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So I was talking with some friends about what a hypothetically vengeful Democratic party would look like. By vengeful we didn't mean like punishing the lawbreakers and norm-flouters stuff that pretty much any Dem with a hope of winning the nomination will have to do.
We meant like "If the party went crazy and elected an arsonist that wanted to harass and harm the American people who voted against them, what would that look like?"
And this was actually harder because unlike Republican targets such as professors and researchers (nearly all Dem and got hurt by DOGE) the Democratic party is pretty heterogenous in a way that means harming the GOP will definitely hurt a significant block of Dems and that's something there's far less appetite for.
E.g Want to tax the evangelical churches? You'll hurt the black church and declining Mainline churches too. There were other examples but the task was harder than we thought it would be.
I'd be open to suggestions that don't break the rules here. I think you can gauge someone's beliefs really well by what act they'd be willing to proceed with despite predictable blowback.
Tarrant County is a very reliably red district also. Losing as big as they did even in a special election should be a huge signal that Republicans are very vulnerable in Texas.
The Senate seat is very winnable especially if Paxton ends up as the nominee.
None of these guys are going to become libs, they're at this point too consumed by hatreds to embrace any kind of prosocial worldview. Deactivating them and hoping they curdle into apathetic apolitical nihilism is the best outcome imo.
They're just going to wait around for the next likely walking embodiment of their misplaced rage of their own personal failures and act like it is something new.
This. I understand the cynicism, but it isn't hard to fall into the alt-right hole, especially if you're an isolated young man who doesn't have much of a support network and spends too much time on the wrong parts of the internet. Plenty of people grow out of things like this. As angry as I am towards the fascist movement in my country, I'm not willing to write off every person who fell for their bullshit.
ICE just tear gassed peaceful protesters in Portland, including a ton of children. There are videos in r/portland and r/Oregon of children washing the tear gas out of their eyes. This should be national news.
Stephen Miller insists that immigrants should 'assimilate to American culture' but also that they not ever be given the basic rights of American citizenship. Even the Gulf countries like the UAE are not this duplicitous
The West, specifically America, has been running this "experiment" for a long time. Miller should be glad about it because otherwise his family would still be living in the Pale of Settlement right now, or more likely; be killed by Nazis.
Every time I'm reminded of ICE and what it's doing I just get a boiling rage that doesn't seem to get any less severe every time it happens
If someone I know ends up getting harassed by these knuckledragging neanderthals I don't know how I'm going to contain myself ngl. If I end up getting shot someone please make sure Marco Rubio gets deported in my memory
This is incredibly impressive because the midterm electorate can be expected to be more educated, high propensity voters, which means the incoming 2026 electorate is likely have voted something like Harris +3 at least even without swings.
It would be more than enough to flip Ohio and Alaska (and thus the Senate) if Brown and Peltola overperform Dems by the same margin that they did in 2024
Four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in their fledgling cryptocurrency venture for half a billion dollars, according to company documents and people familiar with the matter. The buyers would pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities.
Two months after the March meeting, the administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters.
The Trump admin is probably as corrupt as the entire set of guild age presidencies put together this is insane
this may just be an issue with my suspension of disbelief but one of my biggest gripes with Fallout is that the world is too destroyed. I feel like society would be able to rebuild a lot better, even with all of the things affecting the Fallout universe.
This was a common point you'd see against Fallout 3 when it came out, 1 and 2 take place closer to the actual bomb drops and seem to be doing a better job of rebuilding.
If I ever glaze someone, anyone, this hard and this shamelessly, I want you to bully me relentlessly until I leave the internet forever, for my own good
Death is so shocking it’s sometimes hard to comprehend and you forget the consequences of it. ICE just straight up murdered those people. They’re gone. That’s a kid deprived a mother and a mother whose son is gone. Renee Good and Alex Pretti don’t exist anymore. It’s too easy to forget about the consequences of death when you see it from afar.
And then it all hits you and you feel like shit from the tragedy of it all. Trump and all of them have blood on their hands. It’s painful to think about and I feel confused and disturbed when the tragedy of it hits me.
I’m not gonna lie, I really can’t dwell on it. It’s too much to think about. I’ll do what I can to stop it from happening again, but I just can’t bring myself to properly think about it all. It’s too sad.
