Democratic Party: yes we know, but is there somehow we can continue doing the bidding of the billionaires and get the working class to support us?

I wonder what kind of plane Syria gave him

Good thing we are saving so much money we can afford to hire 20,000 brown shirts.

The median annual salary for DHS personnel is $72k

That’s an annual expense of $1.4B in payroll alone. Billions of taxpayer dollars so trump can have his own little army.

Americas relationship with our military is weird.

It’s something we actually have poured tons of resources into so it has impressive stats. You get this kind of weird split brain where you are impressed by the immense scale of what we’ve built, and horrified by the massive expense, but then kinda glad that you have the biggest stick on the playground.

As for conscription, the last time we had a draft it was deeply unpopular. There is a good sense of national pride that we have an all volunteer armed forces. I think most Americans are aware that a draft could be instituted but consider it so unlikely and think that if it really happened it would be because of a serious threat that people are mostly fine with the idea.

All men are theoretically eligible for the draft, but with no draft in a half century and with drafts only ever targeting young men, it’s something you kinda vaguely are aware of for a little bit and then you establish a life and realistically aren’t going to get drafted even if they instituted one.

Especially because there no mandatory service requirement in America, most citizens can pretty safely ignore the possibility of serving.

Growing up in America, at least back when I did, you get taught about America as this mythical thing.

• A shining city on a hill
• Manifest destiny
• Defenders of democracy

And when I was young we were also taught how these were our ideals and how we had failed to live up to them and done horrible things to get them.

I was always pretty happy with my public education, we learned about all the aspects, manifest destiny and the trail of tears and the overall genocide of our native Americans to get the land that god said we could have (he said it in secret to some white people doing the genociding). The blight of slavery, the birth out of compromise, etc.

The message I took away from my education was that America was an idea, one we have failed to live up to but one that we forever strive towards, making slow painful progress towards a more perfect union.

And maybe that was true, maybe that was propaganda. What I know now is that my fellow countrymen largely don’t want to consider the bad parts, wouldn’t it be easier if instead of having to do work to live up to our ideals we actually already had it all figured out. We actually aren’t shit, we are great, but we just let some bad stuff get in the way of our greatness. We don’t need to grow and struggle and grapple with how to solve these problems, we actually are already perfect and the most powerful and the bigliest and all we need to do is get rid of this damn scapegoat that ruined it.

And the scapegoat can be anything you like, trans people, Mexicans, an unfair trade deal with Canada. Don’t worry, no one is going to really think too hard about what these things are or how they ruined our perfect greatness, we can just say “hey it’s bad and if we get rid of it we will be great” and that’s just how it is now.

I always thought America’s true greatness, if it ever had any, came from our willingness to confront our problems and strive towards our ideals. All around me I see cowards now that are afraid of the real world and retreating into a fantasy. I loathe them.

Do not forgot this betrayal. My fellow countrymen, a large amount at least, are unmoored by reality, unbothered by reality, living out an infantile fantasy. People like that will hurt others to keep their make believe world going. You should not trust us, for your own sake you must not.

As an American that still has love in my heart for my Canadian neighbors, protect yourself from us. Protect your nation from becoming what we have become. The forces that broke our people will try to break yours too. Stay strong Canada, elbows up.

Being an American right now is so consistently embarrassing.

I worked hard my whole life, went to school, volunteered to help my fellow man, love my wife, support my family, voted against this fascist.

Now I have to listen to every moron that asked in school “teacher when will I ever use fractions in the real world!?” opine about their take on global economic theories.

Canada has been our stalwart ally, good neighbor, and economic partner since that little dust up when you burned the White House down a couple centuries back. And we are blowing it all up for fucking nothing.

We are a stupid nation, don’t bother trying to salvage this relationship. Take the time you have now to shift trade away from this fucking dumpster fire.

Under what authority?

Is the emergency authorization he’s been using and saying the imports are bringing in fentanyl somehow applicable here?

Does the fentanyl somehow shoot into my eyes when watching a foreign movie?

