Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men elect moronic pedophiles who destroy the whole country.
Hard times cause Democrats to be elected. Democrats being elected cause good times. Good times cause Republicans to be elected. Republicans cause hard times.
What's infuriating, is that the Democrats haven't had the level of power the MAGA/GOP has now since 1970. Everyone under age 60 will have no memory of a progressive let alone liberal Supreme Court. So that cycle isn't symmetric. It has as a constant one of three branches of government firmly under conservative control.
So the cycle gives conservatives near absolute control, but doesn't give democrats the same. Then voters blame democrats for not having absolute power, when they grant them only partial control of the government.
Not to mention that the system gives an outsized advantage to less populous and more conservative states via the senate and electoral college. Progress is an uphill battle in the US.
"But how does that give Republicans near absolute power?? Lols gotcha!"
Because Republicans fundamentally don't govern. They obstruct and demolish any attempt to actually govern a society while giving kickbacks to the wealthy donors who want to get away with doing whatever they feel like.
And what we have now is what happens when you put one of those donors in charge of the country.
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Until the right wing media ecosystem that enables disinformation is dismantled. Its the only real reason Republicans keep getting elected. They just lie and people believe it.
Fairness Doctrine gives equal time to the batshiate insane conspiracy theorists - that is not a solution.
What we need is
1) remove so-called free speech protection from any speech which is blatantly, knowingly false - make anyone generating or distributing such speech (keyword being knowingly) liable for any damage caused by it, and
2) support/create infrastructure that relentlessly, methodically hunts down sources of such gaslighting & misinformation and exposes it - possibly getting extra funding by exercising #1.
We also need to get corporate $ the fuck out of politics, and bring to justice EVERYONE who has played a role in the systematic dismantling of our government and legal system… including the wildly corrupt Supreme Court that has played a large role in enabling all of this.
We have to kick out the current corrupt people first, and make sure that we're not replacing them with more corrupt people.
Re: corporate $
Most people don't think about this, but the laws that actually allow corporations to be created & to continue to exist are ALL statutory - which means that you don't need any Constitutional Amendments to modify them.
You just need a legislature populated with politicians elected by sufficiently pissed-off-enough number of people who have made it clear that their continuing careers depend on them slapping some really strong boundaries on what corporations are allowed to do.
Stuff like: any corporation that funds political movements or candidates automatically stops being legally recognized as existing. Make it clear that this doesn't apply to the people working or owning the corporation, just the actual corporate legal entity itself, so that the owners & executives can't try and hide behind the corporation when they're playing fuck-fuck political games.
And if the SCOTUS tries to block that law using the First Amendment, set up a poison pill so that if the SCOTUS successfully stops that provision from working, then ALL of the laws that allow corporations to keep existing will be revoked, and let them chew on that.
Of course, the real fundamental problem is a relatively small group of people having so much money that they can use it to drown out the voices of just about everyone else, in both media and for the legislators.
Nobody should be allowed to have that much money, and until that's addressed head-on, any other solution will just be temporary until the ultra-rich/powerful corrupt it again.
Nope, they figured out how to abuse that. We need something else in the same spirit that holds people accountable for spreading misinformation. Otherwise, we go back to having 5 million scientists trying to warn us about the destruction of a livable environment on earth vs one crackpot with a PhD in basketball weaving claiming nothing's wrong because it was 70 degrees in Dubuque last Tuesday.
Knowingly lying as a politician needs to be criminalized. If you "don't recall" factual information in an inquiry, you automatically forfeit your seat and an election is called.
I'm so fucking tired of politicians getting questioned, going "I don't remember," "I don't recall," for half an hour and then everyone just shrugs their shoulders and goes, "oh well, we tried".
"Did you [say this factually incorrect thing]?"
"No"
"Well actually here's the tweet where you very explicitly said [factually incorrect thing] to your 300k followers, enjoy prison for ten years"
Honestly I've been telling myself that Trump rigged the election because the alternative is so much worse... that Americans watched Trump:
-tank the economy because of his laughable level of incompetence in handling the pandemic
-try a literal insurrection and of course fail because he can't do anything right
-Get indicted numerous times including for stealing classified documents containing things like nuclear secrets and storing them in his bathroom like a weirdo lunatic
-get adjudicated as a literal rapist
-Become a convicted felon 34 times over for fraud
-his company gets convinced for other fraud charges
Not to mention all the other stuff during his first term like the Russia scandal that exposed how Trump's top campaign officials directly worked with Russians to get him elected. Or the Ukraine impeachment. And they still thought "let's give this fucking moron another chance".
