ped_xing

If McDonald's kicks it, people will be radicalized. Bailing it out will have massive bipartisan support because nobody will want to be branded a McDonald's-killer.

I just accept that everything I've enjoyed is done forever. If a good sequel emerges, dope, otherwise it's on me find new stuff.

I cleaned my sink. At some point, I realized that I really only need a fraction of my dishes for myself and kept washing basically a setting for one while letting everything else in the sink grow increasingly gross. Today I finally washed the accumulated gross and it was so gross I'm putting everything through the dishwasher again after a thorough hand-clean because it was clean-twice-or-throw-away gross. Barring a change in my social life, I'll probably go back to just washing a setting for one while letting everything else sit, but this time I'll let everything else sit in the cabinet.

Co-Stanza!

I'm enjoying your culinary adventures. Worst case is you get a good story out of them. Here's mine:

I got store-brand wheat thins, and I think that's one of the products where they're not from the same machine as the name brand ones, or maybe they run the machine with different settings so the name brand ones are still superior. I was definitely not going to finish them but don't like wasting food, so I decided to check out this "gruel" I had heard about in books about orphans. I boiled water and dumped the thin wheats in there. The result wasn't tasty (so maybe a success?), so I reduced it, dumped it into a wok and added an egg. It was so bad that I made a dumpster run so I wouldn't have to smell it in my trash can.

Well, that's what we tell ourselves, isn't it, Goblinmancer?

You're not my real parents!

The public having an illusion of input into how the country is run is central to keeping it going without popular revolt. A very brief timeline:

1. Country starts. You can refer libs to Natopedia on this one, and most of them won't even dispute anything because that's settled history from when our country was Not Nice. There were at least two layers of protection for the owning class from the will of the people -- states were allowed to determine who could vote, generally agreeing on white male landowners, and the Senate was appointed. There was a choice quote from one of those guys pretty much predicting the popular appeal of dividing up the holdings of large landowners and the necessity of the Senate to ensure against it, but I haven't been able to dig it up -- little help? Thank you, @peeonyou, for finding Madison's quote!

2. Political parties emerge. This was practically inevitable and happened almost right off the bat, meaning that anyone who wanted a country that's not so shitty had to get the buy-in of powerful people who wanted it to continue to be shitty. By the time the landholding requirement for voting was gone, our current duopoly was solidly entrenched. Still at least two layers.

3. The Seventeenth Amendment passes. Direct election of senators seems like a big win for the people, but who was behind it? William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper magnate. It was a statement of confidence in the propaganda instruments; the people were so propagandized that there was no longer concern about them voting in their own self-interest. Still at least two layers.

4. Three-letter agencies come into being. If you try to challenge white supremacy, you get killed. The Civil Rights movement allows black people to vote for either wholly-owned party. At least three layers.

5. The Information Superhighway revolutionizes everything. The initial internet hype was that anyone's reach could extend worldwide. Ron Paul. Bernie Sanders. Even if we say that the internet completely supplanted corporate media, there are still two layers.

6. The internet turns into bullshit. The internet consolidates down to four sites sharing memes from the other three. All of them work with the three-letter agencies to ensure that nothing ever changes. TikTok allows people to see the carnage in Gaza and is slated to be banned. The DNC argues successfully in court that it doesn't have to be democratic and doesn't lose any supporters. Genocide Joe's handpicked successor could win without ever getting a single vote in an open primary. Corporate media, bourgeois political parties, three-letter agencies and an approaching great firewall give the owning class more insulation from popular sentiment than ever before and virtually nobody cares.

From the above trajectory, it seems the the owning class has the least to worry about as in any time in the history of the country, so why would they allow a new chapter to be written in which their control is revealed to be brute force supported by nearly nobody?

Are you forgetting a little documentary called Under Siege?

I'm honestly glad to get a post-Joever statement from Kamala confirming she'll be as shitty as Biden before my Friday zoom call with some libs. We all knew it but I didn't want to put up with them saying that she deserves a chance for even a minute, and they could dismiss any prior statements as basically forced by her being his veep.

I'm not buying it. The allowed shitheads list is too short, especially after you remove duplicates by the person behind them. Somebody as online as follows way more shitheads than that. The allowed words don't make sense, or their being somehow disallowed in the first place doesn't make sense. Mexican? That's too commonly used in a neutral/positive context and as if Musk would give a shit about it being used in a negative one. ch******ng? Are we on a playground in the early 80s? Abbie? I don't even get the context, what, that's a regular-ass first name for white people.