Furbag @ Furbag @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I ask this honestly of all the people who think the last election was fair: What did Trump have to lose by not cheating?

If he cheats and he wins, he becomes president and can then use Absolute Immunity™ to completely shield himself from the consequences of both the most recent election and also the 2020 election interference / coup d'etat that he was in court for.

If he cheats and loses, he goes to prison - probably for the rest of his life.

If he plays fair and wins, exact same outcome as if he cheated, only with worse odds for victory.

If he plays fair and he loses, he goes to prison - probably for the rest of his life.

Trump would have been a fool to not try to rig the election. He was already in deep shit, and he couldn't possibly get in more trouble than he already was. Cheating and getting caught in 2024 would have been like throwing gasoline on a raging forest fire.

Literally everybody with half a brain said for 4 years that Trump and his team, if not prevented from running again, would learn from their mistakes in 2020. And the lesson they learned wouldn't be "Don't cheat.", it would be "Don't lose.". Right after the dust settled, Republicans moved to disenfranchise voters specifically for the next election to give them the edge they needed to win this time around. They left no margin for failure this time, and I wouldn't have put it past them to have altered voting machines while they were at it. But nobody is looking into any of this because we're too concerned with not appearing like hypocrites.

The greater fool is the one who trusts a person who cheated and went unpunished to not cheat again.

People who are intelligent tend to not make deals with foreign nations to betray their own.

They don't want smart people, they already have really smart people taken from the homeland and employed as spies. What they really want is greedy people who can be controlled and manipulated - assets that are given everything they desire, and told to do as the boss says or they'll take it all away and make life miserable for them again.

He's pretty transparent in his conflict of interest. He wants a SpaceX contract for a Mars mission. In the same tweet he said the ISS needs to be deorbited, he also said "let's go to Mars instead!" This is him trying to make that happen. In a better world, this kind of blatant cronyism would be immediately punished.

You'd think it would be easy to avoid doing this, but watch as the MAGA scum come out of the woodwork to rush to the defense of another guy who totally didn't mean it, honest.

No matter what, Musk will never ever eliminate 2 trillion in spending. I would bet every last dime I have that in 4 years he won't even come close to that number. Reason? First, corruption within the government does not want to eliminate spending because then it makes it harder for them to skim off the top. Trump just filled the government with lickspittles and lackwits who have no scruples that would prevent them from engaging in behavior like taking bribes or embezzling funds. Second, special interest groups, and most notably the largest special interest group of them all - defense contractors, will absolutely whip their bought-and-paid-for congressional representatives into shape if Musk even goes near the defense budget, which is the majority of where the wasted tax dollars go anyway.

But it doesn't matter that he won't come close to that number, even when he cooks the books to make it looks like he's saving 8 billion and not 8 million, he'll just declare that any savings at all is still better than it was before even if he fell short of his laughably optimistic target. And the morons will eat it up and pat themselves on the back for gutting the government and exposing the nation's most sensitive payment information to teenaged hackers.

The problem is that idiots are eating up these numbers. I have a few low information coworkers who just hear the stories about DOGE saving all this tax money on "wasteful" programs on right wing news outlets and are convinced, full stop. Now, they parrot all the information they hear and are "glad that someone is finally doing something about government waste". They don't look into whether or not the numbers that Elon Musk spits out are truthful, let alone whether or not those tax dollars were actually having a positive impact.

We live in a post-truth society, and the Republicans have been abusing the people's willingness to give authority figured the benefit of the doubt. No amount of untruth can ruin their credibility, because all it takes is a tiny kernel of truth to make it seem like it wasn't actually a lie.

Suggesting that this is RFK's "best idea" implies that this set up addresses the problem of drug abuse better than existing established rehab programs.

If that's what you think my post is saying, then I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. His best idea is still a bad one, but it's at least built on a foundation that has been proven to work, which is rehab. When I said it was his best idea, that wasn't me praising him or implying that it would actually do anything more for drug addiction than current state sponsored or private rehab programs do. It's just closer to hitting the mark than his other schemes would be to making Americans healthier.

Where exactly in my post did I say this solves the problem?

I could see someone who is addicted to hard drugs finding success with a program like this, and the phrase "if they want to" implies that going to one of these is voluntary and not compulsory, but the real question is once they are there, can they check themselves out at any time if they feel like the program isn't working for them? Or did the government just trap them in a taxpayer funded insane asylum for the rest of their lives because they now won't give them any psychiatric medication to help treat the antisocial symptoms?

Of all the RFK stuff I've heard about, this one seems like it would be his best idea and one that most liberals could get behind if it weren't for his regressive views on psychiatric care. Getting people off drugs and back onto their feet should be a worthwhile societal goal. Getting people off of SSRIs and Adderall and other psych meds seems like it would be counterproductive.

I also don't buy Crapple products either, but that's a personal choice.

I stopped using everything Google. Fascist collaborators won't get a dime of my money, won't get my eyeballs on any of their ads, and won't get a single kilobyte of data from me to sell for profit.

I'll keep my gmail account open because all it really does is accumulate spam which probably costs them money.

Likewise, lol. A little friction keeps the chaff out.

Trump's cult can't coalesce around anyone but him. He'll be a martyr, but sanity will be restored long enough to get some adults back in the room and rebuild the guardrails of democracy once more.

Ravioli ravioli, give me the formuoli.

Guarantee I'd be sabotaging shit on this side to help you guys win. Every sensible American loves our Canadian neighbors and respects their sovereignty.

It's amazing how so much of our wealth is tied up in "assets" as opposed to liquid cash. I probably have just slightly less in assets than AOC at the moment, but I also don't own a home, so if I ever managed to buy one my net worth would skyrocket beyond hers but I'd be housepoor and most likely living paycheck to paycheck. I'm not even close to being considered conventionally wealthy, and the distance between me and a billionaire is almost literally unfathomable.

That 500k net worth of hers isn't sitting in a bank account waiting to be spent, moron.

We live in a country where black men gained the right to vote before any woman did.

Misogyny is the original prejudice.

His ethics disqualify him from taking the spot meant for a career neoliberal corporatist.