#Republicans shooting themselves in the foot again | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

red4filthfanfic · 8 months

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You’re gonna have to find a better reason, just like she’s going to have to find a better defense, then, just saying you believe in the fact that the race, or the election was stolen. Unless you are referring to the fact that Donald Trump himself tried to steal the election and still lost, then there’s no point in peddling any of these stupid ass lies. Our fucking country is at stake here for a bunch of petty political posturing going on in the DC bubble.

The trident of truth I holding my hand. And it has already spoken. He may find a way to get off on these charges but that will be merely a technicality. His guilt and aid to the riders or insurrectionists is more than obvious. It’s time to move on. At most he would have four years. Because we’re sure as hell not going to let them subvert the country. Tommy Tuberville is an example of someone who is propagating the insurrection which is still going since January 6. He’s making sure the military is out of sorts, so that they can’t stand in the way of Donald Trump assuming a roll of dictatorship. So Democrats I suggest to fucking do something about that real fucking quick. Because if you don’t, you’re going to get caught flat-footed again. You need to anticipate the nefarious Ness from the Ultramega. As Mitt Romney said, in his farewell, video of sorts, call Dara many people on the GOP side who don’t even believe in the constitution.

America are you fucking listening? There are many people on the GOP side of a fuck. That is no way to run a fucking country unless you’re planning on running it into the ground. Our enemies, Russia, North Korea, and China times, are currently plotting to stock Russia up against the Ukraine, using weapons from North Korea. They are all AutoKratz pulling for autocratic rule around the world.

We’ve been treating him with kid gloves and anyone who would admit otherwise is a fucking liar to themselves. I am so damn tired of hearing white people tell me or tell anyone else how they’re convinced that the election was stolen or there was fraud once again unless they know about fraud that was committed on the Republican side that’s still lost. Wake up. No one said you have to be. Woke to open your eyes and see in front of you what’s happening the grift and where is all that money now nowhere in the pockets of lawyers and he still needs more money so he’s gonna keep asking for more money. If you think for one moment that he’s trying to sign up to be president for another four years for the good of our country once again, wake the fuck up.

Lying to you and why are you lying so hard.

Does this have to do with white exceptionalism? White Virgili? White grievance? White privilege? White power? White supremacy? White savior syndrome? Or white expectation? I mean the caucasity of it all! And trust I speak, Caucasian with respect to the caucasity of it, all fluently, and that’s on 100. Hell you can put it on 200 if you want to. And if you’re feeling real frisky bet it on black I doubt it. So go ahead better on red I’m still big red.

But my shade of red is NOT the same shade of red you see right now, the blood red that Maga and Ultramega have all over their hands. From the blood of the slain black man at the hands of the police, to the blood of the slain children, in the almost countless number of mass shootings at schools, churches, grocery stores, etc.

My shade of red is right of center, but left of chaos. My shade of red belongs in the red white and blue through and through, our democracy, western democracy, and our constitutional republic included. My shade of red, white and blue is not about the congressional elites, it’s about me and you. Don’t let them win. This world is ours together, united, not divided. Doing onto others as you would have others do unto you. Loving thy neighbor.

We can agree to disagree. We can have a positive discourse. We can have the difficult conversations and the tough dialogue’s so that we can change the old narratives together. Politicians are servants to the public. Think about that they are servants to us. We pay their salaries. So we don’t need to worry about our control over them, they’re more worried about their control over us. And as you can see by January 6, there’s a reason to be worried. Once again, don’t fucking kid yourself into thinking that was just another day of visitation. Bye random visitors.

#bebetter

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fipindustries · 2 years

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You are like the epitome of "got mine, fuck you" when it comes to basic queer rights. you do not care about any other queer struggles. don't talk about other people shooting themselves in the foot for not wanting companies literally making being gay illegal in multiple countries to pretend to care when you shoot the rest of the community with your removed from reality ass views

i answer to what comes through my dash, i dont go out of my way to see what is going on in the wider world.

people have a weird way to answer to hipocrisy. companies are two faced and hypocritical because they show support of lgbt causes on the outside but quietly and privatly abuse the rights of people.

i get it, it is insulting and galling that companies can reap all this social credit and clean their image by doing empty gestures without meaningfully changing the real problems happening behind locked doors.

but the answer that i saw on that post to this didnt seem to be "companies shouldnt abuse lgbt rights" but rather "companies shouldnt pretend to be nice" which seems to be focusing entirely on the wrong side of the problem here.

if i see someone whose attitude seems to be "i dont want companies showing support for gay causes" regardless of the reason, i think that leads to worse outcomes.

here is a thing i know you will disagree with me but rainbow capitalism is a good thing, even the emptiest of gestures makes a difference in the culture. i want to live in a world where companies have to at least pretend to care because the only realistic alternative is them not pretending at all and we start to lose what few footholds we have in modern culture and suddenly it becomes open season again.

i dont want companies deciding that we are not worth it and they start pandering to republicans and conservatives instead. if they have to pretend to be nice then that is a step forward, that is a foot that we have on the door.

and yes, i have to remind myself that i am priviledged and that fuck you, i have mine because if i start worrying that my life and rights are actually in danger because people are too stupid and too terminally online to fight for them effectively i would have killed myself years ago.

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saltypiss · 12 days

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In other news, Republicans think Wrestling is Real in 2024 over in Oklahoma.

Republicans fell for a joke on Twitter where someone pretended to be a history teacher grading a student's paper about Gettysburg that was just Dump's spoken speech. You'll never guess what they thought sounded unhinged, but most of all!!! Leftist. Dump's own words, yes, R's, you're slow, I get it.

Republicans are still in Full Bipartisan Agreement with Democrats, a historical first for our generation, that we must continue the Genocide in Gaza, and debate what really is a genocide if not freedom for us.

Trump to charge RNC members 5% for using his name or likeness ever... Good.

The Juror's randomly selected have had their identity's stolen by Dump's Legal Team and are expected to leak when stuff looks mildly bad, and of course it'll be legal for the former president because well hell if this country doesn't like genocidal people!

Dems decided to let Ohio keep Biden off the ballot by not setting their conference before the deadline, sure, R's are absolutely being corrupt, but ya gotta love Dems shooting themselves in the foot for their enemies to stomp on. Gotta make the anti-genocide fence-sitters really grapple with their ethics for this shitty old man after all. (won't work dipshits)

Colorado Republicans united against the greatest threat Dem's can create, no not the Genocide thing, but Allowing Child Rape Victims to Sue their Rapists. Yes yet again, R's unify to abuse to children further, who'd have thought none of them wanted a lawsuit...

SCOTUS going off breaking the law of the land and trust in governmence again by considering Vacating J6 terrorists. Hey man, if they want another J6, I'm just saying maybe we shouldn't let the Shit Smearers do it, maybe Adults can demand better from their government? I'm not considering, nor demanding or inspiring, just thinking aloud of what other's might think in this very high tension time of America, y'know. Also don't think it'll be the capitol only next time, pretty sure letting this be legal will only empower...well, everyone. Just sayin', thinkin alooooud, probably a bad ideaaaaaa long term.

Arizona Republicans are still illegally denying the vote cast by voters to bring back abortion Women's Autonomy rights.

And Dem voters are still expecting normal people to suddenly really like the idea of a genocide simply because Biden made living so noticeably nicer for them...Alot of Larping going on with Dem Voters seperating Ukraine opinions with Palestine opinions.

Alabama politicians decide to vote against allowing Bodycams to be Public Record, of course R's voted against but ya gotta love Dems doing it too. Shitfuck.

Hawaii is paying government workers 20k for working during the pandemic, before ya get mad, they kept businesses going and aided feeding the people that actually matter like fast food people, by giving them meal cards. It's smart, but boy howdy ya gotta love how only supporting the government will reap you any minor benefit and not working for them, well, ya get some scraps.

Florida, on top of Child Slavery, forced Death Births, Irradiated roads, decided they also wanted to remove heat protections for workers. As always, a shithole no one cares about because it'll be the first to go when the floods begin.

Dump's sleeping in court, which really goes to show he's not getting in anymore trouble. Just waiting to poison the jury until everyone gives up, because this country is hardly real, it's all a celebrity show where morals don't matter and reality can be bent to your convenience, Dems, it's a Genocide, you Cannot Drop This Ball by aiding a Genocide and demanding others accept your inhumanity. Time to demand accountability, leadership, and grow some self-respect because boy, if you think either Biden or Dump would choose you over power, you'll be sorely mistaken.

Much like businesses, ya aren't friends with them and they actively hate hate HATE you. I don't blame em, imagine being dumb enough to support a genocide for Biden. Biden.

#republicans are beyond parody #biden #dems #republicans

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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In a democracy, every vote is supposed to be equal. If about half the country supports one side and half the country supports another, you may expect major institutions to either be equally divided, or to try to stay politically neutral.

This is not what we find. If it takes a position on the hot button social issues around which our politics revolve, almost every major institution in America that is not explicitly conservative leans left. In a country where Republicans get around half the votes or something close to that in every election, why should this be the case?

This post started as an investigation into Woke Capital, one of the most important developments in the last decade or so of American politics. Although big business pressuring politicians is not new (the NFL moved the Super Bowl from Arizona over MLK day), the scope of the issues on which corporations feel the need to weigh in is certainly expanding, now including LGBT issues, abortion laws, voting rights, kneeling during the national anthem, and gun control.

