Yeah, he doesn’t even understand how to hit up a divorcee. You don’t tell her she’s young, you tell her that she’s aged like a good scotch, gaining complexity to be cherished by those who understand the value of it. That the subtle sweetness one finds in vanilla notes are much better than that of a saccarine drink for a 21 year old.

He wishes he was president of a thriving country in a thriving time. He will likely never get over the fact that he isn’t JFK but is instead Hoover (for any non Americans, Hoover is the one who really fucked up the great depression in remarkably similar ways). FDR was the sort of man who could not only get that divorcee into bed, but get her to stop living so damn self destructively while doing so, and it begins with an honest appraisal of the situation and seeing the value underneath anyways. Donald Trump has never been someone capable of doing that with anyone or anything.

And yeah, the scotch line has worked for me.

“If mr president says it’s raining then that’s why my leg is wet!” /s

For real though I strongly agree with the thesis here. Don’t give the carney (as in carnival person, not the Canadian politician) a stage, and especially don’t give the clown a respected stage unless you want him to use it to mock the stage and all it stands for. Trump revels in public speaking and direct attention, and he hates writing outside tweets. Hell, congress can openly rebutt and fact check a written state of the union.

The institutions and norms are broken. That’s bad, but you don’t fix a damaged deck by replacing the broken part of one board and painting over the other damage, you check the structures and you replace anything that might be damaged, and you try to make it able to resist what happened. The wood of our deck grew soft after incomplete repairs to damage and people kept jumping on it and stabbing it trying to break it for a long time, then this jackass showed up with an axe swearing he’d fix it. Now it’s partly on those who let him try, but there’s a lot of damage to fix and we really need to take this opportunity to do that and fix some errors in the initial designs that seemed good at the time

I’m a huge fan of lights that simulate the sunrise. They make me wake up fully and comfortably. The absolute perfect way to start my day. Unfortunately it works equally well on my wife who goes to bed and wakes up several hours after I do and hates that thing. Eventually I’m likely to win on this fight, but until I’m too deaf for alarms or she and I have to wake up at the same time, I suck it up and accept that I love her more than a comfortable start to my day.

Peaceful sounds unfortunately don’t wake me

It’s proof of citizenship. But also, here it’s a convenient and plausibly deniable way to disenfranchise people who vote differently than them.

Congrats! Nothing better than being cancer free, except maybe being cancer free for free.

Nah Fedora’s a girl, sorry that’s how you find out your mom is gay

An algorithm that actively attempts to keep me out of bubbles sounds like an algorithm that ensures I keep seeing bigoted opinions about people like me. I do think that there can be decent uses of algorithms, but I don’t think that corporate social media is going to provide it.

I also think we have a serious problem of a lot of people want the algorithm. It’s extremely habit forming and mindless. Hell I much preferred it back in the early days to having to find new websites and all that. It just came with a massive price I wouldn’t’ve paid had I known.

I can be trusted with this, I promise

This one but in the now/future. Basically a lot of money was printed to pay for things but in order to not cause inflation we had to create debt to destroy that money in the future.

Yes, we’re a profoundly broken country in how we use our wealth. But you were over here acting like no other country that isnt entirely and devastatingly impoverished is failing it’s citizens this way, and I’m pointing out that no, once again we fall in line with developing nations rather than developed ones. And for those of us who wish for it to be a functional country, I think my framing is much more useful.

And i apologize for assuming you’re a European who knows nothing of anywhere beyond the Eurosphere and assumes developing nations don’t even have running water.

That’s fair, i just suspect that that element won’t be upheld and am still bitter that it wasn’t then

Yes, it’s a for profit business that makes it’s profit off of trying to have the most accurate odds they can. They charge you slightly more than they expect to lose on you (the house edge) and then they’re betting on every roll of the dice. That’s exactly how casinos earn money (though casinos try to compete on experience and payout, while insurance competes on price and payout).

The difference is that the casino is attempting to take advantage of your greed and wants you to stay there and bet everything you have. Meanwhile the insurer is selling relief from fear of financial ruin and is asking you to make scheduled bets that you want to lose every month. American health insurance has massive issues and should be replaced with something akin to the NHS before it was defunded, but nobody is losing their shirt buying homeowners insurance unless the area they live in is now being pummeled by the climate crisis like southern California or the gulf of Mexico.

Would government run insurance be better? Yeah probably. But in the era before modern insurance a major part of the draw of fraternal organizations was that they served that role.

And this is embraced because profit is capped to a percentage of payouts

Listen, I think we’re as barbaric about this as any reasonable person, but we really aren’t unique. Mexico, Egypt, and the Philippines aren’t doing so great, but they’re all modern nations with modern infrastructure in their urban areas. India has even worse health insurance than the US and while yes they’re still building out their plumbing systems, Mumbai and New Delhi are modern megapolises.

Yeah the better option is for a multi state compact for a public option. I know Washington has a bit of a public option. That said, you get no subsidies if your employer offers minimum contributions to the health insurance of their choosing.

Edit to finish the thought: we need universal single payer, but barring that we need public options and real choice, including choice over where to apply our employer’s contributions. It wouldn’t fix everything that universal single payer would, but it would enable you to have the freedom to not need to change doctors every time you get a new job.

Yeah that’s straight up an attempt to relegalize segregation

Full faith and credit never stopped the refusal of some states to recognize other states’ gay marriages. It should have but didn’t

“We shipped billions of dollars of products to them free of charge and they dare not thank us”

Turns out he thinks the Zulus hold an inalienable right to the whole of Myanmar /s

That’s not even biblical. Israel has never controlled fucking Tehran, and they were routinely in exile in Iraq and Syria, not as conquerors but as conquered. No fuccabee only believes this because he’s pro genocide, anti brown people, and hates Muslims more than jews.