I never get a good answer regarding why they think a government should be ran like a business. They don’t fill the same niches, and the Constitution clearly lays out the role of government:

…form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…

Nothing about consolidating profits into the hands of a few, nothing about profits at all, actually. Nothing about buying/manufacturing and selling goods or services

And why do they always trot out the worst possible examples of businessmen as who they want to run said imaginary corpocountry (Trump is self explanatory, but Romney’s entire ethos was buying companies and bankrupting them)?

If you’re pre-born, you’re fine. If you’re pre-school, you’re fucked

-Carlin

I want to hope that it’s this

I sell steel, and we have been telling everyone to buy as much of their estimated annual usage as possible right now in order for us to hold the pricing, especially if it isn’t mill runs and double especially for exotic alloys.

It’s going to fuck over so hard the small machine shops that are prevalent everywhere that just do whatever jobs get called out and don’t really have the sway or size to be able to negotiate a better deal.

The same machine shops that were flying Trump memorabilia.

Ohio has Issue 1 regarding gerrymandering…

…which the Ohio Supreme Court already told them to unfuck and the GOP was like, “nah, fam”…

…and which LaRose obfuscated (just like he did with the abortion amendment) via confusing language and outright lies (under the guide of free speech, apparently) to trick people into voting No

So, a No vote keeps the same crap we have now where a majority of the state has no voice. A Yes vote gives everyone a more equal say

I have seen so many signs in rural Ohio where people have taken sharpie to their Trump Pence signs to alter the letters to Trump VAnce

They are ingenuitive I guess but also like who holds on to political yard signs until the next term…

is my current spam inbox on my texts messages. I engage sometimes a la the top text, but also my name isn’t Renay and I’ve had this phone number for many many years

My sister in law is a Republican, but doesn’t like Trump, but also buys in to a lot of what he says (her entire personality is “pro-life”)

Yesterday, she’s talking to my wife, who is one of those people that keeps her conversations on speaker when she’s in the house:

SIL: did you guys ever vote early

W: yep, last several elections

SIL: I think I’m going to test them and vote on my mail-in, early, and in person on Tuesday

Me: you will go to jail for that…

They just gobble up whatever they hear in their echo chamber. Nevermind all the Republicans who have gone to jail for voter fraud

Also SIL: well the people who died two years ago that vote won’t go to jail

W: yes but the people that voted in their place did…

I’m just so exhausted trying to understand remotely where they come from

It doesn’t help that LaRose just writes whatever he wants to on the ballot issues (ie summarizing the abortion amendment down to more words than the original amendment, obfuscating this whole gerrymandering thing to make it seem as though a Yes vote will force gerrymandering into our already-gerrymandered state)

I’m surprised he didn’t just say “vote No and we will give you a free puppy and migrants will do your laundry for a year”

Omg can you imagine if Rogan fiees up a dutchie and Trump, feeling like he can’t be outdone since he’s the “alpha male,” gets way too fucked up and let’s all his bullshit out like “yeah I’m only doing this for the pussy, Joe. I love pussy bigly you know I used to grab it accordion hands”

I may also be fucked up on the dutchie

Vince should hang and so should Linda (both for a number of things)

They knew about it, fired everyone, then rehired them

But also TKO purchased them much more recently than these events, and the DOJ knew about it after it happened and went after him for steroids instead. It’s stupid bc there’s only a handful of people left who could (rightfully) face anything on this, but I don’t think TKO is one of them? Can someone ELI5 this?

Behind the Bastards did SIX whole episodes on VKM which is a great listen

Guild Wars 2

Maybe like 5-10 mins of Grim Dawn here and there

In the tabletop space, my group is recording season 3 of our podcast and this season we are playing Mausritter, and it’s a blast

This is pretty much the only video game I play like I’ll hop on Arkham Knight or Grim Dawn or literally anything else for maybe 30 mins and I’m like… Nah Mechanist go BRRRRRRT

Wife and I both are currently finishing SotO storyline, already did Janthir so I guess we’ll try and get sky scale after the story

2300+ hrs since pre launch and I literally haven’t done half of what the game has to offer

This a lot but also they grew up in the time before their hero did away with the Fairness Doctrine, so when they were formative and watching Cronkite and Rather et al on TV, it wasn’t obscured through an echo chamber opinion piece masquerading as The Truth ™️so they never needed to think critically about their news sources bc I’m sure most of what was reported was factual (albeit whitewashed I’m sure)

Some fast food places near me have started using automated ordering at the window ie a chatbot

Also order-yourself screens in the inside ordering zones

Which I guess is cool or whatever but some of us don’t mind human interaction and are fine paying .50 extra for a taco if that keeps someone employed until we can figure out how to move to a more automated world without fucking over those at the bottom

My job is doing outside sales in Ohio and my customer base is very much blue collar manufacturing. There is an obvious overlap in manufacturing and Trump supporters. A lot of places I visit have Trump memorabilia posted around - signs, stickers, flags, whatever.

