Board 8 > Politics Containment Topic 464: Hell-th Care

(+) Yeah! (+)

RFK Jr. is doing such a bad job with healthcare that even the President is going to die from it.

Well it always best to look on the bright side.

That Epstein victims thing is today isnt it? Hope they just loudly announce all the guys who raped them, but whether the media will even cover it is another thing since theyve likely got pedophiles who own them too

Bitto posted...

RFK Jr. is doing such a bad job with healthcare that even the President is going to die from it.

this is eyeliner assassin erasure

So far, it was at least interesting and also eye popping to see Marjorie Taylor Greene say something reasonable

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/03/nx-s1-5521261/white-house-ai-founders-museum

In one video, an artificially generated John Adams says, "Facts do not care about your feelings" a phrase often used by conservative commentator and PragerU presenter Ben Shapiro.

please kill me

FFDragon posted...

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/03/nx-s1-5521261/white-house-ai-founders-museum

please kill me

ffd Ill come visit so we can both be killed at the same time

economies of scale and all

I used to think that people who homeschooled were kinda nutjobs. That was reinforced to me when i met my ex's family and they were all very uneducated and insane.

But now... i kinda get the appeal of why a parent would do so.

PeaceFrog posted...

I used to think that people who homeschooled were kinda nutjobs. That was reinforced to me when i met my ex's family and they were all very uneducated and insane.

But now... i kinda get the appeal of why a parent would do so.

Theres a lot of reasons, but for America specifically I feel like #1 should be significantly lower odds your kid gets shot to death. What a sad excuse of a country we are

Chaeix posted...

ffd Ill come visit so we can both be killed at the same time

economies of scale and all

what I'm hearing is b8 meetup, count me in

PeaceFrog posted...

I used to think that people who homeschooled were kinda nutjobs. That was reinforced to me when i met my ex's family and they were all very uneducated and insane.

But now... i kinda get the appeal of why a parent would do so.

I was homeschooled and I turned out!

swordz9 posted...

Theres a lot of reasons, but for America specifically I feel like #1 should be significantly lower odds your kid gets shot to death. What a sad excuse of a country we are

Depends how many guns your home has

At the rate this is going kids will be learning Bible verses and flat earth at public school in no time. Once the Bible enters public school nationwide or even in your state please pull your kids out and homeschool them.

The fact that The Pledge of Allegiance in school was normalized in the first place is already insane.

We all just said that shit and thought nothing of it. Wild.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

The fact that The Pledge of Allegiance in school was normalized in the first place is already insane.

We all just said that shit and thought nothing of it. Wild.

To be fair I didnt say it as a child because I thought it was silly to swear an oath to a flag

Religions should only be in schools if they teach how awful theyve been throughout all of human history tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VoDCXa7JkA

I got lunch detention once because I refused to participate in the pledge.

My parents dealt with it after that, but suddenly they stopped making me so I'm guessing they threatened to make a big deal out of it or something

But also sure, big Baltimore meet up for the end of days lessssssss gooooo

tag

Baltimore at the end of September for the cake concert and All This Go festival, you betcha

https://bsky.app/profile/rickhasen.bsky.social/post/3lxxhppv5fk2b

What a footnote from a district court about the SCOTUS

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr70rvrd41ko

Hmmmmm

Just pipe dreams of old dictators who will die before living to 150 is ever possible

LightningStrikes posted...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr70rvrd41ko

Hmmmmm

So I'm guessing the Epstein files are worse than we thought, a new strain of Smallpox has been discovered in Florida, and/or the Gaza death toll is approaching a million.

LightningStrikes posted...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr70rvrd41ko

Hmmmmm

The problem they will eventually run into

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/f/fee532e2.jpg

LightningStrikes posted...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr70rvrd41ko

Hmmmmm

these days they say at 70 ones still a child.

LMFAO. More like 70 is when you start regressing to a child again.

in the social media era, everyone is every age now. Its one giant tapioca pudding. You never have eras of closure anymore, because its constantly reflected back onto you via like these platforms.

