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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • There is always a new poll with the “lowest numbers ever!!!” yet Trump seems to consistently have a ~40% approval rate. It’s beyond frustrating.

    This one only focuses on economic sentiment and is sad (people are really struggling) but also encouraging because the struggle is hitting some of Trump’s hard 40% floor of support with the clue stick. Inflation has been hammering folks for years now but the gas prices may be what finally wakes the Tump supporters up 🤞🏾.

    So much of this country has shitty public transportation (or none at all) and so many people live in suburbs or exurbs where there are no sidewalks and nothing is a reasonable walking distance, especially in the freezing winters or 100+ degree summers. Additionally, the people living in cities where you can get by without a car are less likely to be Trump supporters. It may be hopium but the gas prices are such an obvious own goal, I really think the clueless are starting to wake up.










  • To be clear, I’m not trying to “put this on the working poor”. I 100% get why most people aren’t in a position to act. Most people live paycheck to paycheck. This is not a safe place to risk your job, doing so is often risking your life (or your kids lives).

    The GOP, the political donor class and their supporters are absolutely awful and deserve the blame. However, we can’t pretend that we are 100% helpless to stop them. When we think about Nazi Germany, do we think “well, the average German didn’t really have control over the situation?”


  • Yes, and no. Yes the GOP is pushing for all of this madness and obstructing any efforts to reign it in. But as much as it pains me to admit, most people in the US bear some culpability. In theory, if everyone old enough and well enough to do so unsupervised, traveled to their state capital or major city and basically flooded the streets with protesters, effectively halting all traffic and commerce, and refused to move until Trump was gone and the war was stopped, this shit would probably stop. Similarly, if everyone refused to work or spend any money, aside from the absolute bare minimum, this shit would stop. Of course there are a million reasons why this won’t happen. It weighs heavily on me that I’m still paying taxes and generally behaving despite the clear need for drastic action.


  • But individuals do have power to make Twitter less important. Well, maybe not Twitter, just because it’s 95% bots, but social media companies are usually only valuable if they have users. There are people who depend on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram for their business but 99% of users absolutely do not need to use those services. The analogy with recycling and climate fall flat because it takes many orders of magnitude more effort to avoid most/all plastics/packaging/fossil fuels than it does to just avoid IG/FB/X. The biggest barriers to getting rid of these shit companies is 1) too many people don’t realize how awful they are 2) too many people just don’t give a shit and 3) too many people are addicted to the dopamine hits from these trash sites.

    Seriously, just don’t use them. When you’re presented with something that tries to force you to use them, say “sorry, I don’t use Meta products, do you have another way for me to get [the pop-up dates, the invite, etc]”