Mayor Mamdani

Red Apple

They actually have nice ring to it.

I have a 50mm lens that came with the camera itself. However, it’s not great for long distance shot. I need better and wider lens for that purpose.

The thing is, define left. The American left can’t make heads or tails on who gets to be “the left” and what they want. The progressives or the neoliberals? Both factions may believe in social justice, but they deviate from economic policies. One believes in taxing the rich, the other in insider trading. One wants to fight fascism, the other would rather see fascism win to keep his/her own economic privileges and the plebs be damned.

I really need to buy a new lens for my camera. This meme explains it all for anyone who would like to ask me why I haven’t bought one yet.

Because enough people are racist enough to look the other way. Definitely maybe 30 years ago this would have been career ending, but I always say that the living memory of horrors of fascism is slowly evaporating, so the younger people don’t know well enough not to FAFO if they even entertain fascism at the slightest bit.

People have been dumbed down in those 50 years.

The said ball room donors incognito

I’m not trying to defend Obama, especially I abhor his drone warfare, but politics is known to be cut throat, and politicians are beholden to campaign donations. Election campaigning is an expensive endeavour, and those who could throw more money have increased likelihood of winning. There are exceptions to the rule of course, and sometimes those who spent less still wins, but the candidate increases his/her chances of winning by having more campaign funds.

With all that said, this means playing ball with the campaign donors and their lackeys, or else they will gang up on you. Obama is all too aware of this. Consider that Lena Khan’s aggressive FTC investigations under Biden on tech giants pissed off the oligarchs. Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos threw their weights on supporting Trump and now we are here. Apparently, Obama told Bernie in 2016 that he “can’t be the president and be the good guy”.

What is required is someone who is not afraid dip their hands into the mud and throw some, without being in the mud pit itself. People villainise Machiavellianism for good reasons, but evil don’t play by the rules and evil never sleeps. Why still be nice if they already stabbed you? You definitely need to be Machiavellian when the situation requires it. We had that with the Roosevelts, and the fact that they were already wealthy insulated them from being beholden to the whims of campaign donations of the oligarchs and their attack dogs, made them have more free reign to pursue actually more progressive policies. Some people say JB Pritzker has those qualities-- an already wealthy politician willing to be Machiavellian to pursue progressive policies, although I don’t know much about the man to warrant the observation.

Edit: JB not Joseph Pritzker

it was the blunt realization of how effective republicans were using racism to distract from wealth inequality.

Definitely. I notice my colleagues, who are kind of on the right, are more animated and vibrant talking about culture wars. Not once I have heard them talk about wealth inequality. I mentioned it in another post that it’s easier to stoke angry emotions towards one another.

I just had a mental image in my head of Hitler being furious after finding out that a Jewish employee he deems as “one of the good ones” is sent to the concentration camp. I can imagine the race against time by Hitler himself to save his employee before being locked in to the gas chamber.

Unfortunately, carbon capture is useless if we’re still burning fossil fuels for power, heat, and transport.

Carbon capture is actively harmful when used as an excuse to build new fossil fuel power plants.

Yeah, it’s a blank check to just produce more CO2.

Recession will happen in 2029 to celebrate the anniversary of the Great Depression.

I wasn’t aware about this with regards to mobile phone tbf. I know you are spied upon on your phone camera, but mapping the house with the phone? Do you mean like Dark Knight stuff?

It took me awhile to understand the punchline (god is saying the speed of light is 1 dumbass, not calling the person a dumbass as I first thought). Does that mean the speed of light is slow?

Based

And then when Dems get into power again, let them enable fascism all over again? They had 4 years to curb stomp fascism but they didn’t.

What’s practical is to primary progressives. “Perfection is the enemy of good” is a thought terminating cliché to accept breadcrumbs. Outside of US, it’s actually a common mindset among conservatives they tell to electorates to accept the status quo.

What I just do is if I’m not feeling it or feeling it, I will just do whichever is the strongest.

Fair play to the Democrats, but they are still untrustworthy.

Languages have their own quirks and characters, representative of the people’s cultural values and history, and express ideas not even present in other cultures. As many languages have to be preserved as possible for these reasons.

He’s preparing for when civil war comes…