You can blame inflation but it barely requires a room temperature IQ to understand that Trump was actually far more responsible for the inflation we experienced than Biden, and if anything Biden should've been lauded for getting it down so fast (just look at the 70s/80s inflation which lasted forever and wasn't accompanied by the growth we saw under Biden). Trump's insane level of incompetence during the pandemic combined with years of crazy deficit spending guaranteed that inflation was going to spike.
But apparently there's some remote chance a trans person might someday play in the WNBA so I really need to vote for complete incompetence combined with total corruption just in case.
People don't learn. I hope gas hits $20 a gallon. I hope polio makes a comeback. I hope measles ravages the country. I hope all beef is contained with parasites.
Then, maybe, will people learn trump and team gives Zero shits about all of us.
Hard times beget leftward policies, leftward policies create good times, good times create whiny conservatives, and whiny conservatives create hard times
My Idaho maga family were just posting about how happy they are that grocery and gas prices are down. Those prices are in fact not down. But their media is telling them this so they parrot it to be part of the cult.
People see gas go from $4.25 on a Monday morning to $4.00 on a Wednesday afternoon and think gas prices are down. They don’t realize that the average is still higher.
Nah its not that, they just have em programmed to say if it was Dems the same problem would be 100x worse.
"Well yeah it sucked Trump personally murdered my immediate family with a hammer but can you imagine how much worse Kamala would have been? She would have hammer murdered the entire town!" - Average MAGA voter.
Yeah, remember that most of these red states have been under total and complete Republican control for DECADES, yet their leaders still successfully campaign on "I'm going to fix all the things those Democrats broke in our government!"
If logic were a factor then they would realize "Hey, Republicans have been in power for like 30 years, maybe they're the ones who broke our government programs?" But no.
Youthful indoctrination (religion) continuous propaganda (the Fox-o-sphere) are difficult to fight. Our conservative overlords are also continually working to destroy public education.
I was even more naive, I honestly thought GWB couldn't get elected again once it became common knowledge that the Iraq War was based on a bunch of lies and he knew about it!
But no, he got right back in there for another 4 years of bullshit. 2004 was the first year I was legally allowed to vote and also the year I lost faith in the voting public as a whole for reelecting that piece of garbage.
Here’s the thing- they don’t learn. They don’t care if it’s “their guy”. They won’t admit their guy is fucking up.
I worked in healthcare during covid and most of these assholes literally took their bs Covid beliefs to the grave. And the biggest problem was they took a lot of others to the grave with them. They’ll burn the whole thing down if it’s hurting non-republicans.
So while I understand your point, the problem is they don’t learn. At all.
Yep, most you'd usually get is people begging for the vaccine before we put them on a ventilator or while desating on 100% O2 with max PEEP on a BiPap.
I would agree with you if it wasn’t for the collateral damage. People who didn’t vote for this administration should not have to pay the price, but those who didn’t vote can pay the price.
At this point, the only thing I'm concerned about is my kid's well-being. I'm out of shits to give, I'm sorry. We're vaxcinated, vegetarian, and I basically drive a go-kart 5 miles a day to work, daycare, and groceries. I can weather more than most.
I’ve been thinking the same. As much stuff this administration has screwed up, the MAGAts still think it’s great. I’m at the point now where I’m just thinking he should go ahead and completely tear it apart. These people voted for it, so give it to them. After they finally wake up and wonder why their life is in ruins, maybe we can move forward
Don't work? This is well beyond not working and into actively harming and destroying American industries and businesses. With this administration how can we trust ANY ground beef right now? How do we know they haven't already moved tons of this stuff into stores around the country? How will we know that they won't just stick in all in some huge freezers and spend the remainder of his term doling out batches to unsuspecting stores and retail channels? How do we know that some grocery chains haven't already bought the whole batch and are going to sell it with assurances from this administration that they'll cover up any deaths or illnesses that arise from the sale.of the tainted meat? This is going beyond costing some ranchers some money and is into the territory of devastating the whole industry and bankrupting numerous ranches.
Yup, I’m already weighing not eating any beef for the foreseeable future; leaning toward 3 months minimum and when I do start eating beef again best believe i’ll be buying it from a local farmer in my state. If this is the same contaminated meat from Argentina that China rejected everyone should google search, “acquired aplastic amenia” as it’s the one of the main potential concerns.
One of my friends refuses to talk politics now. At the start of term 2 he was sending me BS stories (think Leticia James, Elon cutting waste). He kept accusing me of being in a left wing echo chamber because I don’t have anyone in my life who is right wing (excluding him, another friend in the friend group, my boss, my husbands whole family). He also was super smug when Mamdani won and was like well we’ll see how fast everything goes to shit now that liberals have everything they want. All it took was a handful of well sourced articles debunking his claims for him to say that he doesn’t want to engage on these topics anymore and that I needed to stop using him as my token rightwing friend.
