UnderpantsWeevil @ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

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124

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8,763

Joined

2 yr. ago

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.

Can you elaborate on Ukrainian salvos please?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_in_Russia_during_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine

And also - on Russian peace proposals too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_negotiations_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine

they didn’t inherit their immense wealth

Except even that doesn't hold up under close scrutiny. A big component of the market cap of any Fortune 100 company stems from equity and debt held by the generationally wealthy, typically through family funds managed by private equity groups. Amazon and Tesla aren't worth $1T without the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Adelsons and the Waltons bidding up asset prices. Microsoft doesn't exist today without Bill Gates's mom sitting on the IBM board of directors and handing her son the contracts for their 1980s OS. Hell, Berkshire Hathaway is owned by the sons of a Congressman and a federal judge, respectively.

What's more, the biggest source of market capital is inevitably government contracts. You can't tell me that Michael Dell is "independently wealthy" when the bulk of his fortune came via the Texas public school system buying all his company's computers. Particularly when the governors, legislators, and board members making these decisions are (a) big shareholders of the Dell corporation and (b) legacy scions of wealthy Texas families.

It's been open war for the last three years. Idk if you can blame the latest salvo on Russians being extra mean during Constitution Day any more than you can blame the next Ukrainian salvo on Russians deserving a double-plus bombing on Lenin's birthday or whenever.

Every proposal for a peace plan gets flattened with a media barrage of "They're inhuman monsters who are incapable of peace and all deserve to be exterminated!" So until the two countries can get past that (or one/both finally collapse - which I've been told will happen very shortly, continuously for the last three years) we're going to continue to see new records set in the number of atrocities committed into the foreseeable future.

The fundamental problem with the politics of healthcare is that it plays directly into the hands of Randian Objectivism. You have healthy people (the Makers) and sick people (the Takers). And the Objectivist logic of economics is that you want to remove all the Takers from your economy, because otherwise they'll overwhelm your system and turn it into Dystopia.

When we already operate a floundering system that people generally despise, its an easy sell to claim "It's the sick people who are making health care expensive and driving up the cost of care!" What's more, with the outsourcing of our manufacturing base, its easy to forget the real material cost of the other amenities that make life in the imperial core comfortable. Why does a brand new TV cost me $400 but a night in the hospital cost me $4000? Seems like the hospital system is broken, right?

This is a trap I see liberals fall for as quickly as conservatives, which is why big blue states like California and Illinois and Massachusetts and New York also refuse to implement the far more efficient and equitable public health reforms common to countries in Europe with much smaller GDPs.

Baiting residents - MAGA and Liberal alike - into seeing health care as a cost center rather than a value center (or even a loss leader) has lead the entire country to reject practices that the rest of the world has enthusiastically embraced.

Fewer hospitals just means more people going to Church.

Americans: "Tragedy of the Commons proves that people are incapable of working together for mutual benefit, because personal greed will always lead to the devastation of the collective common good."

Chinese: "Why do you not simply arrest and punish the bad actors in your society when they overstep and impede on the general welfare?"

Americans: "Because that's fascism. Also, we're arresting and deporting you for asking."

Unfortunately, that's not how Imperial Presidencies work.

Mike Lee floats a lot of turds, even in excess of what the standard put out. He's been agitating against NATO membership practically since his first day in the Senate, along with his close friend Rand Paul.

This bill won't even make it out of committee, unless Lee can get a bug in Trump's ear over it.