Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
On October 06 2025 01:28 Billyboy wrote: @oblade Can you explain the logic to sending the national guard and ice to Portland when the entire state of Oregon has just over 100k illegals. You have states like Texas with 1.6 million and Florida with 1 million and those states voted for Trump so he wouldn't get nearly the amount of push back.
Wouldn't it make way more sense from a resource and efficiency stand point to get those states cleared out, show how much better they are because of it and then go after the tiny ones that have insignificant amounts?
Does this not make it look like the goal has nothing to do with getting rid of illegals?
Isn't it rather obvious? He sends national guard, where conditions prevent ICE from doing its job.
But isn't ICE's job where the illegal immigrants are? The condition preventing ICE from doing its job in Portland is that Portland is a thousand mile from the jobsite.
But there are illegal immigrants in Portland?? Also ICE are federal agents therefore entire US is their jobsite plus there is ICE facility in Portland which is their job site.
On October 06 2025 03:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Razyda, I think you mean "cream of the crop".
The point was pretty much that the dirt poor people are the ones the anti-Maidan folks expect to fight/fend for themselves to your west (would you support Europe arming anti-fascists in the US like Ukrainians?). I could be wrong, but I doubt many (I'm sure some are) of Ukrainians on the front lines to your east are more affluent than you, and that's who you expect to protect you (not all flee West like you would) until you're forced to fight/join the fascists yourself. Which with AfD being the most popular faction nowadays, probably isn't as far off as you'd like to imagine.
On September 30 2025 21:12 Ryzel wrote: He’s just trying to light a fire under y’all collective asses to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change. Because if you believe “wow, the way the world works right now sucks”, you can’t then argue “you can’t do that, that’s not the way the world works”, because the logical conclusion of meshing those two is “the world sucks and will keep on sucking until hopefully it stops sucking anymore on its own.”
At that point you’re at best (if you have hope for it to stop sucking) ideologically similar to Nazi Germany citizens who “had to go along with all the bad stuff until hopefully things get better” (but instead internalized all the bad shit they had to do until it didn’t seem so bad anymore), OR at worst (if you’ve lost hope for it to stop sucking) ideologically similar to 647 / No Lives Matter nihilists who say “fuck this fucking sucky world that sucks and everyone in it, even me” (until their rage pushes them to shoot up a public place).
One additional thing I'm pointing out is that oppressed people are being described sorta like canaries in the fascism mine for those people who plan on leaving when the oppressed people around them die/get abused at an uncomfortable enough rate.
I'm not leaving those less fortunate than myself to face the fascists alone and I'm certainly not going to join the fascists. That's just not something the rest of you will commit to.
Ok, you've quoted that post a couple times now, so let's address it.
I take it you liked the opening statement "He’s just trying to light a fire under y’all collective asses to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change."
engaging meaningfully is a vague term, similar to what you get when you ask ChatGPT to write for you. You can project that to cover pretty much any discussion about politics. What does this mean to you?
Harris's domestic platform was similar to Biden's on most issues.[15] She supported national abortion protections, LGBT+ rights, stricter gun control, and legislation to address climate change.[16] She also supported federal cannabis legalization, strengthening voting rights, strengthening the Affordable Care Act, and federal funding of housing. Harris departed from Biden on some economic issues, initially proposing what some described as a "populist" economic agenda. Harris advocated for limited anti-price-gouging laws for grocery and food prices, a cap on prescription drug costs, and expansion of the child tax credit.[17][18] On immigration, Harris supported increasing the number of Border Patrol agents and reforming the immigration system. On foreign policy, she supported continued military aid to Ukraine and Israel in their respective wars, but insisted that Israel should agree to a ceasefire and hostage deal and work towards a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[19]
So, Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people. She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want? Before you start with the genocide enablers thing again, I know that you disagree with her foreign policy, no need to go there.
Maybe something for you think about: were we closer to implementing a socialist system before or after Harris lost the election?
☐ The Democratic party has a viable path forward and we just need to support them ☐ The Democratic party has has no viable path forward so we need an alternative ☐ The US has no viable path forward, but to try to protect our loved ones from the worst of it ☐ I don't know how to get to a socialist future, but that's what I want
Generally speaking, my vote was not counted before the election result was announced. There's no reason for me to have voted for Harris. That said, I didn't want Trump to win. The way the US electoral system is set up though, there's not really much I could do about that.
If I tell you which poll option will you tailor your response? Are we back to cosplaying different characters depending on who you're talking to? That got old fast the first time around , can we not do that again?
I put the link so that hopefully you'd see I mean that:
One frustration the poll shows that confirms my personal experience is that when I'm arguing in favor of socialism I'm arguing against some people that believe each answer (and some unlisted ones) and they each need to be convinced of different things.
For the plurality of people here that ostensibly want a socialist future, I recommend dropping in my Blog to discuss our ideas of how to get there.
Ok, I went with option number 3. Now, your turn. I got these two for you:
So, Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people. She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want?
Are we closer to implementing a socialist system before or after Harris lost the election?
So you chose "The US has no viable path forward, but to try to protect our loved ones from the worst of it"
The idea was also for you to elaborate on it. Because as it is, there's not really any reason to discuss the socialism aspect. I don't know that we're any closer to socialism, but we're definitely closer to revolutionary change one way or the other (granted it's looking like Democrats will side with the fascist revolution over a socialist one atm).
But yes, as far as I understand, Harris said things progressives liked. She didn't have "concrete plans" though. That would have required a viable plan to pass them, which you recognize (in your answer) she (and no one else) had/has.
It's like saying "I have a concrete plan for passing universal healthcare: Democrats win all the elections. Ta-da!"
I thought option 3 was about supporting democrats but I see now that it was just the third option in terms of votes, my apologies.
That's okay. I'd prefer one/several of the people here that disagree with you to disabuse you of that honestly. You're more likely to be receptive of them trying to do that than you are of any attempt I could make. ChristianS maybe? + Show Spoiler +
On October 01 2025 10:32 LightSpectra wrote: Looks like we're officially shutting down.
"A shutdown falls on the President's lack of leadership. He can't even control his own party and get people together in a room. A shutdown means the president is weak." -- Donald Trump in 2013
I wonder how long it'll last and if Trump/Republicans will really start mass firings?
I also wonder whether people think Democrats should hold out on passing a "clean CR", for how long, and what the minimum they should accept is?
I think one reason you get so few takers on “Okay, what should be done?” posts is that a lot of what we’re watching fundamentally undercuts our systems’ premises and foundational assumptions. It’s not clear what rebuilding those foundations would look like, or how we can expect those systems to work adequately under the circumstances.
As an example: the reason SCOTUS has lifetime appointments is because it was always supposed to be a nonpartisan, professional “balls and strikes” institution. Technocratic, if you like. For those purposes having seats be determined by the semi-unpredictable whims of biology is meant to ensure there’s no obvious way for partisans to seize control of the court. But once everyone understands justices are partisan, and figures it’s just another power center to battle over like Congress or the Presidency, lifetime appointments becomes a ludicrous system. It’s like having a legislature in which seats are determined primarily by your faction’s actuarial understanding; if you can predict your people’s deaths far enough in advance, you’ll always have an opportunity to have them step down and replaced with someone younger, and you’ll never lose a seat.
This budgetary process wasn’t functioning *well* before, but it is kind of fundamentally broken by an executive that feels completely unconstrained by Congress’s dictates. If Congress allocated money for something, and the executive doesn’t like it? Doesn’t happen. If Congress didn’t allocate money for something the executive wants to do? It happens anyway. What, then, is the point of the budget anyway?
Then there’s this farce where Republicans are gloating that a shutdown gives Trump some new powers to carry out mass firings. That’s ludicrous as a matter of law. But what do legal protections mean now anyway? He’s been firing people all year that were supposedly entitled to legal protections against this kind of arbitrary dismissal, and court cases have been playing out all year but they’re mostly not getting hired back. Maybe in a few years the court cases will conclude and they’ll get awarded a bunch of back pay, maybe they won’t, but in the meantime there doesn’t appear to be any mechanism preventing Trump from reconstituting the government however he sees fit, regardless of any shutdown.
Anyway. “What should the Democrats do?” IMO the only reason to be talking about the Democrats at all is if we’re hoping that defeating Republicans in some future election is going to end this, or at least if the threat of that will somewhat restrain the worst abuses. With that in mind, I think it makes perfect sense to choose something like the ACA subsidies – a popular, kitchen-table provision that people are already enjoying, and which the Republicans would be eliminating with a “clean” CR. If they succeed, it will mean Republicans are chastened by unpopularity out of a change they wanted to make, which is bullish. If they fail (e.g. if Republicans nuke the filibuster) they can point to the premium increases people will experience and pretty plausibly say “we did everything we could to prevent this, you’d better vote out these Republicans if you don’t like it.” None of that is even pretending to “fix” any of the ongoing catastrophes but I don’t see how any Dem response to the budget shutdown could.
This is all probably a waste of a mental exercise though, they’ll [Democrats] probably just demand Trump promise not to fire more people or something, not even get that promise, and then fold anyway.
That's sorta the point. If we actually think and talk about what Democrats should/could/would do it becomes pretty undeniably obvious they are a waste of our time. The things that even their steadfast supporters acknowledge need to be done and what Democrats are willing/capable of doing simply don't overlap.
Confronting that contradiction is hard/scary so people are holding out on that with their typical mock and gawk until they can return to just thoughtlessly spamming variations of "vote blue no matter who or you're a MAGAt!" instead.
Sure, and I know GreenHorizons feels that way. I guess I was trying to engage with LibHorizons’ challenge (since you often seem frustrated that no one is willing to). Of course, the other reason they might hesitate to engage is because they know LH is a performance, not a true held belief (“bad faith,” someone might say) and they suspect you’ll use any resulting discussion as ammunition for your “stop voting for Democrats” hobby horse.
Personally, I think the position you need to be attacking is not “the Democratic Party has a viable path forward and we just need to support them” (which hardly anybody seems to really buy anyway). + Show Spoiler +
It’s “there is no path forward and we can only watch the decline, maybe trying to protect our loved ones from the worst of it.” The “mocking and gawking” seems to me like a natural response if that’s your viewpoint.
I mean, the thing about liberals is their politics is not particularly motivated by self-interest. There’s a kind of “noblesse oblige” to the whole faction. They tend to be pretty affluent, pretty white, and most of their moral commitments don’t particularly impact them personally. If you want to be uncharitable, you could accuse them of being motivated by the appeal of smug self-righteousness and the social standing obtainable through right-think. But in the last election they widely took the position “Donald Trump is an existential threat to our way of life, and if we don’t stop him he’ll create a fascist autocracy.” The general response was “fuck you, everybody hates you, go away and never come back.”
