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Anyone's entitled to their opinion no matter how smart or dogshit it is (I know plenty of my own takes are not popular here), but if your position becomes more vague when someone asks you a plain question instead of more specific, people are going to assume you're not acting in good faith.
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On September 02 2026 23:28 LightSpectra wrote:
They take plenty of positions, it's just they get ominously vague or silent when you press them too closely on how the position is supposed to make sense in light of their other vocal opinions.
On September 03 2026 00:23 LightSpectra wrote:
Anyone's entitled to their opinion no matter how smart or dogshit it is (I know plenty of my own takes are not popular here), but if your position becomes more vague when someone asks you a plain question instead of more specific, people are going to assume you're not acting in good faith.
Did you want to continue this?
On August 28 2026 00:53 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On August 28 2026 00:19 LightSpectra wrote:On August 27 2026 23:49 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 26 2026 20:17 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 26 2026 15:54 Acrofales wrote:On August 26 2026 10:32 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 26 2026 05:48 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 26 2026 02:34 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 26 2026 02:10 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 26 2026 01:59 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
I appreciate the reasonable response.
What about your thoughts on the damage of what you describe to the notion that the US is a "nation of laws" and "the rule of law" generally? I think the lack of accountability and consequences perpetuates the idea that there is a two-tiered justice system in our country: if you have extreme money, power, or political connections, you're generally free to do as you please even if you break the rules; if you're in the less privileged, lower 99%, then the law still applies to you and you might even suffer additional consequences from that top 1% doing whatever they want. We have laws, and they should be enforced no matter who the criminal is, but sadly that's not the reality of the situation. Does anyone feel like this disconnect between reality and what our leaders (from both parties) tell us is reality is fundamentally unsustainable (and coming to a sort of head sooner than later)? That contrary to the story people sorta thoughtlessly absorbed (because the propaganda was ubiquitous), the US and the institutions and laws were always "corrupted by money". They were built and written by affluent, genocidal, land stealing, rapist, slavers to protect and expand their wealth. Rather than a deviation, Trump and his coterie of crooks is a continuation and proud unmasking of that tradition. It's a huge problem that ought to not exist, but I'm not entirely sure how/when to label it as sustainable or unsustainable. Like, in our political landscape for example, the biggest jump ever in abusing this two-tiered justice system has occurred between the pre-Trump era and then from 2017 onwards. No one has ever been as bad as Trump, nor taken as much advantage of the system as Trump has. And yet the general population isn't pissed off enough to not repeatedly vote for him as the Republican nominee and as president. I wish that this situation was less sustainable - that there would be more protests, more actions taken to push for more accountability, and more willingness to eat the rich and jail the powerful criminals and vote for leaders who will actually make that happen (regardless of their political affiliation) - but I don't see much changing unfortunately. I think both of Trump's presidencies are setting a terrible precedent, and I shudder to think what the next jump in a future president abusing power looks like. Well, we both know wishing isn't very effective. We both recognize Democrats and Republicans aren't a viable path to accountability we both identify as necessary. So it's not really a mystery why we wouldn't see things improving. What are we doing to "be the change we wish to see"? How do we make there be more more protests, more [effective] actions taken to push for more accountability, and more willingness to eat the rich and jail the powerful criminals and support* leaders who will actually make that happen (regardless of their political affiliation [since it isn't either D's or R's])? It's also important to note that the leaders do what they have to do (usually at the Epstein Class's demand). FDR's New Deal was absolutely necessary to save capitalism and the pre-Epstein class from themselves for example. That reminds me. Weren't the "no kings" protests gaining some traction. But they're super punctual 1-day things. And then everyone goes home and nothing is followed up on (until the next "no kings" protest a few months later. Similarly, I remember there was talk of a general strike. I don't recall whether it happened, but if it did, it was 1 day and then everything went back to normal. Why are Americans so incredibly bad at protesting? Your population used to be much better. The 60s and 70s were rife with protests that achieved things. Protests that achieved things require the people protesting to make life for those in charge uncomfortable. Even Occupy Wallstreet was a lot more effective. Clearly doing something about the abuse of power just isn't really a priority for most people. Either that, or there's a Stasi-level counter organization going on to silently disrupt all attempts at organization and mobilization. Yeah, wasn't popular to point out the performative nature of the "no kings" stuff at the time, but it's pretty obvious now. Since the Civil Rights Movement, the pitch from Democrats was "Hey women and Black people! We're (mostly) letting you vote now! Isn't that great! This is how you are to make any changes politically now! No more of that silly mass disruption stuff until demands are met! You can have big fun protests, just make sure to keep them performative/symbolic" There was also the whitewashing of MLK jr and the Civil Rights Movement generally. Basically the TLDR of MLK Jr. that most people internalized (not sure how kids around the country/world are being taught this nowadays) was that he organized legal/peaceful protests and speeches then white people in the US saw the violent response from the state and heard MLK Jr.'s speeches, had some sort of moral awakening, and then agreed that Black people deserved civil/constitutional rights. That's just not what happened and there's a plethora of writing attempting to describe the gap from a variety of angles (The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It comes to mind since it covers what many people remember as just some random woman tired from a days work refusing to give up her seat then MLK Jr. came and saved the day or whatever). I could describe my interpretation beyond my point on leverage, but I think it's important for people to find their own new understanding of what the civil rights movement actually was when they realize what they believe is grossly mis/underinformed. As it sits, people's misunderstanding of the Civil Rights Movement helps form the base of a fundamentally wrong analysis of how politics works that stands in the way of our ostensibly common goals, whatever they may be (human rights and protests in these cases). While not "Stasi level" (COINTELPRO definitely has some similarities) Democrats were instrumental in the government's assassination of Fred Hampton. There has also been a bipartisan effort to squash the protests including Occupy, BLM, pro-Palestinian/anti-genocide protests and related efforts. As you've seen here, they (primarily Third Way Democrats and their useful idiots) essentially robbed people of the basic understanding of how US democracy works, how to obtain leverage, and how that leverage functions in US politics. They replaced it with mindlessly chanting "vote blue no matter who" whenever one isn't laughing/crying about how malicious and stupid Republicans are (which got us Trump 2x). Just wanted to add that the reaction to your question here (and the disengagement) is emblematic of why people in the US are so incredibly bad at protesting/organized resistance. It's easier to satisfy the hobbyist escapism dopamine addiction people use discussing US politics for by talking about MASH, and fantasizing about Star Trek while making fun of MAGA than to do (or even discuss) anything meaningful about how we got here (like why the protests have sucked as bad they have) or how we'll get out. It's not just places like this. It's pretty much everywhere in the US. You simply can't have a meaningfully democratic society like that. They've effectively turned the governance of the US into a spectator sport where you get your dopamine fix from shit talking the other team incessantly and then spend months bragging about how you'll performatively spend about 10 minutes every year or so to vote for your team. Breaking news: Resident tankie gets dopamine fix from shit talking people on the streets actually protesting fascism from the comfort of their anonymous TL.net account. What does "actually protesting fascism" even mean to you?
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Sure, just as soon as you get back to me on this.
