immutable

I suspect it’s because a lot of people, myself included, think that this is how you get to festering problems that are fertile ground for the next authoritarian.

There was a brief moment after J6 where Lindsay Graham took to the floor of the senate, fresh from the reality of what had just happened and said that he didn’t support it. But a few weeks later, suffering no real consequences, he was back at the MAGA trough chowing down.

Humiliating people that change their minds for the better is probably not the solution. But saying “no consequences, all is forgiven if we can move on” is how you get confederate general statues all over union soil.

At the end of the day, trump supporters seem to be responding to the humanity crushing nature of global capitalism. They fall for the populist rhetoric and then swept up by the personality just assume that everything he said would get fixed is getting fixed now and everyone just doesn’t like him and are making things up. This works until it directly effects them, but even then they think it must be some mistake or oversight.

This goes to show how deep the hunger is for someone to rein in capitalism and support populist reforms. In the absence of any legitimate policies pointing in that direction, this conman is making a fantastic meal out of promising whatever sounds good, delivering nothing, then moving on to the next round of grifting.

Real substantive improvement to this nation will only come from actually improving the material conditions under which Americans labor. And this sounds strange for the wealthiest nation on earth, but many of our countrymen can’t afford healthy food, medicine, shelter, and if they can it’s at the expense of their every waking minute of labor. If you push a population like that, they will eventually wonder what the heck the point is, and they will follow anyone that says they can fix it. Sadly, trump sees this rhetoric as a campaigning tool nothing more, he could care less if people can sell their alfalfa as long as they cheer for him. And the Democratic Party isn’t offering compelling solutions either, they’ve slid far enough right that Biden’s cornerstone IRA and CHIPS acts largely targeted massive companies in a full embrace of trickle down economics. Intel gets to build a new chip foundary eventually, if the legislation isn't gutted, and if intel doesn’t find it more convenient to pocket the cash, blame burdensome regulations, and cancel the project a la Foxconn in Wisconsin.

Both parties are captured by the massive companies, they can only legislate in the thin band the wealthy donors allow them too. Dems offer up solutions in that band that dont make things meaningfully better. MAGA just figured out that no one is following up, so you can say you’ll do popular things and then deliver a massive tax cut to the wealthiest instead.

The fed controls interest rates. That controls how cheap or expensive it is to borrow money.

Lower interest rates are a great tool if you’ve got people sitting on capital. You lower the interest rates, borrowing becomes cheaper, and capital takes advantage of this to start more enterprises and the economy heats up.

Higher interest rates help fight inflation, there’s too much money in the system, higher rates make getting more money to pump into the system more expensive cooling it down.

Now what a keen observer might notice is that there no direction to move the interest rates which counteract nonsense trade policies.

You can cut rates to 0, flood the market with cheap credit, and if your inputs are tariffed and you can’t turn a profit… it doesn’t change shit.

This is where stagflation thrives. The cheap money floods the economy to try to spur economic growth, but the thing holding back growth isn't access to borrowing, it’s the nonsense trade policies. So the market flooded with cheap money just becomes inflationary.

You get little economic development, high inflation, this is a classic stagflation trap. And trump and his advisors are going to apply maximum pressure to cut rates to “save the economy” from their terrible trade policies and all that will do is sink us deeper into this hole.

I’ve normally heard the term “bad faith” used to describe such situations.

You’ll sometimes hear about a lawyer doing this and the judge will chastise them for acting in bad faith or advancing a bad faith argument.

Hey the Nazi shitwagon has got better battery range now for when you need to drive it to the dealership to get it glued back together.

Fuck Elon and his dumpstermobile.

He likely has narcissistic personality disorder and so this is less an act and more a mask, a shield. The person he’s protecting the most is himself, he needs to be this facade.

I found this video really quite fascinating about what it’s like caring for a dying narcissist. Whatever family that remains hold out hope that as death itself nears the narcissist might finally let down their guard and show their true self. Apparently the opposite happens.

https://youtu.be/FavgHrxc6oY

Neat, I appreciate your insight. Upvote from me and today I learned.

