I still remember being taught about how politics is America is a pendulum.

It swings too far to the right and people get pissed and send it leftward. Then it swings too far to the left and people get pissed and send it rightward.

I have waited my entire life for the swing leftward, and I think I identified what broke America.

Let’s say that this pendulum swinging is necessary, we are a pack of goldfish swinging from left to right looking for something good with short short memories. This system can be metastable, you don’t make a ton of progress on anything but you just sorta bounce between the two sides and the status quo sticks around and you don’t slide into madness.

When 9/11 happened and Ws war on terror emerged, I worried that it would break the system. But in 2008, Obama emerged with a progressive message of hope and change. The pendulum I was told about was about to swing left. I had lived through the right swing of Ws time in office, and now I got to see what the left had to offer (which as a leftist was very exciting).

I watched two phenomenons happen concurrently that broke the system.

1. Obama captured the leftward energy that should have swung us back to the left and held it solidly in the center / center-right. He ran as a progressive firebrand and then governed from the center / center right. The big hop and change we got was nationwide Romneycare, a program devised by the Heritage Foundation which has done nothing but entrench the powers of the insurance industry into law.
2. Racism broke a large part of the voting public away from reality.

Obama wasn’t the first to do this, Clinton’s triangulation strategy was also a democrat governing from the center.

So we have a captured Democratic Party, beholden to the donor class and they capture the periodic leftswing energy and hold it center / center-right. Things fail to get better and the population goes “well fuck the left doesn’t have any answers, let’s swing the pendulum back the other way”

Over time the result is that the Overton window shifts and shifts and shifts until an oligarch is doing nazi salutes and the corporate media is going “oh he probably isnt really doing a nazi thing, he’s just advancing policies that nazis would love and saying things nazis would say and is excited and you know how hard it is to not do a nazi salute when you are excited.”

Our only hope now is that trump doesn’t slowly boil us into fascism and overplays and the people revolt. But Americans have proven to be willing to just take it in the ass rougher and longer than I’d ever imagine.

His plan seems as obvious as it is simplistic.

Make honking sounds in public about how only he can end the war.

In private tell Bibi to hurry up and finish killing / imprisoning the Palestinians.

At some point Bibi will have killed and subjugated the lot of them and then trump can make additional honking noises about how he ended the war (just no one look for any of those pesky Palestinians, don’t know where they went, war is chaotic and it wasn’t even our war and he ended it bigly)

Bibi gets his genocide, trump gets to take credit as a peace maker, and all it will take is the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people.

And when people wonder why it’s so hard to get out the vote, I think this is a key reason why. I’m old enough to have gone to Obama’s rallies, knock on doors for his campaign as a volunteer, vote for him and watch with joy as he won.

Hope and change. After the George W Bush presidency and the war on terror, it finally seemed like it was time for the pendulum to swing back.

And then every issue they came to the table with a position already in the center in hopes of appealing to the republicans who would then hold their breath and kick their feet and then it would slide further and further to the right until they were holding up romneycare as a progressive victory while also getting completely destroyed in the court of public opinion for passing romneycare.

I knew a lot of people that were very excited for Obama the candidate and completely disillusioned by Obama the president.

And I await the apologists to come out and tell me how he had to do it this way, they only had a super majority for a few weeks. Sure if the republicans have the slimmest majority they rewrite the tax codes and give away trillions to the wealthiest, and if they are in the minority they still somehow get their policies passed. But when democrats have power, well you see, government takes time. They can’t possibly just have the bill ready and call for a vote, you see, that’s just not how it works.

You can only tell people so many times. Vote blue and we promise this time, this time, we will make it better. I know last time we didn’t, but it was because of the blue dogs, or Joe Lieberman, or Joe Manchin. Sure, we have no plan to get rid of those people or other spoilers and we will doggedly support them in every primary… but somehow this time will be different.

Normally these are optional wellness features. Insurance companies will bug you to download a meditation app or go get a checkup because preventative medicine is cheaper.

These things are generally safe to ignore, if you are really concerned though the best course of action would be to call the number on your insurance card and ask them if anything is up. If you owe them money or need to do something they won’t be shy about it.

It seems like the colored area on the side of the joycon fits pretty snuggly into the recess. I’m not sure if you could put it in at any other angle than the one that would marry them up

But that carbon tax would have made a few mega wealthy people ever so slightly less mega wealthy.

I would imagine it’s more ChatGPT getting about as good as stackoverflow.

Couple that with the ability to ask a question without someone closing it as off topic, or a duplicate, or telling you you don’t actually need to do the thing you need to do, or bringing up the XY problem, or… well the list goes on.

ChatGPT might hallucinate sometimes but it’s nice about it and it fundamentally changes the barrier to entry to ask a question in the same way that stackoverflow once did.

Stackoverflow was a step change because it excelled at being a a great place to ask questions because they gamified people actually answering them.

ChatGPT is another step change because it makes it so you can get a similar quality answer instantly and without any of the social baggage. It also allows you to have follow-ups and get into a groove of question and answer. It’s not always right but I was pleasantly surprised using it to navigate unfamiliar libraries and apis and being able to drill down on something. Even when it got something wrong it got it right enough that I could course correct without having to argue back and forth with someone.

