Satire is dead.

Yeah yeah, and then the Iranians are going to declare Mar-A-Lago an Iranian territory and rename it to Mar-Al-Hamdullilah. It’s all a big joke thanks to the orange Bozo running the country into the ground.

Yeah, let’s make our kids figure this out. It’s not like they’ll be kind of busy dealing with global warming and all those other nice challenges we’ve left them.

They want to make clear, once and for all, that we live in a post-factual age. Reality is what MAGA says it is. No ifs, ands, or buts.

It most assuredly is part of the problem.

Yes, there are younger folks with criminal minds and/or stupid ideas in politics as well but this gerontocracy has a lot of people deciding on things they don’t have the fuckingest clue about.

God how tired I am of all these wrinkly-ass motherfuckers fucking things up for the rest of us. Can’t we just put them all in a nice retirement home or something?

We hold these Truths to Be self-evident: That Reality does Not Exist, Disavowed By Our beloved Leader with His inalienable Powers…

Novus Ordo Seclorum indeed. It’s right there in that holiest of scriptures.

womp womp 🎺

The rascally senior was recently seen enjoying a weekend at his place surrounded by his friends. Sporting a fashionable combo of sunglasses and a blue jacket he was somewhat quieter than usual but present wherever the action was.

Nice framing from the Economist with the word “install”. If anyone has installed allies in congress it is the pedophiliac billionaire cabal.

Yep, that’s another great question. Personally, I like the idea that art is any form of human expression that exists for its own sake. Not in order to be instructive or useful or to make money but simply because the person creating it felt like it (obviously this is an ideal and real life motivations vary).

More pragmatically, one might ask what art is good for, but since you didn’t, I’m not going to ramble here.

That said, there is the question I raised in my comment whether the work needs an audience, someone to behold it, in order to fully become art. I believe it does. If you paint a picture in the dark and hide it so nobody ever sees it, I struggle to accept it as art.

What’s your take on these questions?

In a good game they do, but those effects can be abstracted rather than simulated to save processing power.

This is the correct answer. It seems like matter and energy exist regardless of our attentions but the rest comes down to ontology. What is a thing? How does it come into being? How does it cease to be?

Next, ask yourself “do things need to be made of matter and/or energy to exist?” What about Mickey Mouse?

Then you move on to questions like “does a piece of art exist if nobody has ever witnessed it?”

And finally, the psychiatric ward. 😜

They should put some ivermectin in there for good measure.

The important thing is you can’t grandfather in the corruption while you fix it.

100% this (from an Americanist’s perspective). Just think of slavery and how it was enshrined in the constitution despite being on the way out. You had to have a whole-ass civil war, shooting and all, to fix it. And arguably still didn’t, cf. the pervasiveness of Confederate nostalgia and the prison industrial complex.

The same forces that successfully lobbied to keep slavery going are lobbying to keep systemic corruption going. Telling you at every opportunity in all the media outlets they bought that it’s the American way, baby!

The only solution to this mess is to finally redefine who “We the People” actually are. If it’s still going to be a bunch of rich white dudes with an aversion to taxes, woe betide you.

Of course that raises the question who would have the authority to perform this redefinition and how they would gain it. Barring a bona fide revolution, I just don’t see it at this point.

Thoughts and prayers from Europe.

Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are big fans of spending on housing, not since the Red Scare of the 1950s. Investments in public goods carry a faint odor of socialism and are therefore verboten in the United States.

The (Republican-led) government did play a role in bringing about the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis: George W. Bush’s administration successfully lobbied for the abolition of regulations which had previously prevented people with insufficient credit from getting a mortgage approved.

But of course the right wing narrative held Jewish bankers at fault for inner city types defaulting on their mortgages, bankrupting Lehman Brothers et al. Not a combination of deregulation and corporate greed.

Being the leader of the highest tier of the government’s judiciary branch makes everything you do or say political, Johnny-Boy.

Is anyone else getting mighty tired of that “I don’t do politics” shtick in general? I know I am. Even more so in a time where literal nazis are using it to cover up their ideological praxis.

Thank you for the explanation. For some reason, your edit didn’t show up for me at first but now I can see it.

In my opinion there are still way too many people on X, Germans as well as others.

And that relates to Germans on Lemmy how exactly?

I prefer a splodge of mustard in my potato salad. And I second the suggestion of adding garlic to most everything, including veggie soup.