i have really come to the view that partisanship is to be embraced wholesale. partisanship and principle but not purity.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t serve the interests of the corporate owners of these media orgs.

Gonna spend the next two years spamming every elected Dem about the concept of "damnatio memoriae." Chisel his name off every inscription. Build over the various Trump Towers like they're Nero's Golden House. Remove him from physical memory, not to forget but as a sign of disrespect to the man.

That kind of poverty is incredibly stressful and bad for your health. That kind of poverty leads to more crime. That kind of poverty leads to broken families and has a high likelihood of passing all of those bad things on to the next generation.

Fair enough, but raising everyone out of that kind of poverty should be a major goal. No reason for that kind of poverty to be acceptable in a country like the US.

Yeah, well people shouldn’t have to eat beans all week either! Aiming for human flourishing here!

Ok, but to be fair, the delineation of poverty has fallen pretty far behind the times. Then there’s the safety net gap where is you make slightly more, you start losing welfare program qualifications that set you farther behind than your raise gained.

There's a non-zero chance this nonsense ends with the establishment of a Church of America and Trump being declared the Antipope

Again: for any big liberal donor who wants to funnel millions into fixing this country's politics, the ROI on buying any struggling paper and simply tasking it with doing real reporting on local news is vastly higher than the same $$ given to some group that does mass ad buys every election year.

Yeah, if Trump made Biden’s economy the new baseline of “awful” then it would have to have gotten a lot better than that for people to feel better?

Do tell!

So if lots of items are doing that, and you can't just drop them because they're staples, it just feels bad for a long long time.

Do they get replaced by other items/luxuries over time that I spend money on? Sure. I didn't pay for Youtube Premium back then or canned lattes. But people don't easily forget or forgive the same item not being what it used to cost.

Not permanent probably, but it's going to take a WHILE. I used to eat a lot of mint Oreos, but when the price went from being $2 a pack to $2.50/$3 (like 15 years ago) I swore I'd never pay the increased prices. There's been like 20 more items/services like that since, for me.

Another was for a (again, likely scam) car warranty company. “Due to the declining economy, we are making this special offer to help people avoid out of pocket expenses for car repairs…”

I heard one of those just yesterday! It was some IRS debt negotiation scam company, but they always say that “Due to worsening economic conditions, the IRS may be willing to settle your tax debt for a fraction of what you owe…”. Ads like that have been going on the whole time for years.

Absolutely there needs to be massively increased and enforced progressive income taxation. A wealth tax too and on unrealized capital gains. Then yes also to taxes for everyone, scaled appropriately to ability.

I remain convinced that one of the most important things the next Democratic president can do to avoid falling victim to a Biden-style vibecession is to mercilessly, relentlessly crack down on crypto and organized gambling. Just go full scorched-earth.

Yeah, in his first term he was largely restrained. The pandemic itself was the first major shock (and the fact that Biden couldn’t magically fix everything related to it once they threw Trump out the first time for fumbling it). Definitely agree.

Agree that conservative media and social media have a big impact as well though!

It feels more precarious than it did in the mid 90s through until the pandemic. People got used to the stability of our (relatively) benevolent economic dominance and having largely beat the known disease scourges (that are relevant to wealthy countries). The pandemic and Trump upended that feeling.

Precarity vibes come from it being possible that a pandemic can just appear or that someone like Trump can just appear and destroy everything that seemed solid. If massive, unexpected things can just happen, then it would take a truly large bank account to make you feel safe.

Trump must be removed from office. He has no capacity to do the job, and he’s destroying the US and the world with incoherent flailing. He thinks he can bully and blackmail the whole world and will start WW3 or nuke someone eventually. He absolutely cannot he allowed to continue.

Jeffries and Schumer are servile clowns, unbelievably bad at actual politics. They do not understand that the way to beat Trump is to amplify the sense of chaos and crisis along EVERY DIMENSION AT ONCE, which means that you simply pile on as much stuff as possible.

Just personally, I'd say it's because elected Democrats don't have a strong leader or few leaders to give direction/form to state-wide/nation-wide action. I go to the No Kings protests and it's good for some organizing and exhorting to vote in November, but there's no "big" immediate action to take.

Because the UK would actually fold, unlike Iran, at the first sign of pushback.

Regardless of whether it’s all talk, when the leader of our country expresses plainly genocidal intent, everyone has to do something.

For citizens of all political stripes, it means rejecting this madness. For Congress, it means taking action to rein him in. Now.

These Neo-Confederates do not get to win and keep the country.

The internet is where other people do things and you follow and read and watch if interesting and informative, or don’t if not. Could also be my general resistance to pop culture, celebrity culture, etc…. If the masses are doing it, it should be regarded with extra suspicion.