Ague Proof posted:

You know when people say Clinton was impeached for lying to the American people - "depends on what Is means" - do they ever bring up Reagan's best quote?

"In spite of the wildly speculative and false stories of arms for hostages and alleged ransom payments, we did not—repeat, did not—trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we."

"A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not."

ate poo poo on live tv posted:

The sudden fiscal conservative democrats itt, should make sure to let Florida and Texas know that because the Hurricane Relief bills didn't have detailed actuarial tables in them it was impossible for them to pass. What is it with these pie-in-the-sky hurricane victims that they just can't listen to the adults in the room.

Lightning Knight posted:

I sometimes just feel like it's worth reminding people when they ask how anyone ever thought Bill Clinton was good that in '92 they were living in a world where a Republican President had only a decade previously won back to back electoral victories that included every state but Minnesota once (84) and California both times. I can't even imagine how utterly defeated Democrats probably felt in 1992.

Jazerus posted:

(c) Funding-

(1) IN GENERAL- There are appropriated to the Medicare for All Trust Fund amounts sufficient to carry out this Act from the following sources:
[NOTE: the following part of H.R. 676 describes only one idea for the funding. After sufficient support is established in the U.S. House of Representatives, many funding options will likely be debated. It will be important for some citizens to monitor the progress and give input at that time. In the meantime, any ideas or wishes you have for funding should be sent by letter in the U.S. Mail to your U.S. Representative and U.S. Senators.]
(A) Existing sources of Federal government revenues for health care.
(B) Increasing personal income taxes on the top 5 percent income earners.
(to do: need to communicate what level of income this means)
(C) Instituting a modest and progressive excise tax on payroll and self-employment income.
[Current Medicare tax: 1.45% paid by employers and employees.]
(D) Instituting a modest tax on unearned income.
[This is an additional source of funding … added to the H.R. 676 that was proposed in the previous session of Congress. The expected percentage is not yet available. H.R. 676 will not be given an economic evaluation by the Congressional Budget Office until it gets to at least 100 cosponsors<.]
(E) Instituting a small tax on stock and bond transactions.

Instant Sunrise posted:

Including a president that was elected after the presidential administration he had previously been a part of had been caught committing treason.

quote:

In a reversal of internal policy, the Office of Government Ethics says funds benefiting aides caught up in Russia probes may accept anonymous gifts from lobbyists.

Taerkar posted:

axeil posted:

yo this is a good post and i'm glad you made it because it will shut up people (like me!) who will complain about the bill not having funding. it's not perfect but it's way better than ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and i am happy with that.

i'm way more okay with this bill now than i was this morning.

OtherworldlyInvader posted:

Nobody in this topic has advocated for fiscal conservatism.

PerniciousKnid posted:

You don't have to guarantee success. But running on specific promise without any clear path to delivery is how you end up with poo poo shows like the Obamacare repeal. What's the point of winning 2018 and 2020 on Medicare for all and then spending four years arguing about how exactly you remake a sixth of the economy? If Obama walked into Congress in 2009 and said "hey I campaigned on eliminating underwriting, let's make it happen", he never would've passed the ACA.

Hellblazer187 posted:

Yes, of course. I'm not suggesting a balanced budget is necessary. But a single payer plan is literally trillions of dollars. It would run out of that room pretty quickly.

There's literally nothing in there about paying for it.

Hellblazer187 posted:

No country offers a plan as generous as the one Sanders put forward today. Yes there would be reductions in administrative costs and waste, and yes the government has the negotiating power to lower prices across the board. But even if we assume the lowest per capita spending of all 1st world countries with UHC, and apply that across the US population, it's an enormous government program.

We need to sell the fact that even if taxes go up you still wind up with something better. You pay $2k more in taxes but $3k less in premiums, you're better off. But we can't start making that argument until we have the tax (or, ideally, tax plus military cuts) side of this figured out.

axeil posted:

yo this is a good post and i'm glad you made it because it will shut up people (like me!) who will complain about the bill not having funding. it's not perfect but it's way better than ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and i am happy with that.

i'm way more okay with this bill now than i was this morning.

axeil posted:

yo this is a good post and i'm glad you made it because it will shut up people (like me!) who will complain about the bill not having funding. it's not perfect but it's way better than ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and i am happy with that.

i'm way more okay with this bill now than i was this morning.

Jaxyon posted:

Medicare-for-all has always been a very fleshed out proposal and "but money!" and "yeah i want a pony too" has always been the go-to complaint on both the right and center.

