Notices by Poloniousmonk (uair@autistics.life)

election humor

@alper @GreenSkyOverMe @utf_7 @HamonWry

Time will tell, but I'm pretty good at this stuff. I could tell trump was going to use violence to hold onto power by summer 2020. I've also seen this world coming since I became aware in the Reagan 80s. For most of my life, people called me an unreasonable pessimist, but I was dead-on right. Now they call me an unreasonable optimist. I call myself a realist.

I really do think we got this. Americans, especially red state voters, are having their exceptionalism knocked da fuq out of them by reality, and we do get pretty fierce once roused. I mean, we defeated the British Empire at its peak, and were of no small help defeating the Nazis and Imperial Japan.

Churchill said it best--"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing. After they've tried everything else." Well, we're damn near out of 'everything else'.

Hang in there. Stay safe.

@farah

I'm a child of the Reagan 80s and we were taught to cauterize our empathy, not develop it.

Little rebel me refused to, but most of my peers seem to have managed it. The successful ones, at least.

@GreenSkyOverMe @utf_7 @HamonWry

Every crisis is an opportunity, and trump is one hell of a crisis. The backlash against this bullshit is gonna be yuuge! I see it as a once-a-century (if that!) chance to fix some of the systemic problems that allowed this shitshow to happen in the first place. Like the electoral college, and the disproportionate power of the rural states. Neoliberalism. Bigotry and oppression of minorities. The fact that laws aren't real. All the things I've hated about my country all my life.

@HamonWry

Funny. I'm the only "yes". I see us headed in the right direction because people are finally pushing back, hard, against the regime. Even our elected Democrats!

@skinnylatte

Wow! My childhood lunch was a peanut and jelly sandwich washed down by 8oz of skim milk.

@selzero

Properly channeled, it's a catalyst for the evolution of our social compact.

@blakecoverett @evacide

You're giving them too much credit. It's pure malice. The computer system is an accountability sink so they can disappear citizens. "Don't blame me, I just did what the computer told me." And considering that 95 out of 100 Americans are employed as organic input devices for a machine master, it'll fly with a lot of people.

@skinnylatte

Did you know that Singapore has an airbase in the US?

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/10/the-qatar-thing

@selzero

I used to smoke weed with a flat Earther. Sometimes I had to literally physically throw him out of my apartment and push the door closed against him while he was still spouting his nonsense.

@skinnylatte

Yeah, that's horrible treatment.

I enjoyed hearing it come out of his mouth in that show. Disgraced intelligence agents you're trying to drive out of the job are expected to be a little tougher than students.

I've had an employer do worse.

@skinnylatte

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's an island that's just one big city, right?

City-raised Americans don't grasp the outdoors initially. Like, they freak out over snakes. And weird noises at night.

@skinnylatte

I met four Singaporean kids in a campground in Vermont. They were over here to study and headed to Montreal for the weekend.

I had to teach them how to light a fire. They were too scared to get down and dirty with it the way you have to do with not-perfect logs. I did pass my hand through the flame a couple times to show them it's not that hot.

Number 2:

Two great finds by Jay Kuo this Saturday.

@bmacDonald94

When I was seventeen I gave that book to my buddy Barakus and he came up with the most trenchant observation about it I've ever found.

"I admire the quantity if not necessarily the quality of thought that went into it."

@Lana

I'm sorry, but WTF is "trans ideology" anyway? The idea that trans people should be allowed to exist unmolested? That's not an "ideology", that's a defense of basic human rights.

We need to take back the narrative.

@IngridHbn

I filter my water. I'm American and my water frequently stinks like sulfur.

@Shine_McShine

What's the Orca story? I haven't come across it yet.

@discworld@lemmy.ml @discworld@a.gup.pe
@books

I'm reading "Guards! Guards!" by Terry Pratchett for the umpteenth time, and realized that the bad guy, Lupine Wonse, uses the same technique Donald Trump does.

Terry Pratchett really did know everything.
*****
"Let the other societies take the skilled, the hopefuls, the ambitious, the self-confident. He’d take the whining resentful ones, the ones with a bellyful of spite and bile, the ones who knew they could make it big if only they’d been given the chance. Give him the ones in which the floods of venom and vindictiveness were dammed up behind thin walls of ineptitude and low-grade paranoia.

And stupidity, too."
*****
"Ye gods, I’m good at this, thought the Supreme Grand Master. I can play on their horrible little minds like a xylophone. It’s amazing, the sheer power of mundanity. Who’d have thought that weakness could be a greater force than strength? But you have to know how to direct it. And I do."
*****
"It was so easy. All you had to do was channel that great septic reservoir of jealousy and cringing resentment that the Brothers had in such abundance..."