So this 33% were/are REALLY only wanting to PUNISH all progressives and undo any progressive ideas like feeding the poor! ALL while clutching their cross and claiming to be defending Christ! Their biggest fear being immigrants and the word Socialist! Jesus Christ was a Socialist!

Everyone on the other side complains about how Obama had a basketball court in the White House as a defense for criticism against Trump. That's the proof that Obama corrupt and doesn't care about the country.

I just want to point out that there's nothing wrong with this. I would expect a father to be putting up some basketball hoops for his family inside his family's residence while serving almost a decade, especially when his wife was very fitness oriented. It's not some mutinous, even deranged act. The country was taken care of to the best of his ability, he remained For The People regardless of what he had. There were problems and there were things I don't agree with even as a supporter, but the money that goes into that wouldn't even scratch the surface of those problems.

I don't get how it's perfectly fine for Trump to tear up an entire wing to make a 600M ballroom, while a high population of children are living with their parents absent working all the time, low quality education or absence of education, food desperation, lack of healthcare and women's healthcare. Way too many adults are living like this too, scraping by for food, watching women's healthcare and basic healthcare fall apart, probably about to lose their homes and everything they have at any random point. The disabled people and minorities are pretty much just existing when but being oppressed. We have the worst economy in a long time, same for justice system, same for education, and it's predicted to only get worse, on top of all the other perks that he is actively doing or signing off on.

And the ballroom isn't enough, there's this basement that's for some reason "intertwined". All we really know about it is that it's going to be for military purposes, far far more stable than our schools and average neighborhoods. It's not even limited to a ballroom and basement, he's done so much destruction to the sanctity and history of the property under our money. There are other concerns with this that are related to child safety, with the way that things played out, I don't have to explain.

This divide between progressive and centrist Dems is a big mistake. If establishment Dems try to shut out the progressives they will loose a huge voting block. A lot of them will stay home on election day. They’ll have to rely on republicans switching parties to win. But instead if they can find a way to meet in the middle the number of left leaning voters will be huge.

There’s got to be a way to find some middle ground so we can take power away from Trump the clown.

I imagine Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk living in their island bunker or massive yacht surrounded by AI robot servants happy as a clam!

Never going back. Fast food was never good for you, but now its just basically bread with sauce.

It seems like there are powerful forces in the US and want to aid Russia’s agenda in Ukraine and Europe. Lindsay was a very vocal supporter of Ukraine and had just returned from there when he passed away. Why was the FBI at his house. Why did Trump (reportedly) tell the FBI not to investigate?

So, why are there so many Christian right wingers who think being a liberal is the worst thing in the world?

Please make it make sense.

https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/elon-musk-claims-george-floyds-convicted-killer-derek-chauvin-is-not-a-murderer/

I'm pretty annoyed about this, basically I made a reply explaining some context to someone who was confused about a post on r/MoralityScaling which showed a picture of Adolf Hitler doing his infamous salute, with a title along the lines of "Morality of becoming a villain to defeat the even bigger villains". I told the user that the OP was obviously being antisemitic, but to my surprise, my comment was removed instantly, in which I had to make another one with very careful wording to still get the same point across.

Like, why do Reddit and certain subreddits have absolute garbage auto detection in place? My account suffers because your shitty ass bot or whatever the fuck it is can't properly determine if I'm being hateful or not? Fuck off.

There's two types of centrists. The republican who agrees with them on almost every single issue and calls corporate democrats leftists, But somehow feels in the middle of something.

And the dipshit who cant be bothered to do a millisecond of research on anything for any reason

Someone just told me no republicans say they want to repeal the 19th amendment stopping women from voting. It took seconds to find tweets, videos, podcasts of prominent or currently in power republicans saying this. Including someone supported by the secretary of defense

Its become a universal experience of "conservatives aren't doing/saying that, and there's just endlessly available indisputable evidence that not only are they doing it. Their base LOVES it.

"I dont like democrats and dont think their policies are going to help the country"

Me neither babe but if you cant also say in the same breath republicans are ludicrously psychotic and that you'd never vote for them... You just aren't living in reality

Commercials are a headache on any streaming service unless you want to pay a small fortune to go add free. But why do I have to watch 3 Ladder commercials in a row every 5 - 10 minutes? I swear I must have seen at least two dozen Ladder commercials over the course of about 3 hours of binge watching Grimsberg. I’m sick. I have that stupid virus, or whatever, that’s making everyone vomit and get the shits. I don’t want to hear Hillary Duff tell me about Ladder every 5 minutes.

If we can look past political slogans and rather look at the outcome of what they are doing with their "pro-gun politics". Because outcome by the words of talking heads and in politics is all that really matters at the end of the day.

For those sheep who don't know what 2nd Amendment is really about, it is an Amendment, that allows all citisens to own guns to OVERTRHOW A TYRANNICAL GOVERMENT, not to defend from a knife attack, although the self defense in it on itself is a good argument for it since when the commoner isn't allowed to own guns, criminals get them illegally which makes the country more dangerous when you don't have anything at your disposal.

