Where the fuck is the outrage in Washington?

It’s been Exhausted/Diluted/Usurped by a neverending onslaught of daily ragebait and all the other atrocities currently happening in the nation and world.

Is this intentional? I can’t prove it but I think to an extent it is. But it’s not just about the Epstein files, it’s the people who enable Trump and the people who own him keeping him in place because his a useful tool for malfeasance on many, many fronts.

Should we be more upset about a global cabal of pedos, Gaza, ICE shooting people, Greenland, or what’s about to happen in Iran? What’s the biggest threat? The economy? The climate? China? Russia? Fascism? Terrorism? Antivaxxer’s fetish for contracting preventable diseases? Mass shootings? Robotaxis commiting road rage? AI disinfo and job loss? Housing costs? Groceries…?

All of this, whether by design or coincidence, is working together to force people to keep their heads down and worry about themselves as much as possible. That’s why it’s so important to organize, to give material and verbal support to protestors and advocates when you can, and to build a community where you live.

I’ll make it. I won’t be well off, but I’ll make it.

My kids probably won’t unless something changes soon. That fucks with my head a lot. How did we fuck this up so bad?

What’s the quote about virgins from that vampire show? Something like: If you’re going to eat a sandwich, wouldn’t your prefer if no one had fucked it first?

This seems similar.

Two things would happen.

1. They’d justify the ICE goon’s behavior by claiming the embassy was enabling terrorism or drug trafficking.

2. They would pitch a huge fit, take some sort of extreme action, and claim they’re in the right because US diplomats are good guys.

They don’t care about rules, ethics, or even having a consistent system of values. They only care about punishing people, power, and getting what they want when they want it. If they pull back at all, it’s only because they fear their support (and with it their immunity from consequences) is slipping. They’re just bullies and cowards.

That ought to fix it. Pack in the protests, guys, the Catholic Church has saved the world again.

He’s enabled by some very wealthy people. And in the US wealth is more than just money, it’s often the most important factor in status, popularity, and social and political power.

Even some the people screaming for empathy, understanding, and improved social programs often look down upon the poor and homeless, they just hide it behind a veneer of doing good. They want to rid the nation of poverty not because it’s the right thing to do, but so that they aren’t confronted with the reality of what causes poverty and the guilt they feel when they pass by someone who’s panhandling.

Our nation’s version of original sin is productivity. If you’re alive, you must feed into the economic system, you must support yourself and not be a burden to others. If you’re successful and wealthy enough, it means all lesser sins (getting bailed out with tax money, wage theft and fraud, destroying the environment, prejudice, sexual predation, etc.) will be forgiven by at least half the nation. This effect is more profound for celebrity performers.

So, if you’re stable financially and not under a direct threat from the administration, you’re probably upset, but your focus is going to be on finding a way to get rid of Trump and get out of this mess without winding up POOR.

You want to know why so many federal workers are still doing their jobs despite being complicit in many of the awful things that are happening? Because they don’t have a way to pay the rent if they walk off the job. The job market is awful. The economy is in the shitter. Everything is super expensive, and they don’t want to let their families down. Want the military and federal agents to quit? Give them a guaranteed way to pay their mortgages. Find them another job.

It’s not just about luxuries and standards of living. It’s about social acceptance and beloning. People will go to insane lengths to feel like an accepted member of a group. So these workers may be unhappy, even deeply upset about the direction the country is headed in, but it’ll have to get worse before the sacrifice is worth it, because being in jail or being dead is only a little bit worse than being a poor person.

Same holds true for much of the rest of the nation. It’s hard to risk belonging, to risk being part of our society, when there’s no guarantee you won’t wind up homeless and a pariah because of it.

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Well, if you take good old-fashioned violence out of the picture, money. Or specifically a lack of it.

Sanctions, selling off US debt, more retaliatory tariffs, blacklisting US investors and companies, anything that pulls cash out of the US economy and puts it somewhere else. Turn off the money tap, make the mega-donors hurt bad enough and the dystopia machine will eventually grind to a halt. Don’t think for a moment that the current squad of high-functioning sociopaths that are enabling this are principled enough to stay the course after a few of their mega-yachts are repossessed. They’ll flip sides again and again just to try and keep that horde they’ve built up. Someone just has to prove to them that the threat is serious, because right now, they think everyone else is helpless against them.

