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Harold Fjord posted:The obvious political reality in front of us all as the Republican Party suppresses the vote in states they control and preparing to overturn the political will of their constituents at state level as needed. >listening to democrats (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 14, 2022 03:46
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Doesn't everything here just boil down to nobody agreeing on what counts as "trying".
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May 3, 2022 21:43
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The penis joke really doesn't seem to be in the same category as the other stuff. Usually most people don't know the size of someone's penis, making discrimination difficult.
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May 5, 2022 02:43
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Rigel posted:Are you expressing the ignorant, uninformed id of regular voters who are too busy to know how things work, and how that is going to be a problem for future elections (which is fine), or is this a serious criticism? I think the facts of the situation are a lot more important than whether individual posters have "those useless shiftless losers" or "aw shucks they did try but the votes just weren't there" feelings about the Democratic party.
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May 12, 2022 20:16
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Crain posted:At this point all that's going to be left is localized direct action. That's fine, but this subject would be more on topic in the appropriate Your City Sucks thread.
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May 19, 2022 21:10
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Xombie posted:"Authoritarianism" isn't a word meaning "government policies I don't like", or even "government that I don't think is fair". I get your point, but it's also not a binary state or a switch that gets suddenly flipped. I hate to tell you, we're not going to stop authoritarianism by nuancing it to death. Acting like authoritarianism is always right around the corner is probably wiser than you think. What we really need are mutual aid networks based around getting people out of red states. We are going to get a lot more people killed if we keep treating "save the entire United States" as the only possible goal. Flying-PCP fucked around with this message at 03:08 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 03:04
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Uh then are we just going to keep talking past each other while operating on different definitions? Or just stop talking about authoritarianism in the US in this thread?
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May 21, 2022 04:24
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Is it liberalism specifically that folds to fascism? Or just non-militarism in general....
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May 21, 2022 07:02
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Koos Group posted:And bear in mind that something doesn't need to be authoritarian to be a bad action taken by the government. I think it's useful to add also that an action can be pushing a country in an authoritarian direction without having fully pushed it there yet. I'd say one of the most significant material differences between our current situation and 'full authoritarianism' is that in the latter, dissent is both monitored and punished much more consistently. You can say that the definitional line is drawn in a way to make western nations look good, but you can't argue that no line can be drawn at all between the current states of the US and Russia, without getting into heavy conspiracy theorying, source cherry picking, and/or "conceptually zoom out so far that everything is the same as everything else" activity. Flying-PCP fucked around with this message at 19:58 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 19:54
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:"the one thing keeping us from being an authoritarian state is that the government doesn't consistently murder people for dissent" isn't a very persuasive position for anyone trying to say the US isn't authoritarian. By this metric any country with over a certain number of millions in population and/or square mileage is automatically authoritarian. Which, yknow, maybe it is. I feel like people constantly underestimate the role of the totally unreasonable size of the US/Russia/China in how impossible it is to 'fix' things in these 'nations'.
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May 22, 2022 06:27
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Democrats need more of this bullshit if they want to win things. Embrace the bullshit. https://twitter.com/FrankMikeDavis1/status/1528888329600741379
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May 24, 2022 05:46
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Bishyaler posted:I'm not going to sugar coat the odds or say you can fight a tank or jet with a rifle. I'm only saying the likelihood of a civil war in this wretched country doesn't seem to be diminishing and a rifle is better than empty hands. If one starts, not everyone is going to have the option of fleeing, as we're seeing with Ukraine. This is kind of a philosophy problem, isn't it? Is it better to shoot a gun at the stormtroopers and then die, than to just die without getting to shoot? Maybe the former is less depressing to imagine for some people, but the result is the same, you won't care that you got to shoot the gun, after you're dead. Anyway aside from all this, instead of fantasies about melting down All the Guns, for the moment I'm more interested it stopping new sales of AR15s and similar weapons, because apparently that is very relevant to stopping this kind of carnage!
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May 26, 2022 20:39
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virtualboyCOLOR posted:I still never understood why guns are ok for the American public to own but not rocket launchers, weaponized drones, nukes, etc. People will defend private ownership of rocket launchers more often than you think, but in general I think people are more concerned with arms they can actually afford.
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May 26, 2022 21:21
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It looks like in a number of cases the right is going down a path of legally empowering fascist vigilantes to hurt people in ways they haven't managed to do yet through direct legislation, so, yknow, that might be worth factoring into the conversation.
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May 26, 2022 22:03
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virtualboyCOLOR posted:Again, why not attack the situation from the right then? Calls for gun control clearly have fallen on deaf ears. Have the NRA and GPO twist themselves in knots on why one should own a gun but not a drone. Rights are rights and freedom is freedom after all. Right wing politicians in office are already being attacked from the right by primary challengers. Anyway I'm confused on what you'd intend to accomplish by doing this. People got mad when Trump signed the bump stock ban, but generally they fell back in line soon enough.
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May 26, 2022 22:26
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Rappaport posted:Is there a state in the Union that could be split in half, with both halves remaining solid (relatively speaking) blue, without making weird fractal state borders? Don't rule out chopping the biggest cities in half, if needed.
