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Shut up and JAM! posted:I'm appalled anyone could willingly be part of a fascist machine that denies some of the most vulnerable parts of society their unalienable human rights to healthcare and try to justify it by casually condemning it as "poo poo sucks" all while drawing a paycheck while people are, by their own words, 100% dying.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 15:27 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 07:07 |
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James Garfield posted:I mean those guys are building bug out bunkers because they're dumb. There are a lot of dumb rich people. The (edit: second ) richest man in the world is on ketamine while he makes business decisions. If they’re so dumb why are they so rich? Seems like there would be a lot of turnover in rich people if stupidity means they always make bad decisions. Rich people aren’t dumb for having bunkers; we’re dumb for not having organizations of ordinary people who aren’t theorizing, modeling and maybe doing some practical experimental work on consumer grade bunker breaching/isolation techniques. The bunkers are as much a political fact as a cultural one, and they’re real, and they’re widespread. When they go in the bunkers there will be an opportunity for collective action with results that potentially scale to incredible levels of destructiveness to existing class hierarchies. Find your people and start planning.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 15:28 |
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mawarannahr posted:If you're condemning OP's job, I think there are a lot of jobs where you might end up explaining those things to people without being part of the for-profit healthcare system. my entire job is signing people up for medicaid and/or snap and renewal stuff. its a lovely job but the pay is ok, thankfully i dont have to make determinations but i do see the bullshit cut off stuff alot. with medicaid, you have 3 month renewal, with snap, it just ends and you need to start all over. but yeah. i have also had to at time explain to people stuff like that and its um bad and sucks. i dont blame op for having to do their job either.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 15:32 |
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https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1758468801325072873 Democrats need to alter the message of funding the border if they're just going to run on giving these racist schmucks more cash. The CBP is probably the most corrupt entity in the federal government, and that's been the case for years before this Congress and before Biden.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 15:32 |
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Nonsense posted:https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1758468801325072873 Oh yeah, it's full of NDSAP wanna bes https://twitter.com/letsgomathias/status/1757782892728426518 "Tonk" being the sound when you bash a migrant over the head with your maglite
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 15:50 |
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is a candy even an effect form for fet? also those dumb bunker fucks usually only have one point of entry/exit or have one obvious air intake vent or no air intake vent.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 16:04 |
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PhazonLink posted:is a candy even an effect form for fet? Lollipops are a fairly effective sublingual route, yes. They're more commonly seen as lozenges under the brand name Actiq. E: I can't imagine it's an efficient form to smuggle, though, since it's dose:weight ratio would be terrible compared to more concentrated forms. So stupid pointless fearmongering about dealers going after children. Dapper_Swindler posted:my entire job is signing people up for medicaid and/or snap and renewal stuff. its a lovely job but the pay is ok, thankfully i dont have to make determinations but i do see the bullshit cut off stuff alot. with medicaid, you have 3 month renewal, with snap, it just ends and you need to start all over. but yeah. i have also had to at time explain to people stuff like that and its um bad and sucks. i dont blame op for having to do their job either.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 16:19 |
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are we really doing another unironic "explaining is the same as endorsing" thing again?
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 16:22 |
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PhazonLink posted:are we really doing another unironic "explaining is the same as endorsing" thing again? that seems to be a genuine problem on the online left sadly. i see it alot with media critics types and dumb kids. its sad.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 16:41 |
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https://twitter.com/KThomasDC/status/1758522404974792931 Lol thank loving god. (I don't think he was ever going to run, I think he likes the attention) Also: https://twitter.com/ding3rs/status/1758512751213715807 I see. zoux fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Feb 16, 2024 |
# ? Feb 16, 2024 17:17 |
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Let's not forget that RFK jr. is polling at 47% favorability. What a beast!
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 17:23 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Look, taking action to directly help people just opens you up to personal attacks. The better strategy by far is to do nothing yourself at all, so that you are immune to criticism. I tried this but I got continually criticized for inaction
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 17:30 |
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As someone who has also worked in public benefits, it's hard to imagine any occupation less capitalist than getting paid a lovely government salary to give public financial assistance to the poor
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 18:13 |
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Aztec Galactus posted:As someone who has also worked in public benefits, it's hard to imagine any occupation less capitalist than getting paid a lovely government salary to give public financial assistance to the poor But if you're not actively sabotaging the system, you're just perpetuating capitalism!
