The 20 with billions.
They likely couldn’t win - at least couldn’t be sure of winning - on the at least somewhat level and rules-based playing field US law and policy established, which is exactly why they’re currently focusing on co-opting or destroying all of that.
By the time they’re done reshaping government and society, they’re going to be unstoppable. By design.
Yep.
The class war is already happening, and the moneyed class is winning it because they’re the only ones fighting it.
No shit.
X and Meta didn’t eliminate their mechanisms for limiting misinformation for nothing.
Trump and his oligarchs, even with as angry and stupid as their supporters tend to be, aren’t going to be able to keep stringing them along long enough to fully destroy liberty, democracy and justice and implement their planned plutocratic autocracy without a whole lot of lies. So they have to be able to spread those lies. That’s why they very deliberately made it so that their lies would be unchecked on the social media they control. And they’ve already started taking advantage of that.
It’s like Americans watching all of this still want to think it’s happening to someone else, somewhere else. They’ve only made it as far as looking around from time to time and going, “Huh… that’s strange. I thought I saw a jackboot for a moment there.”
threatening coverage for over 20 million Americans.
As intended.
Privatized insurers may gain more control, further escalating costs for remaining coverage options.
And as intended.
If you’re not a billionaire, you will be a serf, a slave, or a corpse.
Ah …
I’ve been wondering what Trump gave the Chinese in exchange for that cringeworthy credit as the supposed savior of TikTok.
Ah… yes.
It became obvious to me that something was up with the announcement a while back that said, once you sifted through all the diversionary puffery and bullshit, that .world was going to follow Vichy Twitter’s and Meta’s lead and allow hate speech and misinformation.
But I assumed they were doing that for the same reason Meta is - to suck up to Big Baby Fascist. I hadn’t considered that they were doing it to suck up to Meta.
Now it all makes sense.
My assumption would be that “singular” is understood to only refer to quantities of one, so “plural,” though it’s commonly thought to mean more than one since that’s far and away its most common usage, actually necessarily refers to any quantity other than one.
Broadly, .world is fairly obviously mirroring the sycophantic policies of X/Meta/Reddit.
The only real question I have is whether it’s primarily rooted in ambition or fear - whether the admin are actively trying to be admitted to the ranks of Trump-approved™ social media, or if they’re just afraid that if they don’t kowtow, they’re going to get TikToked.
There’s a world of difference between “a troll” and “just a troll.” I expect you know that.
And you’ve evaded my point, so I’ll repeat it, broken down into bite-sized pieces:
The sieg heil didn’t cause direct and measurable harm in and of itself.
Meanwhile, there are many things that this administration is actively doing right this moment that are causing and will cause direct and measurable harm.
Every single bit of energy and attention spent on the sieg heil is energy and attention NOT spent on them.
That’s not an accident.
Musk is a troll.
Don’t feed the troll.
Every bit of energy and attention expended on the sieg heil is a bit of energy and attention that’s NOT being expended on any of the actions being taken and policies being enacted by Trump and the oligarchs right this moment for the direct and explicit purpose of destroying liberty and democracy in the US.
The sieg heil is performative. It’s a symbol. In and of itself, it causes no direct harm.
However, a terrifying number of the actions that Trump is actually taking - directives he’s issuing and policies he’s implementing -are causing and will cause direct and measurable harm.
They need to be the focus, and the sieg heil is a distraction from them.
And that’s not an accident. Musk is a troll.
It’s likely not quite the case that treason has no consequences now.
Actual treason, no matter how egregious, has and will have no consequences if it benefits Trump.
But at the same time, it’s pretty much certain that the definition of “treason” is going to just be shifted a bit so that it only applies to opposition to Trump, but will include everything all the way down to just saying mean things about him. And that will very definitely have consequences, and quite often fatal ones.
Except of course it is obvious, and the only delusion here is the farcical idea that there’s some legitimate explanation for the known facts unfolding the way they did.
Since you’ve so definitely rejected my explanation for why and how these particular facts unfolded as they did, you certainly must have some alternative explanation.
So let’s see it.
And still fucking Democrats are sitting in their comfy enclaves with the “good” billionaires, wringing their hands over how they just can’t seem to find the right “messaging” to convince the sweaty plebes that they know what’s best for them.
All it would take to start winning elections is for them to get up off of their soft, pampered asses and get out there and actually listen to some ordinary people for a change, find out what they want, then fucking well set about actually delivering it for them.
So pretty obviously what happened here was that Trump and the Chinese authorities struck a deal by which Trump would be given credit for not enforcing the ban that both he and Biden had already said they had no intention of enforcing.
The interesting question is: what did Trump give China in exchange?
The psychopaths in power are afraid that Israelis might come to see Palestinians as actual human beings, which would complicate their genocidal goals.
No, it doesn’t much matter.
The DNC is more galling though, since serving the interests of the wealthy and empowered few isn’t all that far removed from legitimate conservative ideology. All the GOP really has to do to make it a more or less valid expression of their claimed advocacy is to invoke some variation of “trickle-down,” so they can claim that what’s good for the oligarchs is good for everyone. It’s a lie and at some level they know it’s a lie, but it’s a relatively small one in the grand scheme of things.
For the DNC though, serving the interests of the wealthy and empowered few is diametrically opposed to what the claim to represent, and doing it requires an enormous and complex web of lies and deceit. So even beyond the fact that they’re betraying the ideals I prefer, they just offend me more on principle because their deception is so far removed from even vague legitimacy.
It’s sort of like the difference between being assaulted by a bouncer and being assaulted by a nurse. You end up the same either way, but at least from the bouncer it’s not unexpected. There’s an entire additional layer of evil when it comes from someone whose whole identity is wrapped up in not doing precisely what they in fact are doing.
I think it proves me right.
Harris had a clear lead right up until she started backing away from her earlier more populist rhetoric in order to suck up to the corporate donors.
Yes.
Two things I believe in that context:
“Don’t be impressed by the forced joy of our enemy. This is an animalistic society that sanctifies death. Very soon, we will erase their smile again and replace it with cries of grief and the wails of those who were left with nothing.”
Wow.
It’s astonishing sometimes how deep the delusional evil runs in the Israeli right.
He starts that statement off trying to claim that the Gazans are “an animalistic society,” and then without missing a beat shifts to doing nothing but vividly demonstrating that in fact he and his allies are the actual animals.
They truly are among the most foul and loathsome and vile abominations to have ever crawled across the face of the Earth.
And many, many more are going to follow, as Americans learn that they’re no longer free to criticize those in power.
And the day will actually come when the notion of someone just being fired for criticizing those in power will seem quaint, since it will then be far more likely that they’ll disappear - sucked up into the ever-hungry maw of the corporate police state slave system.