Holy fuck, I have never seen two people with a more dire need to touch grass in my life. Seriously, log the fuck off of Lemmy, sit in a quiet, dark room, and ponder where your life went so drastically wrong that you’re going to accuse someone of being a pedophile over some baby pictures… All because they called you a name during a disagreement.

Yeah, there are so many moments I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and yell at various people while shaking their shoulders.

For the love of God, Barack, don’t make fun of Trump at the White House correspondent’s dinner, he’ll run for president to dismantle all you’ve built up in revenge and HE WILL WIN.

Please, Ruth, I beg you to step down now while there’s still an opportunity for you to be replaced with another liberal justice. If you don’t, your legacy will be undone I’m under four years and it will herald the end of American democracy.

Please, Barack, don’t let them steal a supreme court seat like this, you have to force the issue while there’s still time or else you will watch the heritage foundation gloat about the second American revolution against the left while a corrupt court anoints the president as above the law of the land.

For the love of God, Biden, please run in 2016, I know you’re still grieving over the death of your son, but if you don’t you’ll be grieving over the death of your entire country.

For the love of God, Hillary, please step aside and let Sanders be the candidate, I know you agreed with Obama that he would give you SoS in return for you running after him but the Republican propaganda machine has made you toxic.

Barack, you can’t sweep this Russian interference under the rug, it’s too important to ignore, please!

I beg you, Hillary, don’t ignore the rust belt, your numbers are weaker than they should be there and they are too important to lose, the literal future of democracy is at stake.

For fuck’s sake, Comey, don’t reopen this stupid email investigation two weeks before the election, we both know there’s nothing on that fucking laptop. You need to shut down the trumpy faction before they leak its existence because they are trying to interfere with the election, and if Trump wins he will reward you with a pink slip while gleefully dragging the country to a dictatorship.

This timeline could’ve been so easily avoided, if only one variable out of dozens was different. But here we are, with me wondering where I can even flee to in order to escape the coming dictatorship.

The hush money payments were before the election so they were still felonies. It’s possible Trump wouldn’t have bothered hiding them like he did if he lost, but in any case there wouldn’t have been the appetite to prosecute him.

As for the coup, he absolutely would have tried it, definitely through filing lawsuits, and probably up to the same fake electors scheme and the riot, but it’s debatable how far he would’ve gotten. Definitely not as far as he did in reality, though.

Hoo boy, it’s a toughie. On the one hand, Trump would still be around. He also wouldn’t be in as much legal peril as he is now (it’s likely there wouldn’t have been an appetite to prosecute him over the Stormy Daniels hush money payments, and the classified documents case would have never happened to begin with since he wouldn’t have had access). But he almost definitely WOULD have tried to pull off another insurrection similar to Jan 6th–he was foreshadowing that he wouldn’t accept the results if he lost even back in 2016, using the same language as he did in 2020 before he launched his coup attempt.

The world where Trump doesn’t attempt a coup isn’t very interesting, at least for this thought experiment–he slinks off, continues shitposting about Hillary on Twitter, but likely doesn’t try to run again (or loses in the primary because he’s a sore loser). Everyone ignores his hush money payments in the interest of “statesmanship,” and at best he becomes a minor kingmaker in the party apparatus. MAGA withers on the vine, and we largely continue with the late Obama administration status quo.

The world where he attempts a coup is much more interesting. The real question is, what would have changed after the failed insurrection attempt? It’s highly unlikely it would have succeeded or even gotten anywhere as close as it did, since a lot of the original plan relied on access to the levers of power (I.e. being able to withhold security to let the rioters overrun the Capitol). But how would everyone react to it long-term? In this timeline, Republicans genuinely distanced themselves from Trump and Jan 6th at first, likely out of shock over the realization that they were actually in danger and the very real fear that they could end up hurt or killed. But as the shock wore off, Republicans started shuffling back to MAGA as the propaganda machine did its work to downplay and normalize the failed coup, and they realized that their base saw Jan 6th as a good thing.

