conditional_soup
@conditional_soup@lemm.ee
- Comment on Facepalm on multiple levels 12 hours ago:
Let me speak from experience that there is no such thing as an ironic Nazi. Every single “bro, it’s just a joke lol” is followed by a silent “…unless?”
- Comment on Facepalm on multiple levels 12 hours ago:
Uncritical support for this.
- Comment on Facepalm on multiple levels 12 hours ago:
The AI image really sends the fucking campiness. It’s hard to imagine that fucking bozo even living to a third term. I’m honestly surprised he hasn’t got sniped by atherosclerosis yet.
- Comment on Is there any hope for Ukraine to survive as an independent state now that trump is desperately wishing for a peace treaty with Russia, even bypassing Ukraine? 1 day ago:
I think we are. If you can think of something awful for us to do, we’re already on our way to doing it. We’re probably a month out from shooting garbage and nuclear waste into orbit on spaceX rockets.
- Comment on Is there any hope for Ukraine to survive as an independent state now that trump is desperately wishing for a peace treaty with Russia, even bypassing Ukraine? 1 day ago:
Probably not, I’m afraid to say. Our government has been compromised, and the republic is dead, we will have no more legitimate elections and it’s likely (imo) that our legislature will soon dissolve. I wish I could say that we were ever the America you were taught about, but it was always a farce. I’m almost to middle age and I’ve never once seen my country try to be the place it tells itself it is. It’s always been a place that beats it’s chest while sitting on the couch, that steps on the weak and the poor to satisfy the rich and the powerful. I’ve always believed we could do better, that we could be the place we tell ourselves we are, but we never choose to do the hard work to be that place.
Though Ukraine will likely persist as an ulcer for the remainder of Putin’s life. The only good news is that we still haven’t cracked immortality, and one day probably quite soon, Putin’s number will be called.
- Comment on Anon compares Harry and Ron 1 day ago:
Potatofamine carbomb
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 2 days ago:
Okay, here we go
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The US is fucking YUGE. Historically speaking, it’s very, very difficult to keep countries that span huge geographic areas together. There seems to be some fundamental limit of size per population that can be tolerated before your cultural and geographic differences start becoming significant enough to start forming separate identities. The US has like 14 such subregions, and each one has a little different idea of what “America” means to them. A strong single national identity is not the default case here, you’ve got to really work at it or have some big unifying cause, which we no longer have.
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We already have pre-fabricated governments in the form of state governments. State governments tend to be pretty strong, in the sense that they tend to have a whole lot of administrative capacity, much stronger imo than what I believe of European provincial governments. The whole original idea was that the states were mostly independent states joined together under a trade federation and it’s government. Of course, it hasn’t been that for a long time, but that’s the root that we grew up from.
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We have almost no history of state on state violence, and most Americans do share some sense of national identity. Maybe not a strong one anymore, but it’s there. I think most people would be pretty shocked about the idea of going to war with another state.
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This isn’t really an ideological separation, as much as the federal government is just, like, vanishing in a puff of smoke. There’s a lot of states where they’ve depended on the federal government’s administrative capacity to handle stuff, and that’s just going away in a real haphazard, scattershot way. At some point, these states will ask themselves “if we’re handling all this shit ourselves, what the hell are we sending the Fed tax dollars for?”
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- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 2 days ago:
Okay, I’m not trying to be shitty with you, I’m actually interested. Why don’t you make your case for when you think the US republic died?
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 2 days ago:
The problem that I keep seeing here is people saying “well, he can’t do that.”
Stop that. He can do it because nobody’s going to stop him. I mean, you surely don’t expect that little shit Mike Johnson to tell Daddy Trump no. The constitution itself isn’t going to rise up out of its case like Godzilla and crush him. The judiciary isn’t going to come and enforce their decision in person. That just leaves the military. They’re either going to coup him, or not, and I’m expecting the latter case.
