US Politics, April 2024: "Are You Better Off Today Than You Were <Checks Notes> Four Years Ago?"

yeah, i mean, i know my kid does not read magazines, newspapers, or watch the news. its all tiktok/X.

which scares me but what are ya gonna do? they have to find their own truth. i just tell them to read read read. that's all i can do.

and you can't tell them to look out for memebots and phony headlines because of course THEY would never fall for stuff like that...

to think, the only BS rumors we obsessed over growing up is whether Mountain Dew decreased your sperm count, or whether KFC was actually growing headless chickens

and pop rocks would kill ya.

Don't forget the gay-panic rumors about Rod Stewart and Richard Gere.

hell, I panicked for the sake of the poor gerbil

i still get e-mails from my kids old middle school and i just got one showing concern about the kindergarten class chanting anti-israel slogans and from the ocean to the sea type things. a pocket full of posies indeed!

Libs of Kidz Bop

feel like Biden should mention this guy more

pic.twitter.com/irro9nVWm3

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) April 22, 2024

feel like Biden should mention this guy more

Why? Every poll indicates that he's siphoning votes away from Trump. Better to just let him pinwheel across the landscape until the final humiliating meltdown.

does every Kennedy get spasmodic dysphonia - still up for grabs as a death metal name just saying... - when they get older? is it like a family curse or something? reminds me of diane rehm. #NPR #onethread

i don't actually know if he has that. or if his sister who sounds like him has. or other old kennedys i have heard had that... they sure do get creaky though.

xpost Hard to tell. They usually don't live long enough.

lol

MSNBC chyron: "Trump worried about Pecker leaking"

eunice shriver still my favorite stephen king villain by the way.

https://www.irishcentral.com/uploads/article/125653/eunice_kennedy_shriver___getty.jpg?t=1562758914

xp to myself - I knew it was too good to be true

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/msnbc-pecker-chyron/

Why? Every poll indicates that he's siphoning votes away from Trump. Better to just let him pinwheel across the landscape until the final humiliating meltdown.

you missed my point. Biden should mention him more to siphon more votes way from trump.

Getting into the quality of internal Ukraine factions is completely unnecessary IMO and just opens criticism of US involvement to claims of simping for Putin. Neo-Nazis bad Putin bad invasions bad.

The problem with pumping more weapons into Ukraine is that we’re prolonging an unwinnable proxy war, feeding people into a meat grinder for our own ends but rapping Ukraine’s knuckles when they go after energy infrastructure in an election year.

Upthread someone mockingly said Putin believes the US was behind Maidan and I mean… it’s not a secret that we were using Ukraine as a staging point for spying on Russia for years.

xxp i.e. Biden should run "Kennedy is a dangerous pro-gun anti-goverment radical" adverts in trumpy media markets in swing states.

CW is that you leave the attack stuff to independent PACs.

milo, I agree with you, but I'm not a simp for Putin, and people can insult me that way if they want— nearly all of my Russian friends have left the country because they're queer and they've found asylum elsewhere. I'm not a fan of Putin.

Also, scott, with all respect, I'm not your kid, I'm a 39 year-old leftist who disagrees with a lot of people on here about politics and tHe nEeD tO pReSeRVe NATO and western hegemony in eastern Europe.

eh, details.

“Kennedy is antivax” is a great advert.

https://bsky.app/profile/mtsw.bsky.social/post/3kqqk4uauol2c

I disagree with both Milo and The table is the table on this issue, but I prefer not to insult or make insinuations about anybody supporting Putin, which I think is a mistake.

I think collectively we're losing the ability to have people with different viewpoints in the same spaces, which can lead to a form of circling the wagons and self-selection, which ultimately just increases polarization. I think we all need to hear opinions with which we disagree. Opinions aren't, or at least shouldn't be considered as immutable

I have no problem with hearing opinions different from my own, but I also reserve the right to argue with people about how RONG their opinions are :-)

I think collectively we're losing the ability to have people with different viewpoints in the same spaces, which can lead to a form of circling the wagons and self-selection, which ultimately just increases polarization. I think we all need to hear opinions with which we disagree. Opinions aren't, or at least shouldn't be considered as immutable

Who's "we"? I share spaces with people with whose opinions I disagree all day long, ILX included. (ILM especially, where people trumpet their terrible taste in art in the most hyperbolic language they can muster, but ILE too, where people are militantly full of shit all day long.)