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Jun 1, 2022 15:44
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https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-children-testify-oath-real-estate-investigation/story?id=85267731 No, I'm not hoping for anything to come of it, but just getting the guy on the stand seems like a feat at this point. Flying-PCP fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Jun 9, 2022 |
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Jun 9, 2022 03:50
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Bishyaler posted:Its unfortunate that the prevailing message among the party and the base has become "we must uphold our institutions even as they're subverted by fascists". How do we get these people to heed the warnings of political analysts who have been sounding the alarm about compromised voting rights and the permanent GOP majority? We're watching America get gift wrapped in moral high-ground and handed to Republicans. I mean, he's right, in that progressives with some connection to reality know that "just shoot the people we hate" is a perfectly valid option for the fascists and not a viable option for anyone on the left.
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Jun 9, 2022 05:09
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Bishyaler posted:Border agents just got a waiver to constitutional rights. By 'viable' I mean, you stand a reasonable chance of survival if you do it.
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Jun 9, 2022 06:35
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BiggerBoat posted:I know. My son and his mother have epilepsy too so I know about Keppra. That could also happen just due to... republicans winning 'legitimately' (i.e. without overturning election results and just relying on voter suppression and the electoral college system). So Dems need to be educating people about poo poo like this. Lib and let die posted:I mean, we're not going to see eye-to-eye on this because you're in the camp of "holy poo poo this was a serious threat" while I'm in the camp of "are you loving kidding me a dude tased himself in the balls to death and another one had the gall to put their feet on Nancy's desk, I wish the worst day of my life were that traumatic" which I don't say to demean, but just point out that we're working out of two very different worldviews - I'm considerably more convinced that rather than seize power, the fascists are simply going to be given power out of a desire for the liberal democrats to not appear too far left (sound like a familiar precedent?). Even accepting the premise that it wasn't a serious threat, I'd be 100% willing to act like it was anyway if it could help stop Republicans from taking power. In my opinion, the only salient question is whether it can help, or if it's actually just directing energy away from other strategies that could. Flying-PCP fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Jun 9, 2022 |
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Jun 9, 2022 20:18
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Lib and let die posted:Like it or not, there is an overwhelming majority of eligible voters that are disenfranchised from both the democrats' party and/or electoralism in general that are in essence, the "not republican" version of the right-wing "I won't vote for anyone, of any party, that is pro-choice" voter and where the republicans lean into and leverage those kinds of voters and their energy, the democrats - even the "rowdiest", youngest idealists in the party tell you that actually you need to be more realistic and vote to compromise and put your single issues aside. Are pro-choice republican elected officials really a thing? I'm not up on all the state politics around the country to know about that. Generally though, it seems like republican politicians have little need to tell their base to vote red no matter who, because they're a far more cohesive bloc to begin with, and they already care a lot more about keeping the 'enemy' party out of office. There's a mutual trust that R voters will hold their nose and vote for a namby-pamby election-truth-denying RINO in a general election, and that said RINOs will still support plenty of cruelty towards the groups that are causing the decay of society or whatever.
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Jun 9, 2022 20:43
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Bishyaler posted:Most people who say this don't really believe it. They just believe they aren't good here, usually for American exceptionalism/It-Can't-Happen-Here related reasons. Seems to me to be either a 'win more' move or a 'shoot yourself in the foot when you're already behind' move. Kavanaugh's camp isn't behind.
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Jun 9, 2022 21:35
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Willa Rogers posted:And, ironically, I think that Dems would be more persuasive by saying so rather than pretending 1/6 was on par with 9/11. I don't quite get how you would..phrase this.. without it coming across as literally saying "we know we're full-of-poo poo liars but please trust us that the other guys are worse". Which, if it somehow worked, would only prove that Dems were never in danger to begin with. Idk, maybe that's your point.
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Jun 9, 2022 21:38
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Keyser_Soze posted:They'd have to be very determined liars to make it past the interview stage or psych profile let alone fabricating the "background check" aka "did they play high school football?" I'm not sure this idea is really a winner, but any path to actually surviving this poo poo is going to require a lot of determination.
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Jun 10, 2022 19:17
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Could we all just avoid a lot of back and forth in this thread by all agreeing to never describe any currently serving politicians or their actions with an unqualified positive connotation, replacing such words with terms more along the lines of "less bad"? I'm not being snarky, US politics is a filter sorta like US law enforcement, and truly principled people are consistently kept out of it, and we need to all keep that in mind.
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Jun 12, 2022 13:13
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BiggerBoat posted:Biden is the practical definition and mold for a centrist/moderate. I don't know what planet I'm living on where Joe loving Biden is seen as a far left radical but that's the framing and a lot of people believe it. I wish the dems would run an actual far left candidate (or candidates) since I've been hearing for 20 years now that people like Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama and Joe Biden are "the most liberal candidate ever on every issue". Then why were the candidates I supported (who lost) much further to the left of them? They weren't. Biden is entirely marching to Sanders' and especially AOC's orders (because following a non-white woman is more woke, Bernie doesn't check enough boxes for a good hate target). That's the GOP narrative.
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Jun 15, 2022 15:51
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MLSM posted:https://twitter.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/1538568501136437248?s=20&t=XXAkFDFtolFvw1ccneN5-A The point of the article is obviously that the founding fathers are all skeletons, and the writings of skeletons are not a viable foundation for a country's laws. Seriously, how much do we have to spoonfeed people itt when the headlines are already perfectly clear?
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Jun 20, 2022 13:36
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