You mean you don’t have to like Kamala? I’m voting Kamala.

Not fond of her, but she’ll do better than Trump by leagues and miles and make history while not rocking the boat or affecting any meaningful change. Libs will love her, she’ll be a democrat party darling. I bet she gets a second term.

But we’re fine with the gun and murder?

Understand the way in which people commonly use iconic media figures in artistic, subversive ways to parody and highlight social issues. It’s a human thing, humans do it.

You gotta try to fit in y’know.

I will cast my vote between tears but nobody ever promised preserving democracy will always make you feel good.

In fact, I am close to launching into a really hard condemnation of every last one of you lazy-ass motherfuckers who expect everything to always play out like a 2-dimensional anime plot where you’re the good guy so you’re supposed to always feel good, and any struggles are easily overcome, and if it doesn’t play out like that, then you go full doomer-mode and grab your soapbox to preach how pointless life is just because you’re lonely but too scared to talk to a girl. Go back to your discord safe-spaces and let adults out here make the hard choices.

The hot tl;dr of this that is going to get you a lot of angry boys sending you incoherent diatribes is that we haven’t decided as a species that we will stop sexualizing youth.

Yes there are biological imperatives for the sexually aggressive sex to seek out mates that are young, healthy and capable of producing offspring before they become too old to reproduce. That’s all a thing that’s real, but it’s as far distant in our past as most other ancient instincts that we’ve put to rest. We just keep this one alive because we want it to continue broadly. The whole notion of older men predating and sexualizing youthful appearances or “innocence” as standards of femininity is absolutely something that if we all decided together was no longer acceptable, it would end tomorrow. (Or realistically in one generation.) This is not a more natural part of us than anything else we choose to follow or not, because we are well above using any natural response system as an excuse to allow dangerous social norms to continue.

The reason I say this is because there are a lot of men who will secretly or overtly hold the position that since we have biological urges, then it must be natural and acceptable. Meanwhile, ya’ll fuckers completely ignore the thousand other biological drives and standards that we’ve abolished because they’re unproductive, hurt people or just have gone out of style.

For example: body odor. Do you really think we were using soap and perfume when we were packed together in huts and caves for the last thousand millennia? You are genetically identical to the people who used to bury their faces in each other’s armpits to identify each other in the dark, but the thought makes you gag now because you were socialized to feel repulsion at this. (Fetishes aside.) We can socialize ourselves to believe and internalize almost anything, we are far, far beyond the forces of natural selection and are now choosing our evolutionary path. Wouldn’t it be nice if we chose good paths that respected others and protected children.

Good for this guy, but there is nothing positive or uplifting about this story.

The police were not materially harmed in any way to encourage a change in behavior, the officer who was obviously just another giant asshole in a sea of assholes is enjoying a healthy retirement where he can sit and fondly remember how many dogs he’s shot.

This never should have happened, this doesn’t happen in every country with a police force, we don’t have to put up with this as a cost of “freedom.” We don’t accept “a few bad apples” in hospitals or airlines, so why is one of our most important jobs run effectively with no oversight or independant review?

I used to think it was entirely corruption, but lately I think it’s darker. I think a lot of people want to be persecuted by an authority. Maybe not having a danger to worry about makes humans idle and angry and that’s why we have so much contention and anti-social behavior.

Or it might just be boomers running shit and laughing at 1-dimensional social media memes.

Should have took a lot more.

Could we start discussing credible strategies to reverse this situation, or at least improve that number somehow?

I say this constantly, and everyone nods along happily when I say it, but almost nobody does it. What is it? It’s getting involved in your local politics.

The federal government, the US congress and senate and all the executive branch… they’re all supported and propped up by powerful institutions within the states that got powerful because nobody paid it any attention and still don’t. People get elected to represent us who run without opposition and then we wonder why nothing seems to change.

If you get involved with knowing who in your neighborhood, your school district, your city, your county and your state represent you, and then challenging that representation in any way you can, from actually running all the way to just getting on those horrible neighborhood forums and holding yard-sales to get to know your neighbors.

GET TO KNOW YOUR NEIGHBORS. Jesus, this country is terrible about this one huge thing that could change everything, which is reforming communities. We scream and cry how bad the world is and make ZERO effort to make it better by forming support systems within neighborhoods. I mean fuck, most suburban neighborhoods have nothing else to do, might as well have some bake sales and yard sales and jogging groups and other things to help get to know each other, right? Or has all our cynicism completely overshadowed any possible chance of ever forming friendly communities in the US?

Since the shareholders only care about 6-month projections, they will always choose a shitty, short-term successes with rushed products with patches later or promises of continued bugfixing, than spending more money and time to make something that users approve of and passes all requirements.

The shit is already running pretty deep.

Every job I’ve had I’ve ended up becoming a liaison of sorts between the sales teams and the operational teams because I seem to be the Daywalker, who can walk between worlds and communicate with the techy nerds, take their issues to the loud sales assholes and make it all work.

It’s not an enjoyable role but it always earned me high marks because nobody else can stomach it.

Overused characters who don’t have a lot of range, it would basically be watching Depp and Ryder in a romance together with some funny dialogue.

Gomez and Morticia require a style of acting that calls back to early romance movies and is overplayed and over-the-top while remaining classical and debonaire and oozing with romance. I can’t see that chemistry with Depp and Ryder.

I doubt they’d be able to beat Raul Julia or Anjelica Huston.

I feel like these two have always been Gomez and Morticia. Even the series was just a pale imitation.

Absolutely correct, I watched this happen to our tech team before I was also thrown in the chipper.

And it doesn’t help that a lot of the young people trying to get into coding and tech fields are not what you would call titans of confidence and charisma, these are mostly introverted and thoughtful people who have studied most of their lives under the belief that meritocracy exists, and they can prove themselves in the business world by doing great work and being a good employee.

