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Mellow Seas posted:Overall it's probably good that they loudly announced the spill, but the limits of "people deserve full information" can bump up against the limits of "the information makes people do dumb things." Bottled water is an environmental problem in and of itself and on an individual level a waste of money. There are probably people in the city for whom buying the water was a financial strain, but they thought they had to for the health of their families. Kinda feels like a symptom of the wider diagnosis of "People don't trust poo poo coming from those in power anymore". A few decades of skull loving anyone south of the 1% for an extra dollar has effects like that on a society. If there was a reservoir of trust from previous actions to draw on, individual events like this could be smoothed over and dealt with appropriately by those who do have a good understanding of environmental science. But that's not the society we live in. We live in "gently caress You Got Mine" given mortal form, and the people making these decisions like buying bottled water are doing the best they can with what is available to them.
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Mar 27, 2023 13:44
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I'm all for damnatio memoriae on mass shooters. Don't publish their names, their manifestos, nothing. If you want to publish something about the tragedies concentrate on the victims. Put out stories about how a six year old went from learning to ride bikes for the first time to decorating the wall with their grey matter. Stop encouraging other mass murderers to seek the attention they get, focus it on the people paying the price for our hosed up society.
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Mar 30, 2023 18:08
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We've been publishing their names and manifestos, spreading their faces and actions across the evening news for 30 or more years now. Try something different, maybe? OK sure if you want the stuff available for clinical research yeah I can agree to that I guess. It should not be riding high on the top of Twitter. We, The People, don't need and can't use that poo poo. It has not and will not improve anything. In public they should be faceless, nameless murderers that caused Mary Smith to no longer be able to volunteer down at the Humane Society every Sunday like she has been for the last twenty years. Stop giving them the attention they want. Stop rewarding them for murdering innocent people.
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Mar 30, 2023 18:30
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Cimber posted:I think the general timeline is going to go like this I'm a living embodiment of Negatron Prime on these things which I freely admit. Trump's entire legal strategy for decades has been "gently caress you, no" on every single last possible piece of paperwork, punctuation, testimony, and deadline, which then gets seventeen motions filed when it is supposed to happen and three appeals when it happens anyway. I don't see it only lasting 1-3 years. Trump has money, and that's what the courts respect.
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Mar 31, 2023 13:40
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Oracle posted:He'll do this, because he absolutely CANNOT be a loser, ergo the Deep State has captured the Republican primary/its all rigged against him/those losers don't deserve him, also he'll want to burn it all down on his way out for revenge for being rejected as his narcissistic ego cannot handle it, and he absolutely CANNOT NOT run, because he needs to be president to avoid consequences (also he misses a band playing and everyone standing up whenever he enters a room and flying on an airplane for free and grifting taxpayer money). If things shake out that he goes third party I am looking forward to another round of "....but dogs can't play basketball!" when he ignores all the sore loser laws and just goes ahead and does it anyway. "But technically according to subsection 13, paragraph 8, Trump is not presenting himself as a legally distinct third party candidate he is merely telling his cult followers to write his name in the ballot as is their right to do bing bong so simple laws mean nothing"
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Mar 31, 2023 19:27
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lol if you think Republicans will give up power before they give up democracy. They can cheat enough to keep winning with the naked and mauled corpse of civic society we have now. When they start losing with their cheating in place they'll simply take power with as small a fig leaf as necessary to keep the "opposition" complacent, using as much violence as necessary. This has happened and is happening around the globe. The playbook is written, it works, and "It Can Happen Here" is the wrong tense of word choice.
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Apr 3, 2023 01:41
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haveblue posted:Also structure them so that if work stops the IRS cannot function at all I can hear the Republican fapping from across space and time. Still worth doing I guess but this would be a wet dream for their donors.
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Apr 6, 2023 21:36
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The Furry community had a serious internal reckoning a few years back where the hard-right was trying to recruit them as a group and they ended up fighting back hard. There was a whole time period with Nazi furries. Recruiting isolated outcasts based on their anger is kinda the right's thing. Fortunately for us all, furries policed their own and told fascists to get hosed coming down hard on non-inclusive ideologies. My thoughts are they realized they would be allies of convenience and the first against the wall when push came to shove.
