Invoking, once more, the evergreen adage
Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture.
~ Dr Lubinda Haabazoka, Director of the University of Zambia Graduate School of Business and former President of the Economics Association of Zambia
secretly wants changes and can blame someone else
So many of these Republicans are fully aware that the bill will break the back of the healthcare industry in their states. None of them want to stick their necks out for it, though. The mega-donors will forgive them in the end, but the primary voters are only going to hear “You’re a Secret Democrat for voting against MAGA”.
Bizarre AI-generated images are currently flooding Facebook, as engagement hacks and bots run rampant on the social media platform, spawning a meme-worthy image that has been dubbed “Shrimp Jesus.”
This DNC won’t help any specific candidate in a primary, but they won’t work against a specific candidate either.
The same group of people absolutely shitting themselves over Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of NYC won’t work against any specific candidate in 2028? Did we completely forget about 2020, when Obama got half the field to drop out after Super Tuesday to pave the way for a guy in fifth place? Or 2024, when Dems forewent having a Presidential Primary entirely so they could fumble between a geriatric genocidal bum and his Cheney-loving VP?
We’re on a huge inflection point
In 1972, Richard Nixon made the case for his reelection by invoking the second derivative of inflation. He stated that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing.
This is the inflection point the American liberal party has reached, in the year 2025. Things are so incredibly bad that a Cuomo can’t walk off with a high office in the finance capital of the world. The increase of fascism is decreasing.
We can not afford to roll the dice on neoliberalism again
This won’t be a diceroll. The preponderance of Democrats are firmly in the tank for some ideological mix of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. One of the great “successes” of the Democratic Party over the last 20 years has been to draw a big chunk of the economic conservatives out of the Republican Party and into their own.
From Kristen Gillibrand to Kristen Sinema, from Hakeem Jefferies to Henry Cuellar, from Michael Bloomberg to Rick Wilson, this is a party overflowing with Bush Era “compassionate conservatives”. AOC has no path to a national platform in 2028. Y’all are going to be stuck holding your noses and voting for Gretchen Whitmer/Pete Buttigieg while shouting “Vote Blue No Matter Who” in another three years.
But maybe we can get Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman their house seats back. Maybe we can get a few more Mamdanis into the big city mayorships. Then talk about what a minority of leftists in the Senate could look like in another ten to forty years.
Okay, but if you make $1.1B…
The fundamental problem with the politics of healthcare is that it plays directly into the hands of Randian Objectivism. You have healthy people (the Makers) and sick people (the Takers). And the Objectivist logic of economics is that you want to remove all the Takers from your economy, because otherwise they’ll overwhelm your system and turn it into Dystopia.
When we already operate a floundering system that people generally despise, its an easy sell to claim “It’s the sick people who are making health care expensive and driving up the cost of care!” What’s more, with the outsourcing of our manufacturing base, its easy to forget the real material cost of the other amenities that make life in the imperial core comfortable. Why does a brand new TV cost me $400 but a night in the hospital cost me $4000? Seems like the hospital system is broken, right?
This is a trap I see liberals fall for as quickly as conservatives, which is why big blue states like California and Illinois and Massachusetts and New York also refuse to implement the far more efficient and equitable public health reforms common to countries in Europe with much smaller GDPs.
Baiting residents - MAGA and Liberal alike - into seeing health care as a cost center rather than a value center (or even a loss leader) has lead the entire country to reject practices that the rest of the world has enthusiastically embraced.
Fewer hospitals just means more people going to Church.
I gotta say, given the state of Tennessee at the moment, I would not want my statue anywhere near the other icons they’re raising.
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.
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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.
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.
Who does he think he is? Beto O’Rourke?
Weird how someone who became a minor celebrity opposing the lucrative live fur industry would be targeted and harassed to death.
I hope this isn’t some kind of pattern, wherein public figures who speak out in defense of environmental and social welfare causes are defamed and driven into obscurity or death.
On Lemmy, idk. Some definitely exist.
Anywhere else, a lot more
More seriously, I think erasure is only part of it. Lots of LGBTQ folks deliberately remain in the closet for the sake of family relationships, careers, and local politics.
If you’re bi, it’s just easier.
But that heterosexual camouflage does get confusing to process when you “come out”. Especially with the reactionary attitude that heterosexuality is a choice.
The brutal math of selection bias. Ten people read your post. Nine of them shrug and move on. One of them stops to verbally fuck up your shit.
Agnes Bertrand Sanz of Oxfam said: “There are moments in history where delay and distraction are not neutral, it is a decision.
“While EU ministers continue to debate and defer, entire families in Gaza are being buried under rubble and people are being killed while trying to get food. Every second of delay costs lives.”
The association agreement, which came into force in 2000, underpins a trading relationship worth €68bn (£58bn) between the 27 EU countries and Israel. The bloc is Israel’s largest market, accounting for about a third of its exports.
American businesses will spend millions of dollars to hold an event almost no one outside their little circle of friends will even hear about in order to tell the public to do a thing they have no real choice in.