AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

I hate white panic in all its forms but as a matter of factual accuracy, we can’t lampoon it as freaking out over 2 people in 10 not being white. It’s further along than that, at least nationally. Granted, in any particular room, some white people will still freak out over 2 in 10.

True, yet in this specific instance this isn’t about overall population, but specifically the muslim population, which if I recall correctly is under 1% of the population, far lower than the 10-20% in the comic.

Traffic is only really a valuable thing to get when it drives either ad views, or boosts your reach on a platform.

The thing is, you can use an adblocker, and since Trump owns the platform, no amount of views will change the likelihood of people seeing his posts. At the same time, the traffic you could bring is more server hosting costs that need to be paid to serve you the content.

Regardless, here’s the video without having to go to Truth Social. Also, fun fact, did you know the pool gets cleaned every year, and this isn’t some revolutionary thing that Biden just refused to do? Crazy! Who would have known the man known for lying would deceive people into thinking Biden just neglected the reflecting pool? Shocking.

Took me a second to realize how it was meant to be interpreted.

The fact that we could plausibly interpret it as trump calling him correct about something in some way though is still immensely disappointing about our reality.

“Don’t you see? Those people find civil rights offensive too! Why don’t we just compromise and only call klan hoods “divisive” rather than “hateful.” That will solve the issue!”

And for anyone wondering, yes it’s real.

https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1990484929533419536
https://archive.ph/iBgPH

Yep.

His genius plan is an HSA but your regular insurance subsidy money goes in there too and you can somehow negotiate healthcare prices yourself better than an insurance company can in a system designed to benefit insurers.

That part is true.

If you have an installer selling heat pumps and regular heaters, they’re gonna be much more incentivized to recommend you a heat pump if they get an extra, say, $1,000 in subsidies off marking it up compared to a regular heating system.

But without price controls or very strong competition, it won’t end up actually making things cheaper for consumers.

“It’s just a hurricane! What could it take to stop it? One nuke?”

I think what they’re rightly pointing out is not that veterans deserve more than anyone else, but that veterans are often centered in political discussions on the right when discussing people that “deserve” anything for “free” that could help improve or even just maintain their lives, and that it’s hypocritical to then effectively backtrack on that.

This is what’s so infuriating to me. There are so many policies we don’t implement not because it would be a net negative even for the economy, but just because some people are too afraid of giving anyone a “handout” that they “don’t deserve” or something.

And if they do, I have no doubt in my mind Trump will hold it up as an example for why we “don’t need food stamps because private individuals will donate anyways” or something stupid like that.

“Fuck them poors” - Trump, probably

And honestly, I’m sure it could be made less gaudy after the fact, and used as something other than a fucking gold-encrusted room to flaunt Trump’s wealth and influence.

It counts as protest, but not sustained protest, which is usually a decisive factor for if a protest will succeed in affecting anything. Even if every employee of a company left for a day, if they all came back the next day and resumed working, it wouldn’t be hard for the business to get back up and running, then just put systems in place to account for that in the future, but if those employees strike for months, suddenly all the business’s systems begin to fail without maintenance, customers leave because of no service, and the business goes bankrupt.

And to quote an especially important part about one of the Author’s views from that Wikipedia article:

(emphasis added)

Subsequently, Chenoweth has noticed that both nonviolent and armed resistance have been decreasing in efficacy since 2010, concluding that this is the result of authoritarian regimes learning from history, coordinating with one another, and training their armies and police to discourage defections within their ranks. Consequently, Chenoweth has advised that civil resistance movements take these changes into account and alter their tactics accordingly.

To quote even more from this publication, also by one of the authors. (emphasis also added)

The 3.5% participation metric may be useful as a rule of thumb in most cases; however, other factors—momentum, organization, strategic leadership, and sustainability—are likely as important as large-scale participation in achieving movement success and are often precursors to achieving 3.5% participation.

New research suggests that one nonviolent movement, Bahrain in 2011-2014, appears to have decisively failed despite achieving over 6% popular participation at its peak. This suggests that there has been at least one exception to the 3.5% rule, and that the rule is a tendency, rather than a law.

Large peak participation size is associated with movement success. However, most mass nonviolent movements that have succeeded have done so even without achieving 3.5% popular participation.

The key point is this:

The 3.5% figure is a descriptive statistic based on a sample of historical movements. It is not necessarily a prescriptive one, and no one can see the future. Trying to achieve the threshold without building a broader public constituency does not guarantee success in the future.

The very people who publicized this theory in the first place have been repeatedly, publicly trying to clarify that this is descriptive, not prescriptive, yet if you ran with the wording of 50501 and other related movements, you’d think that 3.5% is a magical number that if you pass, the administration instantly backs down. (source: 50501 - Hands Off protest statement: “History shows that when just 3.5% of the population engages in sustained peaceful resistance – transformative change is inevitable.”, emphasis added ofc)

A lot of these protests, especially in bigger cities, have all kinds of booths at them too. The one near me had like 6 for just one congressional candidate, one for a mayoral candidate, and multiple for revolutionary socialists/communists, along with people walking all over the rally handing out fliers about a general strike.

Tons of people sign up for these things, or even if they don’t sign up to strike/canvass, end up changing their voting habits accordingly. A lot of local stuff can be really impactful, since a lot of the policies most directly felt by people are local policies (e.g. is the pothole in front of your house fixed? Is your rent expensive? Is there visible poverty on the streets? Are the buses slow?) rather than federal ones (e.g. “we cut billions in research grants but you’ll only really start noticing the overall effects yourself many years from now”)

I do wish we could just get all the people going to things like this to head over to ICE facilities and block 'em day and night, but it’s a good consolation that they’re taking some other actions regardless.

They’ll probably still get him on murder charges. As long as they can link him to doing the act itself, he’s not getting away from those consequences without jury nullification or a damn good escape plan.

He founded Turning Point USA, which did a whole heck of a lot of bad things, not to mention that his rhetoric actively radicalized many people, who will then perpetuate much more harm.

For example, he advocated against abortion even in cases of rape, which then helped push people to support local legislation against abortion in all cases, which is then correlated with an increase in deaths during and just after pregnancy.

He actively spread COVID misinformation that led to many people not getting vaccinated, which likely killed some of those unlucky, and he actively perpetuated anti-immigrant rhetoric that likely played at least some part in the violence directed toward them.

This doesn’t even begin to get into his anti-queer views, the fact TPUSA was influential in growing Trump’s campaign and popularity, his support for Israel’s genocide, or any of the knock-on effects caused from the people he himself radicalized.

So yes, he most definitely had an effect.

If your political ideology is based around advocating for harm to other groups of people, violence targeted at you shouldn’t be surprising. FAFO.