Surely there are things that he says that I would even agree with - though I more often question how he says them (that is not me down-voting you though to be clear - a respectful conversation as you are doing is always welcome in my book).
e.g. I agreed with Hillary Clinton on the “ninth-month abortion” topic - there are only less than a handful of those all across the country, and at that point there is 0% chance that they are from irresponsible loose women forgetting to take a pill (or whatever the thinking is there) and 100% chance that it is a huge medical complication. Her answer there was “politicians should not be dictating such matters - that is a subject best left up to the experts and the patient to decide together”. She may be corrupt as sin and her answers were all focus-tested prior to delivery but… nevertheless she was right about that, imho.
Whereas his answer was “baby killer” - as if this literally heart-rending occurrence where the life of the mother is at stake and the loss of the fetus is virtually a foregone conclusion at that point was all besides the point.
They BOTH played the game in their respective ways there. And while I may not have liked her, I did like her answers, while his to that question was so incredibly juvenile that I could hardly believe my ears and eyes, seeing it from the leading candidate of an actual Presidential race. (btw funny video about it - she goes first but don’t worry, after the first minute he comes with some really great jabs:-P)
I would encourage you to remember though that even if you enjoyed his performance in the debate: he is so dumb that other people ended up pulling most of his strings after he got into office, and he never even realized how much he was being manipulated - in fact he still does not, years after-the-fact. Trump is not “conservative”, nor even quite “Republican” so much as a mad bull tearing through the china shop breaking everything that he pleases touches. A vote for him is a vote for anarchy, which sounds fun only to those who have neither experienced it nor studied history to realize what it truly means. imho at least, ofc take with a grain of salt (i.e. be properly skeptical), except it also happens to be shared by most people who study most matters all across the nation world. When the experts (almost) all agree on something, it is either the largest conspiracy of all time ever, or else it just might be true!
I agree that everyone uses the system… but not equally. She would have been a horrible President - more than half the nation agreed with you on that so hard that they outright handed the election to him (with deeds, not merely words) - but that does not in turn mean that he was a good one, and especially that he would be again.
Yup. They are playing a dangerous game of Russian Roulette, hoping it won’t be them that actually gets the blast. Or maybe “chicken” is a better phrasing - which side will blink first? The one who cares least about losing is the one that “wins”, except can you call that winning, REALLY?
Like, hey I have an idea, let’s beat up all the nerds, who actually like… think and stuff… and junk. THAT will surely turn out alright? :-(
It reminds me of how Kansas lowered taxes, then went bankrupt, then did it again, then wanted to do it AGAIN!? (then other states wanted to follow suit - it really is a repeating pattern, where nobody ever learns the lessons of even just a handful of years prior) There, they stuck microphones in the farmers faces (farmers would have been the top benefactors of lowering taxes in that state) and asked them what they would do if taxes were lowered - would they “create jobs”? Their answers were absolutely priceless. “No… (looks with disgust on their faces) why (the fuck) WOULD we!?” They even went into detail - there is only so much crop out there, you can’t simply hire more workers and somehow magically get more profits. Plus Americans don’t want to work those jobs anyway, plus they already manage to get the tasks done as it is, what possible reason would they want to hire on more people for, especially stable jobs, for American citizens? So then the reporters would ask what they would do with all that extra money. “I dunno… prolly put it in the bank, I guess?”
Apparently “JOBS” is a magical 4-letter word that if you lower taxes on the wealthy, somehow just magically materializes. Meanwhile the actual job creators are saying… not so much. Companies like Garmin in Kansas want a nice workplace for their workforce - they want hospitals, roads, bridges, and the like. If they wanted to live in Mississippi or Florida, then they would move there, but they do not. i.e., they WANT to pay taxes, or at least benefit from a place where taxes have been paid into, in the past.
So Republicans in Kansas lowered taxes, supposedly for the sake of the farmers, except even the majority of farmers did not want that, and then the entire state went bankrupt, AGAIN.
But by all means, let’s try it still yet again, on the scale of the entire nation this time, and against the will of the majority of voters - surely that will end well once more? :-( (to clarify, I mean that it will work out well for Putin, and really if you stop to think about it, that is all that matters… right? RIGHT!?)
