UnderpantsWeevil @ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

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124

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8,733

Joined

2 yr. ago

Per the CNN story, its certainly possible he had a mental break after failing to get a job in the forestry service and just decided to take it out on a couple of firefighters before offing himself.

Did his parents holding extremist political views and a fetish for firearms play a role in his actions? Would be more unbelievable if they didn't. But I don't think he'd have been better off with a couple of parents who were firmly in the Ted Cruz camp or disaffected Liz Cheney die-hards, either.

If I was to take a wild guess, I'd say this was the direct result of a kid who was out of high school, unemployed, with no real future on the horizon, who was terminally online in a community of (likely a large number of bot-accounts and trolls) telling him he's worthless and should just off himself.

A classic problem of "surplus males" that plague every militant reactionary society.

That’s a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.

Okay, sure. But consider that they didn't earn those billions of dollars by sucking up to the right assortment of Wall Street financiers, rich family members, and ego-driven Presidential nominees.

The British Government considers being Arab as synonymous with being a terrorist. Not, incidentally, any differently than how Israelis see them.

Of course, the Brits were a colonial power that spent centuries quelling domestic revolts in order to extract natural resources and exploiting cheap labor. Also, not that different from their Israeli peers.

A real picture of colonialism, when the seven largest English-speaking populations after the United States are drowning in US debt and surrounded by US military bases.

Imagine if IBM and Ford and Chase National Bank had pretended like Germany didn't exist, rather than flooding the country with cheap capital and credit.

从今天开始，仅限中国模因

I would like to see that orange fascist try

Yanking funding from state and local agencies is almost trivial, thanks to the DOGE infestation of the US Treasury. Quite literally a matter of button-clicks.

The dream of the Unitary Executive under Bush, has finally been realized under Trump 2. Congress simply could not stop handing the Executive branch more and more authority, both implicit and explicit, until now they're effectively superfluous.

The one upside is that - given the state of Trump's BBLB - there may not be much funding left to pull from NYC by the time they're done gutting the domestic budget.

Zohran the Destroyer

Jesse Waters graphic design department really missed the memo.

Heartgulls

Step 1: Go to an Ivy League school

Step 2: Make friends with a failson/daughter of a prevailing plutocrat

Step 3: Put the Matrix-code screensaver on your laptop (apparently, this worked on Elon Musk in the early Twitter takeover days)

Step 4: ???

Step 5: Get a $10M Series A and a $100M Series B thanks to the family of your rich friends buying into your hair-brained Theranos knock-off.

This DNC won’t help any specific candidate in a primary, but they won’t work against a specific candidate either.

The same group of people absolutely shitting themselves over Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of NYC won't work against any specific candidate in 2028? Did we completely forget about 2020, when Obama got half the field to drop out after Super Tuesday to pave the way for a guy in fifth place? Or 2024, when Dems forewent having a Presidential Primary entirely so they could fumble between a geriatric genocidal bum and his Cheney-loving VP?

We’re on a huge inflection point

In 1972, Richard Nixon made the case for his reelection by invoking the second derivative of inflation. He stated that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing.

This is the inflection point the American liberal party has reached, in the year 2025. Things are so incredibly bad that a Cuomo can't walk off with a high office in the finance capital of the world. The increase of fascism is decreasing.

We can not afford to roll the dice on neoliberalism again

This won't be a diceroll. The preponderance of Democrats are firmly in the tank for some ideological mix of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. One of the great "successes" of the Democratic Party over the last 20 years has been to draw a big chunk of the economic conservatives out of the Republican Party and into their own.

From Kristen Gillibrand to Kristen Sinema, from Hakeem Jefferies to Henry Cuellar, from Michael Bloomberg to Rick Wilson, this is a party overflowing with Bush Era "compassionate conservatives". AOC has no path to a national platform in 2028. Y'all are going to be stuck holding your noses and voting for Gretchen Whitmer/Pete Buttigieg while shouting "Vote Blue No Matter Who" in another three years.

But maybe we can get Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman their house seats back. Maybe we can get a few more Mamdanis into the big city mayorships. Then talk about what a minority of leftists in the Senate could look like in another ten to forty years.

I’m not against people having money

It's been an archaic and backwards system for managing collective wealth for over a century.

We're living in an era of unprecedented surpluses. But we're still gatekeeping the most rudimentary essentials of daily life behind a paywall.

I am absolutely against people having money. All money causes is grief, anxiety, and depravation.

From my perspective Ukrainian strikes are carried out in self defense

And that's the problem. Any amount of bloodletting is permissible if you stick "I think they're defending themselves" in front of it.

So long as you're aligned with the US of course.

I've heard Americans say the same about Middle Eastern casualties weighed against Israelis.

Certain people's lives simply don't matter.

You'll still see plenty of bots

the oil industry.

I guess it's cool to kill civilians when they're roughnecks?

It’s not that I didn’t know any of these

Strange that you would pretend ignorance up front

Ackman is throwing all this money out there precisely so that the right people don't realize it

Okay, but if you make $1.1B...

Unfortunately, he's plugged into the unlimited free money system via his friends in private equity.

Much like Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump, he will never run out of money to borrow and gamble away again.