From the Guidelines (link at bottom of each page): "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work".
Personally, I think it's an interesting experiment. If my prints break, it's at the layer lines. This work may be a stepping stone, an easy way to reinforce prints.
And it's something of a coin flip whether people prefer that philosophy to the other mob. Trump has made it to a seconds term and is talking about a third because of the stunning policy failures of the US government over the last 50 years.
Trump won by <1% against an incumbent in a time that incumbents lost by >10%.
It's absolutely not that people like Trump, it's just that democrats are inept. Literally all democrats had to do was run somebody that didn't have a record of losing primaries.
They're not legislatively inept, it's simply that viscerally, the electorate knows both mobs are guilty of the same representational transgressions. The GOP was always the party of big biz, while the dems were fronting as the hoi poloi's party, and everyone kinda figured that out as Trump played that irony and the anger behind it, masterfully.
How do you get out from behind that, is what renders them inept.
The mob has been convinced of these things. If nothing else, Trump is a master of convincing gullible, desperate people that when he lights the town on fire, only the people they don't like will get burned.
The Democrats did fail, but it's not a both sides situation. They failed to vigorously engage in a simple and honest way with the fact that their opponent is a conman and a crook.
I think the big difference between the Republicans and Democrats is that the R-electorate votes for R-candidates because they want what the R-candidates are promising, while the D-electorare votes for D-candidates because they don't want what the R-candidates candidates are promising.
It's one of the reasons why "both sides" arguments are so frustrating. You can find R-voters who will defend Trump all day, in equal numbers to D-voters who will criticize Biden/Harris. You can see it in the number of R-voters you encounter online who think it's a "pwn" to bring up Clinton going to Epstein's Island, while D-voters respond, "yeah, and? Lock him up, too." We don't want these people who lie to us and glad hand for corporations, but it's marginally better than the alternative.
Trump came to power because too many people have forgotten what kind of man it takes to tear it all down. No more, no less. It's like a clock.
One generation bleeds and dies on a battlefield somewhere so that eventually a few generations later their ancestors can make the same conditions arise again.
He's arguably in worse shape than FDR in his last term. I've come around to seeing such talk as yet another clever and effective bum rush to stave off hisgetting written off as the lame duck he actually is.
Think what you want about him, he is if nothing else, a manipulative genius, so it tracks.
The numbers since 2022 are to be taken with a bucket of salt.
And it's undeniable that the whole country is falling backwards - the economy is in tatters with high inflation, high interest rates , severe economic and kinetic damage to the main revenue generating activities (export of oil, gas, raw materials, military equipment), a poorly hidden ballooning debt crisis. And worst of all, a leader who cannot admit defeat so can't get the country out of the quagmire. So things will get a whole lot worse before there's any chance of them getting better.
Since your other comment got rightfully flagged, I'll respond to you here.
The numbers from 2024 are reflective of the complete disappearance of russia from global markets. For instance, there have been no military procurement deals after 2023, only deliveries of previously ordered stuff.
The poorly hidden debt crisis is within the regions paying the death and recruitment bonuses, and the military contractors forced to sell at a loss and being propped up by state backed loans (one went bankrupt recently). Neither of those show up on official state debt numbers, but are unquestionably a problem for the state budget to fix. The one where 50% is being wasted to achieve nothing in Ukraine. At the best of times there are a few kilometres here and there, but even that is over now.
Ukrainians still unequivocally support keeping the war until russia agrees to leave them the fuck alone, and they get security guarantees (if you think you have polls saying otherwise, look again in the questions and answers, a tiny majority are ready to surrender Eastern Ukraine to end the war now, but practically nobody is willing to do so without guarantees). Those are achievable objectives. On the other side the leadership cannot admit defeat or they'll get toppled, and has no hope of achieving anything they could spin as a victory. So they keep wasting human lives to prolong the inevitable defeat.
No, this isn't a natural law of the universe. Sometimes thing get worse and then stay bad for a long, long time. We happen to exist in a relatively stable, prosperous period. We have used that prosperity to build a system that is more complex and brittle than any time in the history of the species. It won't be pretty when we reach the inevitable crisis.
The people in charge have never seen suffering and don't understand the essential role they have in preventing it. Instead they're disassembling the plane for parts while we hurtle toward the ground.
No, the first one is true. It's the copycat comment that is vacuous and doesn't even make any sense -- "in the right" has a clear meaning, "in the left" is nonsense.
Your comment brought the song lyrics from Murder - Sepultura:
...
Same hand that builds, destroys
Same hand that relieves, betrays
Same hand that seeds, burns
Same peace that exists, here lies
...
Same religion that saves, damns you!
I got no comment on the essence of your comment, but (in your implied meaning), the very last of the song was matching what you wrote.
>A few thousand pagers went off, quite a few in the hands of kids.
Citation needed for "quite a few in the hands of kids".
What kind of kids get to hold very specific communication devices that Hezbollah leadership uses?
I smell bullshit.
>Terrorism by definition.
Says the person who's never read the definition.
You can call the op that targets military leadership whatever you want, but the mere fact of military leadership being targeted makes it not terrorism BY DEFINITION.
Someone walks up to you and stuffs an ad for local prostitutes into your shirt pocket before you react.
Don't like it? Should've worn a T-shirt.
Your wife founds another one in your back pocket later that day, and has questions.
What, you practically asked for it. Should've zippered that pocket. An open pocket is practically an invitation for everyone to put their stuff into it.
https://www.cockos.com/licecap/
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