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AmiYumi posted:Hey, here’s an idea: instead of starting this bad faith trolling on page three of the new thread, maybe don’t? I really don't appreciate your bad faith accusations of other posters being bad faith trolls.
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Nov 1, 2021 21:36
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I'm glad everyone is mad at the true villain here: some powerless goon who is fed up with a party that fails to deliver time and time again, and by its own admission is unable to stop the rise of fascism.
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Nov 3, 2021 02:25
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You can literally just do whatever lmao. It's so insane to me watching people insist we can't do good things if the rules don't allow it after the Iraq war.
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Nov 3, 2021 19:52
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What if the thing that governed society was material conditions - i.e. the system by which we produce and distribute the commodities that sustain our society and reproduce our social relations, which is run by and for those who have ownership of the productive capital - and not some words written on a piece of paper a long time ago?
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Nov 3, 2021 21:38
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We have to elect Democrats so they can do good things. Sorry, the Democrats can't do good things because then they might not get re-elected, which they need to do in order to do good things.
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Nov 5, 2021 15:11
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morothar posted:The way I see the US, you *have* to elect Democrats to prevent worse from happening. Sometimes you may get a good thing. But not being able to maintain power means you won't get to *keep* even the occasional good thing, nor do you get to prevent worse things from happening. Gentle reminder that the ACA prevailing was a 100% personality-driven fluke that came down to one man. Yes this has been the standard reply for the last two decades. Perhaps we can review those decades to determine if the strategy has actually worked. Has lining up for the Dems despite their endless failures actually prevented things from getting worse? I'll leave the reader to think real hard about the trajectory of the last two decades, and where we appear to be headed in the next two, and decide.
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Nov 5, 2021 15:30
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morothar posted:A bit more than four years ago, Republicans failed to take healthcare away from millions of Americans because of a fluke. Yes I'm sure when the history books cover the American collapse they will dedicate a paragraph to how the Democrats were technically less bad.
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Nov 6, 2021 04:24
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Vorik posted:You think roads, bridges, high speed internet, etc will only benefit republicans? Wait til you find out who benefitted the last time we gave telecoms an obscene amount of money to expand high speed internet access.
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Nov 6, 2021 19:25
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How are u posted:Isn't that something that you want to happen? The left warned about Biden not keeping his campaign promises based on his own political history and the history of the party in general and we were told to refer to his website as proof that he really supported these things. Not sure why you think this latest failure would make any difference in changing liberals' minds.
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Nov 6, 2021 20:11
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Why would you compare the scale of the bill to literally nothing instead of the multitude of crises we are facing?
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Nov 6, 2021 22:54
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:A lot of the time - especially for the climate crisis - celebrating slight incremental progress feels like celebrating that the rocket you're heading to space on will now have a whopping 35% of the fuel needed to get there (up from 15%!). It's not "nothing", but it's not enough to stop the ship smashing into the ground. Here's a concrete example of this: https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1454147639046512650 A nice visualization of what "better than nothing" actually means.
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Nov 6, 2021 23:04
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How are u posted:I think that our social media ecosystem allows the process of sausage-making to play out in public unlike ever before, and our completely poisoned public discourse based on public shaming, "virtue signaling" of sorts, and eternal rage just stomps it into the ground. It's funny, the Star Citizen true believers make exactly the same argument. They say the problem is that people don't understand that game dev is messy and bad online people just want to be negative about it.
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Nov 6, 2021 23:37
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Froghammer posted:Someone who's not a Nazi? I'm not sure what your point is You say this as if it's simple and obvious, and yet most people who consider themselves to be good and not a Nazi voted for the Nazi who wrote the 94 crime bill, eulogized Strom Thurmond, and is currently operating concentration camps.
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Nov 8, 2021 18:57
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-Blackadder- posted:Yeah your other big post on messaging was appreciated as well. Especially liked the historical lessons. Honesty, if you wanted to make a "messaging"-focused thread I think it would generate some good discussion. The incredible thing about Huey Long was that he never really understood or gave a poo poo about political theory. The Bible was his guiding light, and the Bible said that you love your neighbors and lift up those in need, and by God that's what he did. And when people tried to stand in the way of him doing that he didn't play the political game, but instead in his words he "dynamited them out of the way."
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Nov 8, 2021 21:21
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How are u posted:Yep. Fascinating focus group. I've long felt that the whole "the USA is a demon cracker nation" type rhetoric is hugely self sabotaging. People like to love their home, people like to be patriotic. It's incumbent upon us to work within that type of framework to achieve our goals. Yeah maybe the Democrats could run some troops who wrap themselves in the flag. Beat the Republicans at their own game, y'know?
