Political Roundtable Part XXXIV

[dobrojim]

Did someone say something about empathy?

[Wizardspride]

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[Zonkerbl]

Yeah this graph is nonsense. Currently only 10% of jobs in the US are in manufacturing. Increasing that to more than 20% would be more than a 100% increase, a massively "successful" expansion by any metric. Successful in quotes because tearing people out of their current services jobs and forcing them into manufacturing jobs won't necessarily make them better off. It's better to be a robot maintenance worker than a burger flipper, but not better than being a software engineer.

I just think it’s funny we all think there should be more manufacturing, as long as it’s someone else working in the factory.

It is funny but it's also, well, if someone asked me if I thought my heroin addicted kids should have better prospects than flipping burgers at mcdonald's I would say yeah, even if I myself would rather stay working at my car dealership.

Also it's really a hidden "do you think we should have more union jobs, even if you aren't in a union yourself" kind of question. As a liberal that's what I'm taking away from it.

[Fairview4Life]

I personally want every MAGA dummy's sons working in factories.

They have car dealerships to inherit.

[queridiculo]

I personally want every MAGA dummy's sons working in factories.

[Zonkerbl]

Dear conservative lurkers: My prediction that the Trump admin would use deportations as the modern update of the concentration camp have come true. Thanks to the modern miracle of international trade you can export your human rights abuses to another country, escaping the oversight of the US court system!

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/15/trump-eyes-deportation-of-homegrown-criminals-to-el-salvador

Let me remind you of some other predictions of mine. In the Soviet Union the circle of people who were safe from being deported to the Gulag shrank each year from 1917 to 1937, until two years before the outbreak of WWII Stalin was sending top generals to labor camps. Not even being a member of the Communist party would save you - during the Great Purge of 1937 Stalin purged one million of the 3 million Communist Party members, many of which were executed or sent to the Gulag.

https://www.history.com/articles/great-purge

Trump is Lenin. When Trump dies, a similar struggle for power will emerge and only the most ruthless, evil bastard will rise to the top - probably some depraved psychopath like Hawley or MTG. When that happens you will have twenty years before your children will have a 33% chance of being "deported" to an El Salvador death camp for your thought crimes.

Don't say I didn't warn you. You made a mistake that you will pay for dearly. What were you thinking?

[AFM]

Yeah except I think when Trump dies MAGA-ism dies. They don't actually have any beliefs, they just love Trump. JD Vance, MTG, none of these people have "it". Trump has something about him, he's a cult of personality.
Conservatives are already moving away from him:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/opinion/dissident-right-trump.html

Let me know if you can't read that article and I'll copy and paste it.

But over the last couple of years, that frontier started seeming to her more like a dead end. Recently, she abandoned the movement. “The vibe is shifting yet again,” Kaschuta wrote on X last week. “The cumulative IQ of the right is looking worse than the market.”

Kaschuta is not alone; several people who once appeared to find transgressive right-wing ideas scintillating are having second thoughts as they watch Donald Trump’s administration put those ideas into practice. The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns “more than genocide,” and his 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,” provided a blueprint for the White House’s war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump’s new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, “The resistance libs were mostly right about him.”

Nathan Cofnas, a right-wing philosophy professor and self-described “race realist” fixated on group differences in I.Q., wrote on X, “All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance.” (Yoon Suk Yeol is South Korea’s recently impeached president.)

Scott Siskind, who blogs under the pseudonym Scott Alexander, has been an influential figure in Silicon Valley’s revolt against social justice ideology, though he’s never been a Trump supporter. Last week, he asked whether “edgy heterodox centrists” like himself paved the way for Trump by opening the door to once-verboten arguments. In an imaginary Socratic dialogue, he wrote, “We wanted a swift, lean government that stopped strangling innovation and infrastructure. Instead we got chain-saw-style firings, total devastation of state capacity in exactly the way most likely to strangle innovation more than ever, and the worst and dumbest people in the world gloating about how they solved the ‘grift’ of sending lifesaving medications to dying babies.”

[Zonkerbl]

There's one thing that I'm certain about, is that technological advance makes atrocities worse. You can do more awful things to people more easily than you could in 1930. Whatever is coming is going to be much, much worse than the Holocaust or the Great Purges.

Assuming we still have Democracy, yeah no one is going to vote for Hawley or MTG for POTUS. But if the GOP does away with elections and simply appoints the next supreme leader?

If we are even permitted to have free and fair midterm elections I'll be pleasantly surprised. If the Republicans somehow mysteriously expand their majority in the House, despite :gestures around: everything, well...

We desperately tried to get Trump supporters not to push us over the edge of this roller coaster and there's no going back now. Only question now is how quickly democracy falls apart.

[dobrojim]

Turns out Due Process was (note past tense) was one of our most important rights.

