• 0 Posts
  • 4 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
cake
Cake day: June 29th, 2025

help-circle
  • The question you’re asking is actually very complicated. Pretty much every for-profit media company will have a bias to the right since their goal is to profit today and survive to profit tomorrow. Lowering the taxes for the company and for the wealthy who own large portions of the company are obviously something that the company and the people running the company want, and the platform of the right is consistently to lower taxes on businesses and the wealthy.

    The wild thing is the way that the right has shifted in the past 30 years or so. Politicians would stir bigoted voters up with dogwhistle rhetoric while maintaining some level of deniability so that non-bigots would also still feel okay voting for them. This all changed with trump. Suddenly, it was possible to say the quiet part out loud and still get elected. Rather than using mild bigotry as a tool to get into office and then make bank off of bribes and carving out loopholes and conduct insider trading, now moron bigots themselves are running and winning, and they don’t actually know what to do or how to do it, so they mostly just shitpost and grandstand because they don’t actually know shit about governing.

    We’re now coming to a point where these companies are hopefully starting to realize that the right is so bad at governing and so damaging with their shitposting that they’re actually hurting these companies’ bottom line. I wouldn’t dare call Democrats “the left” because they’re factually a center-right party; the Democrats were posturing to be a sane, safe, profitable alternative. Like it or not, Biden steered our economy back in the right direction, and Harris would’ve continued on that track while also letting these companies continue to amass wealth. Media companies who saw the forecast and reported with some bias towards Democrats are absolutely not left-leaning. A real left-leaning media company would not be structured like a corporation or traded on the stock market. A real left-leaning media company would be advocating to eradicate the systems as they are and remake them with equity in the foundations. We live in a very right-wing America, and any positive reporting of capitalist America, or gentle criticism of small details of the colonial capitalism of America needs to be understood as right bias. Every time somebody puts the stock market or companies or government contracts or “the economy” over feeding the hungry and housing the unhoused and treating the sick, that is right bias. RATM hit on this perfectly in Bulls On Parade:

    Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes
    Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal
    I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library
    Line up to the mind cemetery now
    What we don’t know keeps the contracts alive and movin’
    They don’t gotta burn the books they just remove 'em
    While arms warehouses fill as quick as the cells
    Rally 'round the family, pockets full of shells

    TL;DR: the litmus of whether your news is biased to the left cannot be determined by whether they nudge for the center-right or the far-right candidate.


  • We can’t lay all of the blame on trump.

    The problem is conservatism in general. Every Republican president of the past 50 years has caused economic turmoil. When Republicans get power in the legislature, the only notable thing they work towards is tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and gutting things that help people in order to pay for it.

    Trump isn’t singularly the problem here, but he is so fucking stupid that he’s speedrunning the economic crisis. A Republican with a halfway functional brain would know to move slowly enough that the economy falls apart as they’re heading out the door, not within the first 20% of their term.

    Start selling trump “I did that!” stickers of him pointing up at the eclipse. You’ll start seeing them everywhere soon. Gas pumps, grocery store shelves, car dealerships, etc.



  • I find it helpful to try to quantify the time I’ll enjoy with a thing before I buy it. Or maybe there will be some amount of cost savings if it’s a tool. You could do both with a motorcycle.

    Unless you get a shitty Harley, it will almost certainly be more fuel efficient than an ICE car/truck, so if you plan to commute by motorcycle at all, there is some cost savings there. That will probably offset the cost of registration and insurance, and maybe regular maintenance, so not really a net gain, but at least pays for itself to some degree.

    So after approximating the cost after those savings, then you can approximate how many hours per year and how many years you expect to enjoy the thing for. Divide the cost by that number of hours. Would you pay that hourly rate for the enjoyment you expect to get from it? If so, buy. If not, don’t buy.

    There are obviously some abstract things to factor in too, though. Would you make friends through your motorcycle? Do you enjoy working on stuff so in addition to the riding do you plan on doing aftermarket work on it? Is there a bucket list aspect to this?

    I can tell you that, as a former motorcycle owner, I would probably not get one again. They’re super fucking dangerous, almost entirely because other drivers are fucking morons. It’s impossible for me to ride without being on edge with the assumption that every other driver is actively trying to kill me. At this point, I would only get one as a fun time to ride once in a while, and the upkeep isn’t worth it for that. Even an electric one would be hard for me to justify for myself because of insurance, registration, and ride gear.

    That all being said, there are considerations that you and you alone will need to apply to this decision. I just strongly urge that if you do buy a bike, you wear all recommended gear. Never shorts. Never sandals. Never without a helmet and jacket. Dress for the slide, not the ride.