How do you define “violent aggression” then?

If someone poisons the air you breathe or the water you drink, is that violent aggression? Because there’s a long history of corporations knowingly doing just that to communities they believed were powerless to stop them.

If officers under the color of law routinely harass members of your community, openly admitting that they can choose who they want to stop under perfectly legal pretextual stops and then find a reason to beat or intimidate you, is that violent aggression?

Violent aggression can take many forms. What does violent aggression look like? If I buy the company that employs the people in your town and then fire everyone and move it overseas so I can make more money, that’s aggressive certainly, it will cause suffering, is it violent? Is violence just physical force? If I put a sheriff between me and the violence, if I use economic means but then enforce them at the barrel of someone else’s gun, am I being violent or are they?

Violence up close is easy to define, but how many layers of indirection do we need for violent acts to become ok. Politics is all about choices and a lot of choices end up harming a great number of people. We are living through and will continue experiencing natural disasters super charged by climate change. Communities flooded and burned down and destroyed by hurricane force wind, all because a few people would like to have more money and convinced some politicians that it was ok. Is that violence?

Sure if I said I was going to burn your house down that’s violent, but if I aggressively pursue bribing (sorry, lobbying) politicians so that they will support policies that my own scientists tell me will result in your house burning down, is that still violence?

That’s the real question people struggle with.

This has real “let them eat cake” vibes

Eggs have traditionally been one of the cheapest staple sources of protein for the working poor.

The right is living out their wet dream right now, in charge of almost every facet of the federal government.

And your concern is that people aren’t being nice enough to them and their supporters.

Collaborators can eat shit

There’s no way a busty woman talking about bitcoins could honeypot any of these people. No sir. These young men are definitely above that sort of thing and no enemy of America would be wise enough to take advantage of these young lads.

Nope, totally safe and secure. We should all sleep soundly tonight knowing some 19 year old has access to our national treasury under the order of a ketamine addict.

You know what they say when you are at the top of a global order and reap substantial benefits from having that coveted position?

Blow it all up and hope that it’ll come out better by having you… at the top… which is where you already were… hold on.

The republicans are bringing back fascism but they are at least doing awful things their constituents want.

I disagree with these things, but they deliver on their stupid backwards promises.

I’ve voted for the democrats for my entire adult life, the very first vote I cast was for John Kerry.

Here’s the thing though. Are you a liberal, you wonder why the party is hated, have you ever seen Last Week Tonight?

Jon Oliver gets on tv every week and talks about some horrible problem that started with Reagan or Nixon and has just been going strong ever since. There are so many of these. And which ones can I look at and go “well the democrats sure did fix X when they finally had the levers of power”

I can’t think of a single thing. The most important project they’ve undertaken was the ACA, and I don’t know if entrenching health insurance companies permanently and legally into the fabric of our nation is all that much to celebrate.

Do they do some good things from time to time, sure. You can point to a policy here or there that are nice. But it’s a party of not-even-half-measures.

Can we have single payer? No How about a public option? No What can you do? Romneycare… great

Can we have immigration reform? No What can you do? DACA and that’ll be rescinded the moment we lose power.

Can we reign in the banking sector? Nah

Can we close Guantanamo? Too difficult

Can we enshrine the right to abortion in law? No, but we will ask justices to pinky swear… oh they just removed it, nevermind

Can we do anything to help the common man? Let me check with the donors, nah they don’t like that, but if you like some tweets about how trump is bad, I’ve got those for you.

A party that refuses to use the power you give it is not much use.

And before you type up your essay about how Ackshually! There was only one weekend in 2009 when they could have passed any kind of legislation at all. Fucking stuff it. Then they should have sat there all goddamn weekend and passed bill after bill fixing this shit box nation. Their lack of any kind of foresight and planning and doing anything but building a better and better donation collection machine has led us to fascism.

They can collect a billion goddamn dollars but have to text me to see if I can give them just $27 more dollars before they can pass a bill. We need a new party to represent the people.

These South African immigrants like musk attempting to subvert the will of the American people are the truest threat.

A billion dollars is a hard sum of money to wrap your head around. There is basically no ethical way to make a billion dollars. If you have a billion dollars it’s because you’ve stiffed a lot of people a lot of the value they created and kept it for yourself.

