My dumb ass thought people actually believed Jesus’ teachings.

9/11 happened and 10 year old me was running around going, “Well, now obviously is the perfect time to turn the other cheek, be good to those who hurt us, and forgive not just seven times, but seven times seven times.”

Strangely, all the people who had taught me those things didn’t hear the words I spoke but apparently heard something along the lines of, “Allahu akbar, America deserved 9/11, death to America, Bin Laden did nothing wrong, and I’m happy about dead firefighters.” They extremely did not like me trying to apply what they had taught me in that context.

I think I must be autistic or something because it seems like everybody else picked up on some sort of subtle understanding that none of that stuff was meant to be taken seriously or applied to real life, and I’m just over here like an absolute dupe who didn’t pick up on the joke.

Clinton and Kamala both tried to appeal to that “near right” and failed. Social pressure isn’t going to magically disappear, I can agree with the point about guns but that just ties into what I’m saying. If anyone on the right can be appealed to, it’s the isolationist, pro-gun libertarian types. You will never win the nationalists, they already have a party that is giving them exactly what they want.

I heard a lot of younger people saying Trump was the peaceful, anti-war President.

This is such a big factor, imo.

The democrats refuse to budge from this neocon position of “benevolent interventionism.” and Trump has been able to attack them over both parts of it, which allows him to appeal both to libertarian types who want to stay out of conflicts because “the government doing stuff is bad,” and to nationalist types who want to just overtly plunder everywhere (with his actual policy being the latter). Meanwhile the democrats just cast anyone who disagrees with them on foreign policy as a Russian bot. They’re stuck in the early 2000’s where there was overwhelming bipartisan support for “bringing democracy” to the Middle East, and they seem think if they can just pick up the “moderate Republican” neocon voters who definitely exist and still believe in that project, then they’re sure to win.

The effect is that they fail to capitalize on the ideological divisions that exist on the right. The actual Republican voters that there would be a chance of peeling off are the libertarian anti-war types, but that would require actually trying to appeal to anti-war voters instead of treating them with contempt.

There’s a slight issue with this way of thinking.

Problem: The two party system is preventing us from enacting reforms

Solution: Use the two party system to enact reforms getting rid of the two party system, so we can start enact reforms.

Problem: My car won’t start.

Solution: Drive down to the mechanic and he’ll fix it so you can start driving places

Problem: Asking the king nicely hasn’t been an effective method of stopping him from taking all our grain.

Solution: Ask the king nicely to institute democracy so that you won’t have to rely on asking the king nicely to make things happen.

Y’all always remind me of the fable about the mice who all decide that it’d be much better if the cat had a bell around its neck so they could hear it coming, but then one mouse asks, “How are we gonna get the bell there? Who’s gonna tie it?” and nobody has an answer.

I don’t think you can compare trump to either Bush or any president in recent history.

Hard disagree. Bush was absolutely terrible, and the only reason he gets whitewashed like this is because he’s no longer the current thing. If anything, Bush was much more capable of enacting his fascist agenda because he was able to get bipartisan support for it. It Trump is worse, it’s only because he’s standing on the shoulders of demons. Bush introduced the surveillance state, extrajudicial detention, and started multiple wars of aggression.

you might not get free elections that far into the future by allowing trump back in.

We don’t have free elections now. We will always have some form of elections though, virtually every country does. Elections are very useful to any aspiring dictator. Give the people a way to feel like they can work within the system and they’ll be much less troublesome, and less prone to engaging in other mechanisms of influencing things that could actually be disruptive.

On top of that, American elections are extraordinary for controlling the people, you get two groups of people who are both adamantly defending different ruling class candidates, hating each other’s guts, and trying to push anyone with a different perspective into that paradigm. It’s one of the most ingenious mechanisms of population control ever designed. Imagine, if we didn’t have elections, you’d not longer have any sort of beef with me at all, and we could be discussing the most effective ways of disrupting the state.

Also, Trump’s nearly 80. Octogenarians are not known for overthrowing governments and establishing dictatorships, on account of how they’ll die soon anyway, even if they had the energy and mental acuity for it. It’s much more likely that someone after Trump will.

Just as the far-right did not originate with Trump, it won’t end with him either. As soon as he’s out of the picture, then you’ll be talking about how uniquely terrifying the next person is, and how you can’t compare him to Trump who wasn’t really that bad and just had a different vision for how to improve the country, or whatever bullshit you say about Bush. Or if you personally don’t, then people will, perhaps young people who weren’t really aware of how awful Trump/Bush was. And you will be right, about the threat being awful and terrifying. But as long as you insist on just treading water, the threat is only going to get worse and worse forever. That path is 100% certain to lead to fascism.

