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On August 07 2025 22:13 LightSpectra wrote:Show nested quote +On August 07 2025 20:45 Uldridge wrote:
Ban social media. The echo chamber is too strong. Left people seem more unhinged because they are so... visible. They shout and do weird things. While fascists... they just kinda like uniforms.
But the right wing is just much better in using the medium to capture negative sentiment towards their ideological enemies (i.e. everyone not them). IMO: social media is not inherently the problem. The problem is they're tuned to reward people for saying the most infuriatingly stupid and mean-spirited shit imaginable. It's literally paying people to have the worst vices of humanity.Now add into the equation how easy it is for troll farms owned by nations or wealthy partisan malefactors to flood the zone. We're never going back to a world without social media, but it can be regulated back into the pre-Facebook/Twitter era to stop encouraging extremism and disinformation.
That's capitalism. If people don't want that, they don't want capitalism.
It's businesses believing they can exploit those vices/algorithms for profit (knowingly/intentionally at the expense of society) which is an indispensable step in the cycle.
Might as well try to regulate away profit while maintaining capitalism.
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On August 07 2025 23:15 GreenHorizons wrote:
..
Might as well try to regulate away profit while maintaining capitalism.
Uhm... Are you of the imagination that everyone here is against taxes, social systems, regulations and goverments setting the rules for trade/business?
Because else your post makes not the least bit of sense or I have missed all the anarcho capitalists constantly posting about how the marked will solve everything in here (and pretty much anywhere else)....
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Northern Ireland25363 Posts
On August 07 2025 19:21 Uldridge wrote:
Once you've lost the optics game towards your base: spineless, pocketed, donor class puppets, ... it's going to be a very difficult road to redemption imo.
People don't tend to grab the hand that did't reach out to them because it was too busy admiring the golden rings it's wearing and worrying how mangled it might be if they'd actually reach out.
Time for Wombat to come out and rightfully point out how bad my analogy game is lol.
Your analogy game is grand, I mean it ain’t mine but few’s are :p I kid
My issue with the one prior wasn’t the analogy, but I felt you misidentified the phenomenon. I felt it was a good analogy, attached to the wrong thing was all!
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Northern Ireland25363 Posts
On August 07 2025 20:01 LightSpectra wrote:
Republicans can be child rapists and murderers and Democrats are annoying. Tough choice.
It's honestly surreal listening to political discourse these days. I wonder if there's any records of people in Nazi concentration camps saying "at least the SPD didn't win".
Zam-bro somewhat wears their hearts on their sleeves with their posts, one can almost feel the frustration dripping out of the screen. But, combined with their general history of posting, I think their point(s) can be dismissed due to their tone, despite having more than a grain of truth in them.
It’s been Shrodinger’s leftist for as long as I’ve been vaguely political conscious. Simultaneously not important enough to seriously court, but important enough to lose you elections. Not just in the States by any means either, seen it plenty in the UK and elsewhere.
Allied to that, and the bigger problem is the centre will frequently throw the left under the bus, and still lose.
If this isn’t a one-cycle thing, but a consistent pattern one observes over a longer span, decades perhaps for me now, it does become rather irritating, insufferable one might even say.
Not on here thankfully, but where was all that #MeToo energy in the New York mayoral primary for the Dems? Oh yeah, it totally dissipated in some quarters when a spooky democratic socialist was on the ballot.
I’d also wager just from snippets of what various folks do for a living here, that many are personally isolated from some of the main failings of the centre left in the past wee while. Not just from when they’ve failed to stem the right, but also when they wielded the reins/rains/reigns of power themselves. Those bite way fucking harder when one is living it, although I think it is to the credit of most here that they’ve clearly got the capacity to care about issues for other reasons other than self-interest.
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This centrism vs. progressivism war is entirely overblown on social media compared to real life. Pro-Palestine voters largely showed up for Kamala Harris, just like pro-Sanders voters largely showed up for her, Biden, and Clinton. On the converse, we can see that after Zohran Mamdani won the NYC primary that a lot of Cuomo and Lander supporters have decided to vote Mamdani for the general, just like the centrists that previously supported Joe Crowley are now mostly happy with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
The "both parties suck" independents aren't mostly hyper-progressives just waiting for their own Vladimir Lenin to turn out for, so framing progressivism like an easy lifehack to win elections is pretty dumb. They like anti-establishment rhetoric while not actually understanding what "the establishment" is or what benefits them. They don't know what tariffs are, but they like unrealistic promises, such as taxing foreign countries for some perceived grievance. So there's no long-term way to win any of their votes that doesn't involve buying all the news and social media up, like conservatives have been doing the past twenty years.