i'm sorry i know you aren't my kid i was just shocked that that was their reaction to the war. ukraine is corrupt + nazis. it sounded like a defense of russia. i just hadn't heard that and then i heard it a lot from younger folks/online stuff. it felt like it came out of nowhere and i wasn't hearing any sympathy for the people of ukraine. hell, i wasn't hearing any sympathy for any of the young russian people being dragged onto battlefields to die by the russian military. the whole thing just seems terrible. but i didn't know there were non-russian people who weren't sympathetic to ukraine. now of course i do.

x-post

xpost must be lonely to be so right

xpost must be lonely to be so right

I just tell myself that you'll all come around eventually.

scott, I have a ton of empathy for the people of Ukraine and for the people of Russia, particularly the young men being used as cannon fodder by a craven lunatic like Putin. But I also have read enough about the conflict to be pretty firm in my stance that Ukraine is being used as a proxy for western European economic interests, and the Nazi shit— just look up Stepan Bandera and the cult around him in Ukraine— sort of seals the deal for me. What we have is essentially two ultranationalist forces fighting each other other, and I am against them both.

well sheesh now it just seems hopeless. is there any solution/answer to all the horribleness?

I wonder if sending more guns will help?

well, yes, it might, is the thing

sadly I am with silby here, not quite ready to subscribe to milo's nihilism

as a cold hearted net calculation, the Ukraine fascists will have a better regime for humanity overall than the Russian fascists, lol this is the same reason I vote for Democrats

And does Ukraine have territorial ambitions?

i didn't know there were non-russian people who weren't sympathetic to ukraine. now of course i do.

I think everyone is sympathetic to the people of Ukraine. People have different opinions about what they will think will happen next with different courses of action, or what will or won't help, and navigating that difference of opinion can be difficult but I don't think anyone thinks they deserve what is happening to them

yeah, anyone who thinks they are all Nazis is taking in seriously damaged info

the Jewish president of Ukraine probably isn't for example

C'mon guys, 'corrupt + Nazis' is a lot of places.

white nationalists basically run Texas so I'm a little nonplussed to see that being used a reason to let Ukraine fall to the wolves

Putin can have Texas if he can make it over here.

lol the infamous nihilism of 'proxy wars are bad' and 'I would prefer that we not feed human bodies into the sausage maker'

Ukraine is at best a stalemate that will see tens of thousands more people killed in the near future without any realistic chance of the Ukrainian military pushing Russia back. Our government is happy to sacrifice more Ukrainians for the chance to continue bleeding Russia economically (but not too much, see knuckle rapping for targeting energy infrastructure) and of international support.

If US involvement in Ukraine is a moral necessity and if the goal is to return Ukraine to even its post-Crimean Invasion borders, shouldn't we be putting boots on the ground and planes in the air in order to actually accomplish that?

Today's "LOL this fucking asshole" update:

RFK Jr.: 'I'm gonna put the entire US budget on blockchain'

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he wants to put the “U.S. budget on blockchain,” a ledger of transactions typically associated with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

“I’m going to put the entire U.S. budget on blockchain so that any American — every American can look at every budget item in the entire budget anytime they want 24 hours a day,” Kennedy said Sunday during a rally in Michigan.

The public accounting of spending would theoretically allow more transparency and accountability into how the government spends taxpayer dollars, although getting every government transaction onto the blockchain would be a Herculean task.

Federal spending is also controlled through legislation, which is available to the public, and federal departments are often audited by government watchdogs such as the Government Accountability Office and their own inspectors general.

Man's running a 2020 campaign, he should have promised to put an AI in charge of the federal budget.

sure, because all Americans know how to read blockchains

Love how support for Ukraine means “seeing as many Ukrainian men die as possible so that Western Europe can continue mining the east for resources”

If US involvement in Ukraine is a moral necessity and if the goal is to return Ukraine to even its post-Crimean Invasion borders, shouldn't we be putting boots on the ground and planes in the air in order to actually accomplish that?

― papal hotwife (milo z)

yes

Oooh, get an AI to audit the federal reserve on the blockhain. Throw in some thinly veiled race science and you can lasso in all of the worst people in the country at once (and then we can ship them off to a FEMA camp).