promoting a specific social and aesthetic vision

And also

proposed by Donald Trump

🤔

The first step in healing is recognizing you even have a wound i guess, but next is cleaning out the wound. Americans have typically just skipped this step in the past and gone straight to believing that recognition was the healing.

Would it help if you knew we paid providers billions of dollars in the 90s for fiber and they ran off with the profits, and we got nothing? So it took almost 2 decades after we paid them, to finally get gigabit speeds, on top of paying them again to do it for reals this time.

Some would argue they are still 15yo boys in mindset.

I believe first term Trumpgret to be more that they thought Trump was going to do things about [insert dumb ideology here] and he turned out to be [dumb ideology] personified, but they still believe in [dumb ideology]. Not that they regret the things he’s doing, more that this he not doing enough of.

For example, drain the swamp. They thought he was going to get rid of Democrats who they thought were the swamp. It turned out during his first term he needed some Democrat support so he met in the middle and that pissed them off and then associated him with the swamp too.

Or building the wall and making Mexico pay for it. It turns out only a small portion got built, and came from US or private (not even his) funding.

Second term Trumpgret from everyday MAGA i agree, i don’t really believe anyone truly regrets voting for him, just that they are now hated by their loved ones, and they don’t see the direct causes of them voting for him and his actions hurting their loved ones, therefore their loved ones cut off contact.

Trumpgret from the likes of Alex Jones, i believe comes from a place of they never really believed in the it from the start, they just saw the easy grift and now the easy money is to jump off the bandwagon.

You’re right, I should go read 1984 again, lol.

If I could put my tinfoil hat on for just a moment, i would say an indefinite war was the intent. If you have an unruly populace, what better place than the front lines to send them? The gulag? Nah, they aren’t producing anything while sitting in a prison. Meanwhile, the front lines are wearing down an enemy populace, and if they are killed there, great. One less dissident to worry about. It’s also a great way to consolidate even more power, if those dissidents happen to be part of the oligarchy who grew a conscience.

But this tinfoil theory would imply he’s playing 4D chess out there, and i don’t think there’s any evidence to support that. Even if it’s a convenient way to remove dissidents, and likely being done to a certain extent, i would surmise this extended war effort is due to plain incompetence and decades of greed surfacing and not the main objective. Slava Ukraini ✊🏻

My next tinfoil hat theory is that this assumes Iran a willing participant in this circle jerk war. Seeing how Iran came out on top in that brief crease fire deal, it could be possible that targets hit so far were considered “soft targets”. Now I’m not so callous to say a school full of children is a soft target, but with the players currently involved, i wouldn’t put it past them to purposefully hit civilian targets to drum up recruitment for the other side, to give yourself more hard targets to hit. And any major attack against a hard target could be seen as letting one in to not give away the game at hand. Even the initial attack against the old leadership could be seen as letting the new leadership in, but that’s so much tinfoil, my fillings are starting to buzz.

There would have to be an investigation into the targeting choices to try and figure out if that’s what’s really going on, in which under a certain threshold and i would classify those as deliberate.

Now i will fully admit that I’m talking out of my ass here as i haven’t really been closely following Operation Epstein Fury. But there are certainly some news pieces recently that lead me to suspect something fucky is going on in the background, even if it turns out it’s just what we already know: market manipulation and gambling on war.

So let me get this straight:

USA and Israel vs Iran

Trump and Putin are basically best buds

Russia is providing Iran with drones

So this is just one big circle jerk war?

Bonus connection:

Trump/Vance wants Orban to win so Vance goes to Hungary to stump for him.

Orban is a Russian puppet trying to undermine the EU.

Netanyahu and Orban are best buds, Orban says he would leave the ICC when he wins the election

Orban reached out to Iran in 2024 offering aid, raising questions about current ties.

Should we just convert to a Trump Cease Fire metric (TCF for short) instead of Scaramucci’s now?

Except, that’s not how it will play out.

They need x number of ballots to overturn the will of the people. They will then look through all of the ballots and find “anamolies” that they will point to as fraudulent like a circle not fully filled in (see “hanging chads”) and use that as the basis to throw that ballot out.

Rinse and repeat until x number of ballots have been tossed out, and oh would you look at that, they won! Pretty fucking convenient!

And just like Florida in 2000, when the ballots in question are being relooked at by a neutral party, some douchbags in collared shirts and khakis start rioting outside the facility and “oh no, for safety of the people inside the count has to stop” by court order passed down from a judge; the same judge that signed this warrant in the first place.

