US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5852

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KwarK

United States44183 Posts

1 hour ago

#117021

On July 10 2026 22:14 dyhb wrote:

Show nested quote +

I swear to the thread that I have not bribed or otherwise influenced LightSpectra to illustrate my point on Democratic party disconnection from dialoguing on working class problems. I believe this to be his completely authentic contribution to how Republicans and Democrats woo working class voters.

Higher taxes on billionaires is not a working class problem.

Fleetfeet

Canada2793 Posts

1 hour ago

#117022

On July 11 2026 00:06 oBlade wrote:

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You know who Epstein customers are? Who has the alleged "Epstein list" and isn't releasing it, the DOJ or LightSpectra?

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On July 10 2026 14:51 Fleetfeet wrote:

On July 10 2026 10:27 Razyda wrote:

On July 10 2026 07:27 WombaT wrote:
Can’t remember who said it, although it has Kwark vibes, but if some monkey just sat around bossing its peers around, and hoarded all the bananas, the other monkeys would probably end up beating it to death before long.

It may be first time when i see someone aspiring to be a monkey...

On July 08 2026 15:50 Fleetfeet wrote:

On July 08 2026 11:36 WombaT wrote:

On July 08 2026 10:43 dyhb wrote:

On July 08 2026 10:33 WombaT wrote:

On July 08 2026 10:00 dyhb wrote:

On July 08 2026 09:41 Billyboy wrote:

On July 08 2026 09:37 dyhb wrote:
[quote]I did say softcore porn. Hardcore porn would be saying you think Donald Trump should be assassinated prior to leaving office.

Actually, transitioning from a video game to a Hollywood drama about the perfect election victory has a narrative rhyme that I missed the first time around.

GH is doing what you said, he’s setting up to quote the posts of Sim and Jan, and claim they need to join his revolution or something. The rest of us are just mixing hope and despair.

Small election wins in subsequent elections are the kind of progress we need and can use, and big wins are possible if Iran keeps going the way its going and the tariffs keep killing the economy. I think the morose attitude on what a small win will say about America is puerile.

On July 08 2026 09:50 WombaT wrote:

Nonetheless I’m pretty sure Billyboy nor Simberto expressed no such assassination sentiment, so it feels odd to me to throw it out in a direct reply to them.

I’ve no such compunctions and I’ll admit to that, the sooner the cunt is out of office the better. Given there are seemingly no limits to what his own party will tolerate, and he’s clearly not going to face censure for his many crimes, death is quite the equaliser, something no person can escape.

Would prefer natural causes or a hilarious accident than assassination, which I don’t support.

The softcore assassination porn was more directed at you and simberto ("A much better scenario than assassination in minecraft" as an evaluation of degree). To Billy, it appears that his problem with assassination is martyrdom, not assassination.

I wholly reject that, I’m in the hardcore assassination porn camp, give me some credit.

I don’t think that’s accurate based on Billy’s general posting and what I’ve gleamed from his musing in general. He’s free to speak for himself of course, but contextually I took him to mean ‘assassination is bad, and there may be a martyr effect’, not ‘assassination is bad because there’s a martyr effect’.

And to follow your earlier billionaire logic, not sure why it’s bad really. I think the death of a person would be of a benefit for wider society, what’s the problem? If you support any domestic policy or foreign intervention that so much as kills 2 people well, you’re twice as bad as me right off the block.

Because you're not the only one on the block with ideas on who in society we should kill in order to make society better off.

Perhaps not but my ideas are actually good ones.

Facetiousness aside maybe Republicans should have backed impeachment, as they should have if they had any gumption.

Instead we’re locked into 4 years of absolutely blatant corruption, with a man who has already skirted his just desserts actively stacking institutions in his favour

So I mean you can’t get rid of him via legitimate means, that ain’t happening.

So it’s either health issue, assassin or just sitting around watching this certifiable prick fuck around for another few years. I know where my preferences would lie there.

Not really sure what the issue is with that really.

To steelman dyhb's position, I think the bar being raised to assassinating a sitting president as acceptable political violence, it's important to recognize all the stuff that is beneath that bar which must then also be acceptable political violence. If you're okay with Trump being assassinated, then you'd have to accept Obama being assassinated also. After all, he's just a former president and not the sitting president. I think there's merit to that concern.

