• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

help-circle



  • On the topic of fentanyl, if I may be so bold as to ask, do that many Americans genuinely give a shit about any fentanyl coming across any of our borders? I suppose those who do drugs that are likely to be cut with fentanyl, but as an American whose drug use consists of at most alcohol and legal weed, fentanyl isn’t something I’m particularly worried about. I’m not saying it’s not destructive or dangerous, but it’s not something I ever feel worried about. Maybe I’m just too poor to be exposed to people who do the kind of drugs that get laced with fentanyl, or maybe I’m lacking more empathy than I realize, but while I’ve seen sad examples of people whose lives have been destroyed by opiates and fentanyl in news programs and documentaries, I also have a hard time not seeing the fear of Fentanyl as anything more than wealthy parents like Trump, who know their kids are doing cocaine or other drugs, worried that their kids (like Don Jr) will accidentally OD on some laced drugs, which again, maybe it’s an empathy problem on my part, but maybe if you aren’t smart enough to test your drugs maybe you shouldn’t be doing them. I don’t know, it just seems like dhe dumbest issue to tank the whole economy over (unless that was the goal all along, and you just want a boogeyman-scapegoat for an excuse). It’s not that I even really care about “the economy” that much either, but I do care about ordinary people being able to afford housing and food.


  • Problem is, we can’t just skip to that part of the story without being accused of being just like the J6 crowd. I hate what is happening, and don’t want to say there’s nothing that can be done, but unfortunately there’s a bunch of people who aren’t gonna wake up and get it until it hurts them personally.

    For now, probably the best thing we can do is stand up for those in their crosshairs and support them however we can, while we wait for a bunch of the anti-woke crowd to wake up to the fact that they voted for the leopard that’s eating their face. Now, there should definitely be a limit on how long we wait for them to wake up, but at the speed this leopard is going? I doubt anyone will be unscathed by Spring.






  • China needs us economically as much as we need them for manufacturing. Sure, we’re trying to be more independent and make more domestically, and they are trying to be more independent economically through BRICS. Neither country is doing a very good job of attaining their goals of independence, but to keep up appearances both countries like to simultaneously pretend there’s not a relationship and also that they are the top in the relationship.

    The reality is both countries have some wealthy “oligarchs” who exploit workers and governments that mostly only work to benefit themselves and their oligarch friends. China will take out an oligarch here and there when they decide they’re getting too powerful, and Americans get to elect some of our leaders, other than that we’re not very different. Deep down both governments understand it would be political suicide to antagonize the other to the point meaningfully harming them. At least both current governments that is, Trump is probably too dumb to realize we need each other, so that’s a potential wild card, but North Korea is almost certainly a bigger threat to both the US and China than we will to each other for decades.






  • They know the meaning. Most of the ones I grew up around chose to believe that since “separation of church and state” doesn’t appear in the Constitution that it was a fringe idea a couple of the founding fathers had, that “liberals” today have made into a bigger deal than it should be so they can keep “persecuting” Christians.

    Christian nationalism takes all the dogmatic thinking they have about the Bible being instructions from an infallible, all knowing God, that must be followed, and applies that thinking to the US Constitution and the founding fathers. Once you’re in the mindset of reading something like it’s absolute truth that can’t be questioned (at least the parts that tell you you’re wrong, the parts that say I’m wrong are different), it’s easy to get stuck in that mindset for everything you read.




  • I remember this with nursing degrees when I was in college in the late 2000s, there was a big deal made about a shortage of nurses around that time, and a bunch of kids were convinced they were going to make bank and have guaranteed jobs when they graduated, then they started graduating and flooded the market. A bunch of them ended up staying in school for grad degrees in other fields, since they couldn’t find nursing jobs.


  • The economic loss of losing a generation and a half of workers who will be unable to save for retirement and will put a giant strain on the economy in 40-50 years when their brains and bodies are shot, but they can’t afford to retire because the money that they could have set aside went to paying student loans. It’s going to be way cheaper in the long run and a better investment to forgive student loans now, than to wait for all those people to hit retirement age and not be able to afford to retire, holding down jobs that should be opening for new generations and screwing over the youth once again. Not that newer generations will be as big, since those strapped with student loans are choosing not to have kids because they can’t afford it. Also if our social safety net for retirees (Social Security, Medicare, etc) is already strained, we’d better give people the best chance we can at being able to afford to save for their own retirements.

    If anything, the ROI on paying off student debt is better long term than the auto and bank bailouts - because the cost of not doing it is going to affect the economy for generations.