Wait till you see the videos of mothers literally chucking their infants/toddlers over the wall, hoping that they will be found by someone on the other side and cared for… in a desert no less. Better dead than having to go back to where they came from, it would seem. Either way they are aware that they will never see them again.
And it gets even weirder when people keep finding literal child slaves, used for both their work product & sex it would seem, up in farms even as far north as Iowa. Oh, and supposedly 80% of the women & girls that cross over are raped as they do. So again, whatever they are running from must be THAT bad, that those mothers are willing to consign their children to that.
But you are right - the USA cannot solve the problems of literally the entire world. Unfortunately things like nuance, subtlety, or even factual information of pretty much any kind, have no place in USA politicking - instead people simply get their pictures taken at the border, then go back home, trying to ignore it as best they can. And then argue about whether or not we want to pay the bill for the things that we’ve already bought.
Both sides are incredibly messed up, yet not equally so, but fairly bad in their own ways, as such matters simply slip through the cracks, as “more important matters” take precedence, I guess.
I think it is more complicated than that but… yeah - she is a soulless robot who would do, and say, ANYTHING to win. For instance, does anyone at all think that she actually carries around hot sauce in her purse everywhere that she goes? She said that, but she did not mean it. She is a politician and she LIED.
Also, Trump was not a politician, but he LIED too - remember when he said, before the primary, that if he won it then he would change the rules? However, immediately after that he said “why should I bother - I WON!?” Also, I seem to recall some chant of “lock her up”, but then immediately after that he was all like “why would do that? she’s nice people - she came to my wedding” Also, the Bob Woodward interview where he told him that he was going to lie in the future, saying that covid was not transmissable by air, and yet it was. Also… well, there’s a lot of examples, just like with her. So Hillary does not have a monopoly on lying.
Even so, her actions do tend to back up what she said: she tended to listen to experts, and the pandemic would have killed far fewer people if she had been in charge. She lies so often that sometimes she even tells the truth, just by accident? :-P So I think she would have followed up on that topic just as she said - not b/c she cared but just b/c it would be most politically expedient to have done so.
That said, she didn’t seem to genuinely care for anything but her own fame & glory (hey, remember when the Supreme Court told her to send over all of her emails, and she told them to take a hike? well, more precisely she told them that she’d do it when she felt like it, but only AFTER she removed all the ones that she didn’t want them to see - THAT IS WHAT SHE ACTUALLY SAID!?!?!?!). Though again, how was Trump any different? They are both shitty people, it’s just that Americans knew more about her than we did him, hence why the vote wasn’t so much “pro-Trump” as it was “anti-Hillary”, and we basically just rolled the dice to see whatever anti-Hillary would end up doing. It did not work out well, though it may not have worked well under her either - Congress would still have been flat-out broken either way, and neither would have helped heal the divide in this nation. Both sides need to stop putting up these jokers and put up someone who MAKES SENSE! :-(
Yes, he does answer questions more simply - if that were the only criteria for someone to be President then he should have won, in fact it’s a large part of why he did. And she answers questions with more weasly-worded phrases that mean nothing so as to let the medium-IQ people delude themselves into thinking that they are high-IQ ones (“hey, she said the thing that I wanted!? I’m so smart to have figured that out” - uh… no she didn’t, in fact if you pay attention, she ended up saying nothing at all). But if the question is “what is 1+1?”, then the answer is neither -1000000000000 (Democrats) nor “ur stUpId” (Republicans), so I firmly believe that neither side is working in our bests interests. On the other hand, one side is ready to literally overthrow the Constitution of the United States of America, even while claiming to do it out of love for that very document (which many admit to never having read in the first place).
I’m going to say something possibly controversial: not only do dumb people have just as much right to vote as smart ones, but smart people are not better people. That said, I am not looking to have a beer with the President of the United States, I want them for their role as a LEADER, for which yes a minimum level of intelligence should be required. Like in a football game, a certain minimum level of athletic prowess should be mandatory? So why look out into the audience and choose one of them, ignoring the ones who have trained for many years to become great at it? The only answer I can come up with is that people hated Hillary THAT MUCH - hence why she is the one who put him in office, arguably much more than he did. He was just trying to promote his latest reality TV show:-P.