On July 29 2026 00:38 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 29 2026 00:12 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 23:58 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 23:52 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 23:15 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 22:07 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 06:40 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 05:00 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 04:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 03:44 LightSpectra wrote:
[quote]
I don't have any criticisms. It's a fine outlook. I assume, since you said "We don't wait for the system to collapse", you therefore would agree that this multi-generational effort is more likely to succeed if socialists vote for centrists/liberals to keep fascists out of power whenever possible, i.e. the opposite of accelerationism. Correct? You are fundamentally confusing the symptom with the disease. Corporate centrists do not stop fascism. Their policies explicitly manufacture the economic misery, desperation, and cynicism that breeds it. When liberals protect monopolies, bails out banks, and suppresses working-class wages, they lay down the foundations for the next right-wing strongman.Treating corporate Democrats as a 'shield' is a delusion. They are a political ratchet. The right moves the goalposts, and the center locks them into place. Voting for them doesn't defeat fascism, it just enables the slow motion decline of society while their corporate donors line their pockets." I reject accelerationism in part because hoping for a catastrophic collapse without an organized alternative is suicidal. But you are misunderstanding the functionality/meaningfulness of voting as political engagement. It takes ~five minutes once every two years (at least it should in an industrialized country). If a worker decides that pulling the lever for a centrist buys a sliver of defensive breathing room for our independent unions and mutual aid networks to breathe, fine. Do it. If another worker decides the corporate party needs to be starved of votes to break its leverage, fine. Do that. But do not confuse a defensive five minute tactical choice inside a rigged capitalist system with the actual multi-generational work of building working-class power. The latter being how you actually keep fascists out of power. One reason the Democratic establishment constantly drags progressives to the right is because of the exact logic you just laid out. They know they can give you objectively worse, corporate/Republican/lobbyist-written policies, and you will still fall in line because you are terrified of the alternative. You have given away all your leverage for free. By making 'harm reduction' one's political guidepost, you ensure that the center rarely has to concede a single thing to the working class (but for to keep the extraction going ala the New Deal). My outlook doesn't really care about your voting habits per se. It cares about what you are doing the other 364 days of the year. The only way to stop a fascist isn't to vote for a corporate puppet. It is to build the organized, independent capacity to shut down the economy when the state steps out of line. Which if you noticed, there was a bipartisan multi-generational effort to dismantle people's capacity to do that coming out of the Civil Rights Movement when they had a similar version of this discussion and falling in line behind centrists was the prevailing common sense. Which again, led us directly to Trump being president 2x (so far). Even if all your criticisms of corporate centrism were true, that doesn't change the fact that every single thing fascists do in office makes the status quo worse than whatever a centrist would do. Choosing not to vote for the most left candidate whenever possible, even if they aren't very left, is actually what gives away leverage. If a politician won't get votes from the left no matter what they can do (within reason), they're going to instead fish for the votes from the center and right. That moves the Overton window to the right and makes grassroots socialists even more alienated. But probably the most important consequence of this is that people operating the state can use their power to cripple all of the extra-state apparatuses like mutual aid and unions that socialists are capable of building. Right-wingers itch at every possible opportunity to roll out McCarthyist policies to prevent grassroots socialism from happening; centrists sometimes do this, but it's a lot more rare and a lot less vicious. You can see from history that this almost never improves that status quo. It's about as rare as directly transitioning from absolute tsardom to Leninism. And another point about this is: how much multi-generational work do you think you're actually going to succeed in building if you've successfully pissed off 90~% of the population by doing this? I mean, just going by the last election, if you hypothetically didn't vote for Harris: Trump voters already think you're a goddless commie, and the center/center-left folks that finds out you didn't vote for Harris are going to think you're untrustworthy, self-righteous, and an idiot. Not a good position to be in if you're trying to be the backbone that builds the future of society. You're just ignoring the actual argument to rationalize your fixation on harm-reduction voting. That is part of what I'm pointing out the system is designed to manipulate you into doing. Your theory of electoral gravity is a key part of how the establishment keeps you in this hopeless Hamster Wheel. Your belief that centrists are less vicious and rarely deploy McCarthyist policies is misleading at best. Who launched the Palmer Raids against socialists? Woodrow Wilson, a progressive champion. Who signed the Smith Act to jail communists? The "best Democrat in history", Franklin D. Roosevelt. Who ran COINTELPRO to assassinate Black Panthers and dismantle the Black Radical Tradition? Liberal darlings JFK and LBJ. Who militarized the modern police state and crushed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Who cracked down on students opposing genocide? Joe Biden. They've managed to confuse you into believing that supporting the people laying the foundations for fascism is the only way to protect yourself from fascism. It'd be funny if it weren't so catastrophic. You think I am alienating 90% of the population because you view 'the population' as a collection of online pundits/posters obsessed with whether someone voted for Clinton or Harris or whatever (and my general disdain for that kind of engagement). Normal, working-class people do not join movements because of a voting scorecard. They join them because of material reality. When a family is getting evicted and a radical mutual aid network stops the landlord, they don't care who we voted for. When an independent union wins them a living wage and healthcare through a brutal strike, they don't care about our presidential preferences (at least historically, going forward, yeah it comes up). The Black Panthers didn't build the most influential radical movement in modern US history by trying to look 'trustworthy' to moderate white liberals. They did it by feeding children and enlisting armed self-defense in the streets to protect it.The center-left will call us self-righteous idiots on social media? Fine. Let them create their vapid digital noise. While they are laughing/crying on Bluesky about the latest idiotic thing uttered by a Republican and voter apathy (or where/whatever), we will be on the ground building the literal networks of survival. When the system inevitably fractures under its own greed, the working class won't run to the liberals who spent decades telling them to compromise. They will run to the people who actually built the infrastructure to keep them alive. Many of the liberals/Democrats/"vote blue no matter who" crowd will run to join the fascists and call it "pragmatism". + Show Spoiler +I didn't think you'd have such a passionate response since you said voting for centrists was a "a defensive five minute tactical choice", but I'll give my thoughts.
I mean, sure? You could also say "Baseball is designed to manipulate you into swinging a bat", but that doesn't give any positive or negative moral value to swinging bats.
I phrased it like that because I knew there were some counter-examples, but this isn't one of them. "Progressives" in the early 20th century were not egalitarians, the core defining value that unites all leftists, since they supported eugenics, scientific racism, persecuting prostitutes, and so on. Woodrow Wilson hosted a viewing of Birth of a Nation at the White House. Fascist in morality. Wilson is one of those "vote for anyone but him" examples in history, not "vote for him to keep someone worse out".
Great example in my favor actually. Compare to what Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan were doing to communists in the same year (1940). Prosecuting 200-something people that had ties to the Soviet Union was considerably less harmful to socialism than pogroms and concentration camps.
Sure, that's possibly a good counter-example. Though I'm not sure any of this is relevant at all since an actual fascist party wasn't really on the ballot at any point in this time period. And moreover, while both Democratic and Republican presidents kept J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the FBI (obviously a point of shame), only one side supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made the modern progressive movement possible.
😐
Quite the opposite. You're alienating the population because all of the evils the Trump administration is doing could've been avoided if just a small percentage more of the population mobilized against it. You don't want to entertain that notion because you alternate between saying saying "Democrats are useless because they couldn't stop Trump" which plays well for the crowd, but also "Democrats aren't that much worse than Trump", which doesn't. Your opinions would be a lot more credible if you picked one of those and stuck with it genuinely instead of trying to dip your toes in both pools.
You should talk to more people. A lot of people care about that.
Yeah, it does come up.
True. Unfortunate that they crippled themselves with all the in-fighting in addition to the cops and FBI murdering them. + Show Spoiler +Mutual aid is a wonderful thing but you're probably delusional if you think we're approaching a future where it provides a valid alternative to the state itself for enough of the country to manifest socialism. If fascists are in power, they will dismantle it by force and have no qualms doing so. Such a thing is only possible if fascists are kept out of power. I think that says much more than you intended. Yeah, leftists make life harder on themselves because in addition to fascists and other authoritarians wanting to kill them, they dilute their own power (their leverage, as you call it) with ideological micro-schisms and self-sabotage. As someone who consistently preaches left unity with everyone except Stalinists/Maoists/Juchists, it's not against my worldview that a Maoist group crippled themselves. Since you've completely lost the plot talking about "infighting" and "micro-schisms and self-sabotage" to rationalize the Democrat "shield" murdering people that want human rights, I think it's worth trying to dig into this general idea of infighting. For it to be a fight, there has to be opposition. I'm not rationalizing anyone murdering anyone. + Show Spoiler +I said J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world.
