There’s always the five finger discount

I start wondering if it’s safe to imagine that maybe things could get better

It’s always safe to imagine. Imagining is the first step to a better place to live. But the dream can’t live in your head forever. At some point, you need to take action.

I have no faith that working within the electoral system will fix that.

Mobilizing a large group of activists around a set of tangible and popular goals is its own reward, whether or not the electoral system is accommodating to the politician’s success.

RCV undermines the necessity for a partisan vote. That’s why Cuomo - the party establishment pick - lost by 8 points to a local outsider with better politics and a cleaner reputation.

But I agree, at some point, you do need to support someone. And if that someone is part of a large political organization (aka a party) they can bring a lot of financial and labor resources to bare when organizing and implementing political reforms. In the case of New York City, which is functionally a one party municipality (Dems regularly swamp the GOP 2:1), Zohran’s entrance to the statewide political scene is a huge break from the traditional partisan politics that gave us Eric Adams and threatened to give us four more years of a corrupt, real estate entwined sex pest.

The fact that he’s got a large, active, well-financed DSA behind him - in a way that transformed a coronation into a competitive primary - is a huge point in his favor.

BBEG: Rogue Paladin Player’s Little Brother’s Character

Paladin Player:

Reaganism was definitely a new kind of politics, in the sense that he was the bellweather of the next generation of the GOP (and Dems tailing after).

But if we’re just looking for an excuse to yell at people for how they voted, I can’t think of maybe half a dozen Presidents undeserving of that response.

Can’t believe the CIA’s favorite news desk would do this.

I mean, we can go back farther than that. Carter reappointing Paul Volcker and deregulating the airlines + oil/gas anti-gouging laws really fucked us.

But then again, the mass general population is fucking dumb

That’s a lazy explanation. It neglects that Netflix did have a lot of accumulated goodwill from ease of access and quality content.

But now its in the enshittification era. All the streaming services are behaving like this. There’s no alternative that doesn’t suck with a comparable library.

*Also the writing generally sucks ass and assumes I’m not paying attention.

I’ve seen the articles dealing with the phenomenon of “Standard Netflix Show” and how it has become so painfully formulaic that it can only be described as background noise.

Really not a great sign when your premium service is treated like elevator music. But hey, they’ve got a near-trillion dollar valuation, so clearly I’m dumb and their C-levels have earned every penny.

Netflix getting in on the streamed video games wasn’t all that crazy. I flirted with it initially, as they had a few good Steam titles on there that I was effectively getting handed for free.

But the marketing approach of jamming “Play this clickbait garbage game, you stupid idiot!” install button into my face every time I visited the site ultimately lead me to cancel my subscription. Like so much else in modern streaming, the website’s admins do not want you to have any control over your front page. The end result is utterly alienating.

So obnoxious to see Americans conclude “The bombings were done incorrectly” after this horrifying bullshit.

Fucker is out there committing naked, wildly unconstitutional straight-up war crimes for clout. And the liberal response is just to pooh-pooh him for failing to demolish a civilian nuclear program.

“If Kamala Harris was in charge, she’d have leveled those mountain-encased centrifuges!” will be the 2026 DNC rallying cry.

I genuinely enjoyed the Kingdom Hearts action-adventure with a couple of celebrity minions supporting your Dark Souls-style main character and the occasional Big Summons to drop a global special effect. I don’t think its bad on its face.

But they’ve invested so much time and energy into making Live Action work as a system that everything from the story to the game mechanics have suffered. Like, if you want to make a FromSoft game, then go over to FromSoft and do a business partnership to make Eldin Fantasy: The Soulslike Crystal Saga. You don’t need to keep tinkering with this engine that clearly doesn’t work.

Also, the FF7Remakes seem to have found a sweet spot. Why can’t the mainline games deliver this level of quality?

Also, also, also why have you abandoned ChronoTrigger? Twelve different DragonQuest titles but you gave up on Chrono in the mid-90s? You monsters.

But you got to be a goddamn moron to be impressed by the current president.

The joke of American politics is that you’ll have two candidates run by smearing each other into the dirt. One of them will squeak out a win and get a few months of being The Most Charismatic Person On Earth because of a marginal victory largely on EC winner-take-all. But the TV/Radio will say this person is INCREDIBLY POPULAR and people will be brow-beaten into believing it.

