I used to be so honest about this. My lung collapsed, repeatedly and they had to carve up my insides and glue it to my ribcage with scar tissue after having a drain tube sucking out my thorax into a bloodbox for 10 days, so like, I have a threshold for “10” that is a bit higher than other folks, and I tried to explain that (this meme is about me apparently) and generally got zero drugs. Now they ask and I say “10” and they give me drugs. Lesson learned.

Yeah but there’s a 44% increase in puppy pimping following their reentry

There’s a Wendy’s by me, a few summers ago in the drive thru lane cockroaches would just climb on your car, windshield, it was nasty as hell. This happened twice and I told a friend about it, and he’s like “Oh you mean the roach Wendy’s.” Sigh. I was coming down off meth binges so I didn’t really care, just needed enough hot food to pass out.

And that’s my pitch for a Wendy’s commercial, which hasn’t happened yet.

Removed by mod

And what about what middle America wants? The voters, you know, that we have to get? “Socialism” is a non-starter for people outside of NYC.

Votes say something, even if they don’t tip the state. They’re counted and the total is very much part of the election - whether popular vote was won is a “mandate.”

More importantly a lot of folks who voted “against Israel” (Kamala, who they seem to believe is responsible for 70 years of foreign policy) then snubbed Dems down the rest of the ballot too, and those races are important.

Splitting our vote over a war that’s been going on for millennia was exactly what the right wing wanted.

Forever relegating the party’s future is a silly move. There is no viable progressive party. It’s been a year since he was elected, there’s still no viable progressive party. The best we’ve done is some well organized protests, but it’s the information age, darlings, protests would have to grow to violent mobs before anything is achieved, and I don’t see that happening anywhere, even as fascism is abducting citizens off the streets, repelling into their apartments off helicopters.

We don’t have years for a party to come together, identify leaders, establish roots at all levels. We are under full attack, now. If we can’t get a single violent mob together, then the next best step is to metaphorically do it to the DNC so we can at least use its infrastructure and mechanisms to get a new movement going.

I would love to spend real, thoughtful time devising a new form for a new party, but I am not seeing how, beyond being really upset, people think that’s going to simultaneously happen while we get also get the 270 electoral votes behind a single person in just 3 short years, with enough of a charisma lead that the next Jan 6 doesn’t turn into a military coup.

Democrats are like half the left tho, so we can either fight prog vs dem, or we can unite to actually take on an external foe

…the 1984 Macintosh commercial…

I was here first but people built around me. One neighbor’s upstairs can see in. I told them when they were building - you’re going to occasionally see dong if you look over here. They laughed, I didn’t.

Hey I’m a wagon consultant and I’ll show you what you’re doing wrong for a small fee

I’m in Arkansas and I have a 6-foot-fenced yard, highest my neighborhood will allow. I straight up called the police department and asked them - if someone complains I am nude, in a non-sexual way, what would happen? They laughed and said they wouldn’t even bother issuing a warning. So YMMV :)

We both agree the party has to be changed from within. We agree on basically everything. I do not hope everyone starts talking like Mamdani tomorrow. I’m in Arkansas, formerly blue and now red (like my home state of Iowa). Absolutely zero people here, within either the Dem party or the progressive coalitions working outside of it, would say “what works in NYC will work here.” People are not there yet. We have to meet them where they are so we can change their hearts and minds.

What will work here is the simple message “we know you’re at or beyond financial ruin, we have the only solution.”

What won’t work is "let’s divide ourselves as progressives vs. establishment, pro vs tepid trans support, split every hair and make ourselves look like the weak navel-gazers they paint us as. Stop dithering about who is “DNC” and who isn’t. That’s the problem right there. We are all DNC. We are all progressive. We are all one.

Unity. It’s what the Republicans started with the Southern strategy, which I know is real because I saw it flip two states, starting way back in the 80s when AM radio was quietly taken over. AM radio was in fact a brilliant way to reach the rural folks and start a populist campaign, which the bore fruit in the 90s and 00s as the party began evolving away from old ideals. They had one message - “those city folks want to destroy your good, wholesome, Christian way of life.” From there the party itself reinvented itself (multiple times over) not at the ballot box, but by powerful people within the party who knew how to crack whips and enact reform. We need to identify and empower these people within the Democratic party, and that might mean putting side differences to build the big tent coalition we need.

I’m a 1982 “elder millennial” and I used to rail against generational divides but honestly I do see a change even from people born a couple years before me. I had digital everything as it came out, my lunch card was a bar code, we had computers everywhere in elementary school. But we also remember the very last of the old world, analog was still everywhere, parenting was much looser.

So now I have become a little protective of the millennial grouping because they feel like my people.

I hear the same from the Gen Z folks who were in HS and college when COVID hit, absolutely. Shared experiences build camaraderie.

When Elon Musk and all the other now-mainstream-weirdos started calling for a civil war, it should have been a wakeup to progressives - this is not in your best interest.

Taking back the average middle-class voter will require changing hearts and minds. That’s what the Republicans did to them. We, on the other hand, have been hitting them over the head with their own racism and stupidity, ignoring the reasons they’re doing what they’re doing - and how we’re playing into Republican hands by doing this over and over.

Now is the time to build the progressive party as a big tent - if you hold one progressive tenant, you’re a democrat, goddamn it - and start inviting voters into it, with solutions to their problems and acceptance of their ass-backward views until we can soften and change them.

I believe this is the only path forward.

Other possibilities include them shooting at citizens or shadowpeople (I’m not here to judge ICE and their use of the drug with the same name) and scaring each other real bad. Then someone has a video of it, and they gotta write a report somehow.

There are actually projections for the economic downturn to come that do and don’t factor in the government shutdown reaching thanksgiving, then Christmas. So it is being considered in terms of consumer spending as a whole, but you mentioned small businesses specifically, and they are the ones that will be hurt more than anyone in what’s to come. Although, I’m seeing more and more local-only-economies pop up, where you all try to keep money within the network of the community.

The projections I saw were for the economy to level off by 1Q 2026, but if the shutdown reaches Christmas, it’ll actually shrink an entire point.

If you’ve ever heard of “neoliberals,” they’re not talking about Democrats, they’re talking about an economic philosophy, they’re “neo” liberals because now instead of just wanting capitalism on the national scale, they want to see it globally, which is what has happened in the past decades. China being the world’s factory, for instance, is a neoliberal greatest hit. Offload the negativities (like shitty life for labor, polluted land and water, etc) and import the positives, while netting a handy profit, what’s not to love.

God I hope at least some folks walked or refused to sign without lawyers.

Waltons only own 45% of walmart now. There are a lot of non-billionaires that will be pretty pissed if the stock slumps. But many of those will just be regular joes, not the rich folk who have divested and planned ahead.