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Nov 8, 2021 21:31
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What if instead of chasing the right wing understanding of patriotism they tried to redefine the term as caring for your fellow Americans and made that the central messaging of a new bill of rights that guaranteed healthcare, jobs, and a living wage to all citizens?
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Nov 8, 2021 22:06
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Fritz the Horse posted:There was a segment on NPR during my commute this morning trying to analyze what happened in VA and NJ. They had on a journalist with the Atlantic who attributed it to "bad vibes" which... whatever. This is interesting because I think that Biden's win was also driven by a desire to return to normalcy, and since normalcy isn't coming I don't know what could stop the ping-pong effect it's causing. In fact I could see the 90s becoming the "good ol days" carrot on the stick that the 50s have been for Boomers.
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Nov 8, 2021 22:31
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Data Graham posted:I had this big post all typed up about how we could exhort the country to regain our lost leadership on the world stage by reinvesting in the things other countries once looked up to us for, our achievements, our resources, our founding principles of equality and opportunity, and how we could leverage nationalist sentiment to bring about leftist goals as a point of pride in what we as a country can do for our people, but then I realized I'd just combined MAGA and some form of "national" "socialism" What if we did all that but also expropriated the capitalist class of their wealth and turned ownership of private property over to workers councils so we could begin to unwind global capitalism?
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Nov 8, 2021 22:49
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Main Paineframe posted:Sure, the data shows that voters believe X, but I don't agree with the voters so I'm just going to handwave it away with snide comments without ever engaging with the underlying evidence! The data didn't say people don't care about material policy, it said people thought the Democrats had better policy but were swayed more by cultural issues. This is the consequence of setting the bar at being better than the Republicans instead of setting it at meeting people's needs.
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Nov 9, 2021 01:54
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A rejection of "The Rule of Law" isn't a rejection of laws. It's an acknowledgement that it is material conditions - our system of production and distribution and our social relations to the system - that governs our society and the law is an attempt to codify and manage those relations. When you don't acknowledge this you fall into the trap of thinking it was the laws that came first, and the material conditions second, and thus it is simply a matter of passing more good laws and fixing more bad laws. But you cannot remove or reform the bad laws of the capitalist system, because they are necessary to its social reproduction.
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Nov 13, 2021 23:52
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How are u posted:I think if in 2022 people can get back to living their lives, declare the pandemic over, and the inflation and supply chain stuff gets worked out, that Biden will bounce back up there. Meeting material needs, and all that jazz. Looks like the Biden administration agrees with you. 
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Nov 16, 2021 02:26
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I don't personally have the power to carry any water for the fascists, but the Democrats who keep insisting that they need a strong party and presence in our politics and keep treating them with kid gloves when they do fascist things sure do.
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Nov 18, 2021 16:09
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Nov 19, 2021 23:13
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The Sean posted:I feel like a person's political leanings are completely relevant to a discussion about politics on a forum about discussing politics. That's only going to lead to "you're a conservative, why should I listen to you?" Just engage with the arguments that are presented to you. You can decide on your own if the arguments are conservative or not.
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Nov 20, 2021 20:58
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How are u posted:It's a good thing that the IIJA and the BBBA are giving out more free poo poo than has ever been given out in our lifetimes, then. Again I must ask what the use is of comparing the bills to the past history of a country that has refused to do anything to help people instead of comparing to the level of people's current needs.
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Nov 20, 2021 21:14
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How are u posted:They are going to meet some of people's current needs. If the choices a system presents me with are doing nothing and doing woefully inadequate things I would reject that system as a false dilemma and I most certainly would not insist it is some kind of Candide-esque best of all possible worlds.
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Nov 20, 2021 21:26
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Fister Roboto posted:There's a story from when the Black Panthers were active and giving out free breakfasts to school kids. A woman was asked, "Why are you accepting help from them? They're communists!" She responded, "I don't know what communism is, but it's keeping my children fed." Also reminds me of David Harvey's anecdote about how when he teaches Das Kapital at Harvard the students fight him tooth and nail but when he teaches it in prisons the response is "duh, doesn't everyone know it works this way?"
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Nov 20, 2021 21:56
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TheDisreputableDog posted:I sort-of buy the argument that Afghanistan couldn’t reasonably have been handled better, but Biden turned it into a massive own-goal by promising no “Saigon moments”. Either he was monumentally wrong or blowing smoke. Not that I'm absolving Biden - he's the CiC and the buck stops with him - but I think it's pretty obvious his military advisors and intel agencies lied to him and set him up to hold their bag. When he gave that infamous speech a couple days before the pullout started he cites all kinds of specifics about timetables of how long the government will hold out and how many troops they have available and how ready they were to fight. There's no way he knows any of that poo poo. He was just repeating what he was dumb enough to believe when his advisors painted him a completely false picture of the situation. That's why one thing I will give Biden absolute credit for is standing his ground once it became clear how badly he was set up and following through with the withdraw. I remember him saying something like "every president since Bush passed this war to the next president and I refuse to pass it on again."