Some people say that Biden has half a brain… and I think they are right!
Oddly enough, I don’t care - he seems to be doing… I cannot say “well”, but given what he faced when he first came in, definitely a far better job than I expected. At this point even if he were a robot puppet animated by people feeding his lines to him, I no longer care b/c it would be those handlers that we would be voting for. And yet would Kamala jump to the same tune as he does, or like Trump ignore the briefings and strike out on her own? So once again, we devolve to a “Hillary vs. Trump”, now “Kamala vs. Trump” standoff, each side trying to play chicken, daring the other side to back off. The truly heart-breaking tragic part of it is that in such a game, it is no guarantee that either side will “win”, and at some point it becomes quite likely that BOTH will lose.
I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to understand the weasel-wording, and what I came up with is this: anytime politicians say ANYTHING at all, they get judged for it, by some nutjobs somewhere. God exists, God does not exist, God exists and he loves people, God may or may not exist and he hates people, God yes/no exists and yes/no whatever whatever people, except he loves/hates YOU in particular, and so on. So the trick is to please the highest number of people by… saying nothing at all. Except that is too easily detected, hence the weasel wording, where they talk… but do not communicate. Then to complicate matters 1000x further, you are supposed to ignore all of that, and just focus on their voting record. Yes, ALL of those debates, the ENTIRE reason for their existence, is the profit of the media companies trying to sell them. They don’t “decide” anything, except for the tiniest, slimmest, barest sliver of people in the absolute middle who haven’t already made up their minds who they are going to vote for. Which might not even be 1% of the nation, though b/c of how polarized we are right now, might just swing the tide anyway?
So think of it like car salesmen: oh you are so smart, wow you have such a good eye, you know most people do not think to ask such insightful questions - BULLSHIT! And yet… you need a car anyway, right? It is extremely distasteful to anyone that prefers Truth over LIES, but what other way is there, than to engage in politics, or not engage and just watch the world burn? (This is fine meme)
And no I think Hillary literally thought that she would win - she managed to bully just about everyone on her own side from even so much as running (except Bernie Sanders who didn’t give a shit, and one other guy that nobody had heard of on the national scale), and then one of the various email leaks about her showed her illegal collusion with the DNC (e.g. she was given the questions that would be asked during the debate in advance, whereas he was not - giving her an enormous advantage). So “legally” (ha!) or not, she was going to push past all obstacles and take what she wanted by force. Arguably Trump may even have been put there to help HER win, but she seems to have underestimated just how much people HATED her, passionately even. Oopsie.
I mean, why would Trump want to take a huge pay cut to run the WH? Simply reading a teleprompter in front of a TV screen was a much sweeter gig - far less effort, plus far less grief too. Though once she lost, ahem I mean he “won”, his ego would not let him turn it down. Remember how he wanted to try and do both - be President and still do that TV show that he had previously signed a contract for!? :-P
I don’t think Dave Chappelle is homophobic, though he’s definitely transphobic, and there’s really something to that, as he explains: other people have a right to do whatever they want, but when YOU start telling ME what to do (i.e. in terms of mandatory pronoun usage), that’s the line that should not be crossed. Your rights (should) end where mine begin, and all that. And yeah, I do think he’d be friends with a trans person even - you don’t have to agree with someone 100% to enjoy one another’s company.:-D Though he’s tired of bending over backwards to all the woke BS, and so he draws the line in the sand - this far but no further. Bill Maher has switched to doing that now also - I used to not be able to stand that pretentious asshole, but now I see how often he’s right and thus he’s grown on me in spite of that.
BTW, if you want to watch a fairly short video that could literally change your view of politics forever - hey, I genuinely am not kidding on that! - here it is: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs. I have re-watched it many times over the last several years and still cannot wrap my head around it. It uses LOGIC and FACTS but… I don’t wanna follow where it leads:-(. Brainwashing cultural/societal influence from all of the various sources like Hollywood movies and just flat crowd-think from talking to almost literally everybody has quite a strong effect, and I realize that I am still under its sway. So anyway, be warned: this video can fuck you up, bigly :-| - but it does have the benefit of being true.