For myself I'm 'okay with' Trump being assassinated for a reason other than him being a republican president. Someone lost their life savings dumping into trumpcoin and then got rugpulled and wants revenge, or some similar sort of karmic justice for Trump's many moral failings. Less a political assassination, more a personal one.

And yeah obviously I'd rather we weren't talking about a sitting president being assassinated, but when he's this brazenly corrupt and the system is powerless to remove him, of course people are gonna talk about other options.

Literally what you saying is we need to find excuse. You also failed to identify what below the bar? Surely if it is okay to assassinate president in the name of political reason, then it should be also okay for sitting president to get rid of people advocating assassinating him, in the name of survival?

You also failed to identify what below the bar? I never even tried to. If you want to debate the valuation of an attempted assassination on the president and who this allows him to kill, go for it. We can accept that assassinating the sitting president is a pretty high bar and that there's a lot below that bar that would displease people advocating for it. That was my point.

Surely if it is okay to assassinate president in the name of political reason, I actually offered that in a hypothetical Trump assassination I would 'be okay' with him being assassinated for personal reasons, not political ones. Even in the hypothetical I'm not okay with him being assassinated for political reasons, so whatever path you took to arrive at believing I said the opposite was dumb and you should take more time figuring it out.

In the example, he is assassinated for personal reasons, i.e. someone lost their life savings on TrumpCoin and took revenge. That's the assassin's motivation.

But political reasons are why YOU'RE okay with it. Unless it was your life savings, maybe someone you know's (who shares at least some responsibility for putting their life savings into a memecoin), it's not personal to you. The reason you are okay with it is political. That's why you're okay with it for him and not for people shooting other memecoin founders. If If it were personal, you would be okay with people shooting them for personal reasons too. You're not. Something's different about Trump. Meaning it's the other stuff that makes you okay with it in his case. Even though it didn't motivate the assassin.

Here's a really clear analogy. Two identical people commit an identical murder, one is black, and one is white. Someone wants the black one to have the death penalty and the white one to have a prison term. He says he deserves execution because the crime was bad. It's a lie. It's because he's black. Otherwise he'd go yeah the white one too. It doesn't matter what he says, he's not credible, the evidence is right there: we can measure it by the fact that he only wants it for the black guy.

Bingbong, you're back!

You seem to believe that if people engage the trolley problem hypothetical, that means they're in support of death by railcar. Do you see how stupid this conclusion makes you look?

Dan HH

Romania9227 Posts

1 hour ago

#117023

On July 10 2026 22:20 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Show nested quote +

On July 10 2026 21:42 dyhb wrote:

On July 10 2026 17:33 Biff The Understudy wrote:

On July 10 2026 04:53 dyhb wrote:

On July 10 2026 03:42 Jankisa wrote:

On July 10 2026 00:56 GreenHorizons wrote:

On July 09 2026 20:54 Jankisa wrote:

Zuckerberg and Page did something innovative very early on and most of the money making business that makes their respective companies insanely huge came from acquisitions of other services and websites or from developing of new services within the existing ones, all of that coding and business development was produced by people's labor.

Zuckerberg specifically is really not that good of a coder and his big invention has been stolen from the Winkevi twins.

Some of those people have been handsomely compensated with stock options so they are certainly very rich right now, but they are absolutely nowhere in the neighborhood of $300 billion level rich of those two, and the contributions of those 2 and the value of their labor is not x 1000 or whatever it is as compared to the person who coded Gmail or Youtube.

Also, the whole conversation is not and should not be who deserves how much money, the issue is what do those people use that money and power that comes with it for.

Gates is not perfect but he did help save millions of lives,

McKenzie Scott is trying to give away as much of her wealth as she can and she is helping many, and it's an absolute shame that she is out donating people like Page, Musk, Brin, Elison, not only in % of her net worth but also in absolute terms.
+ Show Spoiler +

These people generated the vast majority of their wealth off of labor of others and by exploiting their customers, creators on their platforms etc., in a just society they would be made to use that money for good, unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions the world has very few just societies, and USA is firmly very close to the bottom of the list of unjust ones.