It’s not surprising that the response would be to politically disengage and say “well, we tried to tell you, now I guess we’ll all reap the consequences, you imbeciles,” is it? I’m not saying it’s the right response, or that we need to be more considerate of their feelings or something. But I don’t think there’s much to be accomplished by telling them to despair at the Democrats’ prospects right now. They’re in gallows-humor watch-the-world-burn mode because they’re *already* despairing.
Presuming you can't be swayed by even them, that's probably still pretty much what my answer would look like, without the mistaken characterizations of your positions.
I am simply acknowledging that the only way we get to socialism in America is through the Democrats. + Show Spoiler +
I see no future in which a violent revolution happens and the winning block is the socialists.To the majority of Americans this ideology is toxic.
In any case, I wanted to bring this back to the post you quoted 3 times.
He’s just trying to light a fire under y’all collective asses to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change."
I am engaging meaningfully with my political beliefs and tracking how the democratic platform, as embodied by Harris in the recent election, represents progressive values.
Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people.
She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want?
Even if she somehow miraculously helped Democrats win the House and Senate, we know from them using their biggest majority of our lives to pass their biggest achievement (a Republican healthcare plan too far right for Richard Nixon) that then we'd just hear about how her passing Far-Right/Republican legislation instead of her progressive promises is actually good and pragmatic.
The point was pretty much that the dirt poor people are the ones the anti-Maidan folks expect to fight/fend for themselves to your west (would you support Europe arming anti-fascists in the US like Ukrainians?). I could be wrong, but I doubt many (I'm sure some are) of Ukrainians on the front lines to your east are more affluent than you, and that's who you expect to protect you (not all flee West like you would) until you're forced to fight/join the fascists yourself. Which with AfD being the most popular faction nowadays, probably isn't as far off as you'd like to imagine.
On September 30 2025 21:12 Ryzel wrote: He’s just trying to light a fire under y’all collective asses to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change. Because if you believe “wow, the way the world works right now sucks”, you can’t then argue “you can’t do that, that’s not the way the world works”, because the logical conclusion of meshing those two is “the world sucks and will keep on sucking until hopefully it stops sucking anymore on its own.”
At that point you’re at best (if you have hope for it to stop sucking) ideologically similar to Nazi Germany citizens who “had to go along with all the bad stuff until hopefully things get better” (but instead internalized all the bad shit they had to do until it didn’t seem so bad anymore), OR at worst (if you’ve lost hope for it to stop sucking) ideologically similar to 647 / No Lives Matter nihilists who say “fuck this fucking sucky world that sucks and everyone in it, even me” (until their rage pushes them to shoot up a public place).
One additional thing I'm pointing out is that oppressed people are being described sorta like canaries in the fascism mine for those people who plan on leaving when the oppressed people around them die/get abused at an uncomfortable enough rate.
I'm not leaving those less fortunate than myself to face the fascists alone and I'm certainly not going to join the fascists. That's just not something the rest of you will commit to.
Ok, you've quoted that post a couple times now, so let's address it.
I take it you liked the opening statement "He’s just trying to light a fire under y’all collective asses to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change."
engaging meaningfully is a vague term, similar to what you get when you ask ChatGPT to write for you. You can project that to cover pretty much any discussion about politics. What does this mean to you?
Harris's domestic platform was similar to Biden's on most issues.[15] She supported national abortion protections, LGBT+ rights, stricter gun control, and legislation to address climate change.[16] She also supported federal cannabis legalization, strengthening voting rights, strengthening the Affordable Care Act, and federal funding of housing. Harris departed from Biden on some economic issues, initially proposing what some described as a "populist" economic agenda. Harris advocated for limited anti-price-gouging laws for grocery and food prices, a cap on prescription drug costs, and expansion of the child tax credit.[17][18] On immigration, Harris supported increasing the number of Border Patrol agents and reforming the immigration system. On foreign policy, she supported continued military aid to Ukraine and Israel in their respective wars, but insisted that Israel should agree to a ceasefire and hostage deal and work towards a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[19]
So, Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people. She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want? Before you start with the genocide enablers thing again, I know that you disagree with her foreign policy, no need to go there.
Maybe something for you think about: were we closer to implementing a socialist system before or after Harris lost the election?
☐ The Democratic party has a viable path forward and we just need to support them ☐ The Democratic party has has no viable path forward so we need an alternative ☐ The US has no viable path forward, but to try to protect our loved ones from the worst of it ☐ I don't know how to get to a socialist future, but that's what I want
Generally speaking, my vote was not counted before the election result was announced. There's no reason for me to have voted for Harris. That said, I didn't want Trump to win. The way the US electoral system is set up though, there's not really much I could do about that.
If I tell you which poll option will you tailor your response? Are we back to cosplaying different characters depending on who you're talking to? That got old fast the first time around , can we not do that again?
I put the link so that hopefully you'd see I mean that:
One frustration the poll shows that confirms my personal experience is that when I'm arguing in favor of socialism I'm arguing against some people that believe each answer (and some unlisted ones) and they each need to be convinced of different things.
For the plurality of people here that ostensibly want a socialist future, I recommend dropping in my Blog to discuss our ideas of how to get there.
Ok, I went with option number 3. Now, your turn. I got these two for you:
So, Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people. She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want?
Are we closer to implementing a socialist system before or after Harris lost the election?
So you chose "The US has no viable path forward, but to try to protect our loved ones from the worst of it"
The idea was also for you to elaborate on it. Because as it is, there's not really any reason to discuss the socialism aspect. I don't know that we're any closer to socialism, but we're definitely closer to revolutionary change one way or the other (granted it's looking like Democrats will side with the fascist revolution over a socialist one atm).
But yes, as far as I understand, Harris said things progressives liked. She didn't have "concrete plans" though. That would have required a viable plan to pass them, which you recognize (in your answer) she (and no one else) had/has.
It's like saying "I have a concrete plan for passing universal healthcare: Democrats win all the elections. Ta-da!"
I thought option 3 was about supporting democrats but I see now that it was just the third option in terms of votes, my apologies.
That's okay. I'd prefer one/several of the people here that disagree with you to disabuse you of that honestly. You're more likely to be receptive of them trying to do that than you are of any attempt I could make. ChristianS maybe? + Show Spoiler +
On October 01 2025 10:32 LightSpectra wrote: Looks like we're officially shutting down.
"A shutdown falls on the President's lack of leadership. He can't even control his own party and get people together in a room. A shutdown means the president is weak." -- Donald Trump in 2013
I wonder how long it'll last and if Trump/Republicans will really start mass firings?
I also wonder whether people think Democrats should hold out on passing a "clean CR", for how long, and what the minimum they should accept is?
I think one reason you get so few takers on “Okay, what should be done?” posts is that a lot of what we’re watching fundamentally undercuts our systems’ premises and foundational assumptions. It’s not clear what rebuilding those foundations would look like, or how we can expect those systems to work adequately under the circumstances.
As an example: the reason SCOTUS has lifetime appointments is because it was always supposed to be a nonpartisan, professional “balls and strikes” institution. Technocratic, if you like. For those purposes having seats be determined by the semi-unpredictable whims of biology is meant to ensure there’s no obvious way for partisans to seize control of the court. But once everyone understands justices are partisan, and figures it’s just another power center to battle over like Congress or the Presidency, lifetime appointments becomes a ludicrous system. It’s like having a legislature in which seats are determined primarily by your faction’s actuarial understanding; if you can predict your people’s deaths far enough in advance, you’ll always have an opportunity to have them step down and replaced with someone younger, and you’ll never lose a seat.
This budgetary process wasn’t functioning *well* before, but it is kind of fundamentally broken by an executive that feels completely unconstrained by Congress’s dictates. If Congress allocated money for something, and the executive doesn’t like it? Doesn’t happen. If Congress didn’t allocate money for something the executive wants to do? It happens anyway. What, then, is the point of the budget anyway?
Then there’s this farce where Republicans are gloating that a shutdown gives Trump some new powers to carry out mass firings. That’s ludicrous as a matter of law. But what do legal protections mean now anyway? He’s been firing people all year that were supposedly entitled to legal protections against this kind of arbitrary dismissal, and court cases have been playing out all year but they’re mostly not getting hired back. Maybe in a few years the court cases will conclude and they’ll get awarded a bunch of back pay, maybe they won’t, but in the meantime there doesn’t appear to be any mechanism preventing Trump from reconstituting the government however he sees fit, regardless of any shutdown.
Anyway. “What should the Democrats do?” IMO the only reason to be talking about the Democrats at all is if we’re hoping that defeating Republicans in some future election is going to end this, or at least if the threat of that will somewhat restrain the worst abuses. With that in mind, I think it makes perfect sense to choose something like the ACA subsidies – a popular, kitchen-table provision that people are already enjoying, and which the Republicans would be eliminating with a “clean” CR. If they succeed, it will mean Republicans are chastened by unpopularity out of a change they wanted to make, which is bullish. If they fail (e.g. if Republicans nuke the filibuster) they can point to the premium increases people will experience and pretty plausibly say “we did everything we could to prevent this, you’d better vote out these Republicans if you don’t like it.” None of that is even pretending to “fix” any of the ongoing catastrophes but I don’t see how any Dem response to the budget shutdown could.
This is all probably a waste of a mental exercise though, they’ll [Democrats] probably just demand Trump promise not to fire more people or something, not even get that promise, and then fold anyway.
That's sorta the point. If we actually think and talk about what Democrats should/could/would do it becomes pretty undeniably obvious they are a waste of our time. The things that even their steadfast supporters acknowledge need to be done and what Democrats are willing/capable of doing simply don't overlap.
Confronting that contradiction is hard/scary so people are holding out on that with their typical mock and gawk until they can return to just thoughtlessly spamming variations of "vote blue no matter who or you're a MAGAt!" instead.
Sure, and I know GreenHorizons feels that way. I guess I was trying to engage with LibHorizons’ challenge (since you often seem frustrated that no one is willing to). Of course, the other reason they might hesitate to engage is because they know LH is a performance, not a true held belief (“bad faith,” someone might say) and they suspect you’ll use any resulting discussion as ammunition for your “stop voting for Democrats” hobby horse.
Personally, I think the position you need to be attacking is not “the Democratic Party has a viable path forward and we just need to support them” (which hardly anybody seems to really buy anyway). + Show Spoiler +
It’s “there is no path forward and we can only watch the decline, maybe trying to protect our loved ones from the worst of it.” The “mocking and gawking” seems to me like a natural response if that’s your viewpoint.
I mean, the thing about liberals is their politics is not particularly motivated by self-interest. There’s a kind of “noblesse oblige” to the whole faction. They tend to be pretty affluent, pretty white, and most of their moral commitments don’t particularly impact them personally. If you want to be uncharitable, you could accuse them of being motivated by the appeal of smug self-righteousness and the social standing obtainable through right-think. But in the last election they widely took the position “Donald Trump is an existential threat to our way of life, and if we don’t stop him he’ll create a fascist autocracy.” The general response was “fuck you, everybody hates you, go away and never come back.”
