I want to believe you, but I’m going to need sources for those claims about swing state vs non-swing state voters with straight ticket voting save for the presidency.

You place way too much faith in the assholes at the top being the ones holding everything together.

Yea my retirement account has lost however much. And every single morning I still wake up and will the market to drop like lead.

Unfortunately, it’s being manipulated from the top at this point, and it won’t drop until they’ve all safeguarded their money.

Republicans have no idea how the system works (worked). Of course they don’t realize what we’re doing will cause collapse.

Fear is a strong word for it though. I feared it for the last 6 or 7 years. Now I know it’s the only way. The only way out is through it. If any amount of suffering enables us to quit bombing small children, then bring it.

Am I worried about me and my children surviving? Yes, but I’m worried the rich will eat us either way. I hope we do it smart, and organize, and move en masse while the oligarchs are weakened.

Agree that the problems predate social media. Also agree with your assessment of the courts and insider palm greasing. To the dumbing down of the populace: there has always been an undercurrent of conservative white people trying to maintain the county’s wealth and power for themselves.

But this:

widespread ridiculous amounts of Nationalism >switching of people’s critical thinking about their >country and the purposeful stupidification of the >populace

Was made infinitely worse by the media environment post-9/11. Since at least 2005, it has been apparent that there was an intentional effort to sell conflicting versions of events to the people so that they could not discern what was true. Yes, all of the American media at the time contributed to the garbage decision to go into Iraq. Initially though, the worst of the confusion of facts was largely driven by Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News. All of the Internet has greatly exacerbated this since then, and it has been asymptotic post-2020.

Yes, American culture has (always?) been narcissistic and obnoxiously self-aggrandizing. But America had been a gigantic population of wealthy consumers for decades. So it draws all the avaristic psychopaths from around the world like moths to a flame. Are the local people to blame for the machinations of Rupert Murdoch, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk? Saudi Arabian and Russian wealth underwrote Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, even if you count him as one of “the local people”. To the headless beast that is social media now, you have Russia contributing millions of dollars via Tenet Media in the 2024 campaign.

Obviously there are plenty of American bad actors in this stew of billionaire-owned manipulative media, but most of them act with an agenda that does not involve ripping the country apart.

The US has had centuries of the conservative white majority consistently trying to suppress the vote of minorities and the youth. Hundreds of thousands of voters were purged from the voter rolls shortly before the 2024 elections, with a majority of those purged being minorities. Sauce: https://sdvoice.info/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won-here-are-the-numbers/

Many conservative states put fewer polling locations in poor communities. They block measures to make voting easier like same day registration and vote by mail.

Stop demonizing people that have been systematically disempowered. The Republicans in the Senate are about to shut down all other business in an attempt to strip married women of the right to vote.

The local people are to blame, but they’ve been influenced by decades of foreign-backed media/ propaganda and ideologues. Yes, some of it is due to the selfishness and greed of American culture - at every level - but the collapse is due to a confluence of multiple factors. And a non-trivial factor has been the influence of foreign propaganda and henchmen (it’s not just Donald Trump that is beholden to Russia/ Israel).

“The honor of taking Cuba” sounds like an old man talking about a young girl he’s about to rape.

Stop living in a gravity well and we wouldn’t have to expend energy to get out of it!!

They fired most of their specialists on the region, so that will probably be their excuse. But honestly, firing all of your specialists is kind of an acceptance of this kind of BS.

Whoa whoa whoa. I said will never be punished, not should never be punished.

And Trump and Putin are both still alive.

Ok ok, hear me out, what if they were harvested neurons from someone everyone wishes had gotten punished for their crimes, but never was? Hitler or Stalin? Or Trump! Or Putin!

I’m not advocating it. They just seem removed enough from the hot conflicts at the moment to weather the coming moment. If the discussion about this+Venezuela being a pincer move targeting China’s oil supply pans out and/or they move on Taiwan, I guess that could change.

Generally agree, but if China plays their hand well, they could do alright/ lead the following century.

When contractors get buckets of money from the government, for their own purposes and maybe for contract legality purposes, they have to allocate/ specify how that money is spent towards each aspect of an effort. So they break a program down into tasks, and assign specific pots of money towards each task with an associated code to enter when you log your time working on those tasks.

So someone in the management of his current program got obsessed with how every single dollar was spent, and decided they needed to triple the amount of charge codes they had to more closely track the work. It sounded annoying as fuck. But it was also annoying as fuck to have to discuss something so trivial for hours.

Oh my gawd, I had to walk away from my husband on his fourth rant of the week about his deputy PM’s obsession with charge numbers. I can’t handle another rant about those fucking charge numbers.

Surgery is irrelevant when talking about the >treatment of 99.999% of transgender teens. Making >the conversation about surgery is falling for right >wing talking points.

That’s fine. It’s an extreme example to illustrate the perspective: most parents will err on the side of “Do no harm.” You are misidentifying the perspective you’re fighting. I am more likely to live in a liberal bubble than a conservative one. It’s just where my mind (and the average parent’s mind?) automatically goes. One method of philosophical reasoning is to start with the extremes and then narrow down to the center/ more likely scenarios that are shades of the extreme… I think that’s common?

The “end game” is presumably that one goes on >HRT to experience the correct puberty. Most trans >men just take testosterone, trans women often take >an anti-androgen (spiro) with their estrogen.

How do they prevent their bodies from producing sexual hormones they don’t want? Removal of the testes/ ovaries? Ablating the adrenal gland ? (pretty sure that’s not a thing … It would have other serious ramifications).

Sexual reassignment surgery and top surgery are types of treatment. Another type is puberty blockers, which I asked about and you responded with talking points instead of information.

Also, what is the end game of puberty blockers? I assumed if you were a trans boy and took them, you got surgery as an adult to remove for example, breast buds so they never develop into breasts. Are you saying people stay on puberty blockers their whole lives?

I’m not trying to push an agenda here. As a parent, I’m honestly trying to understand the ramifications of these treatments. Because as a leftists, asking these questions becomes verboten, as if you hate trans people to question any treatment.

But really (since this is a controversial thread) I just don’t want my child taking a knife to, and hindering the functionality of, any part of their body that was already working just fine. This is especially true for parts that enables an enormous amount of human bonding and the human experience, like sexuality. It feels akin to circumcision/ genital mutilation in my mind, and if that’s what they decide they want as an adult, I wouldn’t stop them. But as their guardian, who safeguards their person for their future self, I would have been willing to divorce my husband over circumcision (at the time we disagreed on it, but we only had daughters). There’s no way most parents without an ideology want to risk long term damage to their child for something uncertain or fluid.

This a really interesting response. Thank you!