Where’s the beef?

For great justice

You are likely to be eaten by a grue?

Not sure. There’s a full blown white male military guy I know through work. He’s an openly hateful and racist person. Like not even pretending he isn’t. He still is pissed at Trump over being incompetent and disrespectful to soldiers.

Since his term began, my retirement has probably slipped about a year or so, and so much further to go.

Campaign ads have already started for the Senate race in my state.

But his particular sore loser attitude didn’t kick in until he lost the 2020 election. In fact in 2016 he was high on accusing Clinton of being a sore loser, for no particularly good reason. He loved calling out a sore loser until he lost.

He had plenty of bad behaviors, but being a sore political loser wasn’t one of them at that point.

It’s at least fair to point out that he didn’t donate $25M, but he did donate $2M. I’m half surprised that Musk or someone didn’t accuse Soros of buying the election with zero whiff of irony.

This thread has been inundated with links to the commenters. Maybe you could take umbridge with the use of the word “communist”, but largely that’s a label they assert for themselves, and most criticism of them ignores the communist part, since that doesn’t even in theory align with Russia, and is beside the point even for China.

The comment said point blank that China does slavery and colonialism. For wars, they refer to recent history and that’s largely accurate in recent history (at least directly, indirectly they supply and offset Russian military presence), they haven’t used direct military force to get what they want yet. Largely because people would just give them pretty much whatever they wanted for economic considerations. Biggest potential place for things to boil over directly would be if they finally went into Taiwan.

Or you could just acquiesce to any demand when threatened.

But Europe knows that appeasement works against a violent invader. They proved that was a good strategy in the 1930s.

It was a call that plans may be required, and honestly that’s probably a good idea. The administration has repeatedly declined to rule out violent invasion when explicitly asked about how far they would go for their stated aspirations for Panama, Greenland, and Canada.

If you have a neighbor that keeps talking about how they want your house and they need to give up your house to them, and they have a whole bunch of weapons that they keep waving at your property while saying that they’ll do “whatever it takes” to have your land, then you don’t just wag your finger at them and say that’s bad and ignore the situation.

It’s not saying EU needs to do first strike, but they need to be prepared to defend their interests from violence as seems possible to be started by the US, which is an insane prospect I never would have imagined being a real thing in my life.

Interestingly, it may backfire on them. For example they cite Real Id or passport.

So passport only people who travel internationally bother to get. The rural MAGAs are less likely to get this.

For Real Id, it’s more likely since that can be done with your license, however most people I know who do not fly have not bothered, because it’s a hassle, they have to find DMV acceptable materials for a feature they don’t even need (if you aren’t flying, you still won’t need real id for much of anything).

His first term was pretty milquetoast during his term, at least in the ways that these stakeholders cared about. Yeah, he mucked with some trade relationships but largely backed down except for China, and China is a thorn in their side too. The economy basically looked similar to most presidential terms for the last 30 years (except for George W Bush, who had very subpar economic results). Yeah he did some horrible stuff and some incompetent stuff, but economically, his term was just fine (except for 2020, which derailed everyone).

The 2020 election, January 6th, and Trump’s continuing behavior in the wake of that, and the PJ2025 associates that swarmed around him should have been the sign that he was too dangerous to risk. However they could have still thought that Trump’s behavior was more of a show for riling up a base, and his second term would still give them a chance to have him shuffle off to a golf course while the big boys got what they wanted like usual.

This term, there just are no winners, at least domestically, and lots of losers.

People only like authoritarian when they get to be the authority. So these folks that are getting financially screwed also have no reason to believe they would get power in exchange.

It’s basically seeming like a bum deal all around.

Pricing of homes in food deserts has pretty much zero impact on the housing that could actually help low-income individuals.

The housing situation and relative benefits (and lack therof) to house residents in rural areas is just fundamentally distinct from the urban situation.

Especially now, selling a Model 3 to get something cheaper is going to be in “car is probably falling apart” territory. Those things are relatively cheap on the used car market now, less than you’d expect a random 2020 sedan to cost.

There’s a used car lot across the street from my neighborhood with like 3 or 4 Model 3s under $16k.

The Model 3 has been around long enough and priced low enough for it to be in the realm of “boring option of a car”, no more a status symbol than a Toyota Camry.

This is something I find baffling.

In my city, it’s generally a hotspot with dramatically increasing real estate costs and high occupancy, generally.

Except this one road, which has all sorts of vacant retail, with different owners, with thriving retail and/or residential pretty much everywhere around it. Even the gas stations are 50c a gallon cheaper there then going a mile north or south of it. I have no idea why that one road is different and looking like a dying city while being surrounded by exactly the opposite.

Having a home is not useful if living it in means you can’t feed yourself. You can find owned, unoccupied housing that’s been on the market over a year. The owners don’t want it, but no buyers want it either. If you freely gave a homeless man one of those houses without any further aid, he’d probably abandon it because he’d have to be within reasonable distance of a city to actually be able to survive.