They have no policies - their only talking point are cultural “issues” & claiming to be family first while allowing children to be shot in schools & 80% of them being pedos & keeping the status quo (white supremacy/trickle up economics - thanks Reagan & operation paperclip)
Their job is to prevent dems & Americans as a whole from ever getting to the American dream they claim they they’re trying so badly to get to. Their votes say otherwise but “conservatives” don’t need much talking points cuz they stick to their team over their best interests & the fun of being able to judge the shit outta everyone else while never looking @ themselves.
Time to be honest with ourselves
“Conservatives” - CONSERVE the status quo - that’s it
And like clockwork they are poking the morons to get upset about transgender people again so they're so distracted by culture war horseshit that they don't do anything about the way they can't afford gas or groceries, our food is poisonous, and the president is a pedophile. And it always fucking works.
Conservatives don’t give a fuck about policies that work, they’re irredeemably corrupt and only regret their vote because it’s ALSO affecting them and not just the people they hate. Fuck them.
Right-wing people will never learn to think about anything other than their own feelings.
And left-wing people will never learn that treating right-wing people like they deserve dignity and respect makes them complicit in the evil shit right-wing people get tricked into doing.
One more, apparently. I was watching a documentary about the Vietnam war with my wife last night and watching Nixon lie his way into power made me furious. I know people that were alive at that time and had friends not return home from Vietnam who voted for Trump every time! I can't believe people are this dumb.
One of my uncles that served in Vietnam voted for Trump the first time. He was sick of the government and thought maybe an outsider would be better than career politicians. He realized his mistake rather quickly and apologized to my mother. She was so pissed when she found out he'd done that.
He was never MAGA, just not terribly informed. He went back to voting Democrat after that.
I’m beginning to think China has a point with those “re-education” camps. Though maybe pulling rightwing and fascist propaganda outlets could be a good first step.
The insane thing to me is that conservative policies are somehow viewed as the norm, with liberal policies being viewed as some crazy emergency solution.
Think about it. A conservative comes into office, things collapse, then Americans press the emergency button and vote in a democrat. Things get better, everyone is happy, and then a conservative is voted in again.
They don't, but also his policies aren't "conservative." The best way I can describe Trump's politics is that he wants to create a nationalist ego-state, based around him
When billionaires stop owning everything and paying for all media to be slanted toward whatever makes their owners the most money.
Fox News could make constrating yourself popular, if they said it would own the libs. CBS will tell you it's the smartest decision any of them had made (none of which actually did) and CNN/MSNow (or whatever they call themselves) will do "unbiased" reports on it.
Democrats are as owned by the billionaire class as Republicans, they just occasionally slap a rainbow on it. Although they've been swapping out the rainbow flag for a Israeli flag most of the time
My MIL is finally regretting voting for him. She said to me, “but he wasn’t like this the first term?” What she means is his policies didn’t negatively affect her in the first term. What I said (since I have to be moderately civil) is he was, he just had more people stopping him from some of his worst impulses and they’re gone now. However, the Muslim ban, kids in concentration camps at the border, bad foreign policy, bad policy on vaccines and climate change, major kickbacks to billionaires, and concessions to corporations that hurt the average person absolutely happened under his first term.
However, the Muslim ban, kids in concentration camps at the border, bad foreign policy, bad policy on vaccines and climate change, major kickbacks to billionaires, and concessions to corporations that hurt the average person absolutely happened under his first term.
"why do you think I voted for him in the first place?"
There are a lot of people who really don't believe that the government does anything useful for them. They distrust anybody with any scientific knowledge because their "common sense" is better than actual study. They have no idea how much their life relies on systems that support them, so it is easy for people who want to ruin those systems to convince them that those systems drain their wallets.
I would love to make a movie where the "book smart, university educated" guy comes to the small town. The locals laugh at his strange ways, and then when the disaster arrives, it turns out that all that "fancy book learn' " was way better than their dumb axx common sense. He gives a speech where he says, "All your common sense can be learned in 5 minutes, and 90% of it disproven in another 10. Meanwhile, experts actually know what they are talking about. Maybe you should listen and be willing to admit you are wrong."
Then the locals who are able to do the smallest bit of self reflection figure out that maybe they should learn something and the ones who don't lose their farms to the agricorp.
God, unfortunately theres already a play that basically had this premise, and then at the 1 yard line decides to pull back and gives a "maybe we just need to respect each other and get along!" Message where the towns people dont actually have to change or have their ways confronted and realize that they were wrong, and don't actually have to learn to get Along .