It’s not surprising that the response would be to politically disengage and say “well, we tried to tell you, now I guess we’ll all reap the consequences, you imbeciles,” is it? I’m not saying it’s the right response, or that we need to be more considerate of their feelings or something. But I don’t think there’s much to be accomplished by telling them to despair at the Democrats’ prospects right now. They’re in gallows-humor watch-the-world-burn mode because they’re *already* despairing.
Presuming you can't be swayed by even them, that's probably still pretty much what my answer would look like, without the mistaken characterizations of your positions.
I am simply acknowledging that the only way we get to socialism in America is through the Democrats. + Show Spoiler +
I see no future in which a violent revolution happens and the winning block is the socialists.To the majority of Americans this ideology is toxic.
In any case, I wanted to bring this back to the post you quoted 3 times.
He’s just trying to light a fire under y’all collective asses to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change."
I am engaging meaningfully with my political beliefs and tracking how the democratic platform, as embodied by Harris in the recent election, represents progressive values.
Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people.
She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want?
Even if she somehow miraculously helped Democrats win the House and Senate, we know from them using their biggest majority of our lives to pass their biggest achievement (a Republican healthcare plan too far right for Richard Nixon) that then we'd just hear about how her passing Far-Right/Republican legislation instead of her progressive promises is actually good and pragmatic.
"Fool me once..."
Seriously what are you even fishing for? Without a majority in all 3 branches no one, Republican or Democrat can get anything done.
What will you do without the Senate? is not a useful question because there is no actual answer for it, you need consent from all branches of government to govern. What is the plan for your socialist revolution if you lose?
Or I guess the answer your looking for is "Declare martial law. disband Congress and rule as a benevolent dictator" There we go, that is the line you were missing from Harris's election promises that stopped you from supporting her and instead made you constantly run interference for the Republicans. You don't give a shit about Gaza genocide, you just want a dictator of your own.
The point was pretty much that the dirt poor people are the ones the anti-Maidan folks expect to fight/fend for themselves to your west (would you support Europe arming anti-fascists in the US like Ukrainians?). I could be wrong, but I doubt many (I'm sure some are) of Ukrainians on the front lines to your east are more affluent than you, and that's who you expect to protect you (not all flee West like you would) until you're forced to fight/join the fascists yourself. Which with AfD being the most popular faction nowadays, probably isn't as far off as you'd like to imagine.
[quote]
One additional thing I'm pointing out is that oppressed people are being described sorta like canaries in the fascism mine for those people who plan on leaving when the oppressed people around them die/get abused at an uncomfortable enough rate.
I'm not leaving those less fortunate than myself to face the fascists alone and I'm certainly not going to join the fascists. That's just not something the rest of you will commit to.
Ok, you've quoted that post a couple times now, so let's address it.
I take it you liked the opening statement "He’s just trying to light a fire under y’all collective asses to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change."
engaging meaningfully is a vague term, similar to what you get when you ask ChatGPT to write for you. You can project that to cover pretty much any discussion about politics. What does this mean to you?
Harris's domestic platform was similar to Biden's on most issues.[15] She supported national abortion protections, LGBT+ rights, stricter gun control, and legislation to address climate change.[16] She also supported federal cannabis legalization, strengthening voting rights, strengthening the Affordable Care Act, and federal funding of housing. Harris departed from Biden on some economic issues, initially proposing what some described as a "populist" economic agenda. Harris advocated for limited anti-price-gouging laws for grocery and food prices, a cap on prescription drug costs, and expansion of the child tax credit.[17][18] On immigration, Harris supported increasing the number of Border Patrol agents and reforming the immigration system. On foreign policy, she supported continued military aid to Ukraine and Israel in their respective wars, but insisted that Israel should agree to a ceasefire and hostage deal and work towards a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[19]
So, Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people. She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want? Before you start with the genocide enablers thing again, I know that you disagree with her foreign policy, no need to go there.
Maybe something for you think about: were we closer to implementing a socialist system before or after Harris lost the election?
☐ The Democratic party has a viable path forward and we just need to support them ☐ The Democratic party has has no viable path forward so we need an alternative ☐ The US has no viable path forward, but to try to protect our loved ones from the worst of it ☐ I don't know how to get to a socialist future, but that's what I want
Generally speaking, my vote was not counted before the election result was announced. There's no reason for me to have voted for Harris. That said, I didn't want Trump to win. The way the US electoral system is set up though, there's not really much I could do about that.
If I tell you which poll option will you tailor your response? Are we back to cosplaying different characters depending on who you're talking to? That got old fast the first time around , can we not do that again?
I put the link so that hopefully you'd see I mean that:
One frustration the poll shows that confirms my personal experience is that when I'm arguing in favor of socialism I'm arguing against some people that believe each answer (and some unlisted ones) and they each need to be convinced of different things.
For the plurality of people here that ostensibly want a socialist future, I recommend dropping in my Blog to discuss our ideas of how to get there.
Ok, I went with option number 3. Now, your turn. I got these two for you:
So, Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people. She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want?
Are we closer to implementing a socialist system before or after Harris lost the election?
So you chose "The US has no viable path forward, but to try to protect our loved ones from the worst of it"
The idea was also for you to elaborate on it. Because as it is, there's not really any reason to discuss the socialism aspect. I don't know that we're any closer to socialism, but we're definitely closer to revolutionary change one way or the other (granted it's looking like Democrats will side with the fascist revolution over a socialist one atm).
But yes, as far as I understand, Harris said things progressives liked. She didn't have "concrete plans" though. That would have required a viable plan to pass them, which you recognize (in your answer) she (and no one else) had/has.
It's like saying "I have a concrete plan for passing universal healthcare: Democrats win all the elections. Ta-da!"
I thought option 3 was about supporting democrats but I see now that it was just the third option in terms of votes, my apologies.
That's okay. I'd prefer one/several of the people here that disagree with you to disabuse you of that honestly. You're more likely to be receptive of them trying to do that than you are of any attempt I could make. ChristianS maybe? + Show Spoiler +
On October 01 2025 10:32 LightSpectra wrote: Looks like we're officially shutting down.
"A shutdown falls on the President's lack of leadership. He can't even control his own party and get people together in a room. A shutdown means the president is weak." -- Donald Trump in 2013
I wonder how long it'll last and if Trump/Republicans will really start mass firings?
I also wonder whether people think Democrats should hold out on passing a "clean CR", for how long, and what the minimum they should accept is?
I think one reason you get so few takers on “Okay, what should be done?” posts is that a lot of what we’re watching fundamentally undercuts our systems’ premises and foundational assumptions. It’s not clear what rebuilding those foundations would look like, or how we can expect those systems to work adequately under the circumstances.
As an example: the reason SCOTUS has lifetime appointments is because it was always supposed to be a nonpartisan, professional “balls and strikes” institution. Technocratic, if you like. For those purposes having seats be determined by the semi-unpredictable whims of biology is meant to ensure there’s no obvious way for partisans to seize control of the court. But once everyone understands justices are partisan, and figures it’s just another power center to battle over like Congress or the Presidency, lifetime appointments becomes a ludicrous system. It’s like having a legislature in which seats are determined primarily by your faction’s actuarial understanding; if you can predict your people’s deaths far enough in advance, you’ll always have an opportunity to have them step down and replaced with someone younger, and you’ll never lose a seat.
This budgetary process wasn’t functioning *well* before, but it is kind of fundamentally broken by an executive that feels completely unconstrained by Congress’s dictates. If Congress allocated money for something, and the executive doesn’t like it? Doesn’t happen. If Congress didn’t allocate money for something the executive wants to do? It happens anyway. What, then, is the point of the budget anyway?
Then there’s this farce where Republicans are gloating that a shutdown gives Trump some new powers to carry out mass firings. That’s ludicrous as a matter of law. But what do legal protections mean now anyway? He’s been firing people all year that were supposedly entitled to legal protections against this kind of arbitrary dismissal, and court cases have been playing out all year but they’re mostly not getting hired back. Maybe in a few years the court cases will conclude and they’ll get awarded a bunch of back pay, maybe they won’t, but in the meantime there doesn’t appear to be any mechanism preventing Trump from reconstituting the government however he sees fit, regardless of any shutdown.
Anyway. “What should the Democrats do?” IMO the only reason to be talking about the Democrats at all is if we’re hoping that defeating Republicans in some future election is going to end this, or at least if the threat of that will somewhat restrain the worst abuses. With that in mind, I think it makes perfect sense to choose something like the ACA subsidies – a popular, kitchen-table provision that people are already enjoying, and which the Republicans would be eliminating with a “clean” CR. If they succeed, it will mean Republicans are chastened by unpopularity out of a change they wanted to make, which is bullish. If they fail (e.g. if Republicans nuke the filibuster) they can point to the premium increases people will experience and pretty plausibly say “we did everything we could to prevent this, you’d better vote out these Republicans if you don’t like it.” None of that is even pretending to “fix” any of the ongoing catastrophes but I don’t see how any Dem response to the budget shutdown could.
This is all probably a waste of a mental exercise though, they’ll [Democrats] probably just demand Trump promise not to fire more people or something, not even get that promise, and then fold anyway.
That's sorta the point. If we actually think and talk about what Democrats should/could/would do it becomes pretty undeniably obvious they are a waste of our time. The things that even their steadfast supporters acknowledge need to be done and what Democrats are willing/capable of doing simply don't overlap.
Confronting that contradiction is hard/scary so people are holding out on that with their typical mock and gawk until they can return to just thoughtlessly spamming variations of "vote blue no matter who or you're a MAGAt!" instead.
Sure, and I know GreenHorizons feels that way. I guess I was trying to engage with LibHorizons’ challenge (since you often seem frustrated that no one is willing to). Of course, the other reason they might hesitate to engage is because they know LH is a performance, not a true held belief (“bad faith,” someone might say) and they suspect you’ll use any resulting discussion as ammunition for your “stop voting for Democrats” hobby horse.
Personally, I think the position you need to be attacking is not “the Democratic Party has a viable path forward and we just need to support them” (which hardly anybody seems to really buy anyway). + Show Spoiler +
It’s “there is no path forward and we can only watch the decline, maybe trying to protect our loved ones from the worst of it.” The “mocking and gawking” seems to me like a natural response if that’s your viewpoint.
I mean, the thing about liberals is their politics is not particularly motivated by self-interest. There’s a kind of “noblesse oblige” to the whole faction. They tend to be pretty affluent, pretty white, and most of their moral commitments don’t particularly impact them personally. If you want to be uncharitable, you could accuse them of being motivated by the appeal of smug self-righteousness and the social standing obtainable through right-think. But in the last election they widely took the position “Donald Trump is an existential threat to our way of life, and if we don’t stop him he’ll create a fascist autocracy.” The general response was “fuck you, everybody hates you, go away and never come back.”