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As I started to research the topic, however, I realized there wasn’t much to explain. Asking why corporations are woke is like asking why Hispanics tend to have two arms, or why the Houston Rockets have increased their number of 3-point shots taken over the last few decades. All humans tend to have two arms, and all NBA teams shoot more 3-pointers than in the past, so focusing on one subset of the population that has the same characteristics as all others in the group misses the point.

I think one reason Woke Capital is getting so much attention is because we expect business to be more right-leaning, and corporations throwing in with the party of more taxes and regulation strikes us as odd. We are used to schools, non-profits, mainline religions, etc. taking liberal positions and feel like business should be different. But business is just being assimilated into a larger trend.

Corporations are woke, meaning left wing on social issues relative to the general population, because institutions are woke. So the question becomes why are institutions woke?

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Through the lens of ordinal utility, in which people simply rank what they want to happen, we are about equal. I prefer Republicans to Democrats, while you have the opposite preference. But when we think in terms of cardinal utility – in layman’s terms, how bad people want something to happen – it’s no contest. You are going to be much more influential than me. Most people are relatively indifferent to politics and see it as a small part of their lives, yet a small percentage of the population takes it very seriously and makes it part of its identity. Those people will tend to punch above their weight in influence, and institutions will be more responsive to them.

Elections are a measure of ordinal preferences. As long as you care enough to vote, it doesn’t matter how much you care about the election outcome, as everyone’s voice is the same. But for everything else – who speaks up in a board meeting about whether a corporation should take a political position, who protests against a company taking a position one side or the other finds offensive, etc. – cardinal utility maters a lot. Only a small minority of the public ever bothers to try to influence a corporation, school, or non-profit to reflect certain values, whether from the inside or out.

In an evenly divided country, if one side simply cares more, it’s going to exert a disproportionate influence on all institutions, and be more likely to see its preferences enacted in the time between elections when most people aren’t paying much attention.

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Here are two graphs that have been getting a lot of attention

What jumps out to me in these figures is not only how left leaning large institutions are, but how the same is true for most professions. Whether you are looking by institution or by individuals, there are more donations to Biden than Trump. Yet Republicans get close to half the votes! Where are the Trump supporters? What these graphs reveal is a larger story, in which more people give to liberal causes and candidates than to conservative ones, even if Americans are about equally divided in which party they support (and no, this isn’t the result of liberals being wealthier, the connections between income and ideology or party are pretty weak). Here are some graphs from late October showing Biden having more individual donors than Trump in every battleground state.

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In the 2012 election, Obama raised $234 million from small individual contributors, compared to $80 million for Romney, while also winning among large contributors.

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In September 2009, at the height of the Tea Party movement, conservatives held the “Taxpayer March on Washington,” which drew something like 60,000-70,000 people, leading one newspaper to call it “the largest conservative protest ever to storm the Capitol.” Since that time, the annual anti-abortion March for Life rally in Washington has drawn massive crowds, with estimates for some years ranging widely from low six figures to mid-to-high six figures. March for Life is not to be confused with “March for Our Lives,” a pro-gun control rally that activists claim saw 800,000 people turn out in 2018. All these events were dwarfed by the Women’s March in opposition to Trump, which drew by one estimate “between 3,267,134 and 5,246,670 people in the United States (our best guess is 4,157,894). That translates into 1 percent to 1.6 percent of the U.S. population of 318,900,000 people (our best guess is 1.3 percent).” Even if the two left-wing academics who did this research are letting their bias infuse their work, there is no question that protesting is generally a left-wing activity, as conservatives themselves realize.

People who engage in protesting care more about politics than people who donate money, and people who donate money care more than people who simply vote. Imagine a pyramid with voters at the bottom and full-time activists on top, and as you move up the pyramid it gets much narrower and more left-wing. Multiple strands of evidence indicate this would basically be an accurate representation of society.

Another line of evidence showing that the left simply cares more about politics comes from Noah Carl, who has put together data showing liberals are in their personal lives more intolerant of conservatives than vice versa across numerous dimensions in the US and the UK. Those on the left are more likely to block someone on social media over their views, be upset if their child marries someone from the other side, and find it hard to be friends with or date someone they disagree with politically. Here are two graphs demonstrating the general point.

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There’s a great irony here. Conservatives tend to be more skeptical of pure democracy, and believe in individuals coming together and forming civil society organizations away from government. Yet conservatives are extremely bad at gaining or maintaining control of institutions relative to liberals. It’s not because they are poorer or the party of the working class – again, I can’t stress enough how little economics predicts people’s political preferences – but because they are the party of those who simply care less about the future of their country.

Debates over voting rights make the opposite assumption, as conservatives tend to want more restrictions on voting, and liberals fewer, with National Review explicitly arguing against a purer form of democracy. Conservatives may be right that liberals are less likely to care enough to do basic things like bring a photo ID and correctly fill out a ballot. If this is true, Republicans are the party of people who care enough to vote when doing so is made slightly more difficult but not enough to do anything else, while Democrats are the party of both the most active and least active citizens. Yet while being the “care only enough to vote” party might be adequate for winning elections, the future belongs to those at the tail end of the distribution who really want to change the world.

The discussion here makes it hard to suggest reforms for conservatives. Do you want to give government more power over corporations? None of the regulators will be on your side. Leave corporations alone? Then you leave power to Woke Capital, though it must to a certain extent be disciplined and limited by the preferences of consumers. Start your own institutions? Good luck staffing them with competent people for normal NGO or media salaries, and if you’re not careful they’ll be captured by your enemies anyway, hence Conquest’s Second Law. And the media will be there every step of the way to declare any of your attempts at taking power to be pure fascism, and brush aside any resistance to your schemes as righteous anger, up to and including rioting and acts of violence.

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From this perspective we might want to consider this passage from Scott Alexander, who writes the following in his review of a biography of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The normal course of politics is various coalitions of elites and populace, each drawing from their own power bases. A normal political party, like a normal anything else, has elite leaders, analysts, propagandists, and managers, plus populace foot soldiers. Then there's an election, and sometimes our elites get in, and sometimes your elites get in, but getting a political party that's against the elites is really hard and usually the sort of thing that gets claimed rather than accomplished, because elites naturally rise to the top of everything.

But sometimes political parties can run on an explicitly anti-elite platform. In theory this sounds good - nobody wants to be elitist. In practice, this gets really nasty quickly. Democracy is a pure numbers game, so it's hard for the elites to control - the populace can genuinely seize the reins of a democracy if it really wants. But if that happens, the government will be arrayed against every other institution in the nation. Elites naturally rise to the top of everything - media, academia, culture - so all of those institutions will hate the new government and be hated by it in turn. Since all natural organic processes favor elites, if the government wants to win, it will have to destroy everything natural and organic - for example, shut down the regular media and replace it with a government-controlled media run by its supporters.

When elites use the government to promote elite culture, this usually looks like giving grants to the most promising up-and-coming artists recommended by the art schools themselves, and having the local art critics praise their taste and acumen. When the populace uses the government to promote popular culture against elite culture, this usually looks like some hamfisted attempt to designate some kind of "official" style based on what popular stereotypes think is "real art from back in the day when art was good", which every art school and art critic attacks as clueless Philistinism. Every artist in the country will make groundbreaking exciting new art criticizing the government's poor judgment, while the government desperately looks for a few technicians willing to take their money and make, I don't know, pretty landscape paintings or big neoclassical buildings.

The important point is that elite government can govern with a light touch, because everything naturally tends towards what they want and they just need to shepherd it along. But popular/anti-elite government has a strong tendency toward dictatorship, because it won't get what it wants without crushing every normal organic process. Thus the stereotype of the "right-wing strongman", who gets busy with the crushing.

So the idea of "right-wing populism" might invoke this general concept of somebody who, because they have made themselves the champion of the populace against the elites, will probably end up incentivized to crush all the organic processes of civil society, and yoke culture and academia to the will of government in a heavy-handed manner.

To put it in a different way, to steelman the populist position, democracy does not reflect the will of the citizenry, it reflects the will of an activist class, which is not representative of the general population. Populists, in order to bring institutions more in line with what the majority of the people want, need to rely on a more centralized and heavy-handed government. The strongman is liberation from elites, who aren’t the best citizens, but those with the most desire to control people’s lives, often to enforce their idiosyncratic belief system on the rest of the public, and also a liberation from having to become like elites in order to fight them, so conservatives don’t have to give up on things like hobbies and starting families and devote their lives to activism.

#richard hanania #substack

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blakelywintersfield · 3 years

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As a victim of gun violence myself, I will be keeping my guns, thanks. Fear mongering? Maybe a little bit the fact is politicians absolutely “hell yes I want to take your AR15, your AK47”. They’ve said it often and loudly that they would like you to be disarmed. If you feel no one in your home is mentally stable enough for a gun, great, but you have zero right to tell others they should do the same.

1. If you're a victim of gun violence then the NRA gives absolutely NO fucks about you. You're not a victim of gun violence in their eyes, you're a victim of a criminal who happened to have a gun. Calling it "gun violence" is liberal propaganda to blame the gun, instead of the person. The gun didn't create the violence, the person did. That's their shitbrained logic and that's how they would respond to you if you told them (without disclosing if you're a gun owner or not) "I was a victim of gun violence." Because just like your dumb ass, they're not responsible gun owners, they're reactionary gun owners, and if you're reactionary as opposed to rational, you shouldn't have dangerous weapons, and your "you can't tell me what to do" 5-year-old attitude towards that would not hold up in a myriad of other scenarios. By your logic, suspending the driver's license of an elderly individual with dementia is unconstitutional. Not allowing someone with chronic seizures to drive is unconstitutional. Not allowing people to sell food without meeting safety and sanitation standards is unconstitutional. "You can't tell me what to do 'cause muh freedumb" isn't a fucking part of the constitution, you're just a chronic nationalist boot deep-throater whose mommy told him that the world owed him everything.

