That is widely recognized as when Republicans went off the deep end.

Obviously it wasn’t an overnight switch, although my phrasing is more often used for a sudden change, it was a gradual one over decades so I should have used something else.

But Democrats being better than Republicans on average for decades doesn’t mean every Democrat is good now. And every Republican being shit now doesn’t mean that was always the case.

with a 1995 bill outlawing large donations (which was passed in 2002

That only went thru due to Enron crashing, and was a bipartisan effort from McCain and Feingold that was already in the works, they just didn’t have the numbers till Enron’s checks stopped…

And it directly led to PACs…

Two senators, Republican John McCain and Democrat Russell Feingold, had a bill to ban soft money. When Enron collapsed in scandal in 2001, McCain and Feingold had enough support to make the bill law.

Feingold addressed the Senate just before the vote on final passage. “In this moment, we can show the American people that we are the Senate that they want us to be,” he said.

McCain-Feingold pushed soft money out of the national parties, and a lot of it landed in new bank accounts at small nonprofit groups. These were groups that couldn’t coordinate with candidates or party committees, but that shared the same partisan agenda.

https://www.npr.org/2009/12/25/121872329/decade-brought-change-to-campaign-finance

And the wealthy immediately struck back.

In 2004, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth crippled the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. And in 2008 groups challenged the integrity of both presidential contenders and plenty of congressional candidates. The attacks are meaner, but these groups — unlike the political parties — aren’t accountable to anyone.

That is widely recognized as when Republicans went off the deep end.

Get 60 Dem senators and watch it get fixed.

Don’t assume everyone with a D by their name is on your side just because at the national level these days everyone with an R is on the other side.

If we need 60 votes to fix this, and we have 60+, expect just as many to act like Manchin as needed to bring that number down to 59.

We need to treat primaries serious so that if the day comes and we have 60, it gets done.

Because if we have 60 and it doesn’t get done, it’ll crash turnout.

Just like it did when we were told Biden and 50 senators could get shit done.

A campaign donation is not a bribe. There is nothing wrong with spending money to help your party win in a system where that’s legal.

…

Legal is not “right”, especially when I explicitly stated that both parties are deregulating campaign finance.

Do you have any idea what the “victory fund” is? It’s bankrupting Dem state parties and the first election states received less than 1% of the funds they were supposed to.

See it works by “bundling” the max to a candidate and the max to a bunch of state parties, then the lump sum is sent straight to the DNC/candidate in a joint access account. Prior to this grift someone had to actually send that money to the state party for them to use.

But I mean…

Even just knowing what a PAC (let alone a super PAC) is should show you that political.bribery has been legalized.

Nothing wrong with an individual giving the ~3k candidate max, but Elong Musk just paid a quarter of a billion to get trump elected.

I didn’t read any of your comment past that first sentence, because it is such a fundamental misunderstanding that explaining anything else would change drastically after you get that. Before anything else is covered you need to accept the current reality that the only two political options in America are actively working to legalize political bribery

And it’s clearly effective, because it’s working on you…

It blows me away how many people think that problems are straight forward when in reality, they’re all intertwined together

I mean, it shouldn’t be surprising…

It’s the result of decades of propaganda, most people don’t notice anything political until at most a teenager. So most under retirement age don’t know anything else. And the ones who are old enough, can’t remember and are the main propaganda targets.

For most Americans we’ve spent our entire politically active lives where both parties bow to the wealthy and instead focus on wedge issues and pressured to vote for their “team” even tho they don’t want them, just to stop the other “team”.

Hell, I know all about this, have for a while. But I’ve still voted straight party D for decades because I legitimately don’t have a choice. The problem is conservative voters are by nature more likely to motivated by fear of “them”. There’s actual brain differences that can predict party affiliation with like ~70% accuracy, which is fucking huge when you consider ~1/3 of voters don’t vote or waffle between the two options.

Larger/more active amygdala? You’re a conservative and fear is a huge motivater.

Larger/more active prefrontal cortex? You’re a “bleeding heart liberal” who wants everyone to be taken care of.

It’s not like it’s set at birth, even well into adulthood your brain can change. But without completely going on another tangent, for decades now the part of our education system that develops the prefrontal cortex has been getting sliced off. So I don’t understand why people were surprised the people coming out of that system are more conservative.

