lemonaz

Bookmarking this. Well put.

bullets and bombs

I think it’s enough to just do: arrests of leaders (and banning them from public speaking but for life) + breaking up the party + outlawing the party + banning people who decide to take up the mantle of/act as a declared proxy for the party and attempt to visibly pick up where they left off.

That last one I learned from my own country’'s current situation: in Romania, a crazy far right candidate came out of nowhere (on the wings of illegal undisclosed campaign donations) to win the first round, and as soon as that happened our mainstream far right party’s candidate started supporting him. Then they canceled the election because of the undisclosed donations (he literally declared 0 campaign spending!) so now, in the redo of the election, this other guy is basically running as his proxy and will likely try to appoint him PM if he wins.

Exactly. That ratchet works on power.

Why not both?

They been sayin too, for 900 pages and hours of videos.

Always has been.

Mf is acting like whether or not you have a job isn’t life and death for the majority of people. That’s why people were upset with him — not because of an avatar but because their existence depends on their ability to find a job.

There have been countless stories of tourists trying to take them home followed by the bomb squad clearing part of an airport.

Jfc…

Oh, I’m happy for you!

I’m also in Europe but a little too far east for my liking. Thinking about leaving as well (not far, just a few countries over, somewhere nice).

Yeah, it looks like America will get much worse before it gets better.

Exactly, that’s what I was getting at. I’d find it intolerable to live like that (which is what fuels their bigotry, no doubt).

I’m very sorry to hear about your experiences. I hope you’re able to shield yourself from harm until this regrettable period can be overcome. Stay safe.

my tiny violin was repossessed

I gotchu fam:

That’s certainly a part of it, especially the performative cruelty to own the libs. Though I think it goes beyond one group targeting another. It feels like a broad generic metastasized bigotry: a low-trust society full of people so high on their own grievances that they love nothing more than taking revenge on strangers. Sure, racism makes it more likely they target minorities, but that doesn’t mean everyone else is safe. When people are this paranoid, they’re just looking for reasons to blame anybody who gives them a bad “vibe” (which is most people). And they revel in it.

I know it’s not everyone behaving like this, and yes some do it more than others (e.g. uneducated white men), but it sure feels like so many people of all races/genders/etc. are fine just outsourcing their cruelty to the regime. It doesn’t matter if the targets are one race or the other, they hate them all the same (they’ll make up reasons on the spot) because they’ve learned either to take sadistic pleasure in the cruelty itself (i.e. the cruelty is the point and the target is just the “object” the cruelty is applied to, feeling just as good to them when it’s a brown Venezuelan man or a white Canadian woman) or simply to ignore it, excuse it and just not care.

It’s like Orwell’s two minutes of hate, all the time and for no reason.

Looks like someone’s been praxising.

Honestly, it’s even worse than racism. It’s just full on indiscriminate cruelty. I’ve seen people not caring even if they’re white, just zero empathy and full-throated cheerleading. They just tell themselves “they’re criminals” and don’t want to accept the reality that’s staring them in the face — probably because of the implication (that they’ve been downplaying MAGA’s words and actions for so long while “alarmist leftists” were trying to warn them, making them complicit in the horrors of today).

Respect? Who said I respect them? But letting nazis win to spite the libs is suicidal. Now not only do you get zero progressive policies through (which will kill people), you also need to spend all your energy fighting for your existing rights (which will kill people) and weathering the storm (which will kill people).

Also, remember my initial objection was to you lumping Bernie in with the corpo Dems, despite you yourself admitting that they rigged the primary (and if you won’t say against who, then I’ll say it: against Bernie).

PS: I’m done with this conversation.

Maybe you should go back to reddit and complain about voter shaming or something.

Wow, I had no idea they went so far as to specifically outlaw it. That’s insanely evil and all the more reason to stop wasting votes on third parties… which may not matter anymore given the way things are rapidly deteriorating…

You’re clinging to semantics here, which is very frustrating — and honestly not helpful at all except for edgy leftists who can’t stand engaging pragmatically with electoralism because it makes them feel dirty.

When I say pro-democracy, I mean they’re not explicitly anti-democracy, that is not explicitly pro-dismantling-democracy-forever-with-high-priority the way the other guys demonstrably are. So yes, given the context, we’re grading on a curve here — obviously. That’s why we say they’re the lesser evil as opposed to “the good guys”. Jesus fuck, some people really want to be the smuggest person in the death camp. Right now Bernie’s your only shot, but I’m not your boss, keep shitting on him.

It’s clear as day that they sabotoged the whole process.

And who did they sabotage it against? Jesus Christ!

Not sure… Care to elaborate?

EDIT: I’m looking at someone who did a deep dive on this. I don’t know what to say, I hope it’s not that, but it could be…

People say that but in practice third parties don’t end up with many votes, so there’s a disconnect: either the current third parties aren’t known or appealing enough, or people aren’t voting them because they’re scared of throwing their vote away (a consequence of FPTP), or there’s some serious disenfranchisement going on and that requires fixing the system before third parties will be viable. Hell, even the Dems are barely viable, they always eek out victories even when winning the popular vote. All that gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement probably hits third parties way harder.

My guess is that third parties will only be viable when something like Ranked Choice Voting gets implemented instead of First Past The Post. Also, a better selection of third parties because the current one is kinda pathetic.