It’s incredible how quickly our politicians managed to be paid off to fuck that one up.

Only one? “Ukrainian liberal trans communists” is probably pretty high up there in his scapegoat list.

To conservatives, “handling” a region where the population is a different skin color and religion is removing it. So—if you asked Trump’s supporters, you would get an enthusiastic “yes” as a response.

You’re making a very big leap in assuming I don’t condemn the Democrats and their attempt to convince voters everything is fine.

They’re a party led by geriatric, upper-class rulers. No shit, their doubling down on “the economy is fine” didn’t work—they don’t understand or care to understand what the people want. All they care about is what their corporate donors pay them to care about.

The failings of the Democrat Party don’t absolve rural conservatives and undereducated voters of their part in this, though. The literal definition of economy is the wealth and resources of a country as a whole. The economy was doing fine because we had our lovely billionaires and mega corporations consolidating all the wealth and skewing that number while the average person was under growing financial pressure.

The problem was—and still is—the wealth disparity. We have multimillionaires and billionaires absorbing more and more money from the 99% while paying a pittance back towards helping the people they’re screwing. They get to dodge taxes by reinvesting their profits into assets they own, hoard resources, and act with impunity.

A voter base that took the time to understand what they were asking for would have seen straight through Trump’s sensationalist bullshit, not barreled straight into it. It should have been obvious that he wasn’t going to fix wealth disparity. He associates himself with the billionaires, he sees himself as one of them, and he wants to keep it that way. He doesn’t give a single shit about wealth disparity, let alone ever acknowledge it as the problem. Instead, he won his campaign on vague promises about a word that means something completely different to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that cast their ballot for him.

If you grew up in the south, yes.

The economy wasn’t “doing fine” for more than half the population.

People who think like that are the reason Trump got elected.

the economy ≠ standard of living

The problem was purchasing power, wages, and inflation. People’s standard of living was suffering, but the “economy” wasn’t. Conflating the two is why Trump’s stupid rhetoric resonated so much with the uneducated Magats that voted him in: they thought he was promising to fix their standard of living, while the reality was that he was promising to “fix” something that wasn’t broken.

I prefer removing the -french language pack on every install. The command comes with a typo though, so you need to fix that for it by adding /* at the end

“China probably will eat those tariffs.”

Lucky China, they at least get to eat something.

Not be that guy, but the person you’re replying to isn’t exactly wrong in saying “every vote counts is wrong” in some cases.

Being pedantically literal, yes, every vote is counted.

The reality of First Past The Post voting and the Electoral College is that the only votes that “count” insofar that they actually affect the outcome of an election are votes for the winning party. Now add on to that the common understanding that both major parties only care about what their corporate donors have to say, and that individual voter participation isn’t likely to influence anything other than the party campaign strategy for the next election.

That means that if enough people vote as a collective to flip which party wins, then and only then does their vote count for anything meaningful. People should vote anyways, but it’s not hard to see why someone might be just a little bit disenfranchised when their participation in the democratic process seems to result in nothing but wasted time because they live next to a bunch of a conservative hicks.

You are absolutely right about smaller state and local elections, though. Those are where each vote actually has a chance to be meaningful.

The only difference would be his location.

If it means collecting more taxes and finding new excuses to send minorities to the El Salvador concentration camp, it will magically find funding before next week.

A tankie is a hardcore authoritarian communist. They’re people who support governments and politics like Russia, China, and North Korea. Nearly everyone who learns of them can’t stand them, and they don’t have any support outside their own echo chambers or as “useful idiots” to authoritarian governments.

Anyone who says tankies are a bigger threat to the US than the Trump administration is either stupid or using it as a strawman to tactily support Trump.

In a Musk-approved world:

• You’re hit by a Tesla in FSD mode, the driver gets sued for not driving.
• You’re hit by a fully autonomous Tesla taxi, you get sued for vandalism.
• You’re the driver and FSD hit someone, you get sued.
• You’re the owner and the car hits someone while you’re not in it, you get sued for owning it.
• You’re the owner and it catches fire with you inside, you(r estate) gets sued for “not maintaining it”.

Is there no law enforcements with weapons in your courts?

American cops don’t protect American people. First and foremost, they protect their own. Beyond that, they protect the establishment that gives them their authority.