Additionally, the majority of Trump voters cited the economy as a primary reason for voting for him. A good portion of them were probably lying to cover for being racist and just wanted to see POC and the LGBTQ+ community suffer, but if you crash the US economy hard enough, you can still hijack a big chunk of Trump’s public support. It’s the same as with mega-yachts, but here we’re talking pickup trucks, ATVs, and rent-to-own furniture.

Few problems with this. 1. It’s slow. 2. It’ll hurt everyone else economically because US businesses have hooks set real deep in a lot of places. 3. Other nations have a wealthy elite with similar sway who want Trump in power for various reasons and might not play along. & 4. Whoever replaces the US might turn out to be just as big as bully in a few years if we’re not careful.

Still, it needs to be done.

EDIT: It’s like the old saying goes, everything is about money, except money, which is about power.

illegal and unwise.

Shocked. Shocked! That could describe damn near everything he does.

Bet this gets Epstein out of the headlines, and all he had to do was kidnap the duly elected leader of a foreign nation and start yet another war for oil. That’s obviously a master class in political subtlety.

As others have said, I use a client that doesn’t display them, so it never dawned on me. And in general, profile pics have never been a big deal for me. So if the app or site doesn’t make me do it as part of the account set up, my profile pic just stays as the default.

You can set profile pictures on Lemmy?

I’d rather have two cubes and a vehicle that doesn’t reek of midlife crisis.

Holy shit. It is, isn’t it? Perfect!

What an utterly useless thing. You add axles to bear more weight. Unless you’re hauling a big tungsten cube, the truck isn’t big enough to carry a load that would need three axles.

It’s even dumber than those Jeep Gladiators, the #1 pavement princess in my area, which sacrifice departure angle for a ridiculously small amount of cargo space and less load capacity than an entry level pickup truck.

Just stupid.

TBF the term is tossed around liberally these days. But you are correct, this is the type of antisemite that wants to start a genocide, not the kind that wants to end one.

It’s more than that even, they’re usually the reason why the government doesn’t work.

Social security would work great if funded properly, so what do they do? Screw with the funding. The ACA would work if properly funded, so what do they do? Let the subsidies expire. Medicare for all would work if properly funded. The education system would work if properly funded. The VA works when properly funded. And so on, and so on, and so on. In most cases, all it takes is the money and resources that they’d rather steal or give to their donors and like magic, we’d have a functioning government again.

They constantly sabotage programs that benefit tax payers while spinning the lie that government run programs can’t and don’t work. And after decades of dealing with underfunded programs run with minimal staffing and a maximum of red tape, of course people believe them.

His primary qualification is that he was an officer (eventually reaching the rank of Major) in the Army National Guard, via ROTC, and volunteered to serve in Guantanamo and Iraq during the War on Terror.

I highly encourage people to compare and contrast his service record with that of Jim Mattis, or any other appointee to the same office in recent history, for additional context.

It’s a scenario where Tucker’s main schtick makes sense in context. Ruby Rhod is basically Space Tucker with a gossip podcast, and his hyper-annoying behavior serves to illustrate how different he, the other passengers, and celebrity obsessed people in that universe are from Corbin’s grounded and sane everyman character.

That’s an absolutely crushing schedule.

When I think of “middle aged family man”, I think of a salaried employee or tradesman working a 40 hour work week, and supporting kids with the help of a spouse who’s either a homemaker or earns additional income. Which mostly describes me.

You’re comparing apples to oranges when it comes to lifestyles. I work occasional overtime and it always knocks my dick in the dirt for a week or so. All things considered, just surviving what you’re describing is an achievement.

You’re doing an amazing job and I hope you can find a situation that gives you more time off soon. You deserve it.

Yes, that’s denying them the freedom to be ignorant, superstitious, greedy, sociopathic idiots and be rewarded for it.