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Cake day: May 25th, 2024

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  • I mean I do think banning them is a good idea, and in general I think nazis should be taken on helicopter rides, most especially the enablers of nazis, their financial leash handlers which basically bootstrap them into these positions in order to push the dialogue further rightward in service of corporate interests, and probably also in this case in service of “geopolitical security” since we’re going to be seeing oncoming climate refugees in the coming years, and combatting that in any way but increasing the security apparatus is off the table.

    More than that, though, I worry that realistically just banning them, though a great temporary measure, won’t do much, say, five years or a decade down the road, because it’s not gonna solve the core hypocrisies and discrepancies that neoliberalism is not so keen to solve. If you want to actually solve this problem long term then you need to combat those core problems. Instead, though, I think that probably the party being banned will just see them either form a new party, or else tone down their rhetoric to an acceptable degree, or just join the next furthest right party and then decide to push them further right, and so on and so on, until we’ve all collectively just shifted rightward to an incredible degree.

    Ad nauseam, et cetera, regardless of the political apparatuses at work, until collectively the western world plummets towards fascism.


  • The fact that you are not american, and apparently do not understand our political system, means that you probably shouldn’t be talking about our elections. There’s only around 10 states at any given time that actually decide the outcome of a presidential election, by design, and the rest of the states are pretty well locked in, most especially the majority population centers like new york, california, texas, many southern states, cascadia. It’s only realistically medium density states, flooded with suburbs, that are really up for grabs in the EC, which doesn’t necessarily directly correlate with who becomes president. Every state, bubbling from local city districts, to state level districts, are also gerrymandered to shit, which further decreases the power of your vote directly.

    So, if you live in one of those majority population cities or states, your vote basically might as well just be going straight into the paper shredder. You might as well vote for a third party, which, given 5% of the popular vote, could qualify them for federal funding, you might as well vote for a third party to signal to the big two parties in which direction they should lean, you might as well vote for a third party so said third party can understand what their actual activist base is.

    Doubly so when we have further evidence that the marketing of either party doesn’t matter so much when they agree on every other issue regarding their actual political orientation. On economics, they’re both neoliberals. On immigration, they’re both hitting the same line because the only institutional response to the exploitation of latin america and the climate crisis has been to shore up the border militarily. On foreign policy, they are both completely aligned. On social issues, they might seem a little bit different, but I think you’ll find that nobody in the democratic party really takes what is mostly used as an aesthetic ideological divergence seriously, or else they would actually be pulling any number of the levers available to substantially change things. Gay marriage might be legal at the federal level, sure, but see what kamala’s record is as the DA of san francisco, and it’s pretty fucking horrifying, and is obviously something that we know impacts marginalized communities to a greater degree.

    Also don’t hit me with the “oh she was secretly good as the DA”. She was incredibly mid as the DA compared to every other “progressive” DA that san francisco has had, which is an incredibly low bar to still somehow not clear. One side will hit you with “kamala had 2,000 people locked up for marijuana charges”, which is true because when you are arrested you go to jail for sometimes months or even years until trial, most especially when prisons are crowded with marijuana charges or graffiti charges, and then the opposition claps back with “well she only sent 45 people to state prison, which is less than the last guy for state prisons”, despite the fact we have no information for county jails because they refuse to give us those statistics. That’s on top of her deciding to prosecute parents for truancy, which I’m sure can be spun as actually being a good thing rather than a ghoulish curb-stomping of the working class which just needs to buck up and bootstrap themselves under the gentle threat of getting sent to jail, which I’m sure will help kids. I have a lot more then just that, too, and I can hit you with the citations if you actually want to read them. That’s just her, also, a lot of this shit will float around about basically every other “progressive” democratic politician except for maybe bernie, AOC and other members of the squad, and maybe some midwestern politicians that happen to get a simple democratic majority.


  • Hot take but no. I’ve seen no convincing polling on basically any topic that says that the average voter, or, under-educated working class schmuck, is some hardline neoliberal, or free market libertarian. The average tends to skew populist, for pretty obvious reasons.

    There’s also a multibillion dollar propaganda apparatus spinning at all times which is created to convince people that climate change isn’t real, natural gas cookware is good, their lives are actually great, they can work themselves out of the hole and into the dwindling middle class, and government austerity measures are good because the meritocratic private sector will just altruistically innovate and make everything more economically efficient, and if anyone’s getting hurt, then it’s the real poor who aren’t like them at all, because those people are lazy and can’t be changed. So what little anti-populist sentiment we see in the population, I would argue that’s something that’s been pretty deliberately manufactured.


  • It’s also not like local or even state level RCV would realistically be sufficient for these whole sets of overarching problems that the US struggles with. You’re not locally voting for RCV and then gaining the ability to vote for a party that will actually give you healthcare, will connect your city with others via rail to help rework infrastructure, will solve your housing problems and your homelessness, and they probably won’t be solving unemployment. You can maybe vaguely hope that the existence of such a party would put pressure on the federal government to ask “why can’t you do this”, but that would only happen at the state level with one of the states that actually matter, like california or new york or texas, and good luck getting any of those places to go in for RCV considering how strangleheld they are.

    The most you could hope RCV to improve is maybe to make it so you can get someone that’s willing to make your ISP give you free shit, or establish a free ISP, and also maybe to give your town a bunch of roundabouts, and maybe approve some missing middle housing which will probably skyrocket housing prices in the surrounding areas since it won’t really be doing anything to solve the problem at a national level. Which isn’t nothing, right, but that’s kinda boof.







