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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 4th, 2023

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  • Biden should do it, anyway. Do it and declare it an official act, force a Constitutional crisis when SCOTUS tells him its not an official act. The Judicial Branch, by design, has no enforcement arm to make POTUS do anything. They cannot send a brute squad into the White House to apprehend him and Harris. They can say it’s not official, but they can’t actually make him stop. Now, Congress does have armed goons they can send in, but they would immediately be confronted by Secret Service agents with itchy trigger fingers.


  • Exactly. You get what you give. You give the bare minimum to society, and society will give it right back. You want more, give more. Go help your community. Take out your elderly neighbor’s recycling. Volunteer at your local shelters/soup kitchens. Attend some local events. Sit in on city council meetings. When I moved out of my small town a couple years ago, I learned that real life is a lot like online forums. You have to lurk before you can post. Learn the language, the local etiquette and taboos. Watch the people in your neighborhood, their interactions. Blend into the background, and observe. Talk little, hear and see much.



  • Disney winning sets a precedent that will ultimately lead to vigilante justice by necessity.

    If Disney wins, then our “justice” system does not work and cannot be trusted, thus leading people to doing what they need to just to survive when every company starts using that clause to prevent us from holding them responsible for anything at all.

    And if that’s the case, I guess I need to dig out my mask and cape, and get back to work as a crime fighter.





  • People who make money by investing. In the USA, the top 1% earn their income through investments, usually the purchase and sale of stocks. These are not taxed the same as regular income because they made the argument that you can’t really tax unrealized gains on investments that are sold, and it takes a while for the gains to actually materialize. Also, they tend to store their money, their liquid assets, in countries with looser tax laws, called tax havens. Much of their net worths are tied up in investments. Businesses, homes, art, classic vehicles, precious metals futures, oil futures, boats, etc.

    Assessing the value of all of that is a chore, and they also pay lobbyists to keep the IRS defanged so that they don’t have the resources needed to go after the 1%. And don’t get me started on how much more speculative the stock market has become. Investors buy stocks, not on the expected dividends they’ll receive as a share of the profits of the business, but on their ability to flip the stock and sell it at a higher price to another investor, who is only buying because they anticipate flipping the stock. It’s like if a whole neighborhood of single family homes gets bought up buy a few house flippers, who make renovations, then put the houses up for sale, and sell to new flippers, who are only buying so they can make further renovations, increasing the value of the property again to sell to yet another flipper, ad nauseam.





  • You’re not wrong. The main issue is that the Democratic Party is more like 15-16 different smaller parties in a big trenchcoat. Some are in there by choice, others had to get in because they weren’t strong enough to stand on their own, and didn’t want to have their ideas not be heard by somebody.

    So you’ve got all these different groups beset by a mountain of conflicting interests and decades of infighting, and you are a Democratic Party candidate for the House. Now, to win you need votes and funding. There’s a lot of things that you know your base cares passionately about that you know they have no hope of ever getting from Republicans, but unfortunately they are also things the big ticket donors despise. So, this begins the delicate dance of appealing to all the different groups AND to wealthy donors. Faced with that challenge, what should you do? Well, in practice what happens is your average Democrat tends to pivot away from policy and focus more on process. Y’know, uncontroversial things like bipartisanship, decorum, compromise. And while the lack of these things in DC is something everyone left of center is sick of, they’re not things Democrats can make happen all by themselves, and, moreover, none of them are results. They are means by which results are achieved. “A willingness to compromise” is not a position.

    But see, most Democrats see that the fragile coalition that makes up the DNC rests upon their backs. Should the coalition survive, or should we let it die?

    Personally, I think we should do away with it. Yes, we are the “Big Tent Party”, willing to welcome all who do not identify as “conservatives”, give them a home and a place for their ideas to grow and be heard. Once upon a time, I think the coalition served a genuine purpose. But now, we are a rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm. One day, someone will take command and right the vessel. On that day, some of the crew may disagree with the captain, and either mutiny or jump ship, and that’s on them if they do.


  • Well, if you want the history of the Heritage Foundation, look back to the 70’s. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell penned a memo to the US Chamber of Commerce titled “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System” in 1970, and in this memo, he detailed his concern that America’s best and brightest students were becoming anti-business because of our involvement in Vietnam. Powell’s agenda included getting wealthy conservatives to set up professorships, setting up institutes on and off campus where intellectuals would write books from a conservative business perspective, and setting up think tanks. Three years later, the Heritage Foundation was founded.





  • It is illegal, you’re right, but they want to destroy the legal definitions of many things so that they can write new ones. So suddenly, teaching kids about how their bodies work becomes “grooming”. Being anything other than a straight white Christian male makes you a “sex offender”. Reading anything other than the Bible to kids is “indoctrination”, and so on.

    They’ve spent many years and billions of dollars studying the power of language and ideas. They have framing the issues from their perspective down to an art form. If you control what words mean, you control debate and democracy.