theneverfox

There's so much to unpack in such a short statement

There's two kind of "both sides"... There's "we need a middle ground" which is horse shit, it leads to a choice between fascism and fascism-light

Then there's "our politicians are decrepit zombies, so let's do a leftist version of the tea party"

People want change, not stability. Not anymore. Everything sucks, so who are they going to vote for... An openly fascist snake oil salesman saying he's going to fix everything, or someone composed insisting things aren't as bad as they seem?

It's a toss up, apparently.

Change. Remember that campaign slogan? Because it won, and Obama delivered so little of it

If a sandwich shop gives you food poisoning, you absolutely should be telling people not to eat there. You should leave reviews and tell people every time the name comes up

The logic you're using is "well, what if the shop closes down and people can't get sandwiches at all? What if they're forced to eat at the numerous food stands that also give you food poisoning?"

If you say nothing, people are going to look at the sandwich shop sign and think it's safer than the street food... That's not better

To get away from the metaphor, harshly condemning Schumer at every turn would definitely do something. It sends a message that "this isn't what you can expect from Democrats"

You say everyone knows who the real leaders of the party are...I literally don't even know the second name there, I know AOC because she does good messaging about who she is and what she stands for. And I pay attention

Most people don't even know who their representative is, but they're much more likely to know who Schumer and Pelosi are. And they hate them.

This shady shit is why people hate the Democrats. When someone hands Trump everything he wants without a fight, they try to downplay it, like people haven't noticed. They don't punish it, they barely mention it - they're so desperate to not shake the boat that they do nothing

Democrats need to shake the boat and make enemies... That's what wins elections today. They need to call people out, and tell them what they stand for, and then they need to follow through

Because "once you enter you never leave". You can argue that prison is a necessary evil, but you can't argue it's not evil

On that point, Schumer flipped (and whipped up enough traitors to pass the bill) in like the 12 hours before the vote. They had been talking about this since the inauguration, as the time when they'd finally be able to force the Republicans back to the table and do something

There's no way he didn't get a call from someone.

Then he meets with Trump, goes on a talk show tour to try to justify his actions, and the Democratic establishment held their breath to see if people would buy it. They still aren't coming out hard against him... The condemnations are lukewarm and hesitant at best from party leadership.

No, they gave MAGA everything they wanted. They didn't even get to give input on the spending bill. This isn't 5D chess, this isn't a strategic play... It was just total capitulation

And the party still wants to wait and see if Schumer can salvage his reputation, if they can sweep this utter betrayal under the rug

Fuck no. This is exactly the time to hold their feet to the fire and demand they be better and do more... They're handing everything over to the fascists to try to get the oligarchs back on their side

The last thing we should do is believe they're an effective resistance

If I hadn't just seen an announcement about gpt-5 that ended with "I guess I'm retiring" this probably would've got me

Okay... But how much of that is realized?

Before, you told a doctor where to call to get your past records... Now, you tell your doctor where to request your past records. If your doctor works in the same healthcare system campus, they might get them automatically, past that it might happen behind the scenes if you get a referral

Backups are true... Except everyone has their own proprietary formats that require specific software to access the data, and if one of those companies go under, then what?

Access controls and tracking are true, but what's digital can be hacked or leaked. Paper is far more secure - maybe they can phish one person's records more easily without it, but the wrong IT person (who is multiple steps removed) can leak the whole database

I'm not saying paper is better - I'm saying electronic medical records are such a garbage fire in implementation that they bog down the healthcare part of healthcare. They eliminate jobs by automating processeses, but they end up getting rid of support staff in exchange for making the healthcare workers do more work

And I'm not saying it couldn't be better - I'm saying that it's just such a mess of proprietary software and regulation that it became one more layer of wealth extraction that bogs down actual healthcare

Yeah, but like... Are they really? No two systems communicate, every hospital configures even the same systems to be essentially incompatible, and the system is built as if it's all seamless

It's so bad. Paper records in a secure central database would be an improvement - 20 years of this and bending over harder for insurance companies is the only change

Yes. It's all over the place, no clear lines really

I mean, the pathology goes so much deeper.

Musk's family hates him. Like they actively go out of their way to speak against him. His father tweets shit about him, his grown children want nothing to do with him but will speak out against him, his ex... Well you could fill a book with that. His mother and his youngest child (who he uses like a prop) are the only ones that haven't publicly worked against him

What friends does he have? His billionaire buddies will make moves with him, but we've seen the text chains - it's all business. They barely react when he goes against his word... They congratulated him for buying Twitter himself after making plans to go into it together that he backed out of - no way that wasn't a backhanded compliment

Trump hates his guts... But sucks up to him. What friends does he have? He has sycophants, he has people eager to use him... But every relationship he has is based around the fact he's the richest billionaire. If he loses that, what does he have? Who does he have?

But the t-shirt wasn't really the problem. Getting banned from the stadium wasn't the problem - I don't really care if one venue is banning people for whatever stupid and petty reason

They're trawling through massive data sets they shouldn't have and using facial recognition to pick people out through social media posts, job affiliation, and who knows what else.

They didn't make the system, they're clearly just users. That's the problem here