PeaceFrog posted...

Baltimore at the end of September for the cake concert and All This Go festival, you betcha

as long as the cake is a special cake

a special cake

Oh my God I am

So done with this gimmick lmao

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/03/health/toilet-time-hemorrhoid-risk-wellness

Phones ruining every aspect of your body

maybe if life was better we'd have reasons to want to leave the bathroom

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/f/f74fe22a.jpg

Chaeix posted...

maybe if life was better we'd have reasons to want to leave the bathroom

life isnt better because nobody goes outside. This is the product of years and years of decay from everyone being addicted to algo era internet.

Metal_DK posted...

life isnt better because nobody goes outside. This is the product of years and years of decay from everyone being addicted to algo era internet.

nah bruh this is reagan's fault

Chaeix posted...

nah bruh this is reagan's fault

People went outside and socialized during Reagan plenty

kinda missing the point dude

I think that better suits you

I'm starting to think MDK isn't actually a real person themselves and is just a script bot.

Oh I'm very much real. I'm the only real one left. Internet addiction is the number one problem with all of society. It's not even close.

I think your 24/7 obsession with hating on social media has so utterly overtaken your entire life that it's more unhealthy than actual addiction to social media itself.

You are addicted to hating on social media.

internet addiction has certainly contributed to how shitty things are but like, man it's just a domino in the chain of events. the partisan politics around swing issues like abortion, and how those issues can be taken advantage of by the republican party, truly begun in the reagan era. additionally, reaganomics set american fiscal policy on a crash course into the system of wealth inequality that the US has now by massively cutting tax rates under the false pretense that wealth will trickle back down to workers. tech companies have taken advantage of a broken system to create what you're describing, resulting in a broken social system. you can't pretend that social media and algorithms are the first domino in a chain of events that started decades earlier.

do you think i'm missing the point now

UshiromiyaEva posted...

I think your 24/7 obsession with hating on social media has so utterly overtaken your entire life that it's more unhealthy than actual addiction to social media itself.

You are addicted to hating on social media.

I will bring it up when it's relevant. It's where everyone spends their entire time now, and then wonders why the general enshittification process is everywhere they go

Chaeix posted...

internet addiction has certainly contributed to how shitty things are but like, man it's just a domino in the chain of events. the partisan politics around swing issues like abortion, and how those issues can be taken advantage of by the republican party, truly begun in the reagan era. additionally, reaganomics set american fiscal policy on a crash course into the system of wealth inequality that the US has now by massively cutting tax rates under the false pretense that wealth will trickle back down to workers. tech companies have taken advantage of a broken system to create what you're describing, resulting in a broken social system. you can't pretend that social media and algorithms are the first domino in a chain of events that started decades earlier.

do you think i'm missing the point now

Yes, because a lot of what you brought up happened with Nixon era too. Reagan wasn't a good president, but damn is he not overly blamed. Easy scapegoat. Just like how everyone thinks it's entirely boomers fault. People incapable of realizing their internet addiction is the real problem (boomers are addicted to the internet too I know), as it has created the obsoleteification of people.

i had a whole post typed up with statistics and everything but then i decided this discussion wasn't worth engaging in because i am debating someone who will never concede their point, even when my point is 'yes internet addiction is a problem, i agree with you, but it's the result of a system that has been broken for decades'

so my options are to 'lose' the debate by getting tired of arguing a point which won't be conceded, or 'lose' by hitting the eject button now

i choose option b. which i guess is technically also option a.

Metal_DK posted...

Reagan wasn't a good president, but damn is he not overly blamed.

Correct on both accounts -- he was a bad president and is in fact under-blamed.

At the end of the last topic I was going to ask if we could go one topic without the social media / internet addiction shit being brought up constantly. But I see we couldn't even go one page without it taking up the bulk of the page.

