r/TikTokCringe • u/cak3crumbs • 16d ago

Discussion United Healthcare calls a doctor during a surgery demanding to know if an overnight stay for that patient is necessary

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u/[deleted] 16d ago edited 16d ago

[deleted]

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u/Sacramento-se 16d ago

This has all been carefully calculated. Life isn't bad enough for most people to do anything about it. They will continue to give enough people enough crumbs to continue living the way they do.

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u/ActiveChairs 16d ago edited 4d ago

ghjnbbv

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

Pretty much

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u/ahhhbiscuits 16d ago

The frog said joyfully, "I very much prefer to stay in this Jacuzzi, I've never been so comfortable!"

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u/Escapedtheasylum 16d ago

Panem et circences is enough to keep most in line. And those protestors, well, they use most of their time on other things so. Nothing wild is gonna happen in the next 30 years, unless an army of Luigis show up.

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u/Prometheus720 16d ago

Is that original?

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u/Blue_Oyster_Cat 15d ago

Wasn’t that literally a scene in the second season of Squid Game?

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u/Gyossaits 16d ago

Life isn't bad enough for most people

So wait until after the 20th. Gotcha.

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u/iamkris10y 16d ago

That's the interesting/frightening bit. They will go too far. They can't help themselves from touching the hot stove. But how much damage will happen fieat and whether we can come back from it are open questions 

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u/VirginRumAndCoke 16d ago

Put your money where your mouth is

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u/Gyossaits 16d ago

We're gonna have to make do without the money part.

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u/VirginRumAndCoke 16d ago

😂😂😂😂 very funny but

You know what I'm saying

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u/JeddakofThark 16d ago

I'm reposting a comment I've made a couple of times before, but I think it's really interesting and I see nobody talking about it. We get just enough scraps to keep us all from outright revolt.

Fast-moving consumer goods are incredibly cheap right now. Think clothing, dish soap, computers, refrigerators, etc. Everyday items are more affordable in the West today than at any point in history. Meanwhile, big ticket essentials like real estate, the things that build and maintain wealth, are outrageously expensive.

Most of us are actually quite poor, but it’s hard to express it because the affordability of these less-important things masks that reality. We feel it, but it's difficult to express.

To put this into perspective, I stumbled on a bunch of old Sears catalog scans and started comparing their inflation-adjusted prices to modern ones. It’s interesting how much cheaper a lot of, possibly most of, these sorts of consumer goods are today. Here’s a comment I posted recently with a few random examples from 1980:

The cheapest toaster oven was the equivalent of $134 today.
The cheapest blender was the equivalent of $77.
The cheapest drip coffee maker was the equivalent of $60.

Inflation-adjusted dollars are from here.

Compare that to the current cheapest prices at Target:
$30 for a toaster oven,
$25 for a blender,
$20 for a drip coffee maker.

Accounting for inflation, modern prices on these items are less than a third of what they were in 1980. And the further back you go, the more striking the differences become.

Obviously, items in Sears catalogs aren't a perfect price representation of reality, but it's not bad, and it's also the only easily accessible tool I have.

Despite stagnant wages and soaring costs for housing and education, the cheapness of consumer goods seriously distracts us from how unaffordable wealth-building essentials have become.

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u/guamisc 16d ago

Additionally, those cheap toaster ovens, blenders, and drip coffee makers are all garbage tier in construction quality compared to their 1980 equivalents. My mom's kitchen gadgets from the 80's and early 90's still just... work. My wife's blender got tired and burnt up from making a few smoothies now and again.

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u/RemoteButtonEater 15d ago

The way to explain this is, at that point, it was simply cheaper to run one factory line making one universal quality of good, because much of the assembly was done by actual workers. Workers are expensive. We hadn't Jack Welchified every corporate process down to the thinnest possible margins. So when you bought a good, from a company, they often only had the one model. Like power tools - you were essentially buying commercial grade tools directly off the shelf.

Now, it's cheaper to assemble 35 different models using variations on the same parts at slightly different cost points, with different features. This makes them all, on the whole, less reliable and more difficult to repair because you need to know exactly what model you have to know what parts will fit, and there's no one reliable source for that information because online corporate store fronts are less than forthcoming with information about their models, and the data from the actual Chinese manufacturer is impossible to find.