2. Where did I say guns should be taken away from you, or anyone else in my tags. Where? Here, I'll post the fucking screenshot of it and you can highlight it:

Please show me where I said "people should have their guns taken away" you reactionary cowardly fuck. I'll wait.

3. Politicians stating "no one needs a stockpile of AK47s" is not synonymous with "we want to take your guns". Gun buy-back programs that are VOLUNTARY are not the same as threatening to "take your guns". What benefit would you, as one person, gain from owning 5 semi-automatic weapons in the argument of "self-defense"? Are you going to wield one in each hand, one with each foot, and one with the mouth you can't seem to fucking shut? Do you think any of these weapons would protect you against government militia (which is what the second amendment is FOR, for one, and which the NRA does NOT condone if it's conservative sanctioned militia takeover) breaking into your property with a force of 10 people in bulletproof gear and military-grade weapons that could probably blow your fucking empty head off your body in one shot? Or do you like owning all of these shiny scary-looking toys for intimidation, thinking it'll protect you from future violence, like a fucking Halloween house made to scare away children? If that's your reasoning, then you definitely need therapy because that's textbook maladaptive coping with trauma -- I'd know because I have my own array of self-defense weapons that I got in response to my traumatic event, including a knife that could fatally gut an adult man with one stab. That's not a reasonable response to trauma!! But at least I can admit it! Your pisswad ass on the other hand can't, and views anyone saying "the NRA is a shit organization that doesn't support responsible gun ownership or the responsibility of gun owners and their actions, and is essentially a domestic terrorist grooming organization" as an attack on you as an individual, because you can't stomach the idea that maybe, just fucking maybe, you may be on that list of people who shouldn't have a gun because you're too mentally fucked up to be trusted with something like that, like people who are chronically suicidal (in other words, the MAJORITY OF GUN RELATED DEATHS), people with psychotic tendencies that can lead to hurting themselves or others (not because people with psychosis are "scary evil people", but because those moments of psychosis literally keep a person from making rational observations and decisions, and these individuals are already advised to have possible harmful tools locked up or just not in the house for their own safety), people like incels that believe if their entitlement is denied that they have the right to murder, etc. Honestly, you do sound like someone who shouldn't have guns, because your unstable ass probably read up to the second tag and skimmed the rest in a blind rage before sending an ask two days after I made that post, and seemed to conveniently miss the end:

What's your reasoning for the NRA keeping silent about responsible black gun owners being gunned down by police because the cops know they're legally registered gun owners (Jason Washington, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, whom the NRA defended being murdered by police while pulled over for a traffic violation, in his car with his wife and CHILD, and verbally informed the cop like a responsible gun owner that he had a conceal and carry permit, and was reaching for his wallet in plain view of his family and the fucking pig)? What's your reasoning behind them callously dismissing police violence against black people who are unarmed or have a history of supporting gun control (Botham Jean, Clementa Pinckney, fucking JAMES SHAW JR., WHO STOPPED A MASS SHOOTING WHILE UNARMED HIMSELF), as though that makes it their fault they were murdered, injured, or otherwise victimized? What's your reasoning behind them only piping up about "muh guns" whenever politicians say "there's a gun problem" after the 29th public shooting that month, but not tackling the issue of gun control disproportionately impacting people of color while letting crazy little white kids run loose with a multitude of firearms? What's your reasoning behind them siding with idiot fascist Trump's temper tantrum over the NFL's protests on police violence -- something they, once again, consistently respond to with "they should've been armed" if the black person wasn't, and give complete fucking radio static to if the black person was armed (even if legally armed)? They're so against gun control, but never seem to care when it affects black and brown people -- only when Jack Incelson, age 16, who posts on 4chan about how he wants to cut women's heads off and fuck their dead bodies, is at risk of not being allowed to keep his AR15. If people of color are killed while armed, it's justified because "they had a gun"; if people of color are killed while unarmed, it's their fault because "they should've had a gun" -- this is something the NRA is notorious for, because they don't give a flying fuck about people who should have the right to arm themselves.

4. On that point: I fully support the Socialist Rifle Association, even as someone who does not want to own guns -- because, as stated in the post you're shitting your diaper over -- I support organizations that vouch for responsible gun owners. The SRA holds irresponsible gun owners accountable. They actually support people's right to bear arms to defend themselves against tyrannical government forces. They are active in disaster aid, in environmental defense, in protecting people of color. I do not like guns but I 100% support the SRA, because they fight for people who do need to arm themselves to have that right, and I support that sentiment. I believe people of color should be able to arm themselves. I believe queer people should be able to arm themselves. I believe poor people should be able to arm themselves. But the NRA doesn't actively fight for any of those groups' rights -- the SRA does.

But you know what the SRA doesn't do? Send out unsolicited letters begging lower-middle-class white people for money so they can "fight the gun-hating liberals" from "taking away our guns n freedumb" and offering "i <3 guns" bumper stickers and shit in return. They don't view any political party as their friend because they know that Republicans and Democrats alike do not actually want you to be able to defend yourself against the government. They don't send fear-mongering letters full of hyperbolic bullshit to scare people into thinking that Biden or Obama or whatever Democrat is in the office is going to break into your house with police, beat your wife and children, and steal your guns while cackling maniacally over you as you sob "why mister president? why would you do this to your loyal and patriotic citizens?" The SRA opposes gun control laws that unfairly target demographics that are at the highest risk of police violence. The NRA does not, and, in fact, has a very heavily documented history of siding with conservatism, including making statements about things that don't even involve guns -- stating that American men are being turned into "second-rate women", outcried banning anti-queer discrimination and compared the ban to slavery, made a call to imprison people protesting against Trump's Cabinet picks, called the Women's March anti-American. These are all recent you shithead, so you must be purposely ignoring all of this to feel justified in defending this domestic terrorist organization, or you're probably a self-victimizing white man who can't handle being told no. Or maybe both. I don't know and I don't fucking care.

Don't fucking message me again. Unfollow me if you were previously following me and haven't already. Get some fucking therapy instead of crawling through strangers' blogs trying to find a reason to justify your irrational anger at them. And while you're at it, do me a huge favor, you cowardly fucking cunt: go to your nearest sex shop, buy 5 gallons of lube, pour them over your guns, and shove each and every one of them, fully loaded, up your ass. That way you can keep a close eye on them since your head is obviously already lodged up there.

Alternatively, you can eat shit and die.

#welcome to the bpd space my empathy is at 0 for you and i would experience a heavenly degree of schadenfreude from watching you suffer #where did you think this was gonna go you dumb cunt? what did you think you'd accomplish?#what about my blog says ''i'm a friendly space for neo-conservative sacks of shit''?#the last tl;dr point of my byf literally says don't follow if you're republican/conservative #and you can pretend you're not all you want but if you see people condemning the nra while stating they support gun organizations that #stand for responsible gun ownership and your reaction is to send an angry ''fuk u deez er MUH GUNS U CANT TAKEEM FRUM ME'' you are reacting #the same way conservatives do. supporting people's rights to arm themselves does not mean you can't condemn shitty organizations like the #nra and in fact refusing to makes you an irresponsible gun owner in itself because you refuse to acknowledge organizations that mow down #people who need to arm themselves so that YOU can.#you don't care about people's rights you just don't want to be told no. like a fucking toddler.#anyways gonna tag some stuff for possible blacklists #violence against women #police brutality #racism #graphic descriptions of violence #long post #can't think of anything else y'all can lmk if there was something i missed

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somethingusefulfromflorida · 3 years

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It’s no secret that Republicans are anti-intellectual, but it makes you wonder what their end goal is? Why do they keep electing dumber and dumber presidents? Is it just to own the libs? Do they just not care? They’ll get what they want regardless of how smart their presidents are, so why always pick the low hanging fruit?

The only smart Republican of the last 60 years was Bush Sr, and he was a one-term wonder who rode Reagan’s coattails into office.

Nixon was notoriously incompetent as VP, almost beat Kennedy in 1960, threw what should have been a career ending shit fit in 1962 after losing the California governor’s race, but not only came back in 68 and win because Goldwater was so unpopular in 64, but won 72 in the greatest landslide in history up to that point. Corrupt to the bone, he resigned before he could be impeached for hiring burglars to steal dirt on a political opponent, covering it up, and lying about it.

Ford was appointed VP to replace scandal stricken Spiro Agnew, specifically chosen because he was known as an honest politician. His reputation evaporated the second he became president because his first act was to pardon the guiltiest man in the country; he lost handily in 76.

Reagan was an actor who wanted to play politician so he could hurt the people he didn’t like; blacks people, poor people, gay people, women. It was a power trip for him, and because he was good at reading cue cards and delivering jokes written by other people, everyone let him get away with murder. He committed treason by selling weapons to Iran; this isn’t hyperbole, the actual definition of treason includes giving aid to out enemies, and after the oil and hostage crises of the 70s, Iran was an enemy first and foremost. Oliver North took the blame and had his secretary shred the evidence, the President Bush pardoned everyone involved. Reagan won in an even bigger landslide than 72 in 84, and Bush won in a major upset against Dukakis in 88.

