Seventy-seven million people voted to unperson huge demographics of Americans which has included both legal aliens and American citizens, which is a breach of the social contract.
So yeah, the voters were wrong. Now we’re trying to figure out why, and whether the human species is just doomed to stratified societies and extinction through industrial pollution.
The Soviet Union is long gone. Communist should no longer be a derisive and should sound like a 20th century cliché in 2025.
I wonder (can’t confirm) if the evergreen state of communist or socialist as derision is due to the far right propaganda industrial complex still pushing (hard) that anything that isn’t capitalism is a moral wrong.
So there’s two factors that gave Trump (barely) the election (all the battleground states were narrowly chosen)
One, I speculate and no one seems to be addressing, is the trillion-dollar far-right propaganda machine. FOX News, OANN, Michael Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan and so on. It’s continuously pumping content out to the population telling them that liberals are all communists and women should all be tradwives. Also that everyone nonwhite or poor is a leech on the economy.
The other is the King Log vs. King Stork thing. In those industrialized nations where the left-side party is neoliberal (preserves the status quo), the far right parties get strong support. It was happening across Europe around when Trump got elected, though there’s been a left-side push-back since, possibly due to Trump providing a visible example of who they don’t want in office. Canada’s economist / banker PM was elected due to Trump, we are pretty sure.
Biden was as right wing as they come in the Democratic party, and for 2020 the party’s principals (who get their own votes) chose him, deciding that everyone else was too socialist for them. Biden was Biden (that is, an establishment neoliberal) with some efforts to appeal to the public. And then in 2024 he pulled out of the race, and Harris took over and in the last few months of campaigning appealed to less-nazi Republicans, which alienated her base.
The election was won by MAGA disciples voting only top ballot (for Trump and nothing else) and lost by low-information Democrats who weren’t motivated or decided to send a message by failing to show.
Regardless, figuring out how he won is more important than figuring out how to get rid of him, because even if he dies, the GOP is going to churn out Secret Hitler after Secret Hitler, and the Democratic party, determined not to go left, is going to fall into irrelevance, just before they are imprisoned / killed as political enemies.
From what I’ve heard of leaks to the press from inside SpaceX, Musk’s presence there only complicates matters.
Musk’s policies endanger SpaceX employees, but his presence only makes shit worse.
Expect counter protests and unfriendly police departments. If they show up, bricks may be appropriate after all.
First aid, water bottles and other protest support kitch will better serve to help and will be needed by attendees regardless.
Pride is a season around a day, much the way that the Thanksgiving / Christmas is a season around specific days. A lot of families have to gather from far reaches together for Thanksgiving feast and Christmas Day, hence there’s preparation and travel as well as food prep and gift gathering. Halloween is similar for those who take it seriously. It’s a day for the kids but it’s a month (or more!) for those who want to represent.
Pride wasn’t isn’t allowed everywhere, and in the beginning it only happened in those municipalities that had enough of a gay village (an LGBT+ community) to be a voting bloc. As a result there was a lot of travel arrangements from self-discovered people across the country. There were a lot of phone calls to friends to friends from last year if they’ll still provide a place to crash.
The pride parade day is typically the weekend of June 28th (the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising). But sometimes the parade has to accommodate other circumstances in the city, so check with the organizers to get time and date confirmed.
A lot of those attending like to prepare their attire and accessories to look good. And if there are counter-protests or unfriendly law enforcement (more common than we like) then protest gear (first aid kits, bear spray, anonymizing bloc) may also be appropriate and add to the preparation schedule.
It’s a day and a half the way we Americans drive which is to run on coffee and fast food and burn above the speed limit for fourteen hours a day.
I am (or was, now I’m having doubts) of the belief that European motorists were more inclined to take their time, see some sights and not exhaust themselves in the transit. That may have been a late-20th century thing.
In contrast, we far leftists want free stuff.
Basically, we want to be able to tune the production process of essentials so that potatoes 🥔 and drinking water 🥤are dispensed the way we do napkins, and people can take all they need. And with time we expand the free stuff dispensed to smart phones and rocket fuel and ice cream sundaes 🍨
The stuff isn’t absolutely free, and even these days napkin dispensers are adorned with save the trees signs but the price to the end-user is negligible. Sometimes we have to watch our systems for abuse, but then sometimes someone just needs a lot of potatoes. 🥔
Also tool libraries and eventually motor pools that can serve communities who sometimes need gear, but not always. It’s kinda creepy how big automotive has us buying two cars for every home and we can’t spare government funds for (eventually free) robust public rail.