What is more important than their personal predilections is that NO ONE has donated more than McKenzie Scott has since she divorced Bezos. Despite that, she's got about as much wealth as she did when she started (maybe more, we can't truly know).

That speaks to problems so far beyond wealthy individuals and their charity choices that the typical "good guy vs bad guy" (or rather "evil person vs less evil person") political framing can't address.

I personally don't like categorizing people into the "evil" category, just broken. I firmly believe that once you reach a certain threshold of wealth the brain of an average human gets broken in a way where they cease to care about anything other then maximizing their wealth and power.

It's a competition and letting someone have a bigger number then you is the ultimate defeat, to people who believe they are the best and the smartest losing is the biggest fear in their life, losing 5 % of their wealth is catastrophic, especially since more you have the bigger number those 5 % represent, so they just go insane and become these fucked up embodiment of Capitalism,

When some of them reach a threshold where they are so rich they don't know what else to do, like Putin or Trump, they start chasing "history" and we all pay the price for that.

When some of them reach a point where their tweets can move markets and they face no consequences for manipulating them, like Musk, they get addicted to that and they want to change the world into what they think it should be.

There are, of course, notable exceptions, Warren Buffet, to me, by all extents and proposes seems to be a decent bloke, so it's not all of them, or in the case of Gates, not all of them all of the time, but in general, this kind of wealth really, really fucks you up to the point where you join the Epstein class and you never go back.

The most broken ones aren't them, they have been put in extreme circumstances, to me it's their defenders, people who don't really have a lot of adversity in life but have been brainwashed by media and their upbringing into thinking that accumulation of Capital is the ultimate goal of civilization, and as you can see form this thread they are very passionate about defending these other broken individuals because they have been convinced, basically like this:

The cartoon rich guy manipulating the working class to blame an immigrant certainly makes this post humorous. Is this a satire of Marxist class consciousness, or an actual good-faith proposal? The entire post needs an Orwell caption directly below

Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters.

Blaming the immigrants / the blacks / the libs to convince working class Americans to vote against their interests and for the bottom line a class of ultra rich donors has literally been the whole agenda of the GOP since Reagan, but I’m not surprised you didn’t notice.

It's also a pretty clever dodge when you're actually out of touch with working class interests, and are now a party of a highly-educated laptop class serving their own interests. The man at a table telling people what to think is the modern Democratic campaign consultant, and his message to the working class is that they're too poor, too uneducated, and too easily manipulated to actually know what's good for them. The sales pitch was doomed to fail.

A sane party has to keep the middle class socialists in check. Bill Clinton did this with an authentic "I feel your pain" pitch and his understanding of Arkansas voters, and Obama did it with skillful broad-based oration for as long as he could. The same problem in Orwell's time resurfaced. You don't give a damn about the actual lives of less fortunate families than your own. You're just envious of the rich and burn with hatred for them. Connection to the family struggles brought on by gas prices and tariffs play second fiddle to how evil Elon is for making so much money and boy do we have to punish these rich and successful guys for having so much wealth and power! It's toxic. Granted, I believe some of you realize this at a deep level, but feel like doubling down is the only choice left available.

I have zero envy for the rich and especially not someone like Elon. I have an amazing life, and he seems like a really miserable fuck. And tacky superyachts don’t inspire me.

Not only is there nothing to envy, I pity them, their Smaug syndrome is robbing them of most genuine human experiences.

When Zuck calls a meeting to present his genius idea for the Metaverse or the newest dork glasses and everyone claps, is he sure they're clapping because they agree it's an amazing idea or is it because he's the boss and a billionaire?

When Musk makes an awkward joke with poor timing and after a 2 second pause the room forces itself to laugh, is he sure they're laughing because it was funny or they're laughing because he's a billionaire and they're trying to mooch up to him?

These people literally don't know if anyone in their life right now loves them or likes them or respects them. I wouldn't wish their Dante's inferno-ass life on anyone.