Single payer is a common sense proposal that can easily find funding and that is irrelevant as we are in a country where you can say natural disasters are an argument for tax cuts on rich people without getting laughed out of the government.

awesmoe posted:

'common sense proposals' are uniformly garbage and one of the biggest red flags possible when used to market new legislation
e: uniformly garbage is an overstatement. "common sense proposals should be regarded as complete garbage until unusually thorough vetting proves otherwise" is more accurate

quote:

A new poll from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center reveals how shockingly little people know about even the most basic elements of our government and the Constitution that formed it.
Take your pick from this bouillabaisse of ignorance:
* More than one in three people (37%) could not name a single right protected by the First Amendment. THE FIRST AMENDMENT.
* Only one in four (26%) can name all three branches of the government. (In 2011, 38% could name all three branches.)
* One in three (33%) can't name any branch of government. None. Not even one.
* A majority (53%) believe the Constitution affords undocumented immigrants no rights. However, everyone in the US is entitled to due process of law and the right to make their case before the courts, at the least.
(And the First Amendment protects the rights to free speech, free exercise of religion, freedom of the press and the rights of people to peaceably assemble, in case you were wondering.)
"Protecting the rights guaranteed by the Constitution presupposes that we know what they are," said Annenberg Director Kathleen Hall Jamieson. "The fact that many don't is worrisome."
Uh, yeah.
Sadly, the Annenberg poll is far from the first to reveal not only our collective ignorance about the basic tenets of democracy but also the fact that we are even less informed than we were in the past.
Take this Pew Research Center poll from 2010. When asked to name the chief justice of the Supreme Court, less than three in 10 (28%) correctly answered John Roberts. That compares unfavorably to the 43% who rightly named William Rehnquist as the chief justice in a Pew poll back in 1986.
What did the 72% of people who didn't name Roberts as the chief justice in 2010 say instead, you ask? A majority (53%) said they didn't know. Eight percent guessed Thurgood Marshall, who was never a chief justice of the Court and, perhaps more importantly, had been dead for 17 years when the poll was taken. Another 4% named Harry Reid, who is not now nor ever was a Supreme Court Justice.

awesmoe posted:

'common sense proposals' are uniformly garbage and one of the biggest red flags possible when used to market new legislation

awesmoe posted:

'common sense proposals' are uniformly garbage and one of the biggest red flags possible when used to market new legislation
e: uniformly garbage is an overstatement. "common sense proposals should be regarded as complete garbage until unusually thorough vetting proves otherwise" is more accurate

ate poo poo on live tv posted:

They sure do seem "very concerned" about the government spending money that will materially benefit 300+ million people. So if it's not fiscal conservative, what is it then, and why is Medicare for All need to be uniquely intently studied, whereas the Authorization for War in Iraq, or the Katrina Bill or other hurricane bills don't?

Hellblazer187 posted:

I've said multiple times in this thread I want single payer, but the political challenge is selling the tax increases that come along with it. I'm not a fiscal conservative, and you have to be extremely obtuse to read that from what I've said.

Hellblazer187 posted:

I've said multiple times in this thread I want single payer, but the political challenge is selling the tax increases that come along with it. I'm not a fiscal conservative, and you have to be extremely obtuse to read that from what I've said.

ate poo poo on live tv posted:

So therefore we shouldn't even try.

Majorian posted:

If you're referring to 1968, neither Bobby Kennedy nor Eugene McCarthy were particularly "hard left"; McCarthy was just anti-war. The same would later be true of McGovern. What killed the hard left for decades was the Democratic Party very deliberately removing labor and economic justice as core values. I know I curse Fred Dutton's name a lot, but seriously, what an unbelievable moron that guy was.

axeil posted:

yo this is a good post and i'm glad you made it because it will shut up people (like me!) who will complain about the bill not having funding. it's not perfect but it's way better than ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and i am happy with that.

i'm way more okay with this bill now than i was this morning.

Taerkar posted:

"Common Sense" is very much a code word for "The way I think things should be" and is very much virtue signaling for regressives.

RuanGacho posted:

If we want to analyze this is microcosm, let's take Bernie proposal, fund it as suggested with the money spent on the f35 program and see how many people get his level of care suggested.

axeil posted:

yo this is a good post and i'm glad you made it because it will shut up people (like me!) who will complain about the bill not having funding. it's not perfect but it's way better than ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and i am happy with that.

i'm way more okay with this bill now than i was this morning.

ate poo poo on live tv posted:

They sure do seem "very concerned" about the government spending money that will materially benefit 300+ million people. So if it's not fiscal conservative, what is it then, and why is Medicare for All need to be uniquely intently studied, whereas the Authorization for War in Iraq, or the Katrina Bill or other hurricane bills don't?