While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight, but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them. What are some of the points you believe centrists must stop fighting about and concede to those to their left? Why? "Centrism" is not a universal position or ideology, so that question is too vague to answer. It's always a relative position to something else in a certain place and time. I could comment if you were more specific. You most definitely are, more importantly though, you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying.
On July 29 2026 00:44 LightSpectra wrote:
Without arbitrarily deleting words from post, show me where I said that.
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On September 03 2026 00:26 LightSpectra wrote:Sure, just as soon as you get back to me on this. Show nested quote +On July 29 2026 00:38 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 29 2026 00:12 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 23:58 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 23:52 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 23:15 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 22:07 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 06:40 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 05:00 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 04:26 GreenHorizons wrote:[quote] You are fundamentally confusing the symptom with the disease. Corporate centrists do not stop fascism. Their policies explicitly manufacture the economic misery, desperation, and cynicism that breeds it. When liberals protect monopolies, bails out banks, and suppresses working-class wages, they lay down the foundations for the next right-wing strongman.Treating corporate Democrats as a 'shield' is a delusion. They are a political ratchet. The right moves the goalposts, and the center locks them into place. Voting for them doesn't defeat fascism, it just enables the slow motion decline of society while their corporate donors line their pockets." I reject accelerationism in part because hoping for a catastrophic collapse without an organized alternative is suicidal. But you are misunderstanding the functionality/meaningfulness of voting as political engagement. It takes ~five minutes once every two years (at least it should in an industrialized country). If a worker decides that pulling the lever for a centrist buys a sliver of defensive breathing room for our independent unions and mutual aid networks to breathe, fine. Do it. If another worker decides the corporate party needs to be starved of votes to break its leverage, fine. Do that. But do not confuse a defensive five minute tactical choice inside a rigged capitalist system with the actual multi-generational work of building working-class power. The latter being how you actually keep fascists out of power. One reason the Democratic establishment constantly drags progressives to the right is because of the exact logic you just laid out. They know they can give you objectively worse, corporate/Republican/lobbyist-written policies, and you will still fall in line because you are terrified of the alternative. You have given away all your leverage for free. By making 'harm reduction' one's political guidepost, you ensure that the center rarely has to concede a single thing to the working class (but for to keep the extraction going ala the New Deal). My outlook doesn't really care about your voting habits per se. It cares about what you are doing the other 364 days of the year. The only way to stop a fascist isn't to vote for a corporate puppet. It is to build the organized, independent capacity to shut down the economy when the state steps out of line. Which if you noticed, there was a bipartisan multi-generational effort to dismantle people's capacity to do that coming out of the Civil Rights Movement when they had a similar version of this discussion and falling in line behind centrists was the prevailing common sense. Which again, led us directly to Trump being president 2x (so far). Even if all your criticisms of corporate centrism were true, that doesn't change the fact that every single thing fascists do in office makes the status quo worse than whatever a centrist would do. Choosing not to vote for the most left candidate whenever possible, even if they aren't very left, is actually what gives away leverage. If a politician won't get votes from the left no matter what they can do (within reason), they're going to instead fish for the votes from the center and right. That moves the Overton window to the right and makes grassroots socialists even more alienated. But probably the most important consequence of this is that people operating the state can use their power to cripple all of the extra-state apparatuses like mutual aid and unions that socialists are capable of building. Right-wingers itch at every possible opportunity to roll out McCarthyist policies to prevent grassroots socialism from happening; centrists sometimes do this, but it's a lot more rare and a lot less vicious. You can see from history that this almost never improves that status quo. It's about as rare as directly transitioning from absolute tsardom to Leninism. And another point about this is: how much multi-generational work do you think you're actually going to succeed in building if you've successfully pissed off 90~% of the population by doing this? I mean, just going by the last election, if you hypothetically didn't vote for Harris: Trump voters already think you're a goddless commie, and the center/center-left folks that finds out you didn't vote for Harris are going to think you're untrustworthy, self-righteous, and an idiot. Not a good position to be in if you're trying to be the backbone that builds the future of society. You're just ignoring the actual argument to rationalize your fixation on harm-reduction voting. That is part of what I'm pointing out the system is designed to manipulate you into doing. Your theory of electoral gravity is a key part of how the establishment keeps you in this hopeless Hamster Wheel. Your belief that centrists are less vicious and rarely deploy McCarthyist policies is misleading at best. Who launched the Palmer Raids against socialists? Woodrow Wilson, a progressive champion. Who signed the Smith Act to jail communists? The "best Democrat in history", Franklin D. Roosevelt. Who ran COINTELPRO to assassinate Black Panthers and dismantle the Black Radical Tradition? Liberal darlings JFK and LBJ. Who militarized the modern police state and crushed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Who cracked down on students opposing genocide? Joe Biden. They've managed to confuse you into believing that supporting the people laying the foundations for fascism is the only way to protect yourself from fascism. It'd be funny if it weren't so catastrophic. You think I am alienating 90% of the population because you view 'the population' as a collection of online pundits/posters obsessed with whether someone voted for Clinton or Harris or whatever (and my general disdain for that kind of engagement). Normal, working-class people do not join movements because of a voting scorecard. They join them because of material reality. When a family is getting evicted and a radical mutual aid network stops the landlord, they don't care who we voted for. When an independent union wins them a living wage and healthcare through a brutal strike, they don't care about our presidential preferences (at least historically, going forward, yeah it comes up). The Black Panthers didn't build the most influential radical movement in modern US history by trying to look 'trustworthy' to moderate white liberals. They did it by feeding children and enlisting armed self-defense in the streets to protect it.The center-left will call us self-righteous idiots on social media? Fine. Let them create their vapid digital noise. While they are laughing/crying on Bluesky about the latest idiotic thing uttered by a Republican and voter apathy (or where/whatever), we will be on the ground building the literal networks of survival. When the system inevitably fractures under its own greed, the working class won't run to the liberals who spent decades telling them to compromise. They will run to the people who actually built the infrastructure to keep them alive. Many of the liberals/Democrats/"vote blue no matter who" crowd will run to join the fascists and call it "pragmatism". + Show Spoiler +I didn't think you'd have such a passionate response since you said voting for centrists was a "a defensive five minute tactical choice", but I'll give my thoughts.
I mean, sure? You could also say "Baseball is designed to manipulate you into swinging a bat", but that doesn't give any positive or negative moral value to swinging bats.
I phrased it like that because I knew there were some counter-examples, but this isn't one of them. "Progressives" in the early 20th century were not egalitarians, the core defining value that unites all leftists, since they supported eugenics, scientific racism, persecuting prostitutes, and so on. Woodrow Wilson hosted a viewing of Birth of a Nation at the White House. Fascist in morality. Wilson is one of those "vote for anyone but him" examples in history, not "vote for him to keep someone worse out".
Great example in my favor actually. Compare to what Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan were doing to communists in the same year (1940). Prosecuting 200-something people that had ties to the Soviet Union was considerably less harmful to socialism than pogroms and concentration camps.
Sure, that's possibly a good counter-example. Though I'm not sure any of this is relevant at all since an actual fascist party wasn't really on the ballot at any point in this time period. And moreover, while both Democratic and Republican presidents kept J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the FBI (obviously a point of shame), only one side supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made the modern progressive movement possible.
😐
Quite the opposite. You're alienating the population because all of the evils the Trump administration is doing could've been avoided if just a small percentage more of the population mobilized against it. You don't want to entertain that notion because you alternate between saying saying "Democrats are useless because they couldn't stop Trump" which plays well for the crowd, but also "Democrats aren't that much worse than Trump", which doesn't. Your opinions would be a lot more credible if you picked one of those and stuck with it genuinely instead of trying to dip your toes in both pools.
