mozz

The value of the stock finds its own natural balance based on supply and demand -- he has like $5 billion worth of shares, but he can't sell it and get anywhere near that much money, because the value will plummet if he starts selling in any big amount. But, if people are buying the stock, then the value goes up, and he can sell some, and the value will level off back down, and so on.

Basically the dollars that get spent on this stock that has no real inherent value will get routed into a big inflatable balloon of money to blow it up a little more, and then Trump can take some out, and the balloon will deflate a little but still maintain enough pressure that the balloon survives. The dollars that went in don't need to be the same dollars that came out for the system to still work that way.

every critique of Biden being met with "but Trump is so much worse."

Look at this thing I found on the front page -- it's Biden doing something that's both dumb and evil, and the top comment is cursing at him about it and calling him a dickhead.

Look at this thing where I said "at this rate, all the Palestinians will be dead before he works his way slowly and gradually around to the idea that maybe he’ll have to do more than a sternly worded phone call with Netanyahu in order for the killing to stop." and got a bunch of upvotes.

I'll only speak for myself, but the thing that causes me to get sarcastic is when I write that and then someone replies back to me and says "I know it’s hard to comprehend that there’s people that aren’t Trumpers/Republican that don’t support genocide Joe." It's like he's reading from a script, and just sort of blindly throwing out stuff that's on his script. Honestly, something like that -- where someone seems like they're not even trying to connect what they're saying with reality, even of the messages (let along the outside world) is more what leads me to say "Yeah okay man, you're full of shit."

Look around you, man. Everyone is fine with criticizing Joe Biden. I don't think everyone's really gonna see it exactly the same way that you do or I do or whatever, but trying to claim that you're being browbeaten for criticizing Joe Biden, when you are literally surrounded by people who themselves give criticism to Joe Biden, is going to make people think you are lying. Surely you can see that?

Dude I absolutely loved when I first visited Lemmy and found a variety of political views including some I thought were dead wrong. It's like the real internet. And yes that actually includes places like slrpnk, as an example oriented around anarchism or "anti-electoralism" -- the difference being that it seems like they like anarchism first, and have for a while, and not voting for Joe Biden is yes a natural outgrowth of that now that this election is happening, but they still spend most of their time talking about the anarchism, not almost all of it on the Joe Biden part. They're not deeply and suspiciously constantly and consistently interested in talking to you about specifically bad things about Joe Biden... they seem like they're being sincere about what they believe, as opposed to just trying to bring up "anti-electoralism" as a convenient excuse to take up time and bandwidth talking bad about voting (and about voting for Joe Biden specifically). Which they then do extremely consistently, and extremely constantly, and recast people who are disagreeing with them as if they were saying something else that isn't what they're saying.

It's like the difference between someone who likes some type of drink I don't like, but it's fine and we can hang out, versus someone at the club who's loudly talking about one particular brand of drink and offering it to people and doesn't seem all that interested in any type of conversation that doesn't revolve around consuming that particular type of drink. Like yeah buddy. I have no ill will for you but I would prefer that you weren't at my table if that's what's up.

Funny how someone coming to your home and telling you they own your house now, and might have to shoot your children, and you're only allowed to live now where there is no food or water or employment or safety, will lead to that sometimes.

Hamas is a horrible corrupt criminal terrorist organization, I agree. Killing and raping a bunch of people at a music festival is still a monstrous crime, whatever Israel has been doing, and also it will not help the Palestinians any. But it's not like Hamas wandered into someone else's homeland and started making trouble where there wasn't any before.

The key feature is the first part about "intent to destroy." Russia isn't trying to destroy the concept of Ukraine, either as an ethnicity or a country (they just want it to be a puppet-state obedient to their dictates). The US wasn't trying to destroy the concept of Vietnam or Vietnamese people.

Other people could draw different conclusions I guess, but to me it's undeniable that Israel's goal is to steadily destroy the whole concept of Palestine, with maybe some isolated individuals of Palestinian ethnicity still surviving in some location inside or outside Israel, but with Palestine itself completely erased.

Yeah, true dat.

There's a ton of stuff in the budget proposal for this year that goes a bunch further; I just didn't feel like it was completely fair to claim credit for stuff that hasn't happened yet. The corporate minimum tax is already happened. But yeah, this year's proposal is way more.

I was like, wait, buddy - this is a solid meme but why are you the one posting it? Aren’t you one of the fake leftists that’s hitting her in the face?

Then I figured out what you mean. Got it. Also - solid use of the phrase “blue MAGA” just kinda casually working that in there at the bottom, just to try to introduce it into the discourse, even though it makes absolutely no sense in context. (It was used in 18 comments all last month, compared with e.g. 1186 times for “troll”, and I’m guessing most of the uses of “blue MAGA” were gesturing at the Democrats in general instead of at you specifically. Although, I guess anything’s possible.)

Yeah. Or video game levels you love, or fiction, or anything. As long as it’s something you thought was badass when you were dealing with it, then you’ll probably have it fleshed out already in your mind so you can put your main focus into making it badass when your players are going through it, not just fumbling around with encounter tables or whatever.

Midwest.social is the only whole instance that I suspect of being operated at least partly by shill / propaganda accounts. Maybe that's a weird outlandish accusation to make, but some of the admins are on the "no voting for Biden amirite" train which is unusual. And it's not the holistic "we are out of our gourds on all geopolitical issues" way that Hexbear users are. Midwest.social is like radical left people but a large part of the left radical criticism seems to be directed only at the Democrats. And, the whole "We are Midwest, we are from Ohio, look, it says [Ohio] right after my user name so you know I'm from the Midwest" thing is weird. There are plenty of regional servers but none of them give me the same "yo wtf is up with that" vibe like midwest.social does.

IDK. Maybe that sounds uncompelling, like an extraordinary claim with very sketchy evidence. But I looked around it a bit and it seemed just sort of off in a way that's hard now for me to articulate beyond saying that it seemed weird.

More than one conservative person has gone on TV and explicitly said, this Truth Social thing is great because you can funnel money to Trump just by buying some of the stock, and it's perfectly legal and more or less completely secret.

Got it 😢

Yeah. That's what makes it effective.

The fact that Biden's been busting his ass trying to strengthen unions, and increasing wages even outpacing historic inflation which he didn't do anything to cause, is certainly relevant. But, people feel the inflation every time they go for groceries, and things are still pretty grim, so it feels really weak-sauce for someone to try to come in when you're talking about how bad it is and say "Yeah but Biden actually has been making it better, remember back when he took office when we were bailing out literally half of the country with weekly assistance checks" and then a bunch of charts. That's slow, complex, and abstract, whereas "Bro I just know things fuckin SUCK, I spent like $200 at Von's and no one's helping me out anymore" is quick, simple, and can connect emotionally.

Like I say I definitely think you should be doing more of just emphasizing how bad things are. Oh! Also you can point out that the US military and State Dept (and ICE) under Biden are often a sinister force in the world. That's another thing that it's gonna be pretty hard for anyone to take any kind of disagreement with, and tangentially it makes Biden look bad because it implies that he was the one that invented it all.