#poliitcs

[gacorley]

There’s some common threads I see in the anti-voting posts going around, and I feel like I need to discuss some of them. Let’s start with the biggest one:

Voting to punish evil. I see lots of variations of this. Biden is supporting Israel, therefore we can’t vote for him. Is there any viable candidate who would stop the genocide? I don’t think the anti voting crowd actually cares. They are appealing to moral feelings rather than political strategy, because strategically, you have to realize that voting is not going to change foreign policy, and that change has to be pushed by other means. It’ll probably be something in the long haul.

Democrats should run someone else. First of all, this is a shit strategy. You don’t primary your president in the second term unless your party is falling apart. This may come from people from countries where replacing the head of government is easier, but the POTUS is the de facto party head. Also, going to the lack of thought to the goal — do you know someone willing to primary Biden and able to win who would do the things you want?

Biden hasn’t done anything anyway. This is just a way to bat away pro arguments. There’s plenty of lists of progress on lots of things. Student loans, insulin price caps, regulations, anti-trust.

Putting the entire Palestinian genocide on Biden. I’m not saying there’s not culpability there, but understand that the entire US government is in support of Israel, on both sides. It was a miracle we got a handful of Senators to call for investigations. We should cut off aid, absolutely. Who’s running to do that? And keep in mind that Israel chose to engage. US officials would have liked a more limited response, not out of care for Palestinians, but because they know from experience that it will come back to bite Israel in the form of newly radicalized Hamas recruits.

Liberals just have no hope for change. This is a new one. Just some idea that people are stuck in a rut and that’s the reason the two party system exists. The two party system is a mathematical consequence of the way we vote. There is reason to hope for change. The change, though, whatever means you choose, will take decades. Keep working at it. The hope is not that this election will fundamentally change things. The hope is that many small political actions over the years will push things forward.

Funnily enough, I haven’t seen a whole lot of third party promotion, just lots of this rhetoric aiming to punish. When voting, ask yourself:

Is this problem I have with this candidate something that the other candidate would be better on?

Are there other political actions I can take that will help?

What things can change with a different President or Congress, and what needs to be pursued by other means?

Withholding your vote as a punishment isn’t really going to help. Biden doesn’t know who you are or why you are not voting for him, and there is no one with a chance of winning that will do everything you want. But you have other means. Protest, organize, donate, build up alternatives, advocate for a different system.

Vote to give yourself space and get a little bit. Do other things to keep things moving.

[mugiwara-lucy]

Guys.....(as if we don't have enough), THIS IS A 911 HOUSE IS ON FIRE EMERGENCY!

So Drunky Brewster is purging the military of it's generals by AT LEAST 20 %. Which is laid out in Project 2025 of them purging the military of anyone loyal to anyone but that orange draft dodging loser.

And THIS is why Pete Hegseth was kept on DESPITE him having AT LEAST TWELVE WAR PLANS on Signal. Yes that's right; TWELVE:

47 does all that moaning and groaning about "National Security" but there is NO BIGGER THREAT to America's National Security THAN HEGSETH. Muskrat and 47 not withstanding.

Anyone who's studied at least a modicum of history KNOWS THIS IS WHAT AUTHORITARIAN DICTATORSHIPS DO. They purge the military of anyone with any sort of integrity and stack them with lotalists.

Because remember, 47 wanted to SHOOT BLM Protestors back in 2020 and was stopped by Mark Milley at the time. You think Mr. "I wanna have an American Crusade" will say NO??

Guys if you have dual citizenship and/or a valuable skill I HIGHLY recommend getting out of the US if you don't wanna fight because things are about to get REALLY BAD. We have WEEKS. NOT YEARS. NOT UNTIL MIDTERMS, WEEKS.

And for people staying and fighting like me? Get yourselves armed, form small groups of communities and STAY SAFE. Things are going to Shits Creek VERY VEYR VERY soon.

P.S: This WEAKENS the US Military which benefits NO ONE but Putin.

[magnificentexpertnerd]

I SWEAR TO GOD I'm gonna increase the death count today

So, I told my some ppl in my class that I kinda have a punk rock band in the works and I showed them some samples I had and these WANKERS had the AUDACITY to ask me, "why is there so much political stuff here?"