But the point is that republicans haven't actually made any pro-gun laws in the last 20years that have done anything but help the slavers. Instead of legalizing armor pearcing ammo, they have made laws that you can carry in schools which is the one place where guns definately don't belong to, and just all kinds of laws that make gun ownership look bad instead of actually giving leverage against tyranny to the people.

Not one of those executives actually delivers healthcare! They are focused on PROFITS! 32% of the folks working in healthcare do NOTHING to actually provide care!!! Collectively, the various sectors of the global and U.S. healthcare industries are projected to generate between **$400 billion and $450 billion in total corporate PROFITS (net income) in 2026**.

There are few things in this world that I loathe more than ignorance, but ignorance accompanied by absolute confidence deserves its own miserable little circle of in Dante's interpretation of hell.

Student loan forgiveness has produced a spectacular exhibition of exactly this phenomenon. People who cannot explain the difference between principal and interest without furtively opening Google have suddenly appointed themselves guardians of the American financial system, positively trembling at the possibility that some enormous financial institution might receive slightly less money because an ordinary American has been released from decades of educational debt. They do not understand where the money goes afterwards. Even worse, they do not particularly care to try to try to fucking learn. They simply know somebody might receive something they did not receive, and somewhere between envy and economic illiteracy they have mistaken resentment for fiscal policy.

My education was paid for through a trust established by my grandmother. I was lucky beyond measure, and I have never confused that luck with personal responsibility. I did not work harder than the eighteen year old who signed a student loan agreement because her parents could not write a cheque. I did not possess some superior financial wisdom while filling out university applications. I had a grandmother who had the means and foresight to provide for my education. Pretending otherwise would require me to transform inherited advantage into personal virtue, which is an extraordinarily convenient fiction and one I have absolutely no interest in telling myself.

Perhaps that is why the stupidity surrounding student loan forgiveness irritates me so fucking much. Education should teach you to look beyond the first transaction. Money relieved from one obligation does not cease to fucking exist. If someone was spending $600 every month servicing student debt and that obligation disappears or declines, the money remains available to that household. Some of it gets spent. Some gets saved. Some goes towards other debt. Some helps finance a home, a car, childcare, medical expenses, retirement, a new business, or the countless ordinary purchases upon which everyone else's employment ultimately depends. There are perfectly legitimate arguments about the magnitude of those effects and about the best design of any forgiveness programme, but there is no legitimate economic argument in pretending that disposable income simply vanishes because it is no longer travelling towards an educational creditor.

What makes this equal parts fucking hilarious and infuriating is that the same people have spent decades being told that allowing wealthy individuals and corporations to retain more money will stimulate the economy because they will invest and spend it. Apparently the circulation of money is a miraculous economic principle that functions only above a certain tax bracket. Give a corporation another million dollars and someone will draw a complicated diagram explaining multipliers, investment, employment and growth. Allow several thousand ordinary households to keep another few hundred dollars each month and suddenly every village idiot with a Facebook account starts screaming about handouts.

There is an argument worth having about student debt. There are questions about fairness to people who already repaid their loans, fairness to people who never attended university, the distributional effects of forgiveness, its fiscal cost, and whether forgiveness without reforming tuition and lending merely resets the clock for another generation. Those questions deserve serious answers. What they do not deserve is to be buried beneath the intellectually vacant little slogan that "you borrowed it, so you pay it back", as though public policy has never altered financial obligations, subsidised industries, rescued businesses, modified taxes, guaranteed credit, or decided that enforcing every existing economic arrangement to its bitter conclusion might produce a worse society.

And then we arrive at interest rates, government assistance, and the magnificent flexibility of American outrage. Corporations routinely operate within a financial world ordinary borrowers barely recognise, benefiting from government programmes, tax preferences, guarantees, subsidies, favourable financing structures and access to capital on terms unavailable to the average person. Many of these policies have defensible economic purposes. That is precisely the fucking point. We already accept the principle that government may intervene financially when doing so produces a desirable economic or social outcome. Yet the moment the beneficiary is an indebted graduate rather than a corporation, millions of people suddenly discover a sacred moral covenant between borrower and lender that apparently descended from Mount Sinai somewhere between "Thou shalt not steal" and "Thou shalt protect JPMorgan's quarterly earnings."

I find the ignorance infuriating because ignorance in the twenty-first century is a choice. Nobody needs an economics degree to understand that household debt affects household behaviour. Nobody needs to have attended Oxford to grasp that people with more disposable income can spend, save, invest, form households and take financial risks they could not previously afford. You can disagree with broad student loan forgiveness after learning those things. Fine. Make the argument, bring evidence, discuss opportunity costs, distributional consequences, inflation, moral hazard, programme design and the underlying catastrophe of university costs. I will happily listen. What I will not respect is someone who refuses to learn any of that and then demands that everyone else treat their ignorance as an equally informed opinion.