WombaT

Northern Ireland27199 Posts

53 minutes ago

#117024

On July 10 2026 23:38 dyhb wrote:

Show nested quote +

On July 10 2026 23:15 WombaT wrote:

On July 10 2026 21:42 dyhb wrote:

On July 10 2026 17:33 Biff The Understudy wrote:

On July 10 2026 04:53 dyhb wrote:

On July 10 2026 03:42 Jankisa wrote:

On July 10 2026 00:56 GreenHorizons wrote:

On July 09 2026 20:54 Jankisa wrote:

Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters.

If some of the rich weren’t complete arseholes who leverage their power to make the lives of the poor worse, and merely sat around doing other things with their wealth, there’d be considerably less of that anger. I mean it’d still be there, but far less of it.

Point taken on resonant messaging, clearly a problem.

Equally I think the idea that people of a wealthier persuasion who also say they want a more equitable society not actually holding those beliefs to be a bit daft. And even if it is purely performative, it’s preferable to a genuine belief in fucking the poorer over

I don't want to come down too hard on one left-winger venting to another left-winger on an internet forum dominated by left-wing discourse about the latest example of a rich guy doing something bad for society with his power and influence. That's harmless pub talk and I might agree half the time. They have too much power and influence in government and in both political parties.

I think most of you realize this is a segment representing ~16% to ~22% of Americans. (You can get ~30-35% if we're excluding divisive social and cultural issues and the hyperbole is toned down slightly). Both of those are very rough estimates. You won't get stable governing majorities of the required length to reverse Trump's excesses by using the in-group accepted language to the out-group. It might help if you pretend you are the out-group trying to convince the in-group that you aren't a billionaire boot-licker and shill when you use their language to describe their version of the cold, hard facts.

I mean that was the bit of your sentiment I somewhat agreed with.

It’s a strange culture where many are convinced that the wealthiest in society rigging the game benefits them, and folks more egalitarian in mind are out to ruin their lives, but that is the culture we inhabit

Geiko

France2011 Posts

10 minutes ago

#117025

On July 11 2026 00:49 dyhb wrote:

Show nested quote +

On July 10 2026 23:47 Biff The Understudy wrote:

On July 10 2026 23:14 dyhb wrote:

On July 10 2026 22:20 Biff The Understudy wrote:

On July 10 2026 21:42 dyhb wrote:

On July 10 2026 17:33 Biff The Understudy wrote:

On July 10 2026 04:53 dyhb wrote:

On July 10 2026 03:42 Jankisa wrote:

On July 10 2026 00:56 GreenHorizons wrote:

On July 09 2026 20:54 Jankisa wrote:
[quote] McKenzie Scott is trying to give away as much of her wealth as she can and she is helping many, and it's an absolute shame that she is out donating people like Page, Musk, Brin, Elison, not only in % of her net worth but also in absolute terms.
+ Show Spoiler +

Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters.

I have zero envy for the rich and especially not someone like Elon. I have an amazing life, and he seems like a really miserable fuck. And tacky superyachts don’t inspire me.

We live in an economic order that is broken to the benefits of a very few and at the expense of most folks. It’s just a fact that wages and quality of life has stagnated or declined for most people while a very small minority is getting exponentially richer.

Those folks have a ridiculous amount of political power, finance politicians, and own most of the media.

Again there is no conspiracy here, it’s a cold fact.

This post is an improvement to your prior posts. Do you understand that "once you reach a certain threshold of wealth the brain of an average human gets broken" " they cease to care about anything other then maximizing their wealth and power" "people who believe they are the best and the smartest losing is the biggest fear in their life" " they get addicted to that" means you will fail to dodge the reasonable conclusion that you're driven by envy and hatred of the rich.

We hear about the reverse in the popular media all the time: They're defending billionaires (how weird!), they're bootlickers, etc. They, like you, will protest that it's just economic cold, hard facts. Do they, like you, get out of jail free with that excuse?

Now, the GOP havs had a platform that is insanely beneficial to the ultra rich. Tax cuts for billionaires, deregulations, maximization of corporate profit has been the core of their policies, since Reagan.

No real argument here.

