Yes, exactly! What would we do without such fine American institutions! Please, won’t someone think of the investors!

I’ve about had it. If one more shitty, awful thing happens, I’m going to really start hoping that somebody leads the revolution for me.

Tbh, concentrated wealth wouldn’t be able to squeeze the market if there was a healthy supply. There’s a lot of issues with single family homes, but the tl;Dr is that they’re expensive because they are by FAR the least efficient way to house people, and it’s basically the only kind of housing that most cities allow by zoning area.

Just look at them, sitting there, not getting punched by cops. Is that the world you want to live in, son?

Oh, no, not my beloved healthcare insurance provider who’s always been there for me ever since my boss chose them and I have nothing but great customer service experiences with.

Pro-tip: take the bus next time. Who am I addressing? Yes.

Well, we’ll provide the service once we buy it from them because they ran it into the ground as a vulture capital operation, and then once we’ve invested a trillion taxpayer dollars into fixing it up, we’ll sell it back to them for pennies.

This kind of shit is part of how I square government-supplied mass transit with libertarian/anarchist views. Cars are the gateway to so much intrusive, authoritarian bullshit, it’s actually nuts how people see them as tools of freedom.

It depends a lot on where you are. In the west? 50% of Amtrak stations are out in a suburb or a field or some bullshit like that. In the east, you’re absolutely correct. We’ve basically spent 100 years dismantling, underfunding, and obstructing passenger rail to prioritize cars, and it, uh, shows.

It’s probably going to take several fully loaded passenger jets or just two private jets colliding.

Whacko conspiracy time: they’re also working on cutting down Amtrak’s staffing and cutting funding for rail transit. Gas is expensive af and driving is uncomfortable and slow (not that Amtrak is any faster). What if the plan here is to just make interstate travel so painful that people stop travelling? I doubt it, though, I think this is just extra strong vanilla incompetence. I can’t imagine what the point of that would be, for starters.

Did we make America great yet?

They’re not laser focused on it, not honestly. Within milliseconds of regaining the government, the democrats are going to start anxiously rubbing their hands and saying “well, okay, but what about norms? What if we make fox news and the republicans sad?” I’m not seriously expecting the democrats to do a goddamn thing to fix things. Trump has dealt the US’ republic a death blow. I’m a little curious and a lot scared to find out what comes next.

And yeah, I’m not holding my breath. Besides Thomas and Roberts, the other conservatives can at least get things right about as much as a broken clock. I’m hoping that they’ll be broken clocks here, too, but I’m expecting that they’re going to try to thread the needle of “not exactly telling Trump no while also not exactly doing anything meaningful at all”.

Basically, he was all aboard with Eugenics, and he saw probably one of the most aggressive expansions in government power in US history while using WWI as an excuse. Stuff like shutting down newspapers that ran articles he didn’t like; the news of the flu outbreak was pretty suppressed for a while because of the war IIRC. He also banned prostitution not because of any moral argument, but because soldiers were catching STDs at troop collection points and being kept from being deployed because of the STDs. So, 100 years later, it’s still illegal because not using a condom kept a bunch of boys from being fed into the meat grinder.

There’s a bunch of other pretty wild shit that isn’t coming to me at the moment, but Wilson fucking sucked and generally doesn’t deserve any of the praise that people seem to offer him now.

Between shit like this and the DNC fighting as hard as possible to make sure it loses again in 2028, the only copes I have left are that either:

• this shit is going to spectacularly backfire and we’re going to end up with a socialist revolution OR

• we’re going to balkanize and what West Texas, Gary, Indiana, and Louisiana think about the civil war is going to stop holding everyone else back.

Are you the kind of monotheist that thinks that Project2025’s vision of state enforced Christianity is the right idea, or are you the kind that thinks it’s exactly the wrong idea?

“yes, we’re here to, uh… See a movie”

“Psst, ask if they have any slaves”

“Shut up, Rome! You’re gonna get us busted! Ask if they have any tea!”

You can lay blame at the feet of almost every single president since Wilson. We’ve never really been great, but Wilson was a real piece of work. It’s wild that he’s treated as some kind of progressive hero. It’s really been a long, slow death by a thousand cuts.

Well, I’d agree and disagree, but you can pretty much point at the last 100 years and draw a lot of parallels between the fall of our republic and the fall of their republic. Emphasis on the collapse of representative democracy into naked empire.

I imagine so, just much of it likely didn’t get recorded since hard drives were much smaller back then.

Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. I was honestly shocked that Booker did that filibuster at all, but I guess they just really needed to get out there and do a kickflip for the camera.