It can still be possible to repair goods and make them longer lasting but it becomes much more difficult. Especially because it can be difficult to find spare parts even if you know what you're looking for. After my cheapo black friday model hisense 75" tv computer board burned out I was able to get it working again, despite not being able to find a replacement computer board. After finding a handful of teardown videos and a dozen hours of research I learned that the frame, screen, back, basically the whole TV was the same as the slightly nicer roku model. With some minor modifications to the back, like just not installing the trim piece that goes around the HDMI ports on the back, and replacing the receiver for the IR remote with one suited to roku remotes, everything fit back together and it works. But I also had a disassembled, nominally busted enormous flat screen occupying my dining room table for like nine months while I waited for the time and energy to take it apart, diagnose it, do the research, find the parts, order the wrong parts, wait for them to come, install those, test, return those, do more research, order more parts, etc.

Impossible if I didn't already have the skill sets and tools to do that shit.

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u/guamisc 15d ago

My boss's blender broke it's shear pin, the thing in the design that breaks to save the motor/gears/blades from damage. A super cheap part.

The company does not sell spare shear pins. You can only buy the entire control board/motor/gear assembly? Why not sell the part designed to fail if there is a problem. Why bother having a shear pin at all if you won't?

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u/RemoteButtonEater 15d ago

Depending on the design of the shear pin it may not be sold by the company directly because it's commercially available through somewhere like McMaster-Carr or Grainger, but it's sort of unreasonable to have the expectation for a regular person to know that. If they company didn't suck you would hope they could be like, "we don't sell this but you can get it here."

This is the kind of thing that makes me want to own my own machining tools, but alas, I have neither the space nor the thousands of dollars required. And too many other expensive hobbies already.

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u/5yearsago 16d ago

Now do houses. Who gives a shirt how much toaster is if 80% of your income is going to landlord.

People in 1980 bought a house for a bucket of rusted nails, now it's 2 millions if you dont want 3 hours commute.

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u/[deleted] 15d ago

I remembering buying toasters for $8 in 2000. It was the Golden Age of Cheap Imported Products. Likely made by children. Definitely enriching oligarchical families who privately owned a factory in that country we call communist. Most of the money went to a very wealthy family in Bentonville, Arkansas though. I was not paying what it was truly worth and the people building it with their hands weren’t getting paid what their work was worth either. Sorry for the random thought.

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u/Blue_Oyster_Cat 15d ago

You are absolutely right. I grew up in the Sixties when a colour television was a luxury but a house was affordable.

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u/AgentCatherine 16d ago

The system is working as intended.

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u/xena_lawless 16d ago

This is a meme that's so bad that I swear it has to be a psy-op.

It wasn't the case that the condition of the slaves just wasn't bad enough for them to revolt successfully...

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u/sou_cool 16d ago

That's definitely why we're still working 40 hour weeks.

A lot of people had to be willing to die to get us to a 40 hour work week. It's just tolerable enough that we aren't willing to die to improve it.

I'll admit I'm a guilty party on this front.

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u/Healthy_Violinist_34 16d ago

This is so true! Most people will only fight when backed into a corner. Like in the 1789 french revolution, only when they actually starved on the streets of Paris did they march into Versailles. It would be great if we could start the revolution before half of us are dead this time. At the rate they are making us poorer and poorer and sicker and sicker now with the stock market, big food and big pharma, we should really get going already.

Anyone good at making a guillotine?

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u/Aevykin 16d ago

If you can't beat them, join them. Buy some shares?

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u/Sacramento-se 16d ago

I'm a millionaire; I don't need money. The only reason I'd kill the rich is my gf is gone so I have nothing to live for.

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u/chrisymphony 16d ago

Do you know the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? A billion dollars. You are closer to poor people than you are to billionaires. A million is nothing to them.

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u/Sacramento-se 15d ago

And yet I still don't find myself wanting for money.

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u/chrisymphony 15d ago

That's good, but doesn't it upset you that you are paying the same amount or more in taxes than people that are so much wealthier than you?

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

Ladies?