Boston Market. It might try to convince you it’s upscale homemade, but it’s just kfc in another wrapper

The Dems raised billions for the election and lost. What did I receive after donating thousands of dollars to them.

Pleas for more money. Give us just a little bit more money and we will finally do something.

I’m done. We should fight the fascists but the corporate democrats have been completely captured. They only know how to raise money and hand it to consultants that will tell them to parade around Liz fucking Cheney.

I’m not paying them to slide further and further to the right anymore.

What a weird way to spell “will” I mean they missed every letter, “could” some editor must be real embarrassed.

Speech and debate clause.

Someone should read that on the floor

Republicans love a good scam

Next up is the dismantling of the ACA. They will roll out these amazingly cheap alternatives. Health insurance for $10 a month!

So the poor and the stupid will sign up. They’ll go to the bar and saunter up to a “libtard” and tell them that trump fixed everything.

Then when they get sick and try to use MAGA super plan plus premium they won’t be able to find a doctor. The $10/month plan only covers an annual trip to a CVS minute clinic. They’ll go on Facebook and write up how the goddamn liberals tricked him. Other faithful republicans will pray for them and tell them that it must be a glitch because trump made things better.

The con will win because it’ll only hurt those without power.

USA USA USA

The Dems also keep running as Republican Light. But if you are interested in Republican Light you’ll probably just vote Republican.

I think Jon Stewart had a good assessment of this the other night and the fact that the messaging coming out of the DNC is “we lost for running too far left” means they will try again next time too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKBJoj4XyFc

Quick note on this one

Pedestrians are not expected to look out for traffic, but are not allowed to just cross anywhere. So it balances out.

If you end up driving, pedestrians are not allowed to cross anywhere (although some places like New York have legalized crossing anywhere) but pedestrians always have the right of way. You can’t run people over because they crossed outside a crosswalk.

So if on foot, use crosswalks or you could get a ticket for jaywalking. If in a vehicle, don’t hit pedestrians.

That was also Biden’s platform. It worked then because we were still in the grips of covid

White cows make normal milk, brown cows make chocolate milk. That’s just science

I do sometimes wonder if it’s a skill issue, but that feels like a really dangerously self serving position to take, that people that disagree with me are just too dumb.

I like to think that I’m a relatively smart person, I have a very technical job and there’s very few situations where I don’t understand what’s going on (although there’s definitely plenty). Sometime though I’ll be out and about in my life and meet people that just don’t seem to have any idea how extremely basic, to me at least, things work. How does compounding interest work, how does insurance work, why should I put money into a retirement account. Not fresh adults either, people in their 30s / 40s / 50s who just seem content not understanding relatively basic things.

The world preys on these people, if someone doesn’t understand compound interest then you can really bamboozle them. If you don’t see the value of having insurance because you work out and are “healthy” and then suddenly get cancer or some other disease that doesn’t give a shit about how much you can bench, you are fucked.

There is a part of me that thinks that for a lot of people the world is a confusing and unknowable mystery. I mean, it’s not really, but the amount of effort to figure those things out is just too high for them to give a shit. And I think about how weird it would be to go through life like that. At the mercy of forces you don’t understand, and then some guy comes up and says “everything’s fucked up but I can make it great” and because you already don’t know how shit works you think “awesome, because I’m drowning in medical debt because I didn’t think I needed insurance and got screwed over”

I think about this person I met once, I was building planning and projection software and their job was to perform projection calculations for inventory ordering. I watched, in horror, as they tabbed away from excel to manually add up some figures. This is excel, what are you doing?! I showed them the sum function thinking that they would be happy. Then they looked at me and said “that’s too complicated, I’ll just do it myself”

Wild, that was too complicated. It taught me an important lesson though about how everyone’s bar for complicated is different. I think for a lot of people “how does insurance work” is too complicated. “What’s a tariff and how does it work” is too complicated. So it just comes down to “do I trust the person talking”

Yea I remember this same thing. He won and they were even angrier.

Because it’s not like trump being in the White House is suddenly going to make women not be immediately repelled when they show up, mansplain Joe Rogan, and call her a femoid.

They fell for it again. This time he’s really really gonna make it great. Him and jd Vance have some really novel ideas about lowering the age women can get married and making it impossible to get divorced, so finally they can have a child bride or some shit.

It’s super gross and I hope they end up jerking it to trump fanfic every night crying themselves to sleep.