It’s not surprising that the response would be to politically disengage and say “well, we tried to tell you, now I guess we’ll all reap the consequences, you imbeciles,” is it? I’m not saying it’s the right response, or that we need to be more considerate of their feelings or something. But I don’t think there’s much to be accomplished by telling them to despair at the Democrats’ prospects right now. They’re in gallows-humor watch-the-world-burn mode because they’re *already* despairing.
Presuming you can't be swayed by even them, that's probably still pretty much what my answer would look like, without the mistaken characterizations of your positions.
I am simply acknowledging that the only way we get to socialism in America is through the Democrats. + Show Spoiler +
I see no future in which a violent revolution happens and the winning block is the socialists.To the majority of Americans this ideology is toxic.
In any case, I wanted to bring this back to the post you quoted 3 times.
He’s just trying to light a fire under y’all collective asses to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change."
I am engaging meaningfully with my political beliefs and tracking how the democratic platform, as embodied by Harris in the recent election, represents progressive values.
Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people.
She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want?
Even if she somehow miraculously helped Democrats win the House and Senate, we know from them using their biggest majority of our lives to pass their biggest achievement (a Republican healthcare plan too far right for Richard Nixon) that then we'd just hear about how her passing Far-Right/Republican legislation instead of her progressive promises is actually good and pragmatic.
"Fool me once..."
Seriously what are you even fishing for? Without a majority in all 3 branches no one, Republican or Democrat can get anything done.
What will you do without the Senate? is not a useful question because there is no actual answer for it, you need consent from all branches of government to govern. What is the plan for your socialist revolution if you lose?
Or I guess the answer your looking for is "Declare martial law. disband Congress and rule as a benevolent dictator" There we go, that is the line you were missing from Harris's election promises that stopped you from supporting her and instead made you constantly run interference for the Republicans. You don't give a shit about Gaza genocide, you just want a dictator of your own.
In their totality, rather than isolating individual exchanges it’s very difficult to come away from GH’s general posting with anything other than the conclusion that Trump’s election is A-OK with them in an accelerationist sense. That the destruction of orthodoxy will pave the way for something else.
But they also really like to swerve questions that might lock them in to holding that position. Even pretty simple, unambiguous ones.
I don’t agree that they don’t care about certain issues, being wholly inconsistent or a terrible communicator in this kind of environment doesn’t preclude that.
I think they make good points, many I agree with. I think they ask interesting questions that challenge assumptions, but if it’s completely one-way half the time it’s somewhat aggravating.
It’s like having some new partner, she’s all new-age and shit and like you try out Yoga, and like smoking weed while listening to binaural beats in an anechoic chamber. You’re dressing in clothes she made herself that are based upon a particularly obscure religious order who resided in the Hebrides. And hey some of this you kinda dig, but if you ever dare to suggest doing something you like, such as drinking beers and doing a Nicholas Cage marathon, she will flip the fucking bap to use a Northern Irish colloquialism.
As regular users know I rarely use analogies, much less tortuous ones, so apologies.
It’s rather the inverse of current front-line American politics, or indeed what we’re seeing blossoming in terms of right populism in Europe right now.
Doubling down and never conceding anything, being wrong or merely miscalculating on anything, actively works for them. It’s detrimental to the kind of political persuasion GH is trying to enact.
Ok, you've quoted that post a couple times now, so let's address it.
I take it you liked the opening statement "He’s just trying to light a fire under y’all collective asses to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change."
engaging meaningfully is a vague term, similar to what you get when you ask ChatGPT to write for you. You can project that to cover pretty much any discussion about politics. What does this mean to you?
So, Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people. She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want? Before you start with the genocide enablers thing again, I know that you disagree with her foreign policy, no need to go there.
Maybe something for you think about: were we closer to implementing a socialist system before or after Harris lost the election?
☐ The Democratic party has a viable path forward and we just need to support them ☐ The Democratic party has has no viable path forward so we need an alternative ☐ The US has no viable path forward, but to try to protect our loved ones from the worst of it ☐ I don't know how to get to a socialist future, but that's what I want
Generally speaking, my vote was not counted before the election result was announced. There's no reason for me to have voted for Harris. That said, I didn't want Trump to win. The way the US electoral system is set up though, there's not really much I could do about that.
If I tell you which poll option will you tailor your response? Are we back to cosplaying different characters depending on who you're talking to? That got old fast the first time around , can we not do that again?
I put the link so that hopefully you'd see I mean that:
One frustration the poll shows that confirms my personal experience is that when I'm arguing in favor of socialism I'm arguing against some people that believe each answer (and some unlisted ones) and they each need to be convinced of different things.
For the plurality of people here that ostensibly want a socialist future, I recommend dropping in my Blog to discuss our ideas of how to get there.
Ok, I went with option number 3. Now, your turn. I got these two for you:
So, Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people. She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want?
Are we closer to implementing a socialist system before or after Harris lost the election?
So you chose "The US has no viable path forward, but to try to protect our loved ones from the worst of it"
The idea was also for you to elaborate on it. Because as it is, there's not really any reason to discuss the socialism aspect. I don't know that we're any closer to socialism, but we're definitely closer to revolutionary change one way or the other (granted it's looking like Democrats will side with the fascist revolution over a socialist one atm).
But yes, as far as I understand, Harris said things progressives liked. She didn't have "concrete plans" though. That would have required a viable plan to pass them, which you recognize (in your answer) she (and no one else) had/has.
It's like saying "I have a concrete plan for passing universal healthcare: Democrats win all the elections. Ta-da!"
I thought option 3 was about supporting democrats but I see now that it was just the third option in terms of votes, my apologies.
That's okay. I'd prefer one/several of the people here that disagree with you to disabuse you of that honestly. You're more likely to be receptive of them trying to do that than you are of any attempt I could make. ChristianS maybe? + Show Spoiler +
On October 01 2025 10:32 LightSpectra wrote: Looks like we're officially shutting down.
"A shutdown falls on the President's lack of leadership. He can't even control his own party and get people together in a room. A shutdown means the president is weak." -- Donald Trump in 2013
I wonder how long it'll last and if Trump/Republicans will really start mass firings?
I also wonder whether people think Democrats should hold out on passing a "clean CR", for how long, and what the minimum they should accept is?
I think one reason you get so few takers on “Okay, what should be done?” posts is that a lot of what we’re watching fundamentally undercuts our systems’ premises and foundational assumptions. It’s not clear what rebuilding those foundations would look like, or how we can expect those systems to work adequately under the circumstances.
As an example: the reason SCOTUS has lifetime appointments is because it was always supposed to be a nonpartisan, professional “balls and strikes” institution. Technocratic, if you like. For those purposes having seats be determined by the semi-unpredictable whims of biology is meant to ensure there’s no obvious way for partisans to seize control of the court. But once everyone understands justices are partisan, and figures it’s just another power center to battle over like Congress or the Presidency, lifetime appointments becomes a ludicrous system. It’s like having a legislature in which seats are determined primarily by your faction’s actuarial understanding; if you can predict your people’s deaths far enough in advance, you’ll always have an opportunity to have them step down and replaced with someone younger, and you’ll never lose a seat.
This budgetary process wasn’t functioning *well* before, but it is kind of fundamentally broken by an executive that feels completely unconstrained by Congress’s dictates. If Congress allocated money for something, and the executive doesn’t like it? Doesn’t happen. If Congress didn’t allocate money for something the executive wants to do? It happens anyway. What, then, is the point of the budget anyway?
Then there’s this farce where Republicans are gloating that a shutdown gives Trump some new powers to carry out mass firings. That’s ludicrous as a matter of law. But what do legal protections mean now anyway? He’s been firing people all year that were supposedly entitled to legal protections against this kind of arbitrary dismissal, and court cases have been playing out all year but they’re mostly not getting hired back. Maybe in a few years the court cases will conclude and they’ll get awarded a bunch of back pay, maybe they won’t, but in the meantime there doesn’t appear to be any mechanism preventing Trump from reconstituting the government however he sees fit, regardless of any shutdown.
Anyway. “What should the Democrats do?” IMO the only reason to be talking about the Democrats at all is if we’re hoping that defeating Republicans in some future election is going to end this, or at least if the threat of that will somewhat restrain the worst abuses. With that in mind, I think it makes perfect sense to choose something like the ACA subsidies – a popular, kitchen-table provision that people are already enjoying, and which the Republicans would be eliminating with a “clean” CR. If they succeed, it will mean Republicans are chastened by unpopularity out of a change they wanted to make, which is bullish. If they fail (e.g. if Republicans nuke the filibuster) they can point to the premium increases people will experience and pretty plausibly say “we did everything we could to prevent this, you’d better vote out these Republicans if you don’t like it.” None of that is even pretending to “fix” any of the ongoing catastrophes but I don’t see how any Dem response to the budget shutdown could.
This is all probably a waste of a mental exercise though, they’ll [Democrats] probably just demand Trump promise not to fire more people or something, not even get that promise, and then fold anyway.
That's sorta the point. If we actually think and talk about what Democrats should/could/would do it becomes pretty undeniably obvious they are a waste of our time. The things that even their steadfast supporters acknowledge need to be done and what Democrats are willing/capable of doing simply don't overlap.
Confronting that contradiction is hard/scary so people are holding out on that with their typical mock and gawk until they can return to just thoughtlessly spamming variations of "vote blue no matter who or you're a MAGAt!" instead.
Sure, and I know GreenHorizons feels that way. I guess I was trying to engage with LibHorizons’ challenge (since you often seem frustrated that no one is willing to). Of course, the other reason they might hesitate to engage is because they know LH is a performance, not a true held belief (“bad faith,” someone might say) and they suspect you’ll use any resulting discussion as ammunition for your “stop voting for Democrats” hobby horse.
Personally, I think the position you need to be attacking is not “the Democratic Party has a viable path forward and we just need to support them” (which hardly anybody seems to really buy anyway). + Show Spoiler +
It’s “there is no path forward and we can only watch the decline, maybe trying to protect our loved ones from the worst of it.” The “mocking and gawking” seems to me like a natural response if that’s your viewpoint.
I mean, the thing about liberals is their politics is not particularly motivated by self-interest. There’s a kind of “noblesse oblige” to the whole faction. They tend to be pretty affluent, pretty white, and most of their moral commitments don’t particularly impact them personally. If you want to be uncharitable, you could accuse them of being motivated by the appeal of smug self-righteousness and the social standing obtainable through right-think. But in the last election they widely took the position “Donald Trump is an existential threat to our way of life, and if we don’t stop him he’ll create a fascist autocracy.” The general response was “fuck you, everybody hates you, go away and never come back.”
It’s not surprising that the response would be to politically disengage and say “well, we tried to tell you, now I guess we’ll all reap the consequences, you imbeciles,” is it? I’m not saying it’s the right response, or that we need to be more considerate of their feelings or something. But I don’t think there’s much to be accomplished by telling them to despair at the Democrats’ prospects right now. They’re in gallows-humor watch-the-world-burn mode because they’re *already* despairing.
