conditional_soup @ conditional_soup @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

I really want this to be it. I want a big enough mass of freak conservative boomers to die off of old age and for the republicans to finally push everyone else hard enough that this country finally fucking snaps and swings left so hard that Reagan's grave belches black smoke for a month. I hope we swing left so hard that all the Fox News assholes run bawling off to Russia, all the neoliberal dickheads move to their neoliberal paradise of [some offshore oil rig], and we end up fixing all kinds of shit that's been broken for basically my entire life.

I know it won't; we'll just get a bunch of working class republicans standing around the wreckage and mumbling "can you imagine how much worse it would have been under Biden?" to each other.

I'm increasingly certain that the actual plan here is to destroy the federal government. I still go back and forth between "it's about fascism and authoritarian control" and "it's about dismantling the federal government and starting Fuedalism 2: it'll be better this time because we're the ones doing it", but lately I've been leaning more to the latter.

Right, but there's lots of studies that show that those parking spaces are actually much more beneficial to everyone- business included- as bike lanes, bus lanes, seating stalls, and nearly anything else besides parking.

I'm a big fan of the hostile takeover proposal.

If anyone deserves for his workers to get unionized, it's this asshole

I use a sewing machine needle, works great, just don't go crazy and break shit.

Burying the lede a bit here, Trump spent that whole meeting talking about Afrikaner genocide and said that that was what Elon (who was present) wanted.

The stupid thing here is that mass transit, pedestrians, and cyclists are all way better for small businesses than huge parking lots and enforced car dependency. There's lots of studies that show that car dependency really only benefits big box stores and big corporate chains. Fucking dumbasses.

It would be so goddamn funny and on brand if the democratic establishment's plan to keep AOC out of that committee chair backfires so hard that she becomes president or 360 no scopes Schumer.

Bro, if you want to get away from people, Yosemite ain't it. It's about as glamping as it gets you can get 5G signal basically across the whole valley. There's cars and people everywhere, including whole ass traffic jams so that people can drive right up to bridal veil falls.

Compsci ass answer right here

I'm a parent. I'm not going to try and sell you on having a kid; don't do it unless you know you want to. What I'm about to say isn't trying to sell you on parenthood or making apologetics, but just sharing my own personal experience having thought of almost all the same things you've thought and then crossed the bridge anyway. I figure that parenting really isn't about what you get out of it, and you do get stuff out of it- the love, the experience, the ups and downs, someone to depend on and who depends on you. In a lot of ways it's a microcosm of the human social experience in that you much more personally experience the things that make up existing with others in a society. You don't necessarily need kids the same way you don't necessarily need a significant other or a circle of friends, it's just that humans are, by our nature, social creatures, and we're almost always better off with richer social connections in our life than not. Yeah, you definitely do lose stuff; take autonomy, it's kind of similar to how you lose a certain degree of autonomy when you get into a serious long term relationship, only you really shouldn't break up with your kids if they piss you off. If that tradeoff isn't for you, that's cool!

Everybody's different, but my kids have motivated me to get involved in politics (beyond just voting) at the local level and try to start planting trees whose shade I may never get to enjoy. It made me think hard about the kind of world that we're leaving to them, and about what responsibility I have as a parent to do what I can to make that world a better place. I don't expect anything from them; if they move away to live their life, that's fine, I trust them to use their best judgment and live their life how they see fit, and just knowing that they're depending on us to do everything we can for them has really motivated me to think differently about things in ways that I believe are generally positive. In case you're curious about it, you could always try hosting an exchange student. It's about the lowest commitment way to be a parent to someone, especially since they're typically older teenagers. If you hate their guts, you can always ask the host organization that they be placed elsewhere. I've hosted I think eight exchange kids, and in hindsight, I don't regret a single instance, even for the kids we didn't get along with and had to place elsewhere.

This might be a good time to pitch looking into joining or starting a local chapter of Strong Towns. They're a local-first advocacy group rooted in the premise that our cities are broken because we've been building them badly for nearly 100 years now. Strong Towns aims to restore cities as places that are built first and foremost for people to live in. As I've gotten deeper into this, it's really shocked me how much of the blame lies nearly exclusively with municipal policy and political inertia (politicians sticking with doing things the established bad way because that's the established way and they'd rather have a bankrupt, unlivable city than risk changing what they know). The good news is that municipal policy is probably the easiest, most accessible level of policy to effect, and it has the most direct and immediate impact on your life and the lives of people around you. Affecting good urban policy to make our cities livable is what Strong Towns is all about.

You might also look at the Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability. They're another local-first group that focuses on all forms of justice for lower-income communities.

That's not unique to Russia. Birth rates in developed nations have been plummeting across the board. The only reason the US was escaping it and hanging out around replacement was because of immigration, and, well, I don't know if you've been keeping up with the news lately, but it seems like that's going to change.

There's lots of reasons driving demographic collapse, but I don't think war is one of them. South Korea is usually heralded as the shining example of demographic collapse because their birth rate is the worst by far, and it generally seems to be the case that as economies becomes more "advanced", women have less time and supports to focus on motherhood, and so just choose not to have kids. I put advanced in scare quotes because it seems to me that a truly advanced economy wouldn't footgun itself with rapid demographic collapse. Not to say that the trend shouldn't be towards a smaller population that will tax the Earth's resources less, but the way to get there safely for civilization isn't by falling off a cliff.

We'll never know for sure, but some evidence against that is that nobody's ever been able to quite emulate his cult of personality. The republicans who tried were just kinda dweebs and dorks trying to act like the popular kid at school, and those who didn't were boring and uninteresting to Republican voters.

I worked in EMS for fifteen years. The amount of damage a bullet does is really a question of how much energy is transferred. In order to transfer energy into tissue, obviously the bullet needs to make contact. Minimal contact means minimal energy transfer; at some point the bullet's just going to shear off the tissue it brushes against and that's that. It's not like a video game where a glancing shot is going to send him spinning through the air like a top and rip his ear off. Especially because the ear can kinda wiggle freely, it's a bit closer to just nicking a paper target.

Let me sure I got this right. Your plan is to take states that don't like you and teach them to be more independent of the federal government, is that correct?

Newsom is trying his level best to have a right-of-center glow up right now. I'm almost certain that the DNC plans to tilt the scales for him. They likely will resist running a woman again for a long time because they've stupidly come to the conclusion that it was the genitalia of the candidates and not the quality of the candidate, campaign, and platform that caused them to lose what should have been two of the most winnable elections ever.