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 18:16 |
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cat botherer posted:https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/15/business/economy/amazon-labor-nlrb.html I've been reading The Big Myth and I'm halfway through the chapter about the New Deal, and it's really depressing seeing the same tactics that were employed back then still very much in use today. I don't really know what to think other than these people are absolute ghouls.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 18:24 |
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"explaining is the same as endorsing" is not the same as "working in an evil field and excusing" NOTE: i don't think working in the american health care system is that last thing, even if on the csr side. i save that condemnation for people manufacturing weapons of war
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 18:28 |
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There's definitely an argument to be made that every act of trying to help people navigate a system ultimately serves to reify that system by putting effort into supporting the engagement of the victims of the system with their oppressors, and supporting that oppressor-victim model by getting them aligned to what the oppressor demands of them. This goes to what I think about how medicated Americans are for psychological issues--those medications, oftentimes, are to treat issues that quite obviously generated by having to live in the culture and political economy we do--they are not entirely borne within, there's not a slice of Cursed People who will just get mental illness and the environment has nothing to do with it. Lots of Americans take drugs to be better workers, in a system that shits on workers. We are aligning ourselves to the illness in our society, as much as we are coping with our own struggles. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't take the pills. It does mean that we need more socialist and communist mental health professionals that tell you that this isn't your fault, and that there are a lot of people stuck in the same kind of veal pen you are. My personal therapist has been very open to talking about these ideas, while still helping me stay grounded and understand that you just have to take on the world as it exists, and if you get good enough at doing that, you might be able to spare some energy to try and make it a better world. It sucks, but this is what living in the center of the empire means. We get sad, because the violence the system inflicts on everyone cannot exclude us. And the moral injury we take on can only be medicated or mindfulnessed out of our view for so long. My wild conspiracy theory take is that Havana Syndrome is just moral injury finding a place to explain itself without the need to look at causes. selec fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Feb 16, 2024 |
# ? Feb 16, 2024 18:29 |
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selec posted:actual nuance. Yeah but this pretty well considered post is completely different than a drive by calling beetus a perpetrator of fascism for working to help people get what they can from the system.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 18:36 |
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Kagrenak posted:Yeah but this pretty well considered post is completely different than a drive by calling beetus a perpetrator of fascism for working to help people get what they can from the system. I think about this stuff a lot as a comfortable person who is comfortable because I'm sitting in the middle of a place that is powered by a system that will force compliance on entire peoples at gunpoint, despite that compliance making their lives worse. I'm a citizen of the Empire, and the Ewoks get barbecued so I can have cheap gas, and cheap electronics, and clean air. I'm sitting in the middle of it, insisting Alderaan had to be dealt with, or maybe that Alderaan is still there, and reports contrary to that are just fake news. It's difficult to parse what the right thing to do is when you have that knowledge sitting in your head. It's pretty infuriating to be in the middle of the empire and to just know, no matter what you do, you're making it worse for somebody, somewhere, just by trying to go along with what everybody else is doing to get by. Just existing as a living, contributing member of our society visits a portion of misery, distributed to places all around the globe, most of which I'll never see because why would I go as a tourist to an open pit mine, or a suicide-netted factory, or a bombed out village? But I also don't really have the option, if I respect myself, to be willfully ignorant of those miseries that my own comfort requires within the current status quo. To me, the right thing to do is to tear down the empire from within, to withdraw and fix ourselves before we take on fixing everyone else (which is really just what we call exploitation to put patches over the cracks in our own experience of the system) but that's not a popular idea, because the idea of change is terrifying to people, and change when you don't really know what the other side looks like because you haven't planned or even bothered to imagine what it could look like is even more terrifying. Deciding how to participate in the empire is a fraught one, and as I've aged I've become both more and less judgmental of how people cope with it, and those judgments become more and more about where the person I'm thinking about is positioned by class in our society. I have grown more weary of the excuses of comfortable people the more comfortable I become, and the more tempting those excuses become. If other people are so over the system we have that they see any meaningful participation in it as essentially working to perpetuate the inequities it contains, I can't really argue with that--functionally it is true. Having accepted my own position and complicity feels like a relief, in some ways, because at least I'm being honest with myself rather than just fighting back cognitive dissonance.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 19:03 |
