...So then, in self defense, I tried to shoot him in the face with a pepper ball round, which moves at much higher velocities, can cause permanent blindness, and has ... I dunno, 10,000x more concentrated spiciness than plain deli mustard?
I mean, presumably, what Abbot is trying to say, is some kind of ... total, 100% tax on their... net worth? Of people moving across state lines?
I dunno... I dunno what the fuck a tariff on a person means, but hey, I just have an econ degree, poli sci degree, and career in data analytics and econometrics, I'm not a governor of a state.
Valentina Gomez, a Republican congressional candidate in Texas, wrote on X: "Greg, focus on lowering property taxes first. Hardworking people are losing their homes because of this."
Popular MAGA influencer Gunther Eagleman wrote on X: "Good! Now abolish property taxes for us that live here."
Ryan Fournier, a co-founder of the Students for Trump group, wrote on X: "Governor Abbott joked that he’d slap a 100% tariff on anyone moving from New York to Texas if Mamdani wins. Funny—but he’s not wrong. Stop fleeing liberal cities just to vote the same way you did there."
So here we have a spectrum of Republicans.
I mean honestly that on its own, in isolation, is pretty reasonable, Texas has massive property taxes compared to almost every other state, she's telling Abbot to stop wasting time messaging gibberish to idiots, she's worried about her potential constituents.
Ok, so uh, I guess we just don't need a functioning, funded government in Texas. Eagleman is apparently pro-shutdown of the state of Texas... Aka, a libertarian? At least this is possibly a conceptually understandable idea, regardless of how stupid that idea is.
... and now we get to the head-desk level of stupid. Ryan, are the people who voted for Mamdani going to be leaving NYC? ... No? No it would be Republicans. Democrats who hate Palestinians ...who apparently aren't Republican or bigotted enough, or ... Texas enough? I legitimately don't think this person could handle making a flow chart with like, more than 2 nodes.
Cheney gets to set up Haliburton in hell, but then Satan does a hostile takeover, and now its all redirected to simultaneously torturing a kind of gestalt consciouness of Cheney in many seperate, simultaneous bodies.
IE, Cheney gets the mega-deluxe hell premium package.
Probably a bunch of error messages relating to improperly executed macro scripts, failed external api calls, and maybe copilot demanding you put all your documents into one drive... and also somehow the same 'hey, do you have a moment?' Teams message from one person, but somehow on 2 or 3 different versions of Teams, simultaneously.
... they're literally too stupid and un self aware to effectively be on anyone's 'side'.
This is is the kind of absolute moron 'median voter' that the Dems claim they are trying to appeal to, and they claim their method of being appealing to this person is to workshop and focus group develop a perflectly bland, near meaningless corporate marketing campaign that is so very obviously inauthentic.
Spoiler: You don't effectively message/market to inconsistent idiots with fake intellectualism, you effectively message to them with consistent and easily digested messages that are spoken with genuine conviction, confidence, and a consistent style.
As an example: Compare Mamdani's campaign to Harris'.
I am so very tried of pretending that the average adult American is not an actual fucking moron who reads and writes and thinks at a 5th to 6th grade level.
They are.
Don't act like adult idiot children are even capable of having a consistent or coherent worldview that extends beyond their immediate day to day experience.
They're not, they run on vibes, they're mostly concerned with being on the side of whatever seems to be popular right now, like middle school friend group dynamics, and they also have the 'is this person lying to me' assessment capabilities of a middle schooler who's always on their phone in school.
Democracy doesn't work in a nation of uneducated and un/misinformed dolts.
Nearly every prominent historical philosopher/pilitical theorist who ever argued for democracy would also tell you that there must be a significant and effective effort to ensure the masses are capable of critical thinking and are also reasonably well informed.
... A h(y)uge reason that Trump and MAGA are even politically possible in the first place is that so many Americans are just objectively morons... and that is because the Republicans have been for at least 40 years, successfully corrupting and corroding public education.
Why do they do this? Many reasons, but a big one is that morons are easier to lie to and trick, run confidence games on.
What does a non profit do when it wants to try to raise support for a democratic society in an illiberal region?
It funds universal schools and sports clubs, to establish a foundation of learning, curiosity, and in person community involvement.
What do you do to destroy the fundamental basis for democracy?
You ruin and gatekeep and exclusionarily containerize those things.
