Welfare generally means something to keep you alive.

2k is one month mortgage or rent. It’s a bribe to make people think he’s doing something, even if he does it, we will never see another dime and his policies and attacks on our institutions will have resulted in financial catastrophe for the US and worldwide death tolls in the millions with the cutting of aid programs and vaccine/medical research and mandates.

There is no amount of our own money he could give to anyone which will make up for the long-term harm he’s done to the world.

Probably not, but the thing we should be angry about is that she’s getting comforts while being responsible for the ruination of so many lives.

This bestiality talk is just going to make the story disappear because nobody is going to pick it up.

Lot of latinos have really conservative values passed down by families and insular communities. Trump acted like he was “pro man” and his admin empowered people’s worst insecurities about their masculinity. He saw the Tate-taint in our society and pried at it like a scab.

It’s very true that if you appeal to someone about the thing they are most insecure about or hung up on, they will look right past the knife you are digging into their back even as they vote for you. He was able to get a shocking amount of votes from people of color this way. That should be our biggest wake-up call, that we’re this vulnerable to being conned broadly, that it just takes someone petting any segment of the population for those people to fucking roll over and forget their entire brains exist, making up stories and validations for why they won’t have their faces eaten by the Face Eating Leopard Party.

I have thought about this reply for about 9 hours and still cannot connect it to my comment, unless of course you left out one word:

moved from America to Germany because of PTSD and hate towards America Online.

If this is what you meant, then yes, I wholeheartedly agree and support your friend. Just trying to cancel their service alone was traumatizing.

Solution: Release the Epstein files.

While I agree with you, at this point, do we really think it will be any kind of solution? Do we really think any consequence will actually come from it even if we have explicit evidence?

At this point, the fukkin Epstein files are the distraction. They are emptying out our coffers and dashing our world reputation to the rocks and gutting our most basic social services to keep us alive and healthy and have ended programs that would have otherwise kept millions of people alive around the world. They are doing things that will literally lead to the death and suffering of millions and millions of human beings.

America is developing a long, weird, disappointing history of hating on air traffic controllers. Wild move singling out such a small field of people who have such massively important roles in managing not just our travelers but all of our air-shipped goods and products.

What a shame, I kinda liked their burgers back when meat didn’t make me kinda nauseous.

We’re only a matter of time from a sporting regime where it’s just broadly “open” to a level bordering on chaos, and it’s the only thing that is going to keep people watching.

The “should trans people compete” debate is going to be overshadowed by the “should people with extra hearts and enhanced organs be allowed to compete” debate.

The idea of “preserving fairness” in sports is wild when you think about it. Nothing about sports is “fair” you only succeed by getting an unfair advantage over your opponents, we just like to delude ourselves into thinking that because we set some kind of parameters around this capability to gain an advantage, that it’s “fair.”

We haven’t left the liberal world of tone policing and word-crimes unfortunately. When we started attacking the way people talk instead of what they talk about, it was the last nail in the coffin of progressivism, right after guns and flags.

Groups of armed, patriotic people united in a cause and unflinching in their language have been the political capital that have overthrown systems and preserved democracy or at least order and governing for better outcomes for literally thousands of years. (Or they are what we need to defend against other groups of armed nationalists.) I am still baffled why we let this hyper-soft, stupid, pandering-to-the-lowest-most-sensitive-denominator movement represent progressive policy in America.

What is our point here.

Yah they’re setting the stage so we stop paying attention. This one was never going to have traction, but who knows what made-up BS tomorrow will bring.

Q-anon broadly was never about saving any kids or fighting evil.

For the poor, dumb believers, it was always about figuring out some word puzzles so you can become a chosen-one, journey-of-the-hero type protagonist who saves the day and is hoisted to a glorious victory on the shoulders of cheering masses.

The people who believed it were not bright people, they don’t understand politics broadly, they have no sense of scale for national affairs, they are… lets just say their mental faculties have been stunted and held back to some arbitrary point. Whatever the word for that is.

