Zink

I wouldn’t be surprised if Clinton was tied up in this awful stuff, sure, but the Biden hair sniffing thing just reeks of the conservatives’ constant focus on sexuality while crying about how it’s actually being shoved down their throats.

And that double entendre wasn’t intentional, but it definitely stays.

Next you should pretend I wrote that first reply of yours where you linked to a random Australian video about the previous elderly president and then said they were in a cult. How would you critique me?

Yeah, and this is especially so in the important voting bloc of white middle class people --the ones who probably own their home (with mortgage obviously) and are still making ends meet. The good ones are horrified to see what's going on in the world, and the troubled ones may still think they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires with the whole master race thing going for them, but other than inflation their day to day life has not changed.

I'm a white dude living in the swing state of Pennsyltucky, in a very white republican suburb a good distance from the city. My town is growing and some good companies have large offices here (access to infrastructure plus the tax benefit of being in the next county over), so it's attracted residents from just about every ethnic background. But to get an accurate mental image, you have to sprinkle that diverse mix over a base layer of 80% white people, lol.

Just mentally going through our family, close friends, social acquaintances, and various local parents we run into (I have a kid in elementary school, and we're active in the school district), it is almost all white families living in single-family homes or sometimes townhouses. Many are two-income families, some are one-income families (working professionals in a reasonable COL area, not exactly CEOs). I know everybody has their own problems including the ones they don't share with me, but for most of these people life just looks normal. If you followed me around all day and could not see the awful news on the screen when I sat down at my PC, you would be hard pressed to tell which decade we are in. You would need a clue like peeking at my phone model or seeing an old covid mask on a shelf.

There ARE exceptions. People who are not white have absolutely been fucked with by ICE. Thank goodness the best Mexican restaurant in town got raided so that my fellow whites aren't tempted by amazing food from non-white sources. And I do know of one white family where both parents are civilians that work for the government. Both remotely, before Trump 2. They are amazing people raising three great kids (the kindest people we know are usually single child) and they got all kinds of unnecessary stress and fuckery in their real lives thanks to all the chaos and ill considered return-to-office mandates.

Here we find the conservative doubling down by immediately repeating that no, they do in fact know that you are, but plead: "what, then, am I? Tell me!"

Oh what a lovely surprise! They have just tripled down in the very same sentence! You see, part of their hive's rules is that all outsiders must be treated as cooperating members of a single enemy conspiracy.

pedodent

Holy shit, lol. I really hope that term is becoming a thing.

Gotcha. Something about what you said made it sound like the standard windows flavor to me.

Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten so used to running teams in a browser tab that its lagginess just feels like a slow loading webpage refresh, while the rest of the system’s GUI is flawless.

“Well, we both want to improve the country”

Did they though?

One of the most consistent features of conservative “politics” is their ability to get lots of ordinary people to vote against their own interests.

Sure it was nice when the rank and file weren’t cheering on the New American Gestapo (good band name?) but the money > humans goals behind the policies were the same. The bigotry and tribalism and other-ing have always been tools in their propaganda machine. We’re witnessing those chickens coming home to roost.

Who could have known it would be a bad idea to systematically poison american culture so that a handful of old white dudes could hang on to the dream of dying as billionaires instead of pleb-ass run of the mill multimillionaires?

I just want to reply that this

Although I try to remember there's reasons they became that way, I still am not foolish enough to think they're easily redeemable.

and this

That's all I wanted to point out - the fact there are still humans behind those masks with a wide variety of backgrounds. This is something that people too easily drop as a factor when making judgements about others.

both hit home for me. I was born into the white religious conservative world. And when I was younger, more naive, and of course much angrier, some of the hollow rhetoric on the right seemed to make sense.

So when looking at some of these awful people out there, it can be a very “there but for the grace of god go I” situation for me. And their humanity deserves that benefit of the doubt.

However, the very unfortunate reality is that every villain has a sad story. I mean, imagine being raised by a monster like Frederick Christ Trump Sr.

So yeah I try to remember that my ignorant conservative relatives didn’t exactly get shown all the truths in the universe and still chose bigotry over community. They have a warped view of the world for various reasons.

But on the other side of that coin, the sad ubiquity of heartbreaking stories can’t keep people from fighting back when appropriate.

Well don’t forget that Walmart itself is literally government subsidized when the people employed there still need food stamps or other welfare programs.

I can see where you’re coming from, so I started reading the article. But most of what we need to know is right at the top. It was published less than a month ago, and the job fair described was also in June of 2025.

I really don’t expect the people applying for ICE jobs right now have a large percentage of sympathetic characters among them. I would expect there to be some, of course, but not finding any in a random sample doesn’t feel very noteworthy to me.

I’ve said this a few times. The developed world was built around growth, and most of the developed world has a total fertility rate problem. And here are the US conservatives, dumbest of the dumb, doing everything they can to drive people out of the country.

The wikipedia article has a nice color coded map.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate

One thing I love about the Linux/FOSS world is that people work on software because they care about it. This leads to them focusing on parts of the system that users often also care about, rather than the parts that Product Management calculated could best grow engagement and revenue per user over the next quarter.

I’m not arguing that all these big frameworks and high level languages are bad, by the way. Making computers and programming accessible is a huge positive. I probably even use some of their inefficient creations that simply would not exist otherwise. And for many small or one-off applications, the time saved in programming is orders of magnitude higher than the time saved waiting on execution.

But when it comes to the most performance sensitive utilities and kernel code in my GNU plus Linux operating system, efficiency gets way more important and I’ll stick with the stuff that was forged and chiseled from raw C over decades by the greybeards.