Whether or not his administration managed to cut back on illegal crossings (mainly ICE raids I would guess), he definitely and dramatically did cut back on legal visas offered. Thus farmers, who relied heavily upon those with temporary work visas, panicked there during the first year of his administration, e.g. nytimes.com/…/california-farmers-backed-trump-but….
If conservatives really wanted to stop illegal immigration, they would go after the employers who hire them
Conservatives never really want to accomplish most of their stated goals - it’s like a dog chasing after a car, they wouldn’t know what to do if they ever caught it. The catch is that Trump isn’t actually conservative, he simply used those talking points, too dumb to realize that he wasn’t supposed to mean any of it:-P.
He also wasn’t Republican either, although there he won, since he hollowed out the Republican party, laid his eggs inside its brain and now he controls the corpse. I think McCarthy was the last vestige of a Tea Party style fiscal conservative, and now the Alt Right has taken complete control, even as they already have started eating their own and demolishing that from the inside with an even more hardcore line, where e.g. the infamously extreme Fox News is no longer extreme enough.
But anyway, yeah if they truly wanted to stop immigration that is what would need to be done, but they don’t be it’s such an easy talking point that they’ve invested so much effort into, they can’t afford to lose out on it now by actually solving the damn thing!:-P
Biden also has word salads, but yeah at least he isn’t proud of it. I suppose the thinking is that anti-establishment means that whatever THEY do, you should do the exact opposite? Except that is not how adulting works - the way you can spot a counterfeit is to know the geniune article so well that nobody can lie to you and pass off something false as being true. Simply being “not happy” with existing policies is not a good direction to move “forward” in. So instead of e.g. Christians asking “WWJD = What Would Jesus Do?”, they instead ask what Obama would do and then do the polar opposite? So like Obama passed the Affordable Care Act, so I guess the opposite is to, what, kill off all the poor people? (shit, I didn’t mean for this to be so accurate!)
Chappelle is a literal genius, or at least a really smart, very insightful dude. Some people do not like him, I assume b/c they do not understand him (or maybe… b/c they do?:-P). His early work I did not enjoy as much, but then I reflect that it was a different time then, and what seems blasé today was for back then a revolutionary thing. I especially appreciate his insights into racial matters - e.g. that story about a trans person who is white in Texas being “passing”, whereas Dave can never ever change the color of his skin, so they really truly are fundamentally different.
That CPG Grey video really messed ME up. A lot of liberals start thinking “well this is the way the world SHOULD be” - but that is stupid thinking (unfortunately modern conservatives do not have a monopoly on stupidity, or more precisely lack of wisdom, which is not always the same thing, and presence of obstinacy to persist in spite of all the facts pointing in the opposing direction), and instead what actually WORKS is when we are humble enough to realize the way that the world actually DOES work, and then move forward from there. e.g. imagine trying to make a rocket that can go into space, maybe even reach the moon - none of the “feels like” statements (I kinda feel like I want to paint it red and blue, and add sparkles to it - THAT might make it go further?) are going to make it go one inch further, and it is only when we start asking how physics truly works, and then submitting to that so that our actions match our thinking, will we actually be able to achieve the goal.
And I feel like Chappelle gets that. Heck, even Trump gets that, though then he twists it and uses it for his own ends - like yeah he does know how to avoid paying taxes, and that helps the common American HOW exactly?!? Biden also seems to get it, which surprised the hell out of me, though Kamala absolutely does not, preferring instead to blame everyone rather than herself.
About money being evil: consider the related statement that “Guns don’t kill people - people kill people”, which is both a true statement and also misleading b/c guns really do help to kill people, as opposed to lets say a knife or a bow & arrow. Guns not only increase the rate with which humans can be dispatched, but also they increase the ease with which even singular ones can be taken down, by lowering the barriers - simply point and click and if you hit your target in a vital spot, it’s all over for them. Get dumped by your girlfriend? Get a gun and show her who is boss! Teacher gave you an F, or maybe even an A- but you wanted an A? Same. It shortens the effort required to go from initial thought to deed completion, and thus facilitates traveling that pathway more readily, without barriers, and also more quickly, before you have time to cool off or get distracted. In comparison, in Australia unregistered guns are illegal, and while people can still purchase them in an unregulated black market, it costs almost as much as a cheap house, like $40k (this figure was from a decade ago so probably a lot more now with inflation!) - always assuming ofc that they don’t decide to kidnap you and use you for organ harvesting or some such. That puts some barriers back up, so that people must take time to cool off before purchasing one, in order to fulfill their wish. Also younger people are less likely to have that kind of cash on-hand, so the most brash members of society have the least access to those dangerous weapons. i.e., mainly it is people that kill people, and yet guns do significantly help with that.
