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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • I always tell my kids, you can try your best and still fail. Sometimes you will succeed without any effort at all. Luck will affect the outcome of anything you do.

    But you have to be ready for the luck. You have to work hard to be in a position to take advantage. Hard work can mitigate your failures, and any effort you put into doing your best is never wasted because you’re trying to be the best version of yourself.

    That’s why you try. Not because you might win and get wealth and fame and glory. You try because you want to be the person who tries.

    See also, honesty, kindness, generosity, forgiveness. These are not things we do to be rewarded. The universe (not to mention other people) is going to let you down more often than not. You should still be honest and kind and generous and forgiving and hardworking because that’s the person you want to be.


  • Conservativism, in all forms, is not a real ideology. It’s narcissism. A conservative will redefine conservative values based on their own identity.

    So the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” idiot is lying to themselves about who they are. They want fiscal policies that benefit themselves, and they don’t want to be labelled a bigot, but they are fine with bigots in office as long as they get the fiscal policies that benefit themselves.

    Ask them what they mean by “fiscal conservative,” and they will probably vaguely gesture and say “lower taxes.” What they mean is “lower taxes for me.” Fiscal conservatives still want to spend government money on programs they like. They want boondoggles in their backyard, earmarks and pork barrel projects, and social safety nets as long as they are the recipient (Medicare, Social Security, Veteran benefits, etc.)

    They want to frame it as responsible restraint. Pull funding from programs they don’t understand, like scientific research, or don’t like, like foreign aid (except of course if strong ties to their home country).

    And when they say lower taxes, when pressed, they will describe how their property tax or income tax or capital gains tax or death tax is really bad “for the economy.” They want good schools and roads and infrastructure, but they want someone else to pay for it.

    Calling themselves conservative gives them license to be as selfish as they want to be without having to admit that they don’t actually have any values.





  • Bullshit. If the DNC had not been in the bag for Hillary in 2016, it would have been an entirely different primary. Her whole campaign was based on her “electability” and how dangerous it would be to put Bernie up against Trump. Between the superdelegates, the bribery, the caucus malfeasance, and the blatant lies, Hillary and the DNC did everything but literally stab the man in the actual back.

    And that’s fine. The Democrats can pick their candidate however they want. The party leadership thought that Hillary was a better choice. But there’s been an effort to rewrite history to absolve the party leadership, many of whom are still in positions of power ten years later. The DNC fucked America, and they are as responsible as anyone for the disasters of the last, let’s say, 50 years.

    Maybe Bernie would have lost to Trump. Maybe Hillary would have beaten Bernie in a fair primary. We can’t possibly know those things, because that’s not what happened. We do know that the primary was not a fair election, and we do know that Hillary shat the bed against Trump.

    But if it had been Sanders in a national debate, making the arguments, giving impassioned speeches, drumming up supporters and energizing the left, then at the very least Trumpism would not have gone unchallenged. There would have been resistance. Instead, Hillary and the Democratic leadership let go of the rope and now we’re in the middle of a coup d’etat.