We aren’t born well adjusted humans, it takes work to socialize us like any other animal. And we just stopped putting in the work.

Been happening since Watergate and the right decided instead of running good politicians, they’d make a propaganda machine to convince their voters that down is really up.

This allowed them to dive even further into corruption, and take a bunch of dirty money that helped them in elections.

The wealthy elites quickly realized political bribes were so cheap, there was no reason to bribe only one of the only two options.

That brought the rise of neoliberalism, and both parties only caring about the wealthy and deregulating campaign finance and journalistic integrity because both allows them to take more bribes.

Kamala had a ~$1,500,000,000 campaign in like a month and a half.

There is zero reason a campaign (much less one against a candidate as bad as trump) should ever cost that much. The money and time of modern campaigns isn’t spent on getting votes, it’s spent on raising more donations from the rich. They never reach a point where they meet the fundraising goal, even after the election I was getting spam asking to donate to Kamala/DNC. Because the “victory fund” nonsense gets rolled over to the next candidate chosen by the party before primaries even start.

Whoever the party backs in 2028 will be able to use that to compete in the Dem primary.

The whole thing is completely fucked, and it’s a game we literally can’t win with the DNC if they just keep doubling down. Their chair election is in about a month. Depending on how they vote we’ll see if the party reinvents itself, or if it’s truly a lost cause and we need a new party. One who’s focus is on getting votes and not as much money as possible

You can point out someone is wrong but still agree with the spirit of what they’re saying…

It rarely goes over well, but I do it all the time. And I’m pretty fucking progressive.

Like, if people honestly thinks their insurance took a vow to protect them, it needs to be corrected. They’re not saying it shouldn’t be changed, but the first step to fixing it is understanding where we’re at.

It wasn’t about genetics, IQ is polygenic, and really not inheritable because of that.

It was about memetic inheritance, the people who would have raised curious and motivated kids, didn’t.

And the ones who didn’t give a shit but liked boning and hated condoms had a bunch of kids they just sat in front of a TV.

It’s been a while, but I don’t think they blamed genetics directly, they just didn’t spell it out in detail and people who didn’t know what they meant have apparently latched onto what you said?

At least one other person in this thread anyways, which is weird, I’ve never seen this claim before. Is it a tiktok thing?

how do you factor in those that would rather be angry and hateful than think for half a second?

That’s never been new…

And it’s a very common coping mechanism. They do think, it’s just not productive and most people get frustrated and upset.

There’s plenty of people who have voted the same as me for president for 20 years, and when I try to explain that what we’re doing clearly isn’t working…

They just call me nonsensical names.

They’re not choosing to do that, they’re just failing to understand and getting upset about it. And with an IQ differential greater than 30 points, both people will be very frustrated.

The vast majority of people believe they’re the good guys and what theyre doing will help everyone. They’re just not smart enough to see the obvious result, so when people try to explain it, it conflicts with their current behavior and they reject it.

It’s your frame of reference.

For about 1 in 1,200 people, over 80% of the population is more than 30 points below them.

That’s the agreed upon difference where frustration is common, and even the lower IQ person will blame the smarter person for any confusion like in the movie. They literally don’t understand what the problem is, and will just throw out insults instead of of asking questions to try and understand.

Idiocracy was if a regular 100 IQ person went to where everyone was maxing out at the equivalent of 70 and everyone else was much lower.

But there’s always been (and always will be) the people who are already that out of place in their own time period.

It is not a pleasant existence.

When people “with money” are also against capitalism…

That’s rarely an argument for capitalism

Obviously bullshit…

They made the highest bid, no one else bid higher.

The judge said they should have tried to get Alex Jones to make an even higher offer…

And since they didn’t, it somehow means Alex Jones owns it still and is already broadcasting?

The US legal system is a fucking joke.

likely becayse they and their donors benefit from it.

It’s been a few days but I think the parent company is the 59th most spent on lobbying world wide.

And the most they gave this cycle was Kamala and then RNC.

if his parents/family were part of the 1% why would he simply not pay for his medical costs out of pocket?

At 26 you’re on your own insurance and he was a right wing tech bro, it’s a safe assumption he had the cheapest insurance, got hurt and bailed out, then got the “good” insurance and found out it’s shit too.

