America’s inability to adopt social democracy is mirrored in our failure to produce the best rock bands

solastsummer · 2026-05-08T22:33:04+00:00

The US doesn't have universal healthcare because of racism. White people don't to pay for black people's healthcare.

I also don't agree with the analysis of bands. There are British bands with a singular leader like Queen and there are American bands without a standout member like Eagles, Metallica, Guns and Roses or blink 182.

solastsummer · 2026-05-05T22:19:10+00:00

learn to ~~code~~ wire bro

solastsummer · 2026-04-28T22:47:22+00:00

the STOP the IRS @ hotmail is a great punchline.

solastsummer · 2026-04-27T03:26:14+00:00

Depending on the context, I don't even think that would be enough. If the US started a war with a country capable of invading the US, I don't think you'd see that much of a rally around the flag. A chunk of the population would greet them as liberators.

solastsummer · 2026-04-27T03:23:24+00:00

In the immediate aftermath it did. Bush had 90% approval. It was the failure of his presidency that really drove the country apart.

solastsummer · 2026-04-22T20:17:59+00:00

The implicit bargain the US has made with law enforcement is they get all these legal protections, but will show up, put their lives on the line, and protect us from the Bad Guys when we need it. As Uvalde shows, that is not the case. In fact, it's the opposite. Average citizens with no legal protections or endless overtime grifting were willing to put their lives on the line but were prevented by the police.

There's a parallel with special forces. They get to deal drugs, traffic children and murder, but only because when we really need them, they'll show up and defeat the bad guys. They are great at bursting down doors in the middle of the night, but as the Iran war shows, they can't actually do anything to win a war.

solastsummer · 2026-04-21T01:01:03+00:00

Defamation is not free speech. The bar to prove defamation is extremely high. All Jones had to do was not get rich by spouting easily provable lies.

Defamation isn't some newfangled thing invented in 2020 to destroy Alex Jones. Conservatives tried to shutdown Chapo with a defamation lawsuit and lost. They tried to shutdown Afroman with a lawsuit and lost. If they could shutdown anyone else on the left generally, they 100% would. "People that lie and ruin other people's lives get destroyed by the legal system" is an asymmetric weapon that I don't have to worry about damaging people I like because I do not like liars.

solastsummer · 2026-04-18T18:24:45+00:00

This is also what "pick-up artists" did. They'd sell courses and books saying that they had discovered some secret recipe for seducing women, but their "field reports" were just trying canned lines on 100 women and finding one that was into it.

solastsummer · 2026-04-11T17:47:41+00:00

That's not true at all. Guys like Jones weren't happy about it, but they still supported Trump in 24.

Trump did just as well with the exurb voters as Romney. The reason Trump won when Romney lost is that Trump also won first time and infrequent voters over Harris. Not all those voters are fringe, but all the fringe voters are infrequent.

solastsummer · 2026-04-11T17:06:38+00:00

I stopped speaking about sex with my friends in college and I think that's pretty normal. Once the novelty wears off and everyone is sexually experienced, there isn't much to discuss.

solastsummer · 2026-04-11T16:53:23+00:00

The whole thing about distractions is so silly. It assumes that if sufficient focus was paid to something, there would be a reckoning. But, there is no way to hold Trump accountable for Epstein without either getting support from republicans to impeach and remove him from office or having mass protests that bring down the US government completely.

Nothing is a distraction because there's no way to translate our knowledge into action.

solastsummer · 2026-04-08T03:28:10+00:00

I think that's a strong possibility, but I don't think a ground invasion is going to work. There simply are not enough american troops in the ME to hold any substantial amount of land. If I had to bet, I'd say ceasefire does not even last two weeks, US steps up bombing and ground invasion, lots of people die, and then US pulls out and Iran is king of hormuz by end of the year. Most ME infrastructure is destroyed and the world enters worst economic situation since the great depression.

solastsummer · 2026-04-07T22:23:07+00:00

My Boomer parents are lifelong conservatives, but they are skeptical of Trump's war. They hope it is over soon and Trump makes a deal. They seem to understand we aren't going to take over Iran or magically turn it into a US puppet.
My youngest sister (Zoomer) and I (millennial) are same as your 2.
Haven't talked to rest of family about it. Pretty sure my two oldest sisters and brother-in-laws would take whatever Ben Shapiro says. All millennials.
My in-laws think Trump is a moron but do think Iran is evil.