Dead Reckoning posted:

I'm amazed at the stones it takes to describe taxes that need to raise a trillion or so dollars as "modest."

Dead Reckoning posted:

This poo poo right here is why I can't take a lot of the more militant UHC advocates seriously. "Beep boop, just take. all the F-35 money and use it to buy healthcare. So simple." The F-35 program is our only option to recapitalize our fighter fleet at this point, as well as that of several major allies, and canceling it would cause grave damage to our national security. You need to make that hard isolationist sell that we should withdraw from our foreign military commitments and leave Europe and Asia to the wolves. Add to that, canceling the program would result in paying incredibly expensive penalties, because Lockheed wasn't stupid enough to massively stake their company on a program that large without a hedge against shifting political winds. (I'm sure someone is warming up a "hold the MIC leeches over a barrel if they want future contracts" response, to which I would respond that the US government deciding not to pay its debts when it's inconvenient is one of the crises we are trying to avoid at the moment.)

I'm amazed at the stones it takes to describe taxes that need to raise a trillion or so dollars as "modest."

Instant Sunrise posted:

And for Clinton to get elected, all it took was:

• "Read my lips no new taxes"
  
• A Recession
  
• "gently caress nevermind this voodoo economics poo poo ain't sustainable."
  
• A third party candidate buying fuckloads of infomercials
  
• HW pardoning everyone involved in Iran-Contra
  
• Literally a Hurricane
  
• Clinton played the saxophone
  
• "lmao what's a barcode?"
  
• "he looked at his watch lol"

Albinator posted:

That is the proist of pro clicks.

Hellblazer187 posted:

Of course we should. Are you deliberately missing the point? I can't imagine someone could both form a complete sentence AND be dumb enough to actually be missing the point.

Edit: If wanting a 50+% tax bracket on 1M+ incomes spelled out in the bill (or whatever the funding winds up being) makes me a "fiscal conservative" then I guess sign me up for the Heritage Foundation. Don't think they'll want me though. I'm not a conservative I'm an accountant.

awesmoe posted:

it's signalling for anyone trying to elide over details.
like it's not really 'common sense' that single payer is The Right Way - it's rare even among countries with universal health care. Saying that it'll just work in the end is skipping over a whole lot of really difficult minutae, all of which have the potential to cripple the entire thing. I agree it can be made to work, but treating it as a fait accompli is dumb at best, and you (not you you, generic you) do a disservice by bitching out people who think that rewriting the economy might just not be doable in 140 characters.

now im not saying that bernie's bill should have this stuff. I'm saying that if you think "its just common sense lol" about this, or about anything else, you're probably wrong.


e: i got distracted from my main point (which was that 'common sense' is dumb). it's 'common sense' that healthcare should be treated the way everything else is, ie user-pays. it takes a degree of analysis and experience to move past that and recognize that actually the common sense standard approach doesnt loving work for healthcare for a number of reasons, and so something different should be tried (for example, a model where the government pays for everything)

ate poo poo on live tv posted:

No bill has that amount of detail in it. The way to pay for a bill is figured out in a different process called the budgeting process. So worrying about how they are going to pay for it is just a convenient way to be against a bill but convincing people that you are for it. So if you want NHS or Single Payer or whatever, you pass the bill, then congress can figure out how to pay for it. It's a very well established process so stop being a fiscal conservative.

Hellblazer187 posted:

The Social Security act had taxes built in. This is just as big if not bigger. Stop being actually retarded, and maybe look up what fiscal conservative means.

David Wong posted:

Why Every Terrible Person Thinks They're the Hero (this tile is way better than the click-baity one)

I want this phrase added to the American flag:

Hating a bad thing does not make you good.

Put it in place of some of the stars or something. It's important. It's one of those things everyone knows, right up until it's convenient to not know it. Hell, hating bad people doesn't even necessarily get you closer to being a better person. The Klan hates ISIS, but we don't count that as a point in their favor. Yet I'm pretty sure that most of what we consider being good in this culture is just having disdain for the right things.

What does this have to do with police shootings, Nazis, immigration, and most of the headlines you'll see this year? And how does it tie into the best Keanu Reeves action franchise? Well, it comes down to how ...


