There’s no karma to be had here, this is the end game. The Republicans have been working to dismantle the government for decades. Every piece that can be sold off to private enterprise will, regulation will be gutted, and consequences be damned.

The fall of the US is now inevitable. There is no future for anyone here that isn’t already rich. Leave if you can.

For the intelligent, critical thinking ones sure. Of course the rest of their education is designed to prevent that whenever possible.

I like to think of myself as reasonably intelligent and self-aware, but it took me about 15 years after moving out of my childhood home to fully break free of the indoctrination I’d received.

My boomer in-laws have voted D their entire lives, but are considering voting Trump because they think Biden is too liberal. They are not as unusual as you might think.

Sadly, reading comprehension of Lemmy users leaves a lot to be desired.

I also think many that misunderstand something would rather entrench and make a ridiculous argument than admit any kind of fault.

You’re talking about income tax rates, and I agree that the top tax rates should be higher, but this won’t fix the problem because billionaires don’t make their money from salaries. Most of their money is theoretical and tied up in ownership of shares of a company.

They can sell shares or earn dividends to make money, so capital gains should also be taxed at a much higher rate. But billionaires often choose not to sell shares either because they have a better option…

They take out low interest rates loans using their shares as collateral. The interest rates they are charged are generally going to be far lower than the interest on their stocks that stay invested,. This is where most of their liquidity comes from, because loans aren’t taxed, and in some regard is almost an infinite money glitch for billionaires.

I think we need to make it illegal to use financial holdings as collateral for loans, at least for starters.

You’re definitely right, and I kindof lumped those together - it’s hard to write a complete response during a poop break at work.

I was not aware of ‘athiest christian nationalists’ being a thing. Fascinating.

I also didn’t adequately explain that I feel ‘modern’ Christianity has very little to do with the teachings of Christ, much less the content of the Bible even as a whole. It seems it’s much more a justification of their targeted hatred.

As someone raised in a white evangelical household, an ex-evangelical myself, and someone who lived in a number of very conservative communities and as someone who regularly works with police and military, I feel I have a very solid understanding of (and have been thoroughly traumatized by) the conservative/evangelical/christian nationalist mindset - and I think the Christianity part is way more central that you are giving it credit.

Similarly, while there is most certainly racism present, I have encountered few overtly, stereotypically racist people in those communities. They will enthusiastically accept any minority that shares their beliefs. I think it’s far more about ideology than race. Where the racism comes in is they automatically distrust people of other races unless they discover there is a shared ideology.

They hate white Democrats/liberals/progressives just as much, maybe even more, than those of other races, because those are people who have “rejected the word of God” rather than being those who have simply not heard it yet and potential converts.

I have no idea on a metric of how frequently an “ordinary” gun jams, much less these modified ones, but I can apply some logic from my knowledge/experiences. The weapons you mention having experience with are designed with appropriate tolerances to not bind up under heavy use, so are a bit different from the ‘consumer-grade’ type we’re talking about in this specific event.

The type of semiautomatic rifles we’re talking about here use recoil to cycle the action. A bump stock allows the whole weapon to oscillate - and can have an effect similar to not securely shouldering the weapon. This prevents the needed energy from being transferred into the action for complete cycling, and that would make the weapon prone to jamming.

I don’t know if I have much of value to add to or reply to your second paragraph, but yeah that fixation is weird.

I mean, he didn’t really have much of a problem with accuracy - he fired a total of 1058 rounds, and those rounds or shrapnel from them injured 413 different people. Of course, many people received more than a single gunshot wound. He killed 58 (later 60) in ten minutes of shooting – effectively one person every 10 seconds. I think it would be difficult for a single person to injure or kill more from where he was standing with any weapon short of an RPG.

He was operating a significant number of his weapons on bump stocks. Bump stocks allow firing at a much higher rate than the weapons were designed for. Operating at a higher rate causes the weapons to overheat. Overheating causes misfires and jams (and inaccuracy and can permanently damage weapons, but I doubt he was particularly concerned about those things). He did have them all set up in a row and many on mounts. He broke out the overlooking windows of his hotel room before he started shooting. It seems he was shooting with one until it jammed and then moving on to the next rather than trying to clear misfires.

I don’t know about the lack of mental health care being the “main issue.” A healthy society wouldn’t be in dire need of such extreme amounts of mental health care. These mass shootings are a single symptom (among many) of a very complicated and interwoven set of factors that have brought us to this place. There is no single solution that will fix the problem, and the only way out of this mess will take significant investment and likely generations to break the cycle. But humans are greedy, and particularly in the USA, we only look for simple simgle-issue solutions that can have a measurable outcome (and be economically viable) within the next couple or fiscal quarters or an election term, at most. The solutions we should be implementing don’t work on that sort of time scale, and many will be very costly (in varying terms of both money and/or freedom)… So, we just don’t do those things.

I mean, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t organize an orgy even if I did offer to pay. I’m not a lame ass.

They like instability. A steadily increasing market may yield reasonable results, but a chaotic market creates lots of buying opportunities on the cheap.

Anybody younger than me is a kid. One of the few remaining things I have to look forward to in life is calling the new residents of the retirement home ‘kiddos’ and ‘youngsters’.

Because a LOT of people have fallen for the fearmongering.

I know what you’re getting at here, but the way you phrased it is 100% wrong. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an expressly anti-slavery party.

He sure as hell was at my (very close to national average demographics district’s) caucus in 2020. Damn near the whole room lined up for Biden nearly instantly. It was the same for Hillary in 2016, btw. These lies people like to repeat on the internet about how one progressive or another has overwhelming support and only loses out due to manipulation by the democratic party are not borne or by reality, and I think are often spread by those trying to either disenfranchise left voters, or are the voters that fell for it and are now doing the dirty work of repeating the lies.

Yep, we didn’t do that. And the US also didn’t stamp out the Confederacy when they had the chance. And those may very well be one of the primary reasons that fascism is back once again. The world doesn’t really seem to like truly holding people accountable when they can get away with it.

Fascism is perhaps the purest concentrated evil on this planet and is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions. Everybody who supports and gives power to fascism has blood on their hands.

I remember all this, and I fell for it. Due to years of propaganda against her, I just had this mild feeling of revulsion to Hillary. I primaried for Bernie in a district that’s very close in demographics to the national average, and was stunned that Hillary had about a 4x as many supporters. But once she became the official Dem candidate, I started watching her campaign events, debates and researched her political history. Hillary was a fantastic candidate and after watching her in action I fully understood WHY there had been decades of propaganda from the right against her - she was incredibly dangerous to them - not only because of her likelihood to win, but even moreso due to how effective she would be as president.