No worries, I figured from the context that that’s what you meant.

No, but having it be justified by a portion of the population with violent tendencies makes it easy to avoid getting in trouble with the law for doing. You say that you’re getting rid of worker safety programs and bringing back child labor, and people start asking questions. You say that the children yearn for the mines but the woke won’t let them, and half the country will start punching elementary teachers for not letting kids get Black Lung.

Basically, it’s a combo of the two. They get to do the things that they want to do anyway, and they get support from a group of people trying to destroy regulations simply for doing it.

You mean the best Christmas movie?

It’s the perfect excuse to cut back on funding expenditures and increase cronyism, and that’s all the justification that they need.

I haven’t heard somebody use the word “murring” in like a decade. Methinks they’re farther down the pipeline than they want to admit.

Yeah, pretty much what I was getting at. We live in a country where everybody believes themselves to be the hero in their own Rambo style action movie.

Did you mean 2020 or 2024? I think you’re right that 2020 was the largest turnout ever, and we can only assume why, but the jump from 2004 to 2008 and then 2012 was massive, and the drop from 2020 to 2024 was massive as well. They were all in the figures of tens of millions of voters shifting one way or the other in almost every election from 2008 to 2024 except for Hillary vs. Trump, if I remember correctly.

My point is that Republicans campaign on change and appeal to emotion, and the last time we saw a Democrat campaign on a similar message, we saw some of the largest turnouts in US history. The facts are that the country consistently does better under Democrats than Republicans, but Republicans appeal to emotion in a way that Democrats don’t. Biden added, what, 500 million jobs to the economy in the past 4 years? But the majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck - even some of those making six-figure salaries - and so the lack of an appeal to their daily struggles disincentivizes them from supporting Democrats. The Republicans promise change, and even if it’s a bold-faced lie, people eat it up because the issues they face every day seem to fall upon deaf ears.

Seriously, I assumed it was downvoted because the hexbear and lemmygrad chuds got butthurt.

And the ACA was a compromise with Republicans. A lot was stripped out by Republican demand, and yet it was still such a massive improvement from the previous system.

It’s more like the Republicans promise the moon even if they intend to shove the sun up your ass, while the Dems only promise what they think that they can accomplish, and often even that gets trampled by Republicans willing to break the government just to keep the Dems from doing anything.

The last time we had a Democrat who made big promises and ran on a campaign of hope and progress, we had the largest voter turnout ever recorded in the history of the country at that time. And then an even larger turnout for his second election. Cut to 2020, and we elected the VP of that guy largely on his relation to that former President and because he wasn’t the other guy, and in this past election we saw several million less voters than 2020 with notable drops in support in swing states amongst Democrats and unaffiliated voters after right wing politicians voiced their support for Kamala.

There’s also the issue to be had with the bias of media in the country and how that affects public perception. I still remember in 2016 when the news channels aired video of Trump’s empty podium for an hour instead of Bernie Sanders’ speech.

It was also opposed by George Washington on the argument that “A bunch of farmers with guns will never defeat a trained army.” He basically did exactly that, but it took the support of one of the world’s largest super powers at the time in order to do it - France.

Not to say don’t arm yourself. I plan on doing exactly that myself. But don’t expect to be overthrowing the dictatorship to come. There are no resistance groups being armed by the EU here.

Vance is a smarmy piece of shit who will do anything for power

You just described the entire Republican party.

But more to the point, the other side of the coin is that either Trump’s views align with those of his owners, or he’s just as easily manipulated, and either way, he believes himself to be a dictator and acts accordingly. He has no morals and no qualms about breaking the law. He says that people who disagree with him politically should be locked up and talks about how he needs generals like Hitler had. He has been putting people loyal to him in positions of power since day one of his first term. What infighting he has created in the Republican party may slow him down, but it might create more collateral along the way from his cronyism and disregard for rules of politics. At least Vance wouldn’t be ignoring the FBI vetting his appointments and talking about replacing the heads of the FBI with people more loyal to him.

Both are bad for the country, I just don’t know if I can say one would be worse than the other. Vance is the corrupt official while Trump is the Florida man riding the high of who only knows what squared up to fight 5 cops who will probably win the fight.

I’ve been debating this with myself, and my conclusion is that Trump might be worse because Vance is at least a politician. He has some knowledge and “respect” (maybe) for the trappings of the office, whereas Trump gives no shits for rules or regulations and is all too happy to trample on every right and freedom we have.

But who knows, I could go both ways on which would be worse.

It’s like with cults - it’s a source of affirmation that their opinions and emotions are the right ones. It pairs really well with fascism because the fascists give you somebody to blame, and then the Twitter cult content farm tells you that you’re righteous in your hatred.

And that’s also why it’s so hard to break people away from it. To break away, they’d have to recognize and admit that they’re wrong, that everything they’ve done up to that point hasn’t been justified, and that they’ll have to face the consequences of what they’ve done (“are we the baddies?”). After a certain point, the sunk cost fallacy sets in, and people will double down on the cult rather than admit that they were wrong, even when they know it.

Interesting. I had heard that many of the rail lines are used under contract because they’re privately owned by the freight companies and that the freight trains having priority was a stipulation of those contracts. Not the lines marked on this map, as those are Amtrak lines, but all the other ones across the country. It might be a local commuter rail thing or something.

A perfect example of this is the Boston T. It’s half the size it was 100 years ago and is still considered the 3rd best transportation network in the country, with a full 50% of all daily commutes to Boston happening on the T.

If the government owns the lines, it’s a different story, but most of the rail lines in the US are privately owned. So in most of the US commuter rail is using freight tracks on contract, with one of the stipulations being that the freight trains get priority.

He then giggles and calls multiple of his coworkers over to look at it. Luckily he didn’t take it out. This whole damn time I’m right there.

This sounds like grounds for a complaint that could have consequences on their employment status.

But who are we kidding, it’s the TSA, and they don’t even feel like they have the obligation to pretend to give a shit.

Most other countries don’t make you do the math and then guess how much you owe, and give you jail time if you guess incorrectly.

Having played War Thunder, I can say with complete certainty that the Ratte would move at a respectable 2 km/h, be unable to deal with anything more extreme than a 3 degree incline, and would’ve seen combat against Leopard 2s and Abrams while only having access to HE rounds.