  • It’s fucking so obvious that it boggles my mind that people are still gunning for him and buttigieg and shapiro. They are all power-hungry neoliberal freaks, I don’t understand how this is really in contention at this point. Basically the only thing she can do on the campaign trail is talk, and appoint a rather meaningless VP slot to show her allegiance to some kind of politics that actually gets people out and voting. If she chooses some moderate scumbag because they’re in a swing state, that’s like the fastest way for her to piss away all the good will she’s built up so far. It’s crazy, I don’t understand it.


  • I mean, talk that puts something of hers at stake, theoretically (hardline “we must support israel” voters, which I don’t think really exist in the democratic party, israeli funding, military industrial complex funding, etc.), is talk that is, in and of itself, an action. It could still be a lie, sure, but then it’s a lie that she’s gonna get called out on later and then that’s politically damaging, at least theoretically, especially because it ostracizes her from both the hardline group that wants to support israel and it ostracizes her from the people that actually wanted to do that. Most politicians won’t lie so handily unless they’re real pieces of shit, or unless they think people will just forget. Most politicians will instead try to waffle and weasel and say that oh well I tried to do that guys but it was just too hard! I tried but I couldn’t do it! They try to save face. Taking a hard stance, making a strong commitment, that ensure that you’re sacrificing your ability to save face later on to your voter base, which indicates that you might actually do something.


  • She could’ve easily just ignored that protest, because it doesn’t have anything at all to do with her. The only reason this is still getting democratic backing is because of institutional reasons. The rhetoric about, desert rose, shining star of democracy in the middle east, rings hollow when israel has done jack shit as a strategic ally for us for the past 70+ years other than get us wrapped up in multiple conflicts, use us as a weapons manufacturing base to keep the military industrial complex spinning constantly, and train our cops more and more poorly. I don’t think your average democratic voter wants to keep hearing about this shit, I think your average voter wants to ignore this, or has bigger fish to fry in their immediate future, and I don’t think outside of the republican party, which is swamped by doomsday cult evangelical zionists, there are any real hardline make or break “support israel or bust” guys in the democratic voter base. Maybe your super extremist brainbroken libs, but you’re pretty much guaranteed to have their vote anyways, I think. It’s that phantomic undecided voter that they always come back to. Real Hotelling’s law shit, but they’re like, stuck in a fucked up version of the centrism from the 80’s, eternally, only changing the window dressing.

    This is purely an institutional concern, and the more this comes up, the less time she has to actually show anything substantive to people. She doesn’t understand how tenuous and ethereal her meme momentum is. People are satisfied with her now because she’s not joe biden, and because she actually has a chance to beat trump, maybe, but after that satisfaction evaporates and the coconut tree and brat memes fall off with their half life of like, probably two weeks or less, she’s gonna need something better than just “vote blue no matter who or else fascism will destroy democracy”, or else it’s just going to fucking beam us with the exact cynicism that’s been the case for like the last two elections. She could even just fucking lie, and say as president she’ll appoint more people to the supreme court, and reverse the reversal of roe v. wade, and even if she doesn’t do that, the issue would probably still be a huge winner for her and help get her elected. But the more time she spends on israel’s fuckups the more she’s going to tread water, and if you’re not moving forwards, you’re sliding backwards.



  • That’s kind of assuming they can’t just find any other freak to take command while doing everything the foundations and conservative PACs and corporate donors want. I don’t actually think trump really has all that much charisma beyond his slightly flamboyant mannerisms and his weird accent that I’ve never heard anywhere else. They could pretty easily replace him with some other brainworm candidate, probably get someone way younger and slightly more well-spoken, lose maybe like, 10% of the diehard trump supporters, and then gain back those numbers and more after running their candidate for like five months and trying to ride with slightly more centrist appeal.

    Trump isn’t like, the end of this, he’s just a kind of canary in the coal mine for what’s to come, because the conditions which created him still exist and are actively worsening pretty much all the time. It’s not gonna end with him.



  • Yeah, unfortunately people don’t understand that, of the IT guys and linux users and sysadmins that are gonna be most likely to want to migrate over here as a result of reddit going to shit, a lot of those are going to be furries and trans people, sure. But the other half of that demographic is gonna be the most incredible middle class financial anxiety liberal grifter white dudes you’ve ever seen, no question.


  • I just mean that I don’t think they were a good faith interlocutor. Probably if I were to put a specific explanation on it, I’d say that they are probably tired of having the same argument over and over again and being corrected repetitively, to the point where they’re not genuinely engaging anymore, I’ve seen that a lot. Especially with how quickly they backed out but also still left a comment. I dunno if that level of bad faith would be considered trolling in the strictest sense, but I would probably still classify it as such.



  • Depends on the writer. You get a superman DC writer, homelander probably gets treated like every other fascist superman beats up. If it’s a “the boys” writer, homelander probably uses kryptonite to rip superman in half in a graphic full-page spread or some shit. You’re also gonna be dealing with, are we dropping superman into the relatively hopeless universe of the boys, are we dropping homelander into the DC universe, where he’ll probably be right st home with like 30 different characters almost exactly like him, will we come up with some portal stuff, what’s going on there

    So I dunno, depends on the writer. Ke personally I’d prefer if superman won, cause it’s more hopeful and less garth ennis-y.