Hi, Overton window? Can you hear me? You're moving too fast!
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
0 points (NaN% liked)
BrainWorms
1249 readers
13 users here now
Hey, welcome to BrainWorms.
This is a place where I post interesting things that I find and cant categorize into one of the main subs I follow. Enjoy a front seat as i descend into madness
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Anyone remember the time that Toys R' Us decided to take out a gigantic loan to pay off the "management fees" of Bain Capital for the fine virtue of being managed into the fucking ground?
I do.
Is that why they went bankrupt back then? Man, what fuckers.
More or less.
Bain (with Romney at the helm) became masters of the leveraged corporate buyout. That means they use loans to purchase a company. Those creditors would be paid back through bain's revenue which is made up of management fees from the companies it bought. Then Bain would send in managers to make the company look awesome by boosting revenue and reducing expenses. (You can recognize this when private equity buys something and suddenly one guy is doing the work of four - while the assets are liquidated around him.) Bain uses this performance to say to creditors - look how awesome they're doing - give us a loan! So they take out an enormous loan and pay all of that money to themselves and let the former shell of the company collapse around them.
The horribly shitty thing about it is everyone talks about capitalism like it is zero-sum. That's really not true - economies work together and create new wealth out of our labors. Well, Bain is zero sum. Their money comes from taking from others. That kind of business is fucking evil. Bain is fucking evil. Mitt Romney is fucking evil. People who associate with him (the Mormon Church that enabled him, the Republicans that idolized him) are a mixture of fucking evil and stupid.
They killed Kay-Bee toys as well!!!
This isn’t exactly new or unusual. Look how suddenly everyone acted like John McCain wasn’t a treasonous shitbag when he died
A political moron with terrible ideas, yes. But I think treasonous is the wrong word, which is what sets him apart from his comrades in the republican party.
It's not that people remember him as someone they would have liked to vote for, but he was over of very few republicans to speak out against trumpism.
Sort of like how Romney was one of few republicans recognizing the election result. It has just gotten to a point where we expect the worst from these people, and it's somehow worth celebrating when they defy our expectations.
I think it's more an attempt at positive reinforcement, if anything. When you've got a bad dog you're trying to train, you fixate less on punishing the bad behavior and rewarding the good behavior.
Too bad these people are worse than dogs.
I was more referring to his actions while he was a PoW and other various things than his tenure as a politician but that didnt help much either
Or pretending George W. Bush was some sort of reasonable centrist.
I’m still at a loss how my parent was furious at ~W for Iraq and just disowned me for the umpteenth time for telling them * tfg was a fraudster, rapist, insurrectionist and treasonist. The last time I did that, they put me out of the car in sleet, thirteen miles from my home.
- edited two words
The reason is because your parents are shit bags.
I hope that clears everything up for you.
Thanks? Lol. I just meant how they were so outraged at W and not tfg. Mass insanity is real.
My dad spent his entire life doing sophisticated math for NASA, and did a stint getting atmospheric and oceanic study satellites into space, so he is (or rather was ) super aware of rapid climate change and runaway climate acceleration risks.
He was a George W. Bush supporter who went full MAGA in 2016 and hates immigrants so much, I think he hates Irish and Italians on sheer principle even though he wasn't alive then. And now he's a climate science denier.
Even super-geniuses can get swayed by the right-wing cult. Granted, we're right down the Jefferson Davis heritage, but I'm as egalitarian pinko-commu-anarchist as they come. Can't say it's midwest fever or boomer madness. He also screams at the television for gridiron football.
Parents. ☕
It’s the dunning kruger effect. A lot of people think that because you’re an expert in some field, then that proves that you’re smart and therefore apply the same talent to everything.
Your Dad may be smart with science, but all that means is he’s good at science.
The assumption is that if your Dad is smart enough to figure out science then surely figuring out politics is a cake walk. But that just isn’t now it works. The two subjects require completely different skill sets and knowledge bases and at the end of the day you only get from it what you put into it.
Being terrible at politics doesn’t make you great at science it just makes you bad at politics.
Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney are great, when compared to the rest of the party. Let that sink in. That's how low the bar is now.