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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoMemes@lemmy.mlThank you, USA
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    8 days ago

    I think I agree with you but maybe didn’t explain my stance so well.

    Putin and his immediate orbit are … largely, but not entirely, successfully creating a hyperreality for everyone else to live in and experience, they purposefully engage in it as an intentional tactic, to sow confusion and chaos around everything, and then at least project into that chaos that they are stability.

    Trump and his immediate circle… are too fucking incompotent to engage in creating a hyperreality as an intentional tactic… in the sense that they actually believe in half of the insane bullshit they throw out into the world, and they are not actually capable of projecting themselves as that island of stability.

    Putin and co largely do not live in the hyperreality they create, at least not anywhere near to the extent Trump and co do.

    Putin usually knows when he’s lying or promoting an utterly dubious notion.

    Of course there are some utter nonsense ideas that Putin seems to truly believe, what with his personal idea of how Russo/Slavic history, and identity actually work, and his initial vast overestimation of the capability of the Russian military.

    But Trump… doesn’t even know enough, in most instances, to even know if he is intentionally lying or not.

    Trump himself is to a much greater extent, completely lost in the hyperreality he initially created, and can no longer wield it as a political/psychological weapon/tactic with intentionality.

    To torture a metaphor:

    Trump is lost in the sauce, utterly drowning in it, Putin just has a daily foot bath in the sauce.


  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoMemes@lemmy.mlThank you, USA
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    8 days ago

    My only income is Social Security Disability Income.

    I am quite literally having a call with a pro bono lawyer from a non profit law firm that specializes in Social Security matters in a few hours, after having gone through their application process last week.

    I am just trying to pre emptively set myself for at least some kind of legal counsel… as it now seems inevitable that I will need one, given the insanity going at Social Security, thanks to Musk and DOGE not being able to understand how any of their databases work, and taking a hatchet to staff headcount and shutting down Soc Sec physical locations.


  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoMemes@lemmy.mlThank you, USA
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    8 days ago

    Its hyperreality, as Adam Curtis shows in his documentary mostly focusing on Putin… but the Trump admin is actually too stupid to realize … that that is what it is, they fell for their own bs, sheltered and curated worldviews because they are so, so skilled at (really, privileged enough to be able to) surrounding themselves with yes men and sycophants and cult members.

    I mean, a big element of it is falling for much of Putin’s actually intentionally constructed hyperreality… but the Trump admin and MAGA people are actually too stupid to even been correctly just… generally cynical, and the result is honestly more akin to a 1944/45 Nazi movement that has leaders and followers mostly just still in denial/cognitive dissonance and grandiose cult like faith at the same time.

    But the MAGA hyperreality … isn’t centrally planned or directed. Its … basically an accidental consensus of a bunch of idiots screaming different kinds of idiocy into the void loud enough, and the kinda sorta generally agreed on hyperreality is whatever ends up echoing the loudest and most clearly.

    They can’t even project stability or competency, even as hollow suits, even as a false but semi-convincing front.

    Just go look at the last two weeks ish of public appearances of Trump and his cabinet and Elon.

    Half of them are having emotional breakdowns, manic episodes live on air, Hohman, whatever, the DHS goon leading deportations… either he was fucking drunk, or his dentures were falling out of his mouth, a reporter/news host asks him a question and he gives like a 75 word rambling response, maybe 10 of the words actually intelligible.

    The inmates are running the asylum.

    … Oh well, at least I’ve personally passed through the intense despair and depression phase of knowing this was coming, and am now just laughing at how truly stupid and farsical this all is, and how it is honestly, precisely what Americans deserve for either being idiot cult members, apathetic, or placing their faith in an utterly incompetent Democratic party that just still thinks its 1992, or squabbling over inane idpol differences.

    We are apparently actually so stupid, irresponsible and/or more concerned with petty nonsense issues that we are just actually going to have to go through the fire of either overthrowing these malevolent morons, or just acquiesce to all becoming true debt serfs and burn to a crisp.


  • Ask Serj Tankian how he feels about the government of Turkiye.

    A not insignificant amount of people probably know as much, or more, about System of a Down than they do about Turkiye… and thus likely know Turkiye as ‘that beautiful, diverse country that is unfortinately still run by an autocrat who won’t acknowledge past/ongoing ethnic repression and genocide.’


