Those things, and needing to prop up the commercial realestate market.

deleted by creator

Ah yes, lets listen to Bill O’Reily’s concerns about people being deemed guilty by mere association.

Yes, Bill “My Entire Career Is A Series Of Sexual Harassmnent Lawsuits” O’Reily, that’s the unbiased, no spin zone, voice of objective reason on this issue.

Mrm.

Yep.

Certainly an unbiased opinion haver on this topic.

I would also add that they tend correlate wealth as a sign of intelligence and hold wealthy people in the highest esteem.

This is the particularly infuriating/hilarious part.

Here’s a graph from a 2016 meta-analysis of what contributes more to your mid/late life overall socioeconomic status, the general wealth of your society (shared environment, C), your particular wealth and social status at birth/childhood (nonshared environment, E) or, your assessed IQ (genes, A).

This is for the US, and measures variance, the variability of how important those factors are.

As you can clearly see, red line go up.

What this means is that the wealthier you are, the more of a total crapshoot it is whether you are a genius or a moron.

Reality is the exact opposite of how idiot rightoids believe it to be, and how the smarter ones project onto everyone else as a means of social control / gaslighting / propagandizing:

The correlation between wealth and intelligence gets markedly worse, the wealthier a person you are looking at.

(I can find the link for the paper again if you wanna read through it, be warned though it is pretty stats heavy)

This is extremely common rightoid behavior, even at a personal level.

Make a big outward show of being independent, self-made, wholly responsible for your own success…

… and the reality almost always is that this person is in fact getting subsidies or assistance or help from a wealthy friend or family member, but, they’re lying about this, and very often mismanaging the money, which is ‘ok’ in their minds, because ‘nobody knows’ that money even exists.

…

Every Republican voter who is on welfare, but hates everyone else on welfare.

Every Republican business owner who gloats about being successful all thanks to themselves publically, but privately, amongst close friends, laughs about how good they are at manipulating their taxes or legal business structure so that they can get as many tax breaks and subsidies as possible.

Or, the ‘dumbass’ variant of that:

I’m a big tough hard blue collar worker who works real hard and real tough, and thats the right way to have a life and make a living… wait, what? That only even kind of works if the corporation I work for gets massive tax breaks and subsidies, or my own company gets tons of Federal grants and subsidies and tax breaks directly? I thought that was the free market?!

Also every ‘entrepreneur wunderkid’ story that ultimately boils down to: daddy gave me a whole lot of money and also knew a whole bunch of key figures in relevant industries.

… every mega church pastor that is very obviously fleecing their impoverished flock, but claims that they are so wealthy because god loves them so much.

… every rightwing raido talkshow host / podcaster who gloats about how successful their business is, but never mentions that they get a massive, stupidly large amount of money from wealthy right wing individuals and/or lobbying groups/think tanks… or by selling scam health products, scam financial products, etc… or, more recently, just literally gets directly funded by Russia’s FSB.

…

It is literally a core tenet of being a Republican that you lie and gaslight about where your money comes from, or at bare minimum be just actually so stupid that you don’t even realize where your money comes from, so I guess those ones arguably not intentionally lying… they’re just actually too stupid to be trusted with any kind of non rote task.

Like it is essentially impossible to be a Republican and not do this. Its a fundamental aspect to their personalities.

Hence why it is just a social faux pas to even have a frank and transparent discussion about finances with them, and why they get so blustered snd indignant when the idea of ‘fiscal responsibility’ is applied onto them, instead of just projected outward as a demeaning attack on everyone else.

Thats my 2 cents anyway, from having grown up in a rightoid, fundamentalist family. Of course this behavior is not unique to Republicans, but it is essentially a mandatory requirement of being a Republican.

It all began on Twitter. On March 12, 2017, Jafari posted an update defending the comments of incendiary Republican Iowa Representative Steve King. King, who has a long history of controversial statements, made a comment arguing against immigration, saying “[we] can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” The comment was widely criticized for being jingoistic and inflammatory, but found a defender in Jafari.

“Wow, how scandalous,” said Jafari on Twitter. “Steve King doesn’t want his country invaded by people who have contempt for his culture and people! NAZI!!!” The comment from Jafari surprised a lot of his followers, as Jafari rarely spoke about his political beliefs, and even rarer still with such vehemence.

…

In particular, Jafari stated his belief that the United States of America does not “need immigrants from incompatible places,” and voicing his concern about a “demographic displacement” of white people which he compared to the South African apartheid.

https://gamerant.com/jontron-racism-controversy-breakdown/

Maybe now, almost 10 years later, now that Nazism and Facism just are commonplace ideologies, these are ‘pretty generic right wing opinions’.

But uh, no, this is JonTron defending White Replacement Theory, ie, explicitly endorsing a racist ethnostate.

Its about as plainly and directly racist as you can be without just repeatedly shouting ‘the gamer word’.

Thats a bit more than just having a poorly informed take on crime statistics.

…

It is also insanely hypocritical as he is a 2nd Gen immigrant of Hungarian and Iranian (1st Gen Immigrant) parents.

He of course identifies as white the same way that Ted Cruz does:

He is white-passing, but he knows he wouldn’t actually pass any white racist’s ‘one drop’ rule if they knew anything about his actual lineage, so he massively overcompensates by hating non white-passing people.

Fatwa/Jihad, bad.

Crusade, good.

Right, right, now I remember, how silly of me.

The US has been regularly helping to assasinate Iranian foreigner dignitaries for years now, literally assasinsting many high ranking members of their government/military for years as well.

Exploding golf ball.

Please.