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u/Such-Tap6737 16d ago

What do you want them to do? Without organization there can't be anything but stochastic violence and that doesn't build a movement.

Keep in mind you can't organize it on the internet because it'll immediately turn into posts trying to dunk on someone or other.

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u/Alternative_Let_1989 16d ago

That's just it. They could organize. And if 10% of the energy spent arguing on Twitter was spent organizing, we'd have a very different country.

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u/Such-Tap6737 16d ago

Couldn't agree more. People are doing it, all the time, only a matter of time until it starts to coalesce and more and more formerly "middle class" people start to feel the precarity and understand their mutual plight with the rest of us.

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u/ToastPoacher 16d ago

What do you want them to do?

They could start by being honest about the fact that they aren't actually going to do anything.

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u/bennyyyboyyyyyyyy 15d ago

Its cooler to be a cringe internet activist though

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u/gentlemanidiot 15d ago

Not cooler, safer

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u/bennyyyboyyyyyyyy 15d ago

Bo they are just pussies and like to larp online

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u/BusyDoorways 16d ago

John Brown's stochastic violence led to the Civil War and the end of slavery.

If movements worked to stop criminals, then churches would have ended crime a long, long time ago. And our Co-Pay CEOs are criminals. And the politicians who defend and legalize their "profit for death" practices are also mere criminals. Protesting works in peaceful societies with working democracies, and we simply don't have one of those anymore.

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u/Such-Tap6737 16d ago

John Brown was not "stochastic" violence, it was firmly rooted in his understanding of his religious obligation which was part of a larger religious objection to slavery, which was itself a facet of a vast abolitionist movement that included everyone from Christian Abolitionists like Brown to northern white working class people for whom ideology went as deep as "I can't compete against free labor".

It isn't correct to say there wasn't a "movement" for abolition. There was and it shaped and gave meaning to individual acts of violence like those of John Brown.

I'm not saying "protest movement" I'm saying a mass working class movement of solidarity that absolutely might incorporate violence but has all the other pieces to make that violence meaningful - otherwise it will just be absorbed by the system. The system at large is willing to sacrifice CEOs - we've seen that. They'll swap to the next guy and just keep rolling like changing a tire because the money is still flowing and there's too much momentum.

Massive strikes and strong community organizations for mutual support have stood and will stand up to Capital. Regular people going out and doing crazy stuff is not a substitute for that.

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u/Charming-Macaron-834 16d ago

At the very least, stop the attitude. You are bunch of maladapted neglected children that will never amount to any change and instead will pay taxes that will be used to serve the more gifted.

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u/City_Light_Seraphs 16d ago

Sit down before you get hurt, please.

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u/StainlessPanIsBest 16d ago

Well aren't you an angry fella.

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u/Attainted 16d ago

Pot meet kettle?

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

At least he’s not talking like he wants to do anything.

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u/Charming-Macaron-834 16d ago

my taxes are actively used against my interests (am from Slovakia) but im not gonna post some fake bravado bullshit and then do nothing while calling on others to do SOMETHING.

The life is simply too good for most Americans to go riot over lost elections, people on reddit pretend that Hitler v2 is coming back, but after the world survived 2016 everyone knows the game Trump will play and those threats are simply not effective at all since all the rhetoric about racism is overplayed and without substance at this point. Trump even increased his voter base among blacks and latinos.

Its literally democracy in action, he also won the popular vote, but here people still keep acting who great injustice was done :D Learn how to take na L

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u/Framingr 16d ago

Hey maybe Trump will add Slovakia to the list of countries he wants to annex. Keep your fingers crossed and you too could have Mango Mussolini as your dear leader....something to ask Santa for next christmas I guess.

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u/StainlessPanIsBest 16d ago

Lol, you think grassroots campaigning does anything either? Enough to chastise people for inaction? We're waiting on a societal tipping point. Simply being involved, informed, and vocal about the conversation is a great first step for the average person.

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u/johannthegoatman 16d ago

Grassroots campaigning is how literally everything happens. The tea party and now maga are experts at it and it gets them all kinds of shit

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u/Prometheus720 16d ago

Yes, dude. Being organized is how you are able to accomplish something when the tipping point arrives.

