moakley

Oh I totally agree. They're a crime against god and man. Especially when I just want a fucking Coke.

Fun fact about actual cloacas: when chickens breed it's called a "cloacal kiss", and it's exactly what it sounds like.

Must be a regional difference or something, because I recently had Wendy's and was impressed with how good their fries have gotten. Crispy and flavorful.

Meanwhile I haven't had a bite or sip of anything from McDonald's that wasn't absolute shit in like 20 years. I never loved McDonald's (I'm big on texture), but at least they used to have the best fries and sodas. Then they removed the beef tallow from the fries, making them the actual worst fast food fries available, and they replaced their soda fountains with Freestyle soda cloacas.

I already wasn't eating their meat because I like meat to be chewable, so that reduced the number of items I'll order from McDonald's to zero.

Two things can be true.

In today's political climate, Leftist propaganda isn't a threat. It's irrelevant.

I say this as someone who firmly believes in capitalism and limited government.

Fascism is the only threat that matters right now.

I'm pretty sure that Morgan Freeman picture is AI.

I agree with what you said, but I'm like 5% worried you might be referring to "leftist propaganda".

Counterpoint: I figured out how to do it eventually.

moldly infuriating

Well, nobody's perfect.

I'm just saying, her heroes may be unrealistic, but her villains are a prescient depiction of MAGA. So it's strange to me when people try to equate Rand with MAGA.

It's like 50 pages long, which yeah, is way too long.

But what he's actually doing is calling for a general strike. He's explaining that if every productive person just stops contributing to society for a few years, then the parasitic oligarchy will die out, because they're not capable of keeping things running themselves.

It doesn't resolve the overt conflict, but it's suggested that his plan is in motion by the end.

Most or fewest?

She bought into the fantasy that the rich get rich because they’re smarter and harder working than everyone else, when really they’re all a lot more Trumpy than she would have thought.

But that's really specifically the opposite of what happens in the book.

The richest people in the book are referred to as "The Aristocracy of Pull": people who make their wealth by influencing governments to unevenly enforce economic restrictions. Oligarchs, basically.

The entire point of the book is that these people are parasites who obtain wealth without producing anything of value. The heroes in the story stop them by withholding their labor until the system collapses.

The president in the story is a useful idiot installed by these oligarchs.

That's literally the whole book. You can argue about her version of utopia: people thriving by exchanging the fruits of their labor under a free market system. But her version of dystopia is pretty much what we're going through: incompetent sycophants being installed into positions of power by anti-intellectuals who can't tell the difference between wealth and talent.