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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • The two major issues he’s highlighting is the border and gaza. I can’t for the life of me understand why THOSE are the issues his campaign has settled on. Well, I guess I understand israel because of the money groups like APAC bring in… but still it’s become really toxic among the base (even with most republicans at this point). And the border… like the fuck… we lambasted Trump for kids in cages and biden has decided that we should continue that policy and double down on it?

    The only way he’s winning a second term is if somehow Trump voters have lost their motivation and devotion to him. Otherwise this election is really not looking good.

    There are so many popular issues that also make trump look terrible that biden could run on. Abortion, climate change, hating nazis, raising the minimum wage, expanding workers rights, LGBT rights, the actions of the FTC to reign in big business. He’s got so many talking points to really be effective against trump and he’s instead doing Hillary’s campaign strategy of “Well yeah, look at that guy?”.


  • It does not work like that.

    The problem with such statements is the energy costs are nowhere near fixed. The amount of energy needed to play a song on my iPod shuffle through a wired headset is wildly different from the power needed to play that same song on my TV through my home theater equipment.

    The same is true on the backend. The amount of power Google spends serving up a wildly popular band is way less than what they burn serving up an unknown Indy band’s video. That’s because the popular band’s music will have been pre-optimized by Google to save on bandwidth and computing resources. When something is popular, it’s in their best interests to reduce the computational costs (ie power consumption) associated with serving that content.






  • This is all wishful thinking.

    We’ve had politicians with clear signs of dementia still being elected years after those signs show up. Ronald Reagan was said to have very clear signs of dementia in the run for his second term.

    The only thing that will keep Trump off the ballot at this point is his death. He could be catatonic in a wheel chair and he’ll still be on the ballot. There’s simply no mechanism the RNC could pull even if it wanted to to keep him off the ballot.


  • In the unlikely event that he’s generally perceived as a gibbering idiot by that date there’s pretty much no chance that Lara Trump nor Michael Whatley would consider a super-delegate style override of the primary results

    They can’t, like legally and literally. The RNC rules are setup without super delegates and they can’t backport those in right before the convention.

    Literally the only thing that would keep him off the ballot is if either he dies (which will be a HUGE clusterfuck) or a court ruling finds him ineligible to hold office (which, he just won cases keeping him off the ballot so that’s really unlikely).

    He could be drooling on stage while actively shitting his depends, he’s still going on the ballot. That was 1000% on display with Dianne Feinstein, for literally years, she showed very clear signs of dementia/Alzheimer’s.

    And the scary thing is that none of this will stop Trumpers from voting for him. They’d write his name in even if he does die.




  • He can veto bills funding Israel and the current aid Israel is getting is through executive powers passed previously.

    There are also laws on the books that disallow aid to countries with human rights violations that are easy to invoke.

    Biden can also unilaterally put sanctions/tariffs on Israel.

    There’s no somehow about it, he can stop funding today.

    And will that do something? Almost certainly because the US is Israel’s largest supporter (by a long shot). Bebe can, of course, ignore this. However, that’d destroy Israel’s economy.


  • Much much simpler than that. Remember how just a few months ago everything the right didn’t like was “woke”? And a few months before that how everything the right didn’t like was CRT?

    Well, we are here now. All problems are a result of DEI. It really does not matter that it’s completely insane to view the world like this. Right wing media has it’s current swear word of the month and that word (or in this case acronym) is DEI.

    What’s super effective about this tactic is exactly what the mayor hints at. It’s a way to say the n-word without saying it.

    The angle here is the right is a bunch of racist bigots and framing all the ills of the world in terms of that racist bigotry makes their lizard brained viewers happy (well, angry, but at the right people).

    Quiet literally how Nazi propaganda worked. Blame all the problems of germany on the jews and the non-jews right wing morons will happily nod along with “yer right, it is the Jews’ fault our society is crumbling!” It did not have to make sense or be reasonable. You just constantly plant that fear and suspicion in your dumbass follower’s brains.


  • Yup. If you are going to own a printer, get a laser black and white printer and keep it forever. Do not get an inkjet printer. And if you need color prints (you don’t) you can literally just do those at walgreens, cvs, or a bunch of other stores that will do color prints.

    The only time you should get an inkjet printer is if you are a busy photographer selling a bunch of prints and you’ve hit the point where doing color prints through a store has become too expensive.


  • People who have previously stated they are atheists but also are christian nationalists because they believe in the “cultural values” it grants. Generally just people with bigotries that line up with christian nationalism’s current targets.

    “I’m an atheist, but I believe that being gay will destroy society and this CRT stuff will erode the moral values of this nation” that sort of shit. Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson are two that fit right into this mold. Though there have been atheists that have explicitly said they are also christian nationalists, they are just more minor public right wing figures who’s names I’ve already forgotten.


  • I also didn’t adequately explain that I feel ‘modern’ Christianity has very little to do with the teachings of Christ, much less the content of the Bible even as a whole. It seems it’s much more a justification of their targeted hatred.

    Definitely agree there. I think the union of conservative politics and christianity has made both worse.

    It’s that bigotry and hatred that is the core of christian nationalism and nationalism in general. Having a target to hate is just how these fascist operate. Religion helps to have outgroups to hate, and nationalism exploits that to try and radicalize.


  • I grew up in a similarly christian conservative community. I think it’s a mistake to conflate conservative Christians with christian nationalists (though there is overlap for certain). Several of my very conservative christian family members are disgusted by the christian nationalists.

    That’s why I don’t think it’s the christianity driving the nationalism but rather the nationalism driving the christianity. Hence the reason nazis have felt pretty comfortable attending CPAC this year in nazi garb.

    There are athiest christian nationalists who will talk about how it’s “the culture” that matters and makes a “christian nation” superior to other government forms.

    In my home state of Idaho, I see a lot of christian nationists in public office, and they are much more occupied with rooting out “CRT” (re: anything mentioning civil rights and slavery) and LGBT literature than they are focused on “getting prayer back in school” or other overtly “christian” motives.


  • Hillary lost the election because she’s a supremely unlikable person that ran a campaign of “Who else are you going to vote for, Trump?”. She ran on a center right political platform (if you can call it that) nearly as derelict as Trump’s 2020 platform. She further was pretty insultingly dismissive of the progressive wing of the party. She alienated strong base support when she should have been courting the bernie supporters.

    She also did not JUST lose Florida. Further, Biden did not win Florida so that sect of ultra conservative Cubans weren’t the deciding factor.

    Her lose is also why I fear for 2024. Biden isn’t running as bad a campaign as she did, but he is still heavily banking on the “What, you aren’t going to let Trump win, right?”


  • Trump is the new Ronald Reagan of the GOP. The good news about that is the GOP has largely forgotten Reagan at this point. The bad news is they worshiped Reagan for decades after his death. I suspect Trump will largely be treated the same.

    You realized Christian Nationalism follows the (misinterpreted and cherry picked) words of someone who died 2000 years ago as their North Star right?

    I’ll push back on this as I think it’s a mistake to view Christian nationalism as a religious thing. It really should be called “White nationalism” because that’s more what it means. They’ll prop up the bible but they really don’t give a fuck about what’s in it. Rather, it’s just a tool to justify hating Muslims, Jews, and other “brown people” religions. The christian part of christian nationalism is really a tool to sell to grandma “See, we just want a Christian (white) nation. That makes it good because anything christian is automatically good”.