When I was young we created our own reaction videos by simply watching television with another person.

The fact that much of the discussion centers on a ‘big, beautiful bill’ shows how infantilized U.S. politics has become.

In a democracy you must be able to hold anyone with significant influence over policy accountable, through elections or other means. Unless the system is regulated so money has minimal impact on politics, extreme wealth is incompatible with democracy.

An odd feature of post-truth democracy is that a political movements can wreck society and then successfully run on ’’look how broken society is’’.

Imagine voting on egg pricing and ending up here.

Was ”not creating so much fucken noise we need multi-billion dollar AI to filter the shit out” ever on the table? www.cultofmac.com/news/ios-18-...

There’s an alternative explanation to Democratic lawmaker’s passivity besides common liberal fecklessness. It’s a strategy. It’s a well know fact that as radical movements lose their defined enemies or begin to reach some of their goals, they crumble from in-fighting. Mighty big bet though.

Who could have guessed that after winning The Cold War, the US would try to be just like Russia.

Rewatching Severance. Its fusion of personality cult for industry leaders combined with evangelical overtones and a system of strict moral control feels very much in line with current changes in the US. It’s pretty scary.

If I made up a sycophantic newspaper that licked the nutsack of a corrupt president, I’d probably think this was going a bit too far.

It would be helpful if media stopped calling this peace talks and instead described it as an updated Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact where they divvy upp Europe between them.

European leaders tripping all over each other to get the prestigious Neville Chamberlain award.

Thinking the new notion brewing in the far right fever swamps, that USAID is some sort of nefarious nexus of the deep state, is so incredibly dumb it defies belief. Then I remember being totally stupid is not the deal breaker it used to be.

The fact that the world’s richest man, an unelected foreigner, can just seize the whole US system, is the the ultimate capitalist logic I believe Marx would chuckle at.

Striking how much entertainment this brand of politics is. No substance, no good faith, just cheap content to thrill the supporters and line the pockets of the party hacks. It’s bread and circuses, minus the bread.

There’s a beautiful cafeteria scene in Silo, season 2, where Shirley tells Sheriff Billings, who’s being properly fucked by a corrupt system, that he should fight back. But he’s spent his life telling himself the system is what prevents chaos. So all he can say is that the system is all we have.

The far right is such a low quality proposition. The presidency was sold in the open by an ignorant clown in makeup to an insecure little super nerd strung out on ketamine. Not a single supervillain in sight. No evil 4D chess plan. Just incompetence, grift and blatant lies. So stupidly haphazard.

Shuffling my Sonos speaker around as I cleaned my nightstand, I notice the name is not only a palindrome, it also reads the same upside down. Life is full of realizations, big and small.

The Great Again part is not about 50’s suburbia but another 100 yrs back. In that time, a lot that liberals consider evil, like bigotry, corruption and nepotism, was not. They were just seen as the effects of the natural order of hierarchy. They don’t want to tweak modernity, but want to undo it.

Very unpopular politics creating unrest and chaos is great if you want a distraction while you rob everyone blind. Unprecedented times means just that. None of the old rules apply any more.

Neoliberalism is the economic theory for stoners. It requires some serious bong rips to be taken seriously. ”No regulations for companies because the market will sort it out” is really the equivalent of ”if drugs were 100% organic they’d actually be good for you”.

Hilarious if the drone sightings are actually aliens and they’re like ”take us to your leader” and it’s DJT. They’ll be like ”omg we were going to give them the secret of fusion but they’re such giant assholes now we won’t ever!”

We decided long ago that building wealth is the only real metric of success. Is it so strange then, that when ’for profit’-news corporations, faced with either doing the right thing or safeguarding their profits, pick the latter? Sucks as a consolation, but it’s the world we chose.

If you watch Star Wars backwards it’s really a story about a weary revolutionary finding peace while retiring to work a small farm.

I think it’s more useful to think of the US as taken over by authoritarian capitalism, rather than fascism.

It’s been 8 years. No good has so far come out of the MAGAfication of the GOP. Not one thing. How many more years will the average Democrat need to finally understand that bipartisanship is dead? They’re like junkies, addicted to the dream of the first hit of smack more than the drug itself.

Muskaswamy’s mission is not to make government more efficient. They want to sell the notion the US is wasting money on undeserving groups, so they can dismantle the federal state.

Great. Now that I’ve spent years learning to play the guitar, AI invents extra fingers.

US foreign policy, based for generations on the divide and conquer stratagem, has a tendency to devolve into musical chairs. Enemies become friends, and friends become enemies. But sure, let’s get a bunch of drunk billionaire sex offenders in there and shake it up. What can possibly go wrong?

After being emotionally numb for years and doing all kinds of fucked up things, I came upon a guy on a beach and I just shot him. After being sentenced to death I spent the time in jail thinking about how life sucks but still not really giving two fucks about any of it. AITA?

Who’s going to write for and read the NYT and WaPo when their transformation into ’’slightly left of Pinochet’’ is complete?

So, because a couple of thousand uneducated Americans picked Trump, and everyone else is a little tired of inflation, we’re inching towards letting Putin get away with territorial conquest. Got it. It fucking sucks.

When you absolutely refuse to improve a few people’s lives in order to adress social problems, the only other option is to go to war and make everyone’s lives miserable.

Yeah, it’s not that simple. There’s context. Political debate should be more than pugilism. Introspection matters. But still. It’s this.

So, apparently Musk will run the US like Twitter. Fire everyone, rebrand it into something stupid, make it generally suck and then have everyone leave. Has Canada prepared for this?

Thinking the influx of users means I finally get the satisfaction of blocking idiots, is my version of the half full glass.

The anti-elite vote.

You can tell the election is over, because now all the editors in mainstream media is asking their journalists to double down on the grave dangers of a second Trump presidency.

It’s going to get crowded and cozy here.

Twitter is dying. Musk got his way. Bought it, and wrecked it to get more power. The rich will always take things we enjoy, exploit them to further their wealth, and then throw the carcass away. It’s always been the way of the world. But we should at least stop fucking admiring them.

With all the new people coming over from X, can we please hold off with the usual Bluesky purging of anyone slightly to the right of Lenin?

Pundit: Harris lost the real voters because she called Trump a fascist, and they felt patronized. Trump: I want my generals, just like Hitler!

Harris was a great candidate running a great campaign. They hardly missed a beat. In a world without right wing echo chambers like Fox, and without the attention economy of social media, she would have cleaned Trump’s clock. Democracies cannot function when lying comes with no political cost.

Hillary was the better candidate but loses to Trump, who runs for funsies. Biden, 135 years old and without a pulse beats Trump. A smart, competent Harris runs a flawless campaign against a wildly flailing Trump and loses. If you can’t read the writing on that wall, no glasses will help you.

We will now have and endless cycle of media pundits trying to come up with reasons for the election results. Not one of them will bring up their own complicity. On the contrary, the horse race antics that helped make this possible will now just feed itself like a sick snake eating its tail.

Pollsters are people who spend hour after hour with really complex models to come up with: ”Geez, this could go either way…”

Werner Herzog’s Legally Blonde

I can laugh at this obvious buffoonery. But I’m also aware that this resonates with a lot of young, white men steeped in online influencer culture. Especially among gaming streamers you see this attitude of not taking things seriously a lot.

Prediction: Trumpworld demonizes Puertoricans in the most nazi of ways and calling their island garbage. Mainstream media will respond with endless news cycles on Biden retorting MAGA supporters are the garbage.