The simple truth is that you have to justify the cost. Art is expensive and generates no quantifiable income. Capitalism is poison.

There’s intelligent Republican debaters who can’t be baited out there

This is true, but I've seen Vance speak, he has zero charisma. I feel like you need some amount of charisma to be a bullshit artist and have people not see straight through you. I mean people with any semblance of intelligence will see through you no matter what, but votes aren't weighted on intelligence.

Definitely would have been my first choice to look also, but do you think that staples or office max is going to have something cheaper than amazon?

As someone who shaves regularly, my skin finally cleared when I began using alcohol and fragrance free aftershave lotion.

Too bad we're too busy fighting endless capitalist manufactured culture wars. Shame we cant put it aside and end capitalist control of our government. Guess humanity is over then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm curious to see how my boy Sanderson handles a book series that is almost entirely politics. Not to say I haven't seen Sanderson have politics, Stormlight Archives probably the most political of his many books, but its still not even close to the intensely political nature of ASOIAF.

We all know Sanderson would hit a home run though.

Here is a fun narrative I imagine when I see stuff like this.

Some poor asshole who is struggling to pay off student loans and thus has no luxury in job opportunities, sadly accepts a job as a rag company like this. Their boss, who lives in similar conditions sadly tells them that they need to write a hit piece of Simone for "corporate overlords demand a blood sacrifice" both the writer and manager hate themselves in this interaction. Then the writer finds the article from his own company about Simone Biles parents abandoning her and feels sad he has to shit on someone who life has already shit on enough. Finishes the article, goes home, gets the alert on his phone its published, logs onto his burner account to post the context on the article he himself wrote just so he can have any level of control over his life.

Sort of like a Rube Goldberg machine of this guy

And from what I can tell there is no way to convey this point to people effectively. Shit half the time someone reluctantly agrees with me I still know that nothing changed for them. Kind of like "yeah what you're saying is true, but what-about...".

If we cant stop demonizing each other we are fucked, especially when in the end the people who everyone is fighting against, are actually just like 5-10% of the population on other side of the aisle. I truly believe the large majority of people don't really care that much and just vote the way they always have because that's how they were raised, but social media and the news has tricked everyone into thinking that 1 side of the aisle are a bunch of transexual communist's who get pregnant just so they can abort it, and the other side of the aisle are polishing there SS uniforms and dreaming about when they can finally go on a liberal killing spree. The truth is the people worthy of that level of critique are not most people, we are just being propagandized at levels the world has not seen before.

I was once told that it isn't about making your mind blank, it's about acknowledging the thought that rolls into your mind, and then letting it go. The idea being to train yourself to let trains of thought go. When I'm being a huge dick to myself with my inner monologue I can sometimes remember "oh yeah! I can just not think about this" and then I'll let my mind go elsewhere.

"Explain it to me like I'm 10 or i cant understand it."

as opposed to extremists, who take the simplest, least nuanced, most insulting take they can of anyone with a different opinion, and assume that that is what those with a different opinion are doing.

And then you went and did exactly what he said, you threw nuance out of the window, made broad assumptions of all parties motives, and then levied a "with us or against us" thinking to it.

We could all chill the fuck out and focus on real issues. Issues like how the ruling class inflames these wedge issues like abortion, and woke ideology for this exact purpose, so we are too busy fighting each other to care enough about being robbed so we don't band together and end capitalism.. Most people think the way they are told to by their peer groups, that is to say their values are a byproduct of environment, and as long as our government continues to let billionaires exist, they will continue exploiting large groups of people to fight each other over issues, those issues, that if we were all left alone to our own devices, i feel pretty certain we wouldn't be fighting over.

Let me be clear by saying i agree these wedge issues actually matter, but that's why they are effective tools. But fighting over them creates more division which makes the wedge issues more serious, but if we could just collectively agree we are sick of capitalist money in politics and collectively force the government to end it, within 5-10 years you would see that we can have common sense policies again. But we cant do that while divided.

For me I see 2 things happening. 1) I see capitalism destroying the world rapidly, for real, while we are fighting each other over social issues global warming is rapidly closing in on ending our species. 2) I see a population trained to hate each other that cannot stand together against the ruling class that is going to destroy us all just so that they can live like gods on private islands.

This is what gets me, even when you make well reasoned arguments like this people just collectively what-about-ism you into the floor, and we drifter closer to the end. It feels like screaming into a vacuum...

Does anyone consider that there might be a large number of the people that consider themselves to be centrists are near the actual center, and that everyone dunking on them is imagining center of our current Overton window? I think about that a lot. (Not the guy in the meme, just in general)

I mean, even if not, why do both sides shit on them instead of trying to bring them closer to their side?

Do we not want to make change? Because you need people for that. Are we just concerned about being correct? Because that does nothing to solve our problems.

First you have to stop capitalist government

lol yeah right

But really though humanity is doomed unless we figure out a way to actually reverse it, because we wont do anything to stop it until its too late to stop (decades ago), so then we wont do anything until it begins creating worldwide problems, which is soon, so by then we will have to have a solution to reverse it.

There is a kernel of truth in that sentiment though. The government has a tendency to be grossly wasteful of resources, but I feel this is offset by the fact that they aren't profit driven in their goals and less likely to skyrocket prices to line shareholder pockets. Corporation are also "wasteful" in a sense, where they charge insane markups over actual cost and refuse to pay taxes on them, the difference here is that corporations move their profits offshore and out of Americans pockets, where the government always ends up paying private contractors more than they should. In the end corporations do more with less while government controlled services are always WAAAAAY cheaper than their private counterparts for the consumer despite them being inefficient.

This is the part they don't get. Do you want zero waste and ever rising prices for the sake of some worthless rent seeking billionaire cocksucker, or do u want some inefficiency, but you pay less overall. One makes someone else rich at your expense, the other allows you an affordable life while preventing another billionaire from existing.

Those Capitalist of the Gilded Age were fucking amateurs compared to the billionaires of the modern day, where propaganda has been distilled down to a science, and is being force fed to everyone every day at every angle.

They wish they had the tools we're unraveling society with today.

"If properly contained" doing a lot of heavy lifting in this statement haha.

I misspoke, I believe you said facist sympathizers if they vote for trump previously.

Just general left and right. I think the majority of the issues people have with centrists is they're looking at the overton window (and also lets be real the majority of americans thoughts dont go past "my side best side"). Which honestly i think even acknowledging the overton helps guide us farther right by allowing it to change what we see as left and right.

It sounds like were at an impasse, I want to fix the problem before it evolves farther, but you think its already past saving, or at the very least you can only see a route to saving the country that goes through calling half the country fascists and hoping they listen.