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Nov 24, 2021 01:52
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Cranappleberry posted:not even one of the ignorant people who asks "did Mookie do the right thing?" But surety that Mookie did the wrong thing in the movie Do the Right Thing. Spike Lee still gets so (rightfully) pissed when he gets that question lol. The title isn't a question, it's an imperative.
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Nov 26, 2021 01:11
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CommieGIR posted:I mean, so was Trump, so the choice was "Guy who has a history of White supremacy in the past" or "Guy actively promoting white supremacist and violent militia groups today, this very moment" Biden repeatedly gave his support to the police during and after the Floyd protests and vowed to give them more funding and equipment and even accused Trump of wanting to defund them so I very much disagree with your characterization here.
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Nov 26, 2021 20:05
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CommieGIR posted:Again, so was Trump, and to the point that Trump was arguing Blue Cities should be treated as "Anarchist Cities". Was Biden doing that too? Yes, very obviously so. The police were already treating all protests like that regardless if it was a blue city or not and Biden was vocally supporting it. I got teargassed in my blue city not because Trump said so but because the D mayor that I voted for sent a shitload of military equipped police to box us in while we were peacefully marching. It really sounds like you are arguing that while the results re: white supremacist militias committing violence on the population are the same under either candidate that Biden is actually better because he uses nicer words.
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Nov 26, 2021 20:17
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CommieGIR posted:Yes, because Biden would've totally done 1/6. Also: gently caress Joe Biden, but the idea that these are one in the same is laughable. That's the only point I have. Yes I agree that comparing one day of violence from a group supposedly trying to establish a white supremacist order to a massive nationwide organization that exists to violently enforce the already existing white supremacist order every single day is laughable. I also feel it is salient to point out that the Democrats' response to the former was to give more money and power to the latter. CommieGIR posted:Cool. Lemme know how that goes. Alright will do. Be sure to let us know how unconditionally pledging your vote to a capitalist party works out for you.
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Nov 26, 2021 20:32
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How are u posted:We live in a capitalist world, my man. It ain't changing, as far as I can see. We're going to find a way to handle the problems of the 21st century within some sort of more tamed and regulated capitalist framework or we won't at all. I don't think Communism will win, it's dead and buried. Yes I'm well aware of your gimmick where you present giving in to capitalism's destruction of our society and our world as the height of hope and optimism. KillHour posted:Fully automated gay space communism isn't going to magically stop all suffering. The entirety of history has been marginal improvements on top of marginal improvements and there's no reason to think that will ever not be the case. A world without any suffering is only ever possible in a world without sentience. This is just insanely false. Please read about any revolution ever. is pepsi ok fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Nov 26, 2021 |
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Nov 26, 2021 21:23
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Capitalism can never fight climate change because it's beneficial for them not to fight it and they get to make the rules. We were all born into a world where the options are to end capitalism or suffer climate catastrophe. You can say that ending capitalism is unrealistic or impossible or too dangerous. That's fine but none of that matters because the choice is still the same.
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Nov 26, 2021 23:59
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How are u posted:I think it's not so much capitalism as human greed, selfishness, and malice. Those traits are not exclusive to capitalism. They have always existed, certainly under communism and socialism, and they will always exist. You have you cause and effect reversed. "Greed, selfishness, and malice" are descriptions of actions, not causes of actions. We're not RPG characters who are born with the "greed" trait that forces us to act a certain way. Capitalism is a system that necessitates greed because it is a system where your company either grows its profits or it dies, and it doesn't particularly care how those profits are grown. Also if you're going to make a human nature argument you're gonna have to grapple with the fact that our species made it 180,000 years as hunter-gatherers who communally produced food according to one's ability, and distributed according to one's need. Eta: thinking that there are people who are just inherently bad is fash as hell is pepsi ok fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Nov 27, 2021 |
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Nov 27, 2021 19:19
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KillHour posted:This reads of "I'm so sold on the promise of Socialism that it must be the only good economic system" and I definitely disagree on that. All economic systems are flawed compromises, including socialism, which again is just an umbrella term for many economic systems of various plausibility. Regardless, the scientific way to determine this is to iteratively study, implement and reevaluate economic policies top-down, not roll the dice and grab your ankles. Either the capitalists continue to own the means of production or the workers take them. Those are the options. You keep talking about socialism like it's a theoretical system that someone wrote all the rules down for and people are arguing that we should adopt that system when in reality it's the name given to the struggle against capitalism which has a several century long academic and practical history.
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Nov 27, 2021 20:58
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