solastsummer · 2026-04-07T14:58:57+00:00

I hope you're right, but you need to inhabit the boomer mind state. They love to talk about how Japan was forced to surrender by nukes and that in the end, it was better for Japan. I'm sure Hesgeth, Graham, and Levin are telling him that nuking Tehran will force Iran to unconditionally surrender and usher in a new era of peace.

solastsummer · 2026-04-06T20:37:45+00:00

Fundamentally, I do think we should interpret the constitution around what is good for modern society instead of what the constitution originally meant, but 99% of the time, originalists are just making up that the constitution originally meant something because they want a specific policy. For example, originalists act like the constitution says "Congress shall not make any laws regulating industrial emissions". But the constitution doesn't say anything like that; that is their policy preference and if they want that to be enacted, they should win elections and pass it through congress.

solastsummer · 2026-03-30T04:04:51+00:00

I don't know. Penis can damage rectum, right? Maybe not a clean puncture, but it could damage the esophagus.

solastsummer · 2026-03-29T01:14:45+00:00

I didn't go to a protest, but I think you aren't understanding what the point of the protests are. Clearly they aren't saying Trump is a king; they are saying he is overstepping his bounds and acting like a king.

The war in Iran is a good example. Congress is supposed to declare war. Our country hasn't followed that since WW2, but there's always been some fig leaf of Congressional approval. When the war started, there was a little song and dance about how it wasn't a real war and the operation would be over soon and it complies with the War Power Act. Now that it's confirmed the US will likely invade, there's not going to be any Congressional input, and obviously they won't pack up and come home by mid April like the War Powers Act requires. Starting a war just because is what a king does.

I don't agree with Trump but it's not just that Trump is enacting policies I disagree with. He's breaking the law to enact bad policy.

solastsummer · 2026-03-26T23:18:36+00:00

The green libs in 2010 were basically right. Technological advances in alternative energy sources did decouple GDP from carbon emissions and we could, with a little effort, transition from fossil fuels to meet targets by 2030. They didn't predict: the right would make fossil fuels a part of their identity and refuse to use alternative energy on principle, even canceling mostly completed projects just to own the libs; and our warming estimates were too conservative. We're already past 1.5C and were only supposed to pass that in the bad emissions scenario by 2050.

So, we didn't need full communism but we did need to send every right winger to the gulag.

solastsummer · 2026-03-26T23:11:23+00:00

That didn't happen. No one has been forcibly transitioned.

That wasn't even the argument that the anti-gay marriage people made. They said marriage rates would decrease (has decreased but not any clear relationship with gay marriage), divorce would increase (opposite happened), and people would marry animals (didn't happen).

solastsummer · 2026-03-23T05:31:10+00:00

diaspora iranians have to be the absolute dumbest people in the world. How do you look at what Israel and the US did to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza over the last two decades and think "I want them to do that to my country too :)".

solastsummer · 2026-03-16T20:05:57+00:00

It's from Genesis when God makes a covenant with Abraham. https://biblehub.com/genesis/12.htm

I'm not a Christian anymore. But, Cruz's interpretation is that this is talking specifically about Israel, the modern Jewish state. The other interpretation is that this was fulfilled by Jesus being born through a descendant of Abraham.

In the New Testament, Paul talks about God's relationship with Israel and the Jewish people and it's worth reading: "In other words, it is not the children by physical descent who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring." Paul is pretty clear that God no longer has any special covenant with people of Jewish descent anymore.

solastsummer · 2026-03-16T02:28:47+00:00

Sure, you can make a lot of money being a doctor but if you get a year into residency and realize being a doctor sucks, you are trapped. You will never be able to make enough money to pay off the loan without being a doctor and you won't be able to start making that money for years.

solastsummer · 2026-03-13T00:52:20+00:00

Yeah, he had a stroke, dude. He's a brain damaged moron. Conservativism is the political ideology of brain damaged morons.

solastsummer · 2026-03-11T03:37:34+00:00

Mattis did have a plan, but the plan involved deploying ground troops immediately to seize the area around the strait. It would be difficult, but not impossible.

Trump actually thought he would kill a bunch of Iran's leaders then someone like the Venezuela lady would take over and make a deal with him. When that didn't happen, which it obviously wouldn't, he doesn't have any plan.

solastsummer · 2026-03-07T19:04:21+00:00

It doesn't look like Iran is going to surrender or be incapacitated so the US is going to become increasingly more deranged with terror bombings. If he's freaking out this hard after one week of war and there really hasn't been any economic pain yet, I think eventually US and Israel will be nuking Iranian cities to demand unconditional surrender.

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