We Hate Giving People Second Chances

This subject will be about five outrages old by the time this article goes up, but as I type this, the Trump administration just ended a government program for children whose parents entered America illegally. "DACA" basically allowed these young people to get jobs, pay taxes, go to school, and get driver licenses despite not being citizens. Ending the program means destroying the lives of about 800,000 people for a crime their parents committed. As one Republican congressman put it, "justice" means these people deserve to "live in the shadows." After all, he said, they entered the country illegally. Not even years of productive, law-abiding living absolves them of that original sin.

Experts call it "John Wick morality" (or at least they should), named after the film series in which Keanu Reeves' dog is killed by Russian mobsters, and in response he shoots 738 of them in the head. You wouldn't think any real person considers that a reasonable moral code to live their life by, until you look at the comments under any article about a police shooting and see ...



... or see entire comment sections full of people rooting for a guy who shot a car thief to death. The logic almost makes sense if you squint -- if the victim hadn't resisted (or suddenly moved their hands, or smoked weed, or failed to signal, or illegally crossed the border), they'd still be alive, therefore they have no one to blame but themselves.

That "no one to blame" phrasing is key. It implies that once someone breaks a rule, you can do whatever you want to them and you cannot be blamed. Listen for it, and you'll hear somebody using this reasoning once a day, even if it's just over stupid poo poo. Do you have some poor bastard in your social circle who's gotten stuck with a demeaning nickname based on something they did when they were 13? If you want a famous example, try to find a single discussion about Richard Gere, anywhere, that doesn't bring up the urban legend about him shoving a gerbil up his rear end (a rumor that got started during the freaking Reagan administration).

We need that one mortal sin which will let us revoke a person's status as a human worthy of dignity, respect, empathy or anything else. It's the proverbial John Wick's Dog, the moral trump card. We cannot be accused of prejudice or pettiness as long as we've got a bloody JWD carcass to jiggle in response to critics.

How does this apply to you, a good person fighting the good fight? I'm getting to that.


We Use "Justice" As Cover For All Manner Of Awfulness

"Hold on," says the hypothetical skeptical reader who's been following me from article to article for the last ten years, "you're using immigration hardliners and police shootings as an example of this poo poo in action? Those are just the result of racism, dude."

I don't think that's the complete truth. I think the reason so many racists could pass an "Are you a racist?" polygraph test is that they don't think minorities are inhuman due to their color, but rather their supposed criminality. The officer who shot Philando Castille as he sat in a car with his girlfriend and four-year-old daughter said that he thought he smelled marijuana. In his mind, this single hint of a single minor crime meant absolutely anything done in response was justified.

That he would not have done this if the driver were a whimsical white stoner dude never occurs to him -- prejudice almost always hides behind a supposed zeal for justice. Internet hate mobs never flood a woman's inbox with death threats without a JWD to justify it. ("She wouldn't be getting these calls in the middle of the night if she hadn't made fun of us on Twitter!") And where a crime doesn't exist, we'll extrapolate one. "Of course I thought my family was in mortal danger when that Mexican man approached the car! After all, if a guy will cross the border illegally, he'll rape a woman. He's already proven he doesn't care about the law!"

It's an utterly insane double standard, of course -- our own mistakes are singular instances and in no way should affect others' overall opinion of us. ("Just because I lied doesn't make me a liar!") Yet it's so seductive that virtually every hateful rear end in a top hat you've met in your life has built their fetid nightmare of a personality upon this very foundation. They all think their daily cruelty is in response to some extreme provocation.

But this article isn't just about piling scorn on those people; virtually everyone reading this already thinks of them as monsters. My point is that none of them were born monsters, so we should be having the same conversation people do in the second act of every zombie movie. "How do we stop them and, more importantly, how do we keep ourselves from getting turned?" If cruelty wears justice as a disguise, then anyone who believes in justice is at risk. In fact, the more strongly you believe in justice, the more at risk you are.

Once, as a well-meaning child, I asked my Sunday School teacher how it was okay for God to send people to Hell for eternity based on fairly minor infractions, while if an earthly ruler punished rulebreakers with indefinite torture, they'd be considered cruel despots. The answer made sense to me at the time, and went like this:

Because God is infinitely righteous, He has infinite loathing for unrighteousness. His very purity is what makes any tolerance of impurity impossible.

