JDPoZ

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for those not from the US, I highly recommend watching the YouTube channel “Not Just Bikes” to get a better understanding of how absolutely dogshit the US is for anyone without a car.

Not only is public transit non-existent… you are nearly constantly under threat of being hit by a car as a pedestrian - as things like sidewalks, street crossing safe areas, etc. are all spotty at best… not to mention how trucks and SUVs now are bigger than ever so chances are higher than they’ve ever been before that you won’t be seen before being run over.

For some reason I imagine that scene in of one of the first few episodes of the HBO mini-series Chernobyl, when they wade into the water near the exploded reactor and their flashlights just immediately die due to the massive amount of radiation and the episode ends in darkness with the crew’s Geiger counters just going absolute ape-shit sounding like a singular continuous tone.

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Slightly off-topic, but I really hate that the Rs are so goddamn horrific that the Ds can just gesture at how bad the Rs are and not actually do much tangibly for their voters compared to… say… like how LBJ did with the passing of the addition of Medicare and Medicaid to Social Security or FDR with the “Rural Electrification Act”… because they know that the alternative for voters not voting for them = enabling of fascists who will speedrun the 4th Reich.

I really wish the left was even half as powerful as what the demagogue-spouting right-wing news stations pretended.

I would have guessed the “Tar Sands” area being an incredibly massive source of air pollution, but I guess I wasn’t considering wild-fires role in the matter.

Correct. We actually used to have MUCH higher taxes for corporations where all the write offs had to do with improvements to employee lives.

The idea was - either businesses should spend money on making things better for their employees or Uncle Sam will via taxing them.

…And he won’t do a goddamn thing about it legislation-wise. Hell, he won’t even SAY anything about it.

I really wish we would have elected the guy who - despite what he could or couldn’t have done in office - at least used the bully pulpit to call out the ghouls with dragon-like hoards of wealth that have put us all in a worse place than our parents were 60 years ago.

The neoliberal “we’re like the Republicans but as if it were still 1980” type Dems who have been in charge of the party for decades now should be scared out of their minds and doing whatever they can to get the apathetic would-be voters out and mobilized.

After what the MAGA fascist lunatics did to Paul Pelosi, Tammy Duckworth, and were GOING to do to them in the Capitol were they to have caught any of them, I can’t believe these idiots still think being rich will save them from these actual fascists if they lose in 2024.

Seriously, Jan 6th is going to end up looking instead like a dress rehearsal if Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and all the other “3rd-way” Ds don’t stop choosing appeasing capital when given the choice of trying to attract new working-class voters or attempting in vain at appeasing Republicans (who will NEVER choose “Republican-LITE” when they can get any actual R on the ticket).

Time is almost out. The increasingly large pile of historical comparisons are apt. The alarms are blaring.

For the love of all that is good, stop with the half-measure “going high when they go low one-time-partial-mail-in-rebate if you apply on our barely functioning website to request to see if you qualify” legislation and just straight up illegally pass an avalanche of populist actions designed to immediately tangibly address the needs of the working class so the Supreme Court is wasting months and political capital for the Rs trying to declare it all as not-legal even though it’s awesome… as soon as possible… or risk the literal end of democracy by allowing Trump the opportunity to disingenuously claim that he would do what only the furthest left Ds might even dare to suggest.

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I’m afraid it’s worse than that.

Basically after FDR died, for as imperfect as he was… all the objective good he did was slowly whittled away by members of both parties - simply at differing rates.

With Truman put in as his VP after the DNC suggested replacing FDR’s first VP - Henry “I want to pass a civil rights bill in the 1940s” Wallace for their more “centrist” candidate, we dropped 2 atomic weapons on civilian cities.

Kennedy was the first real neoliberal in that he came from a dynastically wealthy family and successfully dropped the top marginal tax rate that FDR had helped set at 90% down to 60%… which helped create massive budget shortages about a decade later. LBJ got us into Vietnam. Carter was too nice to ever use the bully pulpit and also let his own personal Protestant work ethic dictate his own policy goals which he seemed to back with the idea that things like the oil crisis should be a burden that every day Americans shoulder rather than the massive giant multinational oil companies, and then after Reagan won 2x and Bush “my family worked with the Nazis” Sr. won a term afterward, Clinton pivoted the last remaining New Deal democrats to a 3rd way where they abandoned the working class for a more palatable version of Republicanism.

Bernie really could have been a turning point, but instead all that has happened is the accelerating worsening of all our lives alternating between the hands of the ultra rich who only do it slowly… and the hands of increasingly fascistic nakedly monstrous ultra rich ghouls and their goons.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-26/white-house-urges-action-after-alarming-taylor-swift-deepfakes

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/01/27/white-house-responds-to-graphic-fake-images-of-taylor-swift/72378571007/

https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/taylor-swift-ai-generated-explicit-photos-white-house-sag-aftra-release-statements-1235590855/

Gotta come clean - saw the header and the auto-TL;DR, and then commented based on the fact that the title and the bot only talked about the psychological aspects of Trump’s appeal as a candidate to shitheads.

Good to see the article covers the more tangible aspects of what brought about this new age of grifting wannabe despots, rather than just saying his supporters are all ghouls… which is probably also true to some degree… 😕

That’s exactly the type I want to see, too.

