I'm not surprised given the person in charge, but I still feel bad for the guy. Being almost completely paralyzed, it makes total sense to jump at the chance to get some normalcy back.

I didn't expect 85% of the wires to already detach at this point. In a just society, the whole company would be shut down and the CEO put into a bottomless pit.

I want Jimmy Kimmel to hire the animators from the animation he played when Trump left the white house and make a clip of the statue of Liberty clap along to a parody song.

Everyone do the Pelosi Clap!

Clap Clap!

Clap Clap!

I want Stephen Colbert to come out dancing with drag queens in pant suits and bad wigs to clap and get the audience involved so they clap out of tune.

I wanna see Pete Buttigieg's high hopes as he lets another train derail.

I want Joe Brandon to make a cameo as he looks dead-eyed into the camera and makes a gaffe.

And I wish for all of this to be performed without a hint of irony on-screen.

I wish for this without irony.

Seriously though, it's wild watching the generation who kept receipts turn on each other.

But I really just wanted to make a silly pun.

Put the upbears in the bag!

Fun Magician extended universe lore - this was the podcast that broke my liberal brain and pushed me towards communism.

From Wikipedia:

Mueller, She Wrote is a political podcast hosted by Allison Gill, a military veteran who worked at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. It mixes comedy, legal commentary and political analysis, from a liberal perspective, and centers on the Mueller investigation. The original co-hosts were San Diego comedians Jordan Coburn and Jaleesa Johnson; the latter has since left the show due to a pay dispute.

I remember feeling lost after trump got elected and hoped that something would come of the Mueller report. It's wild to think I believed an FBI investigation run by a Republican would to anything to shake up the system, but there were plenty of people who believed it.

These hosts would give updates on the investigation and other bits of news, but it started feeling hollow around the third 'this time he's really in trouble!' story.

The simping for Mueller like he was going to solve things felt hollower and hollower until I stopped listening altogether.

I read up on them a few years later and saw them vote shaming people who were considering withholding their vote for healthcare and student debt forgiveness. I also found out they benefited from PPP loans they didn't have to reimburse. Hypocrisy exposed is an empty victory, but it felt vindicating to know leaving that whole bubble was a good decision.

Finally, I hate the logo so much. Like they were doing investigative journalism or something by collecting headlines from news websites.

I dunno. I just wanted to air out my vitriol while it was fresh.

Did anybody else follow it or similar podcasts before moving left?

Like them playing animal crossing or whatever, reading the character text aloud and then reacting like they're full-on having a conversation? They are framed as though playing the game in real time, but it's clear that they're reacting to a video of playing. It feels like watching someone play dolls or something and I can't stand it.

They're reacting to it like the characters are real. The YouTuber might talk about some of their own lives every now and then, but it all just feels so empty and I'm having a hard time understanding what the appeal is.

My partner loves these kinds of videos and I'm trying to figure out what it is about them that people like. Is there some comfort to them that I'm not getting?

I'm gay so this post is protected from accusations of horny posting 💅🏽

I don't get how libs can tolerate being taken for granted like this. They're not being mature or practical - they're accepting mistreatment by an establishment sworn to serve them.

Trump and his supporters aren't better, but at least he's telling them what they want to hear. He at least made sure to get checks out to people and had his signature stamped on them.

I dunno, at least there's a strategy there. And Biden has had four fucking years and he's done nothing to get people motivated to vote or even register to vote. Not even going into his participation in genocide, it's just a lack of strategy to the point of self-sabotage.

And the entire Democratic party is complicit in all of it. It's like they want to lose, because all I'm hearing are about how bad trump is/was. And it's like, I was fucking there. And after three years, all they can offer is to give him a verbal reprimand and coverage on every major news network, speech, and social media posting.

It's just mind-blowing to think of the wasted time and energy on the part of the US political system.

I'm in my mid thirties and only now am I coming to terms with my neurodivergence. I'm one of the lucky people to have access to health care and the time to educate myself on the topics of neurodiversity and mental health.

And with all of that, I have only recently started to take notice of how my childhood experience affected my perception of people and how the world works.

I won't go into intense details for several reasons, but long-story short - my parents were deeply unwell and in forcing me to hide and overlook their mental health, I currently have to spend time trying to sort out what I now find acceptable, healthy, and loving.

Being on the spectrum and lacking the resources to navigate an allistic world was hard enough. I had to make an approximation of normal without having consistent practice with it.

I feel sad that I'm in my thirties and still seek out the approval of people I don't know. Especially when those people exist in spaces where it's not safe for them to know me, like online, or at bigoted in-person spaces.

I don't feel like I got a chance to make human mistakes and now that I'm on my own for the first time in my life, I lack the tools and connections to safely unlearn unhealthy behaviors and learn new healthy behaviors.

