They are power bottoms who will never know their true calling.

Have you ever heard the Chris Rock routine about rich vs wealthy? Like yeah Shaq is rich, but the white guy who signs his checks is wealthy!

Highly paid employees are not in the personal life social circle.

That’s pretty good, for how bad it is.

I have a pretty old gmail address that’s fmlast@gmail, and several years ago there was a lady with fmlast12@gmail who kept leaving the numbers off. It wasn’t that bad though, and for one or two important things I replied to help.

Next you should pretend I wrote that first reply of yours where you linked to a random Australian video about the previous elderly president and then said they were in a cult. How would you critique me?

Yeah, and this is especially so in the important voting bloc of white middle class people --the ones who probably own their home (with mortgage obviously) and are still making ends meet. The good ones are horrified to see what’s going on in the world, and the troubled ones may still think they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires with the whole master race thing going for them, but other than inflation their day to day life has not changed.

I’m a white dude living in the swing state of Pennsyltucky, in a very white republican suburb a good distance from the city. My town is growing and some good companies have large offices here (access to infrastructure plus the tax benefit of being in the next county over), so it’s attracted residents from just about every ethnic background. But to get an accurate mental image, you have to sprinkle that diverse mix over a base layer of 80% white people, lol.

Just mentally going through our family, close friends, social acquaintances, and various local parents we run into (I have a kid in elementary school, and we’re active in the school district), it is almost all white families living in single-family homes or sometimes townhouses. Many are two-income families, some are one-income families (working professionals in a reasonable COL area, not exactly CEOs). I know everybody has their own problems including the ones they don’t share with me, but for most of these people life just looks normal. If you followed me around all day and could not see the awful news on the screen when I sat down at my PC, you would be hard pressed to tell which decade we are in. You would need a clue like peeking at my phone model or seeing an old covid mask on a shelf.

There ARE exceptions. People who are not white have absolutely been fucked with by ICE. Thank goodness the best Mexican restaurant in town got raided so that my fellow whites aren’t tempted by amazing food from non-white sources. And I do know of one white family where both parents are civilians that work for the government. Both remotely, before Trump 2. They are amazing people raising three great kids (the kindest people we know are usually single child) and they got all kinds of unnecessary stress and fuckery in their real lives thanks to all the chaos and ill considered return-to-office mandates.

<Attenborough>

_Here we find the conservative doubling down by immediately repeating that no, they do in fact know that you are, but plead: “what, then, am I? Tell me!”

Oh what a lovely surprise! They have just tripled down in the very same sentence! You see, part of their hive’s rules is that all outsiders must be treated as cooperating members of a single enemy conspiracy._

pedodent

Holy shit, lol. I really hope that term is becoming a thing.

“Well, we both want to improve the country”

Did they though?

One of the most consistent features of conservative “politics” is their ability to get lots of ordinary people to vote against their own interests.

Sure it was nice when the rank and file weren’t cheering on the New American Gestapo (good band name?) but the money > humans goals behind the policies were the same. The bigotry and tribalism and other-ing have always been tools in their propaganda machine. We’re witnessing those chickens coming home to roost.

Who could have known it would be a bad idea to systematically poison american culture so that a handful of old white dudes could hang on to the dream of dying as billionaires instead of pleb-ass run of the mill multimillionaires?

I think most of us believe decisions should be data driven, but in some edge cases gut instinct is valuable.

What you call gut instinct, I call the output of an immensely complex yet efficient organic neural network that has been trained on years to decades of relevant experience.

If business leaders think AI is so great, they need to get in on this shit while they can still afford it!

I think it’s more that we are way into blissful ignorance in this country.

If you polled the citizens to ask whether America was founded/discovered by European explorers, the vast majority would agree. But of course, even if 80% or 90% get it right that still means tens of millions got it wrong.

But if you polled the citizens to ask whether US territory was simply discovered or stolen from existing inhabitants by murdering/genociding them, I bet you would flip the numbers.

Ah ah ah! You didn’t say the magic word!

sudo edit the file!

…

Ah ah ah! You didn’t say the secret word right after!

God damn it, I had actually forgotten about that in the decade and a half that seems to have elapsed since October.

Whatever shadow of a hope I had that the people of this country would not gobble up low-effort lies about Iran just had this comment appear from the shadows and shiv it in the fucking liver.

When I look at her eyes in a photo or video, I see the kind of evil where as she squeezed the life out of a kitten she would not laugh, cry, or grit her teeth. She would just stare, then tilt her head like a curious alien or Labrador without blinking.

Please note that I am a fan of both dogs and space, so I am sending zero insults their direction in that comparison. It’s like if I were to compare the number of times Trump shit his pants throughout his first term with the number of times my baby boy – born right after the inauguration – shit his pants over the same interval.

My official guess for the name of this new slavery program is the “Essential Guest Worker” bill/order.

I went to business school in the US about a decade ago (stayed full time engineer and happy about it) and I can absolutely see business schools unironically studying the process of privatizing and offshoring prisons as it relates to other more ethical and humane enterprises.

Yooo, Democratic Senators, fuck youuuu!

Signed, an independent US citizen who has repeatedly voted for your shitty controlled opposition candidates because it was glaringly obvious to me SEVERAL YEARS AGO that anything Trump brings to the table is significantly worse for humanity than your bland business as usual.

Like, Trump was so, so bad that in retrospect it makes more sense that HE was the controlled opposition so that status quo capitalist corporate democrats could win their elections and keep the people “happy enough” while letting the elites play their games.

But no. Now he is much worse, mask-off, nominating unqualified morons and traitors to help administrate the federal government, and you fuckups in the “at least we aren’t an openly bigoted death cult” party did not stop it in cases where you could have.

Damn, that is incredible. I am somebody who comes from a conservative white religious family. I am not estranged from them and we actually have a good relationship, but I do keep them at a certain distance because of it.

But while the estrangement context is unfamiliar to me, all of the issues discussed absolutely ring true.

The whole “emotion creates reality” versus “reality creates emotion” thing is a fantastic was to phrase it. I think that simple description might hit the nail on the head for what the hell is going on with conservatives/religious constantly trying to fuck up the world and having ridiculous beliefs.

It also speaks a lot to narcissism, which does admittedly go hand in hand with the whole conservative need for social hierarchy and the expectation that oneself is obviously at the top.

USian here, and totally agree. The willful ignorance is stunning to behold.

But help me with my potential ignorance here - is this meme also suggesting that ordinary citizens of other developed countries know about these things? Do high school history and social studies classes have a day or a week that discuss US imperialism & shady dealings of recent decades?

My impression has always been that people in other countries read about this awful shit in the same places I do online, and that the differences in mainstream knowledge are about much more basic stuff like coal and climate change being bad while healthcare is good.

Remember, the #1 search on google on Election Day was “did Joe Biden drop out”

Jesus fucking christ. I have not read that before, but it is the most believable thing I’ve seen all week.

I’ll look it up tomorrow. I am always curious, but I cannot handle having this fact confirmed to me right now, lol.