Bush lost in 92 in no small part because of Ross Perot splitting the ticket; no third party candidate has ever done better nationwide than Perot in 92, with 19% of the vote (though he didn’t win a single state, which some minor candidates have done). Clinton won with 43% of the popular vote. Forty-three percent! 57% of people voted against him, and he won. 92 was a farce, as was 96 with less than 50% voter turnout, the lowest in modern history. Perot ran again and got 8.4% of the vote, Republican Bob Dole only got 40.7%, and Clinton got 49.2%. This means that less than a quarter of eligible voters voted for Bill Clinton, and he still won. FARCE!

Al Gore rightfully won in 2000, but the conservative majority Supreme Court stole it from him. Florida was too close to call; whichever candidate won it would become president. George W. Bush’s brother Jeb was governor, and he ordered the federally mandated recount be stopped, breaking the law. The Supreme Court decided not to restart the recount for no discernible reason besides they wanted Bush to win. He was notoriously dumb, stereotypically dumb, so dumb a lot of people thought it was an act and voted for him because they thought he was a secret genius who was just pretending to be a cowboy running for president off his daddy’s legacy. He was the stupidest president we had ever had up to that point, and hired a lot of smart people to do horrible things so he could claim plausible deniability. That Obama didn’t send Dick Cheney to the Hague was a deafening silence. Bush only won re-election in 2004 because he started a war in Iraq in 2003 and the country didn’t want to change horses midstream; same exact tactic his daddy used, only this war lasted longer than the Gulf and “worked” as planned.

2008 was a ceremonial race; McCain didn’t stand a chance. He was not incompetent, but his running mate was. Sarah Palin was even dumber than Bush, and like Gingrich in the 90s was responsible for a conservative revolution we’re still feeling today. Barack Obama wasn’t an amazing president, but he was an AMAZING candidate. Everybody loved Obama in 2008, he won more votes than any candidate in history until 2020. McCain was a career moderate, and after the last 8 years of failure both parties were running on a platform of “I am not George W. Bush.” Turns out a young charismatic smart black man is less like Bush than another old white guy.

Obama lost a ton of momentum going into 2012 because he didn’t really DO anything his first term. His only major accomplishment was the Affordable Care Act, which was an act of the Democratic congress than anything else, and it still wasn’t nearly as progressive as it needed to be (the US is still the only developed nation without universal healthcare). Romney, a Republican governor from the Democratic stronghold of Massachusetts, could have beaten him were he not a classist piece of shit. Romney hated poor people more than Reagan, and once wore brown face to a campaign event to make himself look more like Obama (they didn’t paint his hands or neck, just his face). Obama made a lot of promises he didn’t keep, in no small part because of the Tea Party and the devastating losses in 2014 (we suffer under Mitch McConnell because of that).

2016 was a dumpster fire that shouldn’t have happened, and if either party had run a different candidate, it wouldn’t have. Sanders would have beaten Trump, Clinton would have beaten Cruz. It was a perfect storm of a very unpopular and insincere grandma running against a cartoon supervillain. You couldn’t repeat that with what we know now. Your vote in 2016 came to represent who you were as a person; people took it to the extremes, and the sunk cost fallacy made the entire Republican party shift so far rightward that we have actual concentration camps now and NOBODY GIVES A SHIT! Trump was a game show host, a used car salesman famous for being tacky and dumb and offensive. He was KNOWN for running his companies into the ground, that was his MO, he made a career out of bankruptcy, and Republicans still can’t believe that he drove us into the worst economic depression since the last Republican (history repeat itself, whoop-dee-doo). Biden won in 2020 because of record turnout, though 2020 was closer to the intentional walk of 2012 than the home run of 2008 in terms of enthusiasm for the candidates.

If we’ve learned anything its that Republicans just keep getting worse and worse, so it’s getting hard for me to imagine what 2024 has in store. Will Trump risk losing the popular vote 3 times in a row for a second term? i think he’ll pretend to so he can scam millions of dollars out of his base, but he’ll either lost the primaries and tank the Republicans by running third-party, or he’ll drop out and endorse one of his spawn. If Biden decides not to run in 2024, the nomination will almost certainly go to Kamala Harris, at which point I expect the Republicans to run a woman as well, so that we’re guaranteed the first woman president; she’ll be young, and white, and blonde. My money’s on Ivanka. Kamala vs. Ivanka will be a repeat of the 2016 dumpster fire, only worse because then everyone would be acting like both candidates are feminist icons, #GirlPower #SheRunsTheWorld #WarCrimesAreBetterWithTwoXChromosomes If Biden DOES run again, then I suspect the Republican pool will be wide early on (Prick Scott, Ron DeathSantis, Uncle Tom Cotton, Nikkki Haley, you name it), only to shrink before the primaries as they all coordinate to get behind someone strong enough to defeat an incumbent.

Republicans are very good at coordinating; they are the party of “Follow the Leader.” Whoever is in charge has 100% authority, no ifs, ands, or buts, no questions asked, just follow orders. It would be easy to call them lemmings, but it’s more insidious than this. They run dumb candidates for president, but have very smart people working behind the scenes to do horrible things. They’re willing to follow orders blindly to ensure that the party prospers, whereas Democrats are chicken running around with their heads cut off. There are no Democratic leaders. Pelosi? Schumer? Nobody likes those dinosaurs! The only really popular Democrats are progressives, and they will never have power as long as the moderates have a majority of the caucus. AOC could be a senator someday; she could replace Schumer whenever he retires, but that would hinge on her not having any moderate primary challengers. Moderates are still very popular because they are seen as “electable,” even though they never DO anything once elected. Progressives have big ideas and the concrete plans to get them done, but the moderate establishment is afraid of losing power, and would rather placate the other side doing nothing, changing nothing, making no waves. The party needs to shift leftward, or the country is doomed.

I would suggest the progressives splitting off to form a third party, but that would almost certainly destroy left-wing politics in this country as every safe seat would become split. In an ideal world, it would be a nominal change; they would be the Progressive Democratic Party, they would continue to run in blue districts and caucus with Democrats on votes, but would advertise themselves as anti-establishment. They would be like the New Democrats in Canada, which now that I think about it is a very bad idea because the New Democrats have no power and end up giving more votes to the Liberals and Conservatives instead. The Progressive solution is intended to show the caucus that the moderates don’t have total control, but it would end up with the moderate Democrats shooting themselves in the foot, running against Progressives in every seat, handing them to the Republicans. Every election cycle people act like a loss would spell “the end of the _____ party,” but this would actually be it for the Democrats. It would be a turning point, like the 1960s, with millions of people changing parties out of principle, a major shift. A Red Scare

I just want to crawl in a hole and die. I hate politics.

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spraxinoscope · 4 years

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Oct. 14: Why I still think Trump has a ~75% chance of winning

Epistemic status: Who even am I? You shouldn’t listen to me. But see the final section for details.

By ‘winning,’ I mean still being president on 1/22/21, and there being no serious actionable plan to get him out.

2500 words of paranoia and bad math after the cut.

Polling factors:

Today, 538 gives Trump a 13% chance of an EC victory, so let’s use that as a starting point. As Nate Silver will tell you every chance he gets, 2016 presidential polls were only off by a few percentage points, and that’s probably still true. But a similar (or even smaller) systematic polling error would be enough to flip some battlegrounds, bumping Trump up to something like 25-30%. Have pollsters managed to correct for the systemic errors of 2016? There’s true meaningful debate around this, but the balance of evidence seems to be that the pollsters never figured out what caused the errors, and so were not able to fix them.

Note that Trump’s decline in the polls is driven by voters who approved of the president until very recently. Consider the sort of person who still had a favorable of opinion of Trump right up until fall 2020. Generally, dips in Trump’s favorability ratings seem to have been due to conservative infighting. Often, when a person stops supporting Trump, it’s because he is being insufficiently racist. These constituents’ loyalty may be wavering, but they are not likely to switch sides.

As a complete asspull hypothesis, I’d guess that some people who tell pollsters they no longer support Trump are trying to pressure him into adopting more hardline policy and will never vote for a Democrat.

I would posit that the 13% number is the absolute hard minimum chance of Trump winning an EC victory, fair and square. Error bars push that number higher. Taking average polling data over time also pushes that number higher, since it’s almost never been this low.

Dysfunction factors:

So, those are the odds for a free and fair election. What are the odds of the election being free and fair? I’m glad you asked! Zero.

Election integrity has taken major hits recently. Citizens United turned elections into ad campaigns. Shelby County v. Holder made laws against discriminatory election practices unenforceable. The Hatch Act is also not being enforced. The numerous alleged campaign finance law violations brought against the 2016 Trump campaign all amounted to nothing (except jail time, and subsequent pardons, for some functionaries).

Fine, let’s say elections can never be perfectly fair, but even if we grade on a curve and request that elections be as fair as possible, we’re still not doing great, and it’s been getting worse since 2010.

Hey, remember all those jokes from like 2004 onwards about how unreliable and insecure electronic voting machines are? That shit never got fixed. Remember the story from this week about some 90,000 New Yorkers getting the wrong mail-in ballots?

Remember when the Russians got into the Illinois voter database in 2016? The institutions that were supposed to defend against that kind of thing have since been gutted or captured by republicans.

Hey, remember when the Iowa primary was so dysfunctional that they ended the vote count without ever producing a final tally or figuring out what the problems were?

Election integrity groups have been sounding the alarm continuously on this one. Electoral commissions and underfunded, understaffed, and undertrained in use of modern systems. This is a huge problem all by itself, and it gets worse when applied to the next issue.

