Most people on this list have taken their foot off the gas in a major way, and do more of what they want.

Elon is currently blowing tens of billions of dollars running Twitter into the ground, designs impractical cars because he thinks they look cool, committing light treason, and campaigning for a president who would be detrimental to his business interests.

While the Zuck is still involved at Meta, he also picked up a ton of other hobbies. A lot of them are objectively cool. He also seems to spend a lot of time with his wife and kids.

Bezos seems to spend most of his time having sex with his age appropriate mistress on his $500 million yacht.

If you think this is a conservative thing I really don’t know what to tell you. Anyone who has been paying attention for the last five years could tell you that this is a problem that goes beyond political affiliation.

Lol maybe if you’re a white guy in a middle class neighborhood below the age of 60 that doesn’t have any open indication of being queer or a ethnic/religious minority.

Men are much more likely to be a victim of every other violent crime besides rape.

Okay but it’s 20 bucks. The person paying it is probably a relatively regular person attempting to feel special. A rich person is just buying a first class ticket without a second thought, and then arriving at the last possible second to board after chilling at the airport lounge. A really rich person isn’t flying commercial.

Yeah, but it would be fun to figure out what they actually end up doing vs the marketing hype.

Do you mean flying first class? Because that’s different than priority boarding. They are in a different section of the plane, and the people there are paying for a lot more things than boarding.

It’s a frivolous luxury that costs like $20 extra per ticket. For most people that’s just personal preference.

I’d imagine it would be more like CPU scheduling than tree traversal, but according to the article they just do it by hand now.

I know “rich” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but “paying for priority boarding” should not be included in a reasonable definition of the word.

I was in college when this happened. Absolutely nobody thought he could win until Florida was called. Trump himself seemed mildly surprised in his victory speech.

Honestly this is sort of ridiculous.

• Biden is a Washington insider now, but that’s because he had a lifetime to make something of himself. He grew up in the middle class
• I think we can all agree Obama was an outsider without any sort of elaboration
• Bill Clinton grew up dirt poor in a state that basically only makes the news when something stupid happens.

All three had to climb the ladder in a huge way, that simply wouldn’t have been possible in a lot of other countries.

I also feel like Trump embodies the whole “anyone can be president” in his own sort of fucked up way. Trump obviously was born into immense wealth and enjoyed tremendous status, but he was in no way ever considered leadership material by America’s political elite. His election was a complete “wtf” moment and wouldn’t have happened in most countries. In a more rigid system we’d probably have had something like a Hillary Clinton v Jeb Bush election, which strictly speaking would have been better than what we got but also let’s be real we would have all hated it.

I’m not saying America is some pure meritocracy. Bush was a third generation political dynasty member. His opponents were also pretty well connected. It’s just that he’s only one of several presidents to get elected in the past 30 years.

Look man at this point saying either party has a monopoly on pedophilia is sort of ridiculous. It’s very obviously a rich/powerful thing, not a left/right thing.

I don’t see how anyone doesn’t understand that at some point. Diddy’s arrest was less than 24 hours ago.

No, but the idea that any random white guy could get away with what Trump gets away with is also laughable. Since 2016 there have been a million and one politicians trying to act Trumpian, and none of them enjoyed the nearly success Trump has.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, Trump seems to have this larger than life persona that has allowed him to escape scandal after scandal that would doom literally any other politician.

As a fun sidenote, look up DC Mayor Marion Barry. Dude made Trump look pedestrian.

Look man I don’t know how old you are, but this type of comment is what I’d expect a teenager to write. it’s not just that you’re acting like a massive asshole; You’re using insults and arguments that I’d expect a teenager to come up with. It’s the sort of argument that only works if the vast majority of people in the audience are already both deeply in your corner and also immature. Otherwise you’d just come off looking like a massive jackass.

Do you have any experience talking to people outside of an echo chamber? How does that go for you?

This is a serious answer so it’s gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.

There’s a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Above all else, these communities don’t really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.

To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.

Ironically I think a lot of Trump’s worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.

An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community’s wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that’s literally what happened just a few years prior.

The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment’s bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.

Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment’s outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word “sky fairy” on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.

Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.

A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don’t conform like shit. I’m pretty sure I’m voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It’s completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you’ll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.

Okay man, believe what you want to believe. I’ve already wasted enough time on you.

There is absolutely nothing I could show you that could change your mind. You phrased your original comment as a good faith question, but in reality you were trying to give yourself ammunition to attack me with.

Your take isn’t even rational. If I thought there was any chance of you changing your mind, I would go through your comment detail by detail showing what arguments you have that are wrong, where you twisted my words, and what claims you avoided.

You’d just respond with more bullshit and more bad faith arguments, until I eventually lost my temper. Arguing with someone like you is a complete waste of time.

Lol, every fucking time. The initial question was in bad faith, the response has misinformation, and there’s always some nonsense moral implication. Yet if I just didn’t respond there would be someone commenting something along the lines how “it’s pretty telling” I don’t engage with this crap.

I feel that this is not an honest question, but an attempt for me to state more concrete positions which you will then attack me for using misinformation and bad faith emotional arguments. I’m guessing it’ll be in the form of going bullet point by bullet point, and then with some witty last sentence implying I’m a bad person or a mossad sock puppet.

I’ll state a few obvious ones, in case I’m wrong

• The phrases “intifadah revolution” and “from river to the sea” are blantant antisemitic dog whistles. They are direct references to previous attempts to destroy Israel and terror attacks on Jews worldwide. Despite this, they are still ultimately accepted in liberal circles
• Liberals repeatedly refer to Israel as a European colonial ethnostate state. This is extremely misleading on multiple aspects. The most notable is 22 percent of the Israeli population is Arab, while the largest ethnic subgroup of Jews are mizrahi Jews.
• I’ve heard the Nakba mentioned a million times, but I never hear discussion about how basically every Arab state forced their entire Jewish population into Israel via violence and ethnic cleansing. Hence the reason for the large Mizrahi Jewish population
• College campuses have handled antisemitism claims with kid gloves, because the antisemitism comes from progressive coded groups. Their response would have been completely different if conservative groups were acting in the same way, or if black, Asian, or queer folks were targeted in a similar manner.

The top comments on this post alternate between blaming Israel, claiming the IDF accidentally killed the hostages and blamed Hamas, and claiming the IDF executed the hostages themselves as a psyop.

There is clearly a huge portion of liberals that have extreme issues when it comes to treating this conflict with any sort of nuance or objectivety. They see the conflict primarily though the lens of the US culture wars, are extremely comfortable with declaring themselves informed after reading a few curated social media posts and watching a John Oliver video, and are extremely confident that anyone who disagrees with them is either morally or intellectually inferior.

That mentality works fine when you’re dealing with straightforward issues like legalizing weed or trans bathroom laws, but completely fails here. Geopolitics in general is extremely complicated, the middle east is a particularly complicated issue for geopolitics, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a particularly complicated issue for the middle east. Despite all this you have people running around with an extreme amount of self assurance that their barely informed zero nuance outlook is unquestionably correct. It’s absolutely insufferable.