The other day I was in a spot southeast of Columbus, near the Ohio River. I pull in to this smaller machine shop and see Trump signs in the windows and Trump stickers on the only car outside.

Go in and start chatting with the owner. Within 5 minutes he had already hit me with 3 hard Rs, going on a rant about the “criminals in office” and “if everything goes the way it’s supposed to November 5th” and “if it doesn’t there’s gonna be some problems on November 6th”. Had a Biden-Harris Target List hanging (idk if it was a list of people he wanted to kill or if it was one of those “people judge me for my shitty actions and I feel attacked” things).

He was carrying a Glock (not uncommon in a lot of these places that people open carry) and I’m not unfamiliar with firearms (I grew up in Kentucky and was in the Marine Corps), so in order to turn the conversation back to business and away from the racist pro-Trump conversation, I mentioned that the company I work for makes gun barrels for a couple high-profile gun manufacturers. Conversation went that way for a minute (he says it’s “bullshit that they try to take guns away from people like you and me (I’m a white dude so I guess we are the only ones supposed to have guns) when everybody knows the hard Rs and illegals are the ones committing all the crime”), then he says, “yeah, if you were a hard R, you’d be seeing this pistol up close”

Idk what my point is other than this guy is the type of dude that’s gonna vote for Trump and if that’s the people Trump supporters want to side with idk y’all need to look at yourself in a mirror or something.

Yes. Gravy Team 6 has spent generations fighting an asymmetrical war against Russia then the US and I’m sure they train every day at Taliban compounds or are remnants of the Republican Guard

Be real: they sit in their garage drinking shitty beer and jerking off their unsatisfying-to-anyone cocks to guns, trucks, and Trump

I mean, they did a great job Jan 6, when Babbitt did not comply, of fighting back and showing big ol tyrannical gov! /s

Jk, they ran like little girls as soon as the reality set in

Lemme see any of these fucks hump full battle rattle 15 miles before we talk about them staging an insurgent war against the US

Christ, I bet all but a handful can’t do a single pull-up

Yes, there are people in that culture that are capable of small-arms engagement, using fire and maneuver to close with engage and destroy the enemy, but the VAST majority of them are fatbody chodes who fantasize about living in right-wing Divergence or some other young adult fantasy novel series

Bruh the shit going on in Ohio this election cycle where LaRose has reworded (see also the abortion amendment where his “summary” was longer than the actual text of the amendment) the ballot to obfuscate the actual intent of Issue 1 to make people vote No which helps consolidate the Republicans grip

It’s ridiculous. My wife is relatively intelligent and she doesn’t understand the wording on the ballot and I explained to her that despite the reading, a No vote will continue the status quo. Like I’m a free speech kind of guy but just put the damn text on the damn ballot like don’t bullshit us Frankie!

Fuckin schmucks

Man of Steel Woman of Kleenex by Larry Niven is a weird take on this

Your guy isn’t in the inner circle of the highest ranking members of a party. Atwater was, and refer to the quote above. Rather than being overt, they couch the racism in other terms, but it’s the same terms.

Since the 1960s and the ERA and Nixon, racism and fear-of-the-Other has been intrinsic to the Republican party.

Like… Per their own words. In the quote I referenced. From someone in the inner circle of the Republican party, and who helped them get elected. How? By preying on the fear-of-the-Other ie racism

The current GOP is still entrenched in their Southern Strategy. To quote Lee Atwater:

Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “removed, removed, removed.” By 1968 you can’t say “removed”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “removed, removed.”

This plus fundamentalist Christianity is the basis of the modern GOP playbook, only now it’s Latinos that are the target, at least moreso than blacks

Sure we can’t distill it down to just racism since the GOP has become so entrenched with the religious right, so let’s just call it Christofascist Racism, but let’s not ignore 60 years of Republican racism and bullshit

Edit: Lemmy blocks the n-word even when it’s a direct quote, but Atwater was using that derogatory term for blacks in the above quote