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selec posted:If other people are so over the system we have that they see any meaningful participation in it as essentially working to perpetuate the inequities it contains, I can't really argue with that--functionally it is true. Having accepted my own position and complicity feels like a relief, in some ways, because at least I'm being honest with myself rather than just fighting back cognitive dissonance. If one isn't offering a credible alternative then tbh this is laziness and they're not actually withdrawing from it. The vast vast majority of people who express opinions like that are just using their alleged distance from it as a rhetorical cudgel. But as soon as you actually interrogate what they practice day to day, people making posts like the one directed at Beetus are never engaged in improving people's lives in a big way. Either from a framework of improving the system or a framework which exists completely outside of it. In fact much of the time they're meaningfully engaged in much more harmful occupations compared to the people they spurn who are working close to our broken social support systems. I'd never hear anything like it coming from the people I know who run the local food not bombs chapter and poo poo, for example.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 19:10 |
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I'm sure it's been discussed, but I just wanted to chime in and say even though Navalny's murder was 100% expected it's still hitting me harder than I ever imagined, especially knowing our political system seems devoted to placating that fuckface Putin. At lest Biden's speech today was on-point, thought I doubt shame will force these ghouls to act. gently caress the GOP, gently caress Putin.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 19:11 |
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I dunno if this is just a modern thing or a me thing, but I've been feeling more despair at politics than usual because it feels like people are incredibly entrenched in their positions. If people will vote for Trump regardless of what's going on, it just seems like a big fraction of the country is beyond convincing on anything.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 19:14 |
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/us/politics/trump-abortion-ban.htmlNYT posted:In supporting a 16-week ban with exceptions, Donald Trump appears to be trying to satisfy social conservatives who want to further restrict abortion access and voters who want more modest limits.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 19:14 |
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Kagrenak posted:If one isn't offering a credible alternative then tbh this is laziness and they're not actually withdrawing from it. The vast vast majority of people who express opinions like that are just using their alleged distance from it as a rhetorical cudgel. But as soon as you actually interrogate what they practice day to day, people making posts like the one directed at Beetus are never engaged in improving people's lives in a big way. Either from a framework of improving the system or a framework which exists completely outside of it. In fact much of the time they're meaningfully engaged in much more harmful occupations compared to the people they spurn who are working close to our broken social support systems. Can't be angry at people for giving up, IMO. You look at voter participation by socioeconomic status, it becomes very apparent that the system we have grinds the people who benefit the least from it until their participation in the system becomes either so repellant to them or such a burden that it's not worth it. This also goes to the mental health aspect--if you're medicating yourself to be a more compliant, reliable worker, that's also going to take away some of the vital sense of anger you might need to drive you to further action. SSRIs were great for helping me not feel as depressed, but they also take off some of the top end too, and that top end is where the energy to do the work sometimes lives. Then you look at the way that genuine energy around political actions are funneled into coopted, do-nothing endorsements of the status quo, and you don't blame people for not wanting to engage with that system. I gave up on believing that we can ever get national health care through a democratic process after the ACA passed. That doesn't mean I don't think we'll ever have national health care, but it will be done over the misery and fear generated in the powerful from a mass movement that is not able to be shunted into a political party. It will be done over the protests and tooth gnashing of the people who claim to be there to represent us. It cannot be aligned with a political party as they exist because, and again just IMO, it's clear that those parties exist to defuse and tamp down any challenge to major structural pillars of the rent-seeker economy, among other things. So I guess I disagree--I think giving up or unplugging from the work is a reasonable response to being handed a society that will grind you down from every angle. People have limited time on this earth, and if they believe (in my opinion, rightly) that engaging with a system that is tilted so heavily against their needs and desires that it's pointless and that energy can be better spent on creating a small place they can at least feel okay in, well who am I to tell them they're wrong? I cannot judge their lives because I don't live them. But the more comfortable someone is and the more content they are with the status quo? That's where I get judgy, because if anybody's gonna have the ability to drag themselves out to work to improve it, it's those people. This doesn't mean I don't believe that a working class political movement is destined to fail in this country, only that it can't be meaningfully aligned with either major party for it to succeed. The energy has to feel like it's going to a fight, not to support somebody who is socially indistinguishable from the person in HR you talk to once a year, who you never see on the production floor.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 19:25 |