Similar to the above statement, money both directly warps a person’s mind - studies show that people literally change their actions when they start to get some, e.g. becoming fearful that others will try to come & take it - plus also the greed aspect affects people far more, even if they do not have any actual money itself. Though not everyone is greedy - there are so many stories of people that e.g. win the lottery and donate all of the funds to charity. Being forewarned is forearmed, and some people are more careful than others to avoid letting greed take over their lives. I actually think Biden is that way - his wife comes from the Heinz ketchup fortune so is extremely wealthy, and neither of them would ever need to work a single day for the rest of their lives, and yet that old man instead of taking naps all day (as many of us would prefer!) gets up every day and works himself to the bone. Yeah he surely has his selfish reasons too, like wanting to be remembered as someone who did great things - which is a good thing? - but his actions at least do not match what I would consider “greed”. Whereas Trump on the other hand… that pussy-grabbing MFer will take every last tiny bit that he can get! :-P
About our survival: I watch a lot of sci-fi, and I have read even more of that. I agree with you that we might end ourselves, but I also think that it is possible for populations to go in “cycles”, and while we might kill off oh let’s say 90% of humanity on earth, even so the rest of us might remain, and grow all the stronger as a result of learning from our trials. That’s the key btw: EVALUATED EXPERIENCES - some people never learn, either from their own mistakes or those of others, but some people are open to learning, and they will have a much greater chance of being okay… like a Jew that moved out of Germany, before other Jews were thrown into the furnaces: if you pay attention, I happen to think that the outcome is more likely to be better than if you do not. That does not seem like a fully natural mental state: it is far easier to just go to sleep and conserve energy, hence the drag/pull towards laziness each and every day. But if we resist laziness, and greed, and other mental ills, then past history shows that such people as that do that DO end up with far better lives.
But… we aren’t all going to make it. Some people are simply too stupid - I should stop using that word btw, when really I mean obstinate - to survive. Trying the same thing over and over, hoping for a different results the next time - that simply is not a winning strategy, 999,999,999 times out of a billion.
My girlfriend started taking a Masters in a college this year. In her course the faculty have shown some disorganization and computer illiteracy since day one but the latest one…completely killed me....
I don’t know what to do. If I upvote this, then people will have to go through the agony that I did, in listening to this. :-( On the other hand, if I upvote this, then people will have to go through the agony that I did, in listening to this. :-)
Alright, I will sacrifice some of my karma for this, if it helps:-).
The meme is trying to wrangle the premise that “large corporations are (most often) bad” (which ofc is true:-P) into a humorous statement that engineers in the state of Texas have limited opportunities to find jobs.
The problem is that it messes up all the details - e.g. if you have ever heard of GameStop, Dell, or Texas Instruments (just to name 3) they all have their headquarters in Texas, plus numerous top tech companies have branches there like Samsung. A 5s Google search shows many, MANY more.
For extra context: moving between states is nothing at all like moving between countries - and e.g. the state of California has a GDP comparable to Germany - plus there are many jobs in the state of Texas for both Engineers and also non-Engineers, especially if someone is willing to make less money in exchange for other QoL factors (like living closer to family?) so… in short, it is not your fault for not understanding this meme.:-)
Though there must be just enough of something in it for it to have gotten this many upvotes, in spite of all that. As someone who hasn’t lived in Texas for many years, I must be on the outside looking in now and thus don’t get it:-P.
🤢... (sh.itjust.works)
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I'm trying to think of something more stupid than this but it's not easy...
My girlfriend started taking a Masters in a college this year. In her course the faculty have shown some disorganization and computer illiteracy since day one but the latest one…completely killed me....
It's just a prank bro (lemmy.world)
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21 January 2024 (sh.itjust.works)
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Amogus (lemmy.world)
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