The 2020 lockdown showed us that people are not turned into couch potatoes 🥔 by benefits and furloughs. (They do couch potato after burnout or due to depression) rather they take up hobbies, many of which become lucrative or are useful to the community. (Community projects were harder because we were hiding in our homes) This led to the Great Resignation during which companies had to offer higher than minimum wage for their bottom-rung jobs.
We’ve also seen government benefits programs facilitate great movements in art. The whole British Rock-&-Roll boom of the 1960s followed the post-war restoration programs to get everyone who lost everything fed again and back into homes. Then someone threw in an electric guitar.
So it’s not bad to want free stuff. It’s just assumed that you can’t have free stuff if someone else can make a profit by charging, ergo paid toilets and office bathroom tissue pools.
One of the factors is that the US is surprisingly huge. It takes EU tourists by surprise that a quick jaunt from NYC to visit their friend in Chicago is several days by road (unless you drive like an American roadtripper for fourteen hours a day) moreover, there’s just huge tracks of land featuring not-too-exciting vistas (unless you plan your road trip to feature pretty routes, in which case multiply the distance by 1.3), so for the short while that airlines were regulated and we weren’t worried (yet) about the air-travel carbon footprint (Huge. Enormous. Colossal.) it made sense to fly everywhere in the US.
Now that it’s insanely expensive and inconvenient to fly, and we shouldn’t be doing it, it’s time for the US to build HSR for realsies, if the automotive / fossil fuel industrial complex will let us.
If you’re close enough, you can walk.
ETA I’d expect there are fast rails from Berlin to Paris, and if not, why not?
c/politicalmemes has a quality standard for memes? Besides which the argument was they might still be useful, and the versions we’ve seen in the US so far have shown to cost way more than their value (and that’s before we get to asset forfeiture).
At this chapter it’s long time to start implementing programs with the goal of completely replacing law enforcement in the US with other systems, including enough benefits to assure people aren’t driven to crime by desperation.
I’m getting a paywall or adblock block or something. Anyone have a less problematic link to the article?
Those kinds of crimes are exceedingly rare, and many (such as rampage killings) are the result of systemic issues that could be addressed in other ways (not merely just regulating firearm access).
They’re not a very good one considering how they have a very poor case closure rate for serious violent crimes, and the state and federal justice systems of the US are disturbingly okay with false convictions and excessive retribution.
BMW and VW are the same beasts they were when they were backers of NSDAP in Germany.
Between the VW emissions cheating and BMW’s subscription car features, it seems their attitude towards commerce has not changed a jot.
Once a society decides some people need to be denied rights inevitably the monarch takes them all.
You lost some of us at the presumption of restaurants and servers.
Maybe imagine no countries (nothing to kill or die for, etc. etc.)
Presume that everyone is a person and has all the rights you do.
My dad was a contingency engineer during the Apollo moon shots and worked for JPL most of my life. I was sold the dreams as a toddler of reaching for the stars, Seeking out new life and civilizations etc.
And I’m really sore that we gave up that for a global religious supercult and a slow death killing the global ecology.
The typical FOX News watcher assumes that criminals are bad guys by character, are caught red-handed and identified by a perfect means of detection, and still dress like The Hamburglar.
So no, they do not understand that a robust due process is the right of any given suspect before they are even fined (though a one-year sentence is usually the bar for a mandated jury trial, depending on the state / county), and this is a controversy in the US because a lot of people are not afforded their full rights, or are often coerced into surrendering rights by law enforcement who is more interested in putting a warm (brown-skinned) body in jail than actually seeing justice done.
In this era, no one is asking exactly whom CECOT is supposed to be imprisoning. Here in the US, our death row inmates are treated better, and US prisons are notoriously squalid for industrialized nations. CECOT is Edgar Allen Poe caliber cruel-and-unusual incarceration for tens of thousands who are allegedly worse than the people the US would execute.
Mara Salvatrucha members don’t deserve CECOT incarceration. Tren de Aragua members don’t deserve CECOT incarceration. So who was thinking what when the CECOT facility was built?
And then we’re sending people there for life who have mere visa infractions – a grossly disproportionate sentence – and the US is skipping the hearing before a judge.
So yeah, congratulations, United States, you’ve become one of the worst offenders of human atrocity… again.
I’ve come to assume We’re in danger from the state is the theme of this year’s pride.
Bring a brick.