You should talk to more people. A lot of people care about that.
Yeah, it does come up.
True. Unfortunate that they crippled themselves with all the in-fighting in addition to the cops and FBI murdering them. + Show Spoiler +Mutual aid is a wonderful thing but you're probably delusional if you think we're approaching a future where it provides a valid alternative to the state itself for enough of the country to manifest socialism. If fascists are in power, they will dismantle it by force and have no qualms doing so. Such a thing is only possible if fascists are kept out of power. I think that says much more than you intended. Yeah, leftists make life harder on themselves because in addition to fascists and other authoritarians wanting to kill them, they dilute their own power (their leverage, as you call it) with ideological micro-schisms and self-sabotage. As someone who consistently preaches left unity with everyone except Stalinists/Maoists/Juchists, it's not against my worldview that a Maoist group crippled themselves. Since you've completely lost the plot talking about "infighting" and "micro-schisms and self-sabotage" to rationalize the Democrat "shield" murdering people that want human rights, I think it's worth trying to dig into this general idea of infighting. For it to be a fight, there has to be opposition. I'm not rationalizing anyone murdering anyone. + Show Spoiler +I said J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world.
While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight, but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them. What are some of the points you believe centrists must stop fighting about and concede to those to their left? Why? "Centrism" is not a universal position or ideology, so that question is too vague to answer. It's always a relative position to something else in a certain place and time. I could comment if you were more specific. You most definitely are, more importantly though, you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying. Show nested quote +On July 29 2026 00:44 LightSpectra wrote:
Without arbitrarily deleting words from post, show me where I said that.
I don't delete words out of people's posts. That's what the context you edited in (but not without deleting words lmao) demonstrates:
On July 29 2026 01:01 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 29 2026 00:44 LightSpectra wrote:On July 29 2026 00:38 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 29 2026 00:12 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 23:58 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 23:52 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 23:15 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 22:07 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 06:40 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 05:00 LightSpectra wrote:
[quote]
Even if all your criticisms of corporate centrism were true, that doesn't change the fact that every single thing fascists do in office makes the status quo worse than whatever a centrist would do.
Choosing not to vote for the most left candidate whenever possible, even if they aren't very left, is actually what gives away leverage. If a politician won't get votes from the left no matter what they can do (within reason), they're going to instead fish for the votes from the center and right. That moves the Overton window to the right and makes grassroots socialists even more alienated. But probably the most important consequence of this is that people operating the state can use their power to cripple all of the extra-state apparatuses like mutual aid and unions that socialists are capable of building. Right-wingers itch at every possible opportunity to roll out McCarthyist policies to prevent grassroots socialism from happening; centrists sometimes do this, but it's a lot more rare and a lot less vicious.
You can see from history that this almost never improves that status quo. It's about as rare as directly transitioning from absolute tsardom to Leninism.
And another point about this is: how much multi-generational work do you think you're actually going to succeed in building if you've successfully pissed off 90~% of the population by doing this? I mean, just going by the last election, if you hypothetically didn't vote for Harris: Trump voters already think you're a goddless commie, and the center/center-left folks that finds out you didn't vote for Harris are going to think you're untrustworthy, self-righteous, and an idiot. Not a good position to be in if you're trying to be the backbone that builds the future of society. You're just ignoring the actual argument to rationalize your fixation on harm-reduction voting. That is part of what I'm pointing out the system is designed to manipulate you into doing. Your theory of electoral gravity is a key part of how the establishment keeps you in this hopeless Hamster Wheel. Your belief that centrists are less vicious and rarely deploy McCarthyist policies is misleading at best. Who launched the Palmer Raids against socialists? Woodrow Wilson, a progressive champion. Who signed the Smith Act to jail communists? The "best Democrat in history", Franklin D. Roosevelt. Who ran COINTELPRO to assassinate Black Panthers and dismantle the Black Radical Tradition? Liberal darlings JFK and LBJ. Who militarized the modern police state and crushed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Who cracked down on students opposing genocide? Joe Biden. They've managed to confuse you into believing that supporting the people laying the foundations for fascism is the only way to protect yourself from fascism. It'd be funny if it weren't so catastrophic. You think I am alienating 90% of the population because you view 'the population' as a collection of online pundits/posters obsessed with whether someone voted for Clinton or Harris or whatever (and my general disdain for that kind of engagement). Normal, working-class people do not join movements because of a voting scorecard. They join them because of material reality. When a family is getting evicted and a radical mutual aid network stops the landlord, they don't care who we voted for. When an independent union wins them a living wage and healthcare through a brutal strike, they don't care about our presidential preferences (at least historically, going forward, yeah it comes up). The Black Panthers didn't build the most influential radical movement in modern US history by trying to look 'trustworthy' to moderate white liberals. They did it by feeding children and enlisting armed self-defense in the streets to protect it.The center-left will call us self-righteous idiots on social media? Fine. Let them create their vapid digital noise. While they are laughing/crying on Bluesky about the latest idiotic thing uttered by a Republican and voter apathy (or where/whatever), we will be on the ground building the literal networks of survival. When the system inevitably fractures under its own greed, the working class won't run to the liberals who spent decades telling them to compromise. They will run to the people who actually built the infrastructure to keep them alive. Many of the liberals/Democrats/"vote blue no matter who" crowd will run to join the fascists and call it "pragmatism". + Show Spoiler +I didn't think you'd have such a passionate response since you said voting for centrists was a "a defensive five minute tactical choice", but I'll give my thoughts.
I mean, sure? You could also say "Baseball is designed to manipulate you into swinging a bat", but that doesn't give any positive or negative moral value to swinging bats.
I phrased it like that because I knew there were some counter-examples, but this isn't one of them. "Progressives" in the early 20th century were not egalitarians, the core defining value that unites all leftists, since they supported eugenics, scientific racism, persecuting prostitutes, and so on. Woodrow Wilson hosted a viewing of Birth of a Nation at the White House. Fascist in morality. Wilson is one of those "vote for anyone but him" examples in history, not "vote for him to keep someone worse out".
Great example in my favor actually. Compare to what Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan were doing to communists in the same year (1940). Prosecuting 200-something people that had ties to the Soviet Union was considerably less harmful to socialism than pogroms and concentration camps.
Sure, that's possibly a good counter-example. Though I'm not sure any of this is relevant at all since an actual fascist party wasn't really on the ballot at any point in this time period. And moreover, while both Democratic and Republican presidents kept J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the FBI (obviously a point of shame), only one side supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made the modern progressive movement possible.
😐
Quite the opposite. You're alienating the population because all of the evils the Trump administration is doing could've been avoided if just a small percentage more of the population mobilized against it. You don't want to entertain that notion because you alternate between saying saying "Democrats are useless because they couldn't stop Trump" which plays well for the crowd, but also "Democrats aren't that much worse than Trump", which doesn't. Your opinions would be a lot more credible if you picked one of those and stuck with it genuinely instead of trying to dip your toes in both pools.
You should talk to more people. A lot of people care about that.
Yeah, it does come up.