[AFM]

[dobrojim]

Which branch or branches of government will
defeat or stop him. Led by which leaders?
Will cheaper eggs placate the masses (assuming
that ever actually happens)? Rhetorical question.

If enough GOP congressmen or congresswomen
to swing the majority in Congress woke up
and said country first, my confidence would buoy.

Would national demonstrations 10 or 50 times the
size of April 5 make a difference?

What is the solution or cure for the national widespread
level of malignant narcissism currently seen?

[Zonkerbl]

We lost when the SCOTUS went 6-3. If the GOP stuffs a bunch of ballot boxes in 2026 to pad their majority in the House and then goes to the SCOTUS and says "we think all these allegations of voter fraud against us should be thrown out" and the SCOTUS agrees with them, like they did in 2000, it doesn't matter whether Trump is or isn't a dictator yet. We've just gone over the hump and things are going slowly and we're thinking "ah there's still time to steer this roller coaster back up hill" The problem is there is no steering wheel on this roller coaster. The controls are very clunky - go forward, over the hump that leads to the end of democracy, or put on the brakes. We chose to just fling ourselves over the edge and there is no going back. The old experiment in Democracy is over. If we want to defeat Trump and the GOP we can secede, but as far as the United States is concerned, it's over.

If Fox News didn't exist maybe. But that's what pushed us over the edge, and Fox News isn't going away. Maybe the billionaires who subsidized Fox News will be unhappy with Trump and they'll replace him with some other more compliant dictator. But we aren't going back to the way things were before, Trump voters set that all on fire and it's gone.

[queridiculo]

It's a clown show.

No serious person, irrespective of their political leaning, can look at what is happening with this administration and conclude that yup, that's what it's going to take to set the USA up for the future.

Drill baby drill, bringing back coal, killing the EV and renewable energy industry, gutting research and flushing down all the work that was done to accumulate soft power down the toilet.

What is happening is insane, if you wanted to accelerate the USAs demise, you couldn't do a better job.

Trump is the Manchurian Candidate.

[AFM]

This is honestly just crazy:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musks-wild-plan-to-father-legion-of-kids-by-hitting-women-up-on-x-revealed/

Here's a summary from the comments:

People close to Elon believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher than what is publicly known.

Elon offered Ashley St. Clair $15 million and $100,000 a month in support in exchange for her silence about the child. St. She turned it down because the agreement prevented her from discussing Musk being the father of her child or disparaging him while Musk was allowed to speak negatively about her if he wished. If St. Clair broke the agreement, she would have to pay back the $15 million lump sum in full.

In 2023, Elon met with Japanese officials who asked him to be a sperm donor for a high-profile woman, Musk agreed to give his sperm to the person who asked for it.

Elon asked Cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong who he has never met in person to have his child on X. Fong didn't respond but told a few of her friends about the strange request. Musk learned that he told her friends about it and intentionally lowered the engagement of her account and her earnings fell.

The first time Elon had sex with St. Clair, he joked that they should “pick a name” for their future child. Months later on a trip to St. Barts, she told him that she was ovulating. He asked her “what are we waiting for?” and the two conceived their son on that trip.

While Elon was in Pennsylvania campaigning for Trump, he compared his endorsement for Trump to going to front lines of a war and sent a text to her stating “In all of history, there has never been a competitive army composed of women. Not even once."

Elon built a gated compound for the mother of his children. His partner, Shivon Zilis lives there but Grimes refused to move into the compound.

When St. Clair told Elon's fixer, Jared Birchall that the other mothers of his children don't seem to be very happy, Birchall said, “Zilis goes in and out of finding contentment” but Grimes wasn’t “ever going to find true happiness.”

During St. Clair's pregnancy, Elon sent St. Clair $2 million for expenses with half of that amount structured as a loan.

After St. Clair posted on X about their child, Elon eliminated the offer of $15 million and lowered her support to $40,000 a month, just as her legal fees were set to balloon in the fight. When Elon found out St. Clair was talking to the Wall Street Journal, he decreased his support again to $20,000

[dobrojim]

Just taking a break from play-in games for a moment
and watching the news reporting on AOC and Bernie
out in Red States drawing big crowds. I wonder if
there might be any follow on effect since many in
the crowd, perhaps, have only heard the Faux News
reports on her. This is their opportunity to redefine
themselves from how they have previously been
portrayed.

[dobrojim]

Watch on YouTube

[Zonkerbl]

Dow tanking again today. Great job everybody!

S&P is up though.

[Wizardspride]

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[AFM]

I was lucky enough to meet Mr Van Hollen as a teen. I actually knew his daughter. Good man.

[Wizardspride]

I was lucky enough to meet Mr Van Hollen as a teen. I actually knew his daughter. Good man.

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