Which is why the whole “lesser evil is still evil” schtick bothered me so much. Like yeah, we know, Dems are evil. But Republicans are more evil, and the race was not close enough to entertain alternatives.

Looks like a reference to Dungeon Meshi. Laios is a character who had an almost autistic-coded love of adventuring and eating monster meat, and wields a mimic sword.

If there is a next time, I will absolutely say to vote lesser evil again. Without a workable alternative, that is the option. I still see no workable alternative. Longshot third parties with ~1% polling are not a workable alternative. Vague revolution composed of ~1% of the population is not a workable alternative. When you have a plan, with reasonable chances of success, we can talk.

If you didn’t vote for Harris, you accepted that allowing genocide and converting Gaza into a Trump resort was preferable to voting for slightly less genocide. The genocide has only gotten worse because Harris lost. Clownshow ethics.

“B-b-but, muh Marxist dialectic materialism requires that I vote ideologically and totally disregard all dissident opinions”

Because death is inevitable and if it’s going to happen anyway, I can use the brief time here to experience all that I can.

There it is. As far as we know, this is the one chance we have at existence. Revel in it.

Not from Cali, not a programmer (though honestly I could be).

Hard not to at 99, prospects really drop off after average life expectancy

Just like a stock portfolio, the economy is healthier if it is diversified. That means we need to bring back manufacturing

We have a diversified economy, including manufacturing. We have plenty of high tech, high skill manufacturing that pays well. There is no benefit to trying to claw back low low skill, low tech factory jobs that pay even less than teachers. No one’s portfolio is healthier because they move their investments from blue chips and Treasury bonds to penny stocks and meme coins. Blind, non strategic diversification for the sake of diversification is dumb.

Agreed. And phone calls have some horrible compression artifact that makes them unpleasant to hear.

We need to NOT accept that manufacturing is behind us. NEVER accept failure.

How is manufacturing being behind us failure, exactly? Does an engineer fail when they pay to eat at a restaurant? The service industry jobs that make up 3/4 of our GDP pay better than manufacturing jobs. Tariffs are like adding a restaurant tax to incentivize lawyers and doctors and engineers to cook at home.

Transitioning from low paying physical work to high paying mental work is success, not failure.

No no you’re thinking of Razor Gator which states scrape, sweep, wipe.

Tell them they only have authority on the US border or 100 miles from it.

Pretty sure they count international airports as borders, so within 100 miles of them too.

This is from the alternate reality where Rob Liefeld illustrated Watchmen

Wood for sheep?

Or at very least, preface your uninformed opinions with acknowledgement of the limitations of your understanding.

What is more though? Individual action has limited scope of efficacy. Coordinated mass action is pretty much better in every way. We need central planning and guidance. Authoritarianism succeeds as much as it does because there’s a central authority to distribute a common plan. We need a plan.

Dissent is a good starting point, but it doesn’t really accomplish anything. It can gather people around common grievances, but without an agreed upon redress to those grievances, all you have are a bunch of upset people who will each maybe do something. And that something probably won’t even be useful.

That’s pretty weak considering his record tbh.

there are some bad apples

What do bad apples do, Mom? What is the consequence of a few “bad apples” that needed to be immortalized in idiom? Because I’m pretty sure the saying isn’t “A few bad apples don’t negatively affect the bunch in any significant way”.

I swear, if keto cures cancer we’ll never hear the end of it.