And on up to the Supreme Court it goes, which guess what happens there. Check out the Brooks Brothers riot, and look at some of the familiar faces in there.

Fuck that, challenge this in courts before it gets to that point. Then vote this sheriff and judge out as soon as possible.

Right. So we just need Congress to do something it doesn’t want to do.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

I swear, this midterm is going to end up with another 45-50% voter turn out and people will continue to complain that nothing changes or has gotten worse.

People: IF YOUR VOTE DIDN’T MATTER, THEY WOULDN’T BE SPENDING SO MUCH MONEY AND EFFORT TO KEEP YOU FROM VOTING!

I don’t care if you live in a +60 (your political leaning) district. Vote in spite of that and make it +61.

Vote in every god damn election you fucking can, down to School District Board elections and even HOA’s. My city councilman just lost reelection by 1 fucking vote to some douchbag who will probably get bought out by some data center asshole within a week, and even though turn out was historically high, it was still only 18-20%. And when i asked my very liberal neighbor if she and her husband voted, she said “No, we just didn’t have time”. 🤦🏻

At least in my area, you are allowed to take time away from work to vote, it doesn’t matter what the election is for.

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS AND FUCKING USE THEM!

And this is why true grass roots movements are so powerful, instead of co-opted movements. Our local election cycles just finished, and there were some decent changes that occurred with city council members, who voted in favor of data centers, getting handed their asses. But guess what. The turn out was record setting, yet abysmal, sitting somewhere around 18-22%. You start putting in real progressives into positions of power, and not fake ones, and changes start to be made (a full on data center blockade is in the works), which gets people to realize they actually have influence, which they then get more involved, and increases turn out in the next election.

We need to send a message to these centrist Democrats so they realize they need us WAY more than we need them or their pandering to fascists for money.

The next fix i would say is that news media needs to become federated and/or open sourced. I’m not sure what this looks like, but probably something like a mix of Ground News (i currently pay monthly for btw) and Patreon, where journalist post their stories to a decentralized platform, that people subscribe to them. Idk, that sounds like that could get clickbait-y. But i would be willing to cut a streaming service off, and give some of that to something that’s decentralized and not owned by some billionaire handing down memos about what can or cannot be mentioned in a story, or straight up axing a story all together.

Then we keep hammering at the injustices and calling the leadership out and spreading the word, and putting up better progressives in the next election cycle.

But to answer the original OP’s question, like you, i don’t think the current Dem leadership has the spine to actually prosecute Trump or any of his cronies and billionaire Epstein buddies, or take a few pages from Trump’s play book and go the low road to hold those fake news organizations liable for things they say erroneously, or to prosecute corrupt foreign governments who helped facilitate this current mess.

Progressives should continue putting forth bills and amendments that force Dem leadership’s hand to show the people how they vote, which to no one’s surprise, it’ll be the same handful of useful rotational idiots. Then progressives should spend every cent raised campaigning in those districts to primary every one of them.

Yeah i could never understand this leap in logic, especially in courts. If the government is openly admitting that throwing a tear gas canister at them is assault, the defense should then be able to argue in self defense because the canister was thrown at them, which was admitted to being assault by the prosecution! Especially considering there’s a first amendment right to protest, which was being disrupted, everything afterwards should be considered hostile actions of an aggressor.

Trump’s solicitor general was saying the 14th amendment wasn’t intended to cover the children of people here illegally, that it was intended for slaves.

Barrett argued that slaves were brought here illegally, so his basis is flawed.

It goes on about the governments position on domiciled people’s vs jus soli, based on soil, and jus sanguinis, based on descent and how basing citizenship on decent could get confusing very quickly therefore the writers of the 14th amendment clearly intended on jus soli.

I never said Iraq should be the template, I implicitly said Post-WW2 recovery should be. I was referring to Iraq as an example of what not to do, because it was specifically called out for a purge of Nazi officials at every level, which is exactly what happened in Iraq.

As for German resistance, yes of course there were forces outside of government, and they used insiders for information. To believe anything otherwise is just being willfully ignorant, and a waste of time.

Unfortunately to your second point, I don’t think that’s the best approach either. Check out the first 6-12 months of the Iraqi government rebuild during the Iraq war. The Americans basically fired 20,000 Iraqi officials and military members who then had nothing to lose anymore. They then immediately started an insurgency.

