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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Honestly this is sort of ridiculous.

    • Biden is a Washington insider now, but that’s because he had a lifetime to make something of himself. He grew up in the middle class
    • I think we can all agree Obama was an outsider without any sort of elaboration
    • Bill Clinton grew up dirt poor in a state that basically only makes the news when something stupid happens.

    All three had to climb the ladder in a huge way, that simply wouldn’t have been possible in a lot of other countries.

    I also feel like Trump embodies the whole “anyone can be president” in his own sort of fucked up way. Trump obviously was born into immense wealth and enjoyed tremendous status, but he was in no way ever considered leadership material by America’s political elite. His election was a complete “wtf” moment and wouldn’t have happened in most countries. In a more rigid system we’d probably have had something like a Hillary Clinton v Jeb Bush election, which strictly speaking would have been better than what we got but also let’s be real we would have all hated it.

    I’m not saying America is some pure meritocracy. Bush was a third generation political dynasty member. His opponents were also pretty well connected. It’s just that he’s only one of several presidents to get elected in the past 30 years.





  • This is a serious answer so it’s gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.

    There’s a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

    Above all else, these communities don’t really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.

    To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.

    Ironically I think a lot of Trump’s worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.

    An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community’s wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that’s literally what happened just a few years prior.

    The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment’s bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.

    Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment’s outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word “sky fairy” on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.

    Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.

    A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don’t conform like shit. I’m pretty sure I’m voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It’s completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you’ll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.








  • Look honestly I’m not looking forward to it.

    Crossed had a lot of good moments, but also was a product of its time. It relied a lot on shock value derived from gratuitous displays to carry certain points of the story. While this wasn’t that uncommon for that era of graphic novels, the world has changed a lot in the past decade and a half. Audiences have become a lot more desensitized to this kind of stuff. A lot of scenes that would have been met with some level of horror/disgust when first published would now be met with eye rolls and comments about the author’s sexual preferences.

    In addition, when it comes to any nerd IP, Hollywood has a habit of dumbing everything down to an extreme degree while simultaneously acting like they are absolutely geniuses speaking harsh truths. If anyone points out that what they’re making kind of just sucks, they’ll be a million and one fly by night journalists implying that critics are just bigots in some way.

    The latest season of The Boys provides a good example of this. The writing fell off a cliff. A ton of stuff was deliberately over the top for no other purposes to induce shock value, yet somehow still undermined previous parts of the show. The social commentary got flanderized to the point where a lot of it was absolutely braindead. Despite all of this, Hollywood will insist that this season is as good as ever and the only people complaining are MAGA bigots who can’t handle criticism, despite said criticism being fairly blatant since season 1.


  • I’m 30 years old, and even when I was 15 I wasn’t really friends with the super mean girl gossip types. Throughout my life, I’ve been friends with women who largely identify as feminist and sort of reject those stereotypes.

    The problem is that post #metoo it became normalized to take the whole “support women” thing to such an extreme that it enabled toxic behavior. While there were women who tried to pull the whole “it’s sexist to criticize me for making poor life choices” crap, other women would get super offended for them attempting to use feminism in that way.

    It’s extremely frustrating that the 19 and 20 year old women I knew in college had better moral compasses than the 25 to 40 year old women I know now. That’s really not supposed to be how it works.






  • Trust me, you don’t. These women will often want the full emotional availability of a romantic partner from you, with a fraction of both the emotional and physical availability of a partner from them. They generally want a monogamous relationship, just from an emotionally unavailable guy who is very physically attractive. Above all else, they will not be honest about your “ranking”.

    Almost any woman who is halfway sane and willing to use online dating tends to get into a relationship in like three months tops. There’s also a decent number of women who are either not looking for a relationship, or would like a relationship but think the apps are super toxic.

    However around 10 to 15 percent of the women I meet are very much architects of their own misery. These women are extremely vocal, generally shitty to their potential partners, and can always find more partners due to the nature of OLD. The frustrating part is I haven’t met a single woman who calls out this behavior, and a significant amount that actually reassure these people.

    My GF insists that most women are just trying to be supportive, and that they don’t actually approve of the toxic behavior in question. My conversations with closer female friends backs this up. However in my eyes all this does is enable and normalize said behavior. It is also especially frustrating because I’m 100 percent expected to speak out if another guy does something remotely problematic.