In a theoretical timeline where Trump tries a coup in 2016, it depends on how far Trump gets before he fails. If he’s thwarted to the point where he doesn’t (or can’t) hold the rally that stormed the Capitol, then nothing really comes of it at all–it becomes a footnote in history that is only cared about by political historians, pub trivia enthusiasts, and people who like to talk about politics on the internet. If he gets to the point where he holds a rally, but the rally is prevented from interfering with the certification process (complete with provocative images of cops in riot gear swinging at MAGA rioters), it’s likely that this downplaying and normalization would have been ironically amplified by virtue of the coup attempt being less successful. Without the visceral fear of hiding from rioters, Republicans would have no reason to distance themselves from the attempt, and they would almost immediately start using it as fodder to attack the new Clinton administration. In short, the hypothetical coup attempt would become another Benghazi scandal for Clinton–something that she had little real involvement in and largely wasn’t her fault, but that she gets blamed for anyway. Trump, meanwhile, would remain largely in the same position as in 2015–the dominant force in the party.

Aside from that, the court wouldn’t be as openly corrupt as it is now. It’d be filled by a moderate Clinton appointee if democrats have the 51 votes to abolish the filibuster for supreme court appointees (or held open by McConnell otherwise), and when RBG dies her replacement is decided by whoever wins the 2020 election. Roe v. Wade would still exist, the chevron deference would still be the law of the land, and we wouldn’t have the terrifying prospect of legally sanctioned presidential death squads.

Overall, I think we would be largely in line with the status quo of 2014-2015. Not great, with a worrying trend towards fascism and an establishment largely too busy huffing their own farts to address the vast majority of problems facing us, but a LOT better than where we are right now.

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Or worse yet, they split the vote and a solid blue seat sends a Republican to Congress with 35-40% of the vote. I just love FPTP!

Yup, this was one of the central debates with gay marriage vs. civil unions, so many LGBT+ couples were absolutely screwed pre-Obergefell by one of the partners getting sick or dying, and the surviving partner either having no say in medical decisions or getting screwed out of inheritance because the sick/dead partner’s family was anti-gay and froze the surviving partner out of everything.

I’m not “out” in the sense that I go out of my way to actively tell people I’m a furry, and I don’t have blatantly furry stuff like bad dragon stickers, nor do I tell people to refer to me by my fursona name (long story, but a coworker at my job when I first started did this, to the point where it was even his username–IIRC, management went along with it because his birth name resulted in a username that was identical to another employee’s username).

That said… my immediate family all know I’m a furry and so is my husband. my avatar is either my fursona, or a generic furry character (this is the case at work where I do not want people associating me with the type of art I tend to commission). I occasionally post (SFW) furry memes like boykisser in work chat, and I wear furry-adjacent t-shirts at work. My car has Yoshi bumper stickers on it, and my desk has a picture of a grumpy-looking rabbit captioned “Don’t carrot all.” And if someone at work directly asks if I’m a furry, I don’t deny it. So… I’m out, but not in the way where I tell everybody about it proactively?

How about you fuck off and chug a diarrhea dogshit smoothie :^)

I’m pretty sure he was agreeing with you…?

I think it’s because Spotify frequently includes the same song as being on multiple albums separately–for example, if a band has a greatest hits album, Spotify considers the greatest hits album as a different song, even though it’s identical to the song on the original album.

It’s all well and good to say “choose another system of governance” but how do we implement this change? What is the mechanism under which we can replace our current system of government with Swiss democracy, without the old government just saying “lolno” and bombing it to shit? The only method I can think of is a constitutional convention, and right now we’re closer to the right wing being able to call one and rewrite it to take pur rights back 200 years than we are to leftists implementing Swiss democracy.

Like… I would be thrilled if that were within the realm of possibility, but as it stands any possible options for dramatically overhauling our system of governance is more likely to lurch us straight into permanent hard-right minority rule by a bunch of fascists. That’s what I mean when I say I’ve never seen an actual plan by leftists to overhaul the system–it’s all arguing about what the sexy end goal should be, without bothering to talk about the boring minutiae of how to actually get to it. So far as I can tell, the “plan” to make all these needed changes, so far as any thought is put into it at all, is just a silent assumption of either “we lobby our politicians and they do what we tell them and nobody opposes our ideas” or “we do a violent revolution and kill all the bad guys without harming the good guys and we definitely win and accomplish our goal without someone else taking advantage of the chaos to do a fascism instead,” depending on how radical the change is.

