I’m voting blue to keep the water pumps on a sinking ship going to buy a little time and delay some suffering. The ship is dead.

We need a new constitution with a focus on punishing people that try to buy more influence than their single vote permits with the same severity as murderers. I don’t believe in capital punishment, but if murderers are getting it I’m fine with would be antisocial profiteers getting the same treatment, but would prefer life in prison all around.

You might say that’s impossible, but capitalist created, climate change induced collapse makes all things possible long term, and there’s no real interest by people with power/capital in mitigating that.

Even our fallible, slave owning and raping founders who floated voting rights be tied to land ownership acknowledged their document was not divine and would eventually need to be replaced… a quarter millenium ago.

I didn’t think the US would survive Citizens United.

In the ways that matter, like still being a representative democracy and not a functional oligarchy, I was correct.

They’re the biggest reason assisted dying would be so popular, regardless of how it was run.

This is their world, and they must benefit to permit something merciful for the people to happen. Their malice is already everywhere, for this to even have a chance of ever existing, they must get their cut, or they wouldn’t let their middle managers in governments pass it. Just the reality.

I was just suggesting a potential offering to the rule makers to make it achievable. They have no kindness or mercy to appeal to, only money.

With a waiting period, I think assisted dying should be available for adults in general, regardless of terminal illness.

No one opted in, and at least in my society where we are belligerently unwilling to tangibly help one another, where most are expected to endlessly produce regardless of our wellbeing under threat of homelessness and gruesome death by exposure, and where struggling people are often condemned for being lazy or making bad decisions when they’re already down, it would be a small, efficient mercy to allow a quiet, painless opt out.

We could even have the capitalists run it and charge a small fee since they need to turn everything into a for profit endeavor. Everyone wins.

I don’t blame you. My core value has always been truth over comfort, but I fully admit, that value only leads to pain.

I vote for the lesser evil(D) like clockwork so I can sleep at night, but it is water pumps on the Titanic, I don’t do it with hope, it only slows the path we’re on slightly, because both our fascist and neoliberal parties worship the same groups of “donors” who are the root cause of our decline. Our government officials are the owner’s well bribed middle managers. That’s what happens when political bribery is legal and corporations have more rights than people. Neither Biden nor Trump nor all but maybe a half dozen people in Congress are less than hyper-capitalists. Most got into politics to be bribed because that’s American politics.

Without revolution, there will be no hope for a better future until collapse. Fortunately for future generations long term, climate change is likely going to force the second one, because we’re too chickenshit and social opiate addicted for the first one. Better painful collapse and rebuild than multigenerational subservience under the Bezos/Zuck/Musk dynasty.

I know what he said, but I wish he added “…so shit or get off the pot” to the end of it.

Because it won’t get any easier when the owners have armies of humanoid robots defending them in addition to the means of production/propaganda/state violence/governmental capture that they already have to keep us under this class occupation.

Modern Apathy failed to repair the damage, but the ENTHUSIASTIC giveaway of the country to the rich in both capital and power, the “Reagan revolution,” is most directly responsible for the later Citizens United, Trump, and our imminent collapse.

Apathy didn’t destroy this country for the people, Enthusiastic greed worship BY the people did. Greed is a personal failing, character deficit, and is every bit as dangerous and destructive to society as hatred. The Gordon Geckos and Mr. Potters of the nation are supposed to be hated, booed, and shunned by decent people for their antisocial activities, not worshipped as the celebrities and…🤮… Role models they are treated like today.

The owners have spent decades propagandizing us to forget what a societal poison greed is as they took over.

Oh I’m sorry it’s not greed anymore. I meant greed rational self-interest. Shout out to George Orwell.

This is the boiled frog effect.

If the SCOTUS creates enough national crises, and that’s what they’ve been actively doing, rolling back the rights and protections of individuals while further empowering capital as citizens discover there is just no recourse, then the crises they continue to create, as dire as they are, just feel like another tuesday.

-This SCOTUS, unironically unfortunately

The Federalist Society is an organization of right-wing extremists conspiring against the United States as far as I’m concerned, and they have won.

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Can they do it? Yes they can!

But because we let open bribery into our politics, how does that profit them?

Live by capitalist greed and competiton against one another, collapse by it.

Just as long as some people had the opportunity to win and live above others.

I appreciate that, sincerely.

