Remember, those CEOs are also all trump sycophant idiots. They’ll artificially lower costs further, to sell the lie, trump admin will make up the difference, and then some, on “lost” profits in tax breaks for the rich. Then, once he can take credit, they’ll start to raise again, blame China or another country for rising prices as they climb back up and surpass current.
That will be the paper plan though, in reality, he’ll lose his focus and just say it out loud halfway through.
A meaningful number of people globally want “revenge” on COVID. They are impotently raging along with the nearest angry person they can attach to. They don’t understand their feelings but they feel generally cheated. Many real issues layered on to, but that’s the motivating foundation.
They also are failed adults that just want a “daddy” to feel like he will make things better or “beat up” problems on their behalf (or more likely just make them feel like that’s happening, regardless of reality).
I don’t think this is trying to teach tens of millions, I think this is a scaled equivalent of me just standing in my kitchen, looking around and saying to nobody, “God damnit… What the fuck!” Before I take a moment to figure out what’s next.
It’s very human. Many had a lot invested in the idea of a better future, that this all might be salvageable. Takes a minute to reckon with the reality here. We’re going to have to replace presidential debates with slap fights and primaries with Jello wrestling. For someone relatively younger with a family that they pictured hopefully supporting to grow to be good people doing good things in the world, just sucks to realize the “support” now means we need to start slapping them in the face as early as possible so that they have the most red and calloused cheeks possible to survive in the world we selfishly forced them into.
Raising someone to be decent today feels like he would be as valuable as raising them to be the best VCR repair person in 2024. You have a severely limited and likely permanently outdated skill set. You might be able to enter a few small rooms where your talent is appreciated and useful, but more often than not you’ll walk around in a broader humanity that has no use for you or those like you.
Your landlord is a republican.
Or more specifically, your landlord is a property management company employed by venture capitalists who you just emboldened to get even shittier. And those VCs are conservatives.
Enjoy your perceived victory against bad old uncle Joe…
As is historically the case in this country
If you voted for stein, trump or stayed home…
The hardest thing to accept is that, regardless, good Americans are still going to fight for those in the Muslim community if this administration gets in. You voted for this, indirectly or directly, and they are salivating at the pending opportunity to put you in camps, regardless of your actual background of citizenship, because you “Look foreign!” and that scares them.
How can you be such poor students of (extremely recent) history? I sincerely hope that we don’t see the worst of what’s possible, but make no mistake, you’ve made the wrong bet and very likely voted for your own downfall.
I appreciate your measured response and you listening to reason here and having the strength to say you learned something new in the exchange. Wish you well and hope you spread to others - If we all convinced one person of the bigger picture right now, we might be in a much different reality.
The answer here is complex and I doubt you actually want depth. But to clarify your statement, each COUNTY within a state manages their own election. California is also one of the biggest states in the country and the population of some counties dwarf the size of entire U.S. states. So the first answer is, it’s a complex operation WITHOUT any obstruction attempts, but we live in this reality, and gop obstruction is rampant and regular at this point.
An epicenter for election threats and disinformation in California is Shasta County. It will probably take some time for them to dissect all of the subtle ways that this fucked their process, but late in the election cycle, their garbage county supervisors hired a lawyer with no election admin experience to replace the departing competent person who had run elections. Here’s an account from a local paper wrt some of what is allowed to go on in that country:
"CalMatters’ Sergio Olmos visited last week and reports that the presence of self-appointed election observers has led some elections workers to quit. The observers spend their days at the county’s registrar of voters office on the lookout for any misdeeds related to voter fraud. Though voters are legally allowed to enter the office to observe the election process, staffers report that the observers have been following workers into their breakroom and attempting to open doors to see inside their offices. Their intensity pushed Tanner Johnson to quit after working as an account clerk for more than a year. He says that 10 of the registrar’s 21 employees have also left. *Johnson: “They want to catch us in a lie, so they’ll try to trick you into saying something. A lot of times they’ll be secretly videotaping you or recording you. … I make $19.64 an hour. I’m not going to be a martyr for $19.60 an hour.”