Same. We got not-the-onioned

Bro, if people hate you and you company enough to employ and pay others to protest, then you and your company must be an all new level of shitty.

His people—conservatives—don’t follow logic. They have a victim complex and see anything that negatively affects them as someone else’s fault and not the consequences of their own actions. If there isn’t an obvious perpetrator, they scapegoat one into existence.

I’ve debated some of these people and it’s hopeless trying to get them to connect the dots. You can keep presenting them with logic and evidence, and they keep shifting the goalposts and changing the topic to justify their beliefs. A summary of one of my attempts to convince someone that Trump isn’t universally beloved by average Americans went roughly like this:

• “Trump has improved the average citizen’s quality of life”
• “Then why are there 5 million protesters coming out every month?”
• “I haven’t heard of any large protests”
• (links to 50501 Wikipedia page)
• “They’re ‘protesters’ funded by the left”
• “All 5 million of them? That would be extremely expensive, even if it’s just $100 a person. Nobody could afford that.”
• “Remember, all the billionaires are Democrats” (Thiel? Musk?)
• “That’s not even their playbook. It’s cheaper and more effective for them to lobby for changes that benefit themselves.”
• “But they can’t do that anymore because Trump is in charge, so now paid protesters are their preferred choice”
• “Suppose they are paid. With 5 million people, there’s absolutely no way that they’re being paid will remain secret.”
• “OK fine, maybe it’s only a couple hundred thousand being paid.”

I don’t doubt that some tiny handful of people would be paid to protest for some reason or another, but I highly doubt it’s anywhere close to what MAGA conservatives think. IMO, it’s more likely that protesters would be paid by the other side to make the protest violent so they could crack down on them.

If we can’t have lead paint, we can always have lead food dye /s

It’s pretty disheartening to help someone find old media and they show a giant box of USB sticks and hard drives.

Equally disheartening is knowing that both of those have a shelf-life. Old USB flash drives are more durable than the TLC/QLC cells we use today, but 15 years sitting unpowered in a box doesn’t have very good prospects.

That’s kind of the problem I’m getting at.

If the Supreme Court isn’t stepping in and threatening real, immediate consequences laid out by themselves, Trump and friends are pretty much free to ignore it. They don’t respect lower courts, and they’re insulated from consequences handed out by lower courts anyway.

If Boasberg wants to hold them in contempt, what can actually be done? Consequences applied to them as a collective mean nothing (they’ll just ignore them again), so the only thing that can actually scare them is seeing personal consequences like asset seizure or jail time.

Suppose they are threatened with jail time, though. They have a complicit SCOTUS protecting them as individuals. The Supreme Court would step in and either take four years to decide whether that specific punishment is warranted/justified/allowed, say the lower court doesn’t have the authority to punish an individual member of the administration for the actions of the entire administration, or any other manner of bullshit excuse.

The punishment has to come from the Supreme Court, and it has to be something that the members of the administration are actually scared of. Anything other than that is all bark and no bite.

Edit: Bad explanation on my part.

I appreciate the optimism, but I really don’t think they’re going to listen to this one. SCOTUS rulings without clearly defined and severe consequences for both the administration and members of the administration are effectively toothless. Without those being up-front and the court prepared to act upon immediately, Trump’s administration is free to ignore the ruling and carry out their plans while the court spends time fighting amongst itself internally about how to respond. By the time they come up with something and act on it, it’s too late and likely too much of a slap on the wrist to be an effective deterrent.

I italicized the word “might” in my last comment for a reason, unfortunately. The Supreme Court can be a threat to the Trump administration, but they need to be organized, unified, ready to act, and unwilling to pull punches. If they’re going to be effective, they have to be prepared and willing to respond to and immediately shut down the “shock and awe” tactic being used. No waiting, no delaying, no debating. That’s what the administration is counting on to get away with their bullshit: the courts not being fast enough to stop them while also not being harsh enough to actually punish the individuals in its leadership with personal consequences.

On a darker note, if the SCOTUS ever does get their shit together and do that, it’s probably going to lead to another January 6 the first time it happens. I can’t see Trump accept being blocked by the court and punished without crying to his cult about “an attempted coup by the Supreme Court.”