Malfeasance factors:

In my American public school civics education, I learned that Richard Nixon was a crook who paid some burglars to spy on the democrats, because of how crooked he was. I did not learn that ratfucking is bog-standard procedure, in every election, all over the world. I had to learn that on my own, later. Generally speaking, the election integrity talking heads take the opinion that most countries routinely interfere in the elections of most countries, and the Ds and the Rs have never not been spying on each other. The extraordinary thing about Watergate was that Republican congressmen were weirdly amenable to allowing an investigation into one of their own, a mistake they have never since repeated.

Some amount of ratfucking is to be expected. The nation has weathered this factor before. But, like electoral competence, this may be getting worse over time. State governments have very wide purview when it comes to voting procedure, and Republican states are wasting no time in finding creative new ways to toss out ballots. The most common reason for a mail-in ballot to be rejected is that the signature on the envelope doesn’t match the voter’s signature on file. There is no official criteria or standard practice for how close a signature has to be to count as a match. Signatures are not useful security for anything, anyway.

Georgia’s 2018 election was arguably illegitimate. Irregularities included voting sites closed at the last minute for unclear reasons and fraudulent ballot collectors stealing ballots. Calls for recounts all failed. Other southern states are on thin ice. All the big Texan cities are getting one ballot drop box each, in case you thought Texas would be allowed to turn blue.

Red states already have various laws permitting them to throw out ballots that arrive after the election. Sabotaging the post office or throwing out all uncounted ballots soon after the election, as most sitting Republicans in congress and governors have already gone on record to suggest may be necessary, is a violation of the letter but not the spirit of existing restrictive voting laws.

The big thing, of course, is that the right wing media landscape has been fully saturated with the idea that Democrats will engage in conspiracies to steal the election, and action will need to be taken to thwart these plots. To that end, Republicans at all levels of government, including at the DOJ, have repeatedly signaled willingness to take unprecedented measures to stamp out fraud. These include numerous voter purge plans, new criteria for dismissing ballots, and sending the DHS or other law enforcement agencies to take custody of ballots.

In addition, the MAGAs are organizing ‘poll watcher’ groups to secure urban voting sites. Even if these groups fully obey the law and do not engage in anything that could legally be termed intimidation or harassment, that’s still a lot of leeway. Of course, over the last couple years, we’ve all learned that right wing protesters can sometimes bend or break the law and get away with it, and sometimes receive cooperation from the police. This goes triple for blue cities in red states, which is exactly what we’re worried about.

Malfeasance in general is made easier by the unprecedented levels of geographically-sorted voting blocs. It is trivially easy to tell whether a district will go hard for Trump or hard for Biden. So, whether interference is coming from law enforcement officers, protesters, or semi-sanctioned militias, they will know which lines to intimidate and which boxes to steal.

Russiagate set a clear precedent: It doesn’t matter if it’s blatant, outrageous, or corrupt. Republicans do not want to defect, and right wing media will keep the base in line. Democrats will be outraged, and then fold. There are no remaining nonpartisan referees to appeal to.

Pundits like to imagine that sitting Republicans in congress will not blatantly steal an election for fear that it will lead to them getting voted out of office, to which I would suggest that the obvious answer is the correct one: Voted out how?

Democrats shooting themselves in the goddamn foot factors:

Trump likes to say that the election will be illegitimate if he loses. Mainstream news outlets like to push back against this. The NYT, for instance, has been loudly insistent that the election is totally secure all year.

It’s not, and they’re morons. No experts agree with them on this. Trump fabricating a bunch of fictional threats does not invalidate the numerous actual threats.

Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer would not be anyone’s first pick for the task of contesting an election, but that’s who we got.

Possible October surprises:

Hey, what do you guys think this year’s James Comey is going to be? The only real prediction I have is that something very destabilizing happens in the week before the election, but the particulars could be anything. Some fun possibilities:

DNC hacked again

Federally sanctioned repeat of the 1985 MOVE bombing

Hunter Biden cocaine sex tape

Anything that startles people, destabilizes institutions, and distracts from other issues is a viable possibility.

Scenarios after a contested election:

There are plenty of bluechecks and think tanks who have already gamed this out in detail. You don’t have to take my word for any of this part. The choices are:

There are rival sets of state electors, and Congress decides which ones count. Result: McConnell and Barr play Calvinball until they get the outcome they like, Trump remains in office.

The supreme court decides. Result: Trump remains in office.

The militias decide. Result: Trump remains in office, plus the Handmaid’s Tale happens.

There’s an orange revolution. After months of protracted struggle, Trump is ousted from office. However, in the meantime, ~8 states have seceded and Russia has annexed Alaska. In the ensuing chaos, John McAfee claims the presidency.

Probability estimates:

Trump’s odds of a ‘legitimate’ EC victory are only at 13% as of this moment, but the running average is higher, with occasional spikes above 30%. Polling errors add a little extra. Let’s say 25%.

Trump’s odds of losing the EC vote, but clawing it back through malfeasance until enough Republicans agree that he’s won, are very low in the case of a Biden landslide. But a landslide is unlikely, and as the results are closer, the probability of Republicans declaring themselves winners approach one. Note that, at least from mainstream news coverage, this won’t look like the power grab that many democrats fear. It will look like a lot of confusion and disarray, with an unclear EC count, followed by a cascade of authorities and sources declaring Trump the winner and securing the acceptance from government bodies one at a time. For the most likely election outcomes in which Trump doesn’t win straight up, I’d say a 30% chance Trump remains in office.

The election being a total dysfunctional disaster, with multiple states unable to certify results, is at least 5%. At least! In such a case, I’d give Trump an 80% chance of remaining in office.

In general, I believe that the only way that Biden gets to be president is if everything basically holds together and works like it’s supposed to, and also Trump legitimately loses the EC. There is one way for everything to go right. There are many ways it can go wrong.

The NYT has fixated on the possibility that Trump clearly loses, but refuses to leave office anyway. I’d give this no more than a 1% chance of happening. But I think there’s a major blind spot around the possibility that we have no idea who won, because the whole thing is obfuscated by multiple layers of confusion and malfeasance. What tools to democrats have for investigating malfeasance? What tools do they have for persuading people that they won when the results are in question? What tools to they have for enforcing election laws that they didn’t have in 2017?

I think they have approximately one asset, and it’s a populace that’s willing to rise up in defense of their rights. But the DNC spent the last five-ish years antagonizing and alienating anyone left of Dianne Feinstein, so, the efficacy of a potential national mobilization has been severely compromised.

Any protracted contested election scenario either favors Trump remaining in power, or the eventual balkanization of the US. One reason there are no good scenarios for a contested election is that mainstream media has been so adamant that the election is secure. When the Democrats are trying to contest results, they will be struggling against their own narrative.

Then, I add a 10% chance that a last minute October surprise tips the race to Trump. It happened last time, and Comey wasn’t even trying; now that every government office is staffed with Trump appointees who are trying, they have a decent shot at this.

Summing up these odds, I arrive at Trump having around a 70% chance.

Then, I add another 5%, because I bet there’s things I haven’t thought of, and every year there’s some small chance that the far right will go all in on a race war, and this would be a good opportunity for them.

I will take actual bets on these odds.

My biases:

Numerous.

I grew up in a red community in a red state and was bullied a lot by kids who grew up to be far-right; I have a chip on my shoulder about this that precludes dispassionate analysis.

I believe the RNC has looked at US demographic trends and likely consequences of climate change, and has accepted a certain amount of fascistic will to power as a necessary evil. This is mere supposition on my part.

Despite the fact that I am more or less an asshole stoner burnout weeb, I remain convinced that the editorial staff at the NYT and several other major American journalistic institutions are somehow even dumber than I am. Although this may sound unlikely, this assumption has been invaluable for making predictions about the world.

I am a paranoid person.

My motivations for writing this:

Believe it or not, I’m only doing this to assuage anxiety. I’ve been convinced that Trump’s odds for remaining in office have been significantly higher than polls would suggest since 2018, and it’s maddening to see so few other people agree even though my core assumptions keep not going away.

If anyone read this far: I’m sorry, and I hope this motivates you to vote, if you weren’t going to already. If Trump remains in office, protests against him will benefit from having the mandate of a clear popular vote win, even if not an EC win, so I do believe that even people outside battleground states should vote.

I don’t know about Tumblr, but on Twitter, ‘no-hopers’ are characterized (fairly or not) as being defeatist Bernie bros who think that Trump should win the election to teach the DNC a lesson. I disavow this idea in the strongest possible terms. I think Biden can win and urgently should win. But every time I see someone talking about the Biden presidency as if it were a sure thing, it takes another year off my lifespan.

No matter what happens, we will be fighting racism and corruption for the rest of our lives, because that’s what ethical behavior entails in this world. But a Biden term vs. a second Trump term are in no way equivalent, and things can still get worse.

In conclusion, [that picture of the guy at the folding table with the ‘prove me wrong’ sign]

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bambamramfan · 5 years

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The past week I thought about the differences between Slatestarcodex (Scott Alexander) and @Popehat (Ken White.) Besides being upper class white men in California in degreed professions, in some ways they occupy very much the same political niche with some similar fans. They’re left of center to be sure, and politically sophisticated, but they hold certain ideals above the “with us or against us” of modern politics and culture war. They’ve made their name by loudly adhering to their principles instead of whatever trend is most useful to the left today. Alexander has his rationalism, but beyond that, a form of humanistic inquiry that produces great essays like “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup”. White delights in telling hyperactivists how wrong their understanding of the law is, particularly with regards to things like RICO or “crying fire in a crowded theater.” (If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with both men.) Let’s call them principled liberals. I doubt either of them has ever voted for a Republican presidential candidate, but they get along fine with polite Republicans in the course of their professions, etc etc.

