockets they will learn to NEVER do this to a student again..

Ahh the value of life lessons. Builds character my dad once said…

[BryanM]

Yeah, just giving people money universally like the Trump Bucks and Biden Dollars is better. I was shocked as hell that they did that, a real unraveling of reality moment, but I don't see them ever doing that again.

[Sengoku Strider]

Sometimes you can just tell who the ones who end up getting converted into Daleks are gonna be.

[Hoagtech]

Sometimes you can just tell who the ones who end up getting converted into Daleks are gonna be.

Really? Guess what bad tax policies + bad tax policies = Double bad tax policies.

No diversion of this solves the root of the issue: Loan officers are getting paid to continue their practices. They missed the target and marginalized tax payers instead of ANYTHING that would prevent this oppression that would happen in the future.

Either regulate student loans or institutions or you are throwing logs in the fire of the people that screwed you over to begin with

[Sengoku Strider]

Really? Guess what bad tax policies + bad tax policies = Double bad tax policies.

No diversion of this solves the root of the issue: Loan officers are getting paid to continue their practices. They missed the target and marginalized tax payers instead of ANYTHING that would prevent this oppression that would happen in the future.

I'm not quite sure how any of that relates to Daleks.

Either regulate student loans or institutions or you are throwing logs in the fire of the people that screwed you over to begin with

You're in a capitalist country, and not just a dabbler. The political and capitalist classes are not different people. Those institutions are the government. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess they're not going to decide to do any of that regulatey stuff to themselves, unless they find a way for it to benefit them on the other end. It's not even any kind of a conspiracy, a capitalist economy's financial sector has to grow constantly or the country rolls into a ditch.

[BryanM]

The talking point of the next fifteen seconds is pointing out the hypocrisy at the crickets when PPP loan forgiveness was given out. Of course the debtors in that case were the wealthy and powerful, including many many members of congress, so..

It's only ever a problem when >0% of the money goes toward giving a poor irrelevant person a little bit of a break.

Of course the hollow bickering with the heaps and layers of bullshit obfuscation is tiresome as fuck to us old shits. Obscene gibberish to waste everyone's time when the fundamental philosophical beliefs and opinions remain untouched: Who "deserves" a share of the loot and life, and who doesn't. What society is "supposed" to be, and what it isn't.

Terminal values. Not imaginary symbols, gang signs, and key jangling.

The political and capitalist classes are not different people.

Capitalists who hate capitalism can only be fascists, right? Unless they're very confused hippies that want to give everyone healthcare...

I kind of wish there were more than three kinds of people in the world... reality's so boring...

[orange808]

The talking point of the next fifteen seconds is pointing out the hypocrisy at the crickets when PPP loan forgiveness was given out. Of course the debtors in that case were the wealthy and powerful, including many many members of congress, so..

It's only ever a problem when >0% of the money goes toward giving a poor irrelevant person a little bit of a break....

Don't forget the way they aggressively investigated and prosecuted "not-millionaires" that took PPP loans.

Poors that saw the free moneys were "gaming the system". In fact, they flagged investigations based on "name recognition" and income. There's also documented problems with forgiving loans for real black small business owners. (No trouble for white Republicans in Congress, though.)

But, The Church of Scientology was "creating jobs"... Investigation into their finances and jail time for any (and all) irregularities? Nope. Call me crazy, but I bet that "church" (fuckin lol) has some serious irregularities in the books.

Fuck.

Pardon me, while I get out my Napoleon Dynamite time machine slash Scientology E-Meter

PPP cost $800 billion and this student loan haircut costs $240 billion.

800 billion > 240 billion

Eight Hundred Billion.

Of course, any fairly large enterprise can easily obfuscate and cook books. It's actually impossible to hold any significantly large firm accountable for taking PPP money and slowly laundering it into executive pockets. PPP was the largest fraud ever. Of course, the chow mein cat is worried about punishing poor people that went to college.

[Hoagtech]

800 billion > 240 billion

The tax defenders are the most amusing group of advocates.

Let's all do a "debt cartwheel" in celebration.

Let me do some simple math you guys

800 billion + 240 billion = 1.04 trillion of stupid taxes.

The kicker is this does nothing to help the students from being taken advantage of by the loan officers in the future. In fact we paid those sharks to prove their business model.

Yay (bonus debt cartwheel highfive combo!)

[orange808]

The last Republican president with a balanced budget was Richard Nixon.

