ChatGPT summary:

Three big companies are taking advantage of poor families when they pay for school lunches. They charge huge fees—up to 60 cents out of every dollar—when parents put money into their kids' lunch accounts. This means that a lot of the money meant for meals ends up being stolen by these companies, which is pretty disgusting, don't you think?

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) found that these companies are making a lot of money by charging unfair fees, especially to families who can least afford it. Schools are moving towards cashless systems, and parents often can't pick different payment processors. Even though there are rules saying schools should let families pay with cash without extra fees, many schools ignore these rules. The CFPB could step in to fix this mess and help protect poor families, but it's uncertain whether they will continue to fight this under new political pressures.

——

Three companies control the market for school lunch payments. They take as much as 60 cents out of every dollar poor kids' parents put into the system to the tune of $100m/year. They're literally stealing poor kids' lunch money.

In its latest report, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau describes this scam in eye-watering, blood-boiling detail:

https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_costs-of-electronic-payment-in-k-12-schools-issue-spotlight_2024-07.pdf

The report samples 16.7m K-12 students in 25k schools. It finds that schools are racing to go cashless, with 87% contracting with payment processors to handle cafeteria transactions. Three processors dominate the sector: Myschoolbucks, Schoolcafé, and Linq Connect.

These aren't credit card processors (most students don't have credit cards). Instead, they let kids set up an account, like a prison commissary account, that their families load up with cash. And, as with prison commissary accounts, every time a loved one adds cash to the account, the processor takes a giant whack out of them with junk fees:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

If you're the parent of a kid who is eligible for a reduced-price lunch (that is, if you are poor), then about 60% of the money you put into your kid's account is gobbled up by these payment processors in service charges.

It's expensive to be poor, and this is no exception. If your kid doesn't qualify for the lunch subsidy, you're only paying about 8% in service charges (which is still triple the rate charged by credit card companies for payment processing).

The disparity is down to how these charges are calculated. The payment processors charge a flat fee for every top-up, and poor families can't afford to minimize these fees by making a single payment at the start of the year or semester. Instead, they pay small sums every payday, meaning they pay the fee twice per month (or even more frequently).

Not only is the sector concentrated into three companies, neither school districts nor parents have any meaningful way to shop around. For school districts, payment processing is usually bundled in with other school services, like student data management and HR data handling. For parents, there's no way to choose a different payment processor - you have to go with the one the school district has chosen.

This is all illegal. The USDA - which provides and regulates - the reduced cost lunch program, bans schools from charging fees to receive its meals. Under USDA regs, schools must allow kids to pay cash, or to top up their accounts with cash at the school, without any fees. The USDA has repeatedly (2014, 2017) published these rules.

Despite this, many schools refuse to handle cash, citing safety and security, and even when schools do accept cash or checks, they often fail to advertise this fact.

The USDA also requires schools to publish the fees charged by processors, but most of the districts in the study violate this requirement. Where schools do publish fees, we see a per-transaction charge of up to $3.25 for an ACH transfer that costs $0.26-0.50, or 4.58% for a debit/credit-card transaction that costs 1.5%. On top of this, many payment processors charge a one-time fee to enroll a student in the program and "convenience fees" to transfer funds between siblings' accounts. They also set maximum fees that make it hard to avoid paying multiple charges through the year.

These are classic junk fees. As Matt Stoller puts it: "'Convenience fees' that aren't convenient and 'service fees' without any service." Another way in which these fit the definition of junk fees: they are calculated at the end of the transaction, and not advertised up front.

Like all junk fee companies, school payment processors make it extremely hard to cancel an automatic recurring payment, and have innumerable hurdles to getting a refund, which takes an age to arrive.

Now, there are many agencies that could have compiled this report (the USDA, for one), and it could just as easily have come from an academic or a journ*list. But it didn't - it came from the CFPB, and that matters, because the CFPB has the means, motive and opportunity to do something about this.