The best thing everyone can do is just tune out this bullshit.

MAGA is what happens when edge lords grow up. They love laughing at people freaking out over every dumb thing they do.

During the first trump term I watched the news, I got angry at every thing he did, his supporters lapped that outrage up.

This time fuck it. Rename the Gulf of Mexico to trumps big boy bathtub if you want. Enjoy it MAGA people, enjoy all your epic trolls but I won’t be on the other side getting upset. And then enjoy when the tariffs make your construction business unprofitable. Enjoy when his bungling jacks up prices sky high and you can’t buy bananas anymore because he threatened to nuke the countries that grow them for reasons no one can identify.

This term they can just enjoy the fucking mess they’ve made and I’m not going to give them any satisfaction in getting upset and yelling at the village idiot to not play with fireworks. Go ahead, blow your fucking fingers off dumbass.

Lazy comedy punches down. You find a group that it’s socially acceptable to make fun of and then you do, because you don’t need a punchline.

Go back and watch some sitcoms or comedy from the 90s when it was acceptable to punch down at homosexuals. Comedians didn’t need to write the hard part of the joke, they could just do a gay lisp and the audience was in stitches. Sitcom writers didn’t need to work hard just put a character in a situation where another character would think they are gay, audience whooping and hollering.

Were these moments funny? Not really. But at the time homosexuals were a group it was ok to make fun of so people did and audiences liked it. They liked it because implying someone was part of that group was scandalous, the members of the group could be treated with derision, and it affirmed in the audience their own goodness merely by not being a member of the group.

Blackface was working for largely the same reasons. It was acceptable to mock and denigrate black people. It requires no hard thinking or creative writing to have a character slap on some blackface and act in a stereotypical fashion. Doing so was as easy crowd pleaser because it was a joke “everyone was in on” and it made the white audience feel superior.

Telling audiences comfortable jokes that affirm that they are good people is a great way to make boatloads of money. What jokes are comfortable and what makes people feel like good people changes over time and we look back and go “cringe, why the heck did we find that funny at some point?!”

Why would someone that’s “won” the current global order want to rebuild it? The much more likely thing he wants to do is entrench and protect his power by disrupting any government that might challenge him.

Yea 39 checking in, that’s the way I was taught to type in school as well. I never broke the habit and still do double spaces after a full stop.

I’d honestly be more surprised that someone could tell enough to be bothered.

As a leftist, leftist are fine with gun ownership.

I’m sure there’s plenty of corpo centrist Dems that don’t want gun ownership, but you know, fuck them.

If you are in the middle of a class war you don’t disarm willingly unless you are too stupid to recognize what’s going on.

Yea and those damn Americans want enough pay to cover their massive student loans, what selfish bastards. Better to bring in foreign workers you can threaten with deportation and pay a third the pay.

Ok I might have an opinion on H1B

His America First policy is starting off real interesting with backing H1Bs, literally a program that allows foreign workers to take jobs that could be filled by American workers.

I don’t really have much of an opinion on whether H1B is good or not, but it’s definitely not America First.

For the last 13 years we lived about 2500 miles apart. You can make the drive in 4 days driving about 10 hours a day.

We recently moved back to our home state though, so it’s about 30 minutes drive to my in laws and 2 hours to my mom’s now

Oh the dudes that make tons of money by exploiting workers would like cheaper more easily exploitable workers. Shocked pikachu

I’m in the “fuck it, I’ll check back in in 4 years camp”

If I watch the news every day and get angry, the fascists are in power. If I don’t, they are still in power. The amount of news watching and angry I get does absolutely nothing to change how much power they have right now.

Especially after nearly a decade now of the never ending

1. Trump does or says something outrageous or awful or fucking stupid
2. News talking heads go on and on about how this time he will really face consequences, this time is different. Mueller is a pit bull, Jack Smith is not someone to fuck with, the southern district of New York put Capone away. This time for really real, he’s going down
3. No consequences
4. go to step 1

What’s the point. I know the stories already. Maybe one day the magats will kick down my door to carry me off to the gulags, at least I have the power to not give them rent free space in my brain until they do.

We moved back to Ohio recently (born there then moved out to California for over a decade for work and now back to Ohio so we can be near family). The amount of fucking shacks festooned with trump shit is wild. Doesn’t really seem like he did so great for you the first time Cletus, given that you live in a rundown shanty in the middle of one of the cheapest places to buy land and real estate…

My favorite though is there is some sort of steel recycler / wholesaler. His sign cycles between his business name the cost for a ton of steel and “you’re fired! trump 2024.”

I can not wait for the tariffs to absolutely destroy his business and for that reader board to say “thank you for 27 years of business”

I’m a pretty well off leftist, so now I guess I’ll sit back and watch these poor rubes get fucked. It’s the only solace left.

Well don’t forget that he came from the middle class and so intimately knew their struggles and turned his back on them and became a class traitor.

I mean… hold on let me put on my capitalism glasses… “he achieved the American dream”

The only good part about the average age of a congressperson being 80 is that they all remember what life was like before the polio vaccine.