How does the World view America these days?

  On 2/16/2025 at 9:13 AM, prdctvsm said:

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And it gets replicated everywhere in the world 

Wonder why 

  On 2/25/2025 at 3:31 PM, Rubin Farr said:

Trump is selling DOGE membership cards for $47

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-selling-official-doge-membership-cards-donations-elon-musk-2025-2

those are for broke bozos. gold cards are going to be the real (gold) standard

  On 2/26/2025 at 2:05 AM, Nebraska said:

those are for broke bozos. gold cards are going to be the real (gold) standard

 

"Congress determines qualifications for citizenship, but Trump said “gold cards” would not require congressional approval."

He's going to make Putin an American citizen.

  On 2/25/2025 at 3:28 AM, ignatius said:

just at the store getting some water... w/my sweatpants 9 in its holster.. or whatever.. like a responsible gun dude. 

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People bringin they straps & ready to light each other up over some commoditized chicken embryos. America today.

  On 2/26/2025 at 4:59 AM, ambermonk said:

People bringin they straps & ready to light each other up over some commoditized chicken embryos. America today.

meanwhile congress is cutting medicaid and foodstamps... to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. seems fine. surely this will all work w/o any negative consequences. 

edit: medicaid paid for my grandmother to be in a nursing home when she got alzheimer's

oh hey great. I'm on Medicaid. as are 72 million other people. this will surely go well for the republicans. 

to be fair, I really should have thought of how the rich need more money before deciding to be born. would've never signed up for this silly heart condition if I had known the billionaires were in such dire straits!

  On 2/26/2025 at 9:00 PM, luke viia said:

oh hey great. I'm on Medicaid. as are 72 million other people. this will surely go well for the republicans. 

to be fair, I really should have thought of how the rich need more money before deciding to be born. would've never signed up for this silly heart condition if I had known the billionaires were in such dire straits!

that bit i posted about the $1 trillion from medicaid is sorta fishy.. after reading up on it some the cuts will be handled by the commerce dept which can cut from anywhere it wants but all reports say there is no way they can get the cuts they want w/o cutting a lot from medicaid and SNAP (food stamps).  so, they will literally take from the poor to give it to the rich.. all the while still adding like $4 trillion to the deficit to pay for these tax breaks. it's fucking awful and I'll be surprised if it doesn't just destroy a huge segment of the population. 

trump gaza is going to be (figuratively) "the bomb" place to be.

bro

this whole thing couldn't come at a worse time, things are just starting to get good in my life and they gotta fuck it all up, what a bunch of wankers

idk, maybe its a test or something

really beginning to think maybe i'm on some sort of intergalactic sitcom Truman-esque TV show

  On 2/27/2025 at 1:41 AM, Zooluus said:

really beginning to think maybe i'm on some sort of intergalactic sitcom Truman-esque TV show

things are so weird and brazenly in the open that everyone is having that thought.. we're all waiting for the punch line but there won't be a punch line.. there will only be human suffering, misery and forehead slaps at the insanity and wtf-ness of it all. 

as i said on another site, if you feel useless or overwhelmed and don't know what to do, do something locally like soup kitchen, volunteer or just do something nice for a neighbor or something. contribute to your community in some way even small way matters. 

Some naïve part of me is thinking there's still a very slim chance that this atrocity of a bill will fall on the Senate floor with barely enough nay votes. The most reliable dissenters within the GOP have consistently been Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski from my own state. 51 votes in favor would be needed to pass.

Current Senate seats sit at 52 occupied by GOP, 45 by Democrats, 2 by Independents, and one vacant thanks to JD Vance. So probably 50 percent chance Collins and Murkowski vote nay. McConnell did vote against the confirmation for Hegseth to lead the DoD. But I still suspect there's a much smaller chance he'd vote against this bill, given his history. So the votes could come down to 49 Y - 47 N if we're remotely lucky, but the probability is greater that it would be 50 Y - 47 N, which even then isn't guaranteed.

Either way, it would take a miracle kill this fucking bill.

a kid died of measles in texas today. also, apparently the CDC is not selecting strains to make next year's flu shot vaccine. so, there's that.  if there's no new flu vaccine or no flu vaccine at all then a lot of preventable deaths will happen. pneumonia cases through the roof. i'm sure healthcare workers are gonna freak when they find out. 

  On 2/27/2025 at 1:55 AM, ignatius said:

things are so weird and brazenly in the open that everyone is having that thought.. we're all waiting for the punch line but there won't be a punch line.. there will only be human suffering, misery and forehead slaps at the insanity and wtf-ness of it all. 

as i said on another site, if you feel useless or overwhelmed and don't know what to do, do something locally like soup kitchen, volunteer or just do something nice for a neighbor or something. contribute to your community in some way even small way matters. 

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but maybe all this madness is just part of the process of our consciousness giving birth to an AI consciousness. Create the fertile ground, fuck shit up, maybe it's all supposed to happen? Only way i can look at it to still have some hope. But yes, there will be suffering. But with humans, when the fuck isn't there suffering? This whole life is rubbish, that may be the point. You suffer than ya die. Get licked. that's life

  On 2/28/2025 at 12:21 AM, Zooluus said:

but maybe all this madness is just part of the process of our consciousness giving birth to an AI consciousness. Create the fertile ground, fuck shit up, maybe it's all supposed to happen? Only way i can look at it to still have some hope. But yes, there will be suffering. But with humans, when the fuck isn't there suffering? This whole life is rubbish, that may be the point. You suffer than ya die. Get licked. that's life

that's the spirit!  you'd love "Conspiracy against the human race" by Ligotti. .. though a lot of the best bits got stolen and used to build Rust Cole's character in season 1 of True Detective

nothing is "supposed to happen" except physics. 

  On 2/28/2025 at 1:10 AM, ignatius said:

that's the spirit!  you'd love "Conspiracy against the human race" by Ligotti. .. though a lot of the best bits got stolen and used to build Rust Cole's character in season 1 of True Detective

nothing is "supposed to happen" except physics. 

Reminds me I’m due for a rewatch of season 1 True Detective. I know it wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but was and is probably one of my all time fav seasons of television. Thankfully I was living in Louisiana when it originally aired, got to view and contemplate it in its own milieu 

LOL

Is Trump Making Europe Great Again?

An interesting read on the unintended consequences of the infection of MAGATS.

Some choice bits:

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And the treatment is showing results. According to Euractiv, European reactions were rather blunt:

”Several European diplomats speaking to Euractiv didn't mince words. One of them described the UN/G7 debacle over Ukraine wording as a ‘total clusterfuck,’ while another went as far as to call Trump ‘Putin’s bitch.’”

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Beyond the political centre, MAGA is losing popularity even among European far right. French far right leader Jordan Bardella cancelled his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) after Steve Bannon repeated Elon Musk’s Nazi salute. Norwegian far right politician Christian Tybring-Gjedde, who has been one of Trump’s most avid proponents in Norway and nominated him twice for the Nobel Peace Prize, has changed his opinion and is now criticizing Trump’s Ukraine policy. As it happens, Nazi salutes or disrespecting a country’s sovereignty are not considered patriotic moves in France or Norway, both having been occupied by Nazi Germany in World War II. Already a year ago, the far right Sweden Democrats’ MP, Mattias Karlsson, came back severely disillusioned from a trip to the US. He had found MAGA way too radicalized and agreed with the journalist interviewing him that the Republican Party had become “shit”.

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An interesting brief read.