On one hand, yes… but on the other, I think that’s part of why they’re so successful. We constantly give Trump and people like Trump the village idiot pass - we don’t take them seriously because we wave off their malice as just stupidity.

If Trump actually behaved competently, he’d have been in prison ages ago.

…it’s the fucking Darth Jar Jar theory, but it’s happening in real time.

Oh he was trained. This shit wasn’t a fluke. We’ve reached “Nazis patrolling our streets, executing civilians on the president’s orders” stage of US collapse. This will continue until people start shooting back.

I really expected to see more pushback from the military. Every single one of them swore to defend the Constitution from all threats foreign and domestic, and are literally oath-bound to engage Trump the same way they do any other enemy of the US. Instead they keep just blindly following orders from chief domestic enemy while the Constitution burns.

Like, I never expected to see the military actually unite against the Trump regime, but surely there are at least a few thousand people in a force that large who take their oath seriously, right? …apparently not. Not a single one of the troops has stepped up to do what’s right, opting instead to do what’s easy.

Cowards and/or traitors, all of them.

Might be more of a developmental impairment. For children, magical thinking is normal and expected. They might sincerely think they can cause something to happen by thinking about it or engaging in some kind of paranormal way. Like, if a 4 year old points at you with a finger guns gesture and yells ‘bang’, they might just be trying to be silly; but they might also be genuinely trying to kill you. You’ll know if immediately after, they look down at their finger-gun with a wtf expression cuz they’re actually surprised it didn’t work.

Again, normal. Unnerving, but normal.

They should grow out of that shit by about age 7 iirc.

Lots of people never grow out of it, they just compartmentalize that kind of thinking as religion… they know they can’t kill you with finger guns, but Jesus? His finger guns are real!!.

Those people need a fuck ton of therapy.

The disconnect is one of class, not generation. Generation draws a lot of attention, both in solidarity and in backlash, but if you’re expecting the world to suddenly become better when boomers die off, or for X/millennials/Z/etc to swoop in and save the day, you’re in for disappointment.

The ruling class will continue to make our existence as dystopian as possible until we break out the guillotines.

Heart warming story of a royal toddler who noped the fuck out after being caught up in a political murder scheme, met two stoners, became a stoner himself, and kinda just did nothing but be a stoner until his ~20s when he was finally swayed to put the blunt down after his toddler-crush just randomly shows up one day and fucks him. He then proceeds to overthrow the government.

They just don’t make wholesome movies like that anymore. <3

Shhhhhhhhhh you’re going to wake Gabe!

Working in the OR. Anesthesiologist draws up some fentanyl, and I asked him if it was enriched. He looked at me like I’m a dumbass and asked “with what?”

-_-

US deep south. The only sorting of trash I see in the hospital is sharps vs non-sharps. Outside the hospital, sorting is vitually nonexistent… there’s no recycling here, everything just goes in a landfill. It’s fucking stupid, but this is what we get for putting Nazis in charge of everything.

No idea how they dispose of it. I’ve asked my immediate management chain if I can take damaged/pitted instruments that need to be replaced to donate to the local colleges - Anatomy & Physiology classes all have a lab component to dissect something, and the school I went to had instruments that were absolute garbage.

The answer was no… We just put instruments that need to be replaced in a red bin with other sharps like needles, and the bins are shipped off somewhere, probably to be incinerated.

Bigger stuff like equipment, we send to the biomedical engineering department for outprocessing. From there, no idea. Probably land fill.

I wouldn’t dumpster dive at a hospital though. It’ll be a sea of ruptured catheter bags, linens saturated with poop, and just all manner of pathogens. And probably sharps - that stuff is supposed to go in sealed red bins, but all it takes is one lazy employee and you’ve got yourself an HIV+ needle stick.

I work in an operating room, and have been around long enough to see multiple pieces of perfectly good equipment get replaced just because it hit the manufacturer’s end-of-life date.

I’m talking things like a several-hundred-thousand dollar microscope for microsurgery.

Basically that date means if the microscope fucks up somehow, the vendor takes zero liability, and any legal expenses fall onto the hospital… so we trash it and buy another one. Rinse and repeat after another few years.

That end-of-life date is always crazy early, and is like that 100% because the manufacturer knows hospitals would rather just treat a quarter million dollar microscope as disposable than accept liability for an equipment fault.

The waste is unreal.

