immutable

Oh I completely agree. And I don’t want any working poor stolen valor (for lack of a better term). I just think we won’t be able to fix these problems if we keep letting the owner class get away with dividing us up.

The way we pay for labor is unfair and the fact that I get a bigger paycheck is about 5% things I can control (skills, training, etc) and 95% blind luck (if I was born in 1890 or 2190 my ability to write erlang wouldn’t be nearly as marketable. In the 1390s my annoying fastidiousness and desire to work purely in theory would have me a pauper)

It’s that old meme though of the worker with a cookie, the immigrant with a crumb, and the wealthy guy with an immense pile telling the worker to watch out for the immigrant. It’s the same playbook for the working class, just add a third guy with 2 cookies and the wealthy guy is telling you “he’s also not on your side because he has 2 whole cookies, don’t band together to take any of mine”

If the working class could achieve class consciousness and start demanding their fair share, we could actually fix some of our problems. So I hope my brothers and sisters and non-binary siblings in the working class can embrace me and each other in solidarity and fight for a better tomorrow.

Republicans love a good scam

Next up is the dismantling of the ACA. They will roll out these amazingly cheap alternatives. Health insurance for $10 a month!

So the poor and the stupid will sign up. They’ll go to the bar and saunter up to a “libtard” and tell them that trump fixed everything.

Then when they get sick and try to use MAGA super plan plus premium they won’t be able to find a doctor. The $10/month plan only covers an annual trip to a CVS minute clinic. They’ll go on Facebook and write up how the goddamn liberals tricked him. Other faithful republicans will pray for them and tell them that it must be a glitch because trump made things better.

The con will win because it’ll only hurt those without power.

I’m one of those highly paid Silicon Valley workers.

But I’m still working class because I trade my labor for the money I need to live. I trade my labor for the healthcare that keeps me and my wife alive.

I’m working class because I can’t afford not to work.

Don’t let the owners of this country divide us up any longer. They love it when we fight amongst each other to determine who is really “working class” because it means we in-fight instead of challenging them.

No war but class war.

The Dems also keep running as Republican Light. But if you are interested in Republican Light you’ll probably just vote Republican.

I think Jon Stewart had a good assessment of this the other night and the fact that the messaging coming out of the DNC is “we lost for running too far left” means they will try again next time too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKBJoj4XyFc

That was also Biden’s platform. It worked then because we were still in the grips of covid

White cows make normal milk, brown cows make chocolate milk. That’s just science

I do sometimes wonder if it’s a skill issue, but that feels like a really dangerously self serving position to take, that people that disagree with me are just too dumb.

I like to think that I’m a relatively smart person, I have a very technical job and there’s very few situations where I don’t understand what’s going on (although there’s definitely plenty). Sometime though I’ll be out and about in my life and meet people that just don’t seem to have any idea how extremely basic, to me at least, things work. How does compounding interest work, how does insurance work, why should I put money into a retirement account. Not fresh adults either, people in their 30s / 40s / 50s who just seem content not understanding relatively basic things.

The world preys on these people, if someone doesn’t understand compound interest then you can really bamboozle them. If you don’t see the value of having insurance because you work out and are “healthy” and then suddenly get cancer or some other disease that doesn’t give a shit about how much you can bench, you are fucked.

There is a part of me that thinks that for a lot of people the world is a confusing and unknowable mystery. I mean, it’s not really, but the amount of effort to figure those things out is just too high for them to give a shit. And I think about how weird it would be to go through life like that. At the mercy of forces you don’t understand, and then some guy comes up and says “everything’s fucked up but I can make it great” and because you already don’t know how shit works you think “awesome, because I’m drowning in medical debt because I didn’t think I needed insurance and got screwed over”

I think about this person I met once, I was building planning and projection software and their job was to perform projection calculations for inventory ordering. I watched, in horror, as they tabbed away from excel to manually add up some figures. This is excel, what are you doing?! I showed them the sum function thinking that they would be happy. Then they looked at me and said “that’s too complicated, I’ll just do it myself”

Wild, that was too complicated. It taught me an important lesson though about how everyone’s bar for complicated is different. I think for a lot of people “how does insurance work” is too complicated. “What’s a tariff and how does it work” is too complicated. So it just comes down to “do I trust the person talking”

Yea I remember this same thing. He won and they were even angrier.

