US US Politics General 2: Hope Edition - Discussion of President Trump and other politicians

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Should be a wild four years.

Helpful links for those who need them:

Current members of the House of Representatives
https://www.house.gov/representatives

Current members of the Senate
https://www.senate.gov/senators/

Current members of the US Supreme Court
https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/biographies.aspx

Members of the Trump Administration
https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Someone committed a stabbing attack. What he yelled wasn't covered by the MSM. When someone pointed out that it was the usual phrase terrorists yelled, some SJW claimed that was "attacking an entire community" and that it "says more about the agenda"... FFS. First, just because one is a Muslim does not mean he is in a "community" of all Muslims. There is that SJW fixation on "community" yet again. And secondly, that is not necessarily "having an agenda" or "attacking an entire community", it is pointing out reality.

 

[God of Nothing]

I have noticed parallels between trump and ceasar so I actually decided to torment myself by reading the article.

After throwing this based quote out:
View attachment 8548976

it then proceeds to pretend they haven't been calling Christianity evil (or at best catering to those who do) for the past 15 years:
View attachment 8548978

The rest of the article is the typical leftist crap we've heard a million times: "since Jesus teaches you to not be a shitflinging animal that means you have to let insane people rob and kill you ".

Really the only use that comes from this article is as another example that they know their typical crap isn't working and they're desperately scrambling to find a new optics strategy.

oh for fuuuuuuck's sake
jesus explicitly said "Render unto Caesar"
which was clearly "Suck it the fuck up: them's the law but God is still your God," to a trick question the jews were trying to jew him into

 

[moocow]

It is a matter of time before it crumbles and then people who "earned it" will not get what they "earned." This notion of "earning" benefits is a great lie that I assume traces back to FDR as a way to convince people his programs wouldn't cost more than they consumed.

it's similar to social security where the idea is that the current working population supports the current aged population. Most beneficiaries cost more than they ever put in, they're not getting back out what they "earned."

Social Security was by far the worst legacy of FDR. It’s apparently one of the largest government spending items, and people forced to pay into it are unlikely to receive any benefits from it

I've been "forced" to pay into Social Security for my entire working lifespan. I've never gotten a dime from it and to be bluntly honest, I expect it to collapse before I ever see a penny from it myself.

However, having moved back home the past two years to take care of my aging parents (one with Alzheimer's, the other wheelchair bound, neither even remotely physically or mentally fit enough to work), and having seen what social security, SS disability, and medicare are paying for (compared to what my parents or I have had to pay out-of-pocket for things)? I'm getting my money's worth. The money I paid into SS is coming straight back to pay for my parents' healthcare, mortgage, and day-to-day living, and that's good enough for me.

Knowing it won't be around to take care of me is enough to give me motivation to prepare for my old age on my own. It's on me to be ready for the time when I can't work. But I haven't gotten "nothing" out of what I paid in. My folks are far more comfortable and healthy than they would have been without it.

When someone pointed out that it was the usual phrase terrorists yelled, some SJW claimed that was "attacking an entire community" and that it "says more about the agenda"... FFS.

Don't bother arguing with faggots like that. Agree instead and twist it around. "Yes, it's attacking an entire community of stabbing enthusiasts. I'm proudly and staunchly anti-stabbing lobby. Local 54. It's the not-being-stabbed Agenda, Program 4. Maybe all the people who don't stab people should stop saying 'aloha snackbar' so much, or maybe they should go fuck up the ones who shout it while stabbing people if it's so offensive to them. We'll help them with that, y'know. We're totally cool helping Muslims weed out their violent minority. It is just a minority, right, Karen?"

I mean, it's not even a lie. I would absolutely join a cadre of angry Muslims hunting down their violent stabby-stabby kin to put a stop to that "bullshit stereotype." Of course, it's not a stereotype for nothing.

 

[Harvey Danger]

I think a lot of your argument depends on how you're defining inter-generational wealth. Mind putting a # on it?