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Apr 9, 2023 17:29
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Desalination produces brine, not dried salt ready to be used in other processes. It's a somewhat minor problem with desalination plants. If the waste brine is dumped in a bay or behind barrier reefs or something it can end up concentrating high enough to kill stuff off, but it's still just really really salty water. Not dried crystals of table salt ready to be put on the market for other uses.
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Apr 12, 2023 13:30
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Gyges posted:Maybe we could dump it in the salt lake, or blast it into the sun with all our nuclear waste. Generally unnecessary, I specifically mentioned bays and stuff because it turns out we have a few really, REALLY big bodies of salt water around the globe to dilute brine in to. Usually the same sources that the salt water is coming from in the first place. Just have to put in a little bit of extra effort to pump it out in to the ocean a moderate distance instead of dumping it in some place that's going to be cut off and let the concentration build up. It's a minor problem that just a little bit of preparation can easily solve.
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Apr 12, 2023 13:54
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the_steve posted:Pretty sure it's been proven that even if all of us (see: Regular people, the average Joe, etc) went all in on that; installed solar panels, recycled as much as possible, rode our bikes to work, it would still be dwarfed by the carbon footprint that massive corporations are making. Basically pissing on a forest fire. There's also market realities of our system of resource exploitation. If you got a magic wand to wave that did something that would require absolute magic like making half of the population of the United States do everything required to live a life style with absolutely zero dependency on fossil fuels, the economic system we have and all the infrastructure that has been built up since we first started burning dead dinosaurs wouldn't go away. You would just be cutting the demand in half. Now suddenly the remaining half of the country gets to go "Oh cool gas is a dollar a gallon. I'll take that extra trip across country I wanted to go on since it'll be super cheap!"
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Apr 12, 2023 18:10
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Weird thought I know but maybe the country shouldn't be run by a decaying gerontocracy that can be suddenly assassinated by a perfectly flat walking surface and a half second of inattention.
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Apr 13, 2023 13:52
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Vahakyla posted:Who undeservedly is absent from Congress right now so that it is undemocratic? Who’s rights are oppressed? For the house at least, one gain from it would be the ability to return a congressional house district back to a size that actually means your representative is, well, representative of you and your area. Not you and the gerrymandered bullshit map of your 699,999 closest friends. Not that that is going to be allowed to happen at all because "gently caress you" from those in power now, but in theory expanding the house of representatives hugely is a good thing and at some point it would be too many people to fit in one building.
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Apr 17, 2023 14:52
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Gyges posted:We're so far away from having too many representatives to fit into a building that it's an entirely moot hypothetical. It's something to think about when the new Legislative Stadium starts getting cramped. I, of course, grant that 'much higher likelihood' is a comparative statement. On the bigger scale outside of that comparison either approach is on the level of wishing for ice cream making GBS threads unicorns.
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Apr 17, 2023 16:03
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Cheesus posted:Is this what we really do to expired Lithium batteries? Why not? It's a perfectly legal thrill. (No, expired batteries can be recycled. The ones on fire though? Yeah kinda, we just usually end up bringing the sea to them one tanker truck at a time.)
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Apr 18, 2023 11:54
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Shooting Blanks posted:I'd be more concerned about a Trump-Carlson ticket, personally. Trump's narcissism would never in a billion years allow it. Anything at all short of fawning servility with eternal flattery and Trump is not interested in someone being near him.
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Apr 25, 2023 14:48
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Zip tie guy wasn't jumping seats in the rotunda for funsies and he wasn't alone. There were people there with specific intent to kill. Denying and muddying up that reality is something right wing media has spent a *LOT* of time and energy on and that's not an accident. The 'useful idiot' crowd was there milling about not accomplishing much and generally misunderstanding things; sure, granted. They weren't going to stop political actions by trashing a building. That's just not how things work. There were people organizing the event and on the ground that *do* understand how political power and exercise works and their goal was to murder political opposition members until they got what they want. Any understanding short of those facts is astonishingly off base in a country with a rising fascist political party.
