Biden: Hey here’s half a trillion dollars back on student loans, a trillion dollars on climate change, unions and manufacturing jobs, and a bunch of other stuff, all paid for by big increases in corporate tax

USA: Yeah but corporations are still doing bad stuff though

USA: We pick Trump

Biden: Alright fuck you then

Yeah. Anyone can look weird as hell for one instant of a freeze-frame, I’m not sure how much it means. But he definitely looks weird.

Is it really not obvious who the bottom is?

https://www.newsweek.com/bannon-thought-thats-hitler-when-trump-rode-golden-escalator-author-1677386

Like a lot of fascists, he tends to be dishonest about what he really means depending on what he thinks he can get away with, but he means Hitler.

I mean, they took over the country and then more than half of Europe. Hitler fought in the infantry and wrote a whole book. I’m not saying they were geniuses and some parts were a pure clown show, especially after Hitler took over for real, but Trump literally just shuffles around shitting in his pants and doing whatever the last person who talked to him convinced him is a good idea.

Yeah. I haven’t looked at them yet for that exact reason, but the argument is making sense to me.

3blue1brown is phenomenal. It taught me how to understand a bunch of things better than studying them academically did.

“Journey to the Microcosmos” is wonderful.

ZeFrank has quite a lot of accurate biology if you want a humor channel in there.

PBS Eons is great.

I haven’t checked them out, but I feel like things like Nebula or CuriosityStream may be becoming better sources for this stuff than YouTube is. YouTube seems like it is becoming a chess, and I see no real reversal of that in the cards any time soon.

The difference being that the Nazis were often competent people, and there was not the same massive base of crony capitalism with its fingers firmly enmeshed around every single area of government like there is in the US currently.

I won’t say it’s impossible, and I think they might be able to leverage social media to construct the exact same mass movement of loyal followers with the exact same horrifying results, but I don’t think the type of economic populism that did it for the Reich is feasible for the MAGA people to pull off. Definitely not with Trump at the helm.

He’s definitely talking about Hitler. He might have FDR in mind for reasons of plausible deniability.

And just like that, Steve Bannon learned about all the structures of liberal democracy that have thus far been stopping crony capitalism from squishing him like a worm on the sidewalk.

There’s a reason he isn’t hosting his little podcast in Russia or Algeria. He’s not 1% of strong enough to survive without the cushy protection afforded to white men in America who are broadly aligned with the rich people.

Apparently he will “have to uproot my life and relocate. While I can handle whatever comes to my front door, it is irresponsible to expect my neighbors with young families to share that burden.”

Hehehe. Well, you were live-streaming. Why didn’t you go out and handle this guy? That would have definitely been good publicity.

It is a sign of our current reality that I have no idea if this is real or not. My instinct is that it isn’t, but anything is possible. You could have showed me a Ring screenshot of a man in a bunny costume holding a dildo and a pumpkin and I wouldn’t have ruled it out.

“Much worse” is understating it by quite a bit.

And “more of the same” is also wrong, for that matter. It’s spilt milk at this point, but Biden reduced inequality by quite a lot, and raised low-income wages by quite a lot. Both of those are almost un heard of in American governance. All everyone remembers is that eggs cost more now, but that’s not all that’s been happening.

You should read the part of the Robert Hur interview transcript where Biden talks about deciding to run for president, and talking to his family about it. It’s wild. It’s very, very different from how I imagined it.

The whole thing is actually pretty fascinating. I can’t remember exactly where that discussion is, honestly, but I can probably dig out the page number if you’re interested in reading it.

https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=5273

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americans-wages-are-higher-than-they-have-ever-been-and-employment-is-near-its-all-time-high/

Not that it matters anymore, but the last four years were highly unusual in that income inequality actually went down. That basically never happens in American politics, and it was a result of deliberate and specific policies to help working people, which also basically never happens.

There’s a little bit of a mislead in that “higher than they’ve ever been” statement. There were times when unions were strong when the situation for working people was clearly better than it is now. But as far as I can tell, the historic high average is actually true right now, stemming from a combination of high-end wages dragging the average up on a scale of decades, and then also Biden’s policies pulling things up at the bottom end for the last few years.

The average American was led and instructed to blame the pain they were feeling on Biden/Harris, and led to the conclusion that Trump would be a sensible solution. Neither of those had anything to do with reality, but they saw it on the news and social media, and lo and behold they bought it.

That same average American who made that decision is about to lose their health care and experience a massive downturn to their economic situation, and all on purpose. You can blame the Democrats for being plutocrats who mostly don’t give a shit about working people, it’s true. But at least they weren’t deliberately trying to wreck things, and Biden for whatever reason was actually trying to help. Trump really wants to hurt people. They’re about to get a whole new chapter of “the same,” and they’ll have to be very lucky for it to be limited to economic devastation much worse than anything they experienced so far.

The whole thing of “they took him for Burger King” is a red herring. Cops are required to feed you. Some departments have policies about always checking if a new arrestee is hungry, and getting them some fast food if they say yes, so their attorney can’t say later that they were coerced during questioning because they had been denied food for whatever amount of time.

I don’t think it’s Ruud, I think it’s a little clique of the Lemmy people who stepped forward to take it on day-to-day. Ruud doesn’t seem active on Lemmy.

Trying to rig the jury to be sympathetic to your side is one essential aspect of good lawyering. The rules are theoretically just objective filters applied to a random sample, but in practice it is a pure contest of skill between the two legal teams.

I don’t think this is true. Or… I guess it is true, but I think the security benefit from not running JS is overhyped. Most vulnerabilities in the browser don’t involve the JS interpreter, since its security gets a lot of attention and there are a lot of other components which are equally capable of compromising everything as well. You could use Tor to keep your identity private, use an ad blocker to remove tracking which doesn’t need to involve JS, keep up-to-date on security which is critical to do anyway, and then disable JS on top of that but at that point I think you would be getting around a 10% improvement in security or something, when the other factors are a lot more significant.

Maybe I shouldn’t say it’s always a bad idea, but disabling it and then going around complaining about sites that don’t work sounds a lot like a self-created problem to me. A lot of sites don’t work without JS.