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Cake day: May 9th, 2024

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  • I’m sure Republicans would say the same and more about me, but I’d take one migrant who took a risk to work harder than almost any Americans do and give their children a better life (funny how they actually do what the American mythos claims to value, they walk the walk of our largely bullshit rhetoric), at our big corpo’s invitation no less, than a hundred of my fellow American supposed conservatives born in the developed world acting like they hit a triple and reveling in the suffering of those who weren’t born in what was once a cradle of safety until they demolished it with their ballot, seeking to destroy their enemies, aka most Americans, in the zero sum game Faux News drilled into their head.

    These people are unashamedly drunk on the schaudenfreude of cruelty. To me, their willful rejection of basic human empathy means they are wholly devoid of value.


  • You are in a sense.

    Americans love to separate ourselves, but George Carlin was right, this is a representative government. I voted against him thrice, and primaried for an actual left, and phone banked for Sanders on two campaigns, but Donald Trump represents the United States as it is in practice perfectly.

    He’s like the United States anthropomorphized into human form. Proudly classist, proudly racist, proudly greedy, proudly willfully ignorant, proudly drunk on schaudenfreude, proudly cruel and sociopathic, obsessed with ego score and image despite being a gross, overweight pig.

    Trump is this fucking place. The embodiment of everything I’ve despised about this fucking cesspool since before he was fake firing people on fake reality TV. We could not be governed more appropriately as a people given our PRACTICED values of being temporarily embarrassed millionaires dying alone undermining one another to “beat” our neighbors instead of living reasonable lives together if we tried.

    Maybe we should stop being a horrible, antisocial society that tries to compete against one another in every possible way instead of cooperating before we continue to tell other places what they’re doing wrong, because this is a meth house on fire, geopolitically speaking, and has been since the 1970s. We don’t have the credibility to get caught up in other nation’s problems.

    Oh also, sticks and stones but ad hominems will never hurt me.


  • I mean, you can and are.

    That being said, it’s equivalent to a Chinese citizen finger wagging at the US about our compromised democratic republic.

    It would ring empty from a citizen of a place that will literally run tanks over him for wanting a political voice, and would be gallows comical as a source. Context matters.

    Don’t like it? Let’s clean our house up. IMHO the Nordic nations, with the happiest citizens with the highest sense of wellbeing in the world, the only point of civilization existing for those still paying attention, have the right to talk Infinite shit about just about anything to just about every other nation, because they’re doing being a society right and meeting the only fucking goal that matters. Their house is made of iron, not candy glass. Every nation on Earth should be taking their notes, every citizen of every other nation rioting for their models to be enacted at home.


  • I’m saying that you can’t credibly go “you… You fucking shot me! What the fuck?!” at someone who shot you because you shot them a few seconds prior to that.

    It doesn’t make it right. It’s wrong. But it’s also a non-sequitur for a serial killer to condemn another serial killer over the sanctity of life.

    As an American, Americans have no business condemning other nations about misinformation campaigns until we clean our fucking house up and provide reparations to those both within and without who were hurt by our misinformation campaigns.


  • And they do it to their citizens too…

    …And we do it to other countries and we do it to our citizens.

    You can’t condemn another country for what we’ve been actively doing considerably longer than them having never stopped credibly. Our house is made of that candy glass they use in movies in this particular arena.

    The oligarchs and their increasingly captured government, including both parties, have been poisoning us against anything that isn’t hyper-capitalist greed enabling from the great depression to the McCarthy witch hunts into today. Very few Americans could define socialism or communism in any sense with a gun to their heads, but they’ve been misinformed into being filled with hate and/or dread when they’re uttered.

    Name one world superpower that doesn’t actively engage in mass disinformation campaigns both within and without, I’ll wait. I’d also argue that like our general military, we certainly spend the most on our global Orwell machine. Our CIA, along with the KGB, are the OG playbooks other nations refer to when doing it themselves.



  • Been my default plan A long before the economy went to hell.

    I set up home medical equipment for 10 years, and by the eldery’s own words, even if lucky enough to have amoral levels of resources, it’s no life or victory, and certainly shouldn’t be your main life goal. Taking a dozen pills every day to stave of the inevitable, dealing with unyielding physical pain, even in the best of cases being cognitively dulled as if in a permanent, ever worsening brain fog as your very sense of self erodes until even those dozen pills can no longer cheat your body’s imminent failure any longer.

    I’ll never understand regular people that live like monks just in case they don’t get hit by a bus or some debilitating disease and make it to… Their absolute shittiest years (them being the “golden years” was always marketing to keep you working your best years in service to sociopaths). Because sadly even in the supposed “good” times from the 90s onward, most people economically have to choose to live in the present, or do the supposed responsible thing and scrimp to subsist in the future when you’re no longer of use to the oligarchs.