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Shut up and JAM! posted:I'm appalled anyone could willingly be part of a fascist machine that denies some of the most vulnerable parts of society their unalienable human rights to healthcare and try to justify it by casually condemning it as "poo poo sucks" all while drawing a paycheck while people are, by their own words, 100% dying. Outside of a few years of retail hell, my career has been dedicated to serving my community and the public good, so kindly go gently caress yourself
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 19:47 |
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selec posted:Can't be angry at people for giving up, IMO. You look at voter participation by socioeconomic status, it becomes very apparent that the system we have grinds the people who benefit the least from it until their participation in the system becomes either so repellant to them or such a burden that it's not worth it. This also goes to the mental health aspect--if you're medicating yourself to be a more compliant, reliable worker, that's also going to take away some of the vital sense of anger you might need to drive you to further action. SSRIs were great for helping me not feel as depressed, but they also take off some of the top end too, and that top end is where the energy to do the work sometimes lives. I'm not angry because OP or our theoretical third person gave up, I'm angry because they're making GBS threads on someone who is trying to do some good in the world while they smugly poo poo on him for not completely reforming and perfecting the welfare system on his own. It's like yelling at the operators of a free clinic for not fixing all the healthcare inequity in the world at once, while you smugly do literally nothing related to it at all.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 19:53 |
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selec posted:If they’re so dumb why are they so rich? Seems like there would be a lot of turnover in rich people if stupidity means they always make bad decisions. You're overcomplicating this. All you really need is to make sure each of the Peoples' Bunker Breaching Brigades has a working Pip-Boy and you should be able to get into the Vaults without too much trouble. Senate Cum Dump fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Feb 16, 2024 |
# ? Feb 16, 2024 20:42 |
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the idea the security and staff of the rich bunker people ain't going to kill/exile their masters as soon as they realize the currency no longer has value is laughable
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 20:47 |
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World Famous W posted:the idea the security and staff of the rich bunker people ain't going to kill/exile their masters as soon as they realize the currency no longer has value is laughable I agree you're probably correct, but unfortunately Vault 118 was never completed as planned so we don't have good evidence to say for sure. https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Vault_118 quote:The test group would include 10 ultra-rich area residents whose every desire would be catered to by a robotic staff. These wealthy individuals would be placed above all legal restrictions in their interactions with the second group, numbering up to 300 people sequestered in uncomfortable, cramped conditions in the second wing. Any breach of the rules would be judged by the rich, with any judgment executed by the robotic staff. However, this bourgeois-worker dynamic was never established, as once the premiere area of the Vault was completed, construction of the Vault's second wing was halted. Instead the rich people uploaded themselves into robo-brains. So we should probably make sure the Peoples' Bunker Breaching Brigades are equipped with EMPs or similar to disable Neuralinks and other devices.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 20:57 |
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Senate Cum Dump posted:
Knowing Elon you can probably just disable a Neuralink with a consumer-grade microwave oven.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 21:00 |
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World Famous W posted:the idea the security and staff of the rich bunker people ain't going to kill/exile their masters as soon as they realize the currency no longer has value is laughable Doug Rushkoff has written about being asked to be a consultant for the rich guys, and he brought up these same problems with them. That doesn’t mean they stopped the projects, just that they’ll have some innovative ideas to try out when the time comes. Haven’t read his book about it yet, SURVIVAL OF THE RICHEST, but it’s in the pile. I think it’s important to have a clear, well organized and public plan for a mass movement to trap/contain these people in these bunkers, with public plans and also hinting at secret plans, all contingent on the breakdown of larger schemes of law enforcement, both as a practical measure (plan for the worst, hope for the best) and a propaganda measure specifically designed to let the people building the bunkers know that the bunker won’t be safe, that safety only comes from cooperation, and we will cooperate to ensure you don’t escape any fate the rest of us have to contend with. selec fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Feb 16, 2024 |