The CFPB has emerged as a powerhouse of a regulator, doing things that materially and profoundly benefit average Americans. During the lockdowns, they were the ones who took on scumbag landlords who violated the ban on evictions:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cfpb

They went after "Earned Wage Access" programs where your boss colludes with payday lenders to trap you in debt at 300% APR:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

They are forcing the banks to let you move your account (along with all your payment history, stored payees, automatic payments, etc) with one click - and they're standing up a site that will analyze your account data and tell you which bank will give you the best deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

They're going after "buy now, pay later" companies that flout borrower protection rules, making a rogues' gallery of repeat corporate criminals, banning fine-print gotcha clauses, and they're doing it all in the wake of a 7-2 Supreme Court decision that affirmed their power to do so:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

The CFPB can - and will - do something to protect America's poorest parents from having $100m of their kids' lunch money stolen by three giant fintech companies. But whether they'll continue to do so under a Kamala Harris administration is an open question. While Harris has repeatedlly talked up the ways that Biden's CFPB, the DOJ Antitrust Division, and FTC have gone after corporate abuses, some of her largest donors are demanding that her administration fire the heads of these agencies and crush their agenda:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-corporate-wishcasting-attack-lina-khan/

Tens of millions of dollars have been donated to Harris' campaign and PACs that support her by billionaires like Reid Hoffman, who says that FTC Chair Lina Khan is "waging war on American business":

https://prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-corporate-wishcasting-attack-lina-khan/

Some of the richest Democrat donors told the Financial Times that their donations were contingent on Harris firing Khan and that they'd been assured this would happen:

https://archive.is/k7tUY

This would be a disaster - for America, and for Harris's election prospects - and one hopes that Harris and her advisors know it. Writing in his "How Things Work" newsletter today, Hamilton Nolan makes the case that labor unions should publicly declare that they support the FTC, the CFPB and the DOJ's antitrust efforts:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/unions-and-antitrust-are-peanut-butter

Don't want huge companies and their idiot billionaire bosses to run the world? Break them up, and unionize them. It's the best program we have.

Perhaps you've heard that antitrust is anti-worker. It's true that antitrust law has been used to attack labor organizing, but that has always been in spite of the letter of the law. Indeed, the legislative history of US antitrust law is Congress repeatedly passing law after law explaining that antitrust "aims at dollars, not men":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

The Democrats need to be more than The Party of Not Trump. To succeed - as a party and as a force for a future for Americans - they have to be the party that defends us - workers, parents, kids and retirees alike - from corporate predation.

——

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

!kino !trekkies look at Star Trek: Discovery, why millennial writers do this?

The worst part is when adults behave like children while children are portrayed as mature and wise.

Compare with this

I'm taking it from Critical Drinker's video, yes he's a chud y*utuber but he's right

!anime

!g*mers !comicshitters wake up consumers, the 616th alternate multiverse superhero slop just dropped: Batman ACTUALLY DIDN'T DIE WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT LOL!

By the way the game will be shut down next year because it was a financial failure and we will write it as a tax writeoff, oh and also this time Joker is a 600 pound bald lesbian black girlboss, remember to buy this DLC skin before we shut down the servers!

Archive link for later viewing.

I don't really know what's actually happening here but it sure seems r-slurred. The best that I can determine is that somehow he thinks there's a lot of supposedly unseen difficult to access content in Elden Ring but I don't really understand how the court case is going to help. In any case it's the best thread on /v/ in a while so take a look.

Donald Trump Seen Without Bandage For First Time Since Shooting, Seemingly Uninjured

Revelation 13:3 One of the heads of the beast looked as if it had been wounded and killed, but the death wound was healed. All the people in the world were amazed, and they all followed the beast.

+4200 upmarseys btw

The anti Christ is supposed to be a great deceiver so they're just playing the role of the gullible masses.

They will wear the mark on their heads

MAGA; M is the 13th letter of the alphabet. A is the first. G is the seventh letter of the alphabet.

