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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Biden spent 4 years cleaning up Trump’s mess

    I mean, I’d argue one of the reasons Dems lost was that they didn’t clean up the mess. He focused primarily on relieving tensions in the private business sector while largely neglecting the public sector - leaving Dejoy to ransack the Post Office, failing to boost SS COLAs to match record inflation, focusing more energy on funding conflict in Ukraine than financing debt relief for student borrowers or underwater home owners, leaving a litany of crooks and cranks unprosecuted and unjailed so that they could go on to prop up the next fascist administration - which was great for the banking and tech sector but miserable for everyone else.

    That’s actually a trend for Republican presidents in general.

    Well, its been a common baton pass since the Nixon/Ford Administration. Republicans fuck up the economy on a national scale. Democrats bail out private business at the expense of the public sector, then privatize the parts of the public sector that are failing in order to justify the next generation of private bailouts.

    The housing sector reveals this in spades. From Nixon/Ford to Carter to Reagan/Bush 41 to Clinton to Bush 43 to Obama to Trump to Biden, we see a very obvious pattern of public housing becoming public lending becoming private lending becoming private bailouts and foreclosures. And the end result is a steady collapse in the share of homes owned by the people who live in them, while the debts these people owe to private banks (along with the interest revenue on those loans) inflates to turn the FIRE sector into the backbone of the national economy.

    Democrats have their role to play in this, but it largely boils down to bailing out failed businesses and “innovating” public-private partnerships, saving capitalism from itself. They’re medics who resuscitate a dying man, stuff him pockets full of cash, and then send him back out to have another bender.



  • For decades, the Woke Left has complained that we live in a bifurcated society of privileged middle class professionals and trod upon lower class manual laborers. But Donald Trump is resolving the contradiction. Now everyone gets to enjoy the hyper-surveillance, the stochastic violence, and the suffocating revanchist propaganda once reserved for poor people.


  • Kinda like blaming a President at war for not saying “thank you” to its “benefactor”

    What’s crazy about this line is how frequently Zelenskyy has done the “America A#1, you’re the best!” media tour in the run up to this meeting. How many clammy-handed, rictus grin photo-ops does this guy have to do for you people? How many trips does he need to make to DC to say “Hello from Ukraine, I love you!” to Congress? Dude’s entire career as President has just been going abroad and brown-nosing for NATO support.

    This reminds me of the British journalists who will cut an Arab liberal off in the middle of an “I am here to condemn Hamas and ask for release on behalf of the Palestinian people” automated response to grill them on why they haven’t condemned Hamas. It’s all just bullying at an international scale. I’m amazed Trump didn’t drag Zelenskyy into the restroom and try to give the man a swirly.


  • I mean, setting aside the “We’re from the Government and We’re Here To Help” liberalism that American conservatives reflexively recoil at, I do find it disorienting to pretend a heavily rural American breadbasket would need agriculturally scarce Europe to send food aid.

    This reminds me of the 90s US effort to do welfare politics in West Africa, by dumping millions of tons of excess agriculture into Trans-Atlantic wholesale markets. The flood of “free” food (with tons of political strings attached) shifted the balance of power to the African urban centers, as local agricultural markets collapsed and people flooded to the industrial centers to get food at below the domestic production cost. Political leadership capable of controlling the influx of foodstuffs rapidly consolidated power within major port cities. This gave rise to authoritarian governments, political purges, and ultimately two horrifying Congolese Wars (the second often referred to as The Great War of Africa).

    Obviously, more complicated than this. Along with food “aid” we also delivered a surplus of “military aid” to our regional allies (a list that was constantly shifting between US and African administrations, particularly during the fallout of the failure of the Soviet Union). Then there were a host of local tribal conflicts and score-settling that got ramped up to eleven with the sudden glut of foreign wealth.

    But maybe I’m drawing lines where none exist. Can you really imagine how the US economy might be upset by a sudden shift in who controls the supply of cheap imports? Can you imagine what our country would look like if it was flush with small arms or if we had a bunch of local land barons with short tempers and delusions of grandeur? Can you conceive of an America that had a bunch of poorly defined interior borders that suddenly become flashpoints of political tension?

    I certainly can’t. Bring on the flood of EU eggs!




  • Whats the draw of discord?

    Chat plus streaming as a freemium service that has its hooks in with the networking effect.

    Probably the biggest draw of Discord is how many people use Discord. But past that, it fills a bunch of real time social media roles well.

    As a case in point, I’m in a game of Pathfinder Kingmaker with friends, and Discord does a good job of letting players join virtually, sharing screens, rolling dice, keeping a log of the different chats, pinning the links to the Kingdom management files, and providing a search function to find historical info.