He let Epstein use Mar a Lago as a ‘recruiting ground’ for a fucking decade.

Not only did Trump very obviously partake in this evil business, he was a fucking integral part to facilitating it.

Every time you hear any Trumpoid cabinet member mention that Trump kicked Epstein out of Mar a Lago… yeah, yeah that’s after a fucking decade of him disappearing women and girls from there, there’s no fucking way he didn’t know what was going on, he just kicked him out when he got too sloppy and tried to fuck the daughter of someone Trump was trying to impress.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/09/epstein-mar-a-lago-trump-1456221

https://www.newsweek.com/jeffrey-epsteins-visits-mar-lago-detailed-1857636

???

I love the combo of raspberry and chocolate.

And you can also make the sex jokes about uh, shall we say, using the rear entrance a bit too vigorously.

Could be raspberry.

I mean, if you keep nearly or actually ODing on Ivermectin, you’ll shit your guts out, could lose weight that way, probably cheaper.

… probably a lot more unsafe, there’s a lot more OD sideeffects than diarrhea… but… cheaper!

Anywhere in MA I can rent a studio apt for ~$700 a month?

Probably not lol, I’m on SSDI, but an actual proper city/town sounds great!

I agree with your specification.

The kind if mixed use, areas that are walkable, have seating, various kinds of shops… usually only in a few districts of a few fairly large towns or large cities.

There is seating, sometimes, in like… restaurants in basically a strip mall type set up… but they’re like islands, surrounded by acres of parking lots.

All the way up and down the West Coast, multiple times, over the course of more than 2 decades of being driving age… from Bellingham WA down to LA / San Diego… many, many places in between… also many places all the way out to South Dakota via I 90.

If I gave you a full list, I’d have to rewrite Johnny Cash’s “I’ve been everywhere”… I’ve actually been to a good number of places in the original lyrics.

Basically yes.

We don’t do that in the US anywhere near as much.

Maybe a park will have a table and bench, maybe some certain restaurants in certain parts of certain cities will have them.

But its much, much less common, as our society is designed to be unwalkable, designed for cars and parking lots and air conditioning.

So basically you don’t commonly use loose as a verb, I do, and always have, and this makes apparently me a sealion.

Dialects exist within English.

You are evidently not American, as in USAmerican.

I am.

Where I come from, using loose as a verb is fairly common.

Stop being an intolerant ass.

My guess is 30 to 40 % Reps leave, 5 to 15 % Dems leave, and a whole bunch of ‘independents’ join as well, various libertarians and crypto/techbro type people.

EDIT:

Yay, I don’t have to do any too much math, they actually did most of the math.

Apologies for shitty cell phone image, here’s the whole poll (3rd link in the article, by the way):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R4pZVo0ZnrQyElZQzdNtt7CQ1zwTypuS/view

…

So, ballparking a 50/50 male female split:

Likely to Join Elon’s Party:

Republicans

Very likely: 23 + 14 / 2 = 18.5%

Somewhat likely: 34 + 29 / 2 = 31.5%

Not likely: 31 + 30 / 2 = 30.5%

Independents

Very likely: 18 + 11 / 2 = 14.5%

Somewhat likely: 29 + 26 / 2 = 27.5%

Not likely: 35 + 36 / 2 = 15.5%

Democrats

Very likely: 7 + 5 / 2 = 6%

Somewhat likely: 15 + 16 / 2 = 15.5%

Not likely: 54 + 48 / 2 = 51%

…

So, if you say half of the 'somewhat likely’s actually go for it, then you get this:

Republicans who join Elon Party: 34.25%

Independents who join Elon Party: 28.25%

Democrats who join Elon Party: 13.75%

…

So yep, my ballpark guess was indeed in the correct ballpark.

…

Worth mentioning:

There are more Dem voters, than Republicans.

But there are also more independents than either.

Roughly 32% Reps, 33% Dems, 35% Indp.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-partisanship-and-ideology-of-american-voters/

So, throw that in with those previous calcs, and you end up with:

Reps: ~21%

Dems: ~28.5%

Elons: ~25.5%

Indps: ~25%

or, normalized to remove remaining Indps:

Reps: 28%, Dems: 38%, Elons: 34%

So… theoretically, the Dems are still the largest, Elon is now second behind them, and the Reps are now a third party, less popular than having no solid political affiliation.

… if this actually happened, which it could, Elon has enough money to single handedly start a party, though he’d have to find some actually competent people to… do anything other than spend money…

I think you end up with a good number of corpo Dems leaving the Dems, so the Dems now have an easier time shifting to the left.

The Reps lose 1/3 of their voters, and basically just become a cult of idiot racist nazis, paleocons, theocrats, MAGA nutjobs.

Elon party … basically becomes the ‘centrist’/libertarian/ancap/corpo party.

… and everyone would now have to figure out how to do politics in a much more complex kind of paradigm.

I… don’t think a roughly even balanced 3 party system has ever existed in US history with any kind of stability, that endured more than one or two Presidential elections, 8 years.

Two roughly approximate examples:

The Civil War.

Teddy Roosevelt going Bull Moose Party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_eras_of_the_United_States

But uh yeah, not stable.

And these numbers are close enough that a 3 party system might not implode quickly… or it also could.

Especially if the President just gets to remain as functionally a dictator as the last months and years Supreme Court rulings have made him.

???

Yes, thats the ‘independent voter’ cohort the Dems have spent 20+ years making concessions to.

They also grew this cohort by being very largely ineffectual, and allowing education, wealth gap, general quality of life… to all get much worse, such that more people are now more stupid, angry and exhausted.