What are we but a collection of memories? Not much. A body, some desires, occasional suffering and joy.

The memories give context to everything else. Change them, and you change everything.

This is why my chronic illness is so terrifying. It’s in my brain. Literal brain damage. It’s being treated, but I wake up every day with a low lying terror that I have forgotten something important.

“We can hurt the bad people until they tell us what we need to know to be safe.”

It’s nonsense, but it can feel true.

That’s called a taint squeeze.

This is a serious part of the problem. Home insurance, car insurance, can be bad, but at least you don’t usually have to deal with them. You can go years without needing anything from your home insurance.

You WILL need healthcare, minimum once a year. Most people need it every month or every few months. Your car insurance doesn’t pay for your oil changes or new tires because those are guaranteed maintenance costs, not unexpected emergencies.

Steam never showed me this game. It said I have never played a game like it.

I’ve played arpgs, tactical RPGs, and crpgs,

What more do you need steam?

Pixel RPGs? Western RPGs?

I guess steam thinks the target audience is people that played Red Dead Redemption on steam.

Technically, the carbon came from the air and returns to the air, but taking the pellets from where the tree died and turning them into pellets and transporting them to the furnace costs energy too.

Also all the tree carbon that doesn’t make it into the pellets goes into the air. So the cost is greater than the gain.

If we grew trees and then buried them it could be a form of carbon capture. But we need to get the energy to do that from somewhere.

Fair

Yeah world class really.

That rule was added in the 1950’s.

The founders were a gentleman’s club. Which is basically a fraternity. They made up rules that made sense to a bunch of frat boy farmers with enlightenment libraries.

True.

Dems won the house in 2020. They lost it in 2022 midterms. Biden deserves the star.

I actually disagree. Removing it is a democratic idea. We already have 2 houses of Congress which must agree to pass legislation and the president must sign it unless Congress can muster a supermajority.

Any voter has had 4 chances in the ballot box to represent their interest, we do not need to set artificially higher standards to prevent legislation from passing.

If voters sow the wind by electing lawmakers that support reckless or harmful policy, then voters should reap the whirlwind that results.

Harris healthcare plan in 2020 was to the left of Bidens, She called for Medicare for all. She dissagreed with Bernie about banning private insurance.

She was not against universal healthcare. I doubt she is now. If Dems sweep the house and somehow picked up 10 seats in the Senate (impossible) she might try to go for it.

It’s not impossible in 2026 for Dems to make big gains in the Senate, but it is very, very unlikely.

Then why are you here?

If you don’t believe in electoral politics that’s fine. But you should be off organizing union drives, or mutual aid societies, or literally any other venue for democratic power.

Why would you care which corporate shill holds office?

Your presence here suggests that it does, in fact, matter who wins elections, or which team holds power.

I disagree, republicans don’t let the filibuster stop them when they want to do something.

They can still pass their tax cuts because of reconciliation and they immediately changed the rules to lock in the supreme Court.

Classic example of Democrats pretending the other side has a respect for rules and tradition.

Manchin wasn’t even in the Senate yet. Lieberman was an independent that endorsed Romney 3 years later.

There were senators from Louisiana and Missouri in that majority.

Also Franken wasn’t seated until like June because of recounts and lawsuits. Ted Kennedy was on deaths door and passed away 2 months later. His replacement was seated a couple months after that and then Scott Brown won in fucking Massachusetts in January.

They ended up with something like 109 working days in which Democrats could override a Republican filibuster. They passed 2 major pieces of legislation. Dodd Frank and the ACA.

What, precisely, do you think Democrats should be doing right now to help the American people?

If they do their jobs well, they get rewarded with votes. It’s a simple question of not inverting the relationship between the public servants and the public.

Hard disagree. The public is not a monolith. It does not know what it wants, because most people want mutually exclusive things.

You could instruct the federal agencies to ignore court rulings, effectively undoing Marbury vrs Madison.

That’s a constitutional crisis, but what is the court gonna do? Call the FBI? Send in the military?

You can ask the Cherokee people what the court does with an uncooperative federal government, but you won’t find any in Georgia.

Maybe that’s just fascism with our side in charge though.