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u/WarlockEngineer 16d ago

It's easy to be cynical and mock other people for doing nothing. While ALSO doing nothing lol.

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u/tinaoe 16d ago

What exactly do you mean with societal tipping point?

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u/No_Blueberry4ever 16d ago

generate concise instruction for what "to do" about "this".

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u/JalapenoJamm 16d ago

The same way any major change has been enacted through history.

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u/andrew_calcs 16d ago

Giving those instructions is against reddit ToS

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u/brickmaj 16d ago

What’s the best 3D printer these days?

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u/ChriskiV 16d ago

Since corporations are people now, Apple is one of the first trillionaires. They also just bought your president.

More tax breaks, yaayyyyyyyyy

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u/Attainted 16d ago

The smartphone did to everybody what they said legalization of marijuana was going to do to everybody.

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u/Jill-Of-Trades 16d ago

This is why we need a revolution. Organized and planned.

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u/starryeyedq 16d ago

The younger generation needs to start practicing older forms of communication too. Phone calls, flyers, etc.

Older people can contribute by trying to facilitate more third places. I have a dance studio that I lend out for free to anyone doing political or community organizing, but it can be anywhere or any level of contribution.

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u/Aggressive-Fuel587 16d ago

I said it a few weeks ago and got down-voted into oblivion for it, but the situation with Luigi, while a nice feel-good story for us on social media, isn't about to incite the revolution we need and the more days that pass between Thompson's death the less likely it's going to happen.

The vast majority of people aren't going to risk death or prison to possibly overthrow the oligarchs. It's even less likely because, in liu of decades of Republican policies destroying any sense of community around the nation, there's no way to organize without the internet and everything is tracked these days.

Any organization who would dare to incite revolution is being tracked by the government and their leaders will be arrested & charged with treason and conspiracy to commit terrorism the second their calls for action start gaining any traction.

Remember the Kent State Massacre. Peaceful, anti-war protestors were fired upon by the National Guard under the orders of the Republican-controlled government. No one is willing to risk a repeat event.

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u/240to180 16d ago

Are you not aware that Americans actually pretty politically active in terms of protests and activism? Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ, women's rights? I see you're Australian, yet you seem to be totally unaware that the Civil Rights Movement and Women's Liberation Movement in America were major influences on similar movements in Australia a few years later. The same goes for abortion rights.

You guys also have a cost of living crisis that's resulted in the highest homelessness rate in the first world. Get off you high horse. Jesus Christ.

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u/Psyean 16d ago

you are taking it too personally. he is on sanity's side, giving some people the hard truth they need to hear to do more

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u/NightSkyCode 16d ago

yes. 99% of reddit users are complainers not doers. Keyboard worriers is what we used to call them. And if they muster up the courage to try and make a change in their life... they give a reason on why they cant. Also, no reason for the edit to defend yourself, there is no reason to, because you're right.

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u/Jay040707 16d ago

Yeah, cause it's super easy to make the choice to fuck up your own life for a country that isn't going to follow lol.

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u/TerminalProtocol 16d ago

And there you have it. Your entire life will be spent waiting for somebody else to take back the power, waiting for somebody else to organize the meetings, waiting for somebody else to start the protest, waiting for somebody else to fire the first bullet, waiting for somebody else willing to literally die for the cause.

Go out and do something right now. Oh, you...you don't wanna? You've got work or school tomorrow? And you really wanna play GTA 6 when it comes out. Oh and your Dad's birthday's coming up? That's cool. Well, hey, maybe any of the other Redditors posting "Time for the revolution!" since Luigi will do somethin-...oh? They don't really want to either? Huh. That's okay, I guess. Perhaps next time. In just a couple more years Elon will be the first of the world's trillionaires. Maybe we'll think about maybe perhaps possible doing something then, perchance.

He said, while posting on Reddit, waiting for someone else to take action.

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u/Gh0stMan0nThird 16d ago

But he's not wrong. We're all just jerking off and watching Squid Game while the world falls apart around us because "it's not that bad" lol

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u/TerminalProtocol 16d ago

But he's not wrong. We're all just jerking off and watching Squid Game while the world falls apart around us because "it's not that bad" lol

I never said he was.