Also after these fascist take overs, it’s not as easy as simply saying “you’re a Nazi, therefore you go to jail” because if you didn’t swear fealty to the new government (i.e. if you were Democrat you would now have to call yourself Republican) you could be summarily executed on the spot (check out the video of Sadam’s take over).

So you could resign. But then you get called a coward by armchair generals for not trying to stay in the system and slow it down as much as possible.

So you stay in and keep your head down, and may try to slow the processes down enough to hopefully save some innocents without getting pulled out back and shot. But then you’re called a Nazi collaborator. Idk, I would probably just as well resign, but that could put a target on your back, too, because you’re basically outing yourself as hostile.

Personally, i think how we handled it after WW2 wasn’t perfect, but should be the goal. There’s always clean up that can happen even years afterwards. But if you go purging an entire country’s worth of government officials, you have to replace those you purged with equally qualified people. And you often find that those who are eager to step in, are often just eager to enact revenge, or in some cases, even worse than their predecessors because they are just opportunists who now have the good graces of the new regime who just wanted a quick transition to a friendly government.

Ok, you heard her everybody! Time to boycott Starbucks!

While we are at it, might as well boycott some other frivolous things like streaming services, toxic social medias, and any non-local restaurant, on top of the other things we were already boycotting, like Target. And, wait… why’s the economy tanking even faster now!!!

Something about the smartest bears vs the dumbest humans.

God damn, it’s this shit right here that I’ve been calling out to my leftists circles whenever the topic of some messaging semantics change comes up. It doesn’t matter what terminology we agree on, bad faith actors from far-right think tanks will churn out BS and blast it on Fox news 24/7 until we sit down again and come up with new terminology because this new one isn’t reaching people like we intended it to reach. It’s a tactic to keep us from actually discussing ways to fix the problems, by instead focusing on those semantics and labels we affix to them.

What you’re describing is called a Growth Stock as opposed to a Mature Stock. I heard these terms recently when reading about the AI bubble and will just quote the relevant parts, because the author describes it better than I ever could:

Pluralistic: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI from Cory Doctorow

You see, when a company is growing, it is a “growth stock,” and investors really like growth stocks. When you buy a share in a growth stock, you’re making a bet that it will continue to grow. So growth stocks trade at a huge multiple of their earnings. This is called the “price to earnings ratio” or “P/E ratio.”

But once a company stops growing, it is a “mature” stock, and it trades at a much lower P/E ratio. So for every dollar that Target – a mature company – brings in, it is worth ten dollars. It has a P/E ratio of 10, while Amazon has a P/E ratio of 36, which means that for every dollar Amazon brings in, the market values it at $36.

It’s wonderful to run a company that’s got a growth stock. Your shares are as good as money. If you want to buy another company, or hire a key worker, you can offer stock instead of cash. And stock is very easy for companies to get, because shares are manufactured right there on the premises, all you have to do is type some zeroes into a spreadsheet, while dollars are much harder to come by. A company can only get dollars from customers or creditors.

So when Amazon bids against Target for a key acquisition, or a key hire, Amazon can bid with shares they make by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet, and Target can only bid with dollars they get from selling stuff to us, or taking out loans, which is why Amazon generally wins those bidding wars.

That’s the upside of having a growth stock. But here’s the downside: eventually a company has to stop growing. Like, say you get a 90% market share in your sector, how are you gonna grow?

Once the market decides that you aren’t a growth stock, once you become mature, your stock is revalued, to a P/E ratio befitting a mature stock.

If you are an exec at a dominant company with a growth stock, you have to live in constant fear that the market will decide that you’re not likely to grow any further. Think of what happened to Facebook in the first quarter of 2022. They told investors that they experienced slightly slower growth in the USA than they had anticipated, and investors panicked. They staged a one-day, $240B sell off. A quarter-trillion dollars in 24 hours! At the time, it was the largest, most precipitous drop in corporate valuation in human history.

That’s a monopolist’s worst nightmare, because once you’re presiding over a “mature” firm, the key employees you’ve been compensating with stock, experience a precipitous pay-drop and bolt for the exits, so you lose the people who might help you grow again, and you can only hire their replacements with dollars. With dollars, not shares.

And the same goes for acquiring companies that might help you grow, because they, too, are going to expect money, not stock. This is the paradox of the growth stock. While you are growing to domination, the market loves you, but once you achieve dominance, the market lops 75% or more off your value in a single stroke if they don’t trust your pricing power.

Which is why growth stock companies are always desperately pumping up one bubble or another, spending billions to hype the pivot to video, or cryptocurrency, or NFTs, or Metaverse, or AI.