Nah, the whole album is excellent, but track 3 was what put me on a path beyond my parents’ classic rock collection and towards getting into things like Cut Chemist and J Dilla

The Great Gig is gorgeous, but On the Run changed my understanding of what music could be

Also, if you think enough about what a lie even is you can rationalize a lot. Am I a self motivated and highly organized person? Well, nobody’s ever described me that way before, but maybe I could start being one right now, stranger things have happened. And if it all blows up a few months down the line because I couldn’t manage to get my shit together, I’ll take my couple of paychecks and tell myself “well, I meant to do better” and that will be at least 51% true and I will have a couple of paychecks I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Alternatively, just find a way to sell your weaknesses as strengths. e.g. “I’m not always super organized, but I’m real good at dropping in to a chaotic situations on short notice and getting the essential things straightened out quickly because my disorganized nature has forced me to learn those skills. I’m not self motivated, so you don’t need to worry about me undermining your plans and vision for this place with my own, making decisions makes me nervous so you do that stuff and I will see that your decisions are carried out.”

A bandaid that lets wealthy people get an ego boost and a tax write off

Yeah, my “millennial who is still pissed about stupid shit they read during the Clinton and W administrations” might be showing there

I mean, is she any less qualified than, like, Maureen Dowd, or Ezra Klein, or George Will, or any one of the dozen other lint-brained pundits that get paid thousands of dollars to write their idiotic drivel for billionaires in newspaper op-ed columns?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is a measure of average wage growth right? I think it’s possible that there are big variations between geographic regions and industries and income, so for some people wage growth more than outpaced inflation but for a lot of others it didn’t.

choose to extend a war in Ukraine and send 100 billion to Ukraine while their own are struggling.

a) they didn’t start that war,

b) out of all the stupid shit our federal government spends money on, why fixate on this one?

c) rich people and companies are under-taxed anyway, so it’s not like we’re hurting for potential revenue. We have more than enough money to fund Ukraine’s defense and take care of poor people.

what people live under is what matters

That much I agree with and have known since George W Bush won the popular vote in 2004 despite there being no WMDs in Iraq and all sorts of civilian casualties because gas stayed cheap

As far as this “being the last election”, there’s too many safeguards in our governmental system and too many armed people (in both the civilian and military population) with deep vested interests to ensure real elections still happen for that to change.

I’m not so sure considering there’s a good argument to be made that this wasn’t a “real” election, given all the voter suppressing bullshit that happened. I think we need to ask ourselves what a “real” election is and how we will know if we lose them, because I don’t think even our good elected officials are going to tell us about it (because they think, arguably correctly, that living under a stable autocracy is better than the chaos that could happen when a mass of people reject the legitimacy of the government).

Bad times are not end times.

This is true and cannot be said enough. The world doesn’t end, it moves on to the next struggle, and there is always a way to make it better. It might be very small, but there is always something to do. Like, yesterday I ended up up hanging out with some very sad old ladies who volunteered for my local League of Women Voters chapter and got them to laugh a couple of times at how ridiculously bad at bridge I am, and that was the little bit of good I could do yesterday. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

I have to be honest, I am panicking a little bit.

I don’t have any great insight to offer, but - yeah, me too

I don’t think you’re wrong but I also have to add that I won’t accept that we just can’t run black women for offices for that reason

e; I should have read this thread further, it looks like other people are already discussing this

(whose first act as president was to essentially absolve the previous administration and Wall St of their many sins in case anyone forgot how moderate he was).

I think this very thing led to the 2010 tea party wave election that fucked us for a decade and a similar thing has happened here, except it was the seeming inability of the Biden administration to hold Trump and his supporters accountable and not going after corporations making record profits during an inflationary crisis (“So how would you recommend they have done that?” Great question, I will let you know when I have a good answer).

e;

Well, all that and the obvious election interference from Musk, Putin, and the ontological inability of traditional media not to platform literal fascists.

This absolutely played a huge roll (also, voter suppressing laws passed by GOP governments), but I don’t know how to change any of that without having a Democratic party that consistently wins elections first

I’m not gloating, I just said I didn’t want to seem like I was because I’m not trying to antagonize my political allies. I’m sorry if it seems like I am because that really is the last thing I want to do. I want Republicans to lose elections and I’m just putting forth a theory of why they didn’t last night that seems persuasive to me because I’m still operating under the assumption we’ll have more elections (which, like, very TBD, but either way I think building a coalition of like-minded people will be important).

I mean, this wasn’t the friendliest opening statement and I don’t blame anyone for being in a bad mood to begin with this morning

They tried to do a themed Among Us game, but when they removed the ability of crewmates to criticize each others’ votes it just made the imposters win every round

e; That was a joke (probably should be obvious, but I’m not trying to spread disinformation out here)

I didn’t realize the anti-immigrant sentiment had gotten to this level in so much of the population

I think the causation is backwards here, a lot of low engagement voters just assume that the best policies are somewhere to the left of whatever the GOP wants and to right of whatever the Dems are pushing for, but they keep thinking that even as the Dems move to the right.

Dems were thinking if independents saw that they’d respect the Dems willingness to compromise or whatever, but Indies saw that and just decided “Oh, I guess immigration really is a problem like the Republicans were saying all along, even the Democratic party thinks we need a border wall now.”

e; an attempt at better phrasing

Survey methodology is described in detail here - https://www.prri.org/research/challenges-to-democracy-the-2024-election-in-focus-findings-from-the-2024-american-values-survey/#page-section-12 (archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/FtPGJ)

Lots of great nightmares fuel here, but I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned The Lottery yet. The end of that story still makes me feel absolutely nauseous.

“Imposing any kind of environmental regulations in businesses would destroy the entire economy, concludes team of economists paid by those businesses. Coming up next - are you doing enough to protect your family from dangerous toxins in our environment? We’ll tell you what a dumb and lazy piece of shit you are, after these ads!”

There are more than three things

Not everything that is worth discussing has a source. Abstract ideas and hypothetical scenarios (among other things) have their places in rhetoric and communication.