[BryanM]

The kicker is this does nothing to help the students from being taken advantage of by the loan officers in the future

You could, like, also be angry that college costs over thirty times more than what it did in the 70's, when adjusted for inflation, as well.

Infinity times more, in the states where tuition was free. Was.

... oh, sorry. That's what you're trying to say you want. Government price controls. I agree.

Not going to happen in this cannibalism phase where they have to eat more of us to feed the beast. But it's good to keep our eyes on the ball of what we'd like the world to be like. From imagination, stems reality.

[Hoagtech]

The kicker is this does nothing to help the students from being taken advantage of by the loan officers in the future

You could, like, also be angry that college costs over thirty times more than what it did in the 70's, when adjusted for inflation, as well.

Infinity times more, in the states where tuition was free. Was.

... oh, sorry. That's what you're trying to say you want. Government price controls. I agree.

Not going to happen in this cannibalism phase where they have to eat more of us to feed the beast. But it's good to keep our eyes on the ball of what we'd like the world to be like. From imagination, stems reality.

I am also angry at University profiteering. That’s the same boat as double stupid taxes. It’s the art of how you handle it that makes it effective or a topical money bonfire.

Regulate them both and cut the red tape at the same time.

In other news. The stock market had the biggest sell off in months today. It looks like the market voted again..

[orange808]

There's other places to find over $200 billion. For instance, add in Trump's unfunded defense spending and you can get a trillion.

Guess what? The same Republicans that got you all hot and bothered about the student loan thing voted enthusiastically for those increases and they didn't give a shit about the bill.

Not even one time since Nixon have they ever balanced a budget or shown any fiscal responsibility whatsoever. Not even once.

Not one time. Cutting red tape must mean spending without restraint.

Given that the top 10% of wealthiest people control ~90% of the stocks, we all know who "voted" in the 'market".

If a person really held all these libertarian beliefs, that person should write in a candidate instead of voting against his or her agenda. What gets measured is what gets done. The Republican Party has controlled the government for the majority of the time since Nixon and never balanced a budget.

[BryanM]

Coal jobs are also one of those things hit by mechanization. Translation software has also cut into the translator market.

Artwork being the next to take a small trim.. Look at how perfect this is. Besides the slight typos in the Swedish.

The artists angry at IP infringement are interesting philosophical debates. If you take a look at someone's work and ape their style, that's not copyright theft is it? How the hell could anyone make anything if that was illegal? Ripping other people off and being ripped off in turn is just a part of life, right?

In other news. The stock market had the biggest sell off in months today.

Argh, don't get me started on my casino rants. So much of that is all a huge bubble, all greater fool scams where everyone is playing chicken. It's not real money until it's in your bank account, and converting it to real money tanks the trade price.

Our favorite whipping boy, Musk, is an illustrative example. TESLA is not worth a bajillion times more than Ford and Toyota combined. He'd very much like to eat his stock down into something that he can do something with before he dies. But the moment it looks like he's lost faith in the very thing he put so much time into stealing from its founders and hyping up, is the moment Tesla goes out of business and gets sold off to some third string car maker whose suits got duped into thinking they could salvage their battery tech, or something.

[BulletMagnet]

He'd very much like to eat his stock down into something that he can do something with before he dies.

I very much doubt it, as all that stock can be used as collateral to borrow cash from banks at very low rates, and moreover can be passed on to one's heirs tax-free, who can then repeat the process, under current rules. As the saying goes, only suckers work for a salary.

In other news. The stock market had the biggest sell off in months today. It looks like the market voted again..

If I read correctly this was the direct result of the federal reserve doing what the "inflation hawks" want it to do, and keep interest rates high; these are by and large the same "pro-business" sorts, it should be noted, who insist that there's no government funding to spare for anything except ongoing tax cuts and subsidies for the obscenely wealthy, and furthermore would sooner put a bullet right between your eyes in cold blood than so much as pay lip service to the sorts of pro-consumer price controls you advocate above.

Off to the side, I'd like any of the usual suspects around here to explain to me why nobody's allowed to criticize the cops, let alone call for any sort of tangible action against them, no matter what they do (except the FBI, of course; feel free to openly call for lynchings on a whim there), because that might hurt their feelings and make them leave their well-paying, unionized jobs, but as for the volunteers who ensure our elections are run in an orderly fashion for basically zero compensation (oh, and probably aren't packing heat and authority to kill, either)? Fuck them, apparently.