13-1 = 12

12 is two 6s

7.-1 = 6

MAGA = 666

My father is a Pentecostal preacher. I grew up hearing revelation 3x a week… he can not see it and it blows my mind. I'm just shocked constantly. I mean- he hits every single point. Even the hats with the word maga as a mark on the forehead.

Yeah, it's wild that they aren't even able to see their own nonsensical prophecies unfolding before their eyes.

Like y'all, this is YOUR fanfic! I think it's all made-up nonsense, but you ostensibly believe in it, don't you?

I normally remind people that the mark of the beast can't be credit cards or RFID chips or whatever they're afraid of because the punishment is burning forever.  The text says it's the name or number of the beast you worship on your forehead or hand.

That said, the MAGA hats could very easily be said to be the name of a beast that some these people treat with worship.  So if that's it, then it's not a metaphor: it's directly the name of a beast that is worshipped, and that beast is inherently and transparently antithetical to Christianity.

But also of note: there's no numeric option (yet) and no hand option (yet), so even if I believed in this, I'd still say it's not quite there.

They already wear red "45" hats

Isn't the anti-christ supposed to come with the sound of trump pence... I mean trumpets

Would have been useful in 2016

/r/Trump666

Great schizo sub, would recommend

Anyway, the rest of the comments are about how the shooting was staged and the Secret services or Trump himself shot the guy behind to male it more believable.

!christians !catholics thoughts on reddit's "Trump is the antichrist" theory ?

At this very moment, 120,000 to 200,000 children (The American Bar Association)(Archive) are being held in hellish conditions, very literally tortured and brainwashed by design, killed through neglect, and often r*ped (2008 GAO hearing to the 110th Congress, Archive), by shady for profit organizations that keep them as long as they can in the name of 'treatment' and make $50 billion per year among the entire industry, with $23 billion coming from federal, state, and local programs. (Youth Today)(Archive) Furthermore, the ABA adds that, for example, Sequel(Archive), infamous for killing a recently orphaned, not otherwise "troubled" kid for throwing bread crust in Riverside Academy in 2020, makes $200 million a year in revenue among its facilities, and 90% of it comes from Medicaid, Medicare, and some 500 or so additional federal, state, and local programs. Sequel collects as much as $800 per day per child from these government programs.

What is a "Program"?

The common term for such a facility that brainwashes kids into what is best described as "Stepford children" for profit. They take any kid for any reason, and will change the lie about what they are to tailor their pitch. The same program is simultaneously a drug rehab, a 'reform school', a normal boarding school, a 'therapy school', or a foster program for orphans, depending on who is signing and paying.

What do you mean by "Torture"?

Being bound, caged, or both, or forced into stress positions:

Seclusion for days to months at a time:

Strip searching as punishment, placement in isolation rooms for months on end, physical restraint on gurneys, extended time in cuffs or shackles, and being locked in cages; forced exercise, stress positions, beatings, painful joint-damaging restraint, constantly hearing someone enduring any or all of this, constant fear of that being inflicted upon one's self; intense, constant humiliation for any slight, any mistake, any past transgression before being sent to the program, and even any made up sin or flaw that will be repeated until it is true. Being forced to rat out other kids to move up in the program and be treated better, being forced to become unpaid "junior staff" to graduate including being made to restrain lower level children one's self, and being subject to the whims of violent predators and p-dophiles at almost every single facility, often including the owners.

As bad as that is, what every survivor says was the worst part was the 'Attack therapy', 'Encounter sessions', or 'Large Group Awareness Trainings", which are used by almost all programs in some fashion to break and mold children into drones. These are directly comparable to "struggle sessions" from communist states and can be directly linked to Synanon's Game. Shorter sessions happen daily at almost every program, while some feature long marathon sessions that completely destroy a sense of reality in the mind of those made to participate and leave people with lifelong emotional scars.

Where's your proof?

