I had a part time job at a UPS warehouse in Tennessee when covid hit. We got a new manager, and so they gathered everyone in the warehouse together into a small break area, everyone was right next to each other and nobody was wearing a mask, and the manager gave us all a speech about how much he cared about our safety. There were TV screens in the break areas that had been set to display information about covid safety guidelines that were being blatantly violated.

The same day, my supervisor informed me of a new policy: they’d had too many people “faking” being sick and calling out, so from now on you have to come into work even if you’re sick, and they’ll decide if you’re sick enough to go home. I with I had gotten it in writing because what she told me was definitely illegal, I actually called OSHA afterwards but it was my word against theirs. This was the only time I’ve quit a job with no notice, I remember it clear as day, I told her, “People are dying” and she replied, “I have a business to run,” and I said, “I don’t care.”

I wanted to set the damn building on fire. I was fortunate to have saved enough to take time off work because I lost all confidence that there was anywhere around me that would be a safe place to work.

“Democrats in the House and Senate [are] focusing on lowering your costs, dealing with affordability. Republicans, led by Donald Trump, are focused on spending treasure and, God forbid, lives on military adventurism overseas,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer told reporters this week, just before the chamber voted to advance a resolution halting further attacks on Venezuela without congressional permission.

Lmao Chuck Schumer is trying to play this card? Hey, how did you feel about throwing away countless lives and money in Iraq and Afghanistan? How about all the money we’re spending to help Israel commit genocide? Maybe if some of that had been spent on making things more affordable, we wouldn’t be in this situation.

If Chuck Schumer actually believed that for a second, we’d be hearing about his resignation and suicide. It’s just a soulless ghoul saying whatever voters want to hear, just so long as it doesn’t involve bashing ICE.

315 grants were terminated in October, ending support for 223 projects worth approximately $7.5 billion,

Deciding that the government had violated grantees’ rights to equal protection, Mehta only ordered a return to the status quo, reinstating seven grants totaling $27.6 million.

Let’s be clear, that’s $27.6 million out of $7,500 million. 99.6% of the cuts still go through.

Oh, my bad.

"What’s exciting is that the research is clear that these cash transfers are helpful, and the big concerns that they might disincentivize employment or contribute to inflation were not substantiated in our evidence review.”

PN3’s recent evidence review looked extensively at various programs that put money directly in the hands of families, from studies of unconditional cash transfer (UCT) programs in Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas, to existing dividend-based unconditional cash transfers, to child allowance pilot programs throughout the U.S. Two of the largest and most data-rich programs the researchers studied were the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Payments, neither of which was intended to be an anti-poverty program but each of which have measurably reduced poverty among their constituents.

In 2021, in what amounted to the first and so far, only nationwide case study of the impact of cash transfers, the Biden administration temporarily expanded the federal child tax credit (CTC) through the American Rescue Plan Act. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the expansion lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty. For Black and Latino children, official poverty measures shrank more compared to the decline in rates for white children. The temporary cash infusion also had notable benefits on mental health, again with a greater difference observed with Black families. An additional $100 per child per month reduced depression symptoms in all low-income parents, with Black parents seeing nearly twice the reduction in depression and anxiety symptoms as other subgroups.

One study found that the monthly cash difference of $313 per month led to some changes in infant brain activity, with infants whose mothers received $333 monthly showing higher “fast-brain” activity compared to babies of mothers receiving $20 monthly. The brain’s mid- and high-frequency bands are associated with cognitive skills, which indicates that cash transfers may improve development of these skills, though more research is needed to draw a direct link.

According to an analysis at Washington University in St. Louis, child poverty in the U.S. costs up to $1.03 trillion a year in loss of economic productivity, increased health and crime costs, homelessness and maltreatment. Cash transfer policies seem like a bargain in comparison by helping mitigate social challenges and reduce government spending in health and human services.

When it breaks. I don’t remember how long I’ve had this one but it was made in 2019.

This is why I keep telling people that Trump is not an anomaly and is not new. I think a lot of people on here must be too young to remember the Bush era.