Have we just completely stopped the part where we go “hey, that doesn’t seem to be something you have the power to do” and moved fully into the dictator era?

Black people around the nation wait to find out which Haitian gang they’ve always been a part of as part of their deportation.

Truly America is the land of the free*

*terms and conditions apply, may not actually contain freedom

Do it Canadian maga people, split the right vote between PP and trump, give Carney a massive win!

Every suspension of due process seems to have the same contours.

Pick a person that you can tell your followers is “obviously bad.”

Now, because they are so obviously bad it seems like it should be no bother at all to go prove that to a court. But your followers didn’t get into this cult for the critical thinking skills workshops.

And now you’ve got your due process loophole, everything is all nice and legalish. The followers will never find themselves caught in that loophole, no sir, they aren’t “obviously bad.” Oh a follower of the cult just got caught in the loophole, well they must have not been a real follower, they are retroactively obviously bad.

What do you mean I’m obvious bad, no I’m not?! I can prove I’m not bad, I have evidence that I said the right things, I thought the right thoughts, I hated the right people!!! When’s my day in court, I can’t believe the things they are saying about me!!!

What do you mean get on the plane to CECOT?! I’m not a terrorist, I’m not in MS13, this is preposterous. You are only supposed to use this on people who are obviously bad…

As an American so far woke has meant for us.

• due process under law
• the global trade system
• our ability to retire

Just a word of caution before you get rid of those things too

I suspect it’s because a lot of people, myself included, think that this is how you get to festering problems that are fertile ground for the next authoritarian.

There was a brief moment after J6 where Lindsay Graham took to the floor of the senate, fresh from the reality of what had just happened and said that he didn’t support it. But a few weeks later, suffering no real consequences, he was back at the MAGA trough chowing down.

Humiliating people that change their minds for the better is probably not the solution. But saying “no consequences, all is forgiven if we can move on” is how you get confederate general statues all over union soil.

At the end of the day, trump supporters seem to be responding to the humanity crushing nature of global capitalism. They fall for the populist rhetoric and then swept up by the personality just assume that everything he said would get fixed is getting fixed now and everyone just doesn’t like him and are making things up. This works until it directly effects them, but even then they think it must be some mistake or oversight.

This goes to show how deep the hunger is for someone to rein in capitalism and support populist reforms. In the absence of any legitimate policies pointing in that direction, this conman is making a fantastic meal out of promising whatever sounds good, delivering nothing, then moving on to the next round of grifting.

Real substantive improvement to this nation will only come from actually improving the material conditions under which Americans labor. And this sounds strange for the wealthiest nation on earth, but many of our countrymen can’t afford healthy food, medicine, shelter, and if they can it’s at the expense of their every waking minute of labor. If you push a population like that, they will eventually wonder what the heck the point is, and they will follow anyone that says they can fix it. Sadly, trump sees this rhetoric as a campaigning tool nothing more, he could care less if people can sell their alfalfa as long as they cheer for him. And the Democratic Party isn’t offering compelling solutions either, they’ve slid far enough right that Biden’s cornerstone IRA and CHIPS acts largely targeted massive companies in a full embrace of trickle down economics. Intel gets to build a new chip foundary eventually, if the legislation isn’t gutted, and if intel doesn’t find it more convenient to pocket the cash, blame burdensome regulations, and cancel the project a la Foxconn in Wisconsin.

Both parties are captured by the massive companies, they can only legislate in the thin band the wealthy donors allow them too. Dems offer up solutions in that band that dont make things meaningfully better. MAGA just figured out that no one is following up, so you can say you’ll do popular things and then deliver a massive tax cut to the wealthiest instead.

He likely has narcissistic personality disorder and so this is less an act and more a mask, a shield. The person he’s protecting the most is himself, he needs to be this facade.