True. Unfortunate that they crippled themselves with all the in-fighting in addition to the cops and FBI murdering them. + Show Spoiler +Mutual aid is a wonderful thing but you're probably delusional if you think we're approaching a future where it provides a valid alternative to the state itself for enough of the country to manifest socialism. If fascists are in power, they will dismantle it by force and have no qualms doing so. Such a thing is only possible if fascists are kept out of power. I think that says much more than you intended. Yeah, leftists make life harder on themselves because in addition to fascists and other authoritarians wanting to kill them, they dilute their own power (their leverage, as you call it) with ideological micro-schisms and self-sabotage. As someone who consistently preaches left unity with everyone except Stalinists/Maoists/Juchists, it's not against my worldview that a Maoist group crippled themselves. Since you've completely lost the plot talking about "infighting" and "micro-schisms and self-sabotage" to rationalize the Democrat "shield" murdering people that want human rights, I think it's worth trying to dig into this general idea of infighting. For it to be a fight, there has to be opposition. I'm not rationalizing anyone murdering anyone. + Show Spoiler +I said J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world.
While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight, but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them. What are some of the points you believe centrists must stop fighting about and concede to those to their left? Why? "Centrism" is not a universal position or ideology, so that question is too vague to answer. It's always a relative position to something else in a certain place and time. I could comment if you were more specific. You most definitely are, more importantly though, you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying. I think you know what I'm talking about. Democrat leadership (to the extent that's real), Establishment Democrats? Maybe you want me to call them moderate Democrats? Basically the kind of Democrats that refused to vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primary? What do you believe they need to stop fighting with people to their left about and just concede to them? Why? Without arbitrarily deleting words from post, show me where I said that. The part of my post you deleted was where I said people should've supported a Democratic POTUS nominee that would've immediately sacked Hoover. I haven't deleted anything + Show Spoiler +(I've actually gone out of my way to reinclude things you purposely removed) , that's how you post (for reasons I think have become more obvious over the course of this discussion). I find it amusing it's so hard for you (and a lot of other people) to just answer the simple request for those that lament the infighting among the left to list some of the policies/points that the corporate/establishment/moderate/thirdway/whatever Democrats need to stop infighting about and concede to those to their left in order to not self-sabotage. EDIT: Funnily enough, this should actually be relatively easy for all of you because you have dyhb who probably voted for Clinton in the 2016 primary. It's seems LS is struggling, but surely some of you should be able to identify something? EDIT2: I've agreed to disagree about that and am moving on to something more productive and less personal/petty/pedantic. I think your refusal to do so and your attempt at an ultimatum is comically illustrative of what I've been talking about.
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Absolute chef's kiss of a reply that you won't answer my question by reposting yourself lamenting that people around here can't answer a simple question.
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On September 03 2026 00:23 LightSpectra wrote:
Anyone's entitled to their opinion no matter how smart or dogshit it is (I know plenty of my own takes are not popular here), but if your position becomes more vague when someone asks you a plain question instead of more specific, people are going to assume you're not acting in good faith. Then people are going to let their own biases get in the way of understanding more about politics. Some simple questions have long and complex answers. A progressive might have a simple "tax or ban it if I don't like it" and "subsidize it if I like it," and the opposite number is a great "It depends." It might take four paragraphs of nuanced reasoning to explain applicability in varying situations, and instead of reading through the four paragraphs of nuance, the only takeaway from greater than half of readers is "he's being too vague." Well, tough.
I've observed too great of a reliance on associating arguments that don't make sense to the reader into assuming that's because the writer is operating in bad faith.
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On September 01 2026 23:43 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Trump saying the position of the US over the Falklands is under review is absolutely hilarious. It has to be the dumbest and most baseless territorial dispute in the world.
Trump and Milei, clowns of the same circus.
Puddingbrain lashes out with stuff he knows.
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On September 03 2026 00:52 LightSpectra wrote:Show nested quote +On September 03 2026 00:44 GreenHorizons wrote:On September 03 2026 00:26 LightSpectra wrote:Sure, just as soon as you get back to me on this. On July 29 2026 00:38 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 29 2026 00:12 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 23:58 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 23:52 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 23:15 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 22:07 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 06:40 GreenHorizons wrote:[quote] You're just ignoring the actual argument to rationalize your fixation on harm-reduction voting. That is part of what I'm pointing out the system is designed to manipulate you into doing. Your theory of electoral gravity is a key part of how the establishment keeps you in this hopeless Hamster Wheel. Your belief that centrists are less vicious and rarely deploy McCarthyist policies is misleading at best. Who launched the Palmer Raids against socialists? Woodrow Wilson, a progressive champion. Who signed the Smith Act to jail communists? The "best Democrat in history", Franklin D. Roosevelt. Who ran COINTELPRO to assassinate Black Panthers and dismantle the Black Radical Tradition? Liberal darlings JFK and LBJ. Who militarized the modern police state and crushed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Who cracked down on students opposing genocide? Joe Biden. They've managed to confuse you into believing that supporting the people laying the foundations for fascism is the only way to protect yourself from fascism. It'd be funny if it weren't so catastrophic. You think I am alienating 90% of the population because you view 'the population' as a collection of online pundits/posters obsessed with whether someone voted for Clinton or Harris or whatever (and my general disdain for that kind of engagement). Normal, working-class people do not join movements because of a voting scorecard. They join them because of material reality. When a family is getting evicted and a radical mutual aid network stops the landlord, they don't care who we voted for. When an independent union wins them a living wage and healthcare through a brutal strike, they don't care about our presidential preferences (at least historically, going forward, yeah it comes up). The Black Panthers didn't build the most influential radical movement in modern US history by trying to look 'trustworthy' to moderate white liberals. They did it by feeding children and enlisting armed self-defense in the streets to protect it.The center-left will call us self-righteous idiots on social media? Fine. Let them create their vapid digital noise. While they are laughing/crying on Bluesky about the latest idiotic thing uttered by a Republican and voter apathy (or where/whatever), we will be on the ground building the literal networks of survival. When the system inevitably fractures under its own greed, the working class won't run to the liberals who spent decades telling them to compromise. They will run to the people who actually built the infrastructure to keep them alive. Many of the liberals/Democrats/"vote blue no matter who" crowd will run to join the fascists and call it "pragmatism". + Show Spoiler +I didn't think you'd have such a passionate response since you said voting for centrists was a "a defensive five minute tactical choice", but I'll give my thoughts.
I mean, sure? You could also say "Baseball is designed to manipulate you into swinging a bat", but that doesn't give any positive or negative moral value to swinging bats.
I phrased it like that because I knew there were some counter-examples, but this isn't one of them. "Progressives" in the early 20th century were not egalitarians, the core defining value that unites all leftists, since they supported eugenics, scientific racism, persecuting prostitutes, and so on. Woodrow Wilson hosted a viewing of Birth of a Nation at the White House. Fascist in morality. Wilson is one of those "vote for anyone but him" examples in history, not "vote for him to keep someone worse out".
Great example in my favor actually. Compare to what Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan were doing to communists in the same year (1940). Prosecuting 200-something people that had ties to the Soviet Union was considerably less harmful to socialism than pogroms and concentration camps.
Sure, that's possibly a good counter-example. Though I'm not sure any of this is relevant at all since an actual fascist party wasn't really on the ballot at any point in this time period. And moreover, while both Democratic and Republican presidents kept J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the FBI (obviously a point of shame), only one side supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made the modern progressive movement possible.
😐
Quite the opposite. You're alienating the population because all of the evils the Trump administration is doing could've been avoided if just a small percentage more of the population mobilized against it. You don't want to entertain that notion because you alternate between saying saying "Democrats are useless because they couldn't stop Trump" which plays well for the crowd, but also "Democrats aren't that much worse than Trump", which doesn't. Your opinions would be a lot more credible if you picked one of those and stuck with it genuinely instead of trying to dip your toes in both pools.
You should talk to more people. A lot of people care about that.
Yeah, it does come up.
