That is the most accurate and concise summary of their position I’ve seen to date.

Losers for a whole bunch of reasons.

and a party of “the adults in the room” that don’t have the juice, the wherewithal, or the drive to do anything about it

Worse, that party is taking advantage of the distractions of the time to push all the authoritarian wet dream rhetoric they’ve ever dreamed of. It seems while the Rs were slip-n-sliding towards Fascism, the Ds were rollerblading towards Authoritarianism in parallel.

The Ds see Authoritarian control as a way to “regulate” and “clean things up” “for the children!”

It’s as if the political spectrum is but a donut, and as each party circles around the donut, they both exit centrism, neutrality, logic, freedom, and go directly to a Hellscape from either side.

Neither party knows what America was meant to be, nor understands freedom, nor the Constitution. They just want control, for opposing but similar reasons.

The or was more from hope at this point, honestly. Although we really need a first-world free nation to stop that El Salvador shit. Unfortunately, that will probably be the trigger for WWIII the morons in the US federal government are hoping for.

To add on to what @pivot_root@lemmy.world and @Beldarofremulak@discuss.online said, the primary use-case for personal firearms in the US outside of hobby/hunting in day-to-day is self-defense, and as a last resort.

Even with a concealed carry permit, most states’ concealed carry laws state that you can only use your weapon if you have no method of retreat, and retreat should always be the first option. (Rightly so.)

Second problem that this seething pile of shit administration has created, is even if you were cornered, no way out, and used a gun to defend yourself, as soon as they say (real, fake, made up, or retroactively) “oh that was a Federal agent” you’re now looking at having to deal with the Federal “justice” system, which is currently a big lying pile of shit that does whatever it wants with no regard for any life. (State and local laws are, for the most part, still functioning correctly.)

So basically, a death-and/or-El-Salvador concentration camp sentence for the person-that-would-be-helping.

Signing up as a rogue citizen to defend others, as a firearm owner, is at minimum legal fees, possible loss of firearms, possible jail time, or these days, possible disappearing.

You basically have to be in a mental state of writing off your own life to do such an act. If we are at that point, we’re probably in civil war.

There’s not cowboy justice in modern America, most of the time, surprisingly. Only Federal cowboy injustice.

Closest that could be maybe done is if a group of armed citizens in a state where open-carry is legal set up groups to protect those being targeted by the Nazis just outside the legal land boundary of the courts. Specifically because officers (read: thugs) are trained to shoot first and ask questions later. You’d need a mass of armed citizens, not touching their firearms, so the thugs know they’re outnumbered and no matter how tiny-penis-brain they are, they know they’ll probably come out dead if they escalate. Still very risky, could easily escalate as the thugs are also trained to purposely aggravate citizens so the citizens will make a mistake and the thugs can “apply the law” (do whatever they want with no consequences) as they see fit. This would be the tipping point Mango Mussolini wants to declare Martial Law across the US, and then we’re back to the civil war thing. All the rules change at that point, and the perceived “authority” that the ICE cowards think they have disappears, but we’re also looking at massive loss of life, no matter how it plays out. Unlike the Nazis, most Americans value life.

It sucks, right? When a majority of a country follows its laws, but they’re dealing with human trash in power that can mutate it at-will with almost god-mode powers, it becomes infinitely more complex to save the People and Democracy. They’ve done a good job stacking the deck in favor of Tyranny.

Problem is, CA is doing their own version of wacky insanity. Newsom is nuts. The Land of Liberals hates homeless, is losing empathy in a different direction, it’s really weird.

Secede.

It’s cool that most American jobs tend to have a mediocre pay raise that barely keeps up with inflation. Couple that with increasing accelerated cost of everything multiple times (most recent big jumps, Pandemic, end-of-pandemic-fake-price-hike-for-alleged-still-supply-chain-disruptions-moneygrab, runaway inflation from Mango Mussolini 1.0, now all the stuff from Mango 2.0, insurance rate jumps due to climate change) and even a tiny 6% pay raise is still a pay cut (if one is lucky to even see a pay rase.)

CLEAN COAL thank you very much. (/s)

We are idiots.

You give them too much credit. More like, type to an LLM:

“Hey ai, here is an mbox file full of e-mail from people. Find all the names and make a table of names and email addresses.” uploads file

“Hey muskrat, we got the list of people to deport!”

Mango Mussolini’s dream team is using “AI” to do all their decisions and data processing, and they’re too fucking dumb (and don’t give a shit) to realize that it constantly makes mistakes and can’t be trusted for shit. Their jobs are “easier” because of it, the outcomes don’t affect them anyway since they live in an alternate reality bubble, and they can claim they’re “doing something” while really just having taxpayers pay them to golf.

So, like the usual double-speak rhetoric from this party, just gotta invert what he says:

Elmo Muskrat pays for protestors, and is sad that his paid protestors aren’t as effective as real ones.