Just avoided their names specifically because there are a bunch of asshats on the fediverse who seem to take their mentions as a proverbial “bat signal” for spamming downvotes.

Demagogues like Trump are nothing new… and are only able to gain ground when a population is angered by the inaction of others in power to ease their real material suffering.

Medical debt, unaffordable housing, price-gouging, a lack of upward mobility or the ability to afford retirement or having children… all these things make it easy for demagogues to offer scapegoats.

Really - to beat Trump, we just need a firebrand populist who will try to pass legislation that helps the average American and - when unable to pass specific such legislation that would alleviate real tangible problems faced by the overwhelming majority of Americans - would use the bully pulpit to loudly push for the change they support are unable to enact - letting their voters know where to direct their anger and power.

Only genuine populism can soundly beat fake blustering demagoguing populism, because fake populism is designed to only emulate real genuine populism rather than offer up actual solutions to problems faced.

People want universal healthcare, they don’t want wars, they want to be able to take care of themselves and their family, they want the corrupt punished and justice for the citizen harmed by the giant multinational corporation’s greed driven pollution, waste, or lack of safety.

Fake populists only offer fake scapegoats and vague gestures. A real populist loudly and accurately points to the root of these issues.

You want to beat Trump? Then we need Biden to have been this his whole time in office… and to be this now.

The fact that the White House is focusing now more on pushing for anti-deepfake porn measures - only because billionaire Taylor Swift has been wronged by it - rather than making it so Americans can avoid losing their homes, jobs, or medical coverage - is ammo for lying demagogues to then disingenuously blame such problems on trans-kids and illegal immigrant workers.

There are multiple reasons idiots will vote for Trump, but I really get upset at the number of disconnected types who believe that the only reason people are not necessarily voting for Trump… but instead just not showing up to vote (when they ostensibly would for Biden were they to vote), is “because they are idiots.”

Instead what should be happening is introspection by the party of “not-fascists” trying to understand what they could do to galvanize their own voter base into volunteering and showing up and voting in record numbers.

They’re not going to convince any Trump voters to vote for Biden, but they really fucking need people who mistakenly think - as a result of lacking party action - that “their vote doesn’t matter” or that there’s not much really that they stand to tangibly gain by waiting in an 8 hour line in an otherwise deeply blue district where Republicans got rid of all the other polling locations.

Hell, I think at this point even just a few firebrand speeches from party leaders instead playing on loop the “gee shucks not all Republicans are bad” line would help… but really…

…If the “not-fascist” party’s only answer is, “I don’t know… umm… we reduced overdraft fees, stopped prices from getting even worse, and I think we can make it so you can still maybe get an abortion in blue states as long as you aren’t traveling through a route where you pass through a psycho-run red state?”

…then we are probably in a concerning position… because normal working people don’t leave their shitty job on a bus to then show up and stand all day in line for polls when they don’t feel there is much of a measurable and direct benefit to their lives.

I mean… do you see how many tech companies have laid off TENS OF THOUSANDS of employees in just the past couple of months?

How many of those people who were fired are disconnected generally from politics are going to just associate that “when Biden was president” was when they lost their job and will vote just based off that?!

I mean… not that I or anyone should advocate for something like that, but honestly… if Trump openly states that he wants to do this to anyone he deems as an enemy… well… Trump isn’t currently in power… and so anyone who currently HAS power would be a fucking moron not to try and strike first knowing Trump WILL have them killed.

I mean, we are not talking about a game of checkers, people.

We’re talking about actual fucking dipshit fascists who will gleefully damn us all in the ever-accelerating climatological extinction we face in the coming next couple of decades.

Fascists will happily kill every man woman and child, whether they be those who would cure cancer, create cold fusion, or build room-temperature super conductors - if they ever showed disloyalty to the fascists’ despotic whims.

This “we go high when they go low” performative bullshit is a losing game if the other game participants are the only players willing to always go low.

As long as Senator Sanders continues to fight for what is right and shows his brain hasn’t turned to mush… I’m kind of hesitant to hope for a replacement.

Don’t get me wrong, we need LESS octogenarians running for re-election… but I just hate that we’ve been burned by people like Sinema running pretending to be cut from the same progressive type cloth as Bernie, only to do a 180 when elected… and shit on everything someone as magnanimous as Bernie has been basically his whole adult life.

And yet… Bernie has fought the good fight for so long… it’s kinda like Captain America at the end of Endgame… I kinda want him to finally get to enjoy his last few years in life playing ball with his grandkids and having idiots like me ask to shake his hand in public… he deserves all the world’s happiness… but I’m terrified that whoever comes after him won’t even come close.

I always hate it when people tell me that I should eat the food that guy A farted on, because guy B will shit on it… rather than us together being able to say “hey maybe people shouldn’t be sticking their asses on our food.”

…But without fail, that same person saying “everyone should be so thankful for guy A” seems to almost enjoy scolding those complaining about ass touching their food more-so than even fathoming to recognize that maaaaaaaaybe “guy A should stop farting on people’s plates.”

The wrestle with a dirty pig quote comes to mind.

…That and the “play chess with a pigeon” quote.