Not just Republicans. Most voters are fixated on local and personal issues. National politicians typically have a free rein on foreign policy thanks to the significant disconnect between international affairs and voter household issues. To add to the problem, Presidents can’t be recalled. Judges serve for life. Senators hold office on six-year stretches. The only people who really face the wrath of a disgruntled populace on a regular basis are House Reps (and gerrymandering blunts that knife most election cycles).

If you really get under the hood of the GOP and ask what makes them tick, one thing that sticks out is the degree to which the fossil fuel industry’s presence in a district/state influences the number of Republican voters. Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are great textbook examples, with rises and falls in the profitability of petroleum products neatly tracking their success at electing conservative leaders.

One question you might want to ask, as a liberal who claims to love universal programs like health care and education and housing and public transportation, is why your own state leaders suck at it so much. California’s the 7th largest economy in the world. And they’ve got broad control over their Medicaid dollars, same as any other state. Why aren’t they doing Public Options or State Run Hospitals like their peers in Canada and the UK?

FFS, blood red Kentucky has a more leftwing health care system than anything in bright blue Washington State or New Jersey.

I feel for all those whose insurance premium is about to become unaffordable

Idk. I’ve been told a bunch of them are Republicans and therefore they deserve to suffer.

This is why I get all my computer supplies from goats.ex

Like the capitalists want “uneducated” masses

Capitalists have historically needed liberal universities in order to reproduce, both as asset managers and as propagandists. The modern turn towards “AI can do everything” is a real vulnerability in the material working of the system. The Professional Managerial Class has been a major pillar of modern capital since the Cold War Era. Dissolving it to save a few bucks is a serious blunder.

Only question is who steps up to take advantage.

Oh cool, you’re a real person under here

Chinese businesses in the textile district have long operated within what investigators call the “Prato system”, marked by corruption and irregular practices, including labour and safety abuses as well as tax and customs fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_crime_in_Italy#Largest_crime_groups

Real “I’m shocked to discover there’s gambling going on in the casino!” energy in these allegations.

Mafia families have a long and storied history of partnering with state police and prosecutors to rub out rival gangs and cartels. And given Meloni’s own mafia connections, combined with regular press criticism of the same, I can’t say I’m surprised to see her government rediscovering religion on anti-mafia policing as her polling numbers sag.

Without the mafia designation or Chinese cooperation, Tescaroli’s case in the China Truck trial relies on the fragile scaffolding of Italian procedure, and the willingness of translators to show up.

Who do they have running this investigation? Kash Patel?

Sino-Soviet split is over, bro. You aren’t going to wish it back by shitposting.

Wait till their gone, then when you co trol the material

Like when? 2021? 2022? 2023? Maybe 2024, an election year, when the material can do the most damage?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epstein_files

We have flight logs that are a Who’s Who of the rich and powerful. We have photographs of him and dozens of high profile businessmen and politicians. We have the Birthday Book. We have his Quora search history, ffs.

I don’t know what else anyone is waiting for. At what point do we get a file drop that results in anything other than Ghislaine Maxwell getting a pardon? This feels like people coming in after the “Grab’em By The Pussy” video in 2016 insisting that there’s a second, even more secret, even more derogatory film that Hillary refused to produce, but which would definitely have won her the election.

Really excited to hear people demanding the release of the release of the epstein files files.

I know quite a few teachers, and so many of them genuinely love the part of the job where they get to interact with their students and educate them and encourage them to experiment and grow. The inevitable “Why do I have to do this thing if I don’t like it” is the beginning of a broad conversation about how what they’re doing can be fun and engaging and deeply satisfying. Every class shy of high school has it. I rarely left the room without feeling more curious and invested in the material I was there to learn.

What fucking sucks about the modern education system is the fixation on metrics, monitoring, and milestones. Classes that used to be much more freeform and experimental have become this ridged march forward in the state-mandated lesson plan. Read the chapter, do the homework, take the quiz, tell your parents they need to panic if you got less than a “B”, prepare for the exam, prepare for the exam, prepare for the exam. That’s the shit that sucks.

So much of the actual curriculum is sacrificed to keep kids on a conveyor belt of assessment and evaluation. Anything that can’t be strictly and objectively graded - lab exercises, independent study, school trips, artistic expression - is flensed from the lesson plan. And the only way to escape this assembly line style education system is to have parents rich enough to pay for private school or teachers daring enough to transgress against the state rubric.

I’m genuinely curious to see what qualifies as compromat in the modern political climate. You’ve got folks fully undeterred in running for office who have been held done dead to rights on child sex trafficking charges. And you’ve got AI generated slop used to smear people in municipal elections.

Meanwhile, this is policy Massie campaigns on. It’s not like he’s risking his neck to run on leaving NATO. It’s his whole brand.

“Don’t worry, we’ll fix it once we’re in charge again” is a line I’ve been hearing since Nixon.

Are we talking about the same Indonesia where the USA funded and installed a Pro-US puppet government who basically sold out the country to US property development?

The Very Same!

I guess that’s better than the country being torn apart by war, but it got torn apart none-the-less.

It is nearly non-existent in US History textbooks, which is a big fat “W” from the perspective of the capitalist-friendly intelligence services.

Libertarians will cut every federal program at arms length, but they’ll never cut their own salaries.

It’s always other people’s money they’re after

Massie’s brand of libertarianism has made getting out of every intentional organization and treaty a big part of their America First white nationalist message for a long while.

This goes back long before Putin.

At what point does this insanity end America?

We’re not even in Bush-Era levels of economic crisis. Obama couldn’t win a Senate seat on these terms.

If anything, we’re still riding the lingering high of post-COVID revival of ZIRP and the Fed Free Money Machine. The dominoes Trump started knocking over at the start of the year are still tumbling. Quite a few of us are fully removed from the consequences to date.

FFS, we haven’t even been hit with a hurricane yet. Talk to me after another Harvey or Katrina, when we’re looking at some real acute social crisis. Talk to me when unemployment gets north of 5%. The BLM / Occupy levels of public dissidence doesn’t pop off until we’re in the 6-10% range.

Are you not embarrassed enough yet as a country

No. We won’t properly be embarrassed until its a personal problem we can blame on the President. Right now its all someone else’s problem. The college kid’s problem. The migrant’s problem. The guy on Medicaid’s problem. Right now we can do the funny memes on LeopardsEatingFaces sub where we joke about how Trumpies are getting what they deserve.

Talk to me when I’m out on my ass with an eviction notice because my industry just fired half its workforce. Talk to me when the local grocery store is emptied out by a hedge fund that’s bankrupted the agricultural supply chain. Talk to me when its my turn to get a knock at the door from ICE.

Then I’ll be embarrassed. Now I’m content to be smugly dismissive of everyone else.

You can make tons of money selling stocks. Trick is to find enough buyers.