# ? Feb 16, 2024 21:00 |
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Shut up and JAM! posted:I'm appalled anyone could willingly be part of a fascist machine that denies some of the most vulnerable parts of society their unalienable human rights to healthcare and try to justify it by casually condemning it as "poo poo sucks" all while drawing a paycheck while people are, by their own words, 100% dying. Now if only someone would do something that actually helps these people, like sit on the internet and attack people involved in attempting stopgap aid in a wildly imperfect present day scenario.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 21:10 |
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Polling isn't predictive this far out, particularly with hypothetical candidates.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 21:13 |
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If society breaks down to the point where people are hiding out in bunkers, cash no longer has value, law enforcement no longer exists, and the state no longer possesses the monopoly on violence, I think most people are going to be too busy with actually important problems to worry about finding and attacking billionaire bunkers. The billionaires will no doubt have a pretty hard time when they discover that all of their wealth and power collapsed along with society, but we're probably going to be too busy scrounging for basic sustenance and hiding from the roving death squads to have a chance to feel smug about it.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 21:20 |
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Sir Kodiak posted:Polling isn't predictive this far out, particularly with hypothetical candidates. What it IS supporting is the idea that as the election season properly starts and gets closer Biden's numbers will improve, especially as sentiments about the economy swing back to the underlying economic trendline.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 21:20 |
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selec posted:I think it’s important to have a clear, well organized and public plan for a mass movement to trap/contain these people in these bunkers, with public plans and also hinting at secret plans, all contingent on the breakdown of larger schemes of law enforcement, both as a practical measure (plan for the worst, hope for the best) and a propaganda measure specifically designed to let the people building the bunkers know that the bunker won’t be safe, that safety only comes from cooperation, and we will cooperate to ensure you don’t escape any fate the rest of us have to contend with. Why do you think it's important to spend time on planning and organizing bunker-breaching teams as opposed to literally any other organizing activities? edit: basically this post Main Paineframe posted:If society breaks down to the point where people are hiding out in bunkers, cash no longer has value, law enforcement no longer exists, and the state no longer possesses the monopoly on violence, I think most people are going to be too busy with actually important problems to worry about finding and attacking billionaire bunkers. It's a goofy notion that doesn't make any sense. Would work well in a video game or some post-apoc fiction though. Hence my Fallout posts.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 21:23 |
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Sir Kodiak posted:Polling isn't predictive this far out, particularly with hypothetical candidates. The point is that for all the cries of "Biden must get out of the race" there is no successor candidate. https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1758584937735712985 He's going to wring every cent out of the RNC coffers once Lara is made co-chair.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 21:23 |
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selec posted:If they’re so dumb why are they so rich? You do know really dumb people can be the offspring of diamond mine owners, NY real estate barons, famous actors/musicians, CEOs of oil companies etc right? And statistically speaking those types of offspring have a huge advantage in life and usually end up wealthy themselves no matter how incredibly dumb they are. Where do you think the term "failson" came from? Being smart doesn't mean you'll be rich. And being dumb doesn't mean you'll be poor.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 21:30 |
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Looks like Engoron went a little easier on Trump than I hoped and many were expecting.
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 21:31 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 07:07 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:What it IS supporting is the idea that as the election season properly starts and gets closer Biden's numbers will improve, especially as sentiments about the economy swing back to the underlying economic trendline. How does that poll support that idea? I think that idea is likely true, but I don't see how that poll is evidence for it. zoux posted:The point is that for all the cries of "Biden must get out of the race" there is no successor candidate. The cries for Biden to get out of the race are absurd—the man has striven to be president for longer than many of us have been alive; he's either dead or running—but how can a poll that doesn't offer predictive value for the election show that there's no viable successor? Do you actually think Gretchen Whitmer would get 33% of the vote in a country this polarized?
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# ? Feb 16, 2024 21:31 |