“after all, if there is no god, there are billion dollar valuations.” https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/113377194084638747
@hp i bet you’ve been badgered!
You’ve earned a new badge.
@louis Yes. I never respond to solicitations at all, for example. When I donate, I go to ActBlue or Oath and search the candidate. I don’t want to reward their manipulative communications.
I’d rather we lived in a democracy where financial donations were not an important element of participation, would advocate fervently for complete and compulsory public finance. But in the meantime, I do feel some obligation to contribute.
@louis fair enough, from a certain perspective.
but in general i’d say giving/spending money and being a mark need not be equivalent. it would be possible for political campaigns and organizations to form a longer-term, ultimately more lucrative relationships with me if they actually invested, not just or primarily financially, in a relationship.
the false familiarity of political solicitations makes me want to vomit.
“Steve, it's Aly, and I need to have a quick ❤️ to ❤️ with you”
i don’t know Aly. you are not Aly, just some fundraising flack using her name. it’s a campaign i support, have already given money to. why do you treat me like a mark?
I am grateful that Israel seems to have chosen a cautious, calibrated response to Iran’s prior salvo. Frankly, it is not what I expected, and I am very glad to have been proven wrong.
i’m getting pretty tired of Jeff Bezos’ cancel culture.
@IzzyChambers maybe “poop” and “turd” for short. “i just pooped about last night’s debate.” or “i dropped/stepped in a turd about that.”
since there’s no longer any website called “twitter”, i think “tweet” should become a site-neutral term for a microblog post on any site, or for posting one. i am tweeting this on Mastodon.
“Musk has all the money in the world. He has the ability to be one of the best informed people in the world. And he’s built for himself a snowglobe of confirmation bias, making sure that a randomly floating combination of grifters and morons continue to feed him the dumbest shit imaginable, rather than take the slightest effort to actually inform himself of reality.” @mmasnick https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elon-musk/
Chicken: She started it!
Egg: No he did!
“I wouldn’t completely write off a Harris win in the Electoral College even if Mr. Trump narrowly won the popular vote.” #NateCohn https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/upshot/poll-trump-harris-election.html ht #JoshBarro
// on the bright side, this would be the event that could rid of us of the electoral college.
maybe the LA Times and the Washington Post are part of a conspiracy to make The New York Times look good.
“yes,” said the boy who cried wolf. “but there were guard rails — i mean fences — around the village those times.”
“I’ve noticed a little linguistic tic in some recent public statements – the use of the word ‘ruthless’ as if it was a synonym for ‘diligent’ or ‘competent’.” @dsquareddigest https://backofmind.substack.com/p/ruthless-pragmatism
// kind of dark. reminds me of Kamala Harris’ choice to emphasize the word “lethal” when discussing the armed forces.
you’ve become a casualty of the war — in a sense, just a bit — if you find your initial reaction to news of soldiers’ deaths on the side that you dislike is unleavened by sadness or grief.