[orange808]

Off to the side, I'd like any of the usual suspects around here to explain to me why nobody's allowed to criticize the cops, let alone call for any sort of tangible action against them, no matter what they do (except the FBI, of course; feel free to openly call for lynchings on a whim there), because that might hurt their feelings and make them leave their well-paying, unionized jobs, but as for the volunteers who ensure our elections are run in an orderly fashion for basically zero compensation (oh, and probably aren't packing heat and authority to kill, either)? Fuck them, apparently.

If you're talking to me, I never said any of that. I don't like the blue wall any more than you do. Was it you that actually wrote a post suggesting we could actually live under the honor system? Fuck.

I *did* say all this ham-fisted fucking "defund the... (insert essential social mechanism here)" is stupid as fuck.

Here's the bottom line: It's not a secret code. You aren't clever. It's not 5-D chess. Here's what you're saying: a necessary piece of our society should be abolished. That's bullshit and you know it.

I talk a lot about transparency and that's my only suggestion. I don't trust human beings and thet includes Big Brother. So, there has to be a chain of people watching one another. A better slogan is "police the police". People are corrupt; we need transparency and accountability. People won't willingly do the right thing, so we have to jam it down theit throats. Unfortunately, we aren't doing enough to hold the police accountable. Although, developed western nations are doing much better than Mexico or Russia. Those places are shitholes. (Something I'm not supposed to say out loud.)

Fuck your union busting Republican rhetoric. Being a cop is a shit job. It should pay well. The problem is we can't find enough professionals to handle the responsibility and most people resist accountability and transparency.

Prison reform is needed, but that's not the people working on the street. Social programs are underfunded, but law enforcement isn't the reason why. We have no health care or social services because our overlords are corrupt assholes. No transparency or accountability at the top.

We'd also be infinitely more safe if the cops weren't (sometimes legitimately) saying they are terrified of being shot. Guns are everywhere. Police and theives. Guns and ammunition.

[BryanM]

I very much doubt it, as all that stock can be used as collateral to borrow cash from banks at very low rates, and moreover can be passed on to one's heirs tax-free, who can then repeat the process, under current rules. As the saying goes, only suckers work for a salary.

Yeah, maybe.

One thing you might be overlooking is this man is a massive selfish asshole. He might not care about leaving a lasting legacy for his family, and he sure as shit doesn't feel like he owes his topmost underlings anything.

Setting it all on fire for some short term personal gain is within character. Tesla was never meant to endure, the scam can only last so long before its price collapses. (As long as the personality cult around Musk keeps it pumped up, at most. After he dies it'll wither to nothing after a few decades.) .... did you miss his robot presentation? It was a huge news story.

The guy has far less empathy in him than most. Forget Obama or Trump, I'd put Musk only two or three steps higher than Albert Fish.

Social programs are underfunded, but law enforcement isn't the reason why.

Being the kind of society that gives massive constant raises to military force instead of putting food into someone's hands kind of is.

The knights and samurai have always been thugs that work on behalf of the current ruling class. Money spent on them is money spent on loyalty where it matters most. It's all a matter of degrees, of how far removed a society is from an outright military dictatorship. Which is the natural order of hierarchies; it's warlords all the way down.

In some states, these people make effectively low six figure salaries on average. They're always more than doubly ahead of rents. It's a protected class.

[orange808]

They're always more than doubly ahead of rents. It's a protected class.

Well, not always.

Google North Korea.

[BulletMagnet]

If you're talking to me

I wasn't; the reason I posted what I did was not to suggest that cops are paid too much (some, particularly the higher-ups, certainly do have gaming the system down to a science, retiring early and drawing from multiple pensions, but..."anti-union Republican rhetoric"? You...have read at least a few other posts I've made over the years? (...haven't you?), but that if the "back the blue" crowd is so worried that the mildest of criticism directed towards any segment of law enforcement risks alienating the entire profession and leaving us unsafe, how in heaven's name do they have no problem openly threatening the lives of people who are paid practically nothing for their work, are far less capable of defending themselves from the fringe, and perform a societal function at least as important as the police do?

We'd also be infinitely more safe if the cops weren't (sometimes legitimately) saying they are terrified of being shot. Guns are everywhere. Police and theives. Guns and ammunition.

That would be another question for the "thin blue line" fetishists; if the proliferation of firearms so obviously makes us safer, why do police departments across the country near-uniformly oppose nearly every such loosening of gun regulations that comes to pass?

One thing you might be overlooking is this man is a massive selfish asshole. He might not care about leaving a lasting legacy for his family, and he sure as shit doesn't feel like he owes his topmost underlings anything.

