Sure, leopards eating faces and all that, only these people lack that kind of self awareness. As the leopard is eating their face, they’re sitting there telling themselves that this is simply an honest mistake by an administration that’s trying to do the right thing and would never hurt them on purpose.

Get ready to ride in the bicycle gutter and get yelled at by drivers for, like, existing.

There is, which is why the bungalow owners bitch endlessly about the skyscrapers ruining the view [of the 12 lane interstate]

God damn, Carl Sagan 360 no scoping the 2020s from the 80s and 90s.

Let me speak from experience that there is no such thing as an ironic Nazi. Every single “bro, it’s just a joke lol” is followed by a silent “…unless?”

Uncritical support for this.

The AI image really sends the fucking campiness. It’s hard to imagine that fucking bozo even living to a third term. I’m honestly surprised he hasn’t got sniped by atherosclerosis yet.

Tbh, a lot of the suck comes from zoning codes and car centric design. Here, watch this kickflip: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa

The cool thing is that, unlike economic systems, zoning codes are actually pretty easy to change. Your city council is in charge of that, and consistent, specific, and deliberate political pressure can still produce results at the local level. Right now, the only people showing up are the NIMBYs. We need people like you who want better cities to show up and demand them.

These aren’t contradictory. If you build up instead of out, it’s easier to save green spaces and make sure that they’re accessible. If you keep cars off the road with good public transit, less green spaces need to get paved to make ugly ass parking lots, you get fewer shitty drive throughs, you get more walkable spaces and small businesses instead of big box marts, and everything is generally less polluted and shitty.

The problem comes when everyone wants their own little slice of private green space (that is, suburbia). You eventually end up in a single family home desert with a 5 sqft yard and some fucking dork with too much time on their hands coming along to measure your grass with a ruler and bitching at you about how your car doesn’t look as nice as your neighbors’, and how it’s ruining the character of the neighborhood. Meanwhile you look over Steven’s shoulder and it occurs to you again how every house looks exactly the same, everything is artificial and sanitized looking, like you live in a CGI scene from the late 90s. How long has it been since you’ve seen a bird? Kids playing outside? When was the last time you wanted to go outside? The last time your kids wanted to go out? You got them a bike, but they never bothered to learn to ride it, it’s quietly rusting away in a corner of the garage. You tried taking it yourself one time and got yelled at by someone in the neighborhood after they almost ran you over while driving recklessly (and maybe drunk). Actually, isn’t there some insect apocalypse happening right now? Come to think of it, when was the last time you saw a ladybug or a butterfly? This all feels wrong. You tried to find the little dipper to show it to your kids a few weeks ago, but you couldn’t find it at all. You definitely remember seeing more stars as a kid. Maybe you should just refuse to cut the postage stamp lawn and let the tickets pile up, you’ll go into the woods and live off mushrooms, become a witch, and come back and terrorize your neighbors and grow trees in their living rooms. Where did that come from? Haha. Anyway, you don’t even know your other neighbors even though you’ve lived here for years. It’d be cool if there was some reason to run into them, like a shop or cafe down on the corner or something, but that doesn’t exist and you don’t want to bother anyone. You “oh, yeah, sorry” as Steven chides you to stop putting the garbage out the night before the garbage truck runs, and then bid him a nice day, even if you don’t mean it. No, Steven, I can’t go to your church this weekend. I’m, uh, busy.

We couldn’t even get our fellow countrymen to wear cloth masks without them screeching and guzzling horse dewormer. We’ve been demanding universal healthcare since at least the 90s; we got a fucking insurance marketplace instead, and the right wing has never stopped bitching about it to this day. If we could clean it up, we would have, but there’s a subset of our population that’s hopelessly propagandized. The only upshot here is that it tends to be a regional phenomenon and might be able to be addressed via balkanizing; just walk away from the table and let the fucking bozos be bozos in their own little bozoville.

Those who are really going to do things about stuff shouldn’t yap about it on social media. Loose lips sink ships.

