immigration raids = pogroms

Bullshit.

The thing that five day workweeks won’t fund is obscene pay packages for executives.

The problem is that the corporations have no incentive to not pay the extortion money.

If Paramount had, as anyone with any integrity at all would have, told Trump to go fuck himself, the Toddler-in-chief would thrown everything he could get his tiny little hands on at them, and they would’ve ended up paying far more than $16 million trying to fend it off. So instead, they just cut President Shitbag a check, and now he’ll (supposedly) rubber stamp the merger they want.

The responsibility for bringing that loathsome bag of pus to justice falls on someone else - the other two branches of the government. And they’re cowardly, complicit and corrupt.

The Supreme Court doesn’t even bother pretending to be upholding the law or the Constitution any more. The conservative majority is wholly owned by the same autocratic scumbags who are backing Trump, and they self-evidently see themselves as having one and only one mission - to give that reeking piece of shit whatever he wants no matter what sort of illogic and lies they have to use.

And in Congress, the Republicans are lining up to suck the rapist’s deformed dick in the hope of getting to play a role in the oligarchy to come, and the Democrats are entirely focused on destroying the leftists in their midst so that they can continue gorging themselves on conservative soft money in exchange for doing nothing.

So the profoundly mentally ill and brazenly criminal piece of shit who’s stinking up the Oval Office is free to do whatever the hell he wants because every single person who might be able to do something about it is one or another sort of piece of shit themselves, with the only minor distinction being whether they’re corporate pieces of shit or judicial pieces of shit or congressionsl pieces of shit.

That was when it kicked off in earnest.

I still think that if there’s one single person who deserves more of the blame than anyone else for Trump becoming president in the first place, it’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Even against the staggeringly grotesque day-to-day reality of Trump’s corruption and malfeasance, this urge he apparently has to try to come to the rescue of foreign politicians rightly facing consequences for their own corruption and malfeasance really stands out.

It sounds glib, but it really does appear thst he simply, genuinely believes that corrupt sacks of shit have to stick together, and he’s trying to do his part (and, no doubt, end up owed a favor).

Unfortunately, the establishment Dems have the desires of the voters in one hand and they’re weighing that against hundreds of millions of dollars in soft money in the other, and so far the money has an uninterrupted win streak.

And Gilibrand has already clearly signaled which side she favors.

Why?

Oh FFS. Do you really not know?

This, just like so many other things in our current society, is simply a direct result of the fact that over the last few decades, the system as a whole has shifted sway from the well-being of the many and toward the privilege of the wealthy and powerful few.

Put bluntly, younger people aren’t partying (or having children, or buying homes, or planning careers, or supporting establishment political parties, or even going outside much) because the earlier generations have turned the US into a toxic shithole run by and for lying, greedy assholes, so the younger people see no reason to plan or hope and no opportunity to even really look up from their day-to-day gig economy scramble just to fucking survive and the handful of things they can afford to do to wind down from that scramble.

You want to do something about it? Stop raining shit down on them. Tax the fucking billionaires, shut down the student loan opportunists and the health insurance opportunists and the housing opportunists and all the other pieces of shit enjoying government-enabled privilege on the backs of the common people, and do what you can to turn the US back into a place where ordinary people vould have some hope, instead of just facing a life of underpaid drudgery just so that some fucking billionaire who owns a stable of politicians can buy more mansions and a bigger yacht.

And if you can’t be bothered to di that, then you’re just going to have to accept the fact that the people on whom you’re raining down shit are increasingly hopeless, and that has consequences.

Trump in charge of voting system changes is sort of like Larry Nassar in charge of sports medicine for teenage girls.

Right - a guy who’s known to have visited Epstein’s island is denying the conspiracy theories about his oh-so-convenient death.

That has all the credibility of a four-year-old with chocolate on his fingers and crumbs on his face saying “Cookies? What cookies?”

Conservatives live in such a bizarre fantasy world.

You’d think that sooner or later it would filter through to at least some of them that it’s meaningful that essentially without exception, if they just let information flow freely, whether on a website or a forum or in public comments or via an AI or whatever - it ends up skewed against conservatism.

But they never seem to get it. Instead, they go to great lengths to carefully censor and silence and astroturf and manipulate to force it over to a pro-conservative position, and they then have to constantly monitor and censor and astroturf to keep it there because if they relax their guard it starts drifting anti-conservative again.

In one sense, yeah - it’s easy and obvious - they lie, and often even to themselves.

But that doesn’t really explain anything. It goes so far beyond just lying that I really have a hard time making sense of it. Glib answers just don’t hack it.

It just doesn’t seem possible that they can sincerely believe that opinion consistently turns against them through some sort of near-universal conspiracy and that their constant manipulations and censorship and astroturfing can really be in support of truth. Sure, individuals can be that delusional, but that many of them?

I just can’t make sense of it. It’s like they believe that gravity is a conspiratorial lie that everyone else pretends to believe in just to stop them from flapping their arms and flying to the moon.

Government of the people, by the idiots, for the psychopaths.

I used to work with a woman who was part of a Pentecostal church that did snake-handling and speaking-in-tongues.

Reading this article was sort of like listening to her talk about her church.

I still remember when Facebook first caught on, and I learned that it was a site on which people posted their real names and pictures of themselves and their families and their lives, and all I could think was, “Why in the hell would anyone ever do that?”

I still don’t know.

The late 90s or maybe the early 00s Probably pre-Google (so pre-1998) but maybe in their earliest days. Definitely pre YouTube and pre Facebook (so pre-2004). It’s been pretty much all downhill since then.

Fucking psychopaths.

I would say that the most telling thing is that there hasn’t been a similar shift among Republicsns.

Anyone who can look at what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza, and increasingly in the West Bank, without being filled with horror, revulsion and pity is a monster.

“Shamed” implies he’s capable of feeling shame, which I very much doubt.

Oh look - the latest article in the ongoing series - “Sure we’ve turned America into a shithole, but why are young people avoiding sex/marriage/parenthood?”

Not coincidentally pretty much exactly so.

Sort of the clinical equivalent of a big, blinking neon sign that says, “I am a psychopath.”