I prefer to think of the Democrats/neoliberals as AIDS and Republicans/fascists as pneumonia. It’s the pneumonia that kills you, but it’s the AIDS that has to be addressed if you want to survive. Establishment Democrats sap our ability to fight off fascism, and now fascism has come for us.

It always has been.

That’s the only reason I’ve ever done much of anything in shell script. As a network administrator I’ve worked many network appliances running on some flavor of Unix and the one language I can count on to be always available is bash. It has been well worth knowing for just that reason.

That door can be made to swing both ways.

Anyone can be a pedophile, regardless of other characteristics. The major champions of actual sexual abuse of minors today are politically right wing. Compare age-of-consent laws in red states to blue, or advocacy/performance of child marriages, and a pattern appears.

The conflation of evidence-based methods of sexual education with “sexualizing children” is a bald faced attempt to make kids more vulnerable. Kids trained in the importance of consent are far less likely to keep quiet when dealing with an abuser.

I would not concede, as you have here, that there was ever any appreciable link between trans advocacy and sexual abuse advocacy. The fact that some people somewhere advocated for both is true of any movement of sufficient size.

We could get a lot more benefit if we spent that money on building infrastructure instead of blowing shit up, but I still agree. Doing the right thing and US interests aligning doesn’t seem to happen very often. I think we have to act when they do.

Most Ukraine funding is actually in the form of weapons, most of which have been sitting in warehouses in case of war with Russia. Now they get used before going obsolete and the US’s #1 rival is quickly becoming irrelevant without putting US soldiers at risk. We provide the weapons and Ukraine supplies the soldiers. I think we got the better side of that bargain.

This whole idea that the US is spending money abroad out of some kind of altruism or that we just let other countries take advantage is preposterous. It’s always money spent in furtherance of US interests. We are the wealthiest country in the world in large part because we exploit the labor and resources of the rest of the planet.

Oh, fuck off. I never called for perfection and I never jumped ship. It’s the establishment with the purity tests.

Oh, I have no doubt that he’s 100% faking it. The country is falling to the fascists thanks to the Democratic establishment’s incompetence and Obama’s manipulations, but keeping up “the norms” is still job one! Fucking pathetic.

The guard isn’t.

https://images.app.goo.gl/zzpsuQN6nc2eVZbM6

When barbarians loot the town I get pissed at the barbarians. When I find out they got in because the guard of the gate was drunk off his ass and rolling around in the bushes with his girlfriend, I toss the guard over the wall and get a new damn guard.

If you are currently in the process of saving instead of withdrawing in retirement, then falling stock prices are just buying opportunities. If the grocery store puts eggs on sale, you wouldn’t fret that the eggs currently in your fridge aren’t worth as much.

When you think of it that way, it gets a lot easier to hang on after a crash, and you might start looking for ways to buy even more at bargain prices.

Down payment on a bribe.

It’s an orwellian term for a package of anti-worker and anti-union laws. The centerpiece where the name comes from is making it illegal for a union shop to require workers to pay union dues.

If not for the fact that a felon is about to become President again, I would want some form of justice in the law for the assassin.

Maybe we should run him in 2028. I think it would be a landslide.

“Deny, Defend, Depose 2028!”

Making exceptions is never a good idea.

Why not? The whole reason we have judicial discretion is that every crime departs from the platonic ideal in one way or another.

The working class has been losing a class war for decades without ever properly noticing that it was happening. Working Americans have been dying in that war, and now someone struck back.

I’ll be sold on the “no exceptions” ideal when we haul in the corporate murderers alongside the people who fought back.

Jury nullification is the other acceptable option.

Some people just want to watch the world burn.

Less less people voted tin the 2024 presidential election than in the 2020 election. This is a basic fact.

Well, your apparently disingenuous argument was of a repeating pattern so, even if we assume the gap is made up of leftists, your argument is still invalid. Why would Harris’ campaign ignore leftists because leftists don’t show up if leftists showed up in 2020?

Twist it turn it, divide it how you want, they did not show up.

How about “substantiate it”? We know that someone didn’t show, but it’s not leftists. It’s never leftists, and this bullshit gets thrown around every damn time. By the time the analysis is done the establishment humpers have moved on.

This is not complicated, it’s grade school math.

Your math still just shows that someone didn’t show.

Working class voters with no particular allegiance and zero interest in political theory are the voters you are looking for. They show up when inspired. Harris wasn’t inspiring.

The left isn’t telling the establishment how to get our votes, we’re telling them how to get working class voters.

Sure, we have some idiots in our ranks, but so does every group. We also have a boatload of trolls pretending to be leftists to sow division, and assholes like you play right into their hands. If you had any impact at all on people voting for Harris, I guarantee it went the other way. You can’t berate people into voting your way, just ask Hillary.

to you. If you didn’t vote then Trump is your fault.

I DID SHOW UP. Fucking hell.

If you actually want to understand what happened, these two videos are a good start.

This Is A Huge Problem

BIDEN AND THE DEMOCRATS DOOMED US TO A TRUMP VICTORY

YOU DON’T SHOW UP. How many times do I have to repeat this for you to understand?

I DID SHOW UP. This explains so much. Unlike you, I don’t judge the truth of a statement based on how often it’s repeated. No matter how many times you and corporate media make this incorrect claim, it isn’t going convince me. I prefer evidence like this Pew study that found the political left to be the most engaged, “that is, they voted at the highest rates in the 2020 presidential election, and they are most likely to say they post about politics on social media and that they donated to campaigns”.

As I TOLD YOU ALREADY, it’s regular working class voters who stay home in droves.

Why in the the hell would they ever cater to people who don’t show up, especially if doing so turns away the people who do show up?

I absolutely love the deluded framing of this sentence. I reject the premise but, even if I didn’t, does it not occur to you that the ability of “people who do show up” to “turn away” means they are exactly as fickle as you falsely accuse the left of being?

Democrats aren’t balancing the preferences of the “median voter” with the preferences of progressives. That is a lie. Modern elections are won on turnout, and Democrats are weighing the working class appetite for populist messaging with the demands of the donor class. Right wing populism doesn’t threaten capital in the same way as left wing populism, so Republicans get a lot more leeway in embracing (foe) populist messaging. Democrats try to strike a balance between voters and donors, which is why all of our elections have razor thin margins. Whenever Democrats miscalculate and give in too much to their donors, the Republicans take power.