It's not a number, it's a trajectory.

Spoiler: 3 promises

The first promise is you keep what you worked for, turning it into wealth. That's the general promise of well-ordered capitalism, which the USA purports to embody best of any country. It was especially important during the times of communist blocs and national revolutions, when everything you worked for could get seized by governments or wiped out. This also synergizes with the cultural hatred of taxation and government taking anything from the citizens.

The second is that you can use that wealth to give your kids a head start in life, so they have it better than you. That's the "I worked hard so you could go to school" emotional story so many working class families tell. The implication is that going to school jump starts the kids into achieving higher pay and wealth. But even without school, the promise is they won't have to go through the hardships their parents did.

The third is that you can pass your wealth on to your family when you die, the final form of "intergenerational wealth". This isn't just inheriting millionaire money, it's also passing on a business, a house, land, tools, heirlooms, all the real forms of wealth that continue being valuable while money itself depreciates.

The American Dream, such as it's made either to immigrants or to its citizens, is that there is so much opportunity and reward in America, that everyone can build up wealth by working hard. But that's only part of the idea. If you and your kids follow the plan, everyone should come out ahead over the generations. "Work hard and you yourself get a paycheck" is not enough.

I won't rehash all the ways current generations are worse off than the previous, you can find plenty of such articles in A&H or this thread. The point is those promises are all being broken right now. Repeating them as the reality of Current Year America is absurd. Hard work needs to be done to restore it before we try bribing anyone else with these promises. And if it can't be done, we should drop the sentiment.

I think Trump is doing some of that work, which is good. But until the trajectory measurably changes for millenials and zoomers, I'm going to bitch at anyone repeating the mantra.

 

[StudMccool]

Epstein had a trapdoor on his island that lead right to the ocean

 

[God of Nothing]

Epstein had a trapdoor on his island that lead right to the ocean
View attachment 8549136

wowee
what a fun place to skinnydip!
surely nothing nefarious happened here
afterall, epstein wasn't a part of a jewish pedophile ring

 

[Aisin Gioro Puyi]

The Japanese and Italians carving up the British Empire was part of the plan from the get-go.

if hitler had his way, he would have peaced out britain asap
italy and japan were allies of convenience,
hell, it wasnt until about '41 that the germans pulled all assistance from the chinese
if it came down to it, he would have gladly hung the italians out to dry if it would secure a peace with britain

 

[Breadbassket]

The American Dream, such as it's made either to immigrants or to its citizens, is that there is so much opportunity and reward in America, that everyone can build up wealth by working hard. But that's only part of the idea. If you and your kids follow the plan, everyone should come out ahead over the generations. "Work hard and you yourself get a paycheck" is not enough.

I won't rehash all the ways current generations are worse off than the previous, you can find plenty of such articles in A&H or this thread. The point is those promises are all being broken right now. Repeating them as the reality of Current Year America is absurd. Hard work needs to be done to restore it before we try bribing anyone else with these promises. And if it can't be done, we should drop the sentiment.

The economic conditions that made the "American Dream" ideal possible don't really seem like they're present anymore for a lot of people. This isn't to say there is no kind of success to be found at all but the odds of achieving it don't seem as good as they used to be.





Here is the rather utopian definition of the American Dream from the man who popularized the term during the Great Depression:

That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Economic realities shift and change but there is a human tendency to cling onto what was rather then what is or what has become.

 

[JambledUpWords]

However, having moved back home the past two years to take care of my aging parents (one with Alzheimer's, the other wheelchair bound, neither even remotely physically or mentally fit enough to work), and having seen what social security, SS disability, and medicare are paying for (compared to what my parents or I have had to pay out-of-pocket for things)? I'm getting my money's worth. The money I paid into SS is coming straight back to pay for my parents' healthcare, mortgage, and day-to-day living, and that's good enough for me.