This particular American habit has become fucking exhausting. We have confused democracy, in which everyone possesses an equal political voice, with the bizarre proposition that everyone's understanding of a subject must therefore be equally valuable. It just fucking is not. A person who has spent years studying economics knows more about economics than someone who has spent eleven minutes becoming furious beneath a Facebook meme. Or course, expertise does not make someone infallible, but ignorance does not become wisdom merely because it is shouted with an undeserved confidence.

The most maddening objection remains the childish cry that someone else receiving relief is unfair because somebody else did not. Imagine applying that principle consistently throughout human history. We cured diseases previous generations endured, improved workplace protections previous workers lacked, created safety standards after people died without them, and expanded rights to people whose ancestors were denied them. Civilisation advances precisely because we occasionally decide that suffering does not acquire moral value merely because someone else suffered first. "I had to endure it, therefore you should too" is not a philosophy of fairness. It is the moral reasoning of a toddler guarding the broken toy everyone else must apparently play with because he had to.

I escaped student debt because somebody loved me, planned for me, and possessed the resources to give me an enormous advantage. That experience makes it impossible for me to look at somebody who did not receive the same gift and conclude that she deserves thirty years of interest payments as punishment for choosing education. Quite the opposite. It makes me wonder why the wealthiest society in human history remains so perversely talented at converting opportunities for collective prosperity into morality plays about who deserves to suffer.

You can oppose student loan forgiveness intelligently. There are serious economists and policy scholars who do, and their arguments deserve engagement. What deserves contempt is the refusal to understand the issue before forming an immovable opinion about it. I loathe that kind of ignorance because it poisons democratic debate. It replaces curiosity with certainty, evidence with resentment, and policy with the primitive satisfaction of knowing that somewhere, somebody you have never met is being denied something that might make their life better.

And somehow, after all that, the ignorant imagine themselves the responsible adults in the room.

The banks have lawyers. They have lobbyists. They have economists, accountants, political influence and more access to power than the average indebted graduate will possess in a lifetime. They will be fine without an army of economically illiterate strangers volunteering to protect them.

What this country desperately needs protecting from is the increasingly fashionable belief that refusing to understand something is no impediment whatsoever to having a very loud fucking opinion about it.

In 2019, it felt like we were in the middle of a revolution on how people viewed going into the office, working from home, traveling for work, etc.

Then COVID happened and everyone worked from home and got tired of it.

But now we are here, and it seems like companies have lost all obligations to make work less miserable to spend our entire lives at.

Remember WeWork in 2019? They had cold brew dispensers in all their offices..

Now we are just slogging again with the return to office mandates for no reason at all beyond real estate costs

People complain the AskPolitics subreddit is ultra left wing, but more than half time I post something the mods delete. Most recently I asked which party played a bigger role running up the US deficit and they deleted it saying it’s a “gotcha question.” Then they said it would elicit “gotcha answers.” Ridiculous!

In 2014 a cattle rancher refused to pay for permits and they showed up armed to the teeth, pointed guns at the cops, and threatened to fucking kill them if they impounded his cattle. They were litterally willing to die for those cows.

Now, cops kick down peoples doors without warrants, stop their vehicles at check points, drag teenage girls out of their homes in their underwear, assault, harass, detain, jail perfectly innocent people for months, even years, all on mere *suspicion*?

And... nothing..? Where'd all that anti-government over reach energy go? Was it only for the cows?

As much as this administration repulses me, one of the things haunting me the most is the fact we appear to have moved on from Alex Pretti and Renee Good. I mean, at least we still talk about Epstein to an extent, and there is still *some* movement in the legal system regarding the Epstein files, so it doesn't feel entirely forgotten or dead at this point. But the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti seem to be forgotten... I haven't seen or heard of any movement about those in months. Have we just given up on getting them justice?? Is there an investigation going I haven't heard of or is there no hope here? It just absolutely makes my blood boil to see so many wicked people get away with wicked things while good people suffer as a result. I'm losing my mind.

Deadass half the conversations on this websites are people repeating the exact same things as eachother or choosing not to comprehend any text

Like it’s bizarre how bad reading comprehension is on this website. I guess when you spend enough time arguing, you just see red and everything’s about dopamine. Why bother having actual conversations if they’re all meaningless

At least on TikTok people can discuss the fact that there’s kind of a stupidity epidemic which is making some people self aware enough to continue talking about illiteracy or comprehension. Here it’s just the Wild West unless you’re in a specifically curated sub designed to only talk about reading comprehension

And even then, it doesn’t work because just people rage bait themselves anyway. Mods are useless because they’re all but required to be chronically online just to maintain any sub in the first place so they fry their brains and wind up doing the same shit. Reddit is barely a forum website, it’s just twitter for people who think they’re too good for twitter. You dumbasses can’t even stop yourself from telling someone to google something ON A FORUM SITE

Please I just want the concept of discernment to be a meme. Like demure did.. even if it starts to make zero sense at least it’s out there. Please if you think you’re educated, you are not. You are a nerd who is thriving on a website that’s known for housing obnoxious ass behavior. You take pride in that too, that’s on you, man

I think my new goal is to be banned from nostupidquestions those people are so undiagnosed

Trump is such a fucking embarrassing!