OpenStars

I don’t follow you. They are BOTH the capitalist party, though not equally so. Also, voting for one side vs. the other does not mean that you agree with EVERYTHING that they do - in fact it is more common these days to vote against the other side and ignore what your own might plan or actually do. Nor is it true that avoiding voting - e.g. for mental or physical health reasons - means that someone does not care at all about what happens as a result of the election. Plus, a rather ENORMOUS fraction of people in the USA could skip a particular vote and it would not make the tiniest iota of difference, due to the electoral college system, though that heavily depends on where you live, and also trends to be more true the larger the region impacted (federal > state > county), whereas local elections could turn on a dime and also make a huge impact regardless of what goes on in upper levels - e.g. federal sends monies to help people but locals turn that aid away b/c “reasons”.

Unpopular opinion alert: I dare to say that many people who should NOT be voting - especially those who do little to no research beforehand - would vastly improve the outcome of elections by NOT voting, and thereby contribute more that way than they do now, by actually voting, where they tend to just magnify the votes of whatever the TV & radio talk show people (or more recently, pastors behind the pulpit) tell them to do. The latter makes the USA even more of a plutocracy than later, when the votes get ignored and the rich get whatever they want regardless of who got elected does.

deleted by creator

Hehe, nothing to see here, these are not the stories you are looking for, move along :-P

In the wild, it is rare to see a predator before it strikes. Have you ever seen one of those games where there is a picture and you are supposed to find it… but you can’t, even zooming in and scanning every section, and then even when the answer is shown you can barely make it out? In the wild, prey aren’t supposed to evade death - the entire food chain is predicated on that fact. Ofc the predator still has to cross the distance between it and the prey, but lulling it into a sense of complacency is the first part of its successful strategy, then it waits for the prey to turn its head, and only THEN does it pounce. Sorry if this is upsetting but it’s very relevant I promise you, and in no way shippable for this conversation.

So in the wild, if I ever were to see this large fat orange buffoon, bumbling around while making wild hooting noises, actively trying to get noticed by saying whatever manages to get the most reaction from everyone around, I think I would be wisest to run away. Crucially though, not from the orange thing - which has no obvious teeth or claws or anything at all harmful - but from whatever it is that may be following it (whether the orange thing has any knowledge of that or not), waiting to take advantage of the distraction that it provides.

Whether any particular person wins the next election or not, there are always more willing to step up in their place - more Republicans, more Democrats, etc. - and a smart predator is ready to take advantage of whichever side wins in order to get what they want.

Sorry if you thought I was building up to some point worth knowing about - I have found no solutions, only more layers of problems the further deep you dig into these matters.:-( I will say that often when you meet Trump supporters irl, they can be very kind people - they are mislead, but aren’t we all? It is the system that is broken, not solely them (obviously outliers exist, on both sides, and no they are not remotely close to being equal <cough>KKK<cough>, but nor is the problem uniquely on one side vs. the other either, plus the whole division between “sides” is working out VERY well to Putin’s benefit, hence making me question just how much involvement his agencies have with the recent Civil War style divisionist thinking that is currently fashionable).

I think all we can do is question what we see, and compare it against what we KNOW to be true. Which not everyone is capable of - e.g. who has the luxury of that kind of time? A great place to start, imho, is to recommend watching https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs.

Counterpoint: the rich want to get richer, and the lapdogs want their bribes, and the lazy folks in the middle can only be motivated by fear (not even greed works anymore, e.g. for retirees who already got theirs), so to break out of this cycle would take… … …

I have no clue.

On the bright side, Kbin is showing a picture of absolutely gorgeous cherry blossoms 🌸 in the snow for this post. :-P

Just at a guess, people who say that surely must be factoring in medical healthcare costs, to deal with the consequences of obesity and such.

Welcome to late-stage capitalism, where companies sell what you do not want to buy. e.g., no wired connection has ever once had this problem, but they had to sell more thingies, so now everything is bluetooth, whether it should be or not, plus it seems like nobody ever bothered to finish implementing bluetooth - e.g., this exact issue you are having, which surely could be fixed except… why bother, when you (& your neighbors) have already bought all the thingies?

But once you pay farmers to grow corn, they have to sell it somewhere. Hence HFCS, and corn oil, and corn gas, and ofc corn corn, and… The then-head of NIH Francis Collins was once asked what single thing Americans could do to be healthier - he said to eat better, especially less sugar, and Congress could remove the farming subsidies, or at least expand them from beyond corn & soybean to include fruits & vegetables. They laughed in his face. Ain’t nobody got time for 'dat!

The single worst part of it all is that those subsidies were put into place when a huge fraction of aspiring volunteer soldiers were turned away in WWII due to “malnutrition”. Thus the campaign was born to literally fatten up America. It worked!!! And it will continue to work… forever, bc once you create a voting block, ending it or even redirecting (towards a healthier end for us all, but lower profits for Monsanto in the short term) seems next to impossible. It actually is a good argument against socialism, at least in the USA where the government is so enormously susceptible to special interest groups (although there are even better arguments against capitalism so I don’t mean to say that it PROVES that socialism is bad, just that it is one example of its misuse, when the government is in charge of something and also the government is stupid; and before anyone says it, yes this situation is an argument against both at the same time:-P).