That’s definitely a good thing. Out of pocket, those healthcare costs would be astronomical. I’m glad not all the money is being wasted

 

[SpergioLeonne]

Medicare and Social Security is under a lot of strain right now. The fate of former I'm unsure but there have been on proposals on how to maintain the latter by raising the minimum age to receive it or raising how much money is to be paid into the program. Curious to see what will become of it all but politicians addressing either can be described as something akin to pulling teeth.

Hmm

I wonder what would happen if we

The economic conditions that made the "American Dream" ideal possible don't really seem like they're present anymore for a lot of people. This isn't to say there is no kind of success to be found at all but the odds of achieving it don't seem as good as they used to be.

The American Dream relied on American manufacturing.

Net surplus trade balance certainly boosts shit, but anything besides being a trillion a year in deficit could work

another major thing, though, is that all our shit these days is intentionally shitty so we’ll have to buy more in shorter cycles. That’s very anti-wealth accumulation, especially when the shorter cycle involves our money leaving our system faster

 

[Martian High Command]

That's what Cubans get for thinking communism was a good idea.

Also for making enemies of an international superpower. You have no idea how sick I am of tiny 3rd world shitholes getting away with shit because they know they can cozy up to a rival superpower. I'm sure it's caused incalculable damages to international politics besides.

I want countries to really, REALLY sweat when they even consider intentionally setting their international agenda against our own.

 

[Macaron]

A lot of jobs are fake. They were created by businesses because it showed growth if they needed to hire more people which is good for the stocks I guess. Among other fuckery.

This is absolutely true. To provide some context, as someone who saw it (mercifully mostly from the outside...):

Most tech companies in the 2020s were flush with easy cash for a variety of reasons (pick your favorite conspiracy theory: government kickbacks from Democrats looking to implicitly buy control over electronic communications channels, people being forced online and into technology-dependent lifestyles due to COVID-19, a surge of easy money via loans/grants due to rampant speculation and government meddling). This meant that those tech firms could do some genuinely wild nonsense, and that included both kicking off idiotic projects as well as hiring people for a wide variety of useless jobs. Case in point, and slight power level: I have been in board rooms of Fortune 500 companies where the express and only purpose of certain hiring decisions for six figure jobs was to make sure that the number of employees was higher on a 10-K. I am not kidding whatsoever.

The FAANG firms were particularly bad at this: I can name, just off the top of my head, at least 20+ people (all diverse, all solidly middle-of-the-bell-curve types that barely scraped by at some prestigious university) hired into some sort of desk-based, quasi-managerial position at a FAANG, where they mostly did e-mail job nonsense for 12+ hours a day like develop slide decks, fart around with asinine tech project Gantt charts, or just have meetings for their own sake. This seemed to really suck for the technical people down the chain. For example, if you were some sort of low-level back-end developer doing code monkey grunt work, you suddenly had an army of "girl job" middle managers with freshly-minted degrees micromanaging the crap out of you to prove their value. One weekly "stand-up" became two, then three, then daily. Suddenly, the volume of Slack messages exploded, e-mails would pour in like water, and it was hard for engineers to do anything actually useful.

Keep in mind that a lot of this behavior was absolutely stock/investor motivated. For instance, now and six years ago, Meta was about as truly big as it will ever get. Back in 2022, Facebook had 2.936 billion users - that's around 30% of the entire world. That means that Meta has to do performative nonsense to look busy and upwardly mobile when they had probably long since plateaued. That's precisely the reason why Facebook pivoted towards the whole VR thing: they had to, otherwise they'd look like Myspace 2.0 (which is not inaccurate). Also, this is almost certainly why Elon Musk continues to say silly nonsense like promising a "million-person" Mars colony: his investors expect unreasonable amounts of explosive growth across all of his companies, and the promise of that growth being just around the corner must be constantly reaffirmed lest his investors bail.