Right now I’m in a holding pattern. There’s a non-zero chance that Trump will be distracted by something shiny and we’ll move on to the next fucking fever dream crisis. There’s also a really, really good chance that if he does order to invade Canada, real shit will start to pop off here.

As a Californian, I’m hella stoked for the future nation of Pacifica.

Good riddance to bad garbage.

Mitch is, frankly speaking, one of the most talented statesmen of our time, and he reliably used his powers to the detriment of all but a few of the wealthiest. Imagine if a moldy, watered-down Talleyrand was just a cynical jerk off that continually fucked everything up for everyone else in order to get a little microslice of the profits he made for a handful of people, and you’ve Mitch McConnell. He could have really achieved some great things for everyone if he hadn’t been doing them just for the ultra-wealthy.

The elites don’t want you to know this, but you can grow your own plants

I’m legitimately struggling to answer this right now. I have little pride for nations in general, and none whatever for ours at the moment. I have plenty of pride for individuals and groups that are trying to do the right thing, but there’s nothing unique to America in that regard.

I think we are. If you can think of something awful for us to do, we’re already on our way to doing it. We’re probably a month out from shooting garbage and nuclear waste into orbit on spaceX rockets.

I’m worried, I’m afraid to say. Our government has been compromised, and the republic is dead, we will have no more legitimate elections and it’s likely (imo) that our legislature will soon dissolve. I wish I could say that we were ever the America you were taught about, but it was always a farce. I’m almost to middle age and I’ve never once seen my country try to be the place it tells itself it is. It’s always been a place that beats its chest while sitting on the couch and reminiscing about how cool it was on the high school sports team; that steps on the weak and the poor to satisfy the rich and the powerful. I’ve always believed we could do better, that we could be the place we tell ourselves we are, but we never choose to do the hard work to be that place.

Though Ukraine will likely persist as an ulcer for the remainder of Putin’s life. The good news is twofold:

• we still haven’t cracked immortality, and one day probably quite soon, Putin’s number will be called.

• Europe is stepping up to the plate now that the US has shit its pants and is currently waddling off the field. Take my energy, Goku!

Potatofamine carbomb

I like that defibrillator theory, though usually I’ve seen patients react with pain when it goes off. Maybe the disengagement is him going into v-tach and his blood pressure tanking before it pops him.

As for Musk covering for the dementia, I doubt it. If you look at Trump’s transcripts over the years, he’s had a propensity for dementia soup when he speaks for a while now, but his supporters just dismiss it, hear what they want, and say it’s fake news. I don’t see why they’d suddenly be worried about it now. No, this is Musk just plain old taking the driver’s seat.

Okay, here we go

• The US is fucking YUGE. Historically speaking, it’s very, very difficult to keep countries that span huge geographic areas together. There seems to be some fundamental limit of size per population that can be tolerated before your cultural and geographic differences start becoming significant enough to start forming separate identities. The US has like 14 such subregions, and each one has a little different idea of what “America” means to them. A strong single national identity is not the default case here, you’ve got to really work at it or have some big unifying cause, which we no longer have.

• We already have pre-fabricated governments in the form of state governments. State governments tend to be pretty strong, in the sense that they tend to have a whole lot of administrative capacity, much stronger imo than what I believe of European provincial governments. The whole original idea was that the states were mostly independent states joined together under a trade federation and its government. Of course, it hasn’t been that for a long time, but that’s the root that we grew up from.

• We have almost no history of state on state violence, and most Americans do share some sense of national identity. Maybe not a strong one anymore, but it’s there. I think most people would be pretty shocked about the idea of going to war with another state.

• This isn’t really an ideological separation, as much as the federal government is just, like, vanishing in a puff of smoke. There’s a lot of states where they’ve depended on the federal government’s administrative capacity to handle stuff, and that’s just going away in a real haphazard, scattershot way. At some point, these states will ask themselves “if we’re handling all this shit ourselves, what the hell are we sending the Fed tax dollars for?”