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Apr 30, 2023 16:17
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I’m more wondering about the efficacy of shoot to wound. There’s a place for warning shots. It feels too hollywood to expect anyone to be able to easily plugs the limb of a moving person. Even assuming you can somehow guarantee shots will only ever hit limbs it is still very, very easy for that to be lethal. Shooting to "wound" is dumb and bad. If you're shooting someone then assume you're going to kill them, because that is a very likely outcome. In a sane world this concept is used to moderate the choice to begin shooting in the first place but, welp, here we are.
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May 1, 2023 15:08
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Anyone who can prove they are materially impacted could sue once they prove the impact (or have a default happen, which would be de facto proof). Standing has become a bunch of bullshit that Republican judges will wipe their rear end with then move on to do whatever they wanted to do anyway. Abso-loving-lutely nobody has standing of being harmed by mifepristone being approved 23 years ago and look where we are today.
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May 2, 2023 19:30
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Ethics_Gradient posted:This will prompt the judges to just openly solicit more "gifts" to keep the lights on. They'll put decals on their robes like NASCARs. I mean why not? Not like it would hurt them. Plus, the amounts they're getting are just laughable. $150,000 across years for a kid's private schooling? You're making rulings worth billions, possibly tens or hundreds of billions, to these people. Have some respect for the power you wield and the country that has foolishly given it to you within its system of government. Get some real money in exchange for selling out the future of 300 million people. Make it seem like there's something of value you're trading away, not just a country club membership or something.
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May 4, 2023 13:23
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Josef bugman posted:Why the gently caress isn't her brother helping her? Other than pure FYGM. Behind The Bastards did a piece on Thomas. He is a bastard.
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May 5, 2023 22:33
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:There's lots of legal things you can do to really enjoy your contributions more than necessary (stay at nicer hotels, serve nicer food at events, etc.) but, you can't just use campaign money for personal things. There is nothing that stops you from using your campaign money to stay in the nicest hotels whenever you are campaigning or flying private plans or catering your events with the nicest food. People do those all of the time, but the very dumb or very greedy people are the ones who try to use them for personal expenses and almost always get caught. When Santos first filed his quarterly FEC disclosures earlier this year, basically everyone thought that he was doing something very suspicious and was going to get caught. Duncan Hunter spent thousands on Steam games and taking his mistress out. They are very dumb, very greedy, or think they will never get caught because they are very smart (but, if you see point #1, they are actually very dumb). https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/01/13/george-santos-finances-raising-questions/11031759002/ Santos' financial filings had dozens upon dozens of finance charges that were exactly one penny below the required reporting threshold and they were for completely ludicrous things like exactly $199.99 for parking in a facility that did not charge $0.99 for anything. It was very dumb, very greedy, and very very VERY obvious. At some point other people who generally do not want to go after their social class peers get forced in to it by the very dumb people not even bothering to put on the mask.
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May 10, 2023 14:41
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Short fingered vulgarian will never not be funny. Mostly because it pisses him off.
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May 14, 2023 04:34
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Charliegrs posted:It's not that surprising. The GOP is holding a gun to the head of the economy and if they pull the trigger Biden is the one that will get blamed. In the past the GOP holding the gun didn't really want to pull the trigger but they wanted Obama to think they would. Now the GOP is completely unhinged and is itching to pull the trigger and the only thing that will keep them from doing it is hurting lots and lots of people through spending cuts. Only thing that will keep them from doing it this time is hurting lots and lots of people through spending cuts. What about next time? And the next? And the next? This is the exact same logic as negotiating with terrorists and for the exact same reasons. We've seen this song and dance FOR loving DECADES NOW. It needs to stop.
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May 15, 2023 16:32
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Failed Imagineer posted:For sure. It's not impossible that as DeSantis farts his way out of contention the anti-Trump GOP money coalesces around Pence, but I don't realistically see his warchest ever being that impressive I give a hearty "lol" at money that tries to coalesce around Pence. Trump will roll him up and smoke him like a cheap cigar. Then probably have another crazed lunatic fascist assassinate him at CPAC or something that couldn't even be predicted right now.
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May 16, 2023 15:38
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Mooseontheloose posted:Way back in the day D&D had a PBEM game of SMAC going. The YOSPOS one is still going after like 3, 4 years?