You’re talking about different chemicals as a comparison not a 1:1. I’ll concede that some dyes may indeed exist only from chemical derivation. However, many do not. We’ve already put more thought into this than RFJ Jr. has, btw. (Not all dyes referenced below are foodsafe, to be clear, just a quick comparison chart.)

Random table of dyes that can be derived both ways:

You had the brevity to say what I tried to say in a news article-level word barf. Kudos.

Oh, flood them with everything. Find a way to firehose noise at them constantly. It would honestly be the best thing anyone could do. I was just adding to @Wren@lemmy.world 's post, that we all sharing memes for internal humor is pointless. Mango Mussolini only sees something if it’s on FOX or CNN, written on the underside of a Big Mac, or some poor sexually abused intern has to hand him a note. Muskrat doesn’t see messages carved onto his cars, he just sees his stock dropping and how he’s too impotent to love his children.

The meme has to actually be in their face all the time. Inescapable. Billboards, sky writing, blimps, snail mail, post-it notes on their car, a Tetris of Teslas on an interchange that spells out TWAT that then catches on fire, a subscription to Anus of the Month club with newsletters, whatever. It has to be something that makes them realize they can’t hide from being a shitty person anywhere. That’s what their brains do to justify being evil, hide. They have their quiet happy place thanks to rich privilege. Take that away, make them feel the same discomfort the entire planet feels because they’re assholes, they’ll get scared like they already should be.

It’s more difficult now, really, as we can’t be some 1950s movie where bags of mail are delivered to Congress showing pissed-offed-ness. There are too many filters in place. You gotta figure out how to send them WEA messages on every phone in DC using the cellular networks, you gotta get road signs around where they ride hacked to say terrible things, you gotta get their Uber Eats order to somehow have a bowl of soup that spells out “you are a shadow of a human being” in soup letters when they pull the lid off. (Might be a stretch, that last one.)

(This is a bad reference but it’s the best I can think of in the moment.) Think of the spirit of what 4chan always was (mixed topic, right?) 20 years ago, it was claimed to be a far left site while just being random, now it’s claimed a far right site, but it was always just a far weird site, chaos, bedlam. When Balloon Boy was live TV with allegedly a kid trapped in a balloon that turned out to be fake, 4chan ordered a pizza to the house of the weird criminal parents. Pizza delivery seen on live TV across America. A harmless prank that actually was also food and made as much sense as the whole scam balloon thing.

TL;DR: The point is, make them SEE and FEEL they aren’t as invulnerable as they think they are. No violence has to happen. The discomfort alone is all they need. It’s insanely simple. Remember Muskrat and the already public information jet tracking he freaked out over? So simple.

Trade school too. Trades are necessary, can pay very well, and for whatever reason are stigmatized in the US, so there is a high demand.

Doing something tangible is also so much more rewarding than dying overweight at a desk typing the same code over and over ad infinitum.

They’re so tone-deaf and under-educated, they have no clue that the things they say are not only lacking in humor, but lacking in any connection to reality, humanity, and they don’t even understand the concept of empathy.

That administration and their remaining followers have no value for life of any kind.

We can’t forget that.

The fun thing about “natural” vs “artificial” dyes is pretty nothingburger in reality. The manufacturers of chemical dyes, scents, etc. just generate the chemical by whatever means. If it’s a “natural” flavor/scent/color it is derived from something like a beetle or a flower. If it’s “artificial” it is derived via a chemical process. The end product is the same.

Reminds me of some years back when Starbucks answered the cry of, “but we don’t want artificial flavors/colors in our coffee!” so they started using a red dye for one of their drinks that was derived from crushed up beetle shells. People then freaked out, “I don’t want to drink beetle shells!!!”

TL;DR: The end product is the same, whether it be natural or artificial. The real concern, is if the product should really be consumed at all.

The Big Brains like RFK Jr. likely lack the mental capacity to understand such concepts, so all the dyes will become “natural” and stick around, and just increase the number of purée’d parakeets. Basically, another shitty cup game.

The concept of an influencer should, ideally, be made illegal. I’m convinced the primary reason they are popular, is people are too lazy to want to have to read news/information of whatever topic and assemble it into something resembling their own opinion. They’d much rather have some other person read, parse, watch the goings-on and then deliver it as the influencer’s opinion. That way, people can subscribe to people that have similar opinions as themselves, and not be spooked by information that is “scary” or challenges their worldview.

It is like influencer was the next progression after social media echo chambers came into existence. A role inserted between old/traditional methods of information delivery, that parses it and delivers it in a format appealing to a particular audience. A role that has never had any certification or vetting process. Just some dude with a microphone in his mom’s bathroom.

So many people (in America at least) legitimately want to get into this as a “career” too, which is disturbing. Rather than doing real work of any kind to benefit society. If everyone is an influencer, who’s maintaining the codebase that makes their streams possible? Designing the hardware the software runs on? The power plants that run the datacenters? etc.

That being said, traditional media definitely hasn’t adapted well to the changing methods of information delivery, so maybe this is our 21st century media transition happening organically, and standards will eventually follow, hopefully.

Also Democrats: “We’re still doing nothing.”