• Flying Squid
    5•3 hours ago

    You’re all wrong. This is about NPR’s This American Life host Ira Glass.

    He knows what he did.

  • nifty
    13•7 hours ago

    This is kinda stupid, there’s a million assholes available to take the place of current top asshole. The only cure is to address the reason why assholes get the amount of power they do. FDR-style socialism and high taxes will address so much of this.

    • @Wogi@lemmy.world
      4•2 hours ago

      My father was extremely intelligent. Usually one of the smartest people in the room. He predicted Dick Cheney’s imminent demise shortly after he’d had some rather dramatic heart surgery. “That’s one of the last things they do.” He said. “You spend a year to 18 months clinging to life before your body just gives up.”

      He would go on to retire, enjoy several years of retirement, come down with an extremely rare progressive disease, go through enough testing to get successfully diagnosed, go through treatment, and unfortunately pass away.

      He could have done all that twice since Dick Cheney got that fucking heart surgery. My dad was a good, if flawed man, and that genocidal mother fucker is the one still drawing breath.

      If God is real, he is not good.

      If he is good, he is not real.

    • Ben Hur Horse Race
      13•8 hours ago

      you know, ive always heard “only the good die young” and I cant help but believe it.

      my father died when I was 18 and the funeral procession was so long people were laughing. his only brother, my uncle, has raging full-ass narcissistic personality disorder and terrorizes everyone who has the displeasure of knowing him. healthy and thriving nearly 30 years after his brother died. he didnt seem sad at the funeral.

      anyway!! i was talking to a muslim guy i know who’s mother recently died very suddenly from a terrible cancer and he said that in islam there is a notion that ‘the righteous are spared a protracted death’. I liked that quite a bit. kinda similar but also a rather different take on the idea

      • @Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
        9•8 hours ago

        Well, neither of them died very early, had significant issues in life after their misdeeds, and they never saw consequences for their actions. So my point stands. I don’t think the “evil” are immortal, but they do tend to lead suspiciously long & prosperous lives.

    • @SulaymanF@lemmy.world
      6•9 hours ago

      Depends on the religion.

      For Muslims, we are told that God gives respite to people; so that after they die and they face hell they will beg to be sent back so they can undo all the harms they did, and will be told no because they were mercifully given extra time on earth to do that and refused.

      • @Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
        2•8 hours ago

        I didn’t know that; that’s actually kind of poetically beautiful. If only I could convince myself to believe it. But beautiful nonetheless.

    • Ioughttamow
      8•11 hours ago

      God must be a Kochsucker

      Edit: though I guess one did die… but not both my point still stands

    • @zephorah@lemm.ee
      5•11 hours ago

      There’s definitely a cockroach factor in humans. Medically, I dont believe it’s about Neanderthal DNA, I think god fucked up somewhere and spliced in a cockroach along the way. These are the Dick Cheneys of the world.

      • The QuuuuuillEnglish
        10•10 hours ago

        it’s called “having enough money and access to get any treatment imaginable”

        • @zephorah@lemm.ee
          1•5 hours ago

          Not necessarily though that aspect certainly moves data. We see state Medicaid people who are inexplicably still alive and maintain the energy to be an asshole while the nice person with far less medical diagnoses down the hall is actively dying.

          Maybe the secret is simply asshole energy, that the spite, hate, and overall meanness add enough vitriolic energy to the human body to keep propelling it forward, for longer. These are the people who don’t get cancer so much as cancer gets them, and fails. I joke, but also not.

    • dittyEnglish
      4•4 hours ago

      Thanks for the link! I just ordered four which I’m going to turn into magnets and give out at Xmas this year

    • The QuuuuuillEnglish
      38•12 hours ago

      honestly i have like 6 people i’m rooting for. all significant on the geopolitical stage

        • @MumboJumbo@lemmy.world
          2•5 hours ago

          Everyone letting McConnell off the hook like he’s not responsible for the past 20 years of deterioration of the Senate.

        • The QuuuuuillEnglish
          16•11 hours ago

          and the leader of north korea. call me crazy, but i just don’t like authoritarians.

          also i know his name, i’m trying something my coworker is teaching me where you refuse to use the right names for stuff you hate on account of you hate them

          • @Tyfud@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2•9 hours ago

            Issue with NK great leader, is there’s someone to replace him. Always. Last NK Dictator transition was similar. Nothing changed, nothing got better, a few things got worse.

            You’d need to purge the whole high command there to have a shot at doing any lasting good.

            • The QuuuuuillEnglish
              1•8 hours ago

              also. this is why my coworker recommended i stop using the names of these fuckfaces. every autocrat’s name and face changes, but always they are the same people

            • @HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
              1•8 hours ago

              What about inviting them in?

              Their system leans heavily on being a pariah. A core tenet of the Juche philosophy is extreme self-reliance. Remember that Korea had been a puppet state of Imperial Japan, and they can see that even today the South has to permit a foreign military presence and kowtow to American political whims. They’re willing to forego a lot to retain control over their fate.

              Make them a part of the international community and provide a path where they can maintain sovereignity without keeping arms against the world, and it becomes harder to justify the hostility.

              Yes, this means the current leaders endure and will get fat off of graft, but on a longer scale it promises boons for their people: development, integration, and a motive to de-escalate both because there’s a gravy train to keep running and because there’s less of a “you don’t have to be as paranoid when everyone isn’t out to get you” factor.

  • @zephorah@lemm.ee
    8•11 hours ago

    I like the lack of specificity because Make America Great Again is just as nonspecific.

  • @AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
    3•9 hours ago

    In the Soviet Union, there was a man who every morning went to the news kiosk, picked up a newspaper, looked at the front page and put it back. After a few weeks, the seller asked him what he was doing. “I’m looking for an obituary”, he said.

    “But obituaries aren’t on the front page”

    “This one will be”

  • @21Cabbage@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    2•10 hours ago

    The only thing I’ll say on this is that I can’t think of anyone on the geopolitical level who’s death would cause somebody better to show up, presumably everyone has a system more or less like the US and the replacement is from the same party with more or less the same platform.

    • The Snark UrgeEnglish
      5•9 hours ago

      It’s the worst form of right wing authoritarianism. The terror is stochastic, the institutional violence is slow, the captains of industry are all in on it, the figureheads are interchangeable, and the dystopic aspects are distracting and soul numbing rather than providing a sense of being a hard-bitten underdog. There’s nobody you can kill, nothing to destroy that would end it, and all the people with the most credible alternative ideas will demand that you read a shitload of stuff and will still bicker and undercut each other rather than do it.

    • GladiusB
      2•10 hours ago

      I hate this. This is not about Democrats vs Republicans. It’s about goddamn people. The people that live in a nation that was SUPPOSED to help the poor and unprivileged. It was SUPPOSED to be by the people and for the people. But the people that voted are goddamn morons and the ones that didn’t pouted like a petulant child because “it’s not progressive enough”. Grow the fuck up. There was more at stake then your Instagram followers allegiance.