    Should have used all that money in your 401k to take a bunch of vacations back when you could actually fully taste the food, fully feel the wind in your face, fully partake in activities your failing body would no longer survive without injury or death, and fully imbibe the experience as more than a faint, fading shadow of who you once were.

    And again, that’s from the experience of basically hearing how horrible it is from elderly people from the extremely wealthy to the extremely poor.




  • As bad as things are, it’s cathartic to watch the old guard, bourbon sipping Republican party that originally weaponized misinformation to further the agenda of big corpo (faux news since they existed: “Herp derp climate change is a hoax for scientists to sell books”) realize that though their long in motion coup worked, they lost control of it in 2015 when King confidence scheme scam artist stole their grift out from under them by saying the dogwhistles they used to string their racist base along out loud with a dumb little dance.

    Its not helpful, but knowing Mitch McConnell and John Roberts know they sold out their entire society’s future not even for their benefit or the benefit of the right small room of classy old money bigots, but for some crass asshole that’s as belligerent and willfully ignorant as their sucker voting base to take the reigns of post democracy machiavelian power they so carefully curated since the 70s as they watch powerlessly, and IN FEAR no less?

    Poetry.

    🎻🎻🎻




  • I think we’re mostly on the same page.

    I’d just add as someone who was a practicing psychologist that it has been conclusively proven that empathy is learned, it usually needs to be learned young if it is to be learned at all, it is easily tought, and our culture chooses to teach the opposite in glorifying/inflating individual potential with disdain for considering the needs of others.

    Which had led us to this collapse as the rugged individual peasants tear eachother down instead of bringing power back down to earth.

    https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/introduction-2/

    If it were up go me, this experiment would be required curriculum for all young children, but modern American parents would burn schools down if a teacher DARED to tell half a class that kids with other color eyes were better than them for a single day (and then doing the opposite the next day) to safely instill what it feels like to be deemed less important by others. That’s how anti-empathy, and thus I’d argue antihumanist, Americans are TRAINED to be.

    After all, when my kid grows up he needs to COMPETE AGAINST and BEAT your kid so he has MOAR than them. 🇺🇸


  • They should be identified by the rest of society and treated differently.

    PREFERENTIALLY every time all day every day. Trying to indicate they are no different goes in the wrong direction on that. Like so many things in this county, the problem is a culture that fails to, from childhood, educate people, in this case educating to seeing a disadvantaged person and going “how can I make their day easier” and not “eww gross and weird.” Same thing we fail to educate Americans on with regards to poverty and homelessness.

    I don’t think it’s healthy for them to not consider themselves different fron the mean, as is often pushed. They are different from the mean. Self-delusion is a blight, choosing ignorance is always wrong. It hurts them when reality comes calling, and only those of means can make it from cradle to grave avoiding facing reality.


  • I subscribe to the school of George Carlin on this.

    It helps no one, including the afflicted, to dress up a disability.

    It doesn’t help a single disabled person walk to be called “handicapable,” and it’s both society’s failing and pointless to, for example, rebrand a term like crippled which had no shame attached to it for a long time to handicapped, etc as if that society has malice in its heart it will shift its anymous to whatever term you want.

    A disabled or amputated leg isn’t just different, it’s an extra difficulty for that person outside the norm that their society should pick up the slack for them on through assistance and accommodation.

    A brain that can’t orally communicate, can’t self-regulate emotion, can’t grasp simple but important social constructs as those with severe autism can’t, isn’t simply different or beautiful. It often appears like hell to live as even with infinite financial resources and therapies, and that kind of talk diminishes the severity of their disadvantage, which just as the slow march from battle fatigue to post traumatic stress disorder, has a negative effect of minimizing the help that disadvantaged person needs.

    As Carlin said, changing the name of the condition doesn’t change the condition. This is, to be clear, an argument FOR society moving heaven and earth to make life as bearable for their struggles as can be done, precisely because they have a profound disadvantage and a society should care for its members in order of most disadvantaged.

    The neoliberal “solution” to real problems is relabeling it with detached and/or optimistic language and walking away. It solves precisely nothing, but it doesn’t cost their robber baron bribers a cent so there you go.



  • Allonzee@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlDear USians
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    15 days ago

    Only one party is actively funded by our enemies

    Incorrect, both parties take money from Wall Street. Only a tiny, tiny minority of the Democrats don’t, and those spoiler Democrats are hated by the DNC far more than the DNC opposes their esteemed Republican opposition.

    If you refuse to see the capitalist oligarchs are the enemy that created the conditions for Trump, then nevermind and carry on, as there’s nothing that ever could convince you.