The specimen initiates its mating dance, signaling its intention to bone.

I don’t gather your meaning.

There is a drastic increase in autism cases, the cause is “increased testing for autism”.

Republicans argue liberal judges are blocking Trump’s agenda, while Democrats say courts are striking down illegal orders.

Well, when their agenda is composed primarily of illegal orders…

On an unrelated note I, another scary leftist, am so triggered every time I see a Tesla. Right wingers switching to EVs really makes me feel like an owned lib.

As a white cis-man with many friends who are vulnerable minorities, this is a serious concern for me. I don’t use social media, all my political criticisms are here or some other anonymous format (“anonymous” is relative, but at least there’s nothing subversive directly connected to my name). I could engage in overt civil disobedience, but if I keep my head down and blend in I have the means to shelter people if things really start escalating.

Really more of an anti-substance, ain’t it?

All morning, nauseous with a migraine.

The unlucky 10%

Respect, kindness, charity, patience, honesty. Self-expression, cooperation, curiosity, tenacity, cleanliness, punctuality. Duty, ambition, citizenship, compassion, and self-respect.

Only a wannabe, but my parents were pretty bad so I’ve put a lot of thought into it.

Beer is fine for me, wine and liquor are off the table.

Okay. Not much better, but I’m honestly surprised how well it did on that text.

I’m no bankruptcy specialist, but I asked ChatGPT:

Why Five Bankruptcies? A Money Laundering Hypothesis

• 1. Casinos Are Naturally Lucrative

It’s hard to lose money running a casino unless:

You’re mismanaging the business,

You’re overleveraged and using it to siphon cash, or

You’re deliberately disguising the source or movement of funds.

Given that Trump’s casinos consistently lost money—even when the market was booming—it strongly suggests ulterior motives or systemic inefficiency.

• 2. Russian Oligarchs Needed Offshore Avenues

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian oligarchs and other post-Soviet elites:

Rapidly acquired vast fortunes in murky privatization deals,

Faced political risk and international scrutiny,

Needed to move and clean billions in capital out of Russia.

Trump’s businesses, struggling to get U.S. financing after his early bankruptcies, were uniquely positioned to accept this foreign capital, often in cash or through opaque shell companies.

• 3. Casinos as Laundromats

If one were trying to launder money via a casino:

They might funnel money through gambling “wins” or inflated contracts.

They might run the casino at a deliberate loss while extracting capital via salaries, management fees, construction overbilling, or licensing deals.

If the casino “fails,” the money is gone, but whoever needed the cash moved or cleaned has succeeded.

So from that view, the bankruptcies were not a failure—they were the feature.

• 4. Trump’s Own Statements and Patterns

Trump has admitted:

He preferred working with “cash buyers” for real estate, particularly from Russia.

He made money even when the casinos lost money—through management fees, consulting, branding, and leasing.

These mechanisms would be perfect for skimming or channeling illicit funds into legitimate revenue streams without drawing too much scrutiny—especially in the less transparent 1990s and early 2000s.

• 5. Known Red Flags

The Trump Taj Mahal was fined in 1998 for “significant and repeated” money laundering violations.

Trump’s businesses became increasingly reliant on foreign money, with multiple reports of shell companies purchasing luxury condos in all-cash deals.

Post-Soviet money has long been linked to luxury real estate in NYC and South Florida, especially when title is held in anonymous LLCs.

• 6. Bankruptcy as a Laundering Strategy

Here’s how it works:

Investors (possibly foreign or criminal) funnel money into a venture.

The business pays high salaries, construction contracts, legal fees, or licensing fees (some of which go back to the investor or are redirected offshore).

The business eventually “fails”—but the money has already been cleaned and moved.

By declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy rather than liquidation, Trump kept the businesses alive just long enough to extract value, then dumped the debt on bondholders and other investors.

• Conclusion: Highly Plausible

While there’s no conclusive public evidence to confirm it, the pattern of:

Repeated failures in a profitable industry,

Reliance on opaque financing,

Documented anti-money laundering violations,

Financial ties to Russian or post-Soviet capital,

And personal enrichment during “bankruptcies”—

strongly supports the theory that some or all of Trump’s casino ventures served as vehicles for laundering money, potentially from Russian oligarchs or similarly motivated actors.

Again, ChatGPT, so take that with a grain of salt.

1. Not everyone who opposes Trump and Musk is a Democrat, especially on Lemmy. Many of us are leftists who despise Democrats, just less than we despise MAGA fascists.

2. Don’t think a lot of cybertrucks are being driven by those on the left, they weren’t released until well after Musk showed his true colors. Every cybertruck owner I’ve personally encountered has been solidly MAGA.

I think by “Let ‘law enforcement’ deal with them” they’re referring less to the cost than to the functional unreliability.

It’s not a new idea, we just haven’t been implementing it. And who said anything about pushing the liberal party left? It’s not about parties, it’s about politicians and their policies. Run third party wherever it’s viable, run Democrat where it isn’t, it’s really not that important what letter is next to your name. What’s important is your platform.

definitely isn’t a distraction from organizing the working class into a force of its own

That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. What is “showing up to every election to vote for progressives” if not organizing the working class? What kind of organization do you think has a lower barrier than voting? If we can’t organize the working class to vote one day every couple years, how on Earth do you expect them to jeopardize their safety and livelihoods with more direct action?

And even then, those approaches aren’t mutually exclusive. Voting in no way prevents you from organizing. In fact, strategically voting against the fascists explicitly helps the push to organize. It’s much easier to protest when the reaction is a smug “I’m talking now”, than when the reaction is having your degree retroactively nullified or, y’know, getting deported to an El Salvadorian gulag.

Okay? That doesn’t really affect the relationship between philosophy and fact.

The one who wants fewer genocides, how is that even a question?

But much better would be using those 20 years to empower progressives at the local level, so they have the experience to get elected to the state level, which gives them the experience to be competitive at the federal level. No one is saying to just support the Dems forever. You can spend 1 day every 4 years helping the Republicans lose, and spend the other 1460 fighting for better options. I recommend it, in fact.

Voting lesser evil slows the descent into fascism while we build the progressive base necessary for a progressive to win the general election. No one is saying the lesser evil is good, we know it’s evil, that’s why we call it the lesser evil. But it is the lesser evil, and when you have a choice between two evils winning, the lesser evil is preferable.

Voting for a third party with no chance of winning, or not voting at all, does not give us better options. Building a successful third party takes time and many, many wins in smaller elections. Personally, I’d rather spend that time under a neo-liberal regime than a Christofascist one. They’re both bad, but one is unambiguously worse.

Vote progressive for every local office you can. If there are no progressive options, consider running yourself or convincing a politically inclined friend to do so. If we all show up for every single election, and flood every level of government with progressives, maybe in 20 years we’ll have a better choice than 9 genocides vs 10 genocides. But every Republican win helps gerrymander and disenfranchise us further from that goal.

I would say no. Philosophy is, loosely speaking, a collection of useful techniques to turn facts into models. Though one could make the argument that “Cogito ergo sum” is a philosophical fact

Occam’s razor isn’t really a fact, it’s just a reasoning strategy. It doesn’t claim that the simplest explanation is true, just that when choosing between competing explanations that make identical predictions, the one that makes the fewest assumptions is preferable. But sometimes those additional assumptions are true, sometimes the simplest explanation is not the correct one, in which case Occam’s razor in fact takes you further from the truth.

Still a very useful principle, but I wouldn’t really call it a fact.