Good luck on rooting out the secret Reds lurking behind every corner, trying to corrupt an impurify your precious bodily fluids.

sh.itjust.works user posts on .world

“Is this a .ml thing?”

How would anybody know who to rally around because they aren’t allowed to participate in debates or even really participate as a first class candidate?

It looks a lot more possible if one election like 20% of people vote third party, but it hasn’t ever happened.

All the more reason to support them, then. You even spell out the logic yourself, even if they can’t win, if they reached a certain threshold then they’d have to be taken seriously.

Elections are about more than who wins and loses, they’re also about setting precedent. If a third party gets enough votes, if a faction within a party demonstrates a credible threat of defection, then a major party has to start making concessions if they want to bring them into the fold. The Democrats, however, did nothing but spit in our faces, because they made the incorrect calculation that the left’s opposition was just blowing hot air and that we’d come around to the lesser evil (which is generally what has happened in the past and how we got here in the first place).

I see three possibilities, one where the democrats remain stubborn, and a third party eventually emerges and supplants them (as has happened before in history), a second where the democrats start taking the left seriously and start responding to our demands, and a third, by far the worst, where the left gets cold feet and gives up, desperately rallying around the “lesser evil,” thereby ensuring that nothing ever gets fixed, that conditions will continue to decline, and that fascism becomes inevitable.

It’s an objectively raw deal. For the presidential race there are functionally only two choices.

That being the case, everything you said falls apart. Voters are not “the only ones we can criticize,” we can instead focus our criticism on the people deciding what our two choices are.

I could just as easily say that it’s the fault of Democratic voters for splitting the vote instead of rallying around PSL or the Green party. The only real counterargument to that is that there are a lot more of them than there are of us. But there are also a lot more of us compared to the singular individual of Kamala Harris. So why does it make sense to say we should be the ones to change instead of her? It’s nonsense. The only reason I can see is that we’re regular people and she’s ruling class.

If you want to make the argument that I’m the long run trump is a cold shower that we deserve to shock the whole system

I don’t want to make that argument, no. My position has never been that it would be better for Trump to get elected than Harris, and I have never argued for voting for Trump.

“Not getting a Nazi isn’t an option. But what we can control is whether we get a Strasserist Nazi or a Hitlerite Nazi. Clearly, you have a moral responsibility to support the Strasserist.”

(It’s getting harder and harder to do parodies because a lot of people would unironically agree with that.)

They already did Dick Cheney, it doesn’t get much lower than that.

fundamentally the voters pick the politicians

No they don’t. The DNC is a private entity that can nominate on whatever basis it feels like. That’s especially true considering the nonsense of the 2024 primary. When there was something more of a semblance of a legitimate primary, in 2016, the voters soundly rejected Harris. That is, of course, before we get into Citizens United, dark money, the electoral college, etc. Bourgeois elections are not a legitimate representation of the people’s will. There’s even been studies that show no correlation between how popular a policy is and how likely it is to be enacted. Opinion polls likewise show strong, consistent disapproval of Congress.

Suppose the public is pro-Palestine - when did we ever get a chance to express that and have it represented in the political system? If we never got the chance, then how can you claim that Kamala’s Zionism is an expression of popular will? The only opportunity I ever saw was to vote third party, which I did, but apparently that’s not a legitimate method of making my voice heard on account of you’re currently criticizing me for it. So then there was no method at all.

Candice Owens/Milo Yiannopoulos

The literal definition is someone who unquestionably supports anyone who waves a red flag. In practice, it means anyone who ever acknowledges a good thing done by a socialist state, or even refutes misinformation about them. If you say, “Cuba had a successful literacy program,” there are people who will call you a tankie, even though it’s just objectively true.

See, the difference between our perspectives is that you’re punching down at voters rather than punching up at politicians. Maybe if every single person who stood by their valid moral principles was convinced to abandon them, it would’ve changed the outcome. I don’t know how that’s supposed to be achieved, exactly, aside from trying to shame people for having morals, which I don’t expect to be particularly effective.

Alternatively, instead of changing the public in order to be in line with what politicians want, we could change politicians to be in line with what voters want. I think the word for that is “democracy.”

If the status quo was enough to address Trumpism, then why is Trump president?

I don’t say that the two parties are exactly the same, but 1) they will both lead to the same result and 2) they are both fundamentally unacceptable.

The democrats are not “the tourniquet party.” Tourniquets stop bleeding, the democrats want to cause more bleeding. They are the “stab your femoral artery again” party. They don’t fix shit.

If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress.

If you pull it all the way out that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that’s below, that the blow made. And they haven’t even begun to pull the knife out, much less pull, heal the wound…

They won’t even admit the knife is there.

Throughout history, there have been plenty of times when people supported genocide on the premise that it prevented some greater threat. I’m not aware of a single time in history where that position was the correct one.