I’ll never forget what elevated him into mainstream discourse, a game show literally about “I’m rich, so kiss my ass for half an hour” that somehow made him popular. You aren’t supposed to like Gordon Gecko/Mr. Potter. They are to be hissed for their antisocial greed. Our people celebrate it. Many who hate him for his violent rhetoric today still loved him for his proud celebration of greed then.

I’ll also never forget what singular event took him from paying extras to attend his rallies to basically owning the Republican party:

“We’re not allowed to punch back any more,” Trump lamented. The billionaire said he missed the “good old days,” “You know what they used to do to a guy like that in a place like this?” Trump said. “They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/donald-trump-punch-protester-219655

He’s a fucking monster, yes. But what does that say about US that the above elevated him, through public popularity, to basically being worshipped as a God(GodEmperor as some called him) by 40% of the electorate, while making still more consider his message?

I’m voting for Biden, as I did last time and Clinton before, but I can’t help some dark part of me knowing he does represent the US and is practically our mascot.

The embodiment of greed and gluttony, reveling in schadenfreude, cartoonishly shameless, crowing about who he beat and who he’s enjoying the suffering of, and drunk on wholly undeserved vanity. A sociopath who stands against the very concept of empathy for others. If someone is suffering, he’ll tell you what they did to deserve their suffering and suggest ways to really turn the screws. 🇺🇸

I’m ashamed of being an American precisely for all the American traits, that are also destroying us from the inside btw, that Trump unironically personifies. He’s more American as America actually is, not all the pretty lies we say about ourselves, than Apple pies or school shootings.

I wish more Americans would look in the mirror that is Donald Trump and be ashamed of who we are, because we can’t begin to do anything without recognizing what monstrous values we have.

The Republican brand is hatred, and has been as long as I’ve been alive.

Not exactly stable bedrock for fostering cooperation.

I always think people like Santos and Menendez getting in trouble for bribery and fraud is hilarious.

Political PACs make political bribery perfectly legal and the US hates when boring, honest people run for office, they never get anywhere, we demand bullshitters that tell us we’re pretty.

Do it to be sure, but why stop at single digit Congress people? There’s like 10 between both chambers that aren’t on the take.

Same as it ever was. The Nazis did the same thing with the groups they scapegoated, simultaneously an incompetent drain/liability and and a hyper-competent threat that cannot be ignored.

Critical thinking and reasoning must be taught, without that, people will follow their feelings anywhere, and those are easy to manipulate.

Starving public education into complete and utter ruins for half a century to cut rich sociopath’s taxes, and the rise of tens of millions of proudly counterfactual, willfully ignorant nitwits as a political force is not a coincidence.

Garbage in (refusing to pay to educate kids to critically scrutinize the information they take in), garbage out (The United States of duhhhhhhhhhhh).

I appreciate that, sincerely.

Journalism is dead

Yep, buried between the arts and empathy, just behind public education. If you see the social contract’s headstone, you’ve gone too far.

Man, the private profit motive sure does love killin.

There’s no fixing this country. I’ll vote for the band-aid yet again in Biden, just like last time and Clinton before, but we’re bleeding out and Biden pulling it out won’t change that, only buy a little more time with no path to not bleeding out.

The people without meaningful capital, most people, have literally no unequivocal advocates with significant power, even Biden straddles the line of trying to play to us while appeasing the political briber class.

They own the means of production, state violence, mass media propaganda, and even set curriculum from K-Colleges of economics to indoctrinate us to be our blatant con-game of an economy’s defenders.

Things will continue to decline until the people accept this and revolt, or far more likely, our rigged market capitalist con-game collapses having conquered the board and having no new unexploited markets to metastasize/grow with. Our wealthiest will be fine, don’t worry, none have loyalty to any nation-state, and they all have temperate places of escape to avoid the consequences of their actions, alls well that ends well for the ones that matter.

The capital markets that own you and I don’t care what their middle managers in DC do to us, only what DC can funnel to them.

If that means glorious profit from rage clicks as Trump gets PEASANT women arrested for abortions and PEASANT minorities murdered by his mobs with impunity, don’t worry significant capital holders will be immune as usual, then our capitalist owners only have one thing to say: “you had us at glorious profit.”

And don’t forget kids, market capitalism is the only way. That’s why we used our intelligence agencies and military to topple entire regimes attempting something else for more than half a century to keep those markets open for our capitalist’s exploitation, because market capitalism is the only way. Any other economic system will fail, we’ll continue to use every tool at our disposal to make sure of that.