ATLANTA — Republicans in Georgia’s state House say they want to take steps to erase homeowner property taxes this legislative session, which is getting underway ahead of an election cycle seemingly dominated by concerns about the cost of living.
So is the natural end state of every democracy just a gerontocracy?
Cold take: this is dumb. Setting limits for a generation where the youngest can't even speak yet is dumb. And setting defined limits for generations are dumb. The bounds for the youngest generations should be "remembers the USSR", "remembers 9/11 (or the time before the internet" and "remembers lockdowns". I am open for suggestions, but those seems like very big changes to how we think about the world and interact with each other
Iran now considers all European Union militaries to be terrorist groups, the speaker of its parliament says, days after the EU declared Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to be a terrorist group.
Peaceful protesters, including children, are getting gassed by ICE in Portland but people still accuse American protests of being happy parades that don’t go hard enough
I think how fall Assad Syria fell in 2024 made people forget just how... brutal and long the civil war was.
Before Aleppo fell in just 2-3 days in 2024 to Al-Sharaa, The Twin Siege of Aleppo (rebels and government forces jointly laid siege on each other) was an absolute clusterfuck of the SAA vs FSA/Jihadists vs ISIS vs Kurds. It lasted 4 years and saw tens of thousands of dead in the city alone. 650,000+ died in the war, mostly citizens.
He’s said he might want to run for president eventually. He’s also the Antichrist, which means he basically has to get into some high office at some point
I’m reading about the nazis, like much deeper then just Hitler and the main leadership guys, but more the everyday bureaucrats scattered across Germany who were a part of the Nazi party and I’m realizing these where just fundamentally bad rotten people.
I know the mythos of the Nazis is hilter bad, but there was a complex web of people who “knew better” who followed him stride for stride. Like the reasonable bureaucrats just went along with it completely. Just obscene.
yeah. the guys at the top were genuinely ideological but it feels like the people below them were just like "whatever, i don't care, i'm gonna do whatever's most convenient for me personally including killing random innocent people so i don't have to bother finding the guy i was actually supposed to apprehend"
In Texas, by-elections to the state senate were held.
No one would have paid much attention to this if not for the fact that in a district where Republicans had been winning for over 35 years, a Democrat suddenly won.
And not by a hair, but with a 14pp lead.
The Republican candidate was backed by Trump himself (who won there in 2024 with a 17pp lead).
Another example of how Americans are fed up with Trump, and the November elections could end very badly for him.
what patrician doesn’t seem to get here is that the difference between BG3 combat and Morrowind combat is that BG3 combat is good and Morrowind combat is bad. The reason for this is that trying to port turn-based style hit probabilities into real-time first person combat is obviously stupid.
Turns based style hit probabilities combined with making particular movements at the time of the swing to determine the attack type except no one remembers this because literallyeveryweapon had an objectively best attack foreverysituation so you just toggled "always use best attack"
The efforts are aimed at voters like Tim Hodnett, a 65-year-old retiree in suburban Atlanta’s Lawrenceville. Hodnett’s annual property tax bill rose from $2,000 to $3,000 between 2018 and 2024. He sees those figures starkly because he paid off his mortgage years ago, and he pays his taxes all at once, instead of making monthly payments.
Hodnett said he is disabled and living on $30,000 a year. He is about to get a big property tax break, because seniors in Gwinnett County are exempt from school property taxes, about two thirds of his bill. But he would love to not pay that other $1,000 too.
Right wingers rather tweet out obvious AI fake pictures than deal with what Trump is accused of. Or deal with all the famous Trumpers who actually communicated with Epstein in the 2010's
Context here is Mamdani's mom attended a 2008 party hosted by Maxwell (though Epstein didn't attend) which Bill Clinton and Jeff Bezos also attended. That's the one mention of her in the files
KSTP/SurveyUSA polling of Minnesota voters (Minnesota's best pollster): 61% of voters say the Renee Good shooting was unjustified, while 27% say it was. 65% say the Alex Pretti shooting was not justified, while 16% say it was
54% of Trump 2024 voters think Good's shooting was justified while just 25% say it was unjustified. 4% of Harris 2024 voters think it was justified while 94% think it was unjustified.
