Historically far right authoritarians have been surprisngly good at aesthetics and wrapping their shit ideology in aesthetics. The nazis had Hugo Boss for designing their uniforms. Their propagandists created visual language for films we still use today. They were evil bastards who made it look appealing to the regular citizen.
It’s worse they’re scared the government will go after their families. It’s not fear for themselves.
The problem is there could be a looot of time between now and that obituary for him to fuck up a lot of things.
Case and point Henry Kissinger.
“Refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction” is exactly what the other poster did. My “that’s not how reality works” was the next step after “if people spontaneously see how I see voting they’d vote third party too” my argument referring to how people don’t just spontaneously change their mind and vote third party en masse.
Instead they retorted with some vague nebulous “people know how reality works” implying that people know The System™ is corrupt and flawed, which sure they get the instinct it is but don’t actually know why or how it is corrupt and flawed. Which is not what I was talking about. It doesn’t actually refute my point or the description of the exact conversation I’ve had dozens of times. It pretty much always goes the same way, as I described it.
First Past the Post always leads to 2 dominant parties, the last time in us history there was a 3rd party that won one party died and another party split itself in 2. Those conditions are what is most likely to get a third party in the US, and any amount of wishful thinking about the populace suddenly wishing up and just voting 3rd party is delusional magical thinking at best.
There isn’t much more textbook of an example of a strawman you can get in the wild.
Correction, that’s not how reality works in terms of voting systems, you’d be surprised just how few people actually understand how voting systems work and why different voting systems break down in various ways and the greatest mathematicians for the last 150+ years have not devised a perfect voting system.
But at this point, you took my conclusion about how the reality of voting systems break down and strawmanned it implying people already know government is corrupt.
At this point, we get to make a lengthy explanation about First Past the Post always leading to a 2 party system because of the spoiler effect, we get to a lengthy history explanation about how the (at the time) progressive republican party won the election with Abraham Lincoln because the (at the time) conservative Democrat party split into Dixiecrats in favor of slavery and northern Democrats who didn’t care either way and the Whig party just up and died in 1850 and that’s the only way a 3rd party becomes viable in FPTP. And then we just argue back and forth of “well if people just spontaneously saw things the way I do they would vote third party too!” to “That’s not how reality works.”
One point of clarification after I say there were people who just didn’t vote, I also intended to say add Republicans launched several purges of voter registrations that tended to hit anyone further to the left of them and employed every voter suppression tactic in the book to depress Democrat voter turnout.
I think Dems lost because a some of missteps along the way and some external factors. I think Biden should have said he wasn’t running again sooner, there should have been a proper primary, there needed to be even more of a focus on economic populism and making actual progress, not just trying to maintain the status quo. There were a lot of people who just didn’t vote. And then Republicans
At the end of the day, the only people who have an opinion about Palestine are politically engaged leftists who want to see the genocide stop and anyone watching Fox News who wants Israel to win. For the rest of America unfortunately, it doesn’t matter to them. That’s a fight happening halfway around the world between 2 nations that aren’t us.
I would have loved to see a peaceful end to the conflict, but that’s wasn’t going to realistically happen either way, but I would much preferred to see as little escalation as possible, and trump is nothing but escalation.
So again, we punished democrats in the way democracy punishes people who actually believe in democratic processes and let republicans who don’t give 2 shits about democratic processes get to run rampant in the government. Good. Fucking. Job.
Reducing all kinds of violence to the same Violence™ does nothing to address the myriad ways that different kinds of violence happen. All these different kinds of violence makes each kind of violence more manageable that trying to stop Violence™. Focusing on different kinds of violence let’s us allocate resources and attention and research toward dealing with it.
A domestic assault is a much different kind of violence to 2 drunk guys fighting it out to a mobster telling his underlings to “take someone out.” All of these things need/have different things to handle them. Shelters for domestic abuse creates somewhere safe to go, bouncers will break up a fight and kick the brawlers out, for organized crime there RICO legislation.
Stopping All Violence™ is too big of a task for any one person or organization to handle.
I don’t like violence either, so much of it leads to unnecessary loss of life and limb and innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire. But lumping all together into Violence™ brings us no closer to resolving conflicts before the start or helping people when things do go wrongf
If more people had made more noise when Biden continually violated the Leahy Law and circumvented Congress to provide arms to an ongoing genocide… We had a chance to fix the system. To hold him accountable and make sure no matter who was the next president, they’d also be able to be held accountable.
Citizens did make noise, citizens did point out that he violated Leahy Law, and the way to hold politicians accountable in a democracy is getting them out of office and away from the levers of power. Well here we are, Biden and Dems are going out of office and the genocide is going to be actively being accelerated by the Trump administration gleefully flooding Israel with more weapons “cleanse” Gaza so they can build their gaudy hotels and fulfill some Book of Revelations prophesy because the republican party is absolutely flooded with Dominionists.
Good. Fucking. Job.
Gonna include Trump on that list?
When even the putting puppets are saying Trump’s plan is nonsensical…
On the flipside in the US, our last climate change fueled disaster had rampant conspiracy theories about government weather control devices and FEMA doing… idk something nefarious.
Unfortunately US Billionaires have a lot of societal impact outside of the US. They don’t care about the arbitrary borders that bound us plebians, they have enough money that the borders functionally don’t exist.
The thing with intelligence agencies isn’t about the information they collect or apread but the means and methods of they collect or spread information.
If ABC intelligence agency knows someone is a double agent feeding state secrets to XYZ foreign agency, that double agent can go be unknowingly molded into an asset for ABC by feeding them inaccurate information, or their patterns can be used to uncover other undiscovered agents and gain insights into other potential security holes.
Citation needed.
At least the president in Idocracy had the humility and self awareness let the smartest guy in the room advise him on policy.
Make due with the tools you have at hand.