If you want to take that theory to its logical conclusion, I could see him retaining all that stock and leaving it to a random assortment of people and organizations solely to prevent the government, notwithstanding its remarkable generosity in his direction, from seeing a cent of it. Yeeeahhhh fuck yooouuu yeeeahhhh does overrule literally everything else, after all.

EDIT: Why is everybody acting so worried about all the classified documents Trump took? I mean, Mar-a-Lago's security is nothing short of airtight.

[Ed Oscuro]

Although, it's hard to stop laughing long enough to speak. That "down low FDR" shit was hilarious.

Once again I am calling on bernard brothers to stop being incredibly stupid about this. You can't say "dems don't ever fight for anything" and then be 1000% focused on shitting on good news like the IRA, $280B for burn pit vets, and debt forgiveness. And it was the White House, incidentally, leading the charge on labeling Republicans as hypocritical on student debt and the PPP.

Of course this isn't at all obvious if you live in the Twitter bubble of people who make over $125,000 a year (individually, not per household), or are focused on scaremongering about the IRS agents focusing on higher income tax cheats...

It's early days yet but recent polling suggests the Republicans might not even be able to pull off the traditional midterms rout of the President's party in the House, and the Senate is looking even better for Dems.

[orange808]

Stop calling me a bro.

Once again, I call on the complacent comfortable Hillary robots (see, it's not a slur because I wrote it differently! It's all better! No inflammatory slur, there! Will you get the point? Prolly not.)

And, maybe (just maybe), these policies happened because people like me took Reagan Democrats out to the woodshed.

Sanders isn't begging Hillary for her mailing list. There's a reason why. Hers is awfully short and I can get it from Forbes or the WSJ.

I have no idea what any of that has to do with Manchin. He hasn't done much of anything to help--and he didn't sign off on that half-a-loaf bill you keep crowing about until the masters of the universe sat him down--and informed him that he couldn't afford to vote the tax deal down. The EU was going to follow through. Ultimately, companies would have faced dueling tax deals and uncertainty. Europe would have been united and gone forward with their taxes. That means the United States could either cede tax revenues to Europe or implement their own unilateral policy. That would create uncertainty. Without US votes in a blanket policy, Europe would set higher taxes, normalize those numbers, and Americans might follow suit afterwards. It's too risky. The race to the bottom could become a race to normal. It had to be stopped.

The student loan thing amounts to stimulus. The solution is to offer mostly free and affordable higher education and invest in the workforce. Instead, we went with a one time stimulus payment to prop up the markets. And, let's not be stupid, because I am not a knee jerk idiot; the investment will deliver more dollars to the economy over the course of the next decade than it cost. The markets will benefit. It's all simple economics, really. Regardless, the idea was stimulus and getting votes, not reform. Because, of course, our ruling class would never allow a real reform.

[Sengoku Strider]

Have you ever seen anyone have a 48 consecutive post apocalyptic meltdown trying to destroy both civil democracy and the FBI? I do have to give the man credit for how much mileage he gets out of half a bottle of Adderall and a 6-pack of Diet Coke. Your average unhinged extremely-online internet schlub couldn't pull that off.

On Tuesday morning alone, Trump has taken to his Truth Social platform over four dozen times to share memes and posts attacking his political enemies. Some posts are memes attacking President Joe Biden or other Democrats, while others are baseless election fraud claims or attempts to delegitimize the FBI.

I know that this is the content people paid for in signing up for his open-source Twitter clone, but this is one thing about Trump that's never really clicked for me from a levers-of-power angle. Sure, he's flooding the channel with material for people to take viral. But the lessons of history have always tended to be that less is more for leadership. Being too much in view demystifies you, shows the seams in your personality, and leads people to tire of you. In East Asia Emperors as the Sons of Heaven were not even allowed to be directly seen by ordinary eyes, nor did they typically speak directly to anyone.

But he averaged an absurd number of Tweets per day during his presidency too:

Statista: Trump tweeted 5.7 times per day on average during his first half year in the White House and that had grown to 34.8 times a day on average during the second half of 2020.

I'm trying to think of any content creator I wouldn't get sick to death of if they were throwing that much at me on a daily basis - then flooding me with emails from 8 different PACs hitting me up for money. It's like the shittiest Phantom Zone version of a Giant Bomb subscription I can imagine. Except nobody's coordinated enough to beat Mike Tyson's Punch Out!! and instead of Windjammers marathons you get a fat 75 year old playing golf.