it just takes a particular kind of brain utterly boiled by campism to describe a system where 'anyone can run...if they join the party, are approved by the party, and voted on by the party' as more democratic than competitive bourgeois democracy in practice.

One of the biggest messaging mistakes we've been making is treating the American voter with respect. They deserve none. We need more slop served faster

in a similar vein, it's very underexplored how we overemphasize the boomers' teenage and college years, as if the hippies from the 80s onward didn't become all about freedom from taxes, medicine and education, all while denying their collective responsibility like the rest of that shit generation

tbh this was probably a precursor to the election results

They talk like this because they hate normies and are kind of glad to see normies suffer under fascism

Is it terribly “old person” of me to say I want the internet from 20 years ago back? Blogs! Websites! Forums! All that!

(I-WA) John demsoc -young socialist -unregistered as Democrat after 2020 primary -“erm actually we must work with the working class fascists who could totally be won over by leftist politics”

so if you view naziism as a system of racial terror and *nothing else*, the jim crow south and nazi germany seem like natural ideological and geopolitical allies but that’s of course not accurate and flattens a lot. then resisting that flattening gets read as jim crow apologetics, which it isn’t.

Yes. I struggle to see the point of defending modern democracy after the past 5 years. The Churchillian argument was always that mass democracy at least held society to some form of middle ground, but thats clearly no longer true.

The founding fathers were right. Democracy is too important to be left to the American people

This is why the optimal model for democracy is the theoretically but not really accountable eurocrat. The wishes of the unwashed mob need to be diluted by at least 3 levels of bureaucracy or shit starts going wrong

The argument against democracy, at least as early as Plato, is that the demos is not sufficiently rational and too easily swayed by demagogues to be trusted with power. Of course, Athenian democracy was very different and modern communication tech makes a huge difference, but it’s awfully relevant.

That apartheid state was basically dismantled within 20 years of World War II, and that had a lot to do with being against fascism and the experience of WWII. This is classic activist history, where if you aren't socialist revolutionary, you're a de facto fascist.

“You think you’re part of a proud tradition that can draw upon powerful unifying national symbols and myths? No, IDIOT, actually the white nationalists are right about what this country is”

walking around the no-kings protest smirking at all the earnest retired schoolteachers carrying American flags: “actually you’re not fighting fascism. dunces. rubes. fools.”

It is 1977, the nation faces all-consuming moral crisis, terrified Democrats ignore it and focus on healthcare reform It is 2009, the nation faces all-consuming moral crisis, terrified Democrats ignore it and focus on healthcare reform It is 2025, the nation faces all-consuming moral crisis, terri

Ironically, this is a far more crushing repudiation of liberalism than the voters making an informed decision based on their moral principles.

i went through my childhood for *this*?

Human beings on the bottom: Who do those rich fucks think they are, lording over us? The injustice! Human beings upon reaching the top: You know, the view from up here is pretty nice.

believing your physical appearance has any correlation to your goodness or heart is actual medieval peasant shit

One of the funnier things in politics is when people (particularly anarchists) say that nationalism and xenophobia are elite-driven phenomena

People talking about low trust in media but not enough talk about if the media has done to deserve to be trusted

last time I'm retweeting this post but it did remind me of this quote from John Bingham, America's Forgotten Framer

stalin did literally nothing for decolonization. the USSR did actually have a golden age! it was under fucking Khrushchev, but all of you fucking people are obsessed with one of the most brutal, incompetent despotates in human history.

Overall, TV and podcasting have been cultural disasters that are unraveling a hard won-literacy based communication culture and replacing it with a more primal audio-visual one

Again, none of these people know anything about anything. They turn to leftism because they think that by age 30 they should have had the disposable income, savings, and homes that their parents got from not going to Bard but grinding in boring corporate office parks for 25 years

I know I complain about this shit all the time, but one of the ways in which that ‘national conservatism’ is fake is because they’re supposedly all about responding to low social trust and balkanization, while also being also fully on board with the SOCIAL TRUST ANNIHILOTRON, BALKANIZATION-MAXER 300

No. Presidents until now have mostly attempted to implement campaign promises. Politicians get into office and generally attempt to do what they said they'd do - so much so that it's a scandal, when they break their word. But Trump just literally had a secret plan to destroy the government!

This mindset is also so fucking lazy. Guess it’s not actually bad and there’s no reason to do anything! Completely decadent and privileged mindset that you can only get from the kind of person who thinks posting is activism.

I generally believe the people here who profess their hatred for liberals and liberalism. I don’t think they’re poor misguided souls; their attitude to state oppression is roughly “the wrong people are oppressed.”

I think if a significant portion of the left did believe in the 'Manufacturing Consent' thesis, Democrats in Disarray/The Dems Sold Us Out! articles would be a lot less popular than they are now

"Allowed to do that" what a fucking waste of space

The argument seems to be that if Dems don't have a bulletproof plan for making sure Republicans can never hurt us again, we might as well just let the Republicans do it and get it over with. And of course that's not how rights or politics work. It's like people are looking for an excuse to give up.

I would agree with this if the farmers did not overwhelmingly vote for this destructive policy. At this point they're just plundering the rest of us to bail themselves out for their own stupidity

the view from nowhere allows no principles, so the only vice it acknowledges is hypocrisy. if you don't care about being a hypocrite, it has no power over you

They do this because they want Trump to not be an aberration. The idea that US hegemony is a world-historical evil is baked into their ideology, and if there's a big gulf between Trump and Bush, that hurts their argument.

The thing is, there are a lot of people out there who are kind of moderate voters but not super political, who love reality TV like Golden Bachelor and other pop culture shit like that, and he has to appeal to those voters too, not just the usually politically active.

We're getting a wave of articles that are like, "gee willikers it sure seems like the people who complained about 'cancel culture' for years really like canceling people." Yes! This was extremely obvious at the time and a lot of us pointed it out!

Unlimited Vendée on farmers

This is the only website where most users realize farmers suck ass as far as I can tell

I'm a single issue voter now, my issue: revenge

Slavery abolitionists were liberals and liberal political ascendancy was the direct cause of the extinction of slavery

Hampster Dance

Without automation the vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their time farming just so they can eke out meager existence

We have automation to thank for that. And weekends, while we're at it

For most of human existence, everybody had to work, and they had to work almost their entire lives, because production was not efficient enough to support a substantial number of non-working people in a community