And yet, they have completely different attitudes and allies. In fact, they probably detest the other, the few times they read the other. And I think the “why” here is very interesting.

Popehat feels great comfort with the left and viciously mocks those who are afraid of political correctness, SJW’s, and the like. Slatestarcodex writes constantly about how the left is ruining science and academia, and politically shooting themselves in the foot. Again, on any policy matter, I suspect they have little to zero difference in what they want implemented, and what politicians to support, but their attitude engaging in online politics is night and day.

But Popehat routinely disagrees with various left-wing activists, telling them why their ad hoc definition of hate speech is unenforceable and a bad idea, or why giving prosecutors unlimited power when they’re hounding *your* enemies is a devil’s bargain. The difference is, AFAICT, is that he sees these extremists as a minority, as the exception. He broadly thinks the left is good (or at least more reasonable than the right), and just that some “bad apples” behind various twitter handles are just as dumb as Trumpians, and he is happy to mock them too. He doesn’t fear that making fun of a troll on the left will get him denounced. He sees a clear difference between loonies at Oberlin and the sort of centrist liberal fellow lawyers who are his professional environment.

Slatestarcodex sees no clear line. In fact his essays frequently talk about the slippery slope across that line - if you cede a philosophical point to the left, then you have to immediately ask yourself whether the most extreme and inane version of that point is also correct, and now the loonies are running the asylum again. The harassing emails he gets do not seem just from loonies, but from the entire spectrum, right and left, centrist and extremists.

I’d also throw the pair of pundits Matthew Yglesias and Jessie Singal into this mix. Again, these two media microcelebrities probably want the exact same policy outcomes. Yglesias however thinks the left is broadly made of good people, he doesn’t try to antagonize them, and in his experience saying things like “my young child plays rougher because he is a boy” is perfectly safe to say and won’t get you thrown in jail by any thought police. Whereas Singal is laser-focus obsessed about the dumbest thing on the left anyone has said today, raising the twitter feuds of YA authors and critics to the single most important topic of his newsfeed. Yglesias will happily call out tactical disagreement on the left (to the point of taking pride in the award “Chief Neoliberal Shill”) but just doesn’t ever worry that the looniest and most demanding thing said by a BLM account is also the marching orders for all of establishment media.

This divide seems the actual relevant divide in cosmopolitan circles these days. Not between centrists or extremists. Not even between the trolls and the adults. But between those who see the trolls/extremists as representative of leftism over all, and who see them as a few bad apples that can be ignored. (Needless to say, whether this line exists or not is not an objective question with a clear answer.)

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reading-writing-revolution · 4 years

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"If you step back for a moment and look at the world map like you're playing Risk, things might come into focus a bit better about what is actually going on.

Yesterday it was revealed that the conservative Tory party is receiving a lot of Russian money into its campaign coffers. We know that the biggest threat to Russian aggression is NATO. So if you're a gangster with more personal wealth than Jeff Bezos, what would you do with that money if you wanted to cause some havoc against your enemies?

Would you hand some cash to some people in an attempt to break up the European market with an idea like Brexit? Because that's what Putin has done. He didn't face any consequences for that because the people who got their money are simply outraged that you are outraged that they took money to do something against their own interest. But to understand why these Brexiters want to shoot themselves in the foot so badly you have to first remember that historically, conservatives have always had the slime of sedition coursing through their veins.

With the aid of Rupert Murdoch's propaganda machine, people in Britain went a little nuts after imbibing the lies that Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage began spewing about the NHS spending $300 billion on immigrants. Beating up on immigrants has always been an effective tool for the rich to turn the poor against the poorer because most of the poor are convinced that they are just premature millionaires themselves so it must be all those foreigners coming to take their jobs.

The irony and hypocrisy that Murdoch is himself an immigrant should not be lost on anyone but it is his megalomania that should have more of us alarmed. He was quoted as saying that when he calls a politician in England and America, they always answer the phone. When he calls anyone in Brussels, nobody cares. Malignant narcissists do not like being slighted in such a way as we saw with the prime minister of Denmark when she refused to sell Greenland to Trump.

Both Murdoch and Putin are at their roots, insurgents who mean to undermine liberal democracy. But Putin is not merely satisfied with sowing chaos in England and the United States. He wants to destroy NATO and there was a real danger of the Ukraine becoming a member of NATO and Putin would do anything to prevent that. So he needed what people in the spy trade-craft call a 'useful idiot.'

Putin has said that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the most humiliating thing ever visited on the Russian people and that he means to restore mother Russia to its former glory. So Putin has been sowing chaos as best he can all across Europe by filling the campaign coffers of the most right wing conservative candidates that he can find. But why only conservatives you might ask? Because as there power has declined through contrition, their wacky ideas have become revolting to the kids coming of voting age and they know that in politics, money is everything. If they mean to hold seats of power, they must have an endless supply of cash. Putin has done this all across Europe with great success and he has one ally with control of huge media sources in Rupert Murdoch.

Putin started this campaign to make Russia great again by first establishing some pro-Russia groups in Crimea. These agents then took to the newspapers and television claiming the Ukrainians were oppressing them and gee willikers, Vlad was not about to let the pro-Russian separatist languish under the tyranny of a president who fled to Moscow once the people revolted. So he invaded Crimea and killed anyone in his way. Then he built a bridge tying Crimea to Russia. Of course this wasn’t entirely kosher with the rest of the world so NATO imposed the harshest sanctions they could on Russia. The effect has been reducing a country which spans eleven time zones to an economy smaller than Italy and New York state.

Now that he was paying for the crime he didn’t get religion, he just did more crime. Putin then invaded eastern Ukraine killing 13,000 people. Then the Russian navy began ramming Ukrainian boats and seizing their sailors while claiming they were the aggressors. This has gone on on Trump’s watch.

Putin knew one thing for certain and that was Hillary Clinton helped craft the heavy sanctions against Russia so if she were elected president, she wouldn’t be so inclined to lift those sanctions so what could Putin do to keep Hillary from becoming president? Anything he possibly could.

It’s important to remember now that when Trump was claiming anyone could have hacked into the DNC server that he knew Russia did it. Yesterday at Roger Stone’s trial it was revealed that Roger Stone was telling Paul Manafort that he was in contact with Julian Assange and that he had access to Russian intelligence about Hillary. This is documented. Roger Stone told Manafort he knew a way to win the election but, ‘it ain’t pretty’ meaning collaborating with the Russians via Julian Assange. This is not speculation, these are facts laid out in federal court by a US Attorney. Trump’s purpose of saying it could be China or a 300 pound guy in his basement was to deflect from the verifiable fact that it was Russia. He didn’t want the truth known that they helped him win the election.

Since Trump’s election, Putin has been on a killing spree in European countries where his critics have fled his retribution. He has brazenly murdered former spies in England and Germany. He has not faced any further sanctions for these crimes because he has one very devoted fan, Trump.

If you look at the Risk map again, you can see in the Middle East, the threat of a regime change in Syria is now gone. The only base that Russia has on foreign soil is in Syria. Putin has again effectively gotten a right-wing nationalist to win a functional dictatorship in a NATO member state, Turkey.

Putin has been selling arms to Erdogan to shore up his dictatorship and Erdogan has embraced Putin’s tactics in dealing with any political opposition. He has done this by paying two members of Trump’s inner circle, Mike Flynn and Rudy Giuliani. Erdogan has offered big money to both to get Trump to deport a cleric that Erdogan wants to kill, badly. The last time Erdogan was in the United States to visit Trump, his security detail brutally assaulted protesters here and Trump did absolutely nothing about it. Not even a, ‘hey don’t do that here.’

We now know that Trump withdrew our troops in northern Syria after a call with Erdogan. Erdogan told Trump that he was going to invade northern Syria and kill him some Kurds. Trump did not put up any resistance at all to this planned genocide. Why? Well Trump has hotels there and other business interests in Turkey and Erdogan can snap his fingers and take away any money from Trump. After the blowback of abandoning our allies, Erdogan did Trump a solid and gave him Al-Baghdadi.

So if you look at the Risk map before Trump became president and now, you can see England in chaos. Poland in chaos. Ukraine is invaded and losing control of their eastern territory and their coastal waters. Putin has a very good relationship now with Turkey, he has strengthened the Assad regime and completely restored its territorial control of Syria. He has gotten Iran to come in to sow even more chaos and this was all done in the name of ‘bringing home the troops.’ Not one soldier is coming home. In fact Trump sent 1800 extra soldiers to guard oil wells in Saudi Arabia because they are paying us like mercenaries.

When both houses of congress voted to stop weapons sales to Saudi Arabia so they couldn’t kill Yemeni civilians, Trump overruled them and sold them anyway. The fact that Trump has sent our troops to Saudi Arabia as mercenaries has not perturbed any Republican in congress.

That’s because Republicans no longer have any interest in National Security. Putin funneled $30 million through the NRA to help elect Trump and his henchman have filled Republican coffers with cash they need to keep themselves in office. It’s so very curious how easily Republicans so quickly went from being harsh critics of Russia and then changing their presidential platform specifically on Russian aggression in Ukraine to be a little more accommodating to what can only be called a pro-Putin stance.

