retrospectology

@retrospectology@lemmy.world
0 Post – 369 Comments
Joined 2 months ago

A vote for neoliberals is a vote to not have fascism for four more years.

That's an extremely hard case to make at this point though when the "not" fascist guy is funding a genocide and refusing to entertain the measures we'd need to take to actually take the fight to the fascists (ex. Championing an effort to pack the supreme court). Neoliberals are not truly acting like democracy is on the line, they say it a lot but it's not what their actions communicate, which makes it difficult to believe they'd ever stop obstructing progress.

Neoliberals don't stop or stall fascists by getting into power -- they just soft sell it and give the general public time to acclimate to the slipping of the Overton window. They do this in service of corporate interests rather than theocracy the way the far-right does but it ends us up in the same place.

If the plan is to try and encourage the Democrats to have primaries that actually have the power to move the party left, now is not the time to withhold a vote in protest as there’s a good chance that even if it did convince them, there’d never be another election that wasn’t rigged so they’d lose it no matter how popular they were.

Now is the time that the Democratic establishment chooses to try to strong arm the left into voting for them, they do this every election; claim the sky is falling and that we must vote for them or else. So I guess my view is, if they have assessed that they can risk playing a game of chicken, so can voters.

I understand Project 2025 and its seriousness, but that problem is going to be there every election from here until such a time that the GOP dissolves. I'm skeptical that 4 years will allow them to achieve everything they want to without sweeping the house and senate too. The president cannot legally be crowned king, and if they try to do that perhaps that is what it will take to actually radicalize the self-sedated upper middle-class liberals and political fence-sitters.

I'm sick of defensive leadership, and any offensive needs to start with attacking the Democratic structure that's making the party so ineffectual and complicit. More time is not enough in my opinion, people were talking about GOP plans to capture the supreme court as far back as Bush Jr. and giving Democrats wins achieved nothing. They need to be forced to take it seriously and I just don't see that happening without some pain (for them and, unfortunately, us).

Yerp, it just reinforces him looking inflexible and old, committed more to some personal fantasy than what's actually best for the country in reality.

People do understand that concept, but it's literally what Democrats have been doing for the past 40 years and it has put us right here where we are right now. The "lesser of two evils" thing just has no propellant left, no one is buying that line anymore. Neoliberalism needs to go before Democrats can start winning again.

You need to understand that people have been saying "just put the neolibs in power again and we'll work to improve things" every election cycle, and now we are closer to fascism than we've literally ever been. You at least understand why people see that strategy as a failure, right? Like, you understand why no one believes it anymore?

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So this happened under Obama. People voted blue no matter who, gave Dems a super majority and they used it to pass a GOP-crafted bill that forced people to pay for useless private insurance.

The party itself needs to change and the types of candidates that the establishment supports needs to change. That doesn't happen when they can do their pied piper thing and keep winning. And no "just one last hit" won't let them overcome the addiction to corporate conservativism.

Yes, Hillary and the DNC allowed Trump to win by ignoring their base and chasing imaginary "swing" voters. And now they're doing it again.

Heels-dug-in defiance to the idea is not reassuring.

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No ones moving goal posts. Give a ballpark of how many immigrants were involved in those 122 attacks.

You're making the argument that brown immigrants are more dangerous than Europeans and you're then trying to exclude all types of violent crime except that labeled terror attacks to obfuscate the reality that immigrants are statistically no more dangerous than Europeans themselves. It's dishonest.

Even in terms of terrorism, the majority has historically been committed by domestic groups (ex. nationalists, political extremists, separatists etc.), not immigrants. Again, this is very similar to my own country where domestic terrorism is actually the greater threat than that from immigrants.

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Whipping up fear about brown immigrants is what the right does when there is no wedge issue.

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So, even if we assume those 122 attacks were committed by immigrants, how does that compare to violent crimes committed by Europeans themselves? 122 incidents over 9 years is remarkably low for a single demographic. How many bad actors is that per event? How many immigrants are there total and how many committed these crimes?

It's racist fear mongering.