More like we don’t want to crash our only car when we don’t have another means of transportation, and oops, now we can’t get to work.

It’s great to say “the system is broken and must be replaced.” I agree! But nobody who says that, me included, has ever had anything resembling an actual plan to replace the system or to prevent something even worse from taking over once the system is destroyed.

Everyone gave the GOP shit for screaming about how Obamacare needs to be “repealed and replaced” but never saying what it should be replaced with (though that was because the “replace” part was a lie and they just wanted to go back to the bad old days of people being trapped in a job or entirely unable to get insurance because of a preexisting condition). It’s the same thing with people saying the entire system of government needs to be replaced.

Seriously, ever since I drove alongside one of the new 2024 GMC Sierra Denali trucks and realized its hood was as tall as my entire car, I’ve been utterly terrified of being anywhere near them. You probably can’t see anything less than 10-15 feet in front of you, which is absolutely bonkers for a noncommercial vehicle. To say nothing of how getting hit by one is going to be like getting smacked directly in the face like a brick wall, because there’s no way you’ll be knocked up onto the roof to dissipate the force of the impact.

Car companies have absolutely lost the plot with this whole arms race of BIGGER BOXIER TALLER MANLIER trucks ever since Ford got made fun of around 2000 or so for making a car that was too “feminine” because it dared to have a more rounded exterior. The next generation refresh made it bigger and boxier, slapped a 12" Ford badge that was 2-3x the size of the badge on the previous generation, and it’s been all downhill ever since.

The problem is that as far as I’m aware there’s literally zero evidence of this doomsday scenario you’re describing ever happening, despite publicity rights being a thing for over 50 years. Companies have zero interest in monetizing publicity rights to this extent because of the near-certain public backlash, and even if they did, courts have zero interest in enforcing publicity rights against random individuals to avoid inviting a flood of frivolous lawsuits. They’re almost exclusively used by individuals to defend against businesses using their likeness without permission.

Holy fuck how do you not see the difference between “random nobody does an impression for free while hanging out with their pals” and “multi billion startup backed and funded by one of the richest companies on earth uses an impression as a key selling point for their new flagship product that they are charging access for and intend to profit from”

It’s amazing what proper regulations that are designed to prioritize safety over profit can accomplish, and how quickly stark examples of the dangers start happening when those regulations are sidestepped or dismantled…

I’d say “inb4 the AI cultists invade this thread” but it looks like I’m already too late

I’m at about 40% income to rent, and that’s with my living with two other adults. Landlord has consistently pumped rent by 20% every year, all while removing features (per-unit planter boxes demolished, fancy dishwasher & washer/dryer replaced with generic shit boxes, etc.).

I wish I’d never moved here

God, same. One of my little annoyances in life is that my internal voice is a goddamn motor mouth and I literally CANNOT stop it.

I can stare at a white wall and watch paint dry, and my monologue will start philosophizing about watching paint dry, where the phrase came from, why I’m doing it (to try and silence my internal voice), then go on a wiki walk about how trying not to think about something makes you think about it more and the classic example of telling someone “don’t think about a brown bear” makes them think about bears, then I’ll start thinking about bears and my monologue is suddenly halfway across the world.

Put me in a sensory deprivation tank, and my internal voice starts ruminating about how Daredevil uses these to sleep, then goes off about fight sequences, and then superhero comics, and whoops I’m halfway across the world.

Even when I’m paying attention and listening, my inner voice is still motoring away, it’s just that it’s mirroring what is being said to me instead of going on its own wiki walk halfway across the world (though sometimes someone will say something that makes my internal voice go “wait a second, that makes me think of…” and then I stop listening while I go on a wiki walk).

I have ADHD, in case it isn’t obvious yet.