If I’m ever envious of someone doing work in places where they should be relaxing, please kill me.

You miss the fact that conservatives, nearly universally, do not accept that any of their situation is their own fault(sounds strange when us on the left will blame capitalism and the elite for most of the problems in the world, but we also come with petabytes of receipts and the right is allergic to facts). Many of them who live deeper in poverty are also living in cheaper areas, too, and have already cognitive-dissonanced themselves out of needing to worry about paying for things like health insurance(especially since many benefit from public healthcare systems, even in the US).

Now, the other important thing to remember is that conservative said those things. That’s crucial because it means that they aren’t talking to their voting base which is cool and tough and good with money, they’re talking to the other guys who need to get their shit together. If their guy does it then there must be a reason and if their enemy does it then there must’ve not been a reason, except they don’t base that on anything real like who’s actually done the research and shown their work.

Conservatives, no matter where you find them, are inherently anti-social power-seekers who refuse to take true responsibility for their actions. Whenever someone I know moves away from conservatism it is around the time they also, for whatever reason, begin to finally understand that the rich don’t actually love them and that maybe they actually do want to have real friends who aren’t also just other hateful goons, afterall.

They do this because they’re stupid and it’s an old, parroted line aimed at passing the blame to other people. If they said what you’re asking for that wouldn’t be as effective at blaming others.

The other reason is that they know that the centrist/conservative idea of a Starbucks costumer is a woke person who likes fancy drinks and not just black coffee. It’s all about creating a strawman for their base to hate. If they were doing it honestly, they’d also be saying that people should buy smaller vehicles that consume significantly less fuel but SUVs and trucks are associated with their base so they don’t do that. Their base isn’t smart enough to make those connections so it’s all good. They’re not clever, these politicians, they’re just playing “manipulate the voting base” on baby mode.

What do you mean by “heavy duty”? Thursday Boot Company has resoleable boots that are decidedly not work boots.

“Unique” here refers to the fact that every other car is built pretty much the same way in as much first responders are concerned, and that makes them predictable and fairly easy to get out of while cybertrucks are strong enough and door-handleless enough to be incredibly dangerous(while also not being strong enough to do most of what they promise).

Pay a person?? Give a real human being money?!?

These people would rather burn a million dollars in front of a homeless person than give that person $1,000. It’s extra cruel when you realize that society would make that $1,000 back and then some if it were to help that person escape their poverty cycle.

I don’t get the use of “and yet” here. They untouchable because they exist in a system that supports them and has supported them since monarchies were a thing and probably before. They didn’t setup an intricate series of protections, we just willingly gave them a handful of grenades and now we have to, or feel we have to, dance around them whenever they have a temper tantrum so they don’t blow us all up. It’s the same mentality behind “too big to fail” where we could super easily actually let them fail or otherwise punish them but unfortunately we also elected similarly moronic and selfish people to be in charge and they want to pretend that they’ve been fooled or forced to cede to the rich.

The fuck are you talking about? You really believe that there are no ways to measure radiation in Lebanon? The health damage from the radiation would also be way to wide-spread to hide.

Fake kids to real kids is very different than some crazy fucko thinking same-sex marriage would lead to fucking animals. Are you for real?

That doesn’t make them intelligent, and you need to re-read my comment until you understand just how many failures these people experience that they can simply ignore. In many ways you could even argue that what they’re doing isn’t intentional, they’re just reacting in the moment and we can all see how the furthest they can really look ahead is about a couple days.

Look at Musk, there have literally been whole teams of people who made it their job to distract the stupid child so he couldn’t fuck up their company. Jeff Bezos is making terrible decisions and his creativity was “bookstore but online”, yet it looks like success the same way a toddler with a shotgun will get all the cookies they want.

“Intentional” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. These are some of the dumbest, most over-confident people alive right now and they are nothing without their ability to ignore major financial failures.

That is what that means, though. “It is very apparent to me now, and I imagine to others, that I’m an idiot.”

