daltotron @ daltotron @lemmy.ml

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1 yr. ago

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.

this is THE first time I've seen a link to a mastodon page anywhere on my lemmy feed. insane

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.

He's also one of the only democrats that's refused to sign the PRO act iirc, so I don't think he's, uhhh, pro labor either, which is a somewhat large issue I would say

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.

I mean arguably we could've done all of that with nasa if nasa had received a similar level of funding to SpaceX, but that's kind of getting into alt-history.

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.

I believe they are what is known as a "low effort troll"

I mean we do have a pretty good indication of a quite large impending factor which may cause a lot of them to collapse in the coming years, and which could collectively be attributed to them pretty well, especially within the last 50 years.

I mean I'm generally skeptical of like "this one weird 19th century ideology can solve all our problems" schtick, right, and I'm also skeptical of the mythical single tax systems, as a kind of simplified and idealistic compromise between your libertarians, your anarchists, and your more standard socialists and communists.

If you were to ask me in more detail, I would basically say that I think it's a compromise solution for an extremely narrow set of problems that too often gets extrapolated into encompassing the entirety of a political system. I think that it functions well enough as an ideology within a specific set of constraints and goals, but if you seek to extrapolate it solve like, every political problem, as georgists generally tend to do, then it kind of falls apart, and doesn't tend to be broad enough.

It's basically just a less generalized version of marxism, to me, where land is equivalent in the system to capital, and rent-seeking behavior is only really banned from interference with whatever resources are seen as natural, which is primarily land. I dunno. I think as I slowly go more insane and become more cranky, I find myself increasingly wanting a horrible authoritarian state that just does exactly what I want, because everything I like is awesome, and everything everyone else thinks is bad and evil or whatever.

yeah georgism is crap though

but the government has to be pretty authoritarian in order to pull it off

I dunno if that's a super necessary element, really. I think they could probably get off better, actually, if they had a more lenient prison system, and, say, didn't execute people for minor weed possession or like, being gay. But then I also think their economy relies on a large portion of oppressed migrant labor, if I remember right? I dunno, somebody fact check me on that

MLK did advocate for pacifism for all but the last few months of his life

I mean this is sort of reframed with the context that he was assassinated for making that turn away from pacifism. I'm not saying that it was the wrong decision even given the hindsight we have now, but it does recontextualize it.

I mean I would just get rid of the GOP if that were a viable option. and probably also the political system in which we live, as a whole.

I do think more realistically though the only point I'm making is that it's a kind of insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome, without understanding why they're able to poison pill anything and everything and roll back any advancements as soon as they feel that the public pressure has let up enough. There's a deeper issue there beyond just the lack of public housing, an issue that causes that lack of public housing in the first place, and simply building massive amounts of public housing, even if we were able to do that, which would be quite a feat, and something I would be happy about, even that would be a temporary solution, as we've seen.

I mean yeah, but I'm not sure we won't just poison pill them again as soon as the metronome swings back around and keeps us from having anything nice.

The problem is the rentier class has the most resources to throw against this and they still can find other ways to rescarcify housing unless forced building programs are big enough to over power them.

Yeah, we probably just need to get rid of the rentier class. I don't like them very much, I think they might be bad.

So if we can elect like, any old fuck now, can't we just go even older and elect the corpse of mao or something? cause that's kinda the only way I see rent, and rent specifically, becoming a non-issue in the near future. This is like one of the main issues which is directly symptomatic of capitalism, and which keeps capitalism as a system directly propped up. I don't really see any long term solution to it that doesn't involve a lot of no longer having capitalism. Other capitalist countries still have this problem. It's only like, china and the former soviet union and apparently barcelona with superblocks which are still gonna be subject to market demands and rates, it's only those countries which are going to be constructing such an excess of housing that a good amount of it can remain empty, which is also the case here as well but with the caveat that we still have massive amounts of homelessness and the empty housing is basically just to increase demand on top of straight up not having enough housing even were we to construct mass housing projects.

I dunno, this is a pretty good encapsulation of why we are specifically incredibly fucked and how this incrementalism isn't going to work at all to address our current issues. We're cooked, lads. Get the titanic band to start playing the song or whatever.