@gAlienLifeform - eviltoast
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Wright County Circuit Court Judge Craig Carter wrote, “If we don’t let a 16-year-old buy a six-pack of beer and a pack of smokes

    I am normally the last person to give a shit about overly informal language, but for fucks fucking sake Missouri, you couldn’t find one person in your state with the intellectual capacity to realize that “If the state does not permit the purchase of alcohol nor tobacco by minors” maybe sounds a bit more serious? Like, the actual ruling itself is an offensive embarrassment, but I really can’t get over the fact that it’s written like a freakin facebook post.




  • They kept the good stuff under wraps and tried to play it safe but not spooking anyone with “communism.”

    This is it exactly, and I feel like this bit of this Salon article (arc’d) perfectly captures why this happened

    Tobias described a dynamic where campaign staff and candidates are hesitant to publicly push back on the assertions of billionaire donors like Hoffman, even if the campaign doesn’t intend to let them direct policy.

    Tobias indicated that the apparent influence of the super-wealthy has a dual effect. It undermines the Democratic Party’s support from its traditional base by steering policy discussions away from economically populist ideas that go against the interest of the wealthy, while simultaneously helping support candidates who are charismatic but don’t come into politics with a consistent ideological framework.

    The influence of billionaires was directly early in Harris’ bid for the presidency when moguls like Mark Cuban warned the Harris campaign that a billionaire tax, for example, would be too aggressive, according to the Washington Post. Other business executives, like Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber and Harris’ brother-in-law, also served as advisors and, according to the Atlantic, helped steer the campaign away from criticism of corporate power.



  • I think the way more important thing (if only because we can do something about it) are all the rich idiots ostensibly on our side getting out of pocket

    Tobias described a dynamic where campaign staff and candidates are hesitant to publicly push back on the assertions of billionaire donors like Hoffman, even if the campaign doesn’t intend to let them direct policy.

    Tobias indicated that the apparent influence of the super-wealthy has a dual effect. It undermines the Democratic Party’s support from its traditional base by steering policy discussions away from economically populist ideas that go against the interest of the wealthy, while simultaneously helping support candidates who are charismatic but don’t come into politics with a consistent ideological framework.

    The influence of billionaires was directly early in Harris’ bid for the presidency when moguls like Mark Cuban warned the Harris campaign that a billionaire tax, for example, would be too aggressive, according to the Washington Post. Other business executives, like Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber and Harris’ brother-in-law, also served as advisors and, according to the Atlantic, helped steer the campaign away from criticism of corporate power.

    Like Musk and Putin are shitheads who are going to do shithead things until we force them to stop, but at least our ostensible allies could stop screwing us over in the meantime

    e; Just now noticing that I forgot which thread I was commenting in and I just relinked the OP, which was a silly thing to spend effort on, but spending the effort to delete it at this point also seems silly




  • I’m not who you were asking, but I’ve got at least two problems with this,

    The biggest problem is cherry picking examples to reach a conclusion while ignoring contradicting evidence. We had plenty of more successful pop culture stuff that had overtly progressive and feminist themes, and conservative stuff doing well isn’t really a new phenomenon this year (the article even points this out where it talks about American Sniper and Passion of the Christ).

    The second biggest problem is that the numbers underlying this are suspect - it’s easy to manipulate streaming numbers and book sales, and church groups are taking whole congregations to movies if they think it’s a culture war win. Also, reading Sydney Sweeney and hawk-tuah girl as conservative wins are stretches that the author never really justifies (not to mention seeing Beyonce getting shit out by the CMAs as anything other than a sign that country music executives don’t like independent black women who already have successful music careers beyond their influence).

    Which gets to a problem that might only bug me, but this article has nothing to say about any of the art it’s bringing up and misses what I think could be an actually interesting conversation - what does the kind of art conservatives are getting into tell us about them? Like, the fact that they’ve meme-d around hawk-tuah girl, when did conservatives get “sex positive”? (rape positive if we’re being honest, but that’d be a conclusion an article could build towards by actually engaging with the material)

    e; ttpos