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May 18, 2023 03:25
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I think having a button to cut his mic and turn on a big, red, "You're muted, rear end in a top hat, stop trying to talk." light could work. If you forced him to shut the gently caress up and let someone else get a point, any point, out of their mouths without getting drowned out by being called a nasty woman then something could happen. It wouldn't be a debate or a conversation, because he'll go right back to that the instant the light goes off but it could be made to work as.....something. Which is why he would never agree to it.
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May 18, 2023 12:05
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:DeSantis is officially declaring his presidential campaign in a few days. There's just so much  here. It's precious. Like watching a five year old pretend to be an astronaut. Go get 'em tiger, you'll reach the stars if you jump hard enough and you'll absolutely win over Trump by talking about policy.
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May 18, 2023 15:40
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Kalit posted:Do you think the Democratic party can achieve more [lasting] power without getting more votes? Do you think that Republicans will continue maintaining their current level of power if they keep getting less votes? For the Republican half of this question; yes. This is how authoritarian regimes around the planet are operating, and the exact path they've gone down each time to get there. They accept the outcome of democracy if they win, and if they start to lose democracy falls out a window while shooting itself in the back of the head three times. This has happened over and over in recent decades and is where Republicans are pretty explicitly headed. So, yes, I do think they can maintain their current level of power if they keep getting less votes. It's exactly what they are working on.
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May 19, 2023 19:40
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Tuxedo Gin posted:And yet they all got richer during the pandemic when nobody would shut up about the economic catastrophe it was for business. That's a lot of the problem. Almost our entire society, from the ground up, is designed to make the rich richer in all situations for all outcomes. Up or down, everything is built for them to be able to extract more wealth from the rest of society until everything redlines and detonates, leaving us all to pick through the rubble. ...which they'll probably still come out on top of in relative terms. That's just the only point at which they'll suffer along with everyone else because the entire system has blown up leaving them ruling over ashes while everyone else is trying to eat the ashes. They read about the collapse of the entire biosphere and start using their wealth to build themselves compounds to escape the problem, we just get to die.
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May 20, 2023 15:25
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Well if we lived in a not-poo poo country it could be managed responsibly. As an example in South Korea you have what would most closely, though not directly, translate in to a social security number that everyone has that you need to use to register, like, a World of Warcraft account. Here in the US we would freak the gently caress out about that because someone getting your SS# can turbo gently caress your identity and completely ruin you financially. Being a responsible country, that number alone in South Korea doesn't allow you to do those things. It's just a first-step verification that everyone there uses kind of like we use our driver's license numbers here in the states, only they do it on the country level. So if we had a not-poo poo country run by a not-poo poo government, yeah online identity verification could be handled responsibly. I would even go so far as to say I'm open to the idea that, handled responsibly like it never will be, I would be supportive of online identity verification. We don't fix problems as a country anymore though, so here we are and here we'll stay until it all goes completely to poo poo.
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May 22, 2023 01:17
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Among many other extremely valid problems, my personal biggest frustration with middle/high school is the scheduling. For seven years I was a loving zombie, day in and day out, because I had to wake up at the rear end crack of dawn and go sit in a desk then get yelled at and singled out if I feel asleep. gently caress that entire thing it ruined my sleep for years and I'm not convinced I ever completely recovered from it.
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May 23, 2023 02:37
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This is a country where a significant number of children are using their days wondering where their next meal is coming from. And I chose that phrasing very, very specifically. Try not eating for 24 hours before a surgery or something. That really, really sucks and you're distracted all day thinking about it. Now do it as a lifestyle and it gets a million times worse. It is flat out not in the realm of the comprehensible unless it has happened to you. Chronic malnourishment is something our bodies react to really, really, REALLY loving strongly and it simply does not leave room for anything else in your brain. It's a constant, relentless hijacking of your thought process. Like the ocean tides were made of distraction and suffering only they're happening inside your skull. Then tell that kid they have to sit still in a classroom and listen to someone talk at them as a full time job. Yeah they're not going to make it through school, what a loving shocker.
