Time heals all wounds. But you do have to stop picking at the scabs.

Get a gf. She says “good morning <3”. You feel like shit, so let her know. “<3 you too. Rough start. Hope your day is going better.” You might be surprised what you get back.

It’s funny, there was another thread a while back about a girl who meets a guy and clicks. They hook up. She keeps trying to be sweet to him and he ghosts her. So she goes into her own depressive spiral because she assumes she’s the one who isn’t enough.

Other people have shitty days too. Other people are going through what you’re going through. Other people will understand. Reach out, speak your truth, and if that chemistry you had at the beginning meant anything it’ll mean they’re sympathetic to your plight.

And then go do some fun shit together. FFS, it’s a nice time to be alive. Get some sun, eat some food, suck in some fresh air, and hold hands. See if that doesn’t put you in a better mood. Sometimes it really is just a bad start to a normal day.

happiness comes from within

In my experience, having a constant companion has a positive feedback loop. People you can continuously interact with - joking, catching up, eating together, helping one another out, just Netflix’n’Chilling… it’s reaffirming.

But it is a loop. You don’t just wake up happy forever. There’s ups and downs. There’s psychical and emotional adjustments. You’re not immune to despair. You just have someone you can be glum around who - ideally - fills you in on the lows and rides with you for the highs.

If you’ve got a bunch of mental baggage going into a relationship, your partner (ideally) helps you unpack that shit and dispose of it. Or, at least, shows you their own baggage, so you know you’re not alone. It doesn’t just go away instantly, but over time you can put it behind you precisely because you’ve got someone else in your life affirming your own worth.

Today’s empires are tomorrow’s ashes.

The US goes through recessions roughly every ten years, thanks to credit expansion and contraction. If anything, the next recession has been postponed far longer than expected.

The idea that we’re going to be “ashes” in another ten years… the fucking doomer juice has blasted basic American history out of everyone’s brains. Go back and live through the Great Recession, then talk to me about End Of Empire. Live through 9/11. Countries don’t just stop existing because of a stock market sell-off, ffs.

Do it armed with overpowered flashlights and broom handles. Those dogs are dogshit.

The bar has been low for at least 30 years.

It was comically easy to get enlisted during Korea if you were under 18. You could just walk up to the office and lie. They’d take you.

“More like the Gay-vy, amirite? But seriously, just come in and talk. I need at least three other people to fill out a form or they send me to the front.”

The joke about incels is that they’ll blow up your phone with red flags, then freak out if they get anywhere near first base.

Sooner than you’d think.

He literally said himself that he cheated.

He said he cheated. He said the Democrats cheated. He says whatever sounds good to him at the moment. That’s got nothing to do with the election results.

The important point here is people rejecting the party because of him now.

Why is it always “If they won, they must have cheated, but if I won then clearly the people have embraced my party instead”?

Why do elections only provide meaningful information when they break your way?

The president has historically been a factor. Trump’s broken with the trend, typically running several points ahead of the party as a whole.

After three electoral samples (more than most presidential candidates can ever claim), we’ve repeatedly seen people voting just for Trump and nobody else. Like, vote Trump, leave the rest of the ballot blank. Back in 2016, it was described as a “negative coat-tails” effect. Now, it’s more described as a pure cult of personality. Trump sucks in people who generally don’t like either party to vote exclusively for him.

I mean, you say that. But we have a quarterly all-hands office meeting at my company. Every meeting kicks off with “This is how many accidents we had this quarter. We are aiming for ZERO accidents. Zero Is Achievable.” And in the quarters we’ve had zero accidents, the upper management makes a big deal out of it.

There have been a number of campaigns to eliminate certain viruses from the human population - smallpox being the most famous. And there was quite a bit of glory doled out to celebrate the regional elimination of these contagions.

It’s possible to make prevention a celebrated endeavor. But you do have to prioritize it. And you can’t run away and blow it off when you fail. I think the real “no glory” issue is in bungled preventative campaigns. Far easier to insist vaccinations don’t work than to acknowledge our pre-Trump efforts at vaccinating the population have been half-assed and profit-motivated.

As a guy who runs Nurgle, this is genuinely quite hurtful.