Presuming you can't be swayed by even them, that's probably still pretty much what my answer would look like, without the mistaken characterizations of your positions.
I am simply acknowledging that the only way we get to socialism in America is through the Democrats. + Show Spoiler +
I see no future in which a violent revolution happens and the winning block is the socialists.To the majority of Americans this ideology is toxic.
In any case, I wanted to bring this back to the post you quoted 3 times.
He’s just trying to light a fire under y’all collective asses to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change."
I am engaging meaningfully with my political beliefs and tracking how the democratic platform, as embodied by Harris in the recent election, represents progressive values.
Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people.
She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want?
Even if she somehow miraculously helped Democrats win the House and Senate, we know from them using their biggest majority of our lives to pass their biggest achievement (a Republican healthcare plan too far right for Richard Nixon) that then we'd just hear about how her passing Far-Right/Republican legislation instead of her progressive promises is actually good and pragmatic.
"Fool me once..."
Seriously what are you even fishing for? Without a majority in all 3 branches no one, Republican or Democrat can get anything done.
What will you do without the Senate? is not a useful question because there is no actual answer for it, you need consent from all branches of government to govern. What is the plan for your socialist revolution if you lose?
Or I guess the answer your looking for is "Declare martial law. disband Congress and rule as a benevolent dictator" There we go, that is the line you were missing from Harris's election promises that stopped you from supporting her and instead made you constantly run interference for the Republicans. You don't give a shit about Gaza genocide, you just want a dictator of your own.
In their totality, rather than isolating individual exchanges it’s very difficult to come away from GH’s general posting with anything other than the conclusion that Trump’s election is A-OK with them in an accelerationist sense. That the destruction of orthodoxy will pave the way for something else.
But they also really like to swerve questions that might lock them in to holding that position. Even pretty simple, unambiguous ones.
I don’t agree that they don’t care about certain issues, being wholly inconsistent or a terrible communicator in this kind of environment doesn’t preclude that.
I think they make good points, many I agree with. I think they ask interesting questions that challenge assumptions, but if it’s completely one-way half the time it’s somewhat aggravating.
It’s like having some new partner, she’s all new-age and shit and like you try out Yoga, and like smoking weed while listening to binaural beats in an anechoic chamber. You’re dressing in clothes she made herself that are based upon a particularly obscure religious order who resided in the Hebrides. And hey some of this you kinda dig, but if you ever dare to suggest doing something you like, such as drinking beers and doing a Nicholas Cage marathon, she will flip the fucking bap to use a Northern Irish colloquialism.
As regular users know I rarely use analogies, much less tortuous ones, so apologies.
It’s rather the inverse of current front-line American politics, or indeed what we’re seeing blossoming in terms of right populism in Europe right now.
Doubling down and never conceding anything, being wrong or merely miscalculating on anything, actively works for them. It’s detrimental to the kind of political persuasion GH is trying to enact.
No.
Trump's victories were a product of generations of politics. Me and my actions had basically no impact outside of being a tiny part of the people that actually tried pretty hard to do the thing that would possibly save the Democratic party by convincing them they needed to nominate Bernie Sanders or they would lose to Trump (no matter how I voted or posted on TL). Which they did. Twice. Despite him engaging in a failed insurrection and being impeached 2x in between.
Democrats didn't have to get better (decades ago) to satisfy my personal preferences, they needed to be better in a multitude of ways (like not being buddies with someone like Trump in the first place to name one obvious one) to prevent Trump and/or more like him from winning power and enacting the Heritage Foundation (currently known as Project 2025) plans.
You don't get a successful Trump 2024 without a Biden 2024 that "finally beat Medicare" and insisted on staying in the race to tell you about it. You also don't get 107 Days for Harris.
On October 05 2025 17:20 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]It's basically what I was going for with the discussion about the recent poll. I think there's still plenty there to discuss personally and encourage people to elaborate on their answers.
☐ The Democratic party has a viable path forward and we just need to support them ☐ The Democratic party has has no viable path forward so we need an alternative ☐ The US has no viable path forward, but to try to protect our loved ones from the worst of it ☐ I don't know how to get to a socialist future, but that's what I want
Generally speaking, my vote was not counted before the election result was announced. There's no reason for me to have voted for Harris. That said, I didn't want Trump to win. The way the US electoral system is set up though, there's not really much I could do about that.
If I tell you which poll option will you tailor your response? Are we back to cosplaying different characters depending on who you're talking to? That got old fast the first time around , can we not do that again?
I put the link so that hopefully you'd see I mean that:
One frustration the poll shows that confirms my personal experience is that when I'm arguing in favor of socialism I'm arguing against some people that believe each answer (and some unlisted ones) and they each need to be convinced of different things.
For the plurality of people here that ostensibly want a socialist future, I recommend dropping in my Blog to discuss our ideas of how to get there.
Ok, I went with option number 3. Now, your turn. I got these two for you:
So, Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people. She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want?
Are we closer to implementing a socialist system before or after Harris lost the election?
So you chose "The US has no viable path forward, but to try to protect our loved ones from the worst of it"
The idea was also for you to elaborate on it. Because as it is, there's not really any reason to discuss the socialism aspect. I don't know that we're any closer to socialism, but we're definitely closer to revolutionary change one way or the other (granted it's looking like Democrats will side with the fascist revolution over a socialist one atm).
But yes, as far as I understand, Harris said things progressives liked. She didn't have "concrete plans" though. That would have required a viable plan to pass them, which you recognize (in your answer) she (and no one else) had/has.
It's like saying "I have a concrete plan for passing universal healthcare: Democrats win all the elections. Ta-da!"
I thought option 3 was about supporting democrats but I see now that it was just the third option in terms of votes, my apologies.
That's okay. I'd prefer one/several of the people here that disagree with you to disabuse you of that honestly. You're more likely to be receptive of them trying to do that than you are of any attempt I could make. ChristianS maybe? + Show Spoiler +
On October 01 2025 10:32 LightSpectra wrote: Looks like we're officially shutting down.
"A shutdown falls on the President's lack of leadership. He can't even control his own party and get people together in a room. A shutdown means the president is weak." -- Donald Trump in 2013
I wonder how long it'll last and if Trump/Republicans will really start mass firings?
I also wonder whether people think Democrats should hold out on passing a "clean CR", for how long, and what the minimum they should accept is?
I think one reason you get so few takers on “Okay, what should be done?” posts is that a lot of what we’re watching fundamentally undercuts our systems’ premises and foundational assumptions. It’s not clear what rebuilding those foundations would look like, or how we can expect those systems to work adequately under the circumstances.
As an example: the reason SCOTUS has lifetime appointments is because it was always supposed to be a nonpartisan, professional “balls and strikes” institution. Technocratic, if you like. For those purposes having seats be determined by the semi-unpredictable whims of biology is meant to ensure there’s no obvious way for partisans to seize control of the court. But once everyone understands justices are partisan, and figures it’s just another power center to battle over like Congress or the Presidency, lifetime appointments becomes a ludicrous system. It’s like having a legislature in which seats are determined primarily by your faction’s actuarial understanding; if you can predict your people’s deaths far enough in advance, you’ll always have an opportunity to have them step down and replaced with someone younger, and you’ll never lose a seat.
This budgetary process wasn’t functioning *well* before, but it is kind of fundamentally broken by an executive that feels completely unconstrained by Congress’s dictates. If Congress allocated money for something, and the executive doesn’t like it? Doesn’t happen. If Congress didn’t allocate money for something the executive wants to do? It happens anyway. What, then, is the point of the budget anyway?
Then there’s this farce where Republicans are gloating that a shutdown gives Trump some new powers to carry out mass firings. That’s ludicrous as a matter of law. But what do legal protections mean now anyway? He’s been firing people all year that were supposedly entitled to legal protections against this kind of arbitrary dismissal, and court cases have been playing out all year but they’re mostly not getting hired back. Maybe in a few years the court cases will conclude and they’ll get awarded a bunch of back pay, maybe they won’t, but in the meantime there doesn’t appear to be any mechanism preventing Trump from reconstituting the government however he sees fit, regardless of any shutdown.
Anyway. “What should the Democrats do?” IMO the only reason to be talking about the Democrats at all is if we’re hoping that defeating Republicans in some future election is going to end this, or at least if the threat of that will somewhat restrain the worst abuses. With that in mind, I think it makes perfect sense to choose something like the ACA subsidies – a popular, kitchen-table provision that people are already enjoying, and which the Republicans would be eliminating with a “clean” CR. If they succeed, it will mean Republicans are chastened by unpopularity out of a change they wanted to make, which is bullish. If they fail (e.g. if Republicans nuke the filibuster) they can point to the premium increases people will experience and pretty plausibly say “we did everything we could to prevent this, you’d better vote out these Republicans if you don’t like it.” None of that is even pretending to “fix” any of the ongoing catastrophes but I don’t see how any Dem response to the budget shutdown could.
This is all probably a waste of a mental exercise though, they’ll [Democrats] probably just demand Trump promise not to fire more people or something, not even get that promise, and then fold anyway.
That's sorta the point. If we actually think and talk about what Democrats should/could/would do it becomes pretty undeniably obvious they are a waste of our time. The things that even their steadfast supporters acknowledge need to be done and what Democrats are willing/capable of doing simply don't overlap.
Confronting that contradiction is hard/scary so people are holding out on that with their typical mock and gawk until they can return to just thoughtlessly spamming variations of "vote blue no matter who or you're a MAGAt!" instead.
Sure, and I know GreenHorizons feels that way. I guess I was trying to engage with LibHorizons’ challenge (since you often seem frustrated that no one is willing to). Of course, the other reason they might hesitate to engage is because they know LH is a performance, not a true held belief (“bad faith,” someone might say) and they suspect you’ll use any resulting discussion as ammunition for your “stop voting for Democrats” hobby horse.
Personally, I think the position you need to be attacking is not “the Democratic Party has a viable path forward and we just need to support them” (which hardly anybody seems to really buy anyway). + Show Spoiler +
It’s “there is no path forward and we can only watch the decline, maybe trying to protect our loved ones from the worst of it.” The “mocking and gawking” seems to me like a natural response if that’s your viewpoint.
I mean, the thing about liberals is their politics is not particularly motivated by self-interest. There’s a kind of “noblesse oblige” to the whole faction. They tend to be pretty affluent, pretty white, and most of their moral commitments don’t particularly impact them personally. If you want to be uncharitable, you could accuse them of being motivated by the appeal of smug self-righteousness and the social standing obtainable through right-think. But in the last election they widely took the position “Donald Trump is an existential threat to our way of life, and if we don’t stop him he’ll create a fascist autocracy.” The general response was “fuck you, everybody hates you, go away and never come back.”
