oh you want to improve conditions, that sucks compared to my method, complaining non stop about the issues and doing nothing

People can think whatever about the way this played out but honestly I’m never not going to be mad about the accounts that sneered at the ACA subsidies as a pointless waste of effort because they weren’t relevant to the priorities of BlueSky clout pushers

Weird how at some point the ACA subsidies went from meaningless technocrat babble that it was obviously incredibly stupid for Democrats to try protecting to being incredibly important for helping people avoid suffering. And Democrats managed to get it wrong both times!! What were the odds?

yeah man, prove me wrong

We should hold rallies where everyone who works a federally funded job, either directly in a federal agency like ATCs or indirectly like scientists, wears the same T-shirt and shows out to demonstrate how many we are and how much of society our labor powers.

You'd think that after everything that's happened this year (DOGE, funding cuts, firings, now this shutdown), the public has gotten a big crash course in "oh, so that's government too?" This is prob the best time to be pro-gov-workers, now that ppl can clearly see the everyday places gov helps.

it’s interesting to learn the times when “better messaging” or “just fighting” apparently won’t work.

A core part of this whole discourse on here is a lot of ppl just continuing to refuse to believe that Republicans might actually have sincere beliefs that they will adhere to.

"I hope this email finds you in poor health and beset on all sides by the consequences of your actions,"

Btw, every single soldier in America? You know, the guys with the guns? Federal employees. Shocking, I know.

If I was so self-centered that I thought "most people don't know any federal workers" I don't think I'd advertise what an asshole I was that loudly but...

"feds don't have a lot of visibility so it's okay to throw them under the bus" is A> sick and B> so spectactularly wrong.

"You either burn out on radicalism and become a normie lib or you keep going long enough to turn into a MAGA" -Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight

Lmao, he is just literally repeating GOP lies about Dems: "we gave up your healthcare subsidies" - what? The GOP cut them! That's just a fact. Yet he's pretending "Continue shutdown --> *Underpants Gnomes* --> GOP votes to restore subsidies it cut" was a done deal & re-allocating GOP cuts to Dems.

Remember when Trump wanted to rename Veteran’s Day? Yeah, neither does anyone else

about 2% of the workforce are federal employees. and about as many again are state and local government employees. that's almost 1 in 20 people! Granted a lot of them are teachers, but still. It's pretty unlikely you don't know a fed! And it's impossible you haven't had a positive encounter with one

Growing up truly is realizing that liberals are the only group in the entire country who actually want to accomplish things and view the world with any degree of complexity. Everything else is just different flavors of "fuck the system, I'm going to burn it and replace it with my ideal society!"

I want people to describe to me, slowly, the actual mechanism by which ACA subsidies could be restored by the minority

Reflexively hating public employees is a stock RW position. Public employees are Mom, and everybody hates Mom.

"Feds don't have a lot of visibility in regular people's lives." The postal worker who regularly delivers your mail might have something to say about that.

“We want the government to do stuff but fuck the people who do it” is not a coherent position in any way.

“The broad left must position itself against government workers” is absolutely equivalent to “the broad left must position itself against government.”

We’re watching Joyce Carol Oates slowly torture a Boer to death in real-time

“whatever club he’s invited to join has been devalued by the invitation”

*maximum alpha at 1.25x speed* continuously lives on in my head, unfortunately.

I say "oh let me mapquest it" whenever I have to look up directions to a place, without fail, every time

The reason Democrats can't do anything more than sometimes stall the Republicans before they destroy something is because not enough Democrats were elected to stop them, so embracing a "primary and replace every Dem" strategy which will prob lead to even fewer Dems in Congress seems less than ideal

Most of these leftwing activist groups are a bunch of snakes. They grift off of maximalist demands to their donors, so view any sort of normal politics as a "bEtRaYal". Constant screaming and vote suppression.

For a group called Indivisible, they sure do want to divide, huh?

Who could have guessed back in 2016 that Nate Silver would become literally Ben Shapiro

every single week they're throwing this guy a special oval office love-in that appears to be the presidential equivalent of letting your dog scarf an entire big mac and fries before that last trip to the vet

this man show sequel is really going some interesting directions, I like how they're exploring the logical consequences of the worldbuilding

Update: this is no longer included in the final funding deal. I'm going to keep fighting to lower premiums and ensure Republicans can’t get away with a backdoor national abortion ban.

If you say you wouldn't try it you're lying

This has come on my feed again and I just want to say, there are people who vocally dislike government workers, they will harass you and intimidate you if you're a visible federal worker (I experienced this) Those people are bad people and they're not getable democratic voters

It can be deeply terrifying to realize you're surrounded by tens of millions of people who want to destroy everything you love, but there are also tens of millions of people who want to fight them! They have a political party that you should want to be a part of!

I think one aspect of this is some people are basically unable to psychologically process the reality that way too many republicans exist in raw numbers in this country.

I honestly think it's part of why so many folks cling to the idea that Republican voters are all embarrassed socialists just waiting for the right message to shed their bigotry.

The Onion is full of shit and lies right to your face for clicks. They have literally become the media institutions they were created to parody.

A problem with the new Onion is that, as with most things, the writers spend way too much time on niche social media websites

Reminder that ICP is strongly anti-Trump.

"We should be willing to kill as many people as it takes to get them to do what we want" is psychopathy. You are a psychopath if you say this.

The truth is a muscle, and like any muscle it will atrophy from lack of use. "We all know Republicans suck, no reason to ever say it" is like saying we all know how to walk, so there's no reason to ever get out of bed.

Joyce Carol Oates owned Elon so hard he's spent the last day posting about movies he hasn't seen in 15 years

Right like we have a word for someone whose primary political commitment is antipathy towards Democrats, that word is “Republican”

So true. People need to realize that these online platforms are not just a personal venting place. They are a BROADCAST. Normies may dip in from time to time just to see what the vibe is. If the vibe you usually project is "DEM BAD!" that is what the normies will come away with. That is not helpful.

There’s an attitude on here that I am obliged to read the minds of every random dipshit on here and assume they believe things they haven’t said, and no I’m not

Going to the mat to defend people's god-given right to view Democrats as two-dimensional caricatures

what if we made the whole website out of people who are built different

90% of Americans will reflexively agree with the idea that "both sides are to blame for the problems in America." That's presented as the savvy thing to think, in fact. It's just wrong in every meaningful way.