Ad hominem

Flagrantly false. Gaza has been leveled since Biden left. Not leveled vs leveled =/= just as bad.

pre-loaded accusations

They’re called logical fallacies. The one you just used is called a false dilemma. If you don’t like me drawing attention to them, I’d recommend refraining from using them.

Whether it would have been a “lesser” genocide is unfalsifiable. We’ll never really know. But I don’t have the faith in it that you have. I’m not sure what a more competent genocidal administration would have done.

Correct. But I’m confident the Harris administration wouldn’t have taking the swan-dive that Trump’s did. Same with all the other evils he’s committed outside the scope of genocide: bad under Harris, worse under Trump. Given what we know about the two, that assumption seems pretty reasonable. If you disagree, well like you said, that comes to which candidate we have less faith in. For me, Trump is the obvious rock-bottom worst outcome, but I can’t compare to an administration that never happened, so speculate as you will.

Consider what many US Palestinians did: threaten to withhold their votes if Harris didn’t say there was at least some daylight between herself and Biden regarding Gazans. And she wouldn’t even do that much.

But that’s how you use the vote, if you use it at all. You use it as leverage. If the Democrats know you’ll “vote Blue no matter who” or “vote Blue no matter what,” then they’ll ignore you altogether, because you’re already in their pocket. You’ve made yourself irrelevant.

Half correct. Withholding votes won’t get their attention - we’ve seen that play out again and again. Democrats would rather lose than change. If you want their attention and real change, you’ll need to do things other than vote.

It’s extremely telling that even you “lesser evil” BlueMAGA types can’t being yourselves to actually be honest about what you supported

You’re projecting. Y’all need to get that under control.

bullshit white washed version of the Democrats that wasn’t entirely all in on genocide.

Where did I say that? They just don’t have the same affinity for it as Republicans, so between the two, blue team is the wildly obvious choice if you want to minimize the suffering.

Clearly even you know the lesser evil position as it actually exists is indefensible.

Correct. The lesser evil is still evil. But contrasted against a greater evil and locked into a dichotomy, the lesser gets my vote despite being indefensible.

If you had me tied up and held a loaded gun to my head and offered the choice of either pulling the trigger or using it to pistol-whip me, your actions would be indefensible either way, but one stands out as significantly worse than the other, so I’ll choose the pistol-whip. I’ll also be doing other things like trying to fidget my way out of the ties, but I can do that in addition to choosing the lesser evil of a shitty dichotomy.

No I’m with you there - but it’s hard to discuss that stuff without getting banned; and you can do that stuff while still casting a vote every now and then. I’ve stirred up a lot of drama here by encouraging the use of that tool - this thread is stuffed with mouth-foaming Trump progandists, so proceed with caution. And grab some popcorn - it’s a shitshow, but it’s a show!

Mate, I was one of the people saying Democrats would lose if they didn’t change tact. But I still advocated against Trump. The Democrats handed the election to him on a silver platter. Fucking twice. But I still advocated against Trump.

No, you were just a genocide denier when it was your team doing it. It took Trump winning for you to actually admit the extent of the genocide.

Also incorrect. I bit my tongue during the election (did I mention the bit about advocating against Trump?) but was and remain opposed to genocide regardless of who’s in power.

Correct. That’s what I’m bitching about.

Bro you’ve been reduced to yelling “This is what you wanted!!!”

Is it not what you wanted? It’s what you’re advocating for.

none of this was necessary

Wholeheartedly agree, but necessary or not, it is inevitable as long as we allow evil people to run the world. Yes that includes Biden and Harris. It also includes Trump.

Well, you got your “pragmatic” genocide and then some.

The “pragmatic” genocide didn’t include the “and then some”. That second bit is the one you asked for.

You got your guy in to stop Trump

My guy got primaried. No one’s guy got in to stop Trump: that orange traitor still hasn’t been stopped.

and he immediately shit the bed.

Ah, you must be talking about Biden. Yeah fuck that guy.

Here we are again. You’ve learned nothing.

Here we are. And no, so far I haven’t learned shit. Are you the teacher in this scenario? Cuz so far you’ve taught nothing. My proposal was to utilize your vote - literally that’s it - and so far that’s only attracted propaganda about how doing so won’t get us systemic change. …but like… no shit? You gotta do bigger things than just voting to get that. But still do vote. You know you can do that, right? Voting, and other things? The ballot box doesn’t lock you out of other actions.