It’s not surprising that the response would be to politically disengage and say “well, we tried to tell you, now I guess we’ll all reap the consequences, you imbeciles,” is it? I’m not saying it’s the right response, or that we need to be more considerate of their feelings or something. But I don’t think there’s much to be accomplished by telling them to despair at the Democrats’ prospects right now. They’re in gallows-humor watch-the-world-burn mode because they’re *already* despairing.
Presuming you can't be swayed by even them, that's probably still pretty much what my answer would look like, without the mistaken characterizations of your positions.
I am simply acknowledging that the only way we get to socialism in America is through the Democrats. + Show Spoiler +
I see no future in which a violent revolution happens and the winning block is the socialists.To the majority of Americans this ideology is toxic.
In any case, I wanted to bring this back to the post you quoted 3 times.
He’s just trying to light a fire under y’all collective asses to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change."
I am engaging meaningfully with my political beliefs and tracking how the democratic platform, as embodied by Harris in the recent election, represents progressive values.
Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people.
She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want?
Even if she somehow miraculously helped Democrats win the House and Senate, we know from them using their biggest majority of our lives to pass their biggest achievement (a Republican healthcare plan too far right for Richard Nixon) that then we'd just hear about how her passing Far-Right/Republican legislation instead of her progressive promises is actually good and pragmatic.
"Fool me once..."
Seriously what are you even fishing for? Without a majority in all 3 branches no one, Republican or Democrat can get anything done.
What will you do without the Senate? is not a useful question because there is no actual answer for it, you need consent from all branches of government to govern. What is the plan for your socialist revolution if you lose?
Or I guess the answer your looking for is "Declare martial law. disband Congress and rule as a benevolent dictator" There we go, that is the line you were missing from Harris's election promises that stopped you from supporting her and instead made you constantly run interference for the Republicans. You don't give a shit about Gaza genocide, you just want a dictator of your own.
In their totality, rather than isolating individual exchanges it’s very difficult to come away from GH’s general posting with anything other than the conclusion that Trump’s election is A-OK with them in an accelerationist sense. That the destruction of orthodoxy will pave the way for something else.
But they also really like to swerve questions that might lock them in to holding that position. Even pretty simple, unambiguous ones.
I don’t agree that they don’t care about certain issues, being wholly inconsistent or a terrible communicator in this kind of environment doesn’t preclude that.
I think they make good points, many I agree with. I think they ask interesting questions that challenge assumptions, but if it’s completely one-way half the time it’s somewhat aggravating.
It’s like having some new partner, she’s all new-age and shit and like you try out Yoga, and like smoking weed while listening to binaural beats in an anechoic chamber. You’re dressing in clothes she made herself that are based upon a particularly obscure religious order who resided in the Hebrides. And hey some of this you kinda dig, but if you ever dare to suggest doing something you like, such as drinking beers and doing a Nicholas Cage marathon, she will flip the fucking bap to use a Northern Irish colloquialism.
As regular users know I rarely use analogies, much less tortuous ones, so apologies.
It’s rather the inverse of current front-line American politics, or indeed what we’re seeing blossoming in terms of right populism in Europe right now.
Doubling down and never conceding anything, being wrong or merely miscalculating on anything, actively works for them. It’s detrimental to the kind of political persuasion GH is trying to enact.
No.
Trump's victories were a product of generations of politics. Me and my actions had basically no impact outside of being a tiny part of the people that actually tried pretty hard to do the thing that would possibly save the Democratic party by convincing them they needed to nominate Bernie Sanders or they would lose to Trump (no matter how I voted or posted on TL). Which they did. Twice. Despite him engaging in a failed insurrection and being impeached 2x in between.
Democrats didn't have to get better (decades ago) to satisfy my personal preferences, they needed to be better in a multitude of ways (like not being buddies with someone like Trump in the first place to name one obvious one) to prevent Trump and/or more like him from winning power and enacting the Heritage Foundation (currently known as Project 2025) plans.
You don't get a successful Trump 2024 without a Biden 2024 that "finally beat Medicare" and insisted on staying in the race to tell you about it. You also don't get 107 Days for Harris.
Why does that matter?
You just said in your response to Christian that a Harris victory would have been essentially irrelevant as they wouldn’t have been able (or willing) to enact her platform. But now it’s about winning? Why does winning matter if the Dems won’t do anything?
Your actions may or may not have no impact, they are your actions. And your words.
I could say ‘I love the smell of napalm Palestinians in the morning’ and you would quite rightly have issues with that. But hey, I don’t really have any influence on Israeli policy so I can just say whatever right, doesn’t matter? So what if I spammed that phrase for 9 months, I didn’t change anything so I don’t have to defend it.
I guess I’d like to hear the case for optimism about the Democrats made. I know that kind of sincerity and optimism isn’t in vogue, and it leaves you open to cynical sniping and mocking; I don’t think I’d respond that way, but it’s likely others in the thread would.
To clarify what I mean, I think most people in the thread (excluding Intro, Razyda, oBlade, etc.) would agree that:
The current administration is lawless and authoritarian.
That will have enormously negative consequences for just about everybody by the time it runs its course.
If anything can be done to stop that, in lasting fashion, it should be done.
So I wouldn’t consider it optimism about the Democrats to say “I think they might take back the House in the midterms” (sure, maybe?) unless there’s a mechanism by which that actually ends this lawless autocracy in lasting fashion.
Personally I can’t see how that occurs without substantial penalties imposed on those responsible (to dissuade future politicians from attempting the same lawlessness) and revamping of our systems (since, as I posted about previously, they’re kind of fundamentally broken by all this in a way that would not improve if Trump dies tomorrow).
So if it seemed reasonably likely that, say, Democrats are swept into power on a platform of impeaching and removing Trump, Republicans are running scared and going along with it to avoid losing legitimacy permanently, and the new ruling coalition has a mandate to substantially reform the courts and executive power, then sure, I’d say supporting Democrats is a good path out of this.
That seems so vanishingly unlikely, though. Not least because to achieve that you’d have to first convince the Democrats *themselves* to want that outcome and push for it. Then because they’d claim (not implausibly!) that a platform like that would be seen as too radical and rejected by voters. Then because a coalition big enough to win those kinds of victories would contain all manner of center- and right-leaning wimps that would balk at actually doing any of it once the far right was (at least temporarily) defeated.
But I’d love to be wrong! Are the political barriers not as high as I thought? Is the Democratic coalition more viable than I’m giving it credit for?
On October 06 2025 01:28 Billyboy wrote: @oblade Can you explain the logic to sending the national guard and ice to Portland when the entire state of Oregon has just over 100k illegals. You have states like Texas with 1.6 million and Florida with 1 million and those states voted for Trump so he wouldn't get nearly the amount of push back.
Wouldn't it make way more sense from a resource and efficiency stand point to get those states cleared out, show how much better they are because of it and then go after the tiny ones that have insignificant amounts?
Does this not make it look like the goal has nothing to do with getting rid of illegals?
Isn't it rather obvious? He sends national guard, where conditions prevent ICE from doing its job.
But isn't ICE's job where the illegal immigrants are? The condition preventing ICE from doing its job in Portland is that Portland is a thousand mile from the jobsite.
But there are illegal immigrants in Portland?? Also ICE are federal agents therefore entire US is their jobsite plus there is ICE facility in Portland which is their job site.
On October 06 2025 03:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Razyda, I think you mean "cream of the crop".
Indeed, thank you.
If they wanted to round up illegal immigrants, they’d put some of their resources into hunting down illegal Irish immigrants in Boston hiding in plain sight. There’s at least a couple thousand there breaking immigration law with their visa overstays. It’s also a blue state, good opportunity to give them Massholes an asskicking.
Hint: ICE isn’t actually about hunting down illegal immigrants or protecting the community or maintaining the law. Kristi Noem consistently makes it clear who they’re targeting.
The point was pretty much that the dirt poor people are the ones the anti-Maidan folks expect to fight/fend for themselves to your west (would you support Europe arming anti-fascists in the US like Ukrainians?). I could be wrong, but I doubt many (I'm sure some are) of Ukrainians on the front lines to your east are more affluent than you, and that's who you expect to protect you (not all flee West like you would) until you're forced to fight/join the fascists yourself. Which with AfD being the most popular faction nowadays, probably isn't as far off as you'd like to imagine.
On September 30 2025 21:12 Ryzel wrote: He’s just trying to light a fire under y’all collective asses to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change. Because if you believe “wow, the way the world works right now sucks”, you can’t then argue “you can’t do that, that’s not the way the world works”, because the logical conclusion of meshing those two is “the world sucks and will keep on sucking until hopefully it stops sucking anymore on its own.”
At that point you’re at best (if you have hope for it to stop sucking) ideologically similar to Nazi Germany citizens who “had to go along with all the bad stuff until hopefully things get better” (but instead internalized all the bad shit they had to do until it didn’t seem so bad anymore), OR at worst (if you’ve lost hope for it to stop sucking) ideologically similar to 647 / No Lives Matter nihilists who say “fuck this fucking sucky world that sucks and everyone in it, even me” (until their rage pushes them to shoot up a public place).
One additional thing I'm pointing out is that oppressed people are being described sorta like canaries in the fascism mine for those people who plan on leaving when the oppressed people around them die/get abused at an uncomfortable enough rate.
I'm not leaving those less fortunate than myself to face the fascists alone and I'm certainly not going to join the fascists. That's just not something the rest of you will commit to.
Ok, you've quoted that post a couple times now, so let's address it.
I take it you liked the opening statement "He’s just trying to light a fire under y’all collective asses to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change."
engaging meaningfully is a vague term, similar to what you get when you ask ChatGPT to write for you. You can project that to cover pretty much any discussion about politics. What does this mean to you?
Harris's domestic platform was similar to Biden's on most issues.[15] She supported national abortion protections, LGBT+ rights, stricter gun control, and legislation to address climate change.[16] She also supported federal cannabis legalization, strengthening voting rights, strengthening the Affordable Care Act, and federal funding of housing. Harris departed from Biden on some economic issues, initially proposing what some described as a "populist" economic agenda. Harris advocated for limited anti-price-gouging laws for grocery and food prices, a cap on prescription drug costs, and expansion of the child tax credit.[17][18] On immigration, Harris supported increasing the number of Border Patrol agents and reforming the immigration system. On foreign policy, she supported continued military aid to Ukraine and Israel in their respective wars, but insisted that Israel should agree to a ceasefire and hostage deal and work towards a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[19]
So, Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people. She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want? Before you start with the genocide enablers thing again, I know that you disagree with her foreign policy, no need to go there.
Maybe something for you think about: were we closer to implementing a socialist system before or after Harris lost the election?
☐ The Democratic party has a viable path forward and we just need to support them ☐ The Democratic party has has no viable path forward so we need an alternative ☐ The US has no viable path forward, but to try to protect our loved ones from the worst of it ☐ I don't know how to get to a socialist future, but that's what I want
Generally speaking, my vote was not counted before the election result was announced. There's no reason for me to have voted for Harris. That said, I didn't want Trump to win. The way the US electoral system is set up though, there's not really much I could do about that.