To get people that they are actually fucking in the ass to vote for them, they have exploited the resentment of the working class to the “other”. You are in the shit because of the black welfare queens, or because Mexican take your jobs. Your community is falling apart because of the trans, or because of the liberal elites on the coast.

That’s not original. The far right does that here. Billionaire Bolloré owns a gigantic proportion of the media in France, and uses his empire to hammer into people’s head that wage stagnate because the Arabs are stealing our jobs, not because people like him are hoarding the growth of this country.

I just have to break with you hard here. You're also exploiting the resentment of the rich to get an economic lower class to blame them (instead of, say, immigrants, a poor justice system and crime policing, a bad education system, economically-destructive policies, bad left-wing policies in general). The manipulation is just the reverse side of the same coin. You simply personally believe you're right (hopefully, you persuasively argue that you're right and they're wrong).

That's why I put you in that center chair, and you're pointing at two working-class voters, and you're telling them that the rich are to blame for their problems. The words you used in the first post spectacularly carry the message that you're envious and hateful. You may not feel that it's true of you in your heart (of cold hard facts), but it's how the message carries to the audience. That's why I also talk about it as a disconnect. The messaging is disconnected from the audience and I'm pointing out the reasons why.

You are the only one who think this is controversial. There is nothing Marxist there.

You're better off saying it's right despite being overt Marxist false consciousness. The working class (proletariat) is being exploited by the rich elite (bourgeoisie), but the exploited class has been politically manipulated to hold beliefs and values that work against their true class interests. That's pure Engels false consciousness. Practical TL.net posters, who believe themselves quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some (historical thinkers). It's always the other guy that's stuck in some rehashed bunkum from Reagan, and never ourselves!

I’m not the one who wrote about rich people brains being broken.

Since you've replied to my reply to Jankisa, please feel free to differentiate your own thinking from his. I told him the Orwell quote that I think his post is an excellent illustration of, but maybe you agree with me in regards to that segment of his post. You chose to only voice disagreement with me.

Show nested quote +

Let me get this straight from your last three posts. A tiny clique of extremely rich people are responsible for problems of the working class, but high rates of immigration are not. You are not manipulating people to believe that a tiny clique of extremely rich people are the source of their problems, but other people are most definitely manipulating people to believe that immigration is the source of their problems.

Billionaires are parasites and you despise rich people. You also aren't envious and hateful of rich people.

I sincerely doubt that you could convince a teenager that you hold all those views seriously in a self-aware manner, much less a grown adult. In fact, I'd use your statements to test if a child can differentiate between fact and opinion.

Person A says that the problems of the working class are primarily due to a tiny clique of extremely rich people that bear responsibility for the decline in their wages and quality of life, but they have manipulated the government and media to put the blame on immigrants and things other than themselves.
Person B says that the problems of the working class are primarily due to large-scale immigration and an out-of-touch educated elite that are driving down wages and quality of life, but that a group of people like Person A seek to instead put the blame on a tiny clique of extremely rich people.

Which of those two statements are statements of fact? Which of those two statements are statements of opinion?

You're so out of touch that if you existed as a prominent American Democrat, then Republicans would have good cause to paste your quotes in a campaign ad. My opinions are facts, and your opinions are manipulation? Yes, every person on planet earth thinks that cold, hard facts are the foundation for their opinions. It's always the other guy whose opinions are in conflict with the facts. Who are you trying to fool by claiming otherwise? You obviously are intelligent enough to possess the capacity to separate facts like inequality and low-skilled immigration from opinions like what should change about society in order to improve the quality of life for working class people and how/to what extent society is broken and who bears ultimate responsibility. I could pretend it's a fact that you possess too much hubris to communicate realistic left-wing policy to a disillusioned working class person, but that's actually just my opinion. My opinion is born out of talking to too many progressive Democrats that pretend their shit don't stink, and it's probably unfairly influenced by my interactions with them.

Some of us think that billionaires don't pay their fair share. Why would they ? They have enough money to buy influence and favorable tax laws.
Simultaneously, we can also acknowledge that uncontrolled immigration is not a good thing.
Some people think that the billionaire problem is more important than, others don't.

Calling out someone because they might be envious of billionaires does nothing to prove they aren't right though.

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