Therefore, our modern pansy-rear end attitude toward lawbreakers (insisting on reform and humane treatment) is actually evidence of our corruption. If we were more righteous, we would be more cruel toward the unrighteous. Therefore, not only is that cruelty justified, but it is in fact a key barometer of our own goodness. Petty meanness toward atheists and homosexuals is exactly what God wants. If you're reading this and sure that this kind of medieval thinking only applies to Christians ... well, keep reading.


We Start Hating People For All The Wrong Reasons

A critic of any female politician/pundit/activist can't resist pointing out how ugly/fat she is (if she's pretty, then the insult is that she's a slut or that she only got her position based on looks). Racists will start with high crime rates and unemployment, but will quickly move on to how rap music is lovely, how ghetto women wear trashy clothes, how blacks can't speak proper English. Never mind that it's impossible to justify music, fashion, and dialect as examples of moral failure. For some reason, it's not enough for their enemies to be merely wrong; they have to be disgusting on a visceral level.

It's crazy how those racists do that, isn't it? Those dirty, toothless, inbred hillbillies. They're almost as bad as the gamergaters. You know, those fat virgin neckbeards in their mothers' basements? They all probably voted for Trump -- that guy with the gross weird hair and fake tan and tiny hands. Disgusting, right?

"Well, but that's different! In those cases, the targets deserve it!" Oh, I get it. It feels great to poke our enemies in their sensitive spots. We know Trump is insecure about his hair, that Chris Christie is probably sensitive about being fat, that social outcasts are so ashamed of their virginity that some of them will blow their brains out rather than live with it. So why not use those weapons? This is total war, after all -- everything about the enemy is fair game. And remember, the more cruel we are to bad guys, the better we are as people. God himself said it.

But what about all of the good people out there with weird hair, those insecure guys shyly trying to hide bald spots? Or your allies who are unattractive, nervous, and unsuccessful at sex? How are they not supposed to take home the message that personal appearance apparently matters just as much as their moral choices, and that sexual failure is something to be deeply ashamed of? That it doesn't matter if you're one of the good guys if you also have poor grooming and social skills?

Well gently caress, now look what's happened. We've not only justified cruelty toward our enemies based on their past sins, but justified cruelty to totally unrelated people. Just throwing out collateral damage like John Wick's stray bullets, mowing down passing tourists with gun-fu until the whole city is brought to a panicked standstill. We certainly don't stop to ask if the dog would even have wanted this.


We Wind Up Radicalizing Ourselves

One genre of angry message I've gotten over the years goes something like "I've been a daily reader since 2010 and thought you were the good guys, but after seeing [joke/article they found offensive], I'm realizing how wrong I was! Goodbye forever." Think about that for a moment. They are claiming to have read and enjoyed literally thousands of articles and videos before encountering one single offensive idea, at which point they declared the whole enterprise a loss. That's super weird.

Well, it's weird until you consider what particular bubble they spend their time in. I've never been around an activist group that didn't turn into an endless series of petty purity tests. I was raised in a church where everyone was looking for more and more inconsequential things to judge each other by. R-rated movies were of course forbidden, but which prime-time network TV shows were permissible? Any of them? Of course rock music was of the devil, but what about country? Aren't those songs about faith, kind of?

The natural evolution is toward tighter and tighter criteria for what behavior gets you shunned from the group. The end result is that the central cause, the group's JWD, can be as pure as the driven snow, and yet the tone will get more and more toxic over time, the members becoming less and less charitable with each other. Here, for example, is what my Twitter timeline looks like:

"Nazis are bad and must be opposed."

Agree!

"People who enable or defend Nazis must also be opposed."

Makes sense!

"Unlawful violence is perfectly acceptable when opposing Nazis and their enablers."

Wait, I'm not sure I'm on board with that ...

"Anyone who opposes the use of unlawful violence against Nazis is also a Nazi enabler."

What? No! I'm one of the good guys!

"Also, if you think about it, all American institutions and capitalism itself help support white supremacy, therefore all are Nazi enablers and eligible for violent retribution."

Hey, I think you just declared war on literally everyone who isn't currently in the room with you.

You hear experts talk about how extremists get "radicalized" -- how a guy went from a mild-mannered food inspector in San Bernardino to a brainwashed suicide attacker in the course of a year or so. But it really isn't a mystery, and we all form less-murderous versions of this. All it takes is a closed like-minded social circle in which it's considered unacceptable to disagree with the group, and then devote that group to hating something. It doesn't even matter if the thing truly deserves hating -- it still turns toxic. In fact, it works better if it does. "How can you criticize any flaw in our group's behavior when the other side is Nazis! That's literally saying that both sides are the same! The mere existence of pure evil on the other side mathematically means our side is pure good!"