Every new topic it feels like 30-40% of the thread is this same shit regurgitated over and over. Whether it's right or wrong, it's tiresome and not constructive and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who is over it.

It would be folly to deny that social media hasnt had an outsized impact on political outcomes. There is an incredible amount of evidence that social media has significantly increased political polarisation. We have also seen it directly impact campaigns, the annulled Romanian presidential election was down to TikTok misinformation campaigns effectively. Of course Trump was elected because of how his campaign used social media, including via suspicious use of data and misinformation again.

The real thing to be aware of here is the way the far right has risen now compared to the last time it rose. Conditions now are very different, the world is vastly wealthier and its not just the richest. Quality of life is significantly better, the economy is doing significantly better, income is significantly higher, crime is significantly lower, and so on. In general people think things are worse than they are now than they used to in a way that did not occur historically. By nearly all measurable outcomes things are better now than in the 1930s. So what is the big thing driving it? Social media. Look at most countries with a notable political presence for the hard right to far right, they are all using social media more than anybody else and usually have the biggest followings too. Also see the way they have used it to organise violence at a greater than previously seen scale.

Additionally we cannot ignore the impact of Russia on all this. With the invasion and occupation of Crimea in 2014 they shifted to a strategy of interference in many democratic governments using social media. This took a variety of forms including support for the far right. That was enabled by the presence of social media.

It is all a chain of dominos for sure. But someone could have put their finger in the middle to stop the dominos falling at any time. After all, lets not forget that the turbulent 1980s were followed by a period of unprecedented relative (emphasis on relative) peace and prosperity around the world. It all changed with the crash then again in the middle of the decade. This is something Metal_DK gets mostly right, it did come down to two distinct time points, they are just off by a year and label them as casual whatever instead of the actual events. It was the 2008 recession followed by the 2014 change in Russias geopolitical objectives coupled with increasing social media use. You can attribute the former partially to Reagan for sure but not the latter. There is no denying how important this all is and we have to keep discussing it though hopefully in a less repetitive and annoying way.

Social media (addiction) is indeed a large driver of way a lot of things are uniquely so bad right now but even if you waved a magic wand and stopped the Casual Revolution of 2007 things would still be shit because of Reagan's presidency. Those graphs that show how wage growth and productivity (and actually a whole lot of other things economic and not) all of a sudden wildly diverge after 1980 despite having been basically a single line all the decades before aren't coincidences. Reagan and his policies are the prime driver and origin point of the massive (and ever increasing) wealth inequality in society and this was decades before social media was a thing. I'm not sure I'd say Reagan's policies caused the social media shit down the road (although maybe you could make a case that all the deregulation culture set the stage) because it's not like "out-of-touch number must go up!!!" shit came into existence with him. Though he did finally manage to undo the round of regulation we put up after the last time that shit got out of hand (Great Depression) and that ethos has continued on strong ever since. That part is just a "feature" of unregulated capitalism.

We just happen to live in the wonderful era where we get to suffer through both at the same time.

LightningStrikes posted...

is something Metal_DK gets mostly right, it did come down to two distinct time points, they are just off by a year and label them as casual whatever instead of the actual events. It was the 2008 recession

The financial collapse started in Sept 2007ish fwiw. 08 was just when it reached it's peak.

Also I'd argue the iPhones release (technically not the first smartphone, that's the ibm Simon. But if you asked 1000 people what the first smartphone was almost all would say the iPhone), Twitter's sxsw conference, YouTube being bought out by Google (I believe was actually October 2006 but close), Facebook opening up to the general public were actually bigger events to our lives than the peak of the financial collapse.

This is literally how millions of Americans and a few billion people spend hours of their day, everyday.

Thorn posted...

Reagan and his policies are the prime driver and origin point of the massive (and ever increasing) wealth inequality in society

Nixon solidified keynesianism in the US. Everyone knows that the origin. When people talk about "capitalism" 80% of the time they mean the new keynesian economy created in the 70s by Nixon. It is an experiment that has only lasted 50 years and you can see the result.