One thing I've found talking to my conservative relatives is they all fucking HATE taxes. They will literally never vote for anybody that promises or even suggests to raise taxes on them by a penny, even though Republicans have quietly done so many times, and Trump has already done so both during the current and previous administrations. Obama and Biden promising a middle-class tax cut was pretty much the most important thing in the universe to win independents, but a lot of progressives who have this "I'm fine paying more taxes if it saves lives" mentality (which I happen to share) often don't seem to understand that.
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I think the fundamental problem is that what humanity objectively needs to do and what it is willing/capable of doing as it is organized simply don't overlap.
We could give Democrats 60 seats in the Senate and a 40 seat lead in the house for decades and they wouldn't even be able to undo the damage Trump has done in 6 months with far less, let alone actually address the existential threats we face.
ChristianS pretty much nailed it ~4 years ago: On September 26 2021 11:52 ChristianS wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On September 26 2021 06:39 Belisarius wrote:
All of which is why the voting rights bill was so important. If the US is a full neofascist state in 12 years time with a 43% R popular vote, I think this year will go down as the last chance you had to hit the brakes.
Gerrymandering is just so unbelievably poisonous to democracy. To stop it, you have to overtake it. Biden came alongside, but then he chickened out and let two random senators decide the trajectory of the next 20 years.
The R's now seem free to accelerate into the distance, limited only by the sheer incompetence of the candidates they're cheating into office. Does a voting rights bill fix it? The nature of US politics is that Republicans will inevitably be back in power sooner or later, and so far they don’t seem to face any penalty in public opinion to openly despising rule of law and aspiring to violent takeovers. Gerrymandering is fucked but it’s a pretty slow way to seize power compared to, you know, just doing it. I mean, GH pointed out that “we need the Republican Party actually” is ridiculous for a Democrat to think. Which seems right to me. Nothing about the modern Republican Party seems capable of becoming compatible with democracy, let alone interested in doing so, and the public seems apathetic at best. Gorsameth pointed out we need two parties in our system, which seems right to me too. What disturbs me is that “the Republican Party is irredeemable and cannot realistically be reformed or replaced” and “our system cannot function without 2 parties” aren’t incompatible statements, but the implication of both being true is catastrophic. It feels like we’re all doing the math on our current velocity toward the cliff and distance from it and maximum braking force, but the math isn’t actually very hard. We just keep recalculating because the result we keep getting is unfathomable.
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Well, that is all pretty accurate and very depressing.
Biden letting Manchin and Sinema block and blackmail their way through any real progressive agenda (or using them as an excuse, depending on your point of view) was one of the nails in the coffin of the US democracy.
Other ones, like the minimal wage being blocked by "the parliamentarian" and a bunch of other things Democrats were unwilling to get over because they don't really give enough of a fuck to try were also pretty instrumental.
I know it was never an actual democracy, it's a republic with a political system that has been out dated for more then a 100 years, and Republicans have finally decided to take full advantage of that empowered by Trump and the oligarchs and fascists behind him.
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On August 07 2025 09:20 Zambrah wrote:Show nested quote +That you see it as menial would be hugely insulting if you were actually doing anything other then typing angry shit into the abyss and talking real tough. No one has asked you for what you have claimed they have, they have asked you for some real basic shit that if you had done ANYTHING you could easily answer. Your just to disaffected to do anything at all, or plain old lazy. And coming on here and insulting people actually trying I guess makes you feel superior or some other lame shit. What is the plan to make sure the violence works and is not just an excuse to do everything that people are scared of? How many people required? Who is organizing? What is the plan to get the military and police on board? What percentage of those organizations do you think would support vs fight against your proposed solution? How do you over power the rest? This is literally you asking for an extremely in depth plan from someone who has never claimed to have a plan or be a leader, lmao. Sorry if I find the idea that knocking on people's doors to be wildly ineffectual in the face of a movement known for its violent action like disappearing people off the streets and putting people into fucking concentration camps. I look at WW2 and definitely ask, "why didnt they just knock on more German doors to stop the Nazis?" Show nested quote +If you really believe America is that dire and that is all that will work, then WTF are you not doing it? You would need to get some other people with you, but you would probably need to at the very least stop insulting anyone who asks you, what now? Because lone actors arent going to do shit, fascism is either going to spontaneously combust because American fascists are unfathomably idiotic, or its going to escalate to a point of a mass mobilization and any violence before enough people are participating in violence is just going to be pointless, imo. No lone actor is going to take on the American police or military state with any degree of success, lol. Show nested quote +If you wonder why you to lesser a degree and GH all the time gets accused of play acting on the internet, it is because if anyone remotely competent thought the things that were written FOR REAL, they would do something, anything about it. That you think my questions are hard only shows that you have done absolutely nothing. And all these people that are not saying what I am, either don't believe you actually believe it, or do not think you are competent enough to accomplish anything. Sure they are being "nice" but they are not being kind. Noone accuses me of that because this thread doesnt have the same baggage with me as it does with GH. Ive tried showing up at protests, and its worthless and pointless. People have learned that protests without the threat of violence have a really, really easy counter. Ignore them. Wait and do nothing because people cant support long term protests under a capitalist society with a hyper aggressive police state. Voting is obviously a stupid fucking plan, voting has produced one result, and its the electing of fascists. That plan is actively failing. Can't rely on an opposition party because Democrats are weak and spineless and more attached to their donors than they are to democracy, they, like you, would rather punch left and complain that people arent voting for them hard enough. So uh, why should I believe that anything other than that the US will succumb to fascists or that the fascists implode? At this point either violence or the fascists themselves will be responsible for the downfall of fascism.
