The Idiocracy of Donald J. Trump

[Jim Cowan]

Some of those girls look too old for Gaetz.

[Tiger337]

47 minutes ago, Jim Cowan said:

Some of those girls look too old for Gaetz.

It's funny that he actually thought he had a chance with Cassidy Hutchinson. 

[Motor City Sonics]

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

It happens to all the right people in that party.

Glenn Quagmire....................

[CMRivdogs]

So much wrong here. First of all MSNBC is a cable channel, not an "over the air entity. So is Fox News which bends over backward to service the Orange Master.

Also the airwaves are not free, over the air broadcasters have specific guidelines issued by the FCC plus license fees (at least they did in the 70s and 80s) There is no license requirements for cable.

Meanwhile how many conservatives would scream the same thing about Fox, OAN, NewsMax, etc

https://www.threads.net/@adam_kinzinger/post/C0O0Jh5LP-B/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Adam Knzinger: If you call yourself conservative and read this statement without alarm bells sounding, you are not a conservative.

[Mr.TaterSalad]

On 11/14/2023 at 12:57 PM, gehringer_2 said:

Personally my biggest fear is over the country simply becoming less and less able to think intelligently. The educational system, the media, and even the business establishment, are failing miserably at producing, preparing, a population capable of making rational self-governance decisions. If we keep losing that, we are toast on all the other fronts anyway.

This is purposeful and exactly what capitalism is about and what wealth and powerful capitalist actors and business executives want from society. The business establishment and wealthy business elite, the capitalists, want mindless people, who grab things off the shelves or put things in their online shopping cart without thing. They want you to feel emotionally connected to the products and services you buy so you will keep buying more of them, without a second thought. They want you to feel worthless without their products. They want you to envy your neighbor and everything they have so you will work just hard enough and get paid just enough money to go into debt and buy their products and services. The most important thing you can do in a capitalist society, according to a capitalist, is blindly and mindlessly consume.

Under a Soviet-style or Maoist-style socialist system you see the immediate effects of bad public policy. Mao's Great Leap Forward is a perfect example of this. The immediate effects being tens-of-millions of people who die due to a famine and collectivization. You see the millions tortured, killed, or kept as political prisoners.

In a capitalist society, you don't see the immediate effects of what the capitalist actors in the private sector and business class are trying to do to you, at least not always. In a capitalist society it is a slower trickle, death by a thousand cuts, instead of bleeding out the system all at once. You see it through the dumbing down and lowering standards of our education system. You see it through trying to turn public education into a money making, for profit, privately controlled industry like the DeVos family is doing with charter schools. You see it through weakening regulations for workers rights that erode worker power, cut pay relative to the rate of inflation, and make people work longer hours for less. You see it through the erosion of workplace safety regulations and through the deregulation of business. You see it through a change in tax and fiscal policy that has caused the wealth gap to explode over a 50 year period and driven us towards banana republic status as a nation.

Sometimes you do see the immediate, negative effects of capitalism on society. One, of many such examples, is the Triangle Shirtwaist factory Fire of 1911. An incident where capitalist business owners literally locked people inside their place of work, rejected common practice safety regulations, and allowed their workers to literally be burnt alive as a result of their purposeful malfeasance. You also saw this happen often in mine collapses and explosions, factory or construction accidents, airplane crashes and more. Alaska Airlines is a more modern example of this. They literally would have rather cut corners and saved a few bucks then to have proper maintenance and safety standards that could have saved the lives of 88 people. Only because of litigation and government regulation, which came to late for the 88 human beings who died when their plane crashed inverted into the Pacific ocean, did Alaska Airlines and the industry truly begin to change. 9/11 is another example of this. Locked cockpits and proper security check measures could have save thousands of lives and prevented one of the worst tragedies in American history. But once again, capitalist actors and executives in the airline industry opposed and did not want to spend the money on having secure, locked cockpits on their planes.

Climate change is yet another great example of the slow drip, death by a thousand cuts mentality of capitalism. For years, energy and oil companies have known that climate change was real. They knew the cliff we were headed towards. Not only did they know, they actually tried to move in the other direction, cover up and/or manipulate the data to say in-fact that climate change was not real, even though all the evidence they had says it was. The tobacco industry is also a showcase in colossal capitalist failure. Cigarettes' aren't bad for you and they certainly don't cause cancer. In-fact, there are many positive health effects and attributes to smoking cigarettes. Just look at all the weight you'll lose.