We know Trump lied about his Trump-Moscow deal. We know that Trump cares only for money. After losing more money than any single person the IRS ever kept track of, Trump is more than eager to get that billion dollars he lost of his father’s money. He has proven over and again that he will lie, cheat and steal from anyone in his quest to pad his bank account and Putin *knows* this.

Trump has never once missed an opportunity to lie for Putin nor has he missed an opportunity to praise him. After Russia rammed a Ukrainian vessel and took its crew hostage, the State Department thought it might look a bit bad if Trump had a meeting with Putin in South America. So they put out a statement saying that the meeting was cancelled because what Russia did was an outrageous violation of international law. Not even an hour later, Russia announced that the meeting was still on. Hmmm. So how do those Russian bastards have the unmitigated gall to tell the world what the president of the United States is going to do after he just said the meeting was off? Was Trump finally going to stand up to Russia? Nope. The meeting happened just as it was previously scheduled with no record whatever of what was said.

Russia effectively said that Trump was their bitch and after announcing there would be no meeting with Putin, they told their bitch that he wasn’t calling off any meeting and that he was going to meet when they said they would meet and Trump did. How do you think that went over in the State Department?

Any one of the things I have mentioned merits being impeached. If Barack Obama had paid off two women to keep them quiet, he would have already been removed from office and justly so. This is how far they have fallen. They have abandoned any semblance of ethics because their leader has no ethics. They are entirely amoral in ways not seen since Caligula was walking around. They have completely abandoned any belief in the rule of law or the constitution. There is not one Republican in congress who can open their mouths and not lie. What’s most troubling is the way that they have become so servile to Vladimir Putin at the costs of American lives.

This trade-war has caused China to go looking for other suppliers for their agricultural needs and who have they turned to? Putin. We were making a profit from China to the tune of $26 billion for the American farmers. Now we are borrowing money from China to give money to American farmers to *not* sell their crops to China. Republicans think this is a good deal because they cannot admit that this is lunacy at its putrid worst.

As more and more damning testimony is revealed about Trump’s incompetence, Republicans are contorting themselves into debased loons trying to defend a president we now know beyond any reasonable doubt, lies as easily as he breathes and who has committed multitudes of felonies that they care nothing about. After last night’s revelation from the senior Trump official writing A Warning by Anonymous, I am left wondering why Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence have not begun 25th amendment proceedings but doing so would mean that they would have to have some allegiance to the constitution that we know without question they do not have.

Donald Trump and the Republican party have become an existential threat greater than any enemy before to the United States. No amount of hand-wringing is going to cure us of this scourge. It’s going to take some drastic measures because the common Republicans are not up in arms about the complete servility of Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin because they are too busy getting poisoned a little every day from the propaganda that tells them comforting lies instead of inconvenient truths. The truth is that Trump has not missed an opportunity to hurt America and help Russia.

If we do not take action now, the epitaph of the United States will read, ‘when fascism came to the United States, it was welcomed with open arms because the unbridled power of propaganda poisoned the minds of Republicans everywhere who sold out every principle this country was founded upon to own the libs.’"

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canchewread · 5 years

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Editor’s Note: actually for once I don’t have very much to add here so please check out the most recent articles on my completely free to read Patreon Blog: “Warren's Technocratic Incrementalism, Liberalism, Foreign Policy & the Gaetz Gang's Dangerous Gambit” as well as “On Bernie Sanders, Polling and Perception.”

If I’m being entirely honest with you here, I must admit at this point that I’m so tired of writing about the “Russia” part of Russiagate that I could literally go the rest of my life without typing the words “Putin,” “treason,” or “Kremlin” again.

Despite being one of the earliest independent writers to identify the strong odor of bullsh*t in all of the most salacious claims of the scandal, I didn’t even bother to write the obligatory “declaration of victory” article when the Mueller report finally put two bullets into the back of this mad conspiracy theory’s head. Why? Well, because by that point I was just too f*cking exhausted to bother after literally two full years and change of refuting the same comically poor “evidence” that swine emperor Trump was a “Russian asset” each time the mainstream media repackaged it into a new variation on the still completely unhinged theme.

Unfortunately regardless of my general loathing of the subject, it remains utterly impossible to explain the severity of swine emperor Trump’s tinpot dictator turn in the Ukraine call scandal without being forced to discuss why this situation is in fact not “exactly like Russiagate” - an effort that is certainly not aided by the Democratic Party and “liberal” corporate media’s inexplicable insistence on bringing the matter up repeatedly; both to try and pile more damage onto Trump, and to attack heterodox candidates in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest.

As I wrote in the graphic above, there is literally no question whatsoever of whether or not Trump is guilty here - to quote Robert Reich in the October 5th online edition of the Guardian: “There are only two questions at stake, and the answers to both are becoming more obvious to more Americans every day.

The first is whether asking a foreign power to dig up dirt on a political opponent is an impeachable offense. The answer is indubitably yes.

When the framers of the constitution gave Congress the power to impeach a president, one of the high crimes they had in mind was acceding to what Alexander Hamilton called “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils”. James Madison argued for impeachment lest a president “might betray his trust to foreign powers”.

The second question is whether Trump did this. The answer is also an unqualified yes. In the published version of his phone conversation with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump asks for the “favor” of digging up dirt on Joe Biden.“

This is of course without even mentioning the fact that the Klepto Kaiser literally went on f*cking TV and did precisely the same damn thing he’d just denied doing, when he asked China and Ukraine to dig up dirt on 2020 Democratic Party nomination candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Frankly it doesn’t even matter that Biden’s son almost certainly did trade on his father’s name to get a position on a Ukrainian energy company’s board for which he was obviously wholly unqualified; if Trump wanted to go after Joe Biden’s possible corruption he has an entire Department of Justice for that - this was political persecution against a potential 2020 opponent; Herr Donald is absolutely guilty here regardless.

This case should be a slam dunk sell for Democrats, and yet it’s not - not even among the many millions of people who legitimately hate Donald Trump and know that he’s a literal fascist.

Sure part of that is mistrust of establishment power and the humiliation of having been tricked, however briefly, by the shittiest Austin Powers script known to humankind, but part of it is almost certainly also raw and fully earned animosity to the established neoliberal order. Mainstream Democrats and elite liberal influencers clearly have no idea the degree of damage they’ve done to relationships with their own voter coalitions by repeatedly gaslighting the American public and smearing anyone who opposed them politically as pawns of Vladdy Putin and the “KGB.” I’m not just talking about Republicans here, but even left wing activists have fallen under the assault of ruling class liberal McCarthyism; including Black Lives Matter protestors, Bernie Sanders supporters and Green Party voters.

Understandably, spending two years censoring left wing voices online and calling anyone who poses a threat to your control over the Democratic Party power structure a Russian troll bot, a “useful idiot” or “basically the same as a fascist Trump supporter” has not endeared the elite liberal establishment to labor class Democratic Party voters - even among those who know Trump is guilty of something in the Ukraine call scandal, there is little desire to help the rich abusive maggots running the Democratic Party wash all their crooked straight in the blood of a Trump impeachment battle.

Of course a responsible adult would suggest that for the good of the country, the party and the future of American democracy, it might be a good idea for Democrats to apologize or at least stop f*cking bringing the subject up every time the opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot appears again - but what the hell would I know, I’m not “the most qualified presidential candidate in American history” after all.

- nina illingworth Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog. Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook. Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

#Russiagate #Trump #trump impeachment #Ukraine Call Scandal #Biden #corruption #fascism #impeachment #Trump is guilty #Democratic Party #McCarthyism #punching left #activists #gaslighting #Robert Reich #Russian bot hysteria

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saltypiss · 1 year

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It truly is impressive the creativity of the dems to shoot themselves in the foot without a gun (law) trying to be passed, even after the midterms energy.

So far Biden has inspired nothing but contempt for this disgusting slowed down 2016. Biden has failed at every angle to accomplish anything substantial, it's always been the barest minimum, if at all.

List of Biden's lies during the election:

Student Loan cancelation: Lied, 20k, then shot down. Can still just sign that fucking document.

Kids Online Safety Act: SOPA, it's 30 sequels, and NN wasn't enough to show politicians in general that touching the internet cripples the party's trust.

Railroad workers: Took the side of the companies, again. Lied to them about taking their side. Garbage.

Stimulus check is gonna be 2,700$: actually, it's 600$.

Legalize marijuana: hahahahahaha

Ban vaping, oh wait, they didn't promise this, but it was their first action in office: Banned Vape sales online, raising the cost of vaping sometimes by 50%

Uh, what has he done? Oh...an infrastructure...bill...yeah...that's what democrats wanted from 2016 onward...free money for republicans to funnel away from infrastructure.

I really, really, hope the dems put someone worth a shit in, and I pray Biden doesn't run again as he's planning, he's let us down so many times, just go away you interim fuck.

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dovahfem · 6 years

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Purity Culture Hurts Leftists.

I've been meaning to bitch about that post calling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a cop for a while now, but I didn't want to reblog it because it's already way more popular than it should be. I have some time today, so here I go.

Isn't it great for Republicans and the Alt-Right how easy it is to sit back and watch Leftists discredit progressive candidates who are trying to make a change? If you don't like the way a candidate may have worded themselves and you want other Leftists to hate them, just call them a cop.

Language like that on this site spreads like wildfire, especially in progressive circles. I hate cops, and every little bit of disdain for them on this website is justified, but labeling AOC a pig with zero context because she made a statement you didn't agree with in a way that was not perfect, is straight up click-bait bullshit pulled out of the air for likes.