Meanwhile glance over at the sales side of the building and there are people there making six figures a year who do next to nothing but party and tell lewd jokes, but are absolutely invulnerable to layoffs and downsizing as long as they can talk to clients and joke about sports with the CEO.

The disillusionment around the business world is real and unsustainable.

Truth.

Been job hunting in similar fields for a while and as a middle-aged person, I simply cannot get a callback from any of these companies, then when you actually visit them and see some of their workforce, you rarely see anyone over late-20’s, and it’s all these high-energy, eager-to-please, eager-to-work-for-recognitionbucks, fresh-outta-college kids who can be exploited and turned over rapidly.

I am job hunting because the previous company I managed was bought out, downsized, and all the senior employees making more than entry level wages were cut. This is happening everywhere.

More and more technology, overseas outsourcing options, and general service/gig systems for filling job openings has left companies treating workers as disposable as toilet paper.

This is because almost every business is now part of a huge chain of ownership, and the shareholders at the top, groups of very rich old white dudes, just gather together in their hooded cloaks and look at the bars and graphs every month and decide what investments are to be amputated, and which to be kept. Before going back to their private sex islands.

I have a gaming group that I regularly spend time with, they are about as diverse as you can possibly imagine. We have back-country gun-toting conservatives playing alongside college campus protesting trans girls, hispanic immigrants, US marines, housewives, people from China and Philippines, midwest American Christians and one extremely loving gay couple who do everything together.

While we do have a few ground rules, more like courtesy guidelines, like no arguing about politics, it’s not something I’ve ever had to enforce or moderate, and if you were to overhear the group on an average gaming night, you would think they are just the closest and tightest group of people who lift each other up, help each other out, laughing together and telling lewd jokes until they laugh so hard together that they wheeze.

This group has been the end-product of years of “distillation” in that the people who have issues with other people’s identity or politics or can’t set aside ego to have fun with people and make new friends, they just have naturally fallen by the wayside, so what’s left is a group of people who are bound together by something much stronger than politics or ideology, and that’s intelligence.

The one common thread that everyone left here has is that they are sharp, they like to talk through issues, they talk about ideas and science and sociology and relationships and enjoy the very simple act of trying to understand other people.

Curiosity about others will carry you through life far, far further than one might think.

If the people who needed to hear any of that the most could understand a word of it, they would probably be nodding along in agreement and ready to do their part to make changes.

Or they would just call you an “elitist commie” and go take out another payday loan.

The economy is doing great.

For the people who manage and control the economy.

They’re already being grifted, they have already passed the first filter.

People sometimes wonder why scam emails and phone calls are so obvious, with mis-spellings, bad grammar and poor English. The thing is that they do this on purpose. Running a scam takes time and energy, you want to work marks that you know can be manipulated easily, and if someone can’t determine that an email from “micosaft.pAypal-Customre-Sercicve.com” isn’t legit, they’re VERY likely to buy the story that they have to send money via Western Union to some random address in Kazakhstan to get their share of the king’s inheritance.

Being in maga is basically that. If you’re wearing a red hat and waving flags and spouting off FOX news lines to anyone who will listen, you’re a mark.

The average progressive or even liberal in the US hates hearing this, but the vast, vast majority of Trumpers are actually “okay” people, and you would all get along splendidly in just about any other context.

The problem is though, they are dumb. Don’t get me wrong or think I’m sticking up for them. I just have some amount of sympathy and pity because I grew up out in the boonies in Southwestern USA, I was raised conservative and only flipped in my 20’s after seeing too much horror and war hurt people I cared about, and by extension, I learned to care for more than just the people I know.

A lot of people haven’t learned that. We take for granted that empathy is a learned skill, and we expect others to have it on demand and we tend to resent those who don’t exercise it. My take is that we’re expecting people to exercise muscles they’ve never even stretched. These are people locked in communities that they will likely spend their whole lives in, often times decaying outskirts of America, rampant with drugs and alcohol abuse, stuck in low-wage jobs or jobs that demand them to spend every waking moment working. They have no time nor opportunity to learn how to incorporate “care” into their daily misery, much less political knowledge. Then someone like Trump comes along, someone they only hear clips of and hear their “news station” praise while simultaneously explaining that all their problems are because of people who “hate america” and are trying to destroy families with scaaary things like abortion and gender-fluidity. It makes sense if your brain is desperately looking for a story to explain why you’re so unhappy. Which is how all our brains work.

We all have to remember that the worst people in the world are identical to us. We could have been born in their lives with their ignorance and tunnel vision, and all their feelings of fighting against a stacked-deck and hopelessness against change that will (supposedly) take away their only comforts in life.

I am getting really uncomfortable with the hate the left is directing at people who are simply dumb as fuck. Yes, they are dangerous, yes they are capable of doing better, and on top of that the only examples we SEE of this segment of America is the most horrific and malicious, the people storming the capitol or screaming at rallys or beating up protestors. They are the worst, but not necessarily the rule.

I had family members who were going to vote Trump and JUST needed to see the clips of him speaking that don’t make it to Facebook news feeds to change their mind. Approach this from a place of education and compassion and you will all have better results.

Let’s save our hate for the real evil, the grifters and pundits who are pied pipers for the ignorant. They are smart and know what they are doing and it’s pure evil.

law person

If only there were people trained in law who could function as our representatives in the legal system.

I mean, everyone has been crying and whinging for years, decades even, that the USA needs to ramp up semiconductor fabrication in case shit goes south in Taiwan. We are finally getting some domestic production power and we’re getting outraged by the traffic delays? America will sink itself because of our people’s own addiction to comfort and complaining about any slight to that comfort.