The 2007 Governemnt Accountability Office report on Residential Treatment Programs. The GAO Hearing from 2008. Extensive, consistent survivor testimony from the past 30 years.

The recording of the hearing on YouTube is a trip. It was held back in 2008, and direct comparisons between these programs and Abu Ghraib and Gitmo were made. Sadly, congress did nothing.

What's the big deal about WWASPS?

We know enough about it to study it, and with that, figure out the industry and other programs and program networks.

WWASPS went too far for its time, even among peers such as this industry, and has been sued enough for legal discovery to yield a lot of information that explains the inner workings of this industry, and serves as the best case study we have to date. While WWASPS per-se is no more, almost all of the same programs with the same people are just hidden under other shell companies with new names. Others joined NATSAP, which is basically just WWASPS 2.0. Still more operate independently.

WWASPS was also big - there are a lot of survivors, with estimates starting at 36,000 victims, enough for there to be a few who actually remember everything and saved their receipts for us to work with. Indeed, The Program on Netflix is about the documentarian herself surviving Ivy Ridge, a WWASPS program sued by the State of New York for fraudulent diplomas, which has since been implicated in enabling p-dophiles to groom and r*pe children, most notably Amy Ritchie and John Free, who is spoken about in greater detail in the linked to post.

This can't be real.

Read on. Suffer with me. Do something about it and you'll feel a little better.

Netflix has just released a survivor's documentary called The Program, detailing her survival of a hellish, cult-like scam masquerading as a school called Academy at Ivy Ridge, one of many former 'schools' of the now defunct WWASPS network (World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools), before going into the WWASPS network itself, and the greater industry as a whole, including how corrupt politicians protect and profit from it. You can find it here The Program, but this thread isn't about the documentary, it's about the subject matter itself. And, increasingly, Narvin's lolcowing as he tries to cover his butt, in addition to former staff of Ivy Ridge being outed as pedos or having affairs, complete with emails!

This is only half the write up. Click the link to read the whole article complete with photos and videos.

!cuteandvalid

Direct threads link

/r/Destiny discusses

/r/WhitePeopleTwitter

/r/JoeRogan

/r/EnoughMuskSpam

/r/Fauxmoi

I was sexually assaulted by Ava Tyson and here is my story:

For Context Ava and I are both adults and met each other as adults

Ava followed me on Twitter in November of 2022 after seeing my transition timelines on Twitter when I had under 500 followers.🧵 pic.twitter.com/vREgZt0Jlt

— Mooskina (@Genderillennial) July 27, 2024

!transphobes !cuteandinvalid !cuteandvalid !lgbt

just to get it out of the way, yes i am a massive braindead r-slur who deserves to be tarred and feathered.

Most Based Comments

Basedness: 🔥🔥🔘🔘🔘

I'm a Korean, watching trump take power in the US was similar to the North.People can talk shit all they want about North Korea but are blind to see how it started.Trump literally is a reflection of how it started (166)

Can you tell us more about the parallels between Trump and how N. Korea started? Americans of all ages have no experience of this to draw on. (41)

Basedness: 🔥🔘🔘🔘🔘

This. Project 2025 is going to do away with IDR programs. (460)

And then I happily default after paying regularly since graduating. I own my home, so frick em. They want to frick everyone, then I won't pay. Heck I could go back to working for cash too making stone counters and other items for people. (64)

Basedness: 🔥🔘🔘🔘🔘

Really lol (84)

what's the point of that nonsense? (29)

Angriest Comments

Angriness: 😡😡😡😡😡

It sounds like you're making a good choice, Im glad for you!Just one late-to-the-thread thought in defense of my more vociferous left-leaning compatriots here:Try not to let the more feverish voices on the left upset you or put you off. In my experience, leftists and liberals with particularly strong messaging here are speaking from a place of fear and frustration, but ultimately a place of compassion. Folks who are angry anyone could even consider not voting for Harris are afraid of what will likely happen if she does not win. That's a rationale fear. Unfortunately, even under good circumstances, most folks are poor communicators, and even worse when they think every disagreement should be met with argument. Most folks in arguments are great at "fighting" but terrible at "persuasion." The take away, though, I think should be that the left is "angry" or "aggressive" or "blue MAGA-like" because they are afraid people will be hurt. Meanwhile, the right tends to get angry and aggressi... (1)