True. Unfortunate that they crippled themselves with all the in-fighting in addition to the cops and FBI murdering them. + Show Spoiler +Mutual aid is a wonderful thing but you're probably delusional if you think we're approaching a future where it provides a valid alternative to the state itself for enough of the country to manifest socialism. If fascists are in power, they will dismantle it by force and have no qualms doing so. Such a thing is only possible if fascists are kept out of power. I think that says much more than you intended. Yeah, leftists make life harder on themselves because in addition to fascists and other authoritarians wanting to kill them, they dilute their own power (their leverage, as you call it) with ideological micro-schisms and self-sabotage. As someone who consistently preaches left unity with everyone except Stalinists/Maoists/Juchists, it's not against my worldview that a Maoist group crippled themselves. Since you've completely lost the plot talking about "infighting" and "micro-schisms and self-sabotage" to rationalize the Democrat "shield" murdering people that want human rights, I think it's worth trying to dig into this general idea of infighting. For it to be a fight, there has to be opposition. I'm not rationalizing anyone murdering anyone. + Show Spoiler +I said J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world.
While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight, but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them. What are some of the points you believe centrists must stop fighting about and concede to those to their left? Why? "Centrism" is not a universal position or ideology, so that question is too vague to answer. It's always a relative position to something else in a certain place and time. I could comment if you were more specific. You most definitely are, more importantly though, you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying. On July 29 2026 00:44 LightSpectra wrote:
Without arbitrarily deleting words from post, show me where I said that. I don't delete words out of people's posts. That's what the context you edited in (but not without deleting words lmao) demonstrates: On July 29 2026 01:01 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 29 2026 00:44 LightSpectra wrote:On July 29 2026 00:38 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 29 2026 00:12 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 23:58 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 23:52 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 23:15 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 22:07 LightSpectra wrote:[quote] + Show Spoiler +I didn't think you'd have such a passionate response since you said voting for centrists was a "a defensive five minute tactical choice", but I'll give my thoughts.
I mean, sure? You could also say "Baseball is designed to manipulate you into swinging a bat", but that doesn't give any positive or negative moral value to swinging bats.
I phrased it like that because I knew there were some counter-examples, but this isn't one of them. "Progressives" in the early 20th century were not egalitarians, the core defining value that unites all leftists, since they supported eugenics, scientific racism, persecuting prostitutes, and so on. Woodrow Wilson hosted a viewing of Birth of a Nation at the White House. Fascist in morality. Wilson is one of those "vote for anyone but him" examples in history, not "vote for him to keep someone worse out".
Great example in my favor actually. Compare to what Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan were doing to communists in the same year (1940). Prosecuting 200-something people that had ties to the Soviet Union was considerably less harmful to socialism than pogroms and concentration camps.
Sure, that's possibly a good counter-example. Though I'm not sure any of this is relevant at all since an actual fascist party wasn't really on the ballot at any point in this time period. And moreover, while both Democratic and Republican presidents kept J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the FBI (obviously a point of shame), only one side supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made the modern progressive movement possible.
😐
Quite the opposite. You're alienating the population because all of the evils the Trump administration is doing could've been avoided if just a small percentage more of the population mobilized against it. You don't want to entertain that notion because you alternate between saying saying "Democrats are useless because they couldn't stop Trump" which plays well for the crowd, but also "Democrats aren't that much worse than Trump", which doesn't. Your opinions would be a lot more credible if you picked one of those and stuck with it genuinely instead of trying to dip your toes in both pools.
You should talk to more people. A lot of people care about that.
Yeah, it does come up.
True. Unfortunate that they crippled themselves with all the in-fighting in addition to the cops and FBI murdering them. + Show Spoiler +Mutual aid is a wonderful thing but you're probably delusional if you think we're approaching a future where it provides a valid alternative to the state itself for enough of the country to manifest socialism. If fascists are in power, they will dismantle it by force and have no qualms doing so. Such a thing is only possible if fascists are kept out of power. I think that says much more than you intended. Yeah, leftists make life harder on themselves because in addition to fascists and other authoritarians wanting to kill them, they dilute their own power (their leverage, as you call it) with ideological micro-schisms and self-sabotage. As someone who consistently preaches left unity with everyone except Stalinists/Maoists/Juchists, it's not against my worldview that a Maoist group crippled themselves. Since you've completely lost the plot talking about "infighting" and "micro-schisms and self-sabotage" to rationalize the Democrat "shield" murdering people that want human rights, I think it's worth trying to dig into this general idea of infighting. For it to be a fight, there has to be opposition. I'm not rationalizing anyone murdering anyone. + Show Spoiler +I said J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world.
While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight, but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them. What are some of the points you believe centrists must stop fighting about and concede to those to their left? Why? "Centrism" is not a universal position or ideology, so that question is too vague to answer. It's always a relative position to something else in a certain place and time. I could comment if you were more specific. You most definitely are, more importantly though, you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying. I think you know what I'm talking about. Democrat leadership (to the extent that's real), Establishment Democrats? Maybe you want me to call them moderate Democrats? Basically the kind of Democrats that refused to vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primary? What do you believe they need to stop fighting with people to their left about and just concede to them? Why? Without arbitrarily deleting words from post, show me where I said that. The part of my post you deleted was where I said people should've supported a Democratic POTUS nominee that would've immediately sacked Hoover. I haven't deleted anything + Show Spoiler +(I've actually gone out of my way to reinclude things you purposely removed) , that's how you post (for reasons I think have become more obvious over the course of this discussion). I find it amusing it's so hard for you (and a lot of other people) to just answer the simple request for those that lament the infighting among the left to list some of the policies/points that the corporate/establishment/moderate/thirdway/whatever Democrats need to stop infighting about and concede to those to their left in order to not self-sabotage. EDIT: Funnily enough, this should actually be relatively easy for all of you because you have dyhb who probably voted for Clinton in the 2016 primary. It's seems LS is struggling, but surely some of you should be able to identify something? EDIT2: I've agreed to disagree about that and am moving on to something more productive and less personal/petty/pedantic. I think your refusal to do so and your attempt at an ultimatum is comically illustrative of what I've been talking about. Absolute chef's kiss of a reply that you won't answer my question by reposting yourself lamenting that people around here can't answer a simple question.
You realize that's what you're doing while effectively "deleting" the entire post you're responding to and lamenting that?
The answer is in the context. It's quite inarguable how Democrats have conspired in/aided and abetted the murder of countless people (many from/related to communities they need votes from) over their existence as a party and your support for them under your harm reduction paradigm (personally less murderous than the fascists they're enabling) is unambiguous.
EDIT: Not holding my breath for you to come through with your answers though lol
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Still no citation for "you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them". It's ok, I have plenty of time to wait patiently.
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United States44268 Posts
On September 03 2026 01:24 LightSpectra wrote:
Still no citation for "you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them". It's ok, I have plenty of time to wait patiently.
He did this to me for ages too. What worked in the end was simply “no, actually you’re the one doing that” at him until he gave up.
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On September 03 2026 01:24 LightSpectra wrote:Show nested quote +On September 03 2026 01:02 GreenHorizons wrote:On September 03 2026 00:52 LightSpectra wrote:On September 03 2026 00:44 GreenHorizons wrote:On September 03 2026 00:26 LightSpectra wrote:Sure, just as soon as you get back to me on this. On July 29 2026 00:38 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 29 2026 00:12 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 23:58 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 23:52 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 23:15 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
I think that says much more than you intended.
Yeah, leftists make life harder on themselves because in addition to fascists and other authoritarians wanting to kill them, they dilute their own power (their leverage, as you call it) with ideological micro-schisms and self-sabotage. As someone who consistently preaches left unity with everyone except Stalinists/Maoists/Juchists, it's not against my worldview that a Maoist group crippled themselves. Since you've completely lost the plot talking about "infighting" and "micro-schisms and self-sabotage" to rationalize the Democrat "shield" murdering people that want human rights, I think it's worth trying to dig into this general idea of infighting. For it to be a fight, there has to be opposition. I'm not rationalizing anyone murdering anyone. + Show Spoiler +I said J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world.