The line from the Star Wars prequels of, "So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause" captures how it felt and was clearly about Bush’s policies. If Trump is worse than Bush, it’s only because he’s standing on the shoulders of fascist giants. And tbh I still regard Bush as the more dangerous of the two because he was able to command such overwhelming support, there was zero opposition in government anywhere, at all. He could ride his bike with no handlebars.

The war powers act gives the president the authority to invade any country on earth, he only needs congressional approval for operations lasting longer than 30 days. Congress also gave the president blanket authorization to invade any country he thinks might be harboring terrorists, following 9/11, with this absurd, fascist decision to grant the executive dictatatorial powers passing the Senate 98-0 and the House 420-1 (and with nearly 90% of Americans supporting Bush at this time). Trump’s actions in Venezuela therefore, while a brazen violation of international law, are fully within US law. It’s virtually impossible for a president to actually violate US law through military actions abroad.

Any attempts to rein in these ridiculous laws should be fully supported and are badly needed. Even if Trump ignores them, it can then be used to discredit him and prove that he is acting against the will of the people.

Having more guns.

Might want to ask the indigenous people how effective pieces of paper are at holding back the US military.

In the US you get two options and both are completely uninterested in “firming up the laws” and reining in the power of the executive. Trump can do basically whatever he wants, because after 9/11, Democrats fully supported measures like the Patriot Act that vastly expanded executive power, and when Obama came in after Bush he did nothing to hold him accountable for war crimes and torture, while continuing to use the same tools for largely the same purposes. No president wants to prosecute a former president for illegal activity because that would open the door for being prosecuted for their own illegal activities, which they all perform.

It doesn’t really matter if the average American cares about guns or about something else. We’ve never been given an opportunity to vote on the power of the executive just like we’ve never been given an opportunity to vote on Venezuela or Palestine or Iraq or Afghanistan or Yemen. The powers that be decide these things, all the voters do is choose which face they want doing it, which aesthetics and justifications will be used for decisions that have already been made.

In my experience, and maybe some churches are different, you’re just supposed to pretend to take it seriously, if you actually take it seriously you’ll find yourself very unwelcome.

If I went around saying, “I’m a Christian, so obviously that means I oppose the Iraq War,” or, “Christian teachings clearly call for opposing the war and anyone supporting it is living in sin,” I would get a lot of strange looks. Swap out the war for abortion or gay marriage and it would be perfectly normal. Between those subjects, Jesus was constantly talking about nonviolence and said nothing at all about abortion or homosexuality.

If you base you beliefs around a good faith attempt to understand Jesus’ teachings, you won’t be accepted in those circles. Heck, even if I based my beliefs around the Catholic Church’s teachings, for example, going around insisting that being “pro-life” requires you to oppose the death penalty, I would be out of place in most Catholic circles, considered annoying at best.

I still don’t really understand what I would’ve had to have done to fit in there. Somehow, a lot of people seem to see morality as something that is almost exclusively related to sex, and the idea of applying morality to things like war or executions is a completely foreign concept. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to arrive at that point but it clearly wasn’t from a good faith reading of the gospels.

I think you have to have the same emotional impulses somehow, like, to really fit in you need to have a drive to tear down people with more exciting sex lives than your own, and that was something I had no interest in. So it was either keep calling myself a Christian and try to reclaim that label, which would just confuse everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, or find a better label. So, now I just tell people I’m a communist.

My dumb ass thought people actually believed Jesus’ teachings.

9/11 happened and 10 year old me was running around going, “Well, now obviously is the perfect time to turn the other cheek, be good to those who hurt us, and forgive not just seven times, but seven times seven times.”

Strangely, all the people who had taught me those things didn’t hear the words I spoke but apparently heard something along the lines of, “Allahu akbar, America deserved 9/11, death to America, Bin Laden did nothing wrong, and I’m happy about dead firefighters.” They extremely did not like me trying to apply what they had taught me in that context.

I think I must be autistic or something because it seems like everybody else picked up on some sort of subtle understanding that none of that stuff was meant to be taken seriously or applied to real life, and I’m just over here like an absolute dupe who didn’t pick up on the joke.