If I tell you which poll option will you tailor your response? Are we back to cosplaying different characters depending on who you're talking to? That got old fast the first time around , can we not do that again?
I put the link so that hopefully you'd see I mean that:
One frustration the poll shows that confirms my personal experience is that when I'm arguing in favor of socialism I'm arguing against some people that believe each answer (and some unlisted ones) and they each need to be convinced of different things.
For the plurality of people here that ostensibly want a socialist future, I recommend dropping in my Blog to discuss our ideas of how to get there.
Ok, I went with option number 3. Now, your turn. I got these two for you:
So, Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people. She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want?
Are we closer to implementing a socialist system before or after Harris lost the election?
So you chose "The US has no viable path forward, but to try to protect our loved ones from the worst of it"
The idea was also for you to elaborate on it. Because as it is, there's not really any reason to discuss the socialism aspect. I don't know that we're any closer to socialism, but we're definitely closer to revolutionary change one way or the other (granted it's looking like Democrats will side with the fascist revolution over a socialist one atm).
But yes, as far as I understand, Harris said things progressives liked. She didn't have "concrete plans" though. That would have required a viable plan to pass them, which you recognize (in your answer) she (and no one else) had/has.
It's like saying "I have a concrete plan for passing universal healthcare: Democrats win all the elections. Ta-da!"
I thought option 3 was about supporting democrats but I see now that it was just the third option in terms of votes, my apologies.
That's okay. I'd prefer one/several of the people here that disagree with you to disabuse you of that honestly. You're more likely to be receptive of them trying to do that than you are of any attempt I could make. ChristianS maybe? + Show Spoiler +
On October 01 2025 10:32 LightSpectra wrote: Looks like we're officially shutting down.
"A shutdown falls on the President's lack of leadership. He can't even control his own party and get people together in a room. A shutdown means the president is weak." -- Donald Trump in 2013
I wonder how long it'll last and if Trump/Republicans will really start mass firings?
I also wonder whether people think Democrats should hold out on passing a "clean CR", for how long, and what the minimum they should accept is?
I think one reason you get so few takers on “Okay, what should be done?” posts is that a lot of what we’re watching fundamentally undercuts our systems’ premises and foundational assumptions. It’s not clear what rebuilding those foundations would look like, or how we can expect those systems to work adequately under the circumstances.
As an example: the reason SCOTUS has lifetime appointments is because it was always supposed to be a nonpartisan, professional “balls and strikes” institution. Technocratic, if you like. For those purposes having seats be determined by the semi-unpredictable whims of biology is meant to ensure there’s no obvious way for partisans to seize control of the court. But once everyone understands justices are partisan, and figures it’s just another power center to battle over like Congress or the Presidency, lifetime appointments becomes a ludicrous system. It’s like having a legislature in which seats are determined primarily by your faction’s actuarial understanding; if you can predict your people’s deaths far enough in advance, you’ll always have an opportunity to have them step down and replaced with someone younger, and you’ll never lose a seat.
This budgetary process wasn’t functioning *well* before, but it is kind of fundamentally broken by an executive that feels completely unconstrained by Congress’s dictates. If Congress allocated money for something, and the executive doesn’t like it? Doesn’t happen. If Congress didn’t allocate money for something the executive wants to do? It happens anyway. What, then, is the point of the budget anyway?
Then there’s this farce where Republicans are gloating that a shutdown gives Trump some new powers to carry out mass firings. That’s ludicrous as a matter of law. But what do legal protections mean now anyway? He’s been firing people all year that were supposedly entitled to legal protections against this kind of arbitrary dismissal, and court cases have been playing out all year but they’re mostly not getting hired back. Maybe in a few years the court cases will conclude and they’ll get awarded a bunch of back pay, maybe they won’t, but in the meantime there doesn’t appear to be any mechanism preventing Trump from reconstituting the government however he sees fit, regardless of any shutdown.
Anyway. “What should the Democrats do?” IMO the only reason to be talking about the Democrats at all is if we’re hoping that defeating Republicans in some future election is going to end this, or at least if the threat of that will somewhat restrain the worst abuses. With that in mind, I think it makes perfect sense to choose something like the ACA subsidies – a popular, kitchen-table provision that people are already enjoying, and which the Republicans would be eliminating with a “clean” CR. If they succeed, it will mean Republicans are chastened by unpopularity out of a change they wanted to make, which is bullish. If they fail (e.g. if Republicans nuke the filibuster) they can point to the premium increases people will experience and pretty plausibly say “we did everything we could to prevent this, you’d better vote out these Republicans if you don’t like it.” None of that is even pretending to “fix” any of the ongoing catastrophes but I don’t see how any Dem response to the budget shutdown could.
This is all probably a waste of a mental exercise though, they’ll [Democrats] probably just demand Trump promise not to fire more people or something, not even get that promise, and then fold anyway.
That's sorta the point. If we actually think and talk about what Democrats should/could/would do it becomes pretty undeniably obvious they are a waste of our time. The things that even their steadfast supporters acknowledge need to be done and what Democrats are willing/capable of doing simply don't overlap.
Confronting that contradiction is hard/scary so people are holding out on that with their typical mock and gawk until they can return to just thoughtlessly spamming variations of "vote blue no matter who or you're a MAGAt!" instead.
Sure, and I know GreenHorizons feels that way. I guess I was trying to engage with LibHorizons’ challenge (since you often seem frustrated that no one is willing to). Of course, the other reason they might hesitate to engage is because they know LH is a performance, not a true held belief (“bad faith,” someone might say) and they suspect you’ll use any resulting discussion as ammunition for your “stop voting for Democrats” hobby horse.
Personally, I think the position you need to be attacking is not “the Democratic Party has a viable path forward and we just need to support them” (which hardly anybody seems to really buy anyway). + Show Spoiler +
It’s “there is no path forward and we can only watch the decline, maybe trying to protect our loved ones from the worst of it.” The “mocking and gawking” seems to me like a natural response if that’s your viewpoint.
I mean, the thing about liberals is their politics is not particularly motivated by self-interest. There’s a kind of “noblesse oblige” to the whole faction. They tend to be pretty affluent, pretty white, and most of their moral commitments don’t particularly impact them personally. If you want to be uncharitable, you could accuse them of being motivated by the appeal of smug self-righteousness and the social standing obtainable through right-think. But in the last election they widely took the position “Donald Trump is an existential threat to our way of life, and if we don’t stop him he’ll create a fascist autocracy.” The general response was “fuck you, everybody hates you, go away and never come back.”
It’s not surprising that the response would be to politically disengage and say “well, we tried to tell you, now I guess we’ll all reap the consequences, you imbeciles,” is it? I’m not saying it’s the right response, or that we need to be more considerate of their feelings or something. But I don’t think there’s much to be accomplished by telling them to despair at the Democrats’ prospects right now. They’re in gallows-humor watch-the-world-burn mode because they’re *already* despairing.
Presuming you can't be swayed by even them, that's probably still pretty much what my answer would look like, without the mistaken characterizations of your positions.
I am simply acknowledging that the only way we get to socialism in America is through the Democrats. + Show Spoiler +
I see no future in which a violent revolution happens and the winning block is the socialists.To the majority of Americans this ideology is toxic.
In any case, I wanted to bring this back to the post you quoted 3 times.
He’s just trying to light a fire under y’all collective asses to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change."
I am engaging meaningfully with my political beliefs and tracking how the democratic platform, as embodied by Harris in the recent election, represents progressive values.
Harris hit most of the issues we agree are important, from taxing richer folks more to extending healthcare and adding protections for LGBT+ people.
She had concrete plans to do these things. Are you going to argue that these don't track with what progressives want?
Even if she somehow miraculously helped Democrats win the House and Senate, we know from them using their biggest majority of our lives to pass their biggest achievement (a Republican healthcare plan too far right for Richard Nixon) that then we'd just hear about how her passing Far-Right/Republican legislation instead of her progressive promises is actually good and pragmatic.
"Fool me once..."
That was a lot of text to say that you didn't want to answer me when I asked you to " to engage meaningfully with your individual political beliefs, see how they track with what’s currently being represented by the Democratic Party, and normalize change." Is it really that off base to discuss how progressive values are being incorporated into one of the two major political parties?
You just said that since there is no path to victory, then it doesn't matter.
I mean, fine. Following the same logic, there is no path to a successful violent social revolution, so why listen to anything you have to say?
On October 06 2025 10:36 ChristianS wrote: I guess I’d like to hear the case for optimism about the Democrats made. I know that kind of sincerity and optimism isn’t in vogue, and it leaves you open to cynical sniping and mocking; I don’t think I’d respond that way, but it’s likely others in the thread would.
To clarify what I mean, I think most people in the thread (excluding Intro, Razyda, oBlade, etc.) would agree that:
The current administration is lawless and authoritarian.
That will have enormously negative consequences for just about everybody by the time it runs its course.
If anything can be done to stop that, in lasting fashion, it should be done.
So I wouldn’t consider it optimism about the Democrats to say “I think they might take back the House in the midterms” (sure, maybe?) unless there’s a mechanism by which that actually ends this lawless autocracy in lasting fashion.
Personally I can’t see how that occurs without substantial penalties imposed on those responsible (to dissuade future politicians from attempting the same lawlessness) and revamping of our systems (since, as I posted about previously, they’re kind of fundamentally broken by all this in a way that would not improve if Trump dies tomorrow).
So if it seemed reasonably likely that, say, Democrats are swept into power on a platform of impeaching and removing Trump, Republicans are running scared and going along with it to avoid losing legitimacy permanently, and the new ruling coalition has a mandate to substantially reform the courts and executive power, then sure, I’d say supporting Democrats is a good path out of this.
That seems so vanishingly unlikely, though. Not least because to achieve that you’d have to first convince the Democrats *themselves* to want that outcome and push for it. Then because they’d claim (not implausibly!) that a platform like that would be seen as too radical and rejected by voters. Then because a coalition big enough to win those kinds of victories would contain all manner of center- and right-leaning wimps that would balk at actually doing any of it once the far right was (at least temporarily) defeated.
But I’d love to be wrong! Are the political barriers not as high as I thought? Is the Democratic coalition more viable than I’m giving it credit for?
I'm not optimistic at all about how politics are moving not just in the US but also worldwide. I think a big part of why we are going in that direction is this pervasive thinking that it doesn't matter who you vote for since it won't change anything. This is very clearly ceding ground to the far right parties who are taking this mantle to position themselves as the anti establishment party of change.
It is very obvious that even though they're not credited for it, the democratic party was exerting significant pressure to shift the conversation towards progressive values. It wasn't that long ago that we were discussing about the fairest ways to implement policies that reduce inequality. Now we are just hoping we don't get picked up off the street by a masked, unidentified ICE officer.
