RustyVenture [he/him]

See, no amount of turd polish is gonna make that turd shine. You can’t paper over the poison that the bill is laced with and expect to be praised for stumping/voting for it when people who are the unwilling recipients of the poison get strapped down to the table for no other reason than an absolutely abominable ploy to “paint the other guys as hypocrites” or to shut down “the whiny complaints of Trump”—a guy who, by the way, isn’t even in the government. The bill:

• Changed to asylum rules that would have risked removing the legal review of cases by judges (which lots of mainstream press disgustingly dressed up as “speeding up the process”)
• Included billions in additional funding for the fascist border patrol and the private companies operating the concentration camps
• Revived construction of the wall Trump wanted
• Imposing dystopian levels of round-the-clock surveillance (also run by private prison corps) on immigrant families

Then there’s the provision that would give the president unilateral power to restrict asylum whenever they get nervous around one of the White House’s maintenance workers (and of course Biden made this even more draconian in his executive order by halving the number of crossings that would allow the president to trigger the closure).

The spoonful of sugar the Democrats managed to get into the bill effectively pits different sets of traumatized groups (that we had a hand in traumatizing) against one another: The party can sing the praises of the “good” parts of the bill while anyone pointing out all of the fashy shit in it that’s actually really fuckin’ bad can be refuted by referring back to the few issues Dems didn’t agree to allow the GOP to fully steer. That Biden seemingly believes the executive order will be struck down anyway just continues to affirm he’s just as willing to toy with people’s lives, enact racist and inhumane policy out of moral cowardice, and waste time on a lark as the GOP is, while facing far less scrutiny for doing so because “it could always be worse!”

I’m old enough to remember when these policies were as sickening to the current president and his party as they were and still are to me. Democrats like Biden and Chuck Schumer were quite vocal about the the previous regime’s border policies and how needlessly harmful they were. Now that it’s more politically advantageous to jump on the mixed austerity-and-manufactured border “crisis” bandwagon, the most vulnerable people, their families, their relatives, and the advocates that do crucial work filling in the gaps the US government refuses to fill are left high and dry wondering where the party that was supposed to be there for them went and why they’re now pawns in an electoral gambit that didn’t even fucking pan out!

Now we’ll get to watch the GOP draw a new line in the sand and demand the Dems step over it so they can meet in the middle, and because they have no answer that will satisfy their base/protect the vulnerable and satisfy their business partners, friends, future and former employers, or the industries that thrive on exploitation of the most vulnerable. Or they win this year and just do this shit anyway—after all, any Democrats in Congress who get re-elected and supported the 2024 bill will be on the back foot for explaining their flip-flopping to the far-right opportunists who will absolutely drag them through the mud over it, and batting away an empowered Republican party even more eager to maximize the suffering of brown people instead of shifting things back into their own favor for once.

Hey, it would actually be a good idea for the Democrats to not pass inhumane, illegal, Republican border policies just to “own the cons.” Them doing what the GOP wants but with less pushback (and more slobbering excuse-making from their cult of pathetic dimwitted losers) is precisely why the “both sides” argument is merely a statement of fact made after observing objective fucking reality.

Next time, Democrats should actually do the opposite of what they did here and what they did with the racist bipartisan border bill instead of defaulting to hurting real people, wasting time and money over a measure that will by all accounts be shot down by the courts, and breaking national and international laws just so they could pretend they pulled off a 5D chess move that literally no one outside of their low-information cult will ever reward them for.

Frankly I don’t think most people will ever want to strap goggles to their head to check their fucking emails or even do any real creative work, and that’s why this is one of the dumbest products ever to be shat out of Cupertino. No amount of iterating on the design will change this fact, and no, this will never all be contained in a contact lens or a normal pair of glasses because physics will still exist in the future lol. What we’re seeing is the usual hype from fanboys, stockholders, and paid reviewers that will fizzle out within a couple of months.

People comparing it to something like the first iPhone or a smartwatch is also stupid because A) while one can spend a whole day with their face pressed up against a screen, it’s not mandatory in order to use them, and B) those devices had inherent value to people right out of the gate. It’s almost a no-brainer to see the perks of having a full web browser and responsive touch keyboard on a phone when you’re coming from the awful hellworld of the “mobile web,” static physical buttons, and the shitty touchscreens of yore. The fuck does a pair of ski goggles do to improve computing compared to my existing laptop, phone, or tablet? On top of it, the Vision Pro seems like the most isolating, lonely, and dystopian sort of device that, like all of the similar facehugging gadgets that came before it, will people off just by looking at it. Just can’t see how this gains traction in any form outside of the nichest niches, and Apple doesn’t build shit for niche markets for long. This isn’t 2001 anymore; they’re a multi-trillion dollar phone company that sells computers on the side.

