Peaceful protests were meant to be a compromise to warn that something worse was coming. Black Panthers. Weather Underground. IRA and Sinn Fein.

Effective peaceful movements had potentially violent components. The more radical elements disappeared and peaceful protests became useless.

Unions were a compromise. Before unions, you’d drag the factory owner into his front lawn and exact justice.

“This is a greedy health insurance CEO who killed countless people and caused untold human suffering. And this is Chewbacca. Why am I talking about Chewbacca? It doesn’t make sense. You must acquit!”

Whistleblowers are automatically overcome with grief at disappointing the high and mighty Job Creators and shoot themselves in the back of the head twice in despair.

I’ve lost all faith in the media and even stories like this. It feels like controlled opposition.

Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy, and the new patsy didn’t kill the asshole CEO who murdered grandmas and grandpas and made people’s lives a living hell by denying claims with AI.

They’ll release a mountain of evidence against him and find every way to discredit this “suspect” in public opinion. They’ll silence him and discredit him with their bully pulpit. That’s what they do. Meanwhile, the available evidence suggests strongly that he didn’t do it. Wrong guy.

The Adjuster pulls off a nearly flawless hit in the heart of NYC and disappears, then some guy gets caught at a McDonald’s with the murder weapon, fake IDs that he supposedly already used, and a fucking manifesto in his bag. The pictures of the shooter show completely inconsistent eyebrows with the guy they arrested. The nose is suspect as well.

This guy is a patsy. That’s why he was yelling about “insulting the intelligence” of the people. And yet, those who consume news slop uncritically will buy it without even questioning it. They’ll call people who look at valid, publicly-released pictures and see what is obviously two different people crazy. This is modern day, corpo-feudalist America.

The media is owned. The narrative is owned. Challenging the status quo is not allowed.

The Original Adjuster

I get the inflation and low-information voter angle, but watching Trump win by such a wide margin was just straight disheartening. At least with Hillary losing, you could complain about the electoral college and how few votes could have flipped it. Trump ran the table this time. His people showed up, and ours didn’t. Democrats are completely lost. They can’t craft a narrative that sticks in people’s heads to save their lives. “Weird” got traction, but “weird” doesn’t do shit for working people, who are struggling with no end in sight.

Plus, I’m waiting to see what happens. Trump is older and angrier, but he was always lazy. I’m hoping he spends all his time golfing and rage-tweeting while accomplishing very little. He’ll cut taxes for rich people and appoint shitty judges for sure, but hopefully he gets bored quickly and focuses on personal grift over wrecking the country long-term.

SBC Joker: “Real freedom is fascism, and becoming Nazis is the only way to stop the Jewish shapeshifters who raised the price of groceries!”

Hundreds of millions of people all over the world: “That makes perfect sense. I am your devoted follower now.”

Work is effort generating positive effects for everyone. Rent-seeking is extracting wealth from workers who actually contribute to the economy.

Nazi, who inherited his generational fortune through slave labor, makes people uncomfortable. They leave. Nazi lies about being weird and/or a Nazi.

Immigrant workers in the US are the definition of essential workers. Many work hard agricultural jobs and take exploitatively low wages to do so.

Cat.

Failed mouthpiece for evil reasserts itself as newer, more extreme evil.

Who knows? Good things might happen while Trump golfs and rambles. Probably not, but it could theoretically happen.

This time around I’m going to learn my lesson and quit watching after Season 4.

I’ll believe it when I see it. McConnell is a cold warrior and a Reagan Republican at heart, but he’s also soulless and evil like the rest of them.

Does some part of him still give a shit about his country? I find it hard to believe.

NO! Harris just needed to go further right. Forced goose-stepping marches at rallies. Pledges to eradicate all minorities. Promise global wars of conquest.

Outflank Trump on the right, and the republicans AND democrats will vote for you.

Last worries that we might now be in a transition to authoritarianism of the kind Russia went through in the 1990s, but I visited Russia often in those days, and much of the Russian democratic implosion was driven by genuinely brutal economic conditions and the rapid collapse of basic public services. Americans have done this to themselves during a time of peace, prosperity, and astonishingly high living standards. An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions.

This is the problem. Americans are not living “affluent” lives. They may have iphones and Netflix, but they are struggling to make rent and buy groceries. Their credit cards are getting maxed out. And their wages are staying flat, certainly relative to the sharp increase in the price of everything.

Americans are hurting economically right now. I wouldn’t compare the situation to Russia, but seeing your bank account disappear, your debt grow, and no solution in sight is a recipe for desperation.

It was the economy, stupid.

Trump Tower Gaza

Exactly. Trump always looks strongest early on. He looked like he had beaten Biden on the early counts. Blue votes get counted later.