Just suffer because suffering is some flavor of good, and then later throw on some ruleset that specifices what kinds of suffering are more or less good.
Can suffering eventually build character, lead to meaningful realizations, growth, development of useful habits and ethics?
Yes.
But suffering for suffering's sake is pointless, destructive, a form of masturbation really.
Suffering because other people tell you its good for you, even when it uh, doesn't actually do anything good for you?
Well now you're actually something of an ideological cuck/masochist, despite all the exaggerated outward signalling toward the opposite.
Like, I'm a white trash dude, I've known poor latinos, asians, blacks, native americans... yeah, its certainly got different variations and specific details for different ethnicities and cultures, but it ultimately just boils down to 'suffering for suffering's sake is a moral good, that is tied into your worth as a man.'
Its an archetype of a moral/identity structure that is at least more than 'I am a worthless failure' for broken/broke men, as you say, with very low self esteem and self respect.
Unfortunately... it does not actually produce genuine self esteem or self respect, it produces contempt, a worldview where your worth is based on being 'better' in some way, than someone else...
It's not an inward originating worldview, based on actual deliberation and consideration, that, while more difficult to create, does actually produce a stable, model of the self, which thus then actually allows for real self esteem and self respect.
On that note, how's Enrique Tarrio doing these days?
You know, the frontman/figurehead leader of the proud boys, token minority, all the actual decisions are made by a shadowy council of I think 13 white dudes, 'elders'?
Token Republican minorities realize they are in fact token minorities, apparently having gone their whole lives somehow not realizing the most solid core of the Republican base is... white Christian racists.
This is exploding all through the right wing at the moment.
Ben Shapiro appears to be genuinely baffled that roughly half the Republican base under 30 likes Nick Fuentes more than him...
...he had a live discussion with his own employeees, including Matt Walsh, where Ben says it would be 'an Agatha Christie novel' to figure out if he were assasinated, whether it'd be from a far left or far right person...
... meanwhile Matt Walsh just cannot be arsed to give a fuck either way... because he is white, Christian, racist, and extremely confident in his...I guess just majestically un self aware world view, total fucking dead eyed sociopath, 24/7.
Mark Levin and Lindsey Graham are yelling slurs and profanities at Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, in public speeches at a fairly high level conservative event... evidently somewhere between baffled and terrified that they need to explain that Hitler was bad, Israel can do no wrong, and if you disagree, go fuck yourself.
(EDIT: Meanwhile, Tucker's interview of Nick includes Nick saying... that Mark Levin was the person who introduced him to the concept of white demographic decline as ... immigrants tend to have more kids... and thus Levin is actually the person who started Nick down the path of realizing that we should all just be as cruel as possible to non whites, because white good brown black bad.)
(... also, in case it isn't obvious, 'Fuentes' is a hispanic name. Very literally, it means 'fountain', more contextually, as a name, it is Spanish for something like 'fountain of abundance/life'. His dad is a Mexican American, best I can tell, his grandpa was born in Mexico.)
(So if one wants to play Nick's own game... Nick is really just white-passing, now isn't he?)
(By Nick's own metrics... I'm French, Norweigan, German, Italian. And yes, its northern Italian. Pretty sure I'm more 'white' than he is, by his own metrics.)
(His fucking eyes aren't even blue, hair ain't even blonde. I'm much closer to the look of the aryan ubermensch than he is, but if you ever see me on the streets, it'll be dressed with a black and red emblem, maybe arrows, maybe an angry kitty kat... fuck do i hate nazis)
These fucking actual morons have been lying to themselves their whole lives that a massive chunk of the movements they are a part of, helped to grow and mold... that a huge chunk of their fanbase isn't actually just dumb asshole racist bigots.
They apparently actually do largely believe their own obvious bullshit.
And now, they seem to have only just realized this, at the very moment that the dumb asshole racist bigots may actually outnumber the older school, corpo suck off neocons.
This is uh, strategic level, almost a stupid as the Dems softwalking Trump's prosecution during Biden's admin, and also running cover for and aiding the Israeli genocide, which lead to an actual fascist takeover of the government.
Now, the Republicans have achieved that, we are not even a year in, and, well, we're on schedule for a Night of the Long Knives, an internal party civil war.
JFC, this is all so predictable to anyone with an understanding of politics and history that expands further than the last 40 years of the US... but, hedonistic myopia is apparently just what we do now.
