people losing income
More than a million of the poorest people in the world have died - so far - of starvation, exposure, and preventable disease, because of DOGE’s illegal cuts to federal programs like USAID.
Sure, we can call that “people losing income”. It’s technically true.
But Jesus, if I did something illegal and a million people died because of it, I’d spend the rest of my life in prison.
I agree. I think Miller and his dweeb crew have “flooded the zone” - done so much outrageous and horrible shit as quickly as possible - so effectively that protesting over specific issues just doesn’t work right now. It’s not that little Donnie has done one or more specific bad things that we want him to change policies on. Little Donnie is going out of his way to do as many bad things as possible, and by the time we organize a protest about bad thing number 67, he’s already moved on to bad things number 69, 88, and 108. “Go back to Epstein Island and put the adults back in charge” is the only rational message for a mass protest right now.
Capitalism isn’t a political system. It’s an economic system.
And I think it’s totally fair to point out how “a company making a product worse because they make more money off the worse product” is one of the flaws of a capitalist economy.
You’re absolutely right. Trump demands the spotlight at all times.
But also, I think your comment is an example of what Trump’s enemies still do not understand about him.
To Donald Trump, no publicity is bad publicity.
Even if it’s “bad publicity”.
If the media is talking about Trump’s mistakes, then Trump’s minions will be all over the news defending Trump and arguing with the people attacking Trump. Trump’s supporters will believe the people defending him, Trump’s opponents will keep being his opponents, and moderates will dismiss the whole argument as just another political he said she said.
And Trump will be the center of the news cycle for yet another day, and become even stronger in his position as the leader of the Republican Party and the biggest celebrity in America.
Jesus fucking Christ, we had four years of the Biden administration trying to get Trump on anything they could, four years of daily headlines about Trump being accused of crimes, or being arraigned for crimes, or being arrested for crimes, and Trump went into the 2024 election more popular than he was in 2020.
If you talk about Trump, he wins.
The only way to beat Trump, as hard as it is, is to fucking ignore him and talk about what the American people actually need instead.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Or, pithier:
The rules for sheep don’t apply to lions.
I think that was also why Qanon got so much play in the right-wing media ecosystem - getting conservatives comfortable with authoritarian big government conservatism.
Trump is going to declare martial law and have liberals killed or sent to camps? Qanon influencers have been telling conservatives that was the plan since 2017. And about 25% of the United States either believed it or thought “yeah, it’s crazy, but wouldn’t it be cool if it was real?”
The plan is to argue that only two consecutive terms bar someone from running for a third term, and have the Supreme Court’s Republican majority rubber stamp it, so Trump can run and Obama can’t.
The Trump family made at least $500 million pumping and dumping cryptocurrency. I guess they’re tired of playing in the crypto sandbox and going for the big money now.
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Same as when one of the big name hosting companies takes a site down. You hope it’s archived, and if it was important enough to you, hopefully you saved it to your personal server.
What you’re describing is a major benefit of federation. Any site can be taken down. But when a federated server goes down it’s because the site owner exercised their control over their own data. If Google or Amazon takes a site down, you lose your data, but they keep copies to use however they want.
You’re missing the point of the exercise. They didn’t want to govern - they wanted to break shit.
Musk went in with the attitude “we will cut everything we have an excuse to cut, and then if one of our political allies objects to a cut, we’ll put it back”.
And DOGE implemented that plan perfectly.
They cut a bunch of grants that had nothing to do with “wokeness” because their goal was to cut as many grants as possible, no matter what they were for. The LLM was there as a propaganda tool - it let them falsely claim they were only cutting “woke” grants. It was there to give DOGE an excuse. The fact that it was wildly inaccurate was the reason they used it.