  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoMemes@lemmy.mlThank you, USA
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    9 days ago

    I’ve been saying that Trump and his ‘ideas’ on tariffs are just… completely, fundamentally broken and self contradictory, at every possible level.

    He literally just doesn’t get it, he doesn’t grasp what you’d be taught in AP Macroecon or a first quarter of Macroecon at a college or uni.

    Yes, of course, more competent oligarchs can profit from an engineered economic collapse…

    But Trump and his immediate orbit are literally too stupid to understand why what they are doing won’t work the way they think it will.

    These idiots are very largely at the peak of the dunning kruger confidence vs actual knowledge curve, right before you fall off into the abyss of ‘oh shit this is actually really conplicated and i am a moron.’

    Of course, they’ll never admit they are morons or were ever wrong, they’ll just keep lying, misdirecting, and inventing new insane conspiracy theories with secret enemies thaf explain why they failed





  • Everything you are describing has been happening and increasing in severity for years.

    Usually what happens in an economic contraction is that credit lending standards raise, not lessen.

    The free market doesn’t give a shit about bad investments, which is what you are if your credit record sucks.

    … And the government is basically now run by a bunch of AnCaps and Fascists.

    We’re looking more likely to become an indentured servitude, debt slave, company town style society, you know, just like the 1890s, that Trump is trying to take us back to, back before the income tax and much of the government actually was funded via tariffs.

    I’d love to be as optimistic as you are, but uh hey, when was the last time you fed a homeless person, personally?

    America hates the homeless, shanty towns aren’t even possible anymore, those are all now ‘homeless encampments’ that are literally bulldozed away, and all the homeless in them are ‘referred’ to shelters that are already full.

    The easiest propoganda line to have all the media blare at everyone is just that all the people driven into homelessness by losing a job, being unable to pay a debt, serious injury or illness… well they’re all violent drug addicts, and really they should all just die, or not be near me, ew.

    Trump already called for creating concentration camps of massive tent cities built on the outskirts of cities for the homeless.

    https://www.newsweek.com/trump-wants-make-homelessness-illegal-1795202

    This is the plan, unless an actual revolution of some kind occurs.


  • … Do you think that not paying your student loans will… not result in your credit score declining, massively so if it goes into collections?

    https://lendedu.com/blog/student-loans-in-collections/

    90 days, 3 missed payments for private student loans, 270 days, 9 missed payments for DoE Federal student loans.

    That missed payment count starts ticking whenever payment deferral period ceases, and you can’t make the minimum payment, and make a smaller payment than that, or none at all.

    That counts as being delinquent, unless you’ve specifically negotiated, before hand, some other kind of repayment plan… which is extremely difficult to do, if not functionally impossible in most cases.

    Student loans, quite specifically, are very difficult, nearly impossible to be discharged in a bankruptcy in the US.

    Personal bankruptcy nukes your credit scores and records anyway, but may make overall sense as less bad in some situations… but you’d wanna consult a lawyer on that, and… it still doesn’t get you out of everything, your wages will be garnished, and if your debt is student loans, you’re still on the hook for all of it.

    You are telling people to condemn themselves to ruin.

    Unless you could somehow organize and coordinate … basically over a majority, ideally a super majority of student loan payers to boycott their payments, and pair that all with some actual concrete strategy for acheiving specific demands on the government… and keep doing so for years… you are advocating insanity.

    It’s basically on the same level as telling people to just stop paying income taxes, stop renewing their drivers liscenses.

    The few that go through with your idea would just eventually be arrested for not showing up for a court summons eventually issued by a debt collector.

    Given the total, utter inability of any meaningful resistance movement to organize thus far, I am extremely doubtful your strategy is sound.

    Maybe, maybe if student loan payers get super lucky and the DoE somehow accidentally deletes all their student loan records, (or if someone somehow Tyler Durdens every single computer system and all paperwork that keeps track of such records) then your course of action would work…

    …but what is much more likely to happen is that the DoE will move all of its loan servicing operations over to private loan/debt servicers as basically the last thing it does before dissolving itself entirely.

    Those private entities will skim a bit more off the top, and also make sure the Fed Gov gets its owed money.

    So… yeah, unless your plan involves starting armed militias to resist police arresting people for being failing to show when the debt collectors eventually sue them, your plan is bogus.