Volunteering and child-rearing doesn’t really build a mansion or yacht now does it?
How much volunteer work is necessary only because the agencies that should have and would have done those things have been shut down to fund tax cuts for the rich?
Or even more directly because the problems being addressed are a direct consequence of government policies instituted solely to benefit a handful of wealthy donors?
Cutting taxes for the rich, raising taxes for the poor and increasing the national debt is an economic plan in the same sense that sitting on the couch eating frosting from a can is a diet and exercise plan.
I grow more convinced all the time that the Republicans and their wealthy cronies and patrons are actively and deliberately destroying the US.
The actual plan is to steal as much value as possible, ultimately triggering economic collapse, which they'll ride out in security and privilege somewhere else (Greenland, for instance). Probably engineer a war or two along the way too. And between the economic collapse, the wars and the destruction of the healthcare system, they'll cause the deaths of many millions of people.
Then, when things are at their worst, they'll move back in, with mercenary armies, claim literally everything, and rebuild the US as essentially a feudal state, with the wealthy few owning everything and everyone else reduced to the status of serfs.
Think he's figured anything out about mob mentality and the damage they do in service to utter bullshit?
Yeah... me neither.
Expect to see a lot more of that all around the world.
Trump can hide enough of his caprice and his pettiness and his self-absorption behind emotive rhetoric to fool the MAGAs, but none of that works on an international scale. The rest of the world just sees him, accurately, as a petulant, self-serving asshole and raving lunatic who can't be trusted. Ever. And that's the way they're going to treat him, and the US by extension.
Right, but China is untrustworthy in a standard international wheeling and dealing sense, while Russia and the US are both direct, existential threats to the EU and its constituent nations.
Yes - they'd be best off avoiding entanglements with all three, but their very survival might depend on allying with China against an overtly hostile Russia and US.
Another day, another policy announcement from the office of the Toddler-in-chief.
Dumb, sick, mean and scared = MAGA, so that tracks.
He’s positioning himself as Fash-Lite, because that’s the kind of candidate the Democratic Party is interested in running.
Nailed it.
The Dems have clearly signaled that, in the face of a right-wing kleptocratic coup d'etat, they intend to keep doing exactly what they've been doing for decades - situationally register mild opposition but carefully manage to consistently fail to successfully oppose much of anything, then fundraise on "the Republicans have destroyed everything and we're not the Republicans" and astroturf opposition to the inevitable observations that they're only technically not the Republicans, and have just spent the last two/four years proving that they're not really any sort of opposition either.
Oh yeah - and they'll run some candidates too, but that's really a secondary consideration. Fundraising is the important part. And to that end, the candidates they run will necessarily be corporate-friendly neoliberals with sufficient lack of integrity to be willing to position themselves just enough to the left of the current Republicans to barely manage to carry off the illusion of opposition.
And that last is the role Newsom is auditioning for.
I'm curious what happened to the NYT.
They've had basically no integrity at all for years now, just kissing whichever ass they had to kiss to keep their access. Even as recently as the campaign, they kissed Trump's ass until Harris got her initial groundswell, then they kissed her ass for a while, then when she faded they went back to kissing Trump's ass.
But lately they've been more critical of Trump and Musk than almost any other legacy media outlet, and even lost their all-important access as a result and are still critical.
So what happened between then and now? Why did they finally grow a backbone at this late stage?
Just a guess, but maybe they found out that kissing Trump's ass wasn't enough by itself when he tried to strongarm $100 million out of them like he did with Zuckerberg, and they told him to fuck off?
I don't know, but something sure changed, and not a moment too soon...
Trying to bring back the good ol' days, when rivers could catch fire.
I'd never thought about it before and my immediate reaction was somewhere between wtf and lol, but thinking about it more, I guess I can sort of see the basis for an argument that they are, since at least some of the expected basic themes are there.
But I don't think that's enough. Cyberpunk isn't just centered around computers and technology - it's an aesthetic, and WarGames and Sneakers don't have even the tiniest hint of that aesthetic.
To reach back to the roots of the word "cyberpunk," I think it's more accurate to say that WarGames and Sneakers are "cyberpop" or maybe even "cyber-easy-listening."
Why should ordinary people already burdened with responsibilities donate their precious time and energy just so that some rich fucks can hang on to even more of the wealth they neither need nor deserve?