Donald lost basically every election in 2025 and 2026

:-/

I gotta double check, but I’m pretty sure Donald wasn’t on the ballot in '25 and '26. I think you’re underselling the rest of the GOP field, which has actually under-performed Trump himself even in the good years and is now outright shitting itself in the bad ones.

But that’s not really the gist of the meme. Might be worth noting that Epstein was as deeply embedded with Dems as Repubs, having allied with liberal luminaries like Larry Summers, Kathy Ruemmler, and - of course - Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, roll the calendar back a couple years to the Biden Era DOJ and you find zero shits given about Epstein when Dems had control of both Congress and the Executive Branch.

Then you’ve got “Kids In Cages”, which was a very big deal right before the '16, '20, and '24 election cycles, but suddenly stopped mattering the day after. Actual concern for real human children does not seem to move the needle on public support/opposition to a politician. It’s just a rhetorical cudgel to swing.

If anything, the sadism inherent in immigration politics seems to get a certain sector of the voting base off.

And, everyone on this thread just pretending the meme is true

Slapping a sticker with a President’s face on it next to a gas station price tag has been common practice since the Bush Era. Very common for apparatchiks to hem and haw over the cost of a gallon.

But when it comes to child sexual abuse? crickets

“originalism” and “textualism” were a fucking death knell for jurisprudence

I might at least have the stomach for these philosophies if they promised some kind of judicial consistency or a tangible stare decisis. Instead, it’s pure Calvinball. The courts read the same statutes and precedents in polar opposite ways, purely based on the ideological shifts in conservative media.

It’s impractical and deeply, inherently regressive to think that a few clever slaveholding provincials had everything figured out forever and ever

Sure. But then you’ve got guys like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito taking bribes in the open from oligarchs intent on extorting the modern day working class. And you realize its not the latter day slaveholders who are calling the shots.

According to the current majority, no you don’t.

You only have a First Amendment Right to be hostile towards “the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters and people who in many instances have absolutely no clue what they are doing.”

There’s issues of base load, of compactness, of reliability, and of yield. That’s why new Chinese coal plants (and Indian and African/Latin American plants) keep getting built.

But there’s a bottleneck in material supply across the pie of energy options. China gets much of its coal from Australia, a country that’s increasingly hostile to the CCP government. As a result, domestic coal production in China has picked up notably.

It’s still a grim picture of the future, precisely because these emerging market states state puts mid-term economic growth ahead of long-term ecological preservation. The current western governments are, similarly, prioritizing annualized rates of growth/consumption over real ecological limits.

But for Oil/Gas production, this war is definitely reshaping what countries consider viable or sustainable even in these short-term time horizons.

each ‘incident’ can v easily have been explained

You hear this from serial sexual harassers all the time. Every individual incident has plausible deniability. It’s the trend line that eventually catches up with you.

your type are to tightly wound up

My type being… big budget advertisers on YouTube?

I’ve seen much the same in the US. Work for a pipeline company and the demand for LNGs is basically maxed out.

That said, a lot of this is coming from retirement of coal plants and other less efficient means of energy generation.

Also, at least wrt Saudi Arabia, they’re having very similar problems to Qatar. And don’t forget that this was kicked off by Israeli strikes on Iranian production. The whole region is getting rattled.

A good example is Fetterman.

I think the problem isn’t Fetterman so much as it is The Senate. Six year terms, expensive high stakes statewide elections, comically disproportionate representation by population size, and the smaller house giving a single bad actor disproportionate power to fuck with legislation.

You could point to Rand Paul or Joe Manchin or Ted Cruz just as easily. They all have a reputation for fucking with the popular consensus through arcane procedures and toxic personal ideologies.

A recall has the potential to remove a single bad actor in a single state and replace them with… what? Another bad actor? If you flipped out Fetterman for Memet Oz, would you be any happier? Meanwhile, the problem of the Senate is still embedded in the national political structure.

What we really need is an Article Five convention, to restructure a centuries-outdated and anti-democratic federal system in its entirety.

Minimum wage earners don’t pay federal taxes.

They’re definitely paying federal tariffs.