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 2 days ago:
X
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 2 days ago:
Well, it depends on how you define the USA. You mean the Republic of the United States of America? Yeah, no, that’s dead. It is currently dead. It died when the SCOTUS made the president functionally beyond criminal prosecution, and everyone has just kind of been playing weekend at Bernie’s since then (though the Trump administration is dropping the pretense pretty quickly). Don’t get me wrong, it’s been dying for a long time, but that was the exact moment it was declared dead. No matter what happens, the republic as we knew it is dead and is not coming back. Nobody believes in the constitution anymore; among our leadership there are only either those who are in a hurry to destroy it, or those who are unwilling to defend it. I think a lot of the American populace haven’t believed in the constitution as an effective charter for governance for a while, too. Imo, we’re less than a year from the legislature being dissolved in some fashion of another, unless they just hang on like some ceremonial vestigial organ.
What we get to decide now is what comes next. That’s what nobody’s sure about. Are we going to have a middle-east style theocratic government? Italian fascism? Maybe the military defends the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic and we re-form the republic? German fascism? Neofeudalism? Peaceful balkanization? Hot balkanization? COULD IT BE?! BY GOD, it’s the ghost of Lenin with a steel chair! Or maybe we’ll get something entirely new? It’s frankly impossible to guess while we’re living in it. I think cold balkanization is both the most likely and most optimistic scenario. IN THE MEANWHILE, yeah, you’re still going to see all the window trimmings of the USA; the maps will still say USA, we’ll at least nominally still have the things that make America America (like the constitution still sitting in its fancy protective case, as though the GOP didn’t just wipe Trump’s ass with it), it’ll all look weirdly normal while they make the republic’s corpse do a funny little jig.
- Comment on where?? 3 days ago:
Idk, bro, I’ve never seen Earth above the horizon.
- Comment on where?? 3 days ago:
I lead stargazing classes with my city parks, and I can tell you that it’s pretty much impossible to find earth in the night sky.
- Comment on Got these (notes) provided by my school.. 6 days ago:
Agreed. I can turn extrovert on when I need to; it’s a skill you can learn, like anything, but it’s not my default mode.
- Comment on Anon watches her boyfriend play videogames 1 week ago:
Nah, they love scary games, they just think STALKER sucks. Hits different when the NPCs call me “loner”.
- Comment on Anon watches her boyfriend play videogames 1 week ago:
Be me, playing STALKER 2
Spouse hates it
That’s the whole story.
- Comment on When we explain to other people how our capitalist system works and they recoil in horror 2 weeks ago:
Right, yes, but the joke is that it’s said in such a way as to sound like an outright fabrication.
- Comment on This is getting bad. Like, really really bad. 2 weeks ago:
The cops will not be on our side. It’s going to be hard to fight them, and harder if we’re unprepared.
- Comment on This is getting bad. Like, really really bad. 2 weeks ago:
This is it. Definitely not all veterans, but all the veterans I personally know still remember that they took an oath to defend and uphold the constitution against all threats, foreign and domestic.
- Comment on When we explain to other people how our capitalist system works and they recoil in horror 2 weeks ago:
So, the joke here is that you’ve got someone, presumably a Chinese official, saying a reality about America in a startling way that sounds like completely cooked up propaganda but isn’t.
- Comment on When we explain to other people how our capitalist system works and they recoil in horror 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Why do smokers specifically seem to be disproportionally bad for littering? 3 weeks ago:
They’re a huge source of microplastics in the environment. Tl;Dr they readily break down into microplastics and small plastic filaments.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34139503/
FTA:
Cigarette butts are dangerous pieces of plastic, but are usually not handled properly and consist of more than 15,000 detachable strands of plastic fiber. Discarded cigarette butts may be carried into rivers and lakes, and finally into the ocean. The plastic fibers will continuously release microplastic fibers into the environment. About 300,000 tons of potential microplastic fibers may enter the aquatic environment from this source per annum. Additionally, toxic substances, such as nicotine, carcinogenic tar, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, have strong toxic effect, which will cause serious damage to aquatic organisms.
- Comment on Why do smokers specifically seem to be disproportionally bad for littering? 3 weeks ago:
Cigarette butts are a huge source of microplastics in the environment. All my homies hate that guy.