No one truly intelligent is seeking their own personal profit over everyone else. The simple fact is that these people are just lucky and have never had to ever consider the consequences of their actions. They aren’t happy, their lives don’t change between a few hundred million dollars and a billion dollars, they just chase a bigger number because the highest level their brains function at is like a monkey that wants all the fruit to itself.

I think about it this way: Neurodivergent are usually considered bad at communicating, except the worst communicators I’ve ever met have been neurotypical people. They live in a world built for them, where anyone not following the script must be broken so it not their fault. You look at these billionaires and they aren’t behaving like this because they’re smart, because there’s a plan, it’s because they refuse to admit they’re lucky and any failure was someone who just didn’t listen to the enough. It’s not their awful planning, it’s the employee who was unable to follow their bullshit.

These people are not intelligent, they just have enough money to be wrong a thousand times and only think about how smart they were that thousand and oneth time. They throw a million darts at the board and claim the single bullseye was all their raw skill.

They don’t care. In their minds, trans men are women and they don’t respect women enough to care at all.

And really, I would just like to see the US working class band together. There is nothing without workers, and people can only be forced so much. Maybe it’s the privileged AuDHD talking but I’m always so shocked with the amount of crap people put up with and how much they’d rather tell their coworkers to chill out than tell their bosses to pay up.

These days I’m still so surprised that we need corpo media to run a campaign. And honestly, we saw Mamdani win so I’m not sure why we have such a hard time everywhere else.

We have a similar problem to the last thing you mentioned here in Canada. We keep voting for the “esser of two evils”, never for the actually progressive party, and have done so to the point where the centrist party has simply become the conservative party from a decade ago. We did nothing with our “strategic voting” except the kick the can ever-so-slightly down the road while, in a sense, attacking the party many of us claim to actually want. The centrist party was elected in 2015 largely because they promised electoral reform and, when a non-partisan committee found that much more democratic systems would lead to them probably never winning again, they quickly threw the whole thing out because it was apparently going to be “too hard.” Then we elected them a few more times because we are stupid. I’ve always voted for the progressive party and refuse to ever engage in this useless, short-sighted, “strategic” voting nonsense. It’s never truly worked in our two countries and we can see it so painfully clearly.

The curse of being even margainally intelligent, I suppose. I ain’t a genius but boy-howdy the bar just gets lower every passing day.

At my first job, I was told I couldn’t be paid more despite the fact that I was getting the same pay as someone in my position was about 20 years prior. The boss? Massive house in the richest neighbourhood with two elephant statues out front that cost $50k each. He spent his days falling asleep in meetings and generally doing less than nothing. All the department heads were disgustingly rich, everyone else could get fucked.

No one is dumber than a rich person, except perhaps the people who are actively being screwed by them and who still believe that having money means the rich person must have earned it.

Whenever the governments of the US and Canada do anything we can’t even be fucked to do much of anything, so I think shutting the hell up and letting the French do what they do is probably better than trying to mock them for at least trying.

I know that the whole thing is more nuanced and I know of the stuff that you’re speaking about, but what I’m saying is that, right now, people from the US are guilty until proven innocent.

Let me put it this way: Saying “it’s just the government” is the same thing as saying “not all men”, but somehow even dumber than that since the government overwhelmingly holds way more power. As a man, I understand my part in the latter and do not expect women to trust me because I think I’m safe, and as US citizens people need to understand that no one cares what they think of the former if our interaction with the United States is done at the end of their threats and through the smoke left behind by their bombs.

That really makes the rest of us in the world happy to hear that the country bombing everyone and trying to intimidate allies is full of citizens who are utterly fucking useless.

Ya’ll would do well to remember that, unless you actually do something, we don’t give a shit about how upset you are. You are a citizen of the US and I have some sympathy for that but when try to deflect like this that sympathy quickly evaporates. It reads loud and clear like you care more for your personal reputation than anything else.