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May 23, 2023 15:18
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Authoritarian regimes around the globe have done exactly what is happening in America multiple times in the last decades. They support democratic outcomes as long as they win. If they start losing, they dismantle democracy until they win again. Like gerrymandering. Or voter suppression. Or capture of media apparatus turning them into outright propaganda. Or threats of/acts of violence and intimidation at the polls and poll workers. Or re-writing the political structure to remove power from the winning faction. Or restructuring the judicial system to cement power outside of elections. Would be really concerning if we lived in a country where those things were happening on the regular, as well as accelerating in frequency and intensity. Thinking the Republican party is a "dying" party correctly identifies that it is not majority popular, while completely ignoring historical precedent that it doesn't need to be. This playbook has been written before and we're going through the exact same steps. It's going to get worse.
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May 24, 2023 13:21
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Angry_Ed posted:Also playing fiscal cliff chicken with a side that won't blink (because they're stupid enough to think its a good idea to destroy the US and Global economy just to own the libs) is, unfortunately, a losing proposition. Tell the terrorists you won't negotiate and they can go gently caress themselves sideways, put the 14th amendment before the courts and dare them to detonate the global economy. That pack of ghouls is the closest thing we have left to people who understand the Republican long con which is a really loving dire state of affairs, but house/senate Republicans have proven over and over for decades now they're not participating in the system of governance anymore. Every concession these lunatics get is confirmation that they can get more next time by doing the same thing, only harder.
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May 24, 2023 17:19
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I think the implication is that for every one Minnesota doing good things, Republicans get a Texas, Florida, Kentucky and more all individually one-upping each other in heinous, bigoted poo poo that will get people killed on top of even more cookie cutter legislation passed out by ALEC or the Koch foundation or whoever is making GBS threads things up this week.
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May 25, 2023 12:05
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I'm sure glad we got a whole two years of not putting a gun to the head of the world economy in a manufactured crisis and all it cost was dead people in poverty. Vote harder, suckers! That'll keep you alive next time. Maybe. If we decide to care. Your sacrifice will not be remembered. But be sure to vote blue no matter who for the only thing that matters in the next two years. In between burying your children or whatever, nobody cares. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 28, 2023 11:45
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 at the idea that any sort of charges will take Trump out of the running. Anybody still voting Republican will vote even harder if he ever got convicted because the thing he admitted to in his own words on live national television will be deep state lies that someone else faked to unfairly witch hunt him. The Republican clown car will absolutely get pantsed in the primary if Trump is still in the running, but wilder things have happened in life. He is one extra hamberder away from a life destroying stroke or whatever.
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May 31, 2023 15:25
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There's worries that Sinema may run as an independent and be a spoiler candidate. I'm not convinced that she wouldn't siphon votes from the Republican candidate though. There's a non-zero number of people who would vote for her just because she makes the other team angry and I know which party I'd put my chips on those people being in. edit: OctaMurk posted:if she runs as an independent it may hand the seat to repubs I just don't see it. Her campaign was on being a progressive then she immediately turned around, poo poo on everything and everyone related to that, and started her bonkers "I'm a maverick! Teehee!" schtick. Nobody likes her anymore. bird food bathtub fucked around with this message at 19:23 on May 31, 2023 |
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May 31, 2023 19:20
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As long as CNN's chief dipshits keep chasing the Fox-Lite wannabe angle of viewership they're gonna just keep sinking. They're ratings chasing idiots that think bringing the absolute best solution to the problem twenty years ago to where they are today is the smart move to deal with cable TV dying as a medium. They make a lot of mouth noises about trying to both-sides and truth-is-in-the-middle-journalism their way through it but even that is bullshit in two major ways. One, they're bald faced lying. All they're having is constant Republican-simp poo poo on their high profile attempts like Trump's town hall and that crap outlined a few posts above. Proof is in the pudding on that stuff and that's not Fair And Balanced™©®, that's pandering while thinking the winning move is to hold on to the sanity of yester-year. There's no market left for that. Even Fox is having issues with that. The crazies want purestrain crazy right from the source, nothing watered down anymore. There's no water left in that well to tap in to, everyone that's left is moving on to the un-cut stuff. Two, the rest of the world is pretty god drat sick and tired of both-sides-ism. We're not a unified country where that poo poo sells anymore. Nobody wants to hear about how solidly in the middle the truth is and what we need to listen to from both sides to find a solution. Proto-fascists are shouting eliminationist rhetoric from the rooftops, a lot of people don't like the idea of being eliminated.
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Jun 5, 2023 15:28
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