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The rich making money off immigration isn't an issue with the immigrants, it's that we don't force companies to pay all their workers the same wage, regardless of status. That's a regulatory problem, not an immigration problem.

Because people that tell us low wages (not GDP increase but working class wages for locals), high house prices, and other things people mention like losing culture and crime increasing isn’t an issue. So what would it take for it to be an issue.

None of this is related to immigration. Immigrants aren't raising housing prices. With crime you have to actually prove that that's immigrants committing more crimes than Europeans and what kind of crime. They call brown immigrants criminals and rapists here too, and it's simply not true, they commit crimes at the same rate as citizens.

You have to understand that this is a pattern we see over, and over throughout history; when fascists want to seize control they blame immigrants for all of socieyies woes. And they do so only with rhetoric or twisted facts, not the truth.

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Yeah, I know all about that, they use the " brown immigrants are terrorists" in my country too in order to exploit people's latent racism.

To have a point you'd have to compare those instances to violence by Europeans against eachother, by being selective you're feeding a narrative that brown immigrants are more violent than Europeans. That's already been demonstrated to be false. You're being manipulated by fascists.

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This is what happens when you try to substitute undecided voters for your progressive base. It's always been a dumb, high-risk strategy, but it's the only way neoliberals can put off being phased out.

Court packing is the solution. It's been suggested that the number of justices be increased to something like 20-30 (similar to the next lowest court is right now) and then judges be rotated out to other federal positions every few years (effectively a term limit in the SC itself).

This achieves two things 1) It allows for each administration to make appointments to the court as a routine matter, making it difficult to capture the court for generations at a time 2) the amount of judges waters down the influence of the extremist dipshits. We know this works because, as we saw in the past, even lunatics like Alito were kept in check when the court was not majority far-right.

People would vote for nearly anybody else. The reason this race is close is not because Trump is popular, it's because Biden is a dogshit candidate. His advisors and friends desperately need to convince him of that.

The part where Lot ("the only righteous man in Sodom and Gemorrah") gets drunk and sleeps with his daughters would be a good one I think.

Yang's a grifter.

Yes, because these debates are not won by whoever is more factual, they're won by whoever has better rhetoric, which is why it's such a fool's errand for Biden to undertake it to begin with.

People who vote based on facts aren't going to learn anything new watching this debate, this is a circus for low-information voters who decide to vote based on "vibe".

Biden isn't too old, he's too mentally incompetent and decrepit.

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With the way the DNC is it would be Harris or, more likely, Hillary Clinton.

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I think in regards specifically to the question of resolution, that anti-fingerprint setting will start your browser at a smaller, set resolution. The problem is nothing prevents you from just expanding the window, so it's not a very strong solution in that aspect.

We're all feeling unwell I think.

There doesn't have to be a strong candidate, just anyone stronger than Biden who's basically zombie-crawling across the floor.

He absolutely can be replaced at this stage, and by nearly anyone.

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Technically Hakeem Jeffries endorsed Bowman and donated a couple thousand dollars, but he certainly didn't make much noise about it. I think that was more for deniability after the fact, Jeffries himself is on the AIPAC payroll.

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If "their right to exist" weren't used to mean "their right to take land from Palestinians and create settlements in land they took through violence" it would be a bit simpler to agree with the statement, but the foundation of Israel itself has always been on pretty shakey ground. The only reason Israel has a right to exist is because it's impractical that they'd leave at this point. They should leave the land they've stolen though.

It's the blood pumping through your arteries. I used to get this even in my teens after very long walks. You're literally just feeling your own pulse as your heart works a bit harder to meet your body's elevated demand for blood/oxygen.

I'm not sure why it seems to be more apparent after milder activity, but maybe something like walking doesn't dialate your blood vessels so much so there's a bit more pressure at certain points?

If you want to confirm its your blood vessels and not muscles, check your pulse as it's happening and see if its the same rythmn.

As far as I know it's normal, since I was in peak physical condition at that age (a lot of athletics, running etc.) but if it seems unusual for you personally I guess bring it up to a doctor.

Yes, Trump is extremely racist. He's also a right-winger, so that's a given. The distinction between someone horrible like Trump and his opposition should be that the opposition is not horribly racist and fascist and doesn't do things like fund a genocide.

