US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5166

On August 13 2025 17:38 Magic Powers wrote:


I don't understand this argumentation. If we end the slaughter, then the slaughter will just continue? I don't get it. If the slaughter ends, then the slaughter ends. So what if it can happen again? It ended. That means there's a time where it doesn't happen. And that's infinitely better than the slaughter continuing. If it starts again later, then it hasn't happened in between, which is preferable to no pause to the slaughter. I don't understand what's so hard to understand about this.

On August 13 2025 20:09 Velr wrote:
Can the Trans debate pls also go there?

On August 14 2025 03:58 Nebuchad wrote:


As usual, this analysis doesn't work because it misattributes power. You're presenting a situation in which, in a party where most people are leftists and most policies are liberal, the issue is that leftists complain too much. No, it isn't. If all those premises are true, the issue is that there is a disconnect between what the voters of the party want and what the party offers. The people who have power in the party, the moderate liberals, should stop purity testing us and let us have the party we want, as we are mostly leftists.

We can immediately see the issue with your analysis in that, omg those leftists complain too much, and then... what? What happens because they complain too much? They don't have power. They can't do anything, except making you feel bad by pointing out that your understanding of politics doesn't work. Now the people with power, what happens when they do purity testing? Large political donations only to "moderate" candidates, media campaigns to explain how tanks will march into DC if Bernie wins the primary, secondary runs as independants if they lose their primary... Now that's purity testing with a punch in it. But of course you don't care, because you're not the one whose purity is being questioned.

On August 13 2025 22:13 Sadist wrote:
The obvious corruption is just baffling to me. There have to be people in these organizations who will raise the alarm.

On August 14 2025 02:55 Billyboy wrote:

I don't think anyone's brain is actually that tiny, because no one has said what you are saying. Perhaps you need some basic reading comprehension lessons or some more emotional control because this and really most of your low (no) content one liners miss the mark by a mile. I wouldn't go calling others morons when you miss the point this bad and this consistently.

Also, this is the exact BS post that needs to be eliminated from TL, it adds no value and is just an angry man lashing out because he does not want the trouble of thinking.


Everyone is different is obviously true, I think a lot of people here who identify as far left would not be considered far left by GH. Someone can avoid most of the stuff targeting them if they critically think about it and check the sources of where it came from, but sadly we are all being influenced by propaganda/marketing there is plenty of studies that it works with enough repetition even if we know it is BS, there is a reason companies spend so much on advertizing and "influencers".

I do not think anyone thinks the bold part, and if you think I've written that somewhere I'd love to see the post.



Everyone can, only people who are scared of self analyzing and want to be mad at made up evil people instead of real people would say such a thing. But could Nazi's and Tankies be allys or agree on anything? No way that would ever happen in the real world....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact


I think this is true. I believe the issue is that the super far loud leftists purity test everyone out of the group instead of building a large enough one. If anything the non tankie leftist's who don't believe Russia is actually good, China is perfect other than capitalist propaganda, Maduro is a real Socialist and not a drug lord, and so on, need to stand up to the the people that call themselves far left but are actually more into feeling special by shitting on people then building some real political movement and momentum.

It would actually be pretty interesting if the left people in the threads starting arguing with the left stuff and the right started arguing with right. Might calm things down.

On August 14 2025 05:43 decafchicken wrote:


What alarm? The DOJ, FBI, the rest of the executive branch, congress, and supreme court are all complicit. There is no alarm to sound or anyone to answer it.

On August 14 2025 07:43 Sadist wrote:



Theres still non political appointees that work there.

On August 14 2025 09:51 GreenHorizons wrote:


Not for long if they are raising alarms about their corrupt bosses. You want them to lose their jobs so they can tell people what everyone already knows; Trump and his cronies are corrupt af?

People like to look at history and think 'If that was me back then, I would have...' We're living through history, and the truth is, whatever you are doing now is probably what you would have done then" "Scratch a Liberal..."

On August 14 2025 07:07 WombaT wrote:

From other thread as I feel it’s already derailed enough

Horseshoe theory doesn’t postulate solely that tankies and fascists share some common attributes, but that that commonality starts to build across both sides of the spectrum the further one gets from the centre. Although, not uniformly hence horseshoe theory and not, idk circle theory or something.

The former in isolation, no issue with that claim, the latter I find incredibly dubious with a million counter-examples that exist.

Plenty of people in the centre absolutely do consider far left politics to be less desirable, or equivalently bad to those of the far right. Their behaviour reflects that. Plenty in the centre, the opposite. I’d struggle to think of any regular centre-left TL poster in the pop threads who doesn’t fall into the latter.

One often sees horseshoe theory appear, even if not explicitly named or invoked, in combination with what I’ll call ‘socialism amplification’, lacking a better term, and it’s quite effective in combination.

Whenever some candidate, some neat policy, some movement or whatever gains some traction and captures some momentum amongst the public, it starts to suddenly become more socialist in how it’s framed by opponents. If it’s relatively bipartisan centrist, milquetoast stuff in nature by European standards, it’s now socialist stuff across opposing media. If it’s actually approaching socialism, it’s now literally communism. And so on and so forth.

Crucially, as it pertains to ‘horseshoe theory’, it is observably not just the right wing of the ledger who do this, the centre absolutely do this as well.

Now, obviously this happens for many, many different reasons. My following example, I’d say, quite niche all told, but not a tiny niche.

Let’s take a hypothetical bloke, Mr Horsehoe. He loves Horseshoe theory so much he changed his name by deed poll. Quite a centre left kinda guy all round, but he really buys into the conception that the more extreme you get on either end of the spectrum, the more you coalesce.

If you were Jane Shitbag, who earns her blood money off trying to alter perceptions of potentially popular policies on behalf of the donor class, working off various generalised demographic profiles, if she came across Mr Horsehoe’s archetype, would it not be a completely sensible tactic from her to seek to amplify how left, and how extreme x policy is to turn Mr Horsehoe off it?

I wouldn’t even have Horsehoe theory in my top 10 weapons used to cudgel the left, and I don’t think it was first conceived as thus. Although, I do still often see it used as part of the arsenal.

Aside from thinking it’s massively flawed anyway, it’s certainly a frustration of mine, and many on the left I’d imagine.

One rarely hears it invoked by the right, when it pertains to the right. As with almost any viewpoint imaginable, I’m sure it’s happened somewhere. I just haven’t seen a ‘guys we can’t keep going further right, or we’ll just end up the same as the far left’ on my travels.