• 8 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • People advocating for Biden to go on a crime spree are assuming that the Supreme Court is aiming to be consistent, and apply this ruling fairly to both parties.

    The SCOTUS doesn’t have a DOJ or an FBI to arrest and prosecute anyone with. That’s the big catch in all this arguing.

    If Biden seriously wanted to be a sassy bitch, he’d have Trump extraordinarily renditioned to a prison in Iraq and tried for bombing the Iraqi airfield that hosted the Iranian ambassadors.

    The SCOTUS gets to pound sand, Americans can heal a gapping foreign policy wound between the US and Iran, and Trump gets a taste of living as an illegal.

    But he’s not going to do that. He’s not going to impound Trump’s assets or freeze his accounts. He’s not going to treat Trump in any way like an asset of an enemy power.

    Because he’s terrified of violating the Norms that dictate presidents can, in fact, do whatever the hell they want.


  • assuming you don’t think the American rescue plan, bipartisan infrastructure act, CHIPS, IRA, and the first massive tranche of funding for Ukraine are useful

    No more than the CARES Act or the PROSWIFT Act or the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 or the Hong Kong Autonomy and Uyghur Human Rights Policy Acts, under the prior administration. We’ve never had a problem issuing large bipartisan bailouts in the thick of a recession, rolling out buckets of cash for proxy wars, or pissing away trillions on expanding legacy highway infrastructure. This is not something unique that Biden brought to the table.

    Hell, Trump was even sending military aid to Ukraine as early as 2019. One could argue it was this military escalation and subsequent bombing of the Donbas that kicked off the war with Russia to begin with. Thanks for that!

    Unfortunately they didn’t codify Roe, overhaul SCOTUS, or harden our institutions against fascism

    Because they’re a party heavily populated with Pro-Life Democrats, they genuinely like the business-friendly / anti-regulatory bent to the SCOTUS, and they are more than happy to break bread with fascists just so long as the fascists can be used as proxies against enemies of US business interests at home and abroad.

    This isn’t a fucking accident. It is deliberate bipartisan consensus.

    Who knows what they could do with a larger majority and control of the House/Senate for 2 more years though

    Exactly what they did in 2009. Send trillions of new dollars to the privatized tech sector. Roll out new privatization schemes for the USPS and US Education System. Bailout failed banks. Increase the size and the authority of police agencies. And impose a host of new unfunded mandates on consumers - via tariffs, anti-union tax increases on health insurance, and private lending schemes - that only serve to degrade quality of life in pursuit of higher corporate profits.

    FFS, the lowest hanging fruit imaginable for the Democratic Party is DC Statehood. Easiest win imaginable to just hand yourself two free Senators and 3-4 new House Reps. And they won’t do it.






  • it’s a chain

    There are more than a few spots in my home state of Texas that are functionally “Whites Only” already. Go in there as a poc and you won’t get served. You might not even be allowed through the front door. “Kung Fu Saloon” down in Houston (most diverse city in the country!) has had reputation for not letting brown people in for years.

    The DEI shit is about inflaming the white nationalists who think even their little pockets of outright segregation aren’t enough. We’re approaching the idea that any place which isn’t “whites only” is somehow stealing something from a white person.





  • instead of using his seemingly infinite wealth to engage in any real systemic change, he puts on a fucking bat costume and prances at night to beat the shit out of low level goons

    Some of the better Batman comics introduce him as skilled detective, rather than a superhero whose power is infinite money.

    Like any good crime thriller, his work starts with some innocuous crime or tragedy that gets swiftly covered up by corrupt police. Batman steps in as a noir vigilante, listening to the witnesses everyone else ignored and tracing the crime back to the low-level thugs who serve as pawns in a much bigger game. He extorts them for information in order to move on to bigger fish - the crime boss who runs the docks or the sleazy businessman who thought he could pay to make a problem go away - and uncovers a deeper systematic corruption. He runs into various freaks and geeks - your two-faced DA or your web-fingered club owner - who facilitate the city-spanning crime. And, in the climax, he discovers the whole system is rotten, even to the point where his own Wayne Enterprises is complicit in these cruelties.

    He discovers the limits of vigilantism, its not just a question of biting into a few bad apples, but tearing the rotten tree out of the earth root-and-branch. And he realizes its too much for one man to change. So he goes back to that first original witness/victim, and he brings him back to his cave. And he sets himself to training this survivor of a broken system how to fight crime like he does.

    The best Batman stories aren’t the ones where he punches a Clown Prince out of a factory window. Its ones in which he pulls another scared child out of the wreckage of his parents’ home and gives him a second chance at life.





  • Something of a joke that Soros made his fortune speculating against the economic fallout of the post-Soviet Eastern Bloc’s collapsing currencies. His fortune was effectively harvested from the skyrocketing inflation that plagued countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and Hungary as they lost access to cheap publicly produced consumer goods and real estate.

    Then he turned his fortune towards philanthropy in those same failing countries and that made him “woke”. So he became an icon of right-wing hate, as a result.


  • Wages need to be increased and the best way to do that is to stop businesses undercutting wages by hiring cheap foreign labour.

    Urban density increases the efficiency of public services. Wage rates do not.

    Trying to keep populations small and fragmented does nothing to improve domestic quality of life. And rising domestic populations don’t hurt overall household incomes. Cartelized labor markets are what do that.

    Inflation is largely a global issue.

    Prices vary enormously by local regions. And price gouging is increasingly difficult over large distances.

    Inflation is most commonly a consequence of local commodity monopolization, not global price trends.


  • tax cuts on the poorest people in society

    Are functionally no different than higher wages. But without public infrastructure - housing, education, health care, etc - what does an extra couple grand actually buy?

    We’ve seen this in the US for decades. A pittance of tax cuts pitched as a percentage of income is presented as this enormous boon. But then wages stagnate, prices skyrocket, and debts soar in the face of new privatization.

    And then we’re worse of than when we started.

    The tax cut doesn’t buy anything in an inflationary economy