I’m just an old man with a skooma problem.

  • 20 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • There’s a big difference between saying “a majority of his supporters are racist” and “their core is 100% racism.” This is exactly the trap you have to avoid if you want to start moving forward.

    There’s also a big difference between defending racism and pointing out the fact that-- like it or not-- some Trump supporters are minorities, and that forces us to accept that there’s something besides racism at play here.

    Is this exhausting? Absolutely. Trump should not even be eligible to run for public office as far as I’m concerned, and yet here we are, dealing with the third straight Presidential election where we have to ask ourselves why his polling numbers are as high as they are despite how thoroughly awful he is as a human being. And because people are tired, we’re willing to accept an easy answer rather than dig deeper.

    But if we dismiss this recurring nightmare yet again by saying that only racists voted for him, there’s no point in trying to debate a racist, so we should never engage with any Trump voter, ever, until the End of Time? Then progress isn’t going to last very long, because we’ll have failed to understand why some people believe so strongly that the system is broken that they’d rather vote for a convicted felon than someone who is actually qualified to be President. That sentiment is only going to spread if we don’t figure out why so many people are feeling so disaffected.

    It’s like we’ve discovered a weird lump on our collective pancreas. It’s uncomfortable, we don’t want to think about it, and we all hope that it’ll just go away, but no. You have to biopsy that thing. Ignoring it would be irresponsible.


  • There’s no question in my mind that the oligarchs in the U.S. want to encourage racism and culture wars, in order to keep lower-class Americans at each others’ throats rather than united against the bourgeoisie. It’s also true that populist dictators have leveraged, and continue to leverage, anti-immigrant and other racist viewpoints in order win support and push their twisted ideologies on their entire country. Trump is, without question, an example of a would-be dictator who’s in the pocket of billionaires and is appealing to Christofascists in hopes of going back to the White House in lieu of jail.

    That being said, articles like these which insinuate that Trump’s campaign is primarily about racism is a repetition one of the key, fatal mistakes that Hillary Clinton’s campaign made in 2016. It’s also not a good way of fixing the “us vs. them” environment that allows the oligarchs to keep thriving.

    While it’s hard for us to understand their motivations for doing so, some voters in the black, Latino and Asian communities still support him. It’s irresponsible and short-sighted to pretend these voters don’t exist, so it becomes necessary to concede that while many of Trump’s supporters are indeed racist, there are still some legitimate ideological reasons why certain people continue to embrace conservatism. And if you actually want long-lasting change in this country, you have to engage with those people and not dismiss them as being just as deplorable as the rabid Trump cultists.

    Granted, it’s getting harder with each passing week to justify supporting Trump for non-racist reasons, as seen by the fact that some conservative influencers have started walking back support for him. That being said, there remains a perception (no matter how invalid) that Kamala Harris is an insider, a cog in an inherently corrupt political machine, while Trump is the guy who’s going to drain the swamp. I know perfectly well that Trump is way more corrupt than Harris, but the ‘drain the swamp’ narrative sticks because some Democrats have been just as subservient to the oligarchs as Republicans. Even when they controlled the White House and Congress, they didn’t undo the Reagan-era tax cuts for the wealthy, or cut the billions of dollars in spending on defense contractors, or pass any reforms that would make our government more accessible to non-elites (like term limits or ranked choice voting).

    The status quo isn’t working out too well for the majority of Americans, and the Democrats represent a continuation of that status quo. A lot of these disaffected Americans just want to see the system “shaken up” in hopes of seeing an improvement. The “vote them all out” sentiment is popular for a reason. Hopefully, those people realize we already gave Trump a chance in 2016, he didn’t fix a damned thing, and it’s not going to be any better for them if he gets a second term. However, Democrats in the U.S. (just like Labour in the U.K.) are going to have to deliver some significant improvements in the quality of life for the common folk instead of serving the oligarchs first and foremost. Otherwise, we’re just going back to conservative leadership in a few years, and the next would-be dictator might be less incompetent than Trump was in staging a coup.


  • As the article points out, the original lyric from American Idiot is, “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda.” They changed it to, “I’m not a part of a MAGA agenda.”