If we can't even acknowledge that democrats are actually a force for good, I don't see how we get out of this hole.
To many observers, both in the US and abroad, Donald Trump has been behaving strangely recently. Especially online.
As a government shutdown loomed in the US last week, the president posted an AI video which depicted Hakeem Jeffries, the first Black House minority leader, wearing a sombrero and exaggerated moustache, with mariachi music playing in the background.
...
It wasn’t the only situation where Trump’s behavior has seemed unusual. Last weekend Trump reposted to Truth Social an AI-generated fake video which promoted “med bed hospitals”. Trump has reposted AI content before, but the difference was that this video showed an AI version of himself speaking.
But then they're getting into conspiracy theory territory:
Did Trump, 79, believe that the video really showed him announcing med bed hospitals? Does the president think he gave a speech about med beds at the White House? Does he believe that his government is about to send “med bed cards” to every US citizen?
You know, just asking questions.
To me this just sounds like Trump is doing his usual trolling, and this Guardian piece feels a bit artificial, similar to what the rightwing press was doing to Biden.
They go on to give other examples:
In a recent speech at the White House where Trump claimed – against most existing evidence – that Tylenol could contribute to autism if women take it during pregnancy, Trump confusingly spoke of “certain elements of genius that can be given to a baby”.
Announcing that 13 grants would be awarded to investigate autism, Trump added: “They have to move quickly. They, they – when the alternative is that nothing bad can happen, let’s do it now. I was just saying to Bobby [health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr] and the group, let’s do it now. Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.”
But one of the issues is that he's always sounded like a moron, so it's hard to tell if this is something new or not.
You can tell that Trump is getting old when he mixes up all his different racisms. He should have been asking Hakeem Jeffries for his long-form birth certificate, not his sombrero.
On October 06 2025 21:15 Gorsameth wrote: 6 years ago Trump was telling people to drink bleach and how he aced a cognitive test for toddlers.
This is not new.
"I didn't eat the crayons and they clapped, they never clapped so goodly like today I tell you. I couldn't believe it. Those crayons looked so good, I might order some tonight."
On October 06 2025 01:28 Billyboy wrote: @oblade Can you explain the logic to sending the national guard and ice to Portland when the entire state of Oregon has just over 100k illegals. You have states like Texas with 1.6 million and Florida with 1 million and those states voted for Trump so he wouldn't get nearly the amount of push back.
Wouldn't it make way more sense from a resource and efficiency stand point to get those states cleared out, show how much better they are because of it and then go after the tiny ones that have insignificant amounts?
Does this not make it look like the goal has nothing to do with getting rid of illegals?
Isn't it rather obvious? He sends national guard, where conditions prevent ICE from doing its job.
But isn't ICE's job where the illegal immigrants are? The condition preventing ICE from doing its job in Portland is that Portland is a thousand mile from the jobsite.
But there are illegal immigrants in Portland?? Also ICE are federal agents therefore entire US is their jobsite plus there is ICE facility in Portland which is their job site.
On October 06 2025 03:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Razyda, I think you mean "cream of the crop".
Indeed, thank you.
If they wanted to round up illegal immigrants, they’d put some of their resources into hunting down illegal Irish immigrants in Boston hiding in plain sight. There’s at least a couple thousand there breaking immigration law with their visa overstays. It’s also a blue state, good opportunity to give them Massholes an asskicking.
Hint: ICE isn’t actually about hunting down illegal immigrants or protecting the community or maintaining the law. Kristi Noem consistently makes it clear who they’re targeting.
I like this post.
On the one hand, somebody is complaining ICE doesn't go all-in on Texas and forgo enforcement in the rest of the entire country to prove they're serious. Here you have someone saying if they're really serious, they would be sure to catch specific people in Boston in addition to what they're already doing. With no proof they exist or explanation why they are a priority.
Here's the thing. There are over 10 million illegal immigrants by any measure. There are a few tens of thousands of ICE agents. They cannot physically remove everyone instantaneously at once. They are rate-limited. There are finite agents, finite holding facilities, and finite immigration judges. If you have actual information of thousands of illegal immigrants "hiding in plain sight," tell the government. Otherwise the argument is there are so many people to arrest/deport compared to the resources available, that because enforcement of the rules is necessarily uneven, enforcing rules is unfair.
That's the argument form of people who don't think rules should exist. It's similar to saying if the FBI were serious about murders they would have solved all the unsolved murders, but since they haven't, that means that singling out and convicting Ted Bundy is unfair targeted state violence. There is no good faith interpretation of how to apply a policy that someone thinks is wrong, if that person's mindset is that because it's wrong, any application of it whatsoever is wrong for teleporting goalpost reasons.
the 25th amendment was written for people like Trump. he was off the rails in 2016 with staff keeping his worst instincts and idiocies in check. and he still got impeached.
not anymore in 2025, while he is turning into Biden sounding even more incoherent than usual. and dangerously deranged people are using this opportunity to fan the flames even more and indulge grandpa in his delusions.
The issue before is now is very simple and clear. There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.
The 69-year-old judge had received death threats in the weeks leading up to the fire, multiple sources told FITSNews. Last month, Goodstein had temporarily blocked the state’s election commission from releasing its voter files to the Department of Justice, a decision that was openly criticized by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon and later reversed by the state Supreme Court. The DOJ had sought the information, including names, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and social security numbers, of over three million registered voters as part of President Donald Trump’s March executive order restricting non-citizens from registering to vote. (Non-citizens are already not allowed to vote in federal and state elections.)
now, they are still investigating. and her ruling being flawed/correct whatever aside...
Miller's style and rhetoric, like his mentor Trump's, is putting any and everyone in the "left basket" they don't like, baselessly demonizing them, and leaving destruction in their wake.
all for fun and show and an agenda not only stupidly unjust but corrosive to the well being of the country.
On October 06 2025 10:36 ChristianS wrote: I guess I’d like to hear the case for optimism about the Democrats made. I know that kind of sincerity and optimism isn’t in vogue, and it leaves you open to cynical sniping and mocking; I don’t think I’d respond that way, but it’s likely others in the thread would.
To clarify what I mean, I think most people in the thread (excluding Intro, Razyda, oBlade, etc.) would agree that:
The current administration is lawless and authoritarian.
That will have enormously negative consequences for just about everybody by the time it runs its course.
If anything can be done to stop that, in lasting fashion, it should be done.
So I wouldn’t consider it optimism about the Democrats to say “I think they might take back the House in the midterms” (sure, maybe?) unless there’s a mechanism by which that actually ends this lawless autocracy in lasting fashion.
Personally I can’t see how that occurs without substantial penalties imposed on those responsible (to dissuade future politicians from attempting the same lawlessness) and revamping of our systems (since, as I posted about previously, they’re kind of fundamentally broken by all this in a way that would not improve if Trump dies tomorrow).
So if it seemed reasonably likely that, say, Democrats are swept into power on a platform of impeaching and removing Trump, Republicans are running scared and going along with it to avoid losing legitimacy permanently, and the new ruling coalition has a mandate to substantially reform the courts and executive power, then sure, I’d say supporting Democrats is a good path out of this.
That seems so vanishingly unlikely, though. Not least because to achieve that you’d have to first convince the Democrats *themselves* to want that outcome and push for it. Then because they’d claim (not implausibly!) that a platform like that would be seen as too radical and rejected by voters. Then because a coalition big enough to win those kinds of victories would contain all manner of center- and right-leaning wimps that would balk at actually doing any of it once the far right was (at least temporarily) defeated.
But I’d love to be wrong! Are the political barriers not as high as I thought? Is the Democratic coalition more viable than I’m giving it credit for?
I'm not optimistic at all about how politics are moving not just in the US but also worldwide. I think a big part of why we are going in that direction is this pervasive thinking that it doesn't matter who you vote for since it won't change anything. This is very clearly ceding ground to the far right parties who are taking this mantle to position themselves as the anti establishment party of change.
It is very obvious that even though they're not credited for it, the democratic party was exerting significant pressure to shift the conversation towards progressive values. It wasn't that long ago that we were discussing about the fairest ways to implement policies that reduce inequality. Now we are just hoping we don't get picked up off the street by a masked, unidentified ICE officer.
If we can't even acknowledge that democrats are actually a force for good, I don't see how we get out of this hole.
It brings to mind folks who go ‘because x doesn’t give a fuck and way outweighs my omissions, why should I bother to be environmentally conscious?’ I mean, there’s absolutely some truth there at an individual level, but if adopted collectively we quickly arrive at Tragedy of the Commons territory.
Or probably more aptly I’m reminded of my union at work. Many complain every single year that they haven’t delivered the kind of new remuneration package many would like to see. Some cancel their membership accordingly. Some may have a point, I’m not in those negotiations, for all I know the union could be terrible negotiators, or corrupt. Many criticisms may be completely legit.
The thing is, we don’t have a parallel reality to look at where the union isn’t negotiating pay and conditions. And the people who stop paying their union dues ultimately still get the benefit of whatever the union negotiates.
Which I think dovetails rather neatly with what you’re saying. Especially in a de facto two party political system that quite resembles the adversarial worker/employer dynamic.
Is the union/party delivering what I want? Absolutely an important element. The second part to consider, and one that tends to be more neglected is, what is its existence and activities preventing the entity I worry about from doing?
The Democrats could have taken the White House and done literally nothing with it whatsoever. Which will obviously be rather dispiriting and aggravating to many. But even if that occurred, simply by being in situ, well the other lot who want to do a Fascism aren’t in there doing a Fascism.
That is a rather low bar, sure. Rather uninspiring. It is still a pretty big win, if nascent Fascism is something you’re trying to avoid.
I think your general observations are pretty bang on.
Like the American Democratic Party, I’m not particularly fond of this incarnation of the Labour Party, to say the least. On the other hand, it also feels they got approximately 5 minutes to actually do anything before people lost patience and demanded more change, more quickly.
In ways fair enough as well, but from what I observe this almost exclusively seems to be benefitting right populism. Perhaps there are good counter-examples. What I tend to see is the right populist parties grab a decent chunk of people susceptible to their grandiose promises, the centre fragments/or people are just unenthused to turn out in elections, and there aren’t equivalent large analogues on the left populist side of the ledger to compensate for what the right are building.
It’s certainly a hell of a minefield to negotiate. Some Goldilock’s zone where scrutiny and robust criticism has the desired effect, and outcomes one may be looking for.
I think broadly what we see is that critiques of the centre, or structures and institutions, while often valid, just end up destroying faith and enthusiasm entirely, and it’s primarily far right politics that end up filling that vacuum.
As with many things in our modern politics, I’m not really sure how you fix that, especially in a desirous manner. Giving a pass and being uncritical might leave less fertile ground for the far right to sow, but then where’s the impetus to improve and make things better come from?
EPT