He had major back surgery and then other shit, it could have went over a million, and the wealthy stay wealthy for generations by understanding wealth is finite. At a certain point they may have cut him off for deductibles and/or insurance capped out.

He could just be pissed Doctor’s won’t investigate the issue, because insurance told them not to.

There’s a lot of reasons to be pissed at insurance, and a lot of reasons health issues bankrupt even well off families.

Luigi was from a life of privilege, parents likely firmly in the 1%, and was incredibly well educated in a high paying field.

He had to deal with the American Healthcare system on what was likely the worst possible plan (he read Any Rand) for one injury in 20s and threw his entire life away to merc a single CEO.

It really speaks to the two different America’s the rich and everyone else experiences. Like, it gets said all the time the wealthy couldn’t live like an average person. But they really can’t.

It’s a big reasons conservatives hate any kind of education and neoliberals are fine with shit k-12 and unaffordable college so onlly elites afford it. They both benefit from a large poor working class, and that’s easier when they can’t figure out what’s going on and have been treated like shit since they were kids.

Which is stupid because I is largely random. Who knows how many Einstein’s were born in poverty and never had a chance to learn shit?

It constantly drives me crazy that the Dem party just kinda forgot about education.

Sit where you used it last, then get up and walk to each place you remembered seeing it, in the order you think it was there last. Mentally picture it in the next place while going there, and that you’re carrying it to the next place When you get to the last place you remember, just go wherever.

It might not work the first time, and it helps if you do it randomly after thinking of something else for a while and “surprise” yourself with it.

But for most of human evolution being able to remember where something is, has been super important. So it’s not really handled by the conscious mind. So you got to try and trigger the more basic parts of your brain into realizing that the goal is ending up with whatever you’re looking for.

It’s like trying to intentionally put yourself on n “highway hypnosis” where the brain just runs on autopilot and handles shit.

I still want to know what admin explicitly told little_cow to remove mentions of jury nullification.

Cuz either they made it up in the moment (which is a problem in and of itself) or if an admin just had heard somewhere that you’ll get dismissed from jury selection for saying anything about nullification and thought that meant it was illegal to talk about ever…

i was asked to moderate anything that is illegal specifically mentioning “jury nullification” and “financially supporting” this has been changed now until a larger announcement is made

https://lemmy.world/comment/13830530

There might have been some language issues going on and it’s just a misunderstanding too.

I don’t know who would phrase it with “moderate” like that…

The billionaire owned media trying to make people care about that guy is gonna backfire horribly…

School shooters barely make statewide news these days, two people tried to kill a presidential candidate at months ago and that wasn’t even a huge deal, but a CEO who just walks around in public gets you nationwide coverage for days and the public on your side?

Especially with the shit that trump brings and the fact that Republican politicians are no longer the dog, they’ve jumped in the mail truck and started driving it…

I don’t think Trump can control his most extreme followers, and historically it’s pretty common for that fringe to turn against leaders if they don’t go all out.

There’s a good chance this guy ends up going down in history as the equivalent to Columbine.

A suppressor takes some of the “umph” out of it.

With a (semi) automatic the slide uses pressure of the bullet exiting to eject and load the next bullet.

Even with a silencer, a standard 9mm cracks the sound barrier, unless you use subsonic bullets that move slower, which exacerbates the problems cycling.

Now there is the Welrod pistol which requires you to rotate the back of the gun manually, this makes the gun honestly “movie quiet” where it’s literally not noticable. Someone makes a new model now with the same style of integrated suppressor, it even comes with a more regular style suppressor for. The “movie quiet” one has to be sent to the company and rebuilt like every 300 rounds.

Something like what is used in the video would still be a noticable noise, not just immediately recognized as a gunshot. It’s just a regular semiautomatic modern handgun with a suppressor on it.

Harris made a damn good effort to fill in

She most certainly did not.

She performed terribly in her last primary because no one liked her, and as soon as she got the nomination handed to her. She immediately and continually moved right until the election despite her numbers going down everytime she moved right.

She rais d 1.5 billion by selling out the party platform, but that’s not a “good effort” because all that money couldn’t buy back the votes she lost by moving to the right to get that money.

The only way someone could say she did well is if they care about dollars more than votes.

Wait, you think Biden/Kamala met the standard of Dem voters?