“You can’t vote out Capitalism” yeah but you can vote for Elizabeth Warren and her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau you can vote for not abolishing food stamp. You can vote for Biden’s millions of dollars in federal loan forgiveness. You can vote for Medicaid expansion to help those at the bottom rungs. You can vote for racial, gender, and sexuality protections in the workplace. You can vote for a million things that improve our life under Capitalism and saying “voting doesn’t change anything” only shows how much privilege you must have that you wouldn’t notice the difference.
“You can vote for Biden’s millions of dollars in federal loan forgiveness” We did that though, and he proceeded to quite immediately and explicitly Not make it happen.
He forgave $188.8 Billion USD in federal student loans. I’m sorry you weren’t one of the borrowers who qualified, but he forgave billions with a B
5.3 million borrowers had their loans forgiven and while, yes, that’s only a drop in the bucket, that’s still a 5.3 million Americans who had a financial burden taken off their back and acting like that didn’t happen when these numbers are a Google search away can only be explained by ignorance or malice.
It wasn’t Biden’s fault that he had his student loan forgiveness plans blocked. It was the fault of every Republican and, truly, every American who could have voted blue down-ballot in every election they were eligible to vote in since 2012 and chose not to. If you aren’t voting for dems in congressional and gubanatorial elections then you can’t blame the dems when they don’t have the power to implement the leftist policies you want to see. That’s on you.
As someone who did benefit from the student loan forgiveness (on loans that my mother’s second husband fraudulently took out using my information, no less), it absolutely provided immense relief. And I ONLY had less than $5k left to be paid back (although I never even received a dime of the loans.)
Reagan put the US on a path to destruction and every time anyone that isn’t a far-right lunatic tries to course-correct, the conservative dark money made sure they never succeeded.
Every nationally beneficial piece of legislation in the last fifty years was from the left. Saying otherwise is sheer ignorance.
And as someone who would have qualified for 10K of forgiveness only for the GOP to launch a dozen legal challenges: I hold all of you “lol the dems are useless” people personally responsible.
I think we’ve turned incrementalism into some great evil that must be destroyed because passing imperfect solutions isn’t as sexy and fun as total reform. And I’m sick to my teeth about it.
Obamacare, the ACA, is an imperfect solution. It was not a universal option, and allowing the individual states to choose whether to take federal subsidies that were set aside for them regardless to expand Medicare created an enormous ironic hell. In red states, which refused the subsidies obvsly, you could be too poor for ACA coverage. I know because I lived in three such states. After Obamacare passed, I still was without insurance for years because I was too poor to be covered.
That, all of that? Is about as imperfect and fucked as a “solution” can be.
But then Obamacare literally saved my life. I would be dead without it. A few years ago, in Florida, I made barely enough money to qualify for ACA coverage. And then something went extremely wrong with my esophagus, and I had to get a magnetic ring surgically inserted around my throat or, y'all, I would have been dead in another month.
I’m sitting here alive because imperfect solutions. And when virtue-signaling cowards talk about how the Dems and GOP are the same, I want to scream, “The GOP would have let me fucking die! They have let so many others die! What the fuck is WRONG with you?”
You, all of you, are surrounded by people who are only here because imperfect Democratic solutions. And I think it’s hideously disrespectful to the people who aren’t here, who didn’t survive, who didn’t get the SNAP benefits they needed or didn’t get the insurance they needed or didn’t get the housing subsidy they needed, to pretend otherwise.
If that’s you, if you have ever sat there and gone “the dems do nothing, I’m not going to bother voting,” I want you to understand you were incorrect. And then I want you to do better.
“I didn’t get the perfect progressive Utopia I wanted with a single election so WHY BOTHER, the left is USELESS.”
–way too many fucking people
i continue to be alive bc of obamacare! im on aca insurance right now, and it is paying for all my stage 4 cancer treatment including my brain surgery tomorrow. do you think i would have a chance in hell if they could still deny preexisting conditions??? i have personally spoken with women whose entire families went bankrupt keeping them alive when they were diagnosed like 20-30 years ago because their coverage was denied due to the preexisting condition of having breasts.
This does not even begin to cover the weirdness of cathode ray televisions.
They are literally particle accelerators that you point at your face.
And for eighty years, Americans’ favorite thing to do was turn them on and stare at them for hours.
If you overcharge them, they emit gamma radiation.
Servicing them is like disarming a bomb – their capacitors are enormous and are usually charged to hundreds or thousands of volts, and most of them have no bleed system that drains that charge, meaning that they can still be dangerous months or years after the last time they were powered up. A discharge can not only electrocute you, it can cause tools to melt or explode.
A black-and-white cathode ray TV driven by an unmodulated analog signal is theoretically capable of resolution that would require a microscope to perceive.
Old school CRT monitors had the same issues.
Back when, I worked at a small whitebox pc manufacturer. One day, a service tech brought back an older, gigantic (30 inch or so) AutoCAD monitor from a service call. The customer said “Made me feel nauseous”
So, we put it on the bench and fired it up. You immediately felt the hair on your body stand up, and my co worker put his hand up close to turn the power off, and his hand and forearm started spasming - I yanked the power cord from the wall as the tingle I was feeling began to feel hot.
No idea what was wrong with the thing, but it was kicking out some serious electro magnetic radiation.
Remembering the almost imperceptible high pitched buzzing that let you know the tv was still on even when nothing was on the screen. Also putting your forearm near the screen and watching the hairs stand up
The little crackle if you touched the screen to wipe it…
Omg no one’s even talking about the smell of the screen
This is both horrifying to read and nostalgic
I liked to turn the back of my hand to the screen, right after it was turned off, and pet the static with the little hairs on the backs of my fingers. It felt soft and fluffy.
one of the reasons CRTs are such a hotbed of glitch videography is that unlike modern monitors that block irregular signals, CRTs don’t have an opinion about the signal you feed into them. they will display anything. and if you’ve ever done glitch work with a video modulator or such, you know what it’s like negotiating with a living beast. the images you can get are often unpredictable and impossible to reproduce even with the same settings on your hardware, because it’s just electricity. there is something magical and strange about the cathode ray tube and when you play with them enough you really remember why The Ring fucked people up so bad. samara climbing out of an HD flat screen is a laughable image; but her climbing out of an old school boob tube? yeah man, i believe it. there’s fucking demons in that thing
i was opening up the nature center and a little wasp flew by while i unlocked the door so i let him out. then i looked down, and there was a spider, a millipede, and two rollie-pollie bugs waiting at the door and they all walked out in a line like they’d been at a party together overnight.
it’s been two weeks and i can’t stop thinking about it.
Prince whose noblest knight keeps insisting that he would throw himself upon his own blade to bleed himself dry of sin should his liege request it has to reassure concerned citizens, “I’ve never asked him to do that.”
“But you could, my liege!” the knight follows immediately.
following people who are into wrestling is just like “holy shit johnny appleseed just hit burner hurtzog (evil artfilm director-themed wrestler) with the Prostate Puncher 5000! can’t fucking stand that guy!” like all day long
ALT
