This is Twitter equivalent to fucking yourself down the bar skank ladder. I knew of Laura Loomer exclusively from Twitter when I was there and she was in a similar but less illustrious category as that guy who got caught pretending to be a black man, that weirdo whose profile pic looks like he bought a shirt too small in order to roid rage out of it, or that former Hercules idiot.
I think the step you’re missing is 4chan
Yeah, I too don’t understand why everyone around him is just OK with the idea of the guy being a completely responsibility-free empty vessel.
It seems that once again they want to absolve this…former president of all responsibilities, but him being responsible for what comes out of his donkey-brained mouth is the lowest possible bar of accountability before the bar clangs to the floor.
You’re right that every capitalist wants to be a landlord, but the distinction between the two groups is that capitalists aren’t there yet, and capitalists are largely also subjected to rents by those that already are.
A lot of the recent movements in software has been away from selling products and toward rents (i.e. away from capitalism and toward neofeudalism / technofeudalism). That is why everything has become a subscription service (even things that you used to pay once and be able to use as is until you wanted to “upgrade” like, for instance, Adobe Photoshop).
Doctorow explains the difference in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-Tl6yIsCoY
Try to enjoy them; if Trump wins, these will be remembered as the good times.
I remember the summer of 2016, when I was playing Pokemon Go in the parks and people I had never talked to and that lived nearby were playing it next to me. We were all celebrating when we caught a pokemon when we were after, and comparing which ones we’d caught with each other.
At the time I thought…who would buy Trump’s conman routine? Who actually thinks that the country is in a terrible enough place that we need to elect this person who seems to actively hate the country and seemed to want to set the entire thing on fire?
I left my Californian home and went back to my original state to visit my family. We went to several different areas of the state in fall of 2016 because my wife was from a rural area and I originally grew up in a slightly more suburban area. I saw the signs in the yards, I saw the discontent, and I saw how people did not seem to be reacting the same way to his craziness. I saw how casually they would put on his rants in the background while talking about other issues. I saw how some of them were amused by his antics. It had been a couple of years since I had last been back and it once again struck me how much worse the area appeared to be from the last time I was there. I was in a rural area when the “Access Hollywood” tape dropped. People seemed to visibly shrink at even the mention of the news. I thought he was done for, and that this was a bridge too far for his supporters to cross. That people would vote third party, or not vote at all. I did not get the sense that my thoughts were shared by those around me.
When I came back to California, people were talking about the debates. It was sunny and nice out, and people would talk about the projects they had going on in their houses, or they’d talk about work related affairs. People were sometimes amused by Trump’s antics, but everyone uniformly thought it was impossible for him to win the election. Having seen what I had seen in the weeks prior, I was no longer one of these people. “They’ll never let him win”, one of my co-workers said. I was stunned…who are “they”? Does the rest of the country actually believe this?
It turns out quite a few of them did. Many people thought there was just simply no way that Trump would win, because either the system was already rigged against him and would not allow him to win, or because the country was just not in dire enough straits to elect such a madman (as I once thought).
Hindsight is 20/20 but when I thought it was bizarre that he was even a viable candidate at one point in 2016, and I saw the decaying state where I grew up, I thought “if he wins the election, then we are in a much worse state as a country than I thought”. And we undoubtedly are.
Of course he won, but the reason that I have this somewhat rambling response to this question is that the answer to “why is he still in the race?” ultimately comes down to the overall state of this country.
He is in this race because this is where we are as a country: barely able to imagine a possible future that is brighter than the present, because we are still caught up in degenerative non-sense that keeps us thinking that our broken down towns, and our poor social bonds are caused by some horde of “others” instead of their true causes: our ever-widening wealth inequality, our ever-decaying moral responsibilities to each other, and our national instinct to absolve ourselves of our responsibilities by claiming that not only is it correct to be forever self-serving, but that even the idea of altruism is a lie.
At some point, companies completely absolved themselves of a large part of their purpose…which is to provide employment.
Totally tracks with the idea that the eventual destination here isn’t capitalism, it’s actually worse than that…it’s fucking neofeudalism.
They don’t want to produce a better product than the competitors, they want to extract rents from anyone unlucky enough to need to use the tools or knowledge in their fiefdom, and they want to use those rents to buy up more tools and knowledge to charge rents on.
The American public also elects them to office so they get to run your entire life.
I saw Sarah Good with the Devil! I saw Goody Osburn with the Devil! I saw Bridget Bishop with the Devil! You can’t fact check me! I WATCHED IT ON TV!
I’d love nothing more than for these two people to be irrelevant, but unfortunately I live in a world where their money causes them to have large amounts of influence.
That’s the kind of shit high schoolers think adults care about.
Most adults care deeply about being embarrassed…some even more so than children. A very common phobia is that of public speaking.
I thought the Cybertruck would be his wake up call, but somehow that is the best selling EV pickup in all of North America.
If we’re looking for business failures, Twitter has cratered in value.
But again I don’t think it’s possible for people like Leon and Trump to look at failures or accomplishments with anything remotely resembling an objective view. They view things other people would view as failures as being someone else’s fault, or fake, or not as big of a deal as someone’s making it, etc.
If your entire worldview and personality is predicated on you always being right, and everyone that tells you “no” always being wrong, you cannot reflect on your failures without changing your entire worldview and personality.
Him being booed onstage at the Dave Chappelle show, or him being widely regarded as a terrible SNL host would’ve taken non-weirdos with some ability to self-reflect down a peg. For weirdos like him and Trump I’m not sure there is any “taking them down a peg”. They’re so enamored with themselves that they’ll never believe they did anything wrong or are incapable of anything.
You’ll get all the Logan act violations you seek if you act now!
It was obvious as hell that he wants Russia to win.
“Me driving a SUV that’s almost as big as a bus anywhere farther than 500ft from my home is not a problem at all!!” - average american, probably
SUVs are passe at this point. The hip thing is to drive a super-duty V12 king cab truck with a constantly empty truck bed to the store.
As an American burgermeister, it’s also important to complain about the price of gas continually while doing this.
(For extra credit: be sure to idle for 50 minutes in an in-and-out or chik-fil-a line that spills out into the street and blocks traffic on your way home from the store.)
I hate that I even know who this disgusting asshole is.
Counterpoint: no there isn’t
Fascism was originally supposed to be a mixture of “the best parts of the right and the left”.
Yes, and they do.