$100k when I checked on Friday. Not going to check again, that way madness lies.

An entire lifetime of work, living modestly, saving, funding my retirement accounts, paying a financial advisor to help me make responsible decisions.

Blown up by that orange turd.

We should make them take an oath to defend the constitution so they would know what they should do…

Yea this is my problem with this video.

It’s a pretty good video and the creator gets so close to figuring out that he doesn’t hate his phone, he hates social media.

It’s an interesting video from the point of view that it kinda makes this argument over and over.

I thought that doing X without my smartphone would be really inconvenient, it was only mildly inconvenient and I was able to manage it.

He ends up realizing how much happier he is without having the ability to just pull his phone out and go on twitter anytime he is bored. So just delete twitter?

All the benefits of his experiment can be had by just getting rid of social media apps and all the inconveniences can go away.

I really wanted this video to end with him putting those two bits together. But instead he just goes “well back to using a phone and it making me miserable” and as the viewer I’m just thinking “what was the point of all this then?! You learned a lesson, you gained a valuable insight about yourself as a person, and now just nothing. Just ‘cool insight, no need to act on that though’ seriously?!”

Yea I tend to think than when someone identifies as a Libertarian they almost certainly don’t mean a civil libertarian, which is how the aclu actually identifies themselves.

We have grown from a roomful of civil libertarians to more than 4 million members, activists, and supporters across the country. The ACLU is now a nationwide organization with a 50-state network of staffed affiliate offices filing cases in both state and federal courts. We appear before the Supreme Court more than any other organization except the Department of Justice.

This is literally the only time the word libertarian appears in their own history https://www.aclu.org/about/aclu-history

Thank you.

I feel like a crazy person sometimes because I remember when the ACA was rolling along it was reported that it was just the Heritage Foundation, a notoriously right wing think tank, plan.

I looked into it because I thought “certainly this can’t be true, hope and change and all that” I went and looked up their plan. It was a market based approach that used tax incentives and penalties to increase the size of the insurance pool.

That’s the ACA.

And people act like it’s some litmus test of progressive policy success.

This is what I’ll never forgive Obama about. He captured an entire generation of voters energy stumping with progressive speeches about making real change. He had no real desire to do that, constantly governing from the center / center right.

So that whole generation learned a lesson, progressive policies don’t work. Which is amazing considering that we didn’t even try any. We somehow passed a bunch of corporate friendly policies and peoples lives didn’t get meaningfully better and they chalked it up to “progressives don’t have an answer either”

I think this is a contributing factor to the absolute shit show we find ourselves in today. America has deeply broken problems that are entrenched because them existing makes someone very rich. Not the same guy for every problem, but for every problem in America you can rest assured there’s a small group of assholes that need that problem to exist so they can buy a third yacht. People feel that pain and they went “well fuck, the lefts best orator, the guy with a vision and plan and skills couldn’t fix it” then along comes trump being a blowhard jackass saying “I can fix it” and people were like “sure, let’s try it”

Obama could have actually delivered on that change, it wouldn’t have been easy, he would have had to actually use that supermajority for the few weeks it existed to pass legislation. He would have had to bring blue dogs to heel or blow up the filibuster. But if he could have found the gumption to do it, and those policies meaningfully improved peoples lives, he would have cemented multiple decades of democratic dominance.

Instead he passed uninspiring half assed solutions that tinkered around the edges of our societies most difficult problems. Structured them so that all the pain would be felt up front and all the benefits would slowly phase in over time. Tried to find compromise so that the right wouldn’t attack him and even after giving everything away they screeched about death panels.

Liberal policies are an actual thing, a thing that leftists frequently disagree with.

Libertarians are often placed on the right part of the left-right divide. The fact you’ve chosen the label libertarian instead of conservative is animated by the exact same “purity test” that you find so silly.