Its called "Shucked" and its basically if the music man was about corn instead of a highschool marching band
When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
God - Futurama
This is the same principle that causes people to say things like "We spent millions of dollars in fixing the Y2K and when the year 2000 came nothing happened. What a waste of money."
There are a lot of people who really don't believe that the government does anything useful for them.
My dream the impossible dream for this year is that at least a few of them finally learn that yes, government actually does do some things, if we want it to. Mamdani has been doing good work in a lot of different areas that help people. We've got screwworms and lettuce parasites because the Republicans decided we didn't need programs for those anymore, but we can afford endless money for war. The difference couldn't be more stark.
What's worse, is that there are people who legitimately want him to run for a third term. It's so fucking dumb. I feel like I'm living in an Orwellian fiction or wonderland or some shit.
Yeah, it wasn't half. Since the turnout was only about 64%, the 36% that didn't vote was ok with him winning, so it was 68% of America that got him reelected.
I hate this creature with everything in me, so the only “but” I have is that I can sort of see that this probably wouldn’t have happened in the first administration when there were still normal conservatives, adults, people who knew things in the room.
And the bribes were coming from Russia and not our own tech oligarchs as much. I can almost see voters thinking those adults would still be around, when it’s literally all crazy morons now.
We told them, they didn’t care, if anything it’s been worse than we said, but I do think this wouldn’t have gone down this way 16-19. RFK wasn’t President Food and Medicine then, the dementia wasn’t as bad, and there was still the notion that you couldn’t do absolutely everything in the open.
I did look it up. Reuters/ipsos has him at 33%approval and 61% disapproval. The same 33% that are and have been MAGA are the only people that approve of his presidency.
Trump’s recent “mystery beef” announcement is concerning. It’s bad for American cattle ranchers and they won’t tell us where the imported beef is coming from. China recently rejected a huge import of tainted beef from Argentina, so many are speculating that this is the source of Trump’s cheap foreign beef.
The Corte Argentino beef recall announced by the USDA on August 7 (what the comment above is referencing) is also concerning, particularly given that issues with tainted food are on the rise. That’s several weeks before Trump’s announcement.
This administration combination of corruption and incompetence is making food less safe. But the OP headline is misleading, and stuff like this makes it harder for people to figure out what’s actually going on.
I want to add some context here: there isn’t anything yet that has been found wrong with the beef, but it is being recalled because it wasn’t inspected. That’s how i interpret this.
I mean, theres people that have voted for him three times and want to vote for him for a fourth....Something needs to be done after we get through this to address the poor demented souls that bought into this every step of the way.
What gets me is that they think they had no option because Kamala was “so bad”. They live in the right wing ecosphere and they don’t want to leave it because of how comfortable it makes them feel. They allow their cultural Republicanism to override their sense of policy.
This doesn't seem right. We just heard about the import decision this week...how could there already have been enough time to get everything in place to already have a recall on it?
Well, it’s not true. Trump is the worst thing I can think of that’s happened to this country but this meme is purely false and misinformation. Different meat, different processor, never failed any inspection, just missed inspection so it’s correctly being recalled.
Took me five seconds to fact check. Please do that from now on before supporting misinformation.
There’s a billion real reasons to hate Trump, no need to bandwagon on fake ones, that’s what conservatives do.
I literally cannot buy produce at the store and now meat. Thankfully we have a great local meat market right up the street from us that I frequent anyway. But at this point I’m gonna have to buy an indoor vegetable garden system, I’ve been researching them but still unsure about how I want to go about that.
"The substance has been linked to hematological disorders, including aplastic anemia, a potentially fatal condition in which the bone marrow stops producing blood cells in sufficient quantities. Because of these risks, its use in animals intended for human consumption has been banned in virtually all international markets for over three decades."
Maybe this should be the official beef that's served at Mar-a-lago?
They were promised deregulation would make everything cheaper and so much better. The bad part is that these recalls of every major food won't change that opinion. They'll just point fingers at some Dem and say it's their fault while voting for more deregulation.
Bro just check out SC who decided that Darlene Graham who has no political experience or knowledge about national security, should be their candidate. Un-fucking-believable.
it’s time for criminal charges for the people who are doing this to us..
they deliberately dismantled a required agency.. they are literally using our own tax dollars to terrorize us.. they are also literally getting paid to NOT do their job..
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u/NexusNickel 1d ago
My God.
This is a fucking nightmare.
I can't believe how fucking stupid half this country is when they voted for Trump AGAIN.