But that’s the thing. The Dems want to campaign like they have for the past century, going out and making sensible campaign stops every so often. Obama was trying to change this, and honestly had the right of it - you blast your message everywhere, all at once, KEEP REPEATING IT, and shorten the general gist until it can fit in a meme.
As Behind the Bastards pointed out recently in their Kent Hovind episode, the IRS doesn’t give a shit about what illegal or immoral activity you commit, they literally just want you to pay taxes on it.
It was a pretty common peasant weapon purely because you could make one super easy, and it fired a thing you could literally pick off the ground. Sling a rock at a wolf or a bear and it’ll probably either be dead or get the hint of “ah shit that guy hurts to fight, I’ll go find some other bastard.”
So give me exactly what your criteria are on “shithole nations”.
Also, our entire aid spending is less than 1% of our budget normally.
Ever since the appearance modding system went in, my Hunter’s been pretty genderfluid - I tend to swap from male to female depending on how I feel that day.
Remember the times they effectively blockaded highways with their ad hoc motorcades, and they kept getting into wrecks there too?
It’s military. If it wasn’t leaking oil, it wouldn’t work.
DoD hardware for police usually comes with contracts that state they have to be maintained in working order, because the DoD can just take them back if there’s a military need.
Effectively, it’s the PD paying to warehouse and maintain DoD equipment for them, as long as the DoD doesn’t mind the stuff getting used once in a while.
Except I have met people championing urbanism who simply refuse to understand that not everyone can, will, or wants to do 15 miles on a bike one-way, especially in my city. It’s all starry-eyed “we’ll just make safer bike lanes and places for people to walk” without any feasible planning for housing, or realizing that “hey not everyone has the ability or pay to live close to their jobsite”. This is usually from people who are living in high-rent areas, working jobs that absolutely afford them the luxury of living just down the road from where they work, and not realizing that not every job is right next door to everyone, especially in a lot of older cities.
Shit, even Star Trek understood the idea of “hey can we make this a voice call instead of a meeting so I can literally stop the ship from exploding while we hash out the menu for the shipwide picnic”.
Right? If an LLM can transcribe all the useful information out of a meeting, it stands to reason that the entire meeting could just be boiled to an email, instead of enabling middle managers to feel useful by tying up other people’s time.
It’s not creditors - lawyers from his supplement company were attempting to get a bankruptcy judge to shut down InfoWars’ parent company. I don’t fully disagree with a lot of assessments saying this is pretty clearly Jones trying to manufacture a crisis to drum up cash (probably to pay the giant settlement he owes in CT). On the other hand, the judge handling his bankruptcy case is expected to make a decision on whether or not Free Speech Systems will continue operating by the end of next week, so Dan and Jordan may have to find someone else to style on for their podcast.
And that’s my bright spot.
Even my modest home-work-home is about 35 miles. Assuming safe road conditions for me to bike, it’s a full hour and a half one-way, with nowhere for me to lock up my bike once I’m at work, and mostly unprotected bike lanes (or just regular road!) 3 hours round-trip added onto my workday, effectively. I could definitely bike to get groceries, or shop, or anything like that in my neighborhood, but better public transit needs to happen for me to ditch my car in my city.
You would be VERY surprised - bigots are usually very willing to shoot themselves in the foot. I mentioned going to my city’s Pride parade once to a prospective landlord I was touring an apartment with, and they all but told me outright “I won’t rent to you”. I’ve also seen this happen with friends buying cars - a buddy asked me to go kick tires with him when he was looking for a new car, and since I’m white and he isn’t, the salesman that came out to talk with us IMMEDIATELY assumed I was the one buying the car.
I also used to work commission-based sales myself as a cellphone salesperson. One common complaint I had from a lot of my Black and Hispanic clientele was that the anchor store sales staff (who were closer to them and better-stocked) would almost always assume they wanted to see the worst, shittiest phones (this was back right as the iPhone 5 was coming out), even if they had walked in ready to drop several thousand dollars on new Apple phones (which got us a commission of about $100 per device). These people would drive 20-30 minutes past THAT store to come to my store (the next closest) just so they didn’t have to deal with those salespeople.
Yeah, pretty much this. People like living near water - you can drink it (if it’s fresh), you can use it for rudimentary sanitation, you can water animals and crops much easier than building complex irrigation, and you can use it as a food source (fish/shellfish).
Yeah, the big issue with saying “it’s your land do what you want” is that you start getting wildly-unsafe buildings and situations because “it’s my land I can do whatever” rapidly turns into “and I want to build something highly unsafe to live in because it’s cheap to do so”. This is how you wind up with tenement housing where one apartment catches fire and a hundred people burn to death because nobody forced the builder to consider evacuation routes.
Their home version of Spokesman is great.
Rage Against the Machine doing this concert would just be Tom Morello beating every one of them to death with his guitar.
Ehh, populism isn’t limited to politics, at least not tactics-wise. Lots of televangelists and the like use the same sort of tactics - boil down everything wrong in your life to a single, easily-solvable datapoint that YOU can take action on.
At the same time, I think it’s important to recognize that not all Trump voters are “stupid” or “ignorant”. While those exist, cults can - and HAVE - suckered in people with high-paying jobs, with degrees and education and accolades. Trump’s cult of personality is no different - a LOT of Trump voters aren’t stupid or ignorant or anything, they might vote for him for dozens of reasons, from “well I’m a shitty racist as well” to “well he wears the trappings of success” to “he sounds confident”, and it’s important to recognize that anyone can fall victim to a cult like that through the sheer momentum of peer pressure. Jonestown was full of people who were desperately seeking a better world, and a lot of them were fairly well-educated engineers and doctors and lawyers and the like. Aum Shinrikyo was FULL of PhDs and MDs. Trump has lost a lot of the more well-informed and well-educated people in his camp, but characterizing his entire voter base as “dumb hicks waiting to be conned” is unhelpful at best and harmful at worst.
Don’t forget megachurch pastors.