I sold my soul to the company store.

I don't think Americans are willing to admit that Iran Contra happened no matter how much evidence there is.

One of the things I've learned is that it's possible to know something without believing it. That is the say you have all the evidence and you acknowledge intellectually that the evidence is true and points to the conclusion however emotionally you just won't believe it.

The idea that a president, Ronald reagan, arranged for Americans to be held hostage to win an election and then sold weapons to our enemies to fund regime change wars in South America for fruit companies is just something nobody wants to believe because it implies we're the baddies and that runs counter to everything you were told as a kid. It gets into the 4 to 14 thing where anything you're taught as a kid becomes integrated into your belief systems and requires a painful process called deconstruction to eliminate

Donald Trump is the Republican end game. Everything he is doing he is doing because he is a Republican. The difference between Trump and every other Republican is that Trump has a cult of personality so he can get away with shit that couch fuckers like JD Vance can't so things are moving faster but that doesn't mean that all of this wasn't on the Republican agenda.

I'm sick and tired of people acting like Trump is some kind of aberration. He is the capstone on the shit sandwich we were warned about by Barry Goldwater back when the religious extremists joined up with the corporatists to screw us all over in '65.

Trump is doing exactly what the Republican party wants and the proof of that is nobody in Congress will stop him except Democrats

Easy. The government will mandate them and we will let them do it because we're going to be busy worrying about trans girls in sports or satanists or violent video games or whatever shiny thing they dangle in front of us this time.

You won't have a choice but to trust it because it'll be rammed down your throat and you'll just get used to it because you won't have a choice and the alternatives would be to stop using computers.

Once a voting public gives up critical thinking you're pretty well and truly fucked.

And I understood how it worked and why it worked and that it worked but what I didn't understand is how somebody could think that would work in the first place. The same thing goes for parity archives.

And I've heard that if you have a background in mathematics that it all kind of makes sense and follows from that however that just kicks the can down the road to whoever first figured out those mathematical concepts.

In my lifetime we go to war with the Middle East and the economy collapses. Every. Freaking. Time.

It's been like this since the 1980s. Why the hell are y'all so bad at pattern recognition? I'm not asking you to pick it up right away I could forgive you for Ronald Reagan but by the time we got to Trump shooting for a second term how is it that the American people, that's you, didn't figure this out? It's been 45 years.

Oh right, the topic. We have lost tens of billions of dollars in tourist dollars thanks to Donald Trump's Gestapo going around arresting people who are here legally in the country. It's been devastating to tourist towns of all kinds. Not to mention him threatening to invade Canada

Basically anything you hear about antitrust law enforcement for the next 3 years or so can be safely assumed to be a euphemism for bribing Trump. Maybe longer if he can score a third term.

With companies that make weapons because those weapons are very very often used to kill civilians.

Take that school America blew up in Iran or the tens of thousands of people killed in Gaza.

Honestly though there is no ethical consumption under capitalism as they say. There's no point to getting hung up on individual purchases. If a boycott starts to take off that can sometimes be effective but very rarely because like we found out with Bud light drinkers switching the keystone all you did was slightly inconvenience some marketing people because both beers are owned by the same parent company.

So go ahead and buy your game boy but try to do something to make it so we aren't blowing up kids anymore

So I hear people complain about how voters want such and such and politicians aren't doing it all the time.

The classic example is the single payer healthcare.

If you ask the public if they support universal Health Care you will get 72 75% yes.

If you ask them if they support a government takeover of Health Care you'll surprisingly get 25% yes because that many have figured out that the pole is rigged and they know how to answer.

The problem of course is that the 75% who oppose a government takeover of Health Care and don't understand the difference between single payer and single provider can be marketed to buy professional propagandists to oppose any attempt to switch to a single payer system.

The last time the public option was being debated in Congress private insurance spent half a trillion with a t dollars shutting it down.

Folks need to understand that politics is war. The ultra wealthy withholding food, shelter and medicine are committing acts of violence and War.

The thing is All is fair in Love and War. You're going up against extremely powerful groups of people and you are an existential threat to their way of life.

So you can't just point it a few polls and call it a day. You need a detailed and complex plan in order to pass significant reform that benefits large numbers of people. And this is before we bring up the fact that have to country reads at a sixth grade level.

Like that nasty Sonny Bono thing passed to extend copyright to AI generated art.

There is just too much money on the table. We aren't talking billions we're talking trillions.

One of the things I don't think people realize is that consequences of letting 1/10 of 1% of the population have all the money.

Whenever we talk about taking it away from them people get nervous because they believe that the slippery slope means we're coming for their houses and their SUVs.

Never mind all the propaganda blasted into our eyeballs telling us how great billionaires are. To this day I know people who work with disadvantaged kids who think Bill Gates is a good guy because he donated a little money. The dollar amounts are large because bill has near limitless cash so it makes it look like he's doing good... Basically he whitewashes his image.

I don't know what you do about that or about the slow March into fascism that we've got going on

First they are valuable attack tools against anyone who would not vote for them. You can run attack ads based on these and they are for some stupid reason highly effective with voters.

And second these laws have been repeatedly traced back to billionaires like Peter thiel and his Planitir initiatives. It's part of the growing surveillance State being built by the wealthiest people on the planet.

When us nerdy liberal people tell you that we need more education and that we should take billionaire's money away so they aren't so powerful it's because of shit like this.

Newsome himself said the law was poorly written but he signed it anyway because anyone who doesn't is going to get ripped to pieces in elections with think of the children bullshit.

I don't know what you do with a voting electorate that is so low information and has so little critical thinking skills that they can't see why this is a problem and that would be vulnerable to attack ads launched against politicians over voting against the law of this bad.

Bottom line we need smarter voters

The problem is that artificially constraining the supply is beneficial to people who already own houses and to wealthy private equity firm owners and shareholders.

I'm so tired of seeing people trying to come up with technological problems to social issues. You can have all the technology in the world and it doesn't do any good if you aren't allowed to use it to make people's lives better.

So if you don't like monopolies valve is our best shot. To get Linux widespread adoption gaming is probably the best place to do that. And no Android isn't Linux.

Windows 11 is the most user hostile software application ever made and by all accounts Windows 12 is going to be worse.

You can have alternatives right now for yourself but for how long? We have dozens of laws that are going to make it increasingly difficult to distribute Linux software. I don't really want to have the cops show up and arrest me for running an unapproved operating system and the more people using Linux the less likely that is to happen

The problem is that the only other way to do useful work that isn't profitable is with the government and good luck doing that.

It is really easy to get people against the government doing anything for anyone but themselves. We tried to do student loan forgiveness and you literally had people who had been fucked by the student loan industry but had managed to pay off their loans demanding we don't do forgiveness because they already paid their loans.

I know queer people that get upset when other queer people don't have as much bigotry and problems in their lives. To their credit they know that it's wrong to feel that way but they can't help but feeling that way because it doesn't feel fair that they went through all that suffering and the younger generations do not.

Again it's a weird thing because they know it's wrong to have those emotions but they can't stop having them. They don't act on them because they know it's wrong but they still have the knee jerk reaction.