And that alone would be enough, but add to that the fact that they cost about 100 grand a piece, and yet they are essentially held together with bubblegum and shoestring. Bro, you paid a year’s worth of salary for the average middle class person to drive around an ugly, falling-apart piece of shit created by a fascist. Yeah. We’re gonna point and laugh at your dumb ass.

They’re not evil, they’re not idiots.

Hard disagree.

But if someone just votes for the other main party to the one I do, who cares?

People who will get hurt by that other party gaining the presidency, or people who care about people getting hurt. Or just people with an ounce of empathy.

None of which seem to apply to you.

Fuck that, and fuck you. They made their bed. Lying in it is the natural consequence.

For me, it’s super easy. My “normal” relationship with Trumpers is one of intense scorn and derision because they’re terrible people that I want nothing to do with. So nothing’s going to change for me.

It’s pretty simple: they willingly sacrificed every last ounce of humanity for a grifter / bully. They’re not coming back. Chasing after the relationship you used to have with them before they decided to embrace virulent hatred is a losing proposition. Sure, you can mourn that lost relationship, but hoping that they’re going to magically see the light and stop being the human equivalent of anal warts is only going to cause you further disappointment and pain.

When there were three TV stations, did any of them highlight police brutality? Overincarceration? The military industrial complex?

This is a very fair point. True, having very limited news options didn’t allow for a lot of deviation in agreement on observable reality, but to your point, it could also easily paper over a lot of very ugly parts of the actual reality. Chomsky writes quite a lot about this in his book “Manufacturing Consent”, which basically is a dive into how media organizations can be used as the propaganda arm of the government. Everything from choosing what you show to choosing how you talk about things goes towards bolstering an underlying narrative that you want to project.

I’m not sure what a solution would look like, if one is even possible. But solution or no, the narrative divergence in this country has primed us to detest each other, which is the first crucial step towards mass violence.

I’m less worried about that, not because there aren’t evil people among the Democrats, but because the Democrats are positioning themselves as the anti-fascist party at the moment. Starting up a fascist movement of their own at the moment would be bad business.

Long term, though? 100% agree. Can’t trust none of these fucks. Hopefully, the Interstate Popular Vote Compact kicks off before that happens, and we can do away with the EC. Won’t completely solve the problem, but it will help.

True, but have you looked at the “intelligentsia” of the Republican party? They’ve got nobody. Just grifters and sycophants. It’s one more small mercy. Obviously, this situation can’t be counted on to continue indefinitely, but once Trump is gone, the only thing ready to take his place is Trump-based nostalgia, and people looking to profit off same.

I think that the US is primed to have a civil war. Ever since Reagan fucked the fairness doctrine in 1987, we’ve been getting more and more divided. Gonna sound like an old fogey here, but it used to be that everybody tuned into the same news, and watched the same anchors deliver the same updates about the same world events. We had differing opinions on world events, but we all agreed on what was and what was not reality.

We don’t have that now. It’s like two completely separate universes occupy the same physical space. In one universe, climate change is fueled by anthropogenic forces and is causing more and more catastrophic damage, viruses are real and vaccines are effective tools to combat them, and thousands of traitors tried to overthrow the government because their cult leader lost an election. In the other? Climate change isn’t real, and also the Democrats have secret hurricane machines that they are using to punish Florida for being a red state, COVID isn’t real, and also it’s a super virus concocted in a lab in Wuhan at the request of Hillary Clinton, vaccines don’t work, and also vaccines are secretly a government tool to kill people, and Jan 6th was a peaceful protest of patriots, and also it was a violent insurrection by Antifa.

We don’t share the same reality with each other. In one reality, Democrats are basically similar to milquetoast conservatives from any other first world nation, and they care much more about maintaining the status quo than they do about making progress. In the other reality? Democrats are evil incarnate, and they’re waging an active campaign to round up all of the patriots and send them to concentration camps, and they’re also pedophiles and Marxists. In that reality, it’s far more preferable to vote for a dead pimp than it is to vote for a standard, run-of-the-mill Democrat.