Edited November 30, 2023 by Mr.TaterSalad

[CMRivdogs]

 

[Tiger337]

22 hours ago, Mr.TaterSalad said:

This is purposeful and exactly what capitalism is about and what wealth and powerful capitalist actors and business executives want from society. The business establishment and wealthy business elite, the capitalists, want mindless people, who grab things off the shelves or put things in their online shopping cart without thing. They want you to feel emotionally connected to the products and services you buy so you will keep buying more of them, without a second thought. They want you to feel worthless without their products. They want you to envy your neighbor and everything they have so you will work just hard enough and get paid just enough money to go into debt and buy their products and services. The most important thing you can do in a capitalist society, according to a capitalist, is blindly and mindlessly consume.

 

 

I don't know if that was the original intent of capitalism, but I am convinced that is the end result.  Not all companies think that way, but I think the big corporations do.  

[gehringer_2]

Capitalism was probably never self-aware of itself enough to have any intents as it evolved. The idea of putting money to work for a return goes back to before the Roman Empire - it's pretty much the same idea everybody thinks of as soon people start using money in commerce. The ideas about how to run a business to most efficiently exploit everyone and everything else are more modern, but I would almost be tempted to separate the general framework for the generation of production by private investment i.e. capitalism as framework for economic activity, from the creation of economic regulatory structures that allow for so much exploitation in the name of profit. The first is a matter of economic theory, the second is simply a matter of political failure in a society.

You can have, and we have seen, terrible human and resource exploitation in both capitalist and non-capitalistic systems. That is always more a matter of governance, politics and how power is distributed in a society than of economic models.

In the recent history of the US, when the law was friendly to unions, workers had more power, worker exploitation was lower. Today the legal environment has been made more hostile to unions and workers, workers have less power, worker exploitation and economic disparity is greater. It wasn't that capitalism somehow changed, the governance under which the US instance of capitalism operates has changed.

Edited December 1, 2023 by gehringer_2

[CMRivdogs]

 

[chasfh]

No puppet. No puppet. You're the puppet.

 

[CMRivdogs]

 

[CMRivdogs]

Not a parody.

MAGA...Make Assholes Grift Again

 

[smr-nj]

20 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

Not a parody.

MAGA...Make Assholes Grift Again

 

For God’s sake.

What is wrong with him????  

[oblong]

NFT's are still a thing?

[ewsieg]

21 minutes ago, oblong said:

NFT's are still a thing?

I know someone with a sweet John Wall assist NFT, but there is no way he's letting that go for anything under 2.50...maybe 3 bucks.

[oblong]

I got some from the Tigers and frankly don't know what to do with them.  Not even sure how I find them wherever they are.  They sent me a link, I opened an app or something, and there 'it' was. Ok... great.  Now what?

[casimir]

2 hours ago, smr-nj said:

For God’s sake.

What is wrong with him????  

I believe the better question is what is wrong with his fearlessly following flock of freaks?

[Tiger337]

8 hours ago, CMRivdogs said:

Not a parody.

MAGA...Make Assholes Grift Again

 

I bet he laughs at his idiot followers every night.  

[chasfh]

20 hours ago, oblong said:

NFT's are still a thing?

Trump is still a thing.

[chasfh]

20 hours ago, oblong said:

I got some from the Tigers and frankly don't know what to do with them.  Not even sure how I find them wherever they are.  They sent me a link, I opened an app or something, and there 'it' was. Ok... great.  Now what?

[oblong]

28 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I didn't pay for them.  They were a "reward" for being at miggy's 3000th hit game, and to celebrate his 500th HR.  I'd rather they just send me another tumbler or some coasters.

 

[chasfh]

13 minutes ago, oblong said:

I didn't pay for them.  They were a "reward" for being at miggy's 3000th hit game, and to celebrate his 500th HR.  I'd rather they just send me another tumbler or some coasters.

 

I was a little unclear, I meant that's what teams do when they get money from fans (not from you) for things like NFTs.

[CMRivdogs]

Have they checked the bathrooms?

How about Mark Meadows trailer in the NC Wilderness
 

 

Edited December 15, 2023 by CMRivdogs

[romad1]

3 hours ago, CMRivdogs said:

Have they checked the bathrooms?

How about Mark Meadows trailer in the NC Wilderness
 

 

My brain exploded.  Cassidy Hutchinsen is a friggin hero. 

[chasfh]

I rewatched Ken Burns’s doc on Huey Long, from 1986. First time I’ve seen it since then. It didn’t stick much with me when I first saw it, but rewatching it, I am struck, almost stunned, by the parallels between Long and Trump, if not exactly in style, then certainly in tactics and effect. They also talk about what happened after Long died, and it’s at turns frightening and heartening. You can watch it free for here if you’re interested.

EDIT: Very weird: the video showed up when I pasted in the link, then disappeared as I posted it. Here is the URL: 

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8mzfmn

 

Edited December 17, 2023 by chasfh