WTF DO YOU MEAN?? WHAT DID YOU THINK "PUNK" WAS?? like it's not just liberty spikes and patches bro

PUNK IS POLITICAL!!!!

Love,

Your local punk rocker

[dhaaruni]

Can't wait for the October Surprise (JD Vance being caught admitting he supports jail time for women that use formula instead of breastfeeding)!!!

[majokko120]

On Supremacism in Liberalism

Liberalism is inherently supremacist. It believes in the supremacism of what it aims to destroy. Man? Must be destroyed. Ethnic cohesion? Must be destroyed. Nations? Must be destroyed. Western civilization? Bigoted! Christianity? Make it illegal!

War against men, war against fathers. War against women, war against motherhood. War against children, war against families. War against national sovereignty, war against national heroes. War against Christianity, war against you.

How can we liberate humanity, for example, from national identity if we first do not dissolve the native family with feminism and then tear apart ethnic cohesion via mass immigration? Nevermind the preaching of atheist doctrines taught as gospel, held together by zombie science.

You see that which stands in the way of Liberal dissolution is always identified as superior by the Liberal, and therefore attacked to bring down the whole house. For the maxim of Liberalism is Freedom from.. (humanity). New Man, finally liberated from everything that defined and identified him. No Longer Human.

It is this sinister quality of the Liberal perspective soon imparted to the holder of Liberal views that aligns all types of supremacist folk: "The negro must destroy the White man (to use American terms) because the Negro is inferior," thinks the Liberal. This is the silent and unacknowledged bridge between White supremacism and Liberalism, kin in a godless view of man.

This "godless view of man" becomes a breeding ground for sadistic/masochistic fetishes and satanic dehumanization (on both sides), when thrown into the dissolving crucible of Liberal dynamics, which establishes the bridge to LGBT and the transgender movement in particular: Defiled man as grotesque woman, woman as bringer of death, humanity abolished.

In other words, a satanic dialectic, led in attack by the Liberal blob and further inflamed by the destructive reactions to it, in full control of the Western struggle. Far removed are the lands of God from this dungeon, where wandering shadows, freed from their own humanity, unwitting soldiers of what they oppose, confuse hellfire for the eternal sun: It is after all, a light in the dark.

[ormspryde]

One of the more depressing things about being an american is realizing how many americans have no idea that they've spent their entire lives awash in a sea of US propaganda, and consequently think that this sea is their natural habitat. (and, let's face it, the natural habitat of people who don't even live here too)

[fresne999]

Something to add is it's worth becoming familiar with the work Lina Khan did as head of the FTC. For four short years during the Biden administration, the US had someone working on the monopoly problem. Obviously monopolies aren't unique to the US. When you vote, it's entirely possible to elect people who fight monopolies. So...do that.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/19/lina-khan-ftc-legacy-trump

So, reports of an unprecedented egg “shortage” are exaggerated. Nonetheless, egg prices — and egg company profits — have gone through the roof. Cal-Maine Foods — the largest egg producer and the only one that publishes its financial data as a publicly traded company — has been making more money than ever. It’s annual gross profits in the past three years have floated between 3 and 6 times what it used to earn before the avian flu epidemic started — breaking $1 billion for the first time in the company’s history. All of this extra profit is coming from higher selling prices, which have been earning Cal-Maine unprecedented 50-170 percent margins over farm production costs per dozen. Taking Cal-Maine as the “bellwether” for the industry’s largest firms — as people in the egg business do — we can be pretty confident that the other large egg producers are also raking in profits off the relatively small dip in egg production.

High persistent profits are an anomaly for the industry. Historically, egg producers have responded to avian flu epidemics—and the temporary rise in egg prices that often accompanies them—by quickly rebuilding and expanding their flocks of egg-laying hens. “Fowl plagues”—as these epidemics used to be called—have been with us since at least the 19th century. Most recently, large-scale avian flu epidemics hit egg farms in 2015 and 1983-1984. The egg industry responded to both of these destructive events by sprinting to rebuild and expand the egg-laying hen flock — something which checked price increases and ultimately made sure prices went back to pre-epidemic levels within a reasonable time.