And it’s not just the whole two-realities thing. Ever since Obama became president, the brains of a huge chunk of people in this country just broke. Some of the nicest-seeming people you’d ever met instantly turned into vile, hate-spewing racists, and started mass subscribing to every single conspiracy theory feed out there. That was 16 years ago. Their rhetoric has been getting more violent every year since. That’s to say nothing of the huge increase in terrorist incidents since then - according to the CSIS:

The number of domestic terrorist attacks and plots against government targets motivated by partisan political beliefs in the past five years is nearly triple the number of such incidents in the previous 25 years combined

So yeah. I think that this country is primed for organized, mass violence. At this point, all that it’s lacking is the organization. Thankfully, Donald Trump is an incredibly stupid man. I don’t think he’d be capable of organizing people to that level. He can stoke their hatred, for sure. He can inspire the craziest among them to firebomb a mosque or shoot up a Democrat’s office… but he ain’t built to lead people. If someone who had even 1/10th of his prowess as a cult leader, but who was actually intelligent and had a tactical mind came along… hoo boy.

Well that’s not true. You’re very pro-genocide, as long as it’s against Palestinians. That’s pretty political.

Yup. I’m old enough to remember when the selling point of cable TV was that it was ad-free. Then, of course, they started adding ads. And then they sold us premium channels that didn’t have ads. Now those have ads, too. You just can’t get away from them.

I find it fascinating how media companies evolved their usage of ads over time. Used to be that the purpose of showing someone an ad was to get them to buy your product. Now, though, the companies who make the ads are paying to have them put on media networks who use the ads to annoy you into paying for a premium membership so you don’t have to see them. It’s double dipping.

Not sure how I would feel if I made an ad, and YouTube was saying to their users: “Yeah, you like that fucking ad? Super annoying, isn’t it? If you don’t pay me more money, I’m going to cram that annoying bullshit down your throat every time you want to watch a video. I’m going to put ads at the beginning of videos. I’m going to sprinkle them throughout the middle. Hell, I’m even going to make you watch ads after the video ends! You like that, you little bitch??”

A bit torn on this, tbh. 'Cause on the one hand, good - fuck that guy. He’s trash and he deserves to be thrown out for being trash. But on the other hand, as far as I’m aware, none of those priests that fucked children were excommunicated. So according to the head of the catholic church, slagging off the pope is worse than fucking children? Seems like a weird set of priorities.

Oh, it 100% is. If being a total fuck knuckle didn’t consistently get them like ~50% of the national vote, Republicans would pivot. But they’ve realized that the worse they are, the more votes they can squeeze out of the hateful pieces of shit who infect us like a cancer.

Despite spending a lifetime living with this reality, it still seems so fucking wild to me that one of the two major political parties in this country is just entirely peopled with assholes. It’s like they have a secret competition amongst themselves to see who is the biggest bag of dicks.

I’m super disappointed in him. Was a big fan of his when I saw him run, and I really liked some of the things I heard about him, like how he got a tattoo marking the date of death for each of 9 people in his city who were murdered while he was mayor. It really made me think that he felt the heavy burden of responsibility and wanted to make the world a better place.

But this… I mean, this ain’t it. It does get a little complicated because of his stroke. I don’t know how much of the personality he’s currently displaying to the world was endemic in him before the stroke. It could be that this has been who he was the entire time, and he just hid it from the world. Either way, though, I think it’s clear that he represents a lot of unfulfilled hope. Granted, he’s likely still better than Oz, but that’s a pretty damned low bar. Fingers crossed he gets beat in the next election by someone who delivers on the hope that Fetterman originally promised.

Being unable to stay awake for his criminal trial is one of the least surprising things about a man whose aides had to dumb his daily presidential reports down to one page, with bright colors, pictures, and bullet points in order to get him to pay any attention to them whatsoever. You know who is surprised about him falling asleep in court? People who have paid 0 attention for the past 8 years.

I really have no idea how these two idiots aren’t in prison already. I mean, there’s the voter intimidation schemes and that time they fabricated allegations that Robert Mueller raped someone. And this is on top of Wohl committing securities fraud in 2015. The fact that they’re still breathing free air is astounding.

So, Kobach et al’s complaint is that the plan to replace lead pipes is underfunded and so probably won’t cause enough of an impact on lead levels in drinking water to even bother, and yet the reason it’s underfunded is because Republicans specifically voted to not fund it properly. So instead of funding it 100% (or close to 100%), they chose to only fund about 1/3rd of what it would cost to replace all of the lead pipes.

It almost seems like Republicans want potential voters to imbibe neurotoxins that will negatively impact their IQ, harm their ability to concentrate, and make them more easily swayed by emotional appeals. I wonder why that could be?

Whoops, my bad. You are absolutely correct, of course.