BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world

Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software pro

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2 yr. ago

No, the people that presume to speak on God's behalf hate democracy

Ronny thinks so

Maybe he does, or maybe he thinks if he says so enough, voters will vote to actually give him authority as if it was God-given.

Cool, cool.

Now do every other tech company

God doesn't give out rights or authority in a secular republic, the people do. When you use the authority delegated by the people to take away some of those people's rights and tell them God gives you that right, it's called bullshitting.

That's always the weakness of a democracy/republic; it's when charlatans convince people to consent to give up their power that they fail into autocracies

It doesn't help that the media gamely both-sides every issue, even when the issue in question is not one that has two legitimate sides.

For example, it's a story when women lose their rights and protections and bodily autonomy, when brown and poor voters lose their voting rights or have their representative power gerrymandered away, when powerful men violate the law and aren't held accountable, etc.

There are two sides to these stories, but one of them is outside the bounds of the peace that makes civilization possible and when 'the media' decline to call that out, they've picked a side and it's not the one that will sustain or defend a republic

After watching him and his cronies repeatedly do crime and get pardons and get kid glove treatment from the law, and knowing full well that if a poor or brown person did half of what he's done, just once, they'd be held in jail awaiting trial, assuming they survived the arrest process, it's plain we live in a country with 2 tiers of justice

...and that ain't justice.

Oh, no! Well, anyways

This is the same bullshit game they play to chill every other sort of speech and expression they think ought to be stuffed into a closet and/or out of public life- threaten those that speak it, greenlight the bullying, and make life hell for people that insist on having their own opinions or identities, and then cry crocodile tears about how they hate our freedom

Y'know, I get the whole 'but it's a red-as-fuck state so we have to take a safe centrist candidate' thing, but are you fucking kidding me? Centrist democrats give democrats a terrible name in the first place- they're corporate creatures whose favorite pastime is hunting the poor for sport and colluding with right-wingers to suppress labor rights and make corporate power unassailable.

Fuck that guy

won't somebody think of the warmongers?

Of course he doesn't want to de-escalate the situation.

If he did that, things might calm down and fewer people will vote based on his promises of being strong on security. Also if he did that, his hard-right backers (who need a hot conflict to keep taking Palestinian land politically acceptable) will attack him for being 'soft' on security.

The logic of it all is genocide of course, but Bibi wants that if the alternative is him being out of office and back in court defending himself against corruption charges.

they are doing what their constituents want

It's worth noting that their constituents are an amalgam of fringe theocratic radicals and check-writing plutocrats. The whole reason Fox exists is that they realized long ago that their policy programs aren't popular, they instead needed to add circuses to the bread and circuses to be relevant in any way

I predicted in the 2016 primaries that if HRC became the Dem nominee, it would be the one thing the Right Wing in America could unify itself against- they hated her then and they still do today; I wonder if she realizes yet how big a gift it is to a splintered, ungovernable mob of political grifters to give it anything they can unify against

How is that not a bill of attainder, accompanied by in-depth media confessions that it is in fact a bill of attainder?

FYI, a bill of attainder is legislation that imposes punishment on a specific person or group of people without a judicial trial

TBH I'm right there with you when it comes to wishing corporate social media a fiery demise.

And yet, I'm happily using decentralized/non-profit social media that I'd very much like to see flourish. The thing I don't like about social media today is that it's billionaires selling personal info to people that want to direct advertising or propaganda to intellectually defenseless people, I really think democracy can't withstand the firehose of bullshit that now empowers bad actors to lie at scale that used to require traditional media or state resources.

At this point it's probably helpful to appreciate that the only reason weed is federally illegal is that the Nixon administration needed a pretext to expand the police state so that it could go after the antiwar left and brown people.

Since then, having drugs like weed be illegal gives cops discretion to target 'likely suspects', which basically can mean 'brown people' and anyone they don't like the look of

At this point, I say that if we're going to fund the displacement of Palestinians we had better damned well be prepared to receive them as refugees.

rather negligent of the article to ignore inflation

Also, while we note that high prices hurt directly, in major ways the Fed's response to that (it's been raising interest rates to reduce the money supply) is a major source of the pain associated with the high prices/price gouging we're calling inflation.

Higher interest rates mean higher mortgage payments (or rent pressure), etc. This way, price gouging leads to higher profits, and if you hold bonds, also higher profits there- while consumers of those things are doubly-fucked

Didn’t it just come from taxes.

No, Treasury directed the fed to issue bonds and run those loans through banks and businesses. When Congress spends money, it spends it into existence- it doesn't have a pool of dollars that people have sent in somewhere. For that matter, when you pay your taxes, the money is used to zero out the bonds (again, in the Fed's ledger) used to issue it. Remember, money in circulation is (from the POV of the fed) a liability on its books.

At this point, pouring on the bombs (shortly after gloating that the new speaker in congress suits Russia) seems likely to be as much about shifting morale (getting Ukraine to worry that its support from the west will dry up with Kremlin toadies in control of Washington's purse strings) as it is about on-the-ground strategy or tactics.

It's not like new Israeli atrocities detracts significantly from the world's ability to pay attention to the atrocities in Ukraine, but anything that gives Moscow something else to gesture at gives it something to whatabout over, and getting the rest of the world (including nato members and US politicians) to fight amongst themselves (over whether it's better to back a genocidal ethnostate or the terrorists resisting it) is always a win when the alternative might be for them to unify against your invasion of Ukraine.