Really wish Apple instead poured their dragon’s hoard of cash into optimizing their existing hardware and software instead of this garbage. Hell, there’s actually some cool gestures and conventions they’ve demoed with AVP that could be developed into a device that helps people who require alternate input methods. Imagine if they actually made the Magic Leap but it wasn’t just astroturf! I fear other product lines will languish because capitalism is a fuck and they “must” go all in on “the next big thing” or else Tim Cook won’t have a “revolutionary” product category under his belt to retire on and/or they’ll be facing the repo men by the end of the quarter unless line go up 🙃.

In short, I wouldn’t worry about it; this too will flop. The only way people are going to stop using their existing workflow and drop it for this shit is if manufacturers/developers stop supporting them entirely and go all in on goggle computing, which would be suicidal for the industry and probably be met by tremendous backlash from anyone who does anything even mildly productive on a computer or who values doing what they want with the gear they own.

pretty hard right here.

Also off the charts. Liberals should follow their leader.

Do you have any proof that PRC citizens are forced to vote lol what the fuck even is this shit man.

Nothing disingenuous about it. Biden’s entire shtick was about following the science and doing the right thing (and being able to win over Republicans on controversial issues, that was the whole reason why we couldn’t gamble on anyone else) and he almost immediately tossed that out and adopted his predecessor’s “ignore it and it’ll go away” attitude. The White House pushed a vax-only approach which was proven to be ineffective before he even took office and then went out to brunch. For fuck’s sake, the man had to be publicly shamed into sending out masks and tests during a surge his feckless ass engendered because he pretended the pandemic was over in April 2021, when less than half of the adult population got their first round of shots.

I’d be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt considering how poorly even the states that did give half a fuck in 2020 were managing and there is no doubt that it is a complex job, but once you start mimicking the guy you lambasted a few months prior for exacerbating the problem (not to mention spending the next year and a half prematurely stripping people of basic protections and the ability to reliably test and track within their own communities), you lost what little sympathy I could muster. For all intents and purposes, he owns all of the deaths from the day he stepped into the Oval Office. Worst of all, it’s both set the tone for how future leaders will be able to respond to crises, as well as reinforced the notion that our government is ontologically incapable of providing anything for its own citizens besides more terror.

As for which one of these shitstains is more apathetic: Trump gave me more cash (and it wasn’t means-tested), suspended my student loan payments, afforded me a rent moratorium if I had lost my job, and didn’t end federal mask or testing mandates for traveling because his buddy at Delta Airlines whined to him in a letter. Nothing spells “apathy” like going on 60 Minutes amid yet another surge in cases and saying “the pandemic is over,” or cutting off extended UI prematurely, or instructing cities to use their unused Covid funds to give to the pigs.

If Trump was smart enough to even utter the words “wear a mask” at any point in 2020 he would still be in office today. This is not an endorsement, for the record. I don’t doubt Trump would have done all of this and worse eventually as well, but the difference is that his callousness was consistently met with resistance and vocal opposition. For Joe Biden, whose callousness is every bit as harmful, there is no effective resistance, no organized campaign to combat the president’s anti-science blathering. We all have to get over it and live even more precariously in this shithole lest we be accused of helping Trump win again.

Gaslighting is telling people that Covid isn’t a threat even though you know it’s not and you deliberately cooked the books to sell that delusion. Gaslighting is telling people you’re supposed to be responsible for governing that a vaccine that was never shown to stop the spread of a disease does, in fact, do that. Gaslighting is telling people that you must personally assess your own risk to a collective, public health crisis with the paltry tools that have been provided, then strip away or sabotage every last one of those tools so they cannot provide even a sliver of usefulness to anyone but the most bad faith interpretations.

All of these things are things both Amerikkka’s fascist wing and liberal, fascist-enabling wing have done and are currently doing (if they’re not outright ignoring it). To anyone with a pulse, there is no meaningful difference, and indeed they are so often intertwined.

Also, Marx was based.