Clinton and Kamala both tried to appeal to that “near right” and failed. Social pressure isn’t going to magically disappear, I can agree with the point about guns but that just ties into what I’m saying. If anyone on the right can be appealed to, it’s the isolationist, pro-gun libertarian types. You will never win the nationalists, they already have a party that is giving them exactly what they want.

I heard a lot of younger people saying Trump was the peaceful, anti-war President.

This is such a big factor, imo.

The democrats refuse to budge from this neocon position of “benevolent interventionism.” and Trump has been able to attack them over both parts of it, which allows him to appeal both to libertarian types who want to stay out of conflicts because “the government doing stuff is bad,” and to nationalist types who want to just overtly plunder everywhere (with his actual policy being the latter). Meanwhile the democrats just cast anyone who disagrees with them on foreign policy as a Russian bot. They’re stuck in the early 2000’s where there was overwhelming bipartisan support for “bringing democracy” to the Middle East, and they seem think if they can just pick up the “moderate Republican” neocon voters who definitely exist and still believe in that project, then they’re sure to win.

The effect is that they fail to capitalize on the ideological divisions that exist on the right. The actual Republican voters that there would be a chance of peeling off are the libertarian anti-war types, but that would require actually trying to appeal to anti-war voters instead of treating them with contempt.

There’s a slight issue with this way of thinking.

Problem: The two party system is preventing us from enacting reforms

Solution: Use the two party system to enact reforms getting rid of the two party system, so we can start enact reforms.

Problem: My car won’t start.

Solution: Drive down to the mechanic and he’ll fix it so you can start driving places

Problem: Asking the king nicely hasn’t been an effective method of stopping him from taking all our grain.

Solution: Ask the king nicely to institute democracy so that you won’t have to rely on asking the king nicely to make things happen.

Y’all always remind me of the fable about the mice who all decide that it’d be much better if the cat had a bell around its neck so they could hear it coming, but then one mouse asks, “How are we gonna get the bell there? Who’s gonna tie it?” and nobody has an answer.

I don’t think you can compare trump to either Bush or any president in recent history.

Hard disagree. Bush was absolutely terrible, and the only reason he gets whitewashed like this is because he’s no longer the current thing. If anything, Bush was much more capable of enacting his fascist agenda because he was able to get bipartisan support for it. It Trump is worse, it’s only because he’s standing on the shoulders of demons. Bush introduced the surveillance state, extrajudicial detention, and started multiple wars of aggression.

you might not get free elections that far into the future by allowing trump back in.

We don’t have free elections now. We will always have some form of elections though, virtually every country does. Elections are very useful to any aspiring dictator. Give the people a way to feel like they can work within the system and they’ll be much less troublesome, and less prone to engaging in other mechanisms of influencing things that could actually be disruptive.

On top of that, American elections are extraordinary for controlling the people, you get two groups of people who are both adamantly defending different ruling class candidates, hating each other’s guts, and trying to push anyone with a different perspective into that paradigm. It’s one of the most ingenious mechanisms of population control ever designed. Imagine, if we didn’t have elections, you’d not longer have any sort of beef with me at all, and we could be discussing the most effective ways of disrupting the state.

Also, Trump’s nearly 80. Octogenarians are not known for overthrowing governments and establishing dictatorships, on account of how they’ll die soon anyway, even if they had the energy and mental acuity for it. It’s much more likely that someone after Trump will.

Just as the far-right did not originate with Trump, it won’t end with him either. As soon as he’s out of the picture, then you’ll be talking about how uniquely terrifying the next person is, and how you can’t compare him to Trump who wasn’t really that bad and just had a different vision for how to improve the country, or whatever bullshit you say about Bush. Or if you personally don’t, then people will, perhaps young people who weren’t really aware of how awful Trump/Bush was. And you will be right, about the threat being awful and terrifying. But as long as you insist on just treading water, the threat is only going to get worse and worse forever. That path is 100% certain to lead to fascism.

Good luck on rooting out the secret Reds lurking behind every corner, trying to corrupt an impurify your precious bodily fluids.