Angriness: 😡😡😡😡😡

Look at the Facts-What has Kamala Harris done in her 4 yrs as V.P. .. I'll wait?Fake News idiots keep saying omg we will get this B.S. Project 2025.. did you read what on it? Its pure fantasy.. Trump literally said he wants nothing to do with that garbage. people using identity politics that shes a woman of color so that means we have to vote for her.. she is as far away from blacks as any white politician .. she while district attorney put away thosands of black men on petty drig charges.I understand many of you may live with your parents so you do not feel the full effect of this economy how bad it is under democrats let alone Biden/Harris.. it horrible near impossible to live let alone buy a house .. afford a car.. intrest rates are through the roof do to billions paid in special intrests like migrant housing, Ukraine B.S. the system is bring crushed.Look at America now under Biden/Harris its in complete chaos heck. We are in wars we should not be in. We all are broke. Inflation ... (2)

Angriness: 😡😡😡😡😡

Op I went to a Trump rally recently that was near me. I'd never seen him in person, the people near me were openly talking about how they wanted to kill Kamala, when Trump mentioned his stance on Abortion and support for the three exceptions (r*pe, incest, life of the mother,) many of the people around me started booing because he wasn't going far enough. There was a 10 minute bit where every one jeered and mocked and a girl beside me screamed bloody murder, while Trump talked about trans athletes. My favorite part was the people raising their hands in the hair in worship of Trump as he spoke.I think you should vote how you feel. I hate the lesser evil argument, democrats have sucked and caved to a lot of corporate interests, but I've never seen anything like this at their rallies these people genuinely are just angry and resentful and in a bubble where they believe anything Trump says. I fear how they will react win or lose, but I think it will be very bad if they win. These people... (1)

Biggest Lolcow: /u/Prior_Canary5000

Score: 🐮🐮🐮🐮🐮(+0🐮)

Number of comments: 6

Average angriness: 🔘🔘🔘🔘🔘

Maximum angriness: 😡😡😡😡😡

Minimum angriness: 😡😡🔘🔘🔘

NEW: Subscribe to /h/miners to see untapped drama veins, ripe for mining!

autodrama: automating away the jobs of dramneurodivergents. Ping HeyMoon if there are any problems or you have a suggestion

!chuds

https://old.reddit.com/r/Millennials/comments/1ecxhah/is_anyone_else_actually_doing_fairly_well_with/

And

https://old.reddit.com/r/povertyfinance/comments/1ecwegx/the_american_dream_is_dead/

All in all, his appointment makes me take seriously the possibility that Trump's second term will focus seriously on setting a policy foundation for the future versus just being cult-of-personality stuff.

Why would you believe this?

How could you actually believe this?

An entire generation of would-be intellectuals attempted to treat Trump as a politician with policies instead of as an incompetent authoritarian using overt fascist rhetoric, creating a cult of personality. The Republicans are still calling out 'civil war' and then realizing this makes them dramatically unpopular.

And TracingWoodgrains continues to think: could this ancient person who just today or yesterday claimed to be a 'young vibrant man' turn his focus towards setting a policy foundation?

Remember (for those who haven't been paying attention), after all the fascism was invited into Scott Alexander's culture war threads in 2016-2020, they turned so violent that Trace created /r/theschism.

And this is one of a few places where the pseudo-intellectuals who couldn't perceive the fascism, but could believe that wokes were out to get them, retreated to in a world where one party was fascist, and the other party tended to insist on calling out that fascism.