Because it’s not like trump being in the White House is suddenly going to make women not be immediately repelled when they show up, mansplain Joe Rogan, and call her a femoid.

They fell for it again. This time he’s really really gonna make it great. Him and jd Vance have some really novel ideas about lowering the age women can get married and making it impossible to get divorced, so finally they can have a child bride or some shit.

It’s super gross and I hope they end up jerking it to trump fanfic every night crying themselves to sleep.

I have to imagine that media understands this and doesn’t care.

A responsible media, one that cares about the outcomes, would zero in on the salient dangerous parts of trumps agenda. If we had a media ecosystem that actually cared about informing people, they would have actually explained what Project 2025 is, they could have even read parts of it stopping to let experts weigh in.

We don’t have that. We have a capitalist media which like all actors in capitalism chase profits. The media companies know that trump is going to do some weird shit everyday and that by reporting on that weird shit they can get the eyeballs on the cialis commercials, because that’s their real goal. Selling ad inventory and making that ad inventory as profitable as possible, if news or information happens as a side effect, fine, but it’s not the goal.

During trumps first term I used to watch msnbc most evenings, it was the same 4 stories first told by the news, then by Rachel Maddow, then by Lawrence O’Donnell, then by whatever was on after Lawrence O’Donnell. Looking back it was the least information dense thing you could imagine. 4 facts repeated ad nauseam over 4 hours. Now they all had different guests on but the guests job was to do a few things. One, reassure you that this is important and you should pay attention. Two, tell you how outrageous it is so that you’ll pay attention. Three, prognosticate wildly about the ramifications so that you’ll stay tuned for more information.

The populace largely follows this drum beat, but the populace is also to blame. You see it outside the realm of politics too, the average person likes novelty and scandal and gossip. You can see this in things like twitter trends. Something happens, there is a viral video, and suddenly for millions of people it’s the most important thing in the world. It’s new, it’s outrageous, it’s exciting to talk about and be listened to. In some ways corporate media, whose goal is to generate profits, just realized “this is what people want” they want us to cover the story of the day or week and give them that salacious novelty.

Trump just happens to be extremely good at generating the kind of events that are perfect for this formula. He’s a man that will do or say anything to make his base cheer, and often those things are batshit crazy and he doesn’t care that they are batshit crazy because people are clapping.

The story there is that there is a man with a lot of power with no externally observable moral center that is willing to do or say anything to increase his power. But that’s a complicated story, that would take a lot of time and effort and dot connecting, what if someone gets confused or bored and turns away. Then the ad inventory won’t be as valuable because there’s fewer eyeballs. Better to go with whatever weird thing he did or said today, simple, understandable, and it will cause the emotional reactions we know keep people tuning in making our ad inventory highly profitable.

If Biden were more interesting they would do it to him, they try from time to time, oh look he bit a baby dressed as a chicken on Halloween. He just isn’t out in public doing 3 hour rallies daily that the news can sift through for best hits.

Finally there is the staying power. Why does trump end up in this cycle more than others. The way the cycle is supposed to play out is

1. Powerful person does weird / bad thing
2. People are outraged
3. Person is shamed or loses support and then the news can report on the fallout.

Step 3 never happens for trump. His supporters do not care about the thing that’s outraging people today. They will never stop supporting him and he will never feel shame, he feels the opposite, he’s proud of the way he can manipulate this machine.

So the news doesn’t get a step three, but this is the formula, so back to step 1. So for trump you do get this unique media cycle of weird / bad thing -> outrage -> nothing. And that nothing sits in the air like an unresolved chord at the end of a music piece, it’s discordant and unsettling and there is no resolution coming. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that might make people stop watching the news. Better spin up the next thing so people will forget about last weeks outrage and start fresh.

In this we agree.

The democrats are just the blue colored boot of the oligarchs.

Have company that completely depends on people using their brains to solve problems.

Give these people free stimulants for years so you can extract extra value out of their brains.

Stop giving them stimulants.

Brain workers are now cranky and stimulant deprived. Surely this will make them more effective…

Give brain workers stimulants again, because fucking obviously.

Naive is the Democratic party’s current position of favoring those donors over voters.

I understand that they’ve done a cynical calculus and decided to leave those voters on the sidelines. It is a failing strategy that successfully got them billions of dollars and lost the election.

It is not that I do not understand the deeper reason, it is that I reject it as a failure.