    …Can this even be considered a significant change? It’s more like a modernization of the original language. Whose agenda did they think Green Day was previously referring-- oh, right. They probably didn’t do any research, did they? It’s just manufactured outrage, so they can pretend that the left is just as vile as they are.


  • This was the right decision in 2023. Making it now, a month before the DNC, means they have completely circumvented the primary elections and robbed voters of their chance to select the nominee. We’ve gone from millions of people having a voice in the nomination process, to a group of less than ten thousand, and that is disenfranchisement on a massive scale.

    Don’t get me wrong, I would vote for a dead raccoon before I’d vote for Trump. But we deserve better than to have Trump’s opponent hand-picked on our behalf like this. I’ll vote for whoever that is, but we should absolutely give the Democrats hell once this is all over. The duopoly in our elections needs to end, if they can’t be trusted to honor the basic fundamentals of the system.


  • The complete collapse of our government by having so many terrible, terribly unqualified people into positions of power they shouldn’t hold.

    So, this is the part of Project 2025 that I don’t think gets enough attention. The Heritage Foundation wants to fire thousands of government employees in the civil service, and replace them with political appointees loyal to Trump. There are lots of reasons why that’s a bad idea, but from a purely practical standpoint, there’s the simple fact that you are never going to get thousands of people qualified enough to replace them.

    It was bad enough when it was just the senior leadership of government agencies who were largely unqualified. They were incompetent, but you had all these experienced people underneath them, keeping things running despite the dysfunction. Not that it wasn’t confusing at times-- by 2020, the turnover in Trump’s cabinet had gotten so bad that no one was quite sure who was serving in what leadership role, and whether or not they were doing so legally.

    Anyway, take the dysfunction of 2020 and multiply it by a factor of however many civil service employees they’re going to fire. Yeah. That equation works out to: absolutely nothing getting done.

    Of course, it’s entirely possible that the Trump Loyalty Committee will be terrible at their job of vetting prospective appointees, and most of these experienced civil service employees could manage to keep their jobs by lying their asses off. It’s not as if Trump is actually going to be paying attention. His handlers are just going to tell him it was a great success no matter what happens, he’ll grunt in approval and go back to throwing hamburgers at the wall.



  • And her reasoning was, of all things, that the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith was illegal. I would have expected her to say that relocating the classified docs to Mar-a-Lago was an official act, done while Trump was still President, but no. She based this idiotic decision on even shakier legal ground. Doesn’t this mean that the appointment of Special Counsel David Weiss was illegal too? Shouldn’t Hunter Biden’s conviction be expunged, based on Judge Cannon’s logic here?










  • You run the risk of being ostracized by a conservative social group if you share any opinion that contradicts the teachings of the church school. I’m straight, but the hicks I went to high school with shouted every homophobic slur they knew at me anyway, because my opinions sounded “gay” to them.

    That being said, you could tell her that the church has held opinions in the past, which they decided to change when we learned more about the world. The church persecuted Galileo for suggesting that the Earth revolves around the Sun. They called Leonardo da Vinci a necromancer for studying human anatomy. And 98 years ago, Christians wanted to hang John Scopes for teaching evolution in Tennessee.

    Basically, if you can’t tell her directly, you can at least suggest that the church is not infallible when it comes to certain topics. Again though, people will consider you subversive even if all you’re doing is relaying pure, historical facts. There’s no safe way to contradict a zealot.



  • The United States has very similar problems. The oppressed are encouraged to work within the system if they want things to change. They go to the system, and find it broken. So they protest, and the moment the protests turn violent-- or appear to turn violent-- the oppressed are labeled as being impatient or perhaps even deserving of being marginalized. Cries for freedom are willfully misinterpreted as the howling of barbarians, and used as populist propaganda.

    Like you, I don’t know what it’s like to be treated like a second-class citizen in my own country, but I do know that racism doesn’t go away simply because the government declares that it won’t be tolerated. It’s hard to come up with any specific solution to this particular problem though, when it’s a conflict that humans have struggled with for their entire existence. Back in 2020, people were just trying to get the message out that black lives matter. Even when taken as a plea for solidarity with no specific policy demands, somehow that statement proved controversial.