Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Politics General)

@marinus18
And it was absolutely hated by people in the incorporated satellite states who had been consistently fucked over ever since the soviets took them over.
But yeah, the fall of the USSR had nothing to do with Reagan and everything to do with the incompetence of the Oligarcs in charge.

Not all that much has changed since.

@TheFinite
it was hated by the people of the Baltic in Ukraine who hated Russian domination already. It wasn’t really because of communism. The people in central Asia though liked the system quite a bit and actually tried to maintain some semblance of the USSR.

But while the oligarchs were far from ideal that wasn’t the cause of it’s collapse. There is this myth that the USSR collapsed economically which is just not true. In the 1980’s the economy stagnated but stagnation is very different from collapse. What destroyed the USSR was a military coup by Boris Yeltsin who grabbed power by force and pulled Russia out of the USSR at which point it was no longer viable.
The stagnating economy meant reforms were needed which is also what was happening with Peristroika. Gorbachov used Sweden as a model for what he wanted the USSR to be like. However his mistake was massively cutting military spending which angered the powerful military industrial complex leading to yeltsin’s coup.

@TheFinite
The main thing was that the military industrial complex of the Soviet-Union had grown too large and too autonomous. So that when the government wanted to cut military spending they overthrew it. This is not a unique thing, other empires in history also have fallen when they lost control over their military.
There is a strong push to make it seem like the fall was due to some inherent flaw of communism but that’s just not the case. It was a military coup just like has happened in other countries like in Spain or Chile.

One advantage the US has though is that there is a seperation between the military industrial complex and the actual military. Though I still wonder if what happened in the Soviet-Union could happen in the US. That if the they cut military spending significantly by like 30% or something like that the military will overthrow the government.

Since Musk has failed to name a representative for Twitter in accordance with national laws, Brazil has now blocked access to Twitter.

@Dustcan
Impressive. I kinda hope the EU has the guts to do something similar.

So this 15-minute tracker of ActBlue donations was brought to my attention: https://observablehq.com/d/c9a5e7a564e6eeea

Bluesky user Dogs and Sobriety crunched the numbers. Since Kamala Harris entered the race, they’ve raised $812,700,000 and counting, and are averaging about $19.8 million in donations per day. D&S said it was all raised by/for Harris, but I’m not so sure about that. The lion’s share of it for sure, since a news story a few days ago dropped about her reaching $540 million, but not ALL of it.

@Dustcan
Not only that, but the judge also said that anyone in Brazil who attempts to use a VPN to access the site will be fined 50,000 rais (est around $9000) a day

Great job Elon!

Now that you mention it, I once got the feeling that even people in my highly religious community didn’t want me to go to college and would do everything they could to discourage me. My dad, who is a TBM (True Believing Mormon,) didn’t fully support my decision to attend anything other than BYU, thinking it would lead me to a world of darkness or something. My employer at the time, the only competitor to the Church-owned Deseret Industries chain of thrift stores, tried to talk me out of going (even though they were only employing me PART TIME.) Hell, even other part time employers were either those who would force me into schedules that conflicted with my school schedule or would be a fucking MLM pyramid scheme that cost more money that I would potentially earn.

Needless to say, I was forced to drop out and haven’t been since. Utah fucking sucks for kids, teens, young adults and middle-aged adults who are kids at heart!

Talk about government overreach. Musk is a scumbag, but the Brazilian Supreme Court also sucks big time.

One thing that I’ve been mulling over is that a Harris win would help put to bed the idea that presidents have to run for reelection.

It kinda sucks the low-key expectation that if you vote for a candidate once you are voting for them again and again because they will run for reelection. Biden signaled that he was running as a 1 term president in 2020, lied, and the rest of the party had to bend the knee and try to Weekend At Bernie’s the dotard because they wanted to take advantage of the incumbency advantage.

If Harris wins despite not technically having incumbency, then it very much opens the door to both people just leaving office at the end of their term willingly and parties not being bound by the selfish whims of weak candidates.

I know Funkyfrogbait isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I loved their latest video on the Trad Wives of Tik Tok, and the growing trend of younger women thinking reinstating the patriarchy and being a submissive, 50’s-style housewife is appealing, particularly because it’s being marketed to them as such as it was to women in the 50’s and 60’s.

Bonus discussion about the false illusion of “choosing” the lifestyle if you’ve had a fundamentalist upbringing.

@BlueYoshi
Update

The Brazilian Court has backtracked their statement on VPNs and will not be issuing fines

Source? I can’t find any articles that say that the judge walked back on fining people for using VPN to access Twitter.

Dana Bash: “[Trump] suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes.” awkward expectant silence

Kamala Harris: “Same old tired playbook. Next question.”

Politico the next day, and I’m not making this up:

@BlueYoshi
This site has the article

In Portuguese btw

Like I mentioned last night, double standards reporting. Trump gets coddled by the media, while Harris will be criticized for even the slightest thing she does.

The article mentioned about how the judge backtracked on his decision to ban VPN, but it didn’t mention about him backtracking on his decision to fine users for using VPN to browse Twitter.

They are realizing just how easy it is to manipulate Trump so now they’re paying to broadcast ads in Florida directly to Mar-A-Lago.

Okay that one hurts. Politico is supposed to be one of the better ones.

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Aw geez Rick, it’s time to get Swifty.

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Relatedly, Trump’s campaign is reportedly spending a lot of money to air ads at his district. Despite A) it being a deeply red district so there’s no chance he’ll lose it and B) his campaign (and the GQP in general) is still having money troubles funding campaigns.

But Trump needs an ego boost so…

He never actually made any sort of promise to do that. In fact he publicly refuted the idea.


@Dustcan

I’m not sure replacing it with the ability to force out a competent and accomplished candidate over a single bad performance is the step up you’re making it out to be.

Here’s an opinion piece from The Hill: if Trump loses the election, there will be a civil war within the Republican party.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-trump-loses-expect-republican-110000954.html

If it stays within the GOP, THAT would be entertaining to watch. Especially since so much of the party has been hollowed out in service of the Donald. But a weak Republican Party is a win for everybody.

@BlitztheDragon
Politico is corporate news.

@ᎶㄖҜㄩ 乃ㄥ卂匚Ҝ
Critical thinking is kryptonite for religion and especially religious extremism.

@marinus18
It’s amazing that people in the 21st century would choose to believe in a (possibly and most likely fictional) magic healing man who lived 2000 years ago to learning how the modern world works.

INB4 someone tells me that it is possible to do both, but it’s the crazy extremists that I’ve complained about before that focus way too much on the former.