huh, reminds me of Hillary’s campaign aiding Trump during the republican primaries

You are looking for a Great Man of history to pin this on. You’d rather believe someone nefarious is in charge and pulling the strings from an ocean away, than to see this for what it is; an empire with no real conscious oversight. A pile of self-interested businessmen, politicians, and militarists doing whatever they can to line their pockets, profits above all else.

The US has, per capita, the largest prison population and, outright, the biggest military on the planet. If there’s a road to ‘unfreedom’, we traveled down it a long time ago.

You’d rather believe Trump is result of foreign interference, that our own institutions would never result in this without being sullied from outside. It’s fan fic, it’s Cold War nonsense.

Trump is the consequence of our political systems, of our spiteful culture, of our economics that promises success and leaves people sick, broken, and in debt. So what if the Russians had a few hundred Facebook posts? That “seed” would not have taken if the soil weren’t already fertile. Frankly, I don’t think it made a difference. We were barrelling toward Trump with or without the oh so spooky slavs typing on a keyboard.

On the one hand, you can read it as a parody of late 20th century life - like, haha imagine a caveman clocking into work

but on the other hand, Flinstones and its far future counterpart Jestsons kinda suggest an inability to imagine anything different. Automobile-ized suburban development frequently gets presented an the human ‘default’. As though we just default to this, rather than it being one of many ways cities and society could be organized.

All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they’re eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I’d rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough…

It’s stripping out the copper wiring for cash. Buy a game studio, fire all the employees. Now their paychecks can be served up as profit to shareholders. Move all the files to your servers, it’s your “Intellectual Property”. Sell off the computers and the desks and anything else not nailed down. Do they own the building? Great, sell that too! Or, better yet, rent it out!

work customer service long enough and being intolerable starts to be appealing

And your metaphor was a fun oversimplification.

Desertification has increased

Local flora has decreased

Rabbit populations have octupled

Deer populations have doubled

Squidward is churlish and often over-reacts when his personal time is intruded upon. Maybe his neighbors don’t recognize when they’re being intrusive, but they do value Squidward’s company. It took drastic conditions for him to realize he values their company as well.

Micky Mouse entering public domain is historical benchmark. Cool, but also… that mouse is hollow. Good for a cheap horror game or thumbing your nose at the big theater conglomerate, but otherwise meh

Donald Duck going public domain will be a real treat

And there certainly wasn’t a neighborhood where your highway on-ramp currently is.

Ok, I think Gaza will actually do better under a Trump administration because liberals actually scrutinize Trump and rally against what he does. Whereas, we get nothing but excesses for the failures (to say nothing of the humanitarian crimes) of Biden’s administration.

for someone posting on a politics community, you seem to really dislike actually discussing politics

i’m talking about the article, referencing things in it. Do you often classify conversation as ‘deflection’?

You seem to misunderstand the Dobbs decision. There was no law in the books, abortion was set by the decision of a previous supreme court ruling, Roe V Wade. Dobbs over-rulled that ruling – if there had been an actual law, passed at any point in time the legislature, there would have been nothing the supreme court could do.

A month before the Dobbs ruling and until the following November, the Democrats had the house, senate, and presidency. If they had passed a law enshrining abortion as a right, then all court rulings would become moot.

And… the supreme court is already a captured body for the republicans. Too late. There is going to be a republican in office either next year or in another four. That’s just how US presidencies go – no party holds the wing for very long. Pearl clutching about the makeup of the court is a little late at this point.

im just typing

but sure, i’ll cop to those labels, if you like. One Trolling, Nacissistic screed, mon sieur;

Let’s talk about the Obama administration! What a campaign they ran, and what a voter mandate it got them to boot! Can you imagine if they actually used that mandate? If Obama had actually closed Gitmo and pulled out of Afghanistan, like he had said he would. The lives that would have been saved, the blood unspilled; it’s beyond calculable.

And what was his legislative achievement, for all that mandate could have done? He passed the Affordable Healthcare Act. A bill modeled on proposals made by the Heritage Foundation. The very same Heritage Foundation that’s giving us Project 2025. Imagine that.