While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight, but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them. What are some of the points you believe centrists must stop fighting about and concede to those to their left? Why? "Centrism" is not a universal position or ideology, so that question is too vague to answer. It's always a relative position to something else in a certain place and time. I could comment if you were more specific. You most definitely are, more importantly though, you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying. On July 29 2026 00:44 LightSpectra wrote:
Without arbitrarily deleting words from post, show me where I said that. I don't delete words out of people's posts. That's what the context you edited in (but not without deleting words lmao) demonstrates: On July 29 2026 01:01 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 29 2026 00:44 LightSpectra wrote:On July 29 2026 00:38 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 29 2026 00:12 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 23:58 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 28 2026 23:52 LightSpectra wrote:
[quote]
Yeah, leftists make life harder on themselves because in addition to fascists and other authoritarians wanting to kill them, they dilute their own power (their leverage, as you call it) with ideological micro-schisms and self-sabotage.
As someone who consistently preaches left unity with everyone except Stalinists/Maoists/Juchists, it's not against my worldview that a Maoist group crippled themselves. Since you've completely lost the plot talking about "infighting" and "micro-schisms and self-sabotage" to rationalize the Democrat "shield" murdering people that want human rights, I think it's worth trying to dig into this general idea of infighting. For it to be a fight, there has to be opposition. I'm not rationalizing anyone murdering anyone. + Show Spoiler +I said J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world.
While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight, but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them. What are some of the points you believe centrists must stop fighting about and concede to those to their left? Why? "Centrism" is not a universal position or ideology, so that question is too vague to answer. It's always a relative position to something else in a certain place and time. I could comment if you were more specific. You most definitely are, more importantly though, you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying. I think you know what I'm talking about. Democrat leadership (to the extent that's real), Establishment Democrats? Maybe you want me to call them moderate Democrats? Basically the kind of Democrats that refused to vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primary? What do you believe they need to stop fighting with people to their left about and just concede to them? Why? Without arbitrarily deleting words from post, show me where I said that. The part of my post you deleted was where I said people should've supported a Democratic POTUS nominee that would've immediately sacked Hoover. I haven't deleted anything + Show Spoiler +(I've actually gone out of my way to reinclude things you purposely removed) , that's how you post (for reasons I think have become more obvious over the course of this discussion). I find it amusing it's so hard for you (and a lot of other people) to just answer the simple request for those that lament the infighting among the left to list some of the policies/points that the corporate/establishment/moderate/thirdway/whatever Democrats need to stop infighting about and concede to those to their left in order to not self-sabotage. EDIT: Funnily enough, this should actually be relatively easy for all of you because you have dyhb who probably voted for Clinton in the 2016 primary. It's seems LS is struggling, but surely some of you should be able to identify something? EDIT2: I've agreed to disagree about that and am moving on to something more productive and less personal/petty/pedantic. I think your refusal to do so and your attempt at an ultimatum is comically illustrative of what I've been talking about. Absolute chef's kiss of a reply that you won't answer my question by reposting yourself lamenting that people around here can't answer a simple question. You realize that's what you're doing while effectively "deleting" the entire post you're responding to and lamenting that? The answer is in the context. It's quite inarguable how Democrats have conspired in/aided and abetted the murder of countless people (many from/related to communities they need votes from) over their existence as a party and your support for them under your harm reduction paradigm (personally less murderous than the fascists they're enabling) is unambiguous. EDIT: Not holding my breath for you to come through with your answers though lol Still no citation for "you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them". It's ok, I have plenty of time to wait patiently.
Well, now I see: The answer is in the context. It's quite inarguable how Democrats have conspired in/aided and abetted the murder of countless people (many from/related to communities they need votes from) over their existence as a party and your support for them under your harm reduction paradigm (personally less murderous than the fascists they're enabling) is unambiguous.
and the rest of the context) as that. You're welcome to disagree and ostensibly hide your answers (that would presumably benefit everyone) behind some ultimatum demanding an answer you like better than that, but that sounds counterproductive and needlessly hypocritical (even if you believe I'm being hypocritical).
You can accept that answer as "an answer" that you disagree with and move on to the discussions about what actually protesting/opposing fascism looks like in your view, and/or any of those policies/points that corporate/establishment/moderate/thirdway/Klobuchar/Buttigieg/whatever Democrats need to stop infighting about and concede to those to their left in order to not self-sabotage. Or you can avoid answering those questions/discussing those answers among yourselves and instead high five each other for totally pwning other posters like you're all still teenagers. + Show Spoiler +As I typed that last sentence and thought about Artosis' chat and then hanging out with friends from high school I get how that overlaps with the hobbyist escapism and general nostalgia for pre 9/11 times (more the hope we collectively shared about the future) that I've mentioned before. It also helps me be less judgemental/frustrated about it fwiw.
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My exact quote:
J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world. While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight, but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them.
After hiding the middle part of this paragraph, especially that crucial part that I've now bolded for emphasis, you wrote "you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them". Since J. Edgar Hoover died over a decade before I was born, that would be a very curious position for me to hold. So I asked for a citation that I believe in supporting murderers to protect myself from them. This is your final answer:
The answer is in the context. It's quite inarguable how Democrats have conspired in/aided and abetted the murder of countless people (many from/related to communities they need votes from) over their existence as a party and your support for them under your harm reduction paradigm (personally less murderous than the fascists they're enabling) is unambiguous.
So the "context" is the exact opposite of what I actually wrote. Well done.
It's blatantly obvious you either didn't actually read my original post in its entirety (too eager to pwn me with a chopped quote, like this was cable news and not an Internet forum where you can just scroll up to read what I actually wrote), or you did but thought you could get away with lying your ass off. If you want people to take you seriously and treat you in good faith, it's time to eat the humble pie and admit you did either one or both of those things. But if you'd like to keep being a laughingstock, by all means, repost yourself lamenting how nobody can answer a simple question as a substitute for answering a simple question yet again.
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On September 03 2026 01:56 LightSpectra wrote:Show nested quote +On September 03 2026 01:51 GreenHorizons wrote:On September 03 2026 01:24 LightSpectra wrote:On September 03 2026 01:02 GreenHorizons wrote:On September 03 2026 00:52 LightSpectra wrote:On September 03 2026 00:44 GreenHorizons wrote:On September 03 2026 00:26 LightSpectra wrote:Sure, just as soon as you get back to me on this. On July 29 2026 00:38 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 29 2026 00:12 LightSpectra wrote:On July 28 2026 23:58 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
Since you've completely lost the plot talking about "infighting" and "micro-schisms and self-sabotage" to rationalize the Democrat "shield" murdering people that want human rights, I think it's worth trying to dig into this general idea of infighting. For it to be a fight, there has to be opposition. I'm not rationalizing anyone murdering anyone. + Show Spoiler +I said J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world.
While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight, but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them. What are some of the points you believe centrists must stop fighting about and concede to those to their left? Why? "Centrism" is not a universal position or ideology, so that question is too vague to answer. It's always a relative position to something else in a certain place and time. I could comment if you were more specific. You most definitely are, more importantly though, you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying. On July 29 2026 00:44 LightSpectra wrote:
Without arbitrarily deleting words from post, show me where I said that. I don't delete words out of people's posts. That's what the context you edited in (but not without deleting words lmao) demonstrates: On July 29 2026 01:01 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 29 2026 00:44 LightSpectra wrote:On July 29 2026 00:38 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 29 2026 00:12 LightSpectra wrote:[quote] I'm not rationalizing anyone murdering anyone. + Show Spoiler +I said J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world.
