halfpipe [they/them]

It’s driven by the massive spike in the cost of living, especially the cost of food / housing / energy, which no party is interested in addressing, so yeah, it’s a fucking problem that isn’t going away.

They can’t get him off the ballot at this point, the election is 45 days away.

It’s a twitter brained NAFO guy. Funnily enough, the libs own this one.

Although it’s still kind of funny that political violence is just becoming a thing now.

Is everyone just gambling that Trump will be as incoherent as Biden? Cause with her promising nothing to voters, and the polls falling back towards Trump, it seems like the Democrats need to her to fucking slaughter Trump tonight, and I don’t think she has it in her.

On the other hand, she did once call Biden a racist segregationist to his face, right up on the Democratic primary stage. That was cool.

I think it could survive a delay. Spiderverse is the only piece of Sony superhero slop that people are interested in, and it managed to build up a massive audience on streaming during the delay between the first movie and the second one. The Post Malone / Spiderverse video from the first movie has more than two billion views on youtube.

The multiverse gimmick is getting so played out though.

The funny thing is that Russia has kept moving into the Donbas this entire time, blasting through lines that have been fortified since 2014, because the Ukrainian reserves that might have held on there are currently getting blasted to shit trying to hold the salient in Kursk.

Someone high up must have really believed all the propaganda about Russian casualties, because the whole thing makes no sense otherwise.

It was deeply boring. One billionaire sucking off another for getting shot at for what felt like a full hour, then Trump rambling on with Musk going “uh huh” “yeah” every minute or so.

Did Kamala’s crowd sizes really put the fear in Trump or what? His only rally this week is in fucking Montana tomorrow, with none scheduled for the rest of the month. He’s just doing unhinged press conferences.

Imagine if the Democrats had brought this kind of competence and energy to 2016 by running LITERALLY ANY OTHER CANDIDATE!

Yeah, because it’s patently obvious that the US is in terminal decline, while China is going to be the worlds foremost economic and manufacturing power for at least the rest of the century. Even TSMC has facilities and employees in mainland China now.

first season was a wonderful surprise that genuinely elevated the source material, with Paddy Considine putting an amazing performance as King Viserys. Second season …eh, it made some weird choices, but it’s nowhere near as bad as Game of Thrones got.

they keep doing this psycho shit , bragging about brutalizing immigrants to try to get Pennsylvania, and all it’s doing is pissing off their base in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado.

There was a period around the 1600s where, relative to their neighbors , they could be described as a pretty well run and meritocratic state. Social mobility generally existed for men who had valuable skills and were willing to convert to Islam. There was a pretty effective administrative state , general internal stability, and the food supply was generally secure.

Your other options in the region at that time were ;

Europe - saw about twelve million dead in the 30 years war and the wars of religion. Widespread hunger as the falling temperatures of the little ice age lowered the crop yields. Glaciers started expanding again, and the altitude at which wheat could be grown decreased by about 200 to 300 meters. Also widespread religious hysteria and witch hunts as the black plague returns to Europe.

Russia - Absolutely wrecked by climate change. The combination of the little ice age , a bad volcanic winter and foreign invasion sees 30% of the population dead in the Time of Troubles, followed by regular famines afterwards. The general collapse of the old feudal relationships sees an increase in serfdom and more exploitation of the peasants.

Persia - Having problems from the rise of the Ottomans and the disruption of the silk road trade, and with some regions only just then recovering from seeing their cities, infrastructure and population almost annihilated by the Mongols 400 years previously. Though still a pretty ok place to live at this time , all things considered.

It is weird that so much of the Trump campaign was built around Biden and Hunter, like IRL years of effort, millions of dollars worth of merchandise, all the attack ads lined up for months in advance…

with literally no one noticing Kamala or even doing opposition research on her, and now the GOP is trying to switch gears overnight in an election where they now need to really compete for women voters while desperately not mentioning womens rights or the abortion bans, or all the women that died in agony from ectopic pregnancies and septic miscarriages.

Yeah, turns out all of this high tech satellite guided shit can be easily defeated by electronic warfare if its used against an enemy that has the time and resources to adapt to it. This is the first time anyone had a chance to figure that out though, because the US has only ever used it against unarmed farmers and goat herders.

Well, at least it’s not as bad as the F-35, the multi trillion dollar jet that fails to both electronic warfare and rain.

pre-covid, It used to be a fairly chill place for people who had reached the “acceptance” stage of grief to look at graphs of ice sheet coverage and talk about maybe learning to grow potatoes.

I hadn’t checked it in years, but it looks like the depressed climate scientists have been replaced by full blown survivalists and scared normies who think that collapse will be something fast, like a disaster movie, instead of the ongoing grind of people watching prices going up as wages stay the same, needing to hang on to clothing longer, no longer being able to see a doctor, or knowing their children will probably be unable to buy homes and start their own families.

Ukraine was always going to get destroyed under Biden. By the time he was elected there was no possible off ramp, and the ultra nationalists just would not stop shelling the separatist republics.

Trying to sanction the entire Russian economy in 2022 , thereby undoing the Sino-Soviet split . putting Russia, China and Iran into an alliance based on shared grievances , and creating a new center of power and finance in the world for the first time since 1991? That was entirely an own goal on the part of the west.

We were saying 6 months ago that there would be a crackdown, simply because the US can’t support a genocidal colonial project if the victims can livestream their suffering to the world.

But what’s really weird here, and I think no one could have predicted, is the mass suppression and arrest of Ivy League student protestors. They’re protesting peacefully, which they’ve been told is the only moral and acceptable way. They’re not making any material demands, and they’re not tied into a workers movement that could strike and threaten capital. Anyone with knowledge of previous college protests and the academic year could have told them that this is harmless, and that it would fizzle out as summer started, but instead they’ve violently cracked down in a way that’s causing the protests to spread, while also radicalizing and blackballing the children of privilege , the people that are supposed to carry on the ideological future of liberalism and sign up to be the next generation of the imperial bureaucracy and the NGOs.

It’s going to try, but it’s not 1992 anymore, there are other centers of power and financing in the world.

What was the point of trying to hold it for ten days after they lost control of the roads in and out, and after the head of the armed forces was fired for trying to retreat. Was the ability to shell civilians in Donetsk really worth that?

Shit, the “stabbed in the back” myth is practically going to write itself when this is all over.

I keep thinking the situation can’t get any more vile , but it keeps happening