It boggles my mind that Trace could be appalled by the violence, but never understand that the violence was the fascism. And now the 'dissident right' is nodding very seriously about Trump's policy positions, as if there is anything to the Republican Party but a bunch of authoritarian sycophants tripping over each other to praise Trump more while they state directly that they'll engage in civil war if they lose.

The Onion says it best: Trump vows to unite nation against common enemy of other Americans.

TracingWoodgrains is the sort of person who believes Trump when Trump calls for unity. TracingWoodgrains requires that we live in the reality where a few kind words erase years of violent rhetoric.

Why, TracingWoodgrains, are you so easily duped by Trump?

When will the greater SFBA Rationalist Cult wake up from the fugue of confusion brought about by Woke Derangement Syndrome?

Scott Alexander semi-ironically tackles 'an orgy of vengeance.' He starts to unravel, hopefully, the failure of the ideological wasteland of his home ground, in his recent essay: Some Practical Considerations Before Devolving into an Orgy of Vengeance.

I was cancelled from the culture war threads. I didn't take it personally, at least in the sense that I didn't think: all rightoids are like Scott, or all rightoids are like the moderators, who were crippled by their necessarily authoritarian connection to the space: whatever Scott said was true.

Cancellation is just part of human nature. The most egregiously obnoxious position of the SFBA Rationalist Cult is that it is somehow above or better than cancellation.

Scott Alexander gets close:

Liberals invent a fictional entity called "The Right", which is full of all of the most racist and fascist things that NYT was ever able to produce an out-of-context quote showing one Claremont guy saying, then believe that any action is justified against "The Right" because it's an ontological threat against democracy, then rile up a mob against a Google guy who sends the wrong memo.

What a terrible paragraph.

Scott Alexander was part of the Woke Derangement Syndrome crowd.

But the NYT doesn't have to produce out-of-context quotes demonstrating Trumpism's authoritarian dialogue.

The problem is that Scott Alexander suffocated his worldview with racism. Never forget: he self-consciously invited fascists and racists (neoreactionaries) into his audience. This level of racism and fascism became normal for Scott--and for TracingWoodgrains.

You have an entire coup attempt planned by Trump in the wake of the 2020 election, starting with the fake elector plot and culminating in January 6th. And Scott Alexander's take is that the liberals (HE IS INVENTING A FICTIONAL ENTITY HERE) are inventing a fictional entity around it and hallucinating its racism and fascism. (To put it in idiot SFBA Rationalist Cult terms, his priors are 'trapped.')

Trump is an "ontological threat against Democracy"

And if you don't understand this, there is in fact a very basic political intelligence test which you have failed. It's ok. The fascism fools people.

The fascism fools young men especially. Young men who feel persecuted by a society that doesn't care much for them. (And to be clear: society does not care for young men. It treats them as disposable, and always has.)

Scott Alexander took these young men and said: it's ok, the evil SJWs are evil and bad and we can create our own little space where we don't cancel people for their beliefs. Then he pulled the people with the worst beliefs on the planet into his space, and leftists were driven away by their racism and violence. This is what happened.

What they never seemed to understand is that you can in fact treat an egregore as an entity with beliefs and conditions provided you are careful to make distinct the voices. A mob of rioters that burn down their police station is in fact different from a mob of rioters instructed by a president who attack our Capitol.

Thus a vast wasteland of pseudointellectuals. Right now the King Pseud is Elon Musk, who is bewildered that other people find Trump morally repugnant. "Shouldn't we treat politics as an exercise in getting what we want?" thinks Musk. "All of these intelligent people in my circles are supporting Trump hoping for policy implementations," reasons Trace.

None of these people possess reasonable social skills. They're perpetually confused by politics, but worse? They think that's the problem of the people who can understand politics.

Which is why I'm here, where they can't cancel me.

**210 BC: The First Emperor of China dies

His plan was for a dynasty to last the millennia. His son was to be the next in line.

Instead, immediately after his death his preferred narrative is abandoned. His son was killed. Others ruled the throne through proxies.