He’s a very opportunistic politician, he knows how unpopular the dems are right now, he is carving out his path for '28, but I have very little faith that his almost inevitable presidency will bring us any real change for the people.

If your actions are indistinguishable from evil, you are evil.

There is no way these people don’t know how many lives they’re going to ruin and end with this vote. There is no way they actually believe they’re going to get the ACA tax credits from the political party that let the government shut down over the issue. Functionally evil is the same as evil.

Yes, that’s over 34 million Americans.

For a game that is supposed to encourage exploration to start off saying not to?

It’s an odd point to get hung up on, I can certainly describe a lot of areas the game is lacking by today’s standards and some other open-world type games, but this wasn’t one of them for me. Some people are going to feel challenged by being told “don’t go there” and some people will feel offended and some people won’t think much of it I guess.

I’m pretty sure out of the 340,000,000+ Americans, there are probably SOME who aren’t ICE agents.

Yeah so you do have a point though that it seems more challenging to make friends, as a strange new form of mass-hysteria has enveloped the younger population in particular that makes everyone not want to hang out with everyone else and withdraw into their own heads, overthinking everything.

But it’s not the entirety of the nation. Not yet anyway. It just seems that way from what we see and read, but the people who do want friends and connection are still out there doing things. So our challenge if we want to nurture our social lives is be out doing things. Have interests, passions, have energy. If you’re tired and groggy and achy from staying inside, then that’s your cue to stop staying inside.

1. Do things until you find something that ignites a spark of some kind of feeling or emotion.

2. Pursue that thing until that spark turns into a passion. Or even a healthy interest that holds your attention. You might need to force it a little to break your habits.

3. The passion is shared. There are enough people to guarantee this. It will happen naturally if you’re not deliberately trying to avoid people. The internet and discord-type groups should be your “staging area” not your substitute. It doesn’t matter if it’s Warhammer miniature gaming or rock climbing or reading books, there is someone out there somewhere who wants to share the enjoyment with someone else.

Every distraction is a distraction for something else. This is the point, keep everyone going in circles until people just tune out and his administration can gut the federal budget and carry out bags of cash out the back door without the population even caring anymore.

He is literally just saying shit and trying to come up with big displays of big-manliness and kaboom power. It’s all he has and it actually works at keeping his base distracted and enthusiastic as he bleeds them dry.

Will we see a return to expensive and internationally condemned above-ground testing? Probably not, but for the length of the news cycle about it, his base will cheer and go “OORAH YAH! BLOW SHIT UP! BLOW ME UP HARDER DADDY!”

Thank you for this, this is actually a fantastic story for me, I have spent the last few years (since Covid actually) trying to learn about cognitive dissonance in people and it turned into a deep, dark rabbit hole that shed a lot of light on heady ideas like free-will and how the brain actually works. (2/10, would not recommend this journey. Caused a small breakdown.)

But the short of it is, as a species logic and consistency is not only not that important to us, it’s not even natural to us.

Our brains are not the things we think they are, even time itself is not what we think. We just have these crazy machines in our heads that write storylines and narratives to explain how we feel and to tie events together to form a coherent story for how time is unfolding. But none of that is anything more than how a large language model “predicts” what should take place via odds and probability.

No part of our minds defaults to logic and sensibility, it defaults to “yeah, that makes sense I guess.” and for the vast majority of people, this is enough to get through the day, but we each are just absolutely swimming in logical inconsistency. Granted, some more than others, but it’s a hard-wired, built-in feature of being alive… your mind tells you stories to explain your experiences and feelings, and this story need not follow any rules of logic.

This is why we have flat-earther scientists and climate-change denying climatologists and doctors who don’t believe in vaccines. Those are extreme examples but if you search, you will find you also likely have dozens of smaller-scale contradictions in your thoughts, your life narratives, your reasoning for anything and everything you do.