An excellent documentary about it, most of what I’m saying here is from part 4: https://www.hbo.com/the-weight-of-the-nation/season-1. I know, filmmakers can be… uninformed some(MANY MANY)times, but this was done as a joint venture between the FDA and NIH, so this is highly credentialed. Also trigger warning; it will make you very very sad watching this, bc facts in this era of end-stage capitalism tend to do that, so if you do not want to see things like mothers feeding their 300 pound 10-year old an enormous meal of pasta - literally killing them right before your eyes, slowly and painfully - then… well, I did warn you at least.

But the anti-romance dialogues were pretty fun too… (choose one person, then the others get mad at u:-P)

Kotor also encouraged replays with all options so that you could try the variety of romance situations:-).

Sadly, that part comes later as well:-(.

The only bright side is that after the adjustment period, Earth is going to be just fine - no lie! (Humans living on it though… that’s a bit of a different story now…😞)

I love this bit:

There is apparently no suggestion that South America is fictional nor has the existence of New Zealand so far been questioned.

It’s just fuck Australia in particular, everything else is fine. :-P

Regexps are awesome! And also not at the same time:-P. 🎉 Congrats👏!:-)

As Global Warming slowly kills us all, try to enjoy it!:-) 😭

Every single time the FCC tries to do absolutely anything (no matter how modest), the telecom industry works with the GOP to first demonize the proposal (or regulatory nominee as we saw with Gigi Sohn) as extreme, and then set about working to dismantle it. Usually successfully. And often with the help of Democrats.

A study on astroturfing on Reddit, written in the style of Reddit by an astroturfer - oh the delicious irony? :-P

Okay, a fair point, but… we were talking about abortion:-D. (also, can we stop, or is it a stipulation somewhere in the contract that we must send? perhaps any time they are “attacked” we must automatically send a certain amount? there may be more there than the for-profit news media is willing to tell us, thinking that we are too dumbp to undermastand so they instead just focus on emotional one-liners that generate more clicks…)

That’s probably the gist of it right there in fairness - he could have tried harder. Then again, he knows what’s what, and like (a) the mess he inherited from the previous occupant of the job took an enormous amount of effort to deal with, like basically ALL of the efforts, really, that were to spare (and things like the border crisis, huge spike in homelessness, greedflation, etc. continue onwards even now), and so (b) to have fought the good fight would have come at the cost of enormous political capital that would have prevented other things from happening. Thought experiment: what would Dems be willing to give up, in order to have made a useless (I mean purely in the sense of doomed to failure in the short term, though ultimately such things may need a coordinated effort over many years) attempt to appear to try to codify Roe v. Wade? Would we have been willing to sacrifice funding for Ukraine? Passing a budget for the year at all? College loan remittance? Political capital has limits, so in order to work towards that goal, something else must be sacrificed, that’s just reality.

Also, unpopular opinion alert - or rather, adjacent to one, in the service of a deeper understanding - women are not prevented from having abortions, at least on the federal level. If a state such as Florida or Texas etc. prevents such a thing, then don’t live in those states? There are MANY things going on in those states - book burnings, teacher shortages, also libraries, also doctors/nurses, also basic infrastructure, the list just goes on forever - and Biden is merely one old man, so what is he being asked to do, replace Jesus in those states? There is only so much that he or any one person could do. e.g., when a Supreme Court seat opens up, that’s when he can do a lot to work towards his goal, but I cannot say this loudly enough, even as a President he cannot pass laws. He can be part of a solution but he cannot be the entirety of one. Nor should he be.

“Successful”? Ah, I see, you think they are making their choices strategically, rather than emotionally. Interesting. :-D

I kid, but there actually is strategy involved there - by saying that their votes cannot be “counted on”, they could be attempting to wrangle additional concessions.

Ofc there is a bunch of nonsense going on as well - e.g. blaming Biden for not managing to codify Roe v. Wade, in this Congress!? They would have a better chance of asking to go to the moon - that is expensive but at least possible in theory!:-P I mention Congress ofc bc that is the government body that passes laws - the Presidency enforces, maybe vetoes, but does not make laws, so having a President receptive to and even someone who heavily pushes for a certain thing is not sufficient. Contrary to popular opinion, the Presidency has many limitations, and you do not simply show up to vote and somehow life gets “all better”, as some seem to think. Young people can be quite inexperienced and naive sometimes.

Then again, it was not young people that gave us Trump, and if they choose not to bail this country out again a second time, especially if they vote their conscience as a result of Israel (right or wrong mind you, in fact especially the latter), I will not be blaming the least experienced among us as the scapegoat to all of life’s problems… It should not be the case that it is up to those least prepared to deal with a situation, to be the deciding factor that “saves” us all - and the fact that we continue to ignore this aspect every time the young people show up to do so, shows how perilous the situation truly is. Maybe next time they won’t? If so, then we never deserved saving in the first place… bc that’s not freedom, to continually lie in the shadow of destruction.