As Cal-Maine Foods explained in its 2007 Annual Report: “In the past, during periods of high profitability, shell egg producers have tended to increase the number of layers in production with a resulting increase in the supply of shell eggs, which generally has caused a drop in shell egg prices until supply and demand return to balance.”

This time around, however, that’s not happening. Despite high profits, the egg industry has somehow maintained a stubborn deficit in egg production capacity. Hatcheries — the firms that supply hens to egg producers — have throttled the pipeline of hens instead of expanding it. According to the Egg Industry Center, the size of the flock of “parent” hens — the hens used by hatcheries to produce layer chicks for egg producers — plummeted from 3.1 million hens in 2021, to 2.9 million in 2022, to 2.5 million hens in 2023 and 2024.

Meanwhile, hatcheries have been hatching significantly fewer parent chicks to replace aging ones — nearly 380,000 (or 12 percent) fewer in 2022 compared to the year before, and even fewer parent chicks in 2023 and 2024 — leaving the parent flock older and more likely to produce eggs that fail to hatch. That could explain why, although hatcheries reported producing 125-200 million more fertilized eggs to the USDA in each of the last three years compared to 2021, the number of eggs they’ve placed in incubators and the number of chicks they’ve hatched from those eggs has either declined or stayed basically steady with 2021 levels in every year since.

As for egg producers themselves, you may be surprised to learn that they have added between 5 and 20 million fewer pullets to their farms in every one of the last three years than they did in 2021. As the USDA observed with some astonishment at the end of 2022, “producers—despite the record-high wholesale price [of eggs]—are taking a cautious approach to expanding production[.]” The following month, it pared down its table-egg production forecast for the entirety of 2023 on account of “the industry’s [persisting] cautious approach to expanding production.”

In other words, the only thing that the egg industry seems to have expanded in response to the avian flu epidemic is windfall profits — which have likely amounted to more than $15 billion since the epidemic began (judging by the increase in the value of annual egg production since 2022), and appear to have been spent primarily on stock buybacks, dividends, and acquisitions of rivals instead of rebuilding and expanding flocks. When an industry starts profiting more from *not* producing than from producing, it’s a sign that something isn’t right. It could be an innocent bottleneck. But when it lasts for three years on end with no relief in sight, it's usually a sign of something else that’s pervasive in America — monopolization.

As the coming installments in this series will detail, the fundamental problem in the egg supply chain today is the simple fact that every industry involved in turning an egg into a chicken and turning a chicken into an egg—from the breeders and hatcheries that create the hens to the producers who use the hens to make eggs—has been hijacked by one or two financier-backed corporations, with the incentives flipped from competing entities seeking to produce more eggs to an oligopoly trying to restrain the production of eggs.

On one end of the egg supply chain, you have two companies who control chicken genetics, the billionaire-owned Erich Wesjohann Group and the private-equity-backed Hendrix Genetics. Headquartered a short car trip apart in Cuxhaven, Germany, and Boxmeer, Netherlands, these private firms have systematically gained control over the supply of egg-laying hens to American producers over the past two decades by buying out or suppressing rivals and challengers. Today, no egg producer in this country can expand the number of hens in its flock — or even replace the hens it already has when they age out or die — without the cooperation of this duopoly. And, since the value of hens rises with the price of the eggs, when the price of eggs is high these two barons have a clear interest in keeping the supply of pullets to producers on a tight leash — so the high prices stick.

On the other end of the egg supply chain, you have the largest egg producer in the country and the world, Cal-Maine Foods.