I asked you very very basic questions, not for a in depth plan.
If you are wondering why people are frustrated it is because the loop I'm about to describe is what has happened 100 times.
Regular conversation goes on.
Revolutionary socialist jumps in "capitalism is evil, Dems are the worst, you are all complicit in genocide, fascists are winning and they have defeated democracy so violent revolution is the only option".
Other people "what is the solution then"
Revolutionary socialist "socialism"
Other people "How does that work?" Or "How do we use this socialism to win?"
Revolutionary socialist "why are you attacking me I already told you"
other people "Well then what are you doing?"
Revolutionary socialist " OMG you are so disingenuous"
Other people "WTF? How can you be so certain of the collapse of democracy to fascist and not be willing to even discuss anything other than "we need revolution and I'm not doing anything, but you all are the problem"?
Revolutionary socialist " YOU ARE A FASCIST".
Other people move on and then we rinse and repeat for the 100th time.
At some point move past the slogan or title page, or 7 second elevator pitch and be a grown up and have an actual discussion about what you are going to do. Or at least link me to the story of you bettering ramming some fascists door. People are trying to discuss with you because obviously GH is a not serious person who is just here to talk down to people to make himself feel better or some other strange shit. People here actually want to discuss ways to make it better not just point out the problems and claim there is no hope over and over and over.
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fascists are winning and they have defeated democracy so violent revolution is the only option
what is the solution then
fascists are winning and they have defeated democracy so violent revolution is the only option
The only thing I'd change is that its the only likely option, you saying I think its the only option is dumb because I dont think its the only option, I just think its the only likely option.
Other people "WTF? How can you be so certain of the collapse of democracy to fascist and not be willing to even discuss anything other than "we need revolution and I'm not doing anything, but you all are the problem"?
We didnt even get this far because you didnt even try to convince me of reasons why the collapse of democracy to fascists is going to be substantively prevented by way of voting or the Democrats or any of these other fundamental institutional structures in the US.
I gave you reasons why I don't believe that these institutions will be responsible for the defeat of fascism, I told you why I think either fascists win, fascists implode from stupidity, or fascists are defeated through violence.
Keep strawmanning though, I have plenty of problems with GH and his beliefs and how he engages with people, but he feels far less disingenuous than the people who strawman him.
At some point move past the slogan or title page, or 7 second elevator pitch and be a grown up and have an actual discussion about what you are going to do. Or at least link me to the story of you bettering ramming some fascists door. People are trying to discuss with you because obviously GH is a not serious person who is just here to talk down to people to make himself feel better or some other strange shit. People here actually want to discuss ways to make it better not just point out the problems and claim there is no hope over and over and over.
This is so fucking stupid, I have discussed plenty in the past about the things that Democrats could do and should do, including,
Listening to people and implementing popular policy based on their wants and needs,
Abandon their absurd obsession with fundraising and their donor class in favor of stronger grass roots connection,
Give people a positive vision of hope and change, not just lip service, actual hope and actual change for the betterment of the average person's lives, and to stop chiding everyone who wants them to do better as though expecting anything from a Democrat is some unreasonable thing.
Wield every fucking ounce of power aggressively, expand the Supreme Court, make Puerto Rico and DC into states, every single thing they can possibly do to obstruct Republicans and to take power should be done because the opposition is fascists and "its only four years and hes good for our fundraising, shrug" is not acceptable opposition to fucking fascists.
I have talked about the difficulty of actually doing this because Democrats have dug themselves deep into a pit with the public for their wide array of inadequacies, but if they did want to actually combat fascism there is/was a path they could/could have taken.
But you don't care, there is no ground to gain between us, you will advocate and do what you think is adequate, I will continue to think its wildly inadequate and continue to do my own thing while I wait for one of the three outcomes of American Fascism to happen. I will never go towards your position and you will never go towards mine, any conversation between us is pointless and if you genuinely wanted any answers to the shit youre asking here go find one of the innumerable posts Ive made reiterating my beliefs, the problems I see and the potential avenues that the problem could be dealth with.
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