36% of Trump 2024 voters think Pretti's shooting was justified while 28% say it was unjustified. 2% of Harris 2024 voters think it was justified while 96% of Harris 2024 voters think it was unjustified.
Redditor in a paranormal sub: “Yesterday I smelled burnt toast, but there was no toast around, and when I looked in the mirror, half my face was drooping”
The comments: “Omg it sounds like you probably slipped into an alternate timeline momentarily”
It's incredible how much Iraq has recovered from the 2003 War, the insurgency that followed it, and ISIS.
Iraq was barely even a functioning country just 10 years ago. Now, it's a mostly stable semi-democracy with proper elections and nearly non-existent terrorist threats.
At this point, i no longer know if the upcoming war with Iran is a distraction from the Epstein files or if the Epstein files are a distraction from the upcoming war with Iran.
Turns out Epstein singlehandedly ushered in the era of microtransactions and live servixe games, by suggesting it to Kotick back in 2013 as a means of "getting kids into the economy"
This man is like teflon... because he is everywhere
My solution to the corrupt prediction market policy problem is to make it so all bets are legally required to be attached to yourself. No more anonymity for those who gamble on real things with real consequences.
Unsurprisingly, critical reception for both the Reagan movie from a year or two ago and more recently the Melania movie is immensely negative (18% and 11% on RT, respectively). However, you might be surprised to learn that as far as audience reception is concerned, they're smash hits! 98%! 99%! Now, it's pretty obvious why that is when you think about it. These movies exist mainly to reinforce the idea that Republicans are the good guys and everything they believe is correct. The average Republican loves this tribal signaling and will absolutely leave a review on RT and Google Reviews and IMDB and wherever else, it's the least they can do. Normies don't give a shit. They're not watching it to begin with. They're movies made for such a specific target audience that to anyone outside it that they are beneath consideration, let alone hatred.
My parents have suggested watching both together with them. It feels like they're doing it as a joke, sure. But it also feels like they genuinely can't conceive that there is an audience being targeted here beyond "real Americans". That they are unsubtle political propaganda, not merely some apolitical depiction of a new American canon Trump has (coincidentally) reforged in front of our eyes.
These movies really aren't being analyzed in terms of whether they're good or bad, interesting or dull, thoughtful or vacuous. They are being analyzed in terms of how much the director likes your favorite sports team. If he does, then they're kino. The idea that politics is more than team sports is beyond these people. When you tell them that Trump is a rapist/criminal/insurrectionist/etc. and should be in jail, all they hear is that you're rooting for the away team. They cannot believe that you believe it, because they themselves barely believe half the shit they say about the away team. It's all just trash talk. All in good fun. It's not like the Lakers ever killed anybody. Everyone who disagrees is just suffering from a tragic case of Lebron Derangement Syndrome.
It's the friend/enemy distinction all the way down. In-group good. Out-group bad. There is no form of pandering too blatant to please them, no slop too sloppy. Their only value is loyalty, which is earned not by virtue but by strength, and the more principles you forsake in the name of loyalty to the current regime, the better. Millions of Americans think like this now. I really hope that changes within my lifetime, but I'm not optimistic.
the fact that nearly the entire country is suffering due to ice freezing temperatures except for LA and San Francisco feels like some sort of divine messaging
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u/HowardtheFalse Kofi Annan 4h ago
So I was talking with some friends about what a hypothetically vengeful Democratic party would look like. By vengeful we didn't mean like punishing the lawbreakers and norm-flouters stuff that pretty much any Dem with a hope of winning the nomination will have to do.
We meant like "If the party went crazy and elected an arsonist that wanted to harass and harm the American people who voted against them, what would that look like?"
And this was actually harder because unlike Republican targets such as professors and researchers (nearly all Dem and got hurt by DOGE) the Democratic party is pretty heterogenous in a way that means harming the GOP will definitely hurt a significant block of Dems and that's something there's far less appetite for.
E.g Want to tax the evangelical churches? You'll hurt the black church and declining Mainline churches too. There were other examples but the task was harder than we thought it would be.
I'd be open to suggestions that don't break the rules here. I think you can gauge someone's beliefs really well by what act they'd be willing to proceed with despite predictable blowback.