So that kind of ceaseless, cowardly, undemocratic intimidation has been long present. It leads to stressed, threatened volunteer temporary workers who don’t get paid enough to deal with that bullshit so if nothing else, they naturally slow down. It also leads to high turnover for those positions from the fear/stress, which means people are more likely to be undertrained or frankly, lower quality job candidates as you’ve already cleared out the “starting lineup and the bench” in some cases and then you’re just desperate for any bodies off the street - including some of these pieces of shit themselves that learn the systems so they can purposefully volunteer and obstruct from the inside work challenges to ballots that are false, but require time in a process for people to then come and do a focused verification process to reclear as flagged ballot - like the tidbit that was caught streaming those “sample” verification ballots and then immediately challenging the validity of their elections process because they didn’t have those ballots (that he obviously stole, on camera)
At the larger systemic level, they’ve challenged valid systems meant to expedite voting and vote processing so much and for so long now, that you’re left (intentionally by these GOP efforts) with a patchwork of disjointed, disconnected and overly careful processing flows that move especially slow to attempt to satisfy their never meaningfully justified “voter fraud” bullshit - claims they are now, suddenly silent about, just like with those “caravans!!!” at the border
I could write you an essay, but I doubt you actually, truly give a shit.
Is that a serious question?
Irresponsible to say “taking it’s sweet time…” these days without also mentioning explicitly that this is the specific effect of decades of a GOP cause to sabotage how votes are collected, processed, tallied and reported.
Stop accepting these cowardly fucking news outlets not giving you the basic facts of who appointed these judges. Not giving them immediately, if at all. First several mentions of this dipshit are just “a judge”… Only deep into the article did they start to make some mention. No way to justify that initial obfuscation, especially when most skim headlines and MAYBE first couple paragraphs.
There is no fucking maybe here. You, your children, your grandkids and their kids, at least, will have, not only a conservative majority, but a fully unqualified, sycophantic trump cultist majority. Period.
America got the late stage 4 diagnosis last Tuesday. We won’t spontaneously combust the next day, but we are effectively dead (as a united states) at this point- the democracy experiment was ultimately a failure. We couldn’t keep the Republic.
First they came for…
Remember this arrogant fucking moment, and how good you feel right now, when he puts you in a camp one day, dipshit.
It’s not “just” that, but it was the deciding factor that made this all moot from the start.
The people who voted for trump are, in their DNA, at their core, bigoted cowards that wouldn’t have been swayed by anything else - She has a vagina and she’s black - That’s all it was ever going to be.
" I was this close, Bill… I just wanted more policy details… More time… If only they didn’t make me vote for trump".
This is literally how we’ll get to “but brawndo gots what plants crave?”
One of the biggest things is that the “deep state”, an innocuous thing turned into a convenient boogeyman by trump, will be quietly destroyed. This is the thing that actually keep your mail arriving, your food edible and your children’s toys not coated in lead. The “deep state”, meaning actual subject matter experts doing their jobs throughout entire government for years, regardless of current administration, are all going to be replaced by kid rock and vaping young republicans fresh from dropping out of their second semester in at The University of Southern Alabama State.
That’s who’s going to be the dude inspecting your meat for e.coli and signing off on the clinical trials for your perception meds - Gunner, Hunter and Ryder.
Really don’t think anyone is considering the reality of how deeply fucked we’re going to be as we’re all fixed fully on the front door for obvious signs of trouble (immediate societal decay), while these broken cartoon villains fill the crawlspace with fertilizer and gasoline and kick in the backdoor with flamethrowers in hand.
We’re fucked, and we’re going to be focused on monitoring the wrong indicators of how fucked, until it is just beyond any repair within any of our lifetimes. For example, you’re going to have FIVE fundamentally broken people on the Supreme Court for the rest of your life. It’s over.
And the “deep state”, meaning actual subject matter experts doing their jobs throughout government for years, regardless of current administration, are all going to be replaced by kid rock and vaping young republicans fresh from dropping out of their second semester in at The University of Southern Alabama State.
That’s who’s going to be the dude inspecting your meat for e.coli and signing off on the clinical trials for you’ve perception meds - Gunner, Hunter and Ryder.
Really don’t think anyone is considering the reality of how deeply fucked we’re going to be looking at the front door for obvious signs of trouble, while they leaf the crawlspace with fertilizer and gasoline and kick in the backdoor with flamethrowers in hand.
IMO, respectfully it’s more comforting for you personally to do that work to justify that it’s all explainable and we’re not being actively governed by the mentally ill. Again, IMO, it’s enabling for you to connect those dots on their behalf. They are showing you reality here, of course its human nature to say, “wait… No? Right, this isn’t serious?”
But it is, “they’re eating the dogs and the cats” “they control the weather” “secret pedophile pizza basements” “secret Muslims without birth certificates” - this is all happening now.
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