I don't vote for Democrats because of their label, I vote based on their potential to actually be meaningfully better. Biden is indistinguishable from your rank and file Republican, and while that's "slightly less bad" than Trump himself, it's not good enough. I am not a Republican, and I will not vote for representatives who share so many of their views. Biden needs to go, he's going to cost the Democrats the election.

This is the way the DNC set their rules up, they've been ok using the system to kneecap progressives, I see no reason that they shouldn't do that to Biden. I'm not precious about the DNC and I have no illusion that it's democratic, so they just need to stop pretending they're being held back by principles and just pull the levers they always pull to control the convention outcome.

All the Abrahamic religions are death cults. It's just as morbid as muslim sects that force women to dress head to toe black robes or w/e. The extremism just becomes part of the scenery when you're around it, but it's all objectively bizzare.

Like think about it, these religions were literally invented by bronze age goat herds who thought the earth was flat and covered by a dome, and people in the modern day still believe in them. It's literally group insanity.

It would be like someone who still believes in the greek gods or something.

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The Abrahamic religions are based on superstious oral traditions that extend into the bronze age. They are a hodge podge of cults and spiritual traditions that got absorbed as tribes genocided eachother over the millenia. Taking over a conquered group's pantheon is a regular occurrence throughout history, similar to how the Romans took Christianity and adapted it. There are remnants in the torah/old testament of the stitching together of different polytheistic religious narratives that eventually became the Abrahamic traditions.

I don't really care about technical specifics of when any given era of the Abrahamic religions began, believing in invisible skymen is not the same as a material tool or a mathematical proof. It's a bunch of bullshit stories people told eachother for why the rain fell or why lightning happened, it belongs in the past, there's no excuse to still believe it now.

Yeah, having to listen to Steve Innskeep gleefully break the news of Bowman's defeat on NPR this morning was not a great way to start the day.

And of course NPR frames it as confirmation that voters support genocide, not that AIPAC uses GOP money to sabotage the Democratic party. Their reporting is getting worse and worse by the day.

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I appreciate the spirit, but people who read books are probably the wrong demographic to aim this kind of messaging at.

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I wish there was somewhere one could go to escape idiots for good. So tired of living alongside braindead morons.

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Yup, what's important for people to understand is that AIPAC is the single largest source of GOP money in Democratic primaries and campaigns.

They take money from right-wing billionaires and use it to back right-wing Democrats who they know can be relied upon to be obstructionist.

AIPAC funding needs to be banned within the party, same as they did with the NRA who tried to do the same thing.

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Hopefully it's a painful enough lesson he never comes near politics again.

Oohh, that's a good way to potentially break this. Just download a ton of useless stuff and upload it onto OneDrive. People could make this service really expensive for Microsoft.

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It's crazy that anyone believes they're going to glean anything from this. What question do people think is going to get resolved here? Is there anyone who seriously doesn't already have their mind made up about both of these guys?

Trump is going to do his vague, rambling spiel about how immigrants are rapists and gish gallop around the stage while Biden is going to get all misty-eyed about how much pork barrel spending he managed to pass over his term and give a bunch of empty euphemisms about "coming together" or w/e. Maybe say something racist about Palestine.

What are people hoping to get out of this? Honest question.

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I've been watching a lot of shiey on youtube and it makes me want to train hop. I went wandering for a few years when I was younger and I miss it sometimes, I hitch hiked all over, but never train hopped and now I'm a bit too tied down I probably won't get the opportunity.

Not a regret exactly, but I do miss the freedom of living out of a bag and just waking up and traveling anywhere you want on a whim with no set dates or requirements other than making sure you have food and water.

They're pretty bad on Israel, yeah. All Things Considered is particularly terrible.

Innskeep and Mary Louise Kelly get me pissed of more than anyone else. Or Ayesha Roscoe. They're all terrible interviewers.

Ok, so I'm not the only one who noticed that their spam has a weird taste to it. It's got that vibe of some agreeable left-wing content but then feels likes it only there to mask authoritarian narrative building.