Then that person will actually attempt to govern, fumble the ball for a while, and watch the media turn on them. Popularity will plummet and the opposition will come out of the woodwork insisting “Our Guy Would Have Been Better”. Except its a media cycle driven by incompetency and corruption at the elected level. It’s inevitably a false choice, because everyone on the ballot was one flavor of corporate shill or another from the get-go.

By the end, all you have left is an argument over who would have been worse. Everyone calls everyone else a moron for thinking the wrong things. Nobody seems capable of identifying quality leadership, because quality leaders don’t have an in with corporate media to inflate their celebrity profiles.

It’s cargo cults all the way down.

The nut of it. Trump wants to be able to parade around DC and say he Ended The War With Iran.

If Israel keeps bombing Iran, it makes Donald Trump look bad. They’re obstructing his victory lap and getting in the way of a bunch of cable news networks posting “Mission Accomplished” over his face.

It would be nice if the focus was on personal comfort over some ideological crusade.

Bras, head scarves, makeup, skirts versus pants, hair dye, hair length, heaven help you if you’ve got a position on cosmetic surgery… Everything’s a fucking binary. Like, I get complaining about advertisement saturation and the endless suffocating waves of online influencing and even the social/family pressures to look or dress a certain way. But at some point its got to be about what each person feels comfortable with.

Not everything has to be a political position. It is enough to say you are self-determined.

Quite literally since birth.

You watch neighbors grow up and mature thinking we’ll all reach some kind of educated, experienced consensus. But I’ve got people I’ve known since middle school who are so sheep dipped in propaganda they can’t tell up from down. And I know more than a few others who have put up with Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo and that assortment of liberal sleeze so long they can’t tell the difference between parties.

Having no sympathy or empathy for the actual innocent victims would make you a shit person.

Generally speaking, Americans do not need extra reasons to avoid feeling empathy.

“Fuck you! You got what you deserved” should be worked into our national anthem by now.

I got extremely yelled at for saying this about the last five presidents.

HitlerPig cheated, and we all know it.

Nixon accused JFK of buying votes all through Illinois after the 1960 election. And we have ample statistical and anecdotal evidence to suggest the Dem machine in Chicago was absolutely stacking the deck in JFK’s favor. But we also have ample statistical and anecdotal evidence to suggest the GOP machine was stacking the deck in the south of the state.

Subsequently, when Nixon recaptured the executive branch in '68 (following a series of very convenient political upheavals) he implemented the “Southern Strategy” to win over Dixiecrat leadership and cement a Republican majority across the Gulf Coast for the next 80 years. The same Democrats who had been winning elections on the back of that machine in the 60s/70s became Republicans winning with the same machine at their backs in the 80s/90s.

This isn’t a problem unique to Trump. It’s baked into the decentralized, county-lead, deliberately opaque and byzantine electoral counting and reporting system. Katherine Harris was fucking with Florida elections in 2000 the same way Brad Raffensperger fucked with Georgia elections in 2024.

And don’t look too hard at California’s ascendancy of Silicon Valley shills or the cop-lead effort to elevate Eric Adams to the NYC Mayorship or the Richie Torries seat in the Bronx or the current ratfvckery with Cuomo.

You won’t be torn anymore.

I’ve seen bits of it and heard some of the highnotes covered in other media. I think one of the producers was on the TrashFuture podcast at one point… or another one I listen to.

Either way, the Russia/China/North Korea/Insert-Evil-Foreigner-Here (but never Israel or Saudi Arabia or Qatar, because we’re friends and they would never dream of…) angle was overhyped, while the degree to which local county clerks and judges fuck with this was under reported.

To believe that extremely powerful forces have NOT been trying to control our elections for years, is extremely naive.

Election manipulation, particularly domestically, is a very touchy subject. It’s been proven to depress voter turnout in the receptive demographic. So you’re stuck with this dilemma of trying to alert people to manipulation without deterring them from turning out in the next cycle. The line that both liberals and conservatives throw out is “We have to vote in such huge numbers that they can’t cheat us!” which can be an effective rallying cry in the moment. But it doesn’t work if you don’t ever do anything to address the claims down the line.

Even when Obama’s campaign swept the Atlantic Coast in 2008, what did his DOJ do to confront all the Bush-era fuckery thereafter? Same with Trump in 2016, screaming “Lock her up!” at Hillary while insisting she’s rigged the whole vote, then… just shrugging and ignoring her while in office. Really kicks the legs out of your base when you spend a year complaining about how inherently unfair the election process has become and then announcing “We won so I guess everything is fine”.