I know I'm not the only one, and I'm glad that this comm is around to meet and troubleshoot solutions.

Sometimes I feel like I don't understand a joke in a post and I'm afraid to lose the game of chicken, becoming the first person to ask if a person was serious.

Sometimes I'll check my comments for up votes to make sure I'm not being cruel to someone without knowing.

I was convinced I was cruel and carrying that belief has made me so vulnerable to manipulation. I've had to create a mask that convinces people that I'm in on the joke. That I know better and any mistake I make could conceivably be intentional. I can't feel vulnerable and I look at people as a collection of warnings and threats instead of human beings who might treat me like I'm human too. I have an exit plan on the off chance somebody sees through my mask, because that was the most dangerous thing in my childhood.

Already feeling out of touch with my body, I had to exist outside of myself to make sure that I didn't present any image that reflected poorly on my parents. Precious bandwidth dedicated to something I don't really even care about. My family was shitty and they should feel shitty, but I have my attention focused outward on how others see me. Because that's what they policed. I didn't get to pay attention to my inner world, the outer world, or the real ways the two interacted.

My heart goes out to any kid that's experienced trauma, but this is the way I experienced it - as part of a community underserved by an allistic society that prioritizes the aesthetics of a nuclear family.

But knowing all this, I can feel some comfort in the fact that I found a community here where I can share my experiences and contribute to a world that values and people like me.

I thought it would be funny if I cropped out the author's name on the article, but I decided grace, citing my sources to avoid the irony singularity

Like no shit, I'm going to make my one safe place look nice.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Thanksgiving_Turkey_Presentation

This originates from an annual tradition from the 1940s where the turkey presented by representatives was later killed and eaten. It wasn't until the 70s when they started sparing the turkeys. During Bush Sr's presidency, it became a formal ceremony with a pardon and everything.

It's this big ceremony on TV where named turkeys are brought to the White House to get ceremonial pardons. Some have food-related names like Marshmallow or Drumstick.

Charlie in 1987 trying to finish what John Hinkley Jr. started. He spent the rest of his days at a petting zoo.

The first president on record issuing a "pardon" to his turkey was Ronald Reagan. Reagan had been sending the turkeys presented to him to farms and zoos since at least 1982, and 1987's turkey, Charlie, was likewise headed to a petting zoo. At the time, Reagan was facing questions over the Iran-Contra affair, on whether or not he would consider pardoning Oliver North (who had yet to be tried for his involvement in the affair); Reagan conjured the notion of the turkey pardon as a joke to deflect those questions.

Reagan did not make any pardon references in the 1988 presentation, but his successor, George H. W. Bush, instituted the turkey pardon as a permanent part of the presentation beginning his first year in office, 1989. The phrase "presidential pardon" in that ceremony was apparently inserted by a speechwriter; Bush initially was indifferent to the terminology, saying "'Reprieve', 'keep him going', or 'pardon': it's all the same for the turkey, as long as he doesn't end up on the president's holiday table."

50-80 turkeys are selected based on their behavior from a pool of turkeys up for slaughter. The 10-20 best looking and most behaved turkeys are selected, then two are finally picked and get named by the president.

This year, Jennie-O brand is bringing two currently unnamed turkeys for Biden to pardon.

For those curious about the fates of the turkeys. It's not great. In a fashion that's particularly telling of the US:

For many years the turkeys were sent to Frying Pan Farm Park in Fairfax County, Virginia. From 2005 to 2009, the pardoned turkeys were sent to either the Disneyland Resort in California or the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, where they served as the honorary grand marshals of Disney's Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 2010, 2011 and 2012, the turkeys were sent to live at Mount Vernon, the estate and home of George Washington; Mount Vernon stopped displaying and accepting the turkeys due to the fact that they violated the estate's policy of maintaining its own historical accuracy (Washington never farmed turkeys)

For many years, the pardoned turkeys were documented to have very short lives after their pardoning, frequently dying within a year of being pardoned; for comparison, heritage turkey breeds have lifespans on par with those of wild turkeys, at least five years.

Emphasis mine:

The lifespans of the pardoned turkeys have steadily improved in recent years, frequently having lifespans of over two years and occasionally reaching three years of age, an improvement attributed to better choices of homes after the pardons; rather than serving solely as tourist attractions, the turkeys are now placed in the care of experts who make conscious efforts to maintain the turkeys' health for as long as possible.

So yeah, in the spirit of aesthetics, the US president puts an animal on TV, promises it life and then leaves it to survive the machinations of an empire in violent decay. All the while the rest of them are condemned to die away from the general.

It just really makes a mockery of so many things the US pretends to care about.