Now, we're economically sobering up. Companies can't actually afford to pay DeShaunda, 2.9 GPA with a BSBA from U. Penn. '19 and member of the company's diversity club, around $200k/yr. to mostly harass the crap out of front-end developers. Unfortunately, some of those companies have completely lost their minds and are now firing their valuable staff with as much vigor as they are firing the people warming seats and filling inboxes.

Depending on how you look at it, the "AI Revolution" is something of a dead cat bounce, allowing certain companies to glom on to some sort of promise to further growth a little bit more before the house of cards truly implodes. It's just another technical concept to point at as alleged growth (and a nice little socially-acceptable, investor-friendly excuse to fire a bunch of people you didn't need in the first place).

I'm actually somewhat excited if there's a big crash, to be honest. It'll suck, but I have no doubt that the truly talented people will eventually land on their feet.

 

[Aidan]

Social security would work perfectly well if it were confined to the truly eligible: Retirees who have paid into the system and those legitimately unable to work. Those two groups aren't the problem (and in fact many of the former paid hundreds of thousands of dollars into it over the course of their working lives). If you want to rant, rant against the frauds, cheats, and abusers - they're the ones pulling the system down. The same is true with Medicare, though as @SpergioLeonne pointed out the cost/benefit analysis on that one isn't easy.

I'm not ranting and not saying beneficiaries are "the problem." The problem is that those programs are unsustainable and bound to fail. No amount of individuals paying into it will fix it.

However, having moved back home the past two years to take care of my aging parents (one with Alzheimer's, the other wheelchair bound, neither even remotely physically or mentally fit enough to work), and having seen what social security, SS disability, and medicare are paying for (compared to what my parents or I have had to pay out-of-pocket for things)? I'm getting my money's worth. The money I paid into SS is coming straight back to pay for my parents' healthcare, mortgage, and day-to-day living, and that's good enough for me.

Knowing it won't be around to take care of me is enough to give me motivation to prepare for my old age on my own. It's on me to be ready for the time when I can't work. But I haven't gotten "nothing" out of what I paid in. My folks are far more comfortable and healthy than they would have been without it.

I agree it's best to assume you/we won't get it but you highlight exactly why it's broken by saying how much they benefit from these programs.

Everyone knows it's going to fail and part of the justification for mass migration is to kick the can down the road so the current politicians aren't left holding the bag. This goes for pretty much every country with unsustainable social programs people "pay into." Though I think they'll do anything to justify mass migration so it's not an important point.

 

[AnitaSarsleezian]

Has the uprising against the eternal liberal femoid started?

View attachment 8548941

I had read that article earlier and it was annoying because it was a clear example of a misleading headline. The father and daughter had had the argument about Trump a day earlier. The shooting had absolutely nothing to do with Trump. The father was drunk and asked his daughter to come in the room because he wanted to show off his Glock and show her something about gun safety (yes, it claims the father said that) and while he was pointing the gun at her, it went off by accident or because the drunk bastard had no trigger discipline.

But I love how they try to frame it as the father and daughter had a heated argument about Trump and so he unloaded on her. They frame it like that because the father was the Trump supporter. If the father had been the liberal and the daughter had been the Trump supporter, then they would have reported it correctly and left out the Trump argument a day earlier and just reported it as an accidental shooting. Burns my biscuits, it does.

oh for fuuuuuuck's sake
jesus explicitly said "Render unto Caesar"
which was clearly "Suck it the fuck up: them's the law but God is still your God," to a trick question the jews were trying to jew him into

That whole exchange is legendary. It's basically Jesus telling them, "If you don't believe in my father, then pay your taxes to Caesar and don't give to the church. But if you believe in my father, then tell Caesar to fuck off, don't pay your taxes, and instead give the money to the Church". People always try to play this off to mean Jesus meant pay your taxes and give to the church but it's not. It's Jesus saying, either pay Caesar and not the church, or pay the church and not Caesar. Who do YOU worship, my father or Caesar?