I found this video really quite fascinating about what it’s like caring for a dying narcissist. Whatever family that remains hold out hope that as death itself nears the narcissist might finally let down their guard and show their true self. Apparently the opposite happens.

https://youtu.be/FavgHrxc6oY

Neat, I appreciate your insight. Upvote from me and today I learned.

$100k when I checked on Friday. Not going to check again, that way madness lies.

An entire lifetime of work, living modestly, saving, funding my retirement accounts, paying a financial advisor to help me make responsible decisions.

Blown up by that orange turd.

We should make them take an oath to defend the constitution so they would know what they should do…

Yea this is my problem with this video.

It’s a pretty good video and the creator gets so close to figuring out that he doesn’t hate his phone, he hates social media.

It’s an interesting video from the point of view that it kinda makes this argument over and over.

I thought that doing X without my smartphone would be really inconvenient, it was only mildly inconvenient and I was able to manage it.

He ends up realizing how much happier he is without having the ability to just pull his phone out and go on twitter anytime he is bored. So just delete twitter?

All the benefits of his experiment can be had by just getting rid of social media apps and all the inconveniences can go away.

I really wanted this video to end with him putting those two bits together. But instead he just goes “well back to using a phone and it making me miserable” and as the viewer I’m just thinking “what was the point of all this then?! You learned a lesson, you gained a valuable insight about yourself as a person, and now just nothing. Just ‘cool insight, no need to act on that though’ seriously?!”

Yea I tend to think than when someone identifies as a Libertarian they almost certainly don’t mean a civil libertarian, which is how the aclu actually identifies themselves.

We have grown from a roomful of civil libertarians to more than 4 million members, activists, and supporters across the country. The ACLU is now a nationwide organization with a 50-state network of staffed affiliate offices filing cases in both state and federal courts. We appear before the Supreme Court more than any other organization except the Department of Justice.

This is literally the only time the word libertarian appears in their own history https://www.aclu.org/about/aclu-history

Thank you.

I feel like a crazy person sometimes because I remember when the ACA was rolling along it was reported that it was just the Heritage Foundation, a notoriously right wing think tank, plan.

I looked into it because I thought “certainly this can’t be true, hope and change and all that” I went and looked up their plan. It was a market based approach that used tax incentives and penalties to increase the size of the insurance pool.

That’s the ACA.

And people act like it’s some litmus test of progressive policy success.

This is what I’ll never forgive Obama about. He captured an entire generation of voters energy stumping with progressive speeches about making real change. He had no real desire to do that, constantly governing from the center / center right.

So that whole generation learned a lesson, progressive policies don’t work. Which is amazing considering that we didn’t even try any. We somehow passed a bunch of corporate friendly policies and peoples lives didn’t get meaningfully better and they chalked it up to “progressives don’t have an answer either”

I think this is a contributing factor to the absolute shit show we find ourselves in today. America has deeply broken problems that are entrenched because them existing makes someone very rich. Not the same guy for every problem, but for every problem in America you can rest assured there’s a small group of assholes that need that problem to exist so they can buy a third yacht. People feel that pain and they went “well fuck, the lefts best orator, the guy with a vision and plan and skills couldn’t fix it” then along comes trump being a blowhard jackass saying “I can fix it” and people were like “sure, let’s try it”

Obama could have actually delivered on that change, it wouldn’t have been easy, he would have had to actually use that supermajority for the few weeks it existed to pass legislation. He would have had to bring blue dogs to heel or blow up the filibuster. But if he could have found the gumption to do it, and those policies meaningfully improved peoples lives, he would have cemented multiple decades of democratic dominance.

Instead he passed uninspiring half assed solutions that tinkered around the edges of our societies most difficult problems. Structured them so that all the pain would be felt up front and all the benefits would slowly phase in over time. Tried to find compromise so that the right wouldn’t attack him and even after giving everything away they screeched about death panels.

Liberal policies are an actual thing, a thing that leftists frequently disagree with.

Libertarians are often placed on the right part of the left-right divide. The fact you’ve chosen the label libertarian instead of conservative is animated by the exact same “purity test” that you find so silly.