At that point, no criticism is possible and there is nothing to moderate the rage. The rhetoric ratchets higher and higher as each member tries to top each other (to prove their own righteousness by demonstrating they hate the target most), and there is no method for reining it in. Moderate voices from outside the group are excluded completely, anyone from the inside who takes a moderate tone can be shouted down with accusations of being an enemy sympathizer. Soon, everything from objectively grotesque insults to elaborate torture fantasies are tossed around without a second thought.


... Until You Reach A Point Of No Return

At some point, an action will be suggested that you would normally consider immoral. It doesn't have to involve armed mobs or building bombs. Depending on the time, place, and cause, it might be as minor as agreeing to spread a lie. ("I mean, even if they didn't really do it, they probably did something just as bad! It's not like they never lie about us!") Or maybe someone will suggest digging up a member of the opposition's address, maybe find out where they work, show them how serious we are.

In every case, some members will be nervous. There can be consequences to this kind of thing, right? But will they risk their status in the group by objecting? Will they have their commitment to the cause questioned?

It is right about here that you realize the cause was never what was important. The group was what was important -- having a bunch of like-minded people standing and fighting alongside you. After all, was it ever about the dog, or was it about what the dog symbolized? So maybe you wouldn't sacrifice yourself for the cause -- you can always get another dog -- but would you sacrifice yourself for your friends, these people who you know would damned well do the same for you? Absolutely!

And now, without realizing it, you have the answer to the question you've been asking your whole life: "How can evil people live with themselves? How can a Hitler or Osama bin Laden or Charles Manson look themselves in the mirror every day?" Here you go. This is how. Inside every truly destructive person is the JWD, the broken and bleeding puppy driving them mindlessly forward, and outside of them is a group of people reinforcing their rage until the rage is all they are.

It is a fact of human nature that living purely in opposition to something, rather than for something, hollows you out inside. To be a whole human being, you have to spend your life building something good. It's easy to find yourself withholding time and energy from friends, family, career, and hobbies, because drat it, one of those assholes on the other side has said something outrageous and I must respond, because this is war and this is all that matters.


And The Whole Time, You'll Tell Yourself It Was The Only Way

Around 70% of readers never make it to the end of an internet article, so it'll be interesting to see how many rebut this with, "Oh, great, another article saying Antifa and Nazis are the same! As if one of them ISN'T ACTIVELY DEMANDING GENOCIDE." It's the same mental dodge I've been pointing out -- as long as the other side is worse, you can't criticize me. But I'm personally telling you, as an individual human being, that you need to ask yourself one crucial question: Are you in it for the cause, or are you in it for the fight? There's an easy way to tell: Do you get involved with the boring parts?

Donald Trump's entire agenda could be obliterated a little more than a year from now with a new congress, but statistically the vast majority of you won't vote at all (and I'd say the vast majority who show up to anti-Nazi rallies also won't cast a vote). Smacking Nazis with clubs is fun. Voting in midterms is not. Only one results in real change. Hell, in the 2016 election that supposedly determined the future of humanity "Did Not Vote" won 44 of 50 states. Why are some of you willing to put yourself in physical danger at a protest but won't suffer the tedium of real-world policy change? Deep down inside, you know the answer.

"But voting doesn't change anything!" Okay, the outcome of exactly one senate race just prevented Obamacare from being repealed. Twenty million people will have health insurance next year because just a small group of voters -- enough to fit in a stadium -- showed up instead of staying home. You think Hillary would be talking about repealing DACA? "Sometimes violence is the only way!" Are you saying that based on evidence, or because you want it to be true? For every nationalist/authoritarian movement that got turned back by war, literally thousands quietly died due to losing elections or just failing to drum up popular support. How many elections has David Duke won? Goddamnit, you're playing their game. Don't let the devils drag you into Hell.

Because god help you if one day you find your enemy has finally been defeated or, even worse, that your tactics only made them stronger (would an armed mob on the other side hurt or help recruitment for yours?). You are left with a personality built entirely on fighting a misguided war, a bottle of poison that didn't kill the cockroaches and is now just collecting dust in the garage. At that point, will you give up the rage and rebuild your personality around loving something? Or will you just turn that hatred on yourself? I want you to at least think about it. Here's a GIF of an otter having a snack.

ate poo poo on live tv posted:

It means being against any type of social program and using the cost of that program to justify your position.