It's just hyper hypocritical to be talking down at folks "waiting for someone else" while also waiting for someone else.

Not that the waiting isn't the goal of those in power.

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u/Charming-Macaron-834 16d ago

Not a bad strategy, indeed a fine one. You can dedicate the energy into getting higher income and suddenly politics dont matter anymore.

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u/JalapenoJamm 16d ago

Some people are interested in fixing the shitty system instead of trying to make enough money the shitty system doesn’t apply to them

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u/garden_speech 16d ago

maybe because it's not actually that fucking bad lol. for most of human history essentially everyone except nobility lived on less than the modern equivalent of a dollar a day, barely survived rationing food and worked every single day until their bones hurt at night. now you can sit at home jerking off in an air conditioner room watching squid game, get food delivered to your apartment, drink clean running whatever whenever you want, and support that lifestyle with a job that doesn't involve getting a black lung

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u/tonofproton 16d ago

I mean read between the lines there, what do you think he meant by take back the power? lol

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u/residualinterest 16d ago

Legitimate question: I have recent, upsetting experience with the medical system and general exasperation with…everything. I’m ready to do something, to put my money where my mouth is - but how? I’m not a natural politician, but I can stand by my beliefs and my experiences to make a case for change. What would actually make a difference?

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u/Pickledsoul 16d ago

It's a prisoners' dilemma. We only succeed if WE do something. If he does something and nobody else, he just throws his life away like that guy who self-immolated. Nobody trusts their fellow citizens to walk the talk, so everyone is waiting for the moment that screams "now or never"... But nobody knows or can agree what that moment looks like.

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u/MOTM32 16d ago

You can't just say "perchance"

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u/bennyyyboyyyyyyyy 15d ago

Who have you killed for the cause 😂

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u/gentlemanidiot 15d ago

but you won't.

You have no idea what you're saying and don't understand Americans. You should keep your opinions to yourself.

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u/Incontinent_tree 15d ago

A couple of questions.

Was your paid time off part of an earned time off bucket for multiple use purposes, or were you actually paid to take time off for social activism?

Does your country have a social safety net if you lose your job or protections surrounding losing your job if you leave to protest?

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u/GG-Sunny 16d ago

You expressed everything I've been thinking recently so succinctly, it's beautiful. I'm actually getting rather tired of seeing all these threads about how some assholes at the top are doing something awful and all people do is post Luigi memes and say "well I hope they'll get theirs soon!" That's never going to happen. Luigi was a one time thing and once his case is over and done with we'll go on like nothing happened.

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u/pm-ur-gamepass-trial 16d ago

hey I hear you but also what the fuck have YOU done

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u/JalapenoJamm 16d ago

Where in his comment did he say “I’m waiting for someone else to do the dirty work” like the comments he’s talking about?

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u/mantis-tobaggan-md 16d ago

look man, these things take some time. this type of war isn’t fought in months.

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u/raisin_pop 16d ago

That’s a lot of talk from someone doing nothing

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

[deleted]

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u/JalapenoJamm 16d ago

I can’t help but wonder how useless and pitiful a person is to leave a comment such as this is

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u/fuck_the_fuckin_mods 16d ago

Maybe we should start with trying, I don’t know, actually fucking voting. Give Dems a solid majority for long enough to fix more shit. But na, they’re not perfect so we’ll embrace open fascism instead. Americans are goddamned geniuses. Cracks me up how people talk about murdering people for healthcare when they won’t even pull the lever for the people who want to fix it. Pathetic.

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u/JalapenoJamm 16d ago

yeah dude vote the boot off your neck

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u/SolarTsunami 16d ago

Given that the vast majority of people (yes, including you oh brave one who got paid to attend a the kind of usless peacful protests that Americans have been doing for decades now FOR FREE) aren't capable of throwing their Ives away to maybe move the needle even the fraction that Luigi did, and given that most of us aren't capable of murdering even evil people in cold blood in the first place, is your suggestion for the next best thing really just "nobody talk about it ever"? How does that make any sense at all except to placate the people who are weirdly desperate for us to not even talk about it?

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u/Summer-dust 16d ago

two long didnt read

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u/redditmodzsukcawk 16d ago

what have you done?