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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Calling someone “blue MAGA” is the equivalent of saying “no you!”

    However, it’s time to stop pretending like some small group of “MAGA” conservatives have hijacked the party and taken things too far. The monied interests backing Trump are the same as have been backing Republicans for decades. The Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, etc. Mitch McConnell has been working to fill the federal courts with Federalist picks for a long time. Picking or just outright manufacturing court cases that would set new precedents. Hell, even those thinktanks are just recent iterations of the same interest’s attempts to shape the government as they see fit. Trump is just a nepo baby turned grifter who got lucky because his grift was actually effective at attracting and controlling the loudest segment of the Republican base.

    Trump just transparently said “As long as I get filthy rich, get to be king, and you keep [metaphorically] sucking my dick, I’ll keep my followers in line and use my position to put your people in power so they can implement your ‘Project 25’ or whatever.” Republicans mostly objected to him because he lacked subtlety and was transparently greedy and petty. He ignored the game of slow, subtle changes and manipulation through “decorum” that Republicans had become experts in. Unfortunately for us, that worked wonders on a subset of the population

    The people who helped those Republican politicians keep getting elected and basically wrote their proposed laws noticed Trump was popular. When it became apparent that Trump’s followers were loyal, the money jumped at the chance to fast track their vision and backed him completely. They helped tweak and hone Trump’s message to amplify his grifter magic. That plus some changes to election laws around the country, gerrymandering, and likely other more covert, extralegal vote manipulation got him back in power.






  • Thanks for being so detailed!

    I use caddy for straightforward https, but every time I try to use it for a service that isn’t just a reverse_proxy entry, I really struggle to find resources I understand… and most of the time the “solutions” I find are outdated and don’t seem to work. The most recent example of this for me would be Baikal.

    Do you have any recommendations for where I might get good examples and learn more about how do troubleshoot and improve my Caddyfile entries?

    Thanks!





  • Kathleen technically fills the specified criteria if you remove the context of the conversation, which is whether or not Lucas shared a morally acceptable portion of the billions of dollars of wealth generated by LucasFilm that he took for himself, including the $4 billion he made personally from it’s sale to Disney.

    Your other two of your allegedly obvious examples are absolutely not from LucasFilm and one of them has a net worth of $20m, which is definitively not “hundreds of millions”.

    I presume, therefore, that you either argue in bad faith or don’t try very hard. In either case, you aren’t worth my time anymore.



  • If the people who worked on making money from the Star Wars franchise generated literally billions of dollars in value for George Lucas’s company and George still has billions of dollars then no, he did not distribute those billions to those people. How do you not understand? I’ll simplify this for you.

    If I have 1000 employees and my company rakes in $4 billion in revenue, I’m not a good guy even if I give them $1,000,000 each and keep the remaining… $3,000,000,000. That would imply that I think my work was 3,000x more important and valuable then their work. I guarantee that some people that helped Lucas make billions of dollars were paid as little as possible, with many likely in foreign countries with much lower minimum wages.

    Society likes to pretend that rich people earn their money. What actually happens is that rich people create a situation in which they are disproportionately rewarded for work done by many other people. Yes, it’s likely they did some work too (occasionally even good work), but not work proportional to their compensation. The fact that they insisted that they be the ones retaining a disproportionately large percentage of the surplus value is very telling.



  • Where do you think he got his billions?

    He owned the IP. He ensured that he’d retain merchandise rights and sequel rights via his contract for the original Star Wars film. He made his billions off of that. Mostly merchandise. Then he sold his company LucasFilm (along with those rights) to Disney in 2012 for a few billion in cash and a few billion in Disney stock (making him one of the largest shareholders).

    So yeah, he did own the franchise first.





  • USA here. They’d likely consider this to be extremely patronizing, but I consider most conservative voters to be unaware of what it is they are actually preaching. It’s crazy but the more extreme their views get, the more I’m convinced they’re misinformed and misled. Some folks at the top of their pyramid I legitimately hate - I have no doubt they know exactly what they are doing.

    So many of conservative beliefs just fly in the face of reality. I hate that they’re perpetuating the harm that the beliefs and resulting policies cause, but seeing as how they are mostly based on clear and obvious lies, I have to assume that most of the supporters just don’t realize they are being lied to and have invested emotionally in an identity that actively harms their own interests.



  • Your clip is Biden saying he did exactly what I said he did and exactly what my source says he did. The US administration, Europe, and the IMF was displeased that the prosecutor wasn’t going after corruption and wanted him fired. The United States, via their chosen representative Joe Biden, threatened to withhold aid if they didn’t fire the guy and find someone who would do the job.

    You are saying Biden did something for reasons that were not in the interest of the US and it’s allies in order to benefit himself and his family. I’m saying he did that same exact thing because it was, in reality, the US and it’s allies’ literal goal. Biden saying he did that thing does not support your false statement regarding why he did it.

    It’s clear you aren’t reading any sources being shown to you. It’s clear you aren’t even reading the quotes from my sources that I included in my response to save you the trouble. It’s clear you aren’t addressing any other points raised in my response.

    It’s clear you are not engaging in discourse. You are willfully spreading disinformation and think a link and insincere politeness makes you look like a reasonable actor. My response is here, not because I think you will respond with anything relevant but because I want the audience you want to misinform to understand what you are and what you are doing.

    Please step outside and touch some grass. While you are at it, please tell whatever foreign power is paying you to spread this nonsense that you need to improve your script or flowchart or whatever.