1185 AD: Andronikos Komnenos

Andronikos oversaw a 'terror state' of reckless bloodshed against his political enemies in his paranoia. When he was finally killed,

At last he was led to the Hippodrome of Constantinople and hung by his feet between two pillars. Two Latin soldiers competed as to whose sword would penetrate his body more deeply, and he was, according to the representation of his death, torn apart; his remains were left unburied and were visible for several years afterwards.[18] He died on 12 September 1185.[19] At the news of the Emperor's death, his son and co-emperor, John, was murdered by his own troops in Thrace.

69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors

A bunch of delusional people swear loyalty to anyone who happens to be a leader. The temple of Jupiter burns.

If there's one thing I would do to Scott Alexander in person, it's slap him so hard he falls to the ground and then put my knee on his back and force his face into the mud and whisper into his ear: your shithead following believes in effective emperors. They believe in a Caesar. They believe in Augustus.

Force is the only way to get through to these people through their woke derangement syndrome.

But the problem of succession is so fricking huge that the one genuine accomplishment of our American system is the peaceful transition of power. This is what Trump threatened on January 6th and if you don't understand that you're a fricking idiot who should never have written about politics.

Trump is an "ontological threat against Democracy"

And Scott Alexander continues to fluff Trump in his mock political debate writing. Scott Alexander is thus a pseudo-fascist: one who propagandizes Trump as an effective politician.

Honestly I have to admire the irony: Scott Alexander doesn't understand why the left freaks out about the things Trump does. Scott assumes that explanations of Trump forcing their reaction are true, so Trump must be effective as a politician, because he produces a desired result through his speech.

Scott does not put these things together, that because the desired result of Trump's violent rhetoric is violence, this is what makes Trump dangerous, this is what makes leftists broadly correct.

Trump is an "ontological threat against Democracy"

There is nothing more to a narrative of state than the people following the story of its leader. The competing narrative of Trump as to the legitimacy of the 2020 Election makes Trump a dangerous instability to be reckoned with forcefully. By any means necessary, including slicing up the worldviews of people like TracingWoodgrains, Scott Alexander, and Elon Musk.

TracingWoodgrains continues to tell the story, bizarrely, of a man who might turn to serious policy.

Scott Alexander continues to tell the story, bizarrely, of a left that is producing 'out-of-context' quotes.

Musk is in a pathetic search for legitimacy on Twitter, getting told by other rich people of his mistake.

Thankfully, Biden has promised to 'finish the job' and I think we'll soon be rid of this old person boomer confusion. (Just because he's incompetent as a leader doesn't mean the movement around him isn't fascism.)

But I haven't forgotten the weakness of the pseudointellectuals whose Woke Derangement Syndrome prevented them from perceiving the authoritarian fascist movement which began in 2016. They still have a chance to correct their answer, before the history books close on them as collaborators with the insurgent traitor Trump.

Soon Impassionata can retire.

!nonchuds

A series of fires have hit French high-speed rail lines, hours before the opening ceremony for the Paris Olympic Games

Rail company SNCF says it's a "massive attack aimed at paralysing the network"; France's transport minister says they're dealing with "co-ordinated malicious acts"

Some 800,000 customers are affected with disruption expected "at least all weekend", the rail firm says - passengers are asked to postpone trips and not travel to stations

Eurostar services to and from Paris are being diverted with several trains cancelled

Whodunnit? My guess is environmentalists.

This is extremely embarrassing to post but this proves my ex was lying about the age of the guy she cheated on me with.

This conversation was in 2022 for Coachella and it speaks for itself.

I have retained legal counsel and need to let the legal investigation complete itself… pic.twitter.com/NqzstUL6ib

— Lex ✝️ (@MrTLexify) July 25, 2024

It's 6 and a half minutes of chatlogs so I'll post screenshots of good bits below

!g*mers

!moidmoment

DO NOT CALL KAMALA A NAZI ON REDDIT

!khive