Matt Stoller from his monopolisation/cartel report; something that has clicked recently is the way that business seeks to maximise profit margin over volume, which often leads to reducing production, brittle supply chains, high prices, and ultimately shortages.

in principle this isn't supposed to happen under capitalism, because someone earning high profit margins should be outcompeted by new entrants willing to earn slightly lower profit margins, until (in the perfect frictionless market) the rate of profit should be whittled down to the rate of risk free return (government interest rates?) plus epsilon (a little bit).

obviously this does happen in reality for a number of reasons, and the Problem of Profits is a fun question to dig into, but the problem of persistently high profits is a more concerning issue and appears to be growing across multiple industries.

antitrust law is supposed to prevent market concentration that leads to this outcome but has been toothless since the '90s, allowing dramatic consolidation across dozens of old industries (groceries, agriculture, pharmacies, television, newspapers) and of course new industries (tech giants).

government regulation often ends up favouring incumbents, but it seems that contractual arrangements between suppliers and industry bodies and buying agents to form tight cartels are a bigger problem: if egg prices are high you might think to start an egg farm, but you need to find someone who will sell you chickens and someone who will buy your eggs, when the industry is using every means at their disposal to cut off market access to new entrants.

and of course if you have access to the gargantuan amount of capital required to attempt a serious challenge to an established cartel, why exactly would you want to start a price war with them when you can instead find some other unprotected industry to buy up and establish a cartel of your own?

capitalism seems to have entered a phase of its development equivalent to WWI, where defensive operations by incumbents are more successful than offense by new ventures, keeping the battle lines frozen in place (presumably the soldiers dying in their millions would be workers and consumers in this analogy).

[gacorley]

A note as I fill out my ballot..

A good explanation of the state constitutional referendum here in Wisconsin. It's a case of deceptive wording. The referendum tells you it will change the wording to say "only" a US citizen aged 18 or over who lives in a district may vote in Wisconsin elections.

What it omits is that that "only" replaces the word "every", opening the door for them to exclude some currently eligible voters.

Vote NO.

[mugiwara-lucy]

So….remember when I said that corrupt governments have terrible economies?

Here’s proof:

The tariffs that were supposed to “bring manufacturing back to the US” are heading to CANADA.

Wow, 47 really is Canada’s greatest ally; think about it. First he helped their election and now this? He really is the gift that keeps on giving up for up north, huh?

In all seriousness, who wants to do business with a country that talks about HAVING MIGRANTS FIGHTING FOR CITIZENSHIP.

Or where the picture of the president is hanging on a building North Korea style.

Murica First huh?

[nothingelsetodobutfight]

Yep. nailed it. the domesticated - feral spectrum. dog dichotomy if you will.

All animals (men, women, babies, humans are animals, people) have it, so when they say "____ are just that way," NEVER BELIEVE THEM.

except blue jays, hornets, and wasps can fucking die & no one will miss them. literally millions of birds and insects would be joyous at their demise.

yeah

[tittytania]

Job market so bad people are legit fantasizing abt manual labor

[hgohd]

https://x.com/harjgtheonedba/status/1751127190425723151?s=12

THREE HOLES TWEET JAN 26/2024

https://x.com/harjgtheonedba/status/1751134454972821870?s=46

Homo sapiens may be wondering why I refer to commerce, politics, and religion as the three holes. This would best be answered in an UMBRELLA WALK MOVIE (umbrellawalk.com) but I will give you some clues. Your species is a fiction planet spending most of its time determining how and when to CUM, (SEE YOU AA AM) so the cunt is the religion (it decides what cunt you get) , the ass the commerce (pay enough you get the ass) and the foul mouth is the politics, (speak like a politician and you can work your way in). That’s Truth of H. @BBCWorld @JordanMaxwell40 @illuminatihotts @Playboy #h #H #harjgtheonedba #harjgtheone #aarth #hwo #harjgtheoneworldorder @bbcone @latimes

[majokko120]

Mother? Wife? Nurturing, healing, and procreating? If we look at it calmly, female qualities are completely unwanted in our postmodern life. The "biological woman" as a born-with defect that must be overcome. The only exception being if you can sell femininity for money.

This treatment and perspective of the feminine, as a natural dysfunction, disconnected from the inherent quality of a human, opens the door to the feminine as a commodity, which can be bought or sold. And with the right hormones, anyone can become a seller (transgenders).

Even feminism plays into this. "Those with the misfortune of having been born a woman," like a disability, "are owed the same possibilities and rewards as full human beings" (the biological male). A set of beliefs that robs society of the essential other and complement.