The whole thing is a great exchange because it shows how the Pharisees tried to hit Jesus with a trick question but he was miles ahead of them with 5D chess, right from the beginning. Even the fact that he asked them for a denarius instead of a shekel already showed Jesus was miles ahead of them because at that time no one would have had a denarius in Israel unless they were in cahoots with the Roman government so right at the beginning Jesus had already exposed the Pharisees to the crowd as being disingenuous and in the pockets of the Romans.

The whole thing is one of my favorite passages.

 

[Martian High Command]

Epstein mermaid theory looking more and more plausible

 

[Harvey Danger]

The economic conditions that made the "American Dream" ideal possible don't really seem like they're present anymore for a lot of people.... Economic realities shift and change but there is a human tendency to cling onto what was rather then what is or what has become

Exactly. So we should stop acting like it's still the case. Specifically, stop inviting immigrants in with that promise, and stop the emotional blackmail that they somehow deserve to pursue it because your grandparents got to. And going back to the original "whitepill" video, stop the right from talking up those promises, trying to order society in the old way that no longer pays off, until they actually fix things.

The real whitepill is that dramatic measures may reverse things. House and rent prices fall when immigrants are deported. Crowded schools become mysteriously un-crowded when ICE rolls into town. Domestic manufacturing starts growing when tariffs stick long enough. Higher education is still in a bubble, but restricting H1-Bs is starting to turn that around. DEI and the competence crisis can be shocked into stalling, if not reversing.

It's too soon to say whether the old version of the middle class can ever return. I think technology itself may have irrevocably destroyed a lot of the wealth-generating mechanisms we had. But until we know one way or the other, nobody gets to use the old American Dream as justification for the current system.

 

[Hallucinogenic Penguin]

We aren't ready for the massive wealth transfer that's going to happen when boomers need nursing homes. Those homes milk the assets of the elderly until there is almost nothing left. Gen X is going to lose most of its inheritance to the private equity that owns nursing homes and hires the poorly paid nurses that beat your grandfather to a pulp for fun.

Boomers being abused and tortured by the same zoomers who they smugly insulted and chided about working harder is almost kind of poetic.

 

[Catch The Rainbow]

Here is the article

https://archive.is/m4Ex3

tldr: "Christianity is only what I define it as and if you disagree you're not a real Christian."

 

[Jose Beaner Luna]

We aren't ready for the massive wealth transfer that's going to happen when boomers need nursing homes. Those homes milk the assets of the elderly until there is almost nothing left. Gen X is going to lose most of its inheritance to the private equity that owns nursing homes and hires the poorly paid nurses that beat your grandfather to a pulp for fun.

Is time to resurrect old traditions like Ättestupa or Ubasute and take the boomers to a trip to the Grand Canyon and ritualistically chuck them all to the void.

 

[N Space]

Ok great, but we don't have any evidence in any of the disclosure that would hold up in court.
Do you see why this gay outrage is annoying? All the "survivors" are there for the humiliation ritual, you have all these congressmen asking why aren't you doing anything why!

But there's nothing being done because there's nothing they can do. They have no evidence to convict.

If they did, then why didn't they? It's utterly insane. They put Ghislaine in jail during the Biden admin, they put Epstein away in 2019 right? So what is the excuse here?

You're a vantablack gorrilla nigger for actually believing the government after actively censoring the identities of Epsteins co-conspirators, clients and acquaintances despite being explicitly forbidden under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The files as redacted* as they may be provide probable cause to prosecute those involved and that is not my opinion, the FBI compiled a list of 10 co-conspirators to prosecute right after Epstein was captured in july 2019 before his or Maxwells case began so there was less evidence to go around back then. Who knows what else would have come up if they actually bothered to prosecute them, let alone his clients or others involved.

*Keep in mind the DOJ has released roughly half of the files and the FBI read and compiled them without redactions so not only are they aware of all the information therein but also its context.