Richard Karl Schultz @rbe_expert@mastodon.social
Visionary, developer, environmentalist
...His supporters have burnt nearly all their bridges with their non-Trump supporting friends and are looking for anything to vindicate their stupid-ass decision. The problem is they don't fully comprehend just how much they are screwing up other people's lives in their quest for vindication. "See! I was right to vote for Trump all along! It was YOU who were the stupid one!"
...Picture Bill Belichick winning the Superbowl on a drunken play where he sends Tom Brady on a kick return and somehow he gets through all the defenders for a touchdown. Everyone would be like "omg Belichick is a GENIUS!" In reality Trump isn't sure how he won but knows that his remaining supporters are "in" all the way with him, he can nearly say or do whatever he wants and his supporters have too much of an ego to admit they should have voted for Gary Johnson or something.
...They just didn't plan on the craziness of the US voter how stubborn they would be in doing whatever it took to prevent Hillary from being in office. They would vote for pretty much anyone else. When Trump got into office, his ineptness showed. He just makes up stuff as he goes and then pretends like it's all part of some genius master plan.
I don't care what political party you support. This particular president shouldn't have ever won. It was a total accident that he won. The Clinton campaign thought it had set a trap for the Republicans where they would be baited to nominate Trump and then he would lose easily in the general election. Campaign documents from early 2015 state outright this was the deliberate strategy.
"National Debt SOARS Under Trump Tax Cuts"
Tax cuts, I should remind you, that were absolutely unnecessary since the economy was already good
I think politicians who actually DO understand climate change, and know it to be true, but actively prevent anything from being done about it just to protect the industries responsible for it, should be treated with contempt by voters, regardless of any other positions they have on other issues that we happen to like #climate
"In an important and long-overdue step toward making the Democratic Party more accountable to voters and less captive to the interests of establishment insiders, the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) Rules and Bylaws arm voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to drastically curtail the influence of superdelegates by barring them from voting on the first ballot of the presidential nomination."
I want to create a non-profit foundation based on the #antifatalism ideology, organized on direct democratic principles, where we can work together to actually solve problems common to humanity. Anyone interested?
Selecting a justice is a TWO-STEP PROCESS: Nomination by the President, and then confirmation by the Senate. And guess what? 1/3 of the Senate is up for re-election in the midterms. This affects who the Senate will agree to confirm and who they WON'T. It could be the difference between Trump's pick having 51 votes (enough to nominate!) to confirm or only 35. The midterms matter to the process. McConnell IS guilty of hypocrisy.
The Republicans' insistence that their hurry to nominate and confirm Justice Kennedy's replacement is not hypocrisy, because after all, when McConnell said we should wait till after the 2016 election to choose the previous justice, that was a *presidential* election year, not a midterm election, is the most disingenuous pile of crap I've ever heard.
#antifatalism Outside of truly unforeseen natural disasters, our misery is of our own making. But we can fix it, if we don't give up before even trying. If the task seems impossible, it's because we're doing it wrong. We may need to learn a new way.
There's also the fact that science hasn't shown that events outside of quantum events (which seem to be random) are anything BUT determined by physical laws dictating cause and effect. When we deny the absolutely fundamental role of cause and effect in deciding _how_ our brains decide at the level of neurons, and thus what we do, then we refuse to use the *only* social policy tools able to extricate human life from completely preventable suffering. #antifatalism
To clarify what I mean by #antifatalism not implying belief in free will. Belief in free will actually paradoxically *strengthens* fatalism. Why? Because when we see evil in the world as the result of people's _free_ choices, evil done even as we try to keep people from doing evil, then we cannot analyze the root of suffering beyond people's choice to do evil. And this leads to the resignation that there is evil in humans that can't be rid of. Free will is not a constructive belief.
I propose a new ideology: #antifatalism
It's about the affirmative belief that humans can change the things that can in principle be changed by humans: Climate change, War, Poverty, etc. We don't have to be resigned to the idea that misery is neverending.
There's no natural law (not even entropy) that says we cannot fix these things. There's only us.
(Note that antifatalism does not imply belief in free will.)
American Mastodon users, have to have "the talk": what country would you flee to if the US became an oppressive dictatorship?
Oh God. Trump is getting another Supreme Court justice. The US is becoming like Turkey...*looks* like a democracy. Looks.
@rbe_expert I am working towards that now. I operate a bicycle-based food scrap collection service. I compost food scrap instead of it being wasted by being thrown in the trash.
Not enough customers to do it full time, but slowly working on it when I do have the time :)
rosecitycompost.com
Anyone else wonder what the point of their job is when it's not addressing any of the problems that matter? But yet you have to keep your job just to earn a paycheck? And almost every other job available is equally pointless and unfulfilling?