- Comment on Is anyone planning on doing anything about trump creating a concentration camp at guantanamo bay? 3 weeks ago:
Okay, real talk, human being to human being. Things are bad enough as it is. You’re clearly not happy. I saw elsewhere that you said you’ve been trolled since 1 am, and that’s a super shitty sounding feeling. I release you from any charge to respond, you win the argument. Why don’t you take a break, go get some sunshine, drink your favorite hot drink, and call or text a friend, maybe one you haven’t spoken to in a while? Take care of yourself, take a break from social, come back if you want to when you’re feeling better.
- Comment on Is anyone planning on doing anything about trump creating a concentration camp at guantanamo bay? 3 weeks ago:
Yes, actually. Edward Snowden risked hanging for treason by leaking the NSA mass surveillance program for just this reason. He’s the last true patriot, imo, and I wish he’d stayed and made the government take him to trial over their blatantly illegal program instead of ending up as a trophy on Putin’s shelf.
- Comment on Is anyone planning on doing anything about trump creating a concentration camp at guantanamo bay? 3 weeks ago:
Dude, fascism didn’t spring into being fully formed out of nothing on the dawn of January 20th, just as the Roman Republic didn’t crumble in a day. It’s been decades and decades of baby steps towards this point, until we finally got to where things could get much worse all at once. Yeah, Kamala wouldn’t have made gitmo into a concentration camp, but she wouldn’t have dismantled the machinery built by the war on terror and the war on drugs that the fascists are using right now. Let’s not oversell it; at best, she would’ve kicked the can down the road another four years. Our past leaders all had chances and made commitments to close gitmo, and they had the perfect authority to do so, and then decided that they could wield the tools of fascism wisely rather than destroying them so that a future fascist wouldn’t have them just laying around. This is on all of them, too.
- Comment on I am in the US and its gotten very political but as pretty much a peon do I just tune the stuff out thinking its fear mongering? Or should I closely pay attention to it? 3 weeks ago:
I’m almost certain that the US is about to Balkanize. The federal government has done a terrible job of responding to people’s actual needs for a long time now, and often even runs directly counter to those needs. They’re starting to fuck with blocks of states and we’re seeing more and more states that are aligning with each other against the federal government on issues. Dumbass is stuffing all of the departments that could do anything about it (the alphabet boys, the DOD, etc) with incompetent stooges and firing the actual competent people that believe in the national mythology and had the connections to foster what interagency cooperation there was. I expect that we haven’t seen the last of these folks. It’s a complicated thing we can talk more about, but generally, I think US balkanization is probably a good thing for everyone but the billionaires, so I hope they enjoy their footguns.
As such, I wouldn’t recommend paying too much attention to federal stuff; skim the headlines and make sure you and yours aren’t in danger, but it’s clear enough there’s not much we can do to affect federal policy unless we’re billionaires. Instead, start meeting other people and working on making the world you want to see locally. City council meetings are a great place to start networking towards that goal. Get to know your neighbors and (crucially) owe them a favor or gift them stuff (eggs from backyard chickens, cookies you baked, whatever). People are hardwired to form bonds to those whom owe us or we owe, and it’s very, very common in many non-capitalist society to consider an equal payment to be offensive (because you’re saying “I want nothing else to do with you”). Got a garage sale coming up? Plan with your neighbors to do a big sale together and get more people to show up. See someone working on something? Ask them “how can I help?” instead of “can I help?”. One of the biggest problems with the US is the lack of community bonds and (therefore) networking, and it’s easier than you think to change it. It’s very cheap and takes less time than you think. I’m begging you to just give it a try, and if you really hate it, then you’re off the proverbial hook.
- Comment on Is there any way our of the US political spiral? 4 weeks ago:
2028 might as well be 3028, feels like
- Comment on Is there any non-zero possibility Musk was not doing a Hitler Salute? 4 weeks ago:
I’ve met ironic Nazis before. Let me give you a spoiler, they’re actually just Nazis at the end of the day. The ironic bit is just a mask because they’re too chicken shit to admit it to themselves and others.
- Comment on Is there any non-zero possibility Musk was not doing a Hitler Salute? 4 weeks ago:
Nope, I doubt Putin had a thing to do with it. Musk is the richest man on earth living in the USA, he’s the closest you can possibly be to being completely immune from all consequences short of having bulletproof skin.