While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight, but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them. [quote] "Centrism" is not a universal position or ideology, so that question is too vague to answer. It's always a relative position to something else in a certain place and time. I could comment if you were more specific. You most definitely are, more importantly though, you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying. I think you know what I'm talking about. Democrat leadership (to the extent that's real), Establishment Democrats? Maybe you want me to call them moderate Democrats? Basically the kind of Democrats that refused to vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primary? What do you believe they need to stop fighting with people to their left about and just concede to them? Why? Without arbitrarily deleting words from post, show me where I said that. The part of my post you deleted was where I said people should've supported a Democratic POTUS nominee that would've immediately sacked Hoover. I haven't deleted anything + Show Spoiler +(I've actually gone out of my way to reinclude things you purposely removed) , that's how you post (for reasons I think have become more obvious over the course of this discussion). I find it amusing it's so hard for you (and a lot of other people) to just answer the simple request for those that lament the infighting among the left to list some of the policies/points that the corporate/establishment/moderate/thirdway/whatever Democrats need to stop infighting about and concede to those to their left in order to not self-sabotage. EDIT: Funnily enough, this should actually be relatively easy for all of you because you have dyhb who probably voted for Clinton in the 2016 primary. It's seems LS is struggling, but surely some of you should be able to identify something? EDIT2: I've agreed to disagree about that and am moving on to something more productive and less personal/petty/pedantic. I think your refusal to do so and your attempt at an ultimatum is comically illustrative of what I've been talking about. Absolute chef's kiss of a reply that you won't answer my question by reposting yourself lamenting that people around here can't answer a simple question. You realize that's what you're doing while effectively "deleting" the entire post you're responding to and lamenting that? The answer is in the context. It's quite inarguable how Democrats have conspired in/aided and abetted the murder of countless people (many from/related to communities they need votes from) over their existence as a party and your support for them under your harm reduction paradigm (personally less murderous than the fascists they're enabling) is unambiguous. EDIT: Not holding my breath for you to come through with your answers though lol Still no citation for "you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them". It's ok, I have plenty of time to wait patiently. Well, now I see: The answer is in the context. It's quite inarguable how Democrats have conspired in/aided and abetted the murder of countless people (many from/related to communities they need votes from) over their existence as a party and your support for them under your harm reduction paradigm (personally less murderous than the fascists they're enabling) is unambiguous. and the rest of the context) as that. You're welcome to disagree and ostensibly hide your answers (that would presumably benefit everyone) behind some ultimatum demanding an answer you like better than that, but that sounds counterproductive and needlessly hypocritical (even if you believe I'm being hypocritical). You can accept that answer as "an answer" that you disagree with and move on to the discussions about what actually protesting/opposing fascism looks like in your view, and/or any of those policies/points that corporate/establishment/moderate/thirdway/Klobuchar/Buttigieg/whatever Democrats need to stop infighting about and concede to those to their left in order to not self-sabotage. Or you can avoid answering those questions/discussing those answers among yourselves and instead high five each other for totally pwning other posters like you're all still teenagers. + Show Spoiler +As I typed that last sentence and thought about Artosis' chat and then hanging out with friends from high school I get how that overlaps with the hobbyist escapism and general nostalgia for pre 9/11 times (more the hope we collectively shared about the future) that I've mentioned before. It also helps me be less judgemental/frustrated about it fwiw. + Show Spoiler +My exact quote: J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world. While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight, but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them. After hiding the middle part of this paragraph, especially that crucial part that I've now bolded for emphasis, you wrote "you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them". Since J. Edgar Hoover died over a decade before I was born, that would be a very curious position for me to hold. So I asked for a citation that I believe in supporting murderers to protect myself from them. This is your final answer: The answer is in the context. It's quite inarguable how Democrats have conspired in/aided and abetted the murder of countless people (many from/related to communities they need votes from) over their existence as a party and your support for them under your harm reduction paradigm (personally less murderous than the fascists they're enabling) is unambiguous. So the "context" is the exact opposite of what I actually wrote. Well done. + Show Spoiler +It's blatantly obvious you either didn't actually read my original post in its entirety (too eager to pwn me with a chopped quote, like this was cable news and not an Internet forum where you can just scroll up to read what I actually wrote), or you did but thought you could get away with lying your ass off. If you want people to take you seriously and treat you in good faith, it's time to eat the humble pie and admit you did either one or both of those things. But if you'd like to keep being a laughingstock, by all means, repost yourself lamenting how nobody can answer a simple question as a substitute for answering a simple question yet again.
I mean I was pretty clear about us not agreeing on this. Perhaps we could get closer with a dispassionate mediator, but as I said; You can accept that answer as "an answer" that you disagree with and move on to the discussions about what actually protesting/opposing fascism looks like in your view, and/or any of those policies/points that corporate/establishment/moderate/thirdway/Klobuchar/Buttigieg/whatever Democrats need to stop infighting about and concede to those to their left in order to not self-sabotage. Or you can avoid answering those questions/discussing those answers among yourselves using whatever rationalizations you wish.
EDIT: I think we all saw this coming.
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I see you've chosen the laughingstock route. Don't get mad when people refuse to engage with you when you consistently meltdown when pressed too closely 🤷
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On September 02 2026 05:08 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On September 02 2026 03:20 LightSpectra wrote:
The Falklands had a referendum in 2013 on the question "Do you wish the Falkland Islands to retain their current political status as an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom?" and literally three (3) people voted No.
Okay but maybe they're squatters on someone else's land. You know, like the 97% of Argentinians in Argentina that aren't indigenous. This too. On this one Argentina is the colonial European state that wiped out all the native inhabitants and is now seeking to expand their land including the forced ethnic cleansing of more indigenous populations who have made it clear that they don't want to be ruled by an alien land and culture from far across the sea that don't speak their language or follow their traditions. Whereas Britain on this one finds itself in the unusual position of being a first people who are living under threat of colonial invasion. And Argentina's justification for this colonial effort is literal colonialism, they're arguing that they deserve the prerogatives that their genocidal Spanish ancestors were gifted by the Pope. 18th Century Spain claimed that South America belonged to them and that anyone living there was their property and Argentina argue that as the offspring of that genocidal mission they shouldn't have to stop the family hobby. Spain could claim the Falklands with just as much justification while Portugal would have to settle for the entire eastern hemisphere. It was an artificial conflict generated by a military dictator to manufacture a nationalist popularity surge after he mismanaged the country and somehow it outlived that dictator. And now indoctrinated Argentinians are apparently taking it seriously, even though Britain did them a favour by killing their occupiers, sinking their ships, and in doing so toppling their shitty government.
I’m half Argentinian myself so i have had that conversation with dozens of Argentinians and my conclusion is that they brainwash themselves with that grotesque obsession that has somewhat become the cornerstone of their national unity. Wether they are communist, liberals, right wing or complete fascists, they all agree like one man that their life would be so much better if that spit of land in the middle of the Arctic Ocean that has belonged to the country a grand total of 16 years in the early XIXth century was returned to them.
It’s pathetic. There is a suburb of Buenos Aires that is called « Malvinas Argentina » and i have seen schools having 6 years old children make drawings of the Malvinas with the country’s colours.
Trump probably got told by Milei that it’s terribly unfair and, being a complete moron, he has believed it.
Also waiting for oblade to tell us in two months when this has escalated into a full blown crisis how this is super clever and how he didn’t in fact vote three times for a clueless and incompetent clown.
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USS Abraham Lincoln looking a bit rough after all that time on the sea:
Good to see that the US military is not over-extended or running it's equipment into the ground.
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the power of salt water + time.
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"But there's no ugly electromagnetic catapult on that ship, looks good to me" - Hegseth
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EPT![[image loading]](https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Thailand_US_Carrier_94371_af6eb9.jpg?w=1569)
