This is a pretty negative outlook, and an unhealthy one. If your childhood trauma is impacting your current life, coming to terms with what happened and growing past it is absolutely a valid option. It will take time and personal effort, and you have to want to make the change, but it is possible.

Note that coming to terms doesn’t have to mean playing nice with the people who abused you, or even having any communication with them at all. It just means finding closure, forgiving yourself, and moving forward.

yo why is the guy packin?

I’m really not sure where I’d point to further back then that, though. Certainly, I’ll entertain any argument that points the finger toward Reagan, but that feels too far back. The thing is, the election of 2000 really seems like the moment the U.S. became fully captured, the moment non-violent resistance became impossible. It was the first time since the 1800s that a candidate won the popular vote but lost the EC, a trend that has continued. Our election was clearly meddled with in Florida, but no one really cared, so we just let them get away with it. Eventually, Bush appointed Alito and Roberts. While both replaced conservative justices, Sandra O’Connor was more of a moderate and could sometimes agree with more liberal justices. Meanwhile, Alito and Roberts are hardliners who secured the 4th and 5th votes for Citizen’s United.

Maybe the way they got there didn’t matter, and America was doomed to fall after decades of unregulated capitalism, but think about the lessons learned from 2000. Billionaires found out they could rig an election, get whatever they wanted, and the American public wouldn’t even notice. That feels like a pretty damning moment.

Sylvanas is a bold example, considering I think most non-gooners would actually prefer her older models.

Good! Hopefully one of those other apps is federated and free from any hostile interests.

Yeah, they should shut down both. Honestly, X should be on the chopping block even faster that Meta, but Zuck seems committed to racing Musk to the bottom.

What does this even really accomplish? Obama famously pushed for greater relations with Cuba, and Trump reversed all of that progress. Trump is very likely to reverse this as well.

If it was actually something important, and it was something Biden could do kinda whenever, what is the point of doing it now? If Biden had at least done it when he took office, we could have had a few years fostering relations again. Now, we’ll be lucky to have a month.

People are hopping in to say this will be a nothingburger, but they’re forgetting something very important.

Donald Trump is a giant, petulant, attention-obsessed baby. The whole President Musk thing has been needling him. Fascists are about as easy to bait into infighting as leftists, and we’ve placed a lot of bait. This provides Donald with an excellent moment to betray and cement his power over Elon.

Obv the power dynamics aren’t fully known, maybe Elon is just an intermediary for Putin and Trump will have to just sit and take it, but I just cannot imagine Trump suffering in silence. Maybe this gets turned into an opening salvo.

Looks like there’s one right here in this thread!

Coming to this realization myself. The coup happened in 2000. The false election of Bush was the first step on the path to Citizen’s United, at which point corporate interests bought America out from under the noses of its civilians.

The country I was born in collapsed before I was old enough to vote. We’re just starting to find out what that means.

The Trump campaign is only a dumpster fire if you’re a blind centrist who refuses to recognize the strength of the enemy.

The Trump campaign was exactly what his voters wanted. It was hours and hours of their god king and his cronies yapping their mouths about any racist thought that popped into their head. He brought up all the problems that his supporters are facing, and he promised change. It didn’t matter that his ideas for change are stupid, or lies, because his opponent was outright denying there were problems at all.

You can hate Trump as much as you want, but his campaign was clearly, grossly more effective than Harris. Whereas Democrats were arguing over all the blunders Harris/Walz was making, the Republicans were lockstep behind their golden god who promised to make all their wildest dreams come true. That’s how you win elections in the U.S., and it’s why everyone with a brain knew the election would be contested in the best case scenario.

I have! It is very laid-back, but I also found it to be a bit lacking in content. That was like a year ago though, and it’s my understanding that they’ve added a lot more to the game since I played.

See the problem is that if you run out of money, you die shortly thereafter.

Will he face any consequences?

Will anyone even care?

I dunno Jack, he seems pretty exonerated to me.

The problem, as I alluded to, is that the Supreme Court is starting to hear the lawsuits filed in response to those policies and is striking them down as unconstitutional. It’s quite likely that things like NDAs being unenforceable will also get overturned.

Everything Biden accomplished has either been grossly undermined, hindered, or reversed by the current corrupt Supreme Court. Completely ignoring them for his full four years, especially after Roe V Wade, was pure incompetency. Again, it gives credence to the idea of a controlled opposition. He was allowed to say and do some progressive things, but anything that stepped over the line the Supreme Court would stop. He could have packed the courts, used the big public outcry against the courts legitimacy to pack it with additional judges, and actually make a meaningful change to our country’s fate.

Instead, Joe Biden will be remembered as a vain fool who gave the country to fascism. Nothing else he accomplished will matter, if any of it is still left.

It’s required in any system that uses a fiat currency. Maybe a fiat currency is evil incarnate, but it also offers a lot of conveniences. Personally, I think I’d prefer having some number that translates my labor into spending units, and fiat currency works about as well as anything else when carefully managed.

There’s also a part of this that could, if you were naive, be solved with time. My job gave me a solid raise last year, 4.9%. Assuming four years of Harris status quo could get inflation down to ~2.5%, and assuming I can maintain similar raises each year, I’d likely recover from the pandemic within the next four years. Inflation is a necessary evil, but when managed over time, it isn’t a big issue. Should work for everyone right, stupid Trumpies just don’t understand long-term economics!

Except it ignores that corporations are colluding in duopolies across many industries to steadily raise their prices above inflation to maintain profit growth. It ignores that landlords are treating maximum rent hikes as the expectation rather than the exception. It ignores that climate change is globally impacting our supply lines for food.

Inflation being healthy doesn’t mean a damn thing when unchecked capitalism is left rampant. The Biden administration, to their credit, did weakly try to fight corporate interests. However, they did nothing to fight the fully captured Supreme Court, which made Biden’s efforts so pitiful they resemble a controlled opposition.

There’s a growing contingent of Democrats who are showing very MAGA traits. The types that demand everyone fall in line and vote how they say, without listening to any compromises. The types who believe that the issue is that the Democrats are playing too fairly, and should stoop to the Republicans level. The types who believe that the issue with Kamala Harris is that she was a black woman, and that diversity should have been ignored for a secured political win by running an old white dude. The types that blindly listen and defend media bought and paid for by wealthy capitalists because they think it represents “their side.”

Realistically, the only thing stopping these people from being MAGAts is personal life circumstances. Maybe their high school bully was a Republican, or they know just enough economic theory to realize how stupid conservative ideas are, or their grandad worked in a union job. In truth, they are as tribalistic and as ignorant as a Trump supporter; their fervor is just to a D instead of an R.

They gunned down a man at a fucking traffic stop. Not liking the guy who was gunned down doesn’t make that right or okay.

All Cops Are Bastards. The goal should always be to bring justice, not to waste human lives.

So the joke here isn’t sampling, it’s the idea of being “featured” on a track. Idk Khaled enough to know if this would be too extreme an example, but imagine a lesser known hiphop artist making nearly 100% of a song. Then Khaled comes in, does a few whoops and hollers, maybe a few bars, but the song ends up on a Khaled album. The lesser known artist is credited as “featured” on the track, even if it was mostly their work.