We should be able to criticize political candidates, and part of that criticism means starting a dialogue among your peers which you can then bring to the attention of that politician, and discuss why you feel the way you do, and what about her statement was wrong/misinformed.

Nah, call her a cop instead, release it into the void without explanation and sit back and wait for the discourse clicks. God forbid Alexandria not be perfectly Left enough for someone on Tumblr, to the guillotine with her!

Alexandria wanting Nazi's deported and her reasoning behind it has been laid out hundreds of times on that post, so I'm not going to explain it again here, I know it's a highly debated issue, but we should be able to disagree with other Leftists without casting our comrades into the fucking flames.

I'd rather debate with another Leftist whom I disagree with, rather than try to reason with the brick wall that is the Republican party. Alexandria is a down to earth person who is willing to listen to criticism from her voters, supporters, and other Leftists. She is open-minded and ready to change her opinions based on new information. If that person was concerned about AOC's point of view on the subject, they could have laid it out thoughtfully and brought it to Alexandria's attention and had an actual discussion with their peers. Google offers up plenty of ways to get in contact with candidates, but nope. “Girl is a cop,” is much more effective apparently judging from the notes on that hot garbage.

It's so nasty that every word that falls from AOC's lips is twisted, misrepresented, picked-apart, and scrutinized to no end not just by Republicans, but by people on the Left who think they're helping our side by calling her a cop like she's our enemy. Just when I think we are going to move past this purity culture rubbish, I see a shitty post like that, and I'm reminded of why on the Left we lose so many of our battles. We should call each other out when we say something problematic, yes, but oh my goddess when will we stop canceling people for wording themselves poorly, being misinformed, or making a mistake that could easily be corrected through the way of discussion? I feel that the term "eating our own" is overused and often applied to silence Leftists who disagree with other Leftists, but that post was an example of us eating our own, and it's sad. Instead of laying out their opinion, they labeled her a cop, a hot-button word that is sure to garner hatred on this website.

Yeah, she's a cop because she thinks Nazi's should be deported. If that's something you don't agree with, bring it to AOC's attention, get her to understand why you feel that deportation is never OK or whatever your position might be. Alexandria's opposing opinion doesn't mean she's suddenly going after all immigrants who have committed a crime and is in fact, a deceiver and a Judas to the progressive movement because she said something you did not agree with. I'm not saying we shouldn't criticize her statement, but I am saying that how we do that, matters. Crushing her beneath the weight of purity culture, a candidate who is one of the best we have had in a very long time and is leading the charge for a lot of other progressives to come forward during a time when we DESPERATELY need their aid..... is just fucking wrong.

If you took that post seriously and are no longer voting for her based on some Tumblr post from someone who you're not even sure is voting themselves, you're shooting yourself in the foot and narrowly missing the feet of your comrades. Thankfully, most of us know better and are going to support Alexandria and know how to approach a candidate with matters we do not agree with, and how to shine a light on such issues without kicking her into a pit and spitting down it afterward.

#Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez #feminism #voting #midterms #progressive #Leftist #long post #my posts are usually always long #my mouthwords

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arlingtonpark · 5 years

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SNK 113 Review

Sad! Edition

Arlingtonpark presents: SNK 113, a play in three acts.

Act I

Act II

Act III

GIVE ME A BREAK, OKAY? THIS CHAPTER DIDN’T GIVE ME MUCH TO WORK WITH!

This was a more leisurly outing for this arc compared to the previous string of chapters. We get some insight into Zeke’s plan (but not a full elaboration), Levi makes a monkey out of him, and the EFC arrives in Shighanshina. That’s it.

Ironically, this was one of the more action packed chapters, yet it’s not as thrilling as, say, SNK 112, which was mostly our main trio sitting at a table.

Our heroes, sans Eren, have been mostly helpless in the face of Zeke and the EFC’s machinations, and Isayama has pressed this to good, suspense-inducing, effect.

We still don’t know much about Zeke, and why Eren is acting like he is now is still not completely understood. The opposition is opaque and they’ve been on a real winning streak so far. Just like how reports of a serial killer in your neighborhood can put you on edge, our heroes are put on edge by…just everything that’s happened so far, and we feel that gnawing fear by extension.

But now might be a turning point.

For the first time, Zeke/Eren (Zeren?)’s plan has hit a real snag. Now, now things will really start to get interesting. Pieck and Galliard did escape and participate in the Liberio fight, and Gabi and Falco are unexpectedly here on Paradis, but those were hardly setbacks. Detours maybe, but they didn’t threaten arrival at the final destination.

This is different. The plan was to rendezvous at Shighanshina and that’s just not going to happen now. Levi is dragging Zeke around like a monkey on a leash and Eren is none the wiser. And there’s no way for him to know that.

It’s not like they can communicate telepathically. unlike Hange and Levi When the time comes to meet up, Zeke isn’t going to be there. From Eren’s perspective, Zeke may as well have disappeared off the face of the Earth.

The plan apparently was to provoke an attack on Paradis by a coalition of the world’s forces. But this plan also apparently hinges on being able to use the Wall Titans to repel this attack. But that’s out the window too now. Zeren’s plan is in danger of catastrophic failure and at the worst possible time.

The enemy is already here. Pieck is on Paradis, no doubt gathering intelligence. It’s good that Zeke is subdued, but that creates a power vacuum and there’s no one around to fill it.

The legitimate government is facing a legitimacy crisis.

The EFC will be in damage control mode now that their plan is in danger of falling through.

And oh yeah, Marley has already infiltrated the island.

Paradis can easily devolve into chaos, now. Pixis’ government is a leader without much of a following; Eren has popular support. The EFC has a following but their leaders will soon be scrambling to regain control of the situation. And all Marley cares about is killing everyone.

And this raises a very intriguing question: How will Eren react to this?

Like I said, things have mostly gone smoothly for him. Yes, Eren’s had this stone cold demeanor, even in the middle of his fight in Liberio, but really he’s been coasting so far. Things have done nothing but go his way. Now it suddenly isn’t. So how does he react to that?

If SNK 112 is any indication, he won’t handle things well. Eren lost his cool at a backhanded swipe by Armin. And I’m not gonna lie, if that was all I had ever seen of Eren, I would have said he was weak.

Sad, even.

When it comes to Eren, Isayama will probably go the classic shonen villain route. Think Frieza or Cell from DBZ. Calm and cool, but only when they’re in control. Once they lose control, they lose their cool and reveal themselves as the wild animals they always were.

This will probably play into his freedom complex. Eren wanted to free humanity from the titans so they could explore the outside world. He framed it in terms of control. Freedom=control is the equation here.

Not being in control, to him, means not being free, so when he realizes he’s not in control anymore, he’s going to go apeshit.

Like the Trumpian figure that he is, Eren will probably resort to dominance rituals to sooth his own ego.

Floch had better watch out. When the guy at the top is a dominance obsessed lunatic, it doesn’t matter how high up the food chain you are. If you’re not at the top, you’re at the bottom. If my Eren=Trump framework is correct, Eren is going to abuse that to hell and back. He’s going to subject Floch and co. to all manner of degradations.

I honestly wouldn’t mind that, if it’s not extreme. Floch would deserve it.

Where do I even start with Floch?

In the past, I’ve compared the story of SNK to the current political landscape in the US. I don’t think this is intentional, to be clear; it’s just a very amusing parallel.

As leader of the Yeagerists, Floch roughly corresponds to Mark Meadows, the leader of the House Freedom Caucus. The HFC is a band of extremist, Trump-aligned, Republican politicians who openly rebel against their leadership. Meadows is the group’s current chairman.

Floch and Meadows share one overridingly important similarity: neither of them can create; they can only destroy.

John Boehner (pronounced “baner.” Seriously.) was leader of the House Republicans, until he was shit-canned because the Freedom Caucus didn’t like him. Here’s how he described their mindset:

“They can’t tell you what they’re for. They can tell you everything they’re against. They’re anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over. That’s where their mindset is.”

That’s basically Floch. He wants to Make Eldia Great Again and he thinks the Wall Titans have a role to play in that, but does he have a plan beyond that? Almost certainly not! That would require building something up, and that is beyond his feeble abilities. He thinks Hange is soft and opposes that. He thinks the military is old fashioned and opposes that.

Is there anything concrete that he supports? He supports using the Wall Titans and he supports Eren’s leadership, but his “game plan” is basically:

Use Wall Titans.

???

ELDIA IS GREAT AGAIN!!1

That’s hardly a plan.

All Floch and his team have accomplished is create chaos and dysfunction.

That’s it.

They instigated a social uprising, decapitated the government, and now? They’re just running around trying to find Zeke. (Even though Zeke and Eren already have a rendezvous point worked out.)

All Floch is good for is blowing stuff up and shitting over everything. But in the words of the great Sam Rayburn:

“Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.”

Floch is no carpenter. Floch is a coward. This pitifully small boy. This absolute failson. It’s no surprise at all he’s where he’s at.

Floch talks big now, but that’s only because he’s riding high now. I bet he’s the type of person who buckles under even minimal pressure. You all saw how he was during the Shighanshina battle. Everyone kept their composure even as Zeke’s rocks were closing in on them. Except him. He was the first to crack.

My sense is that Floch is not a constitutionally strong person, and he knows it. And he thinks he’s a coward, so we know he doesn’t think well of himself.

That’s the key. That’s why he is so devoted to Eldia.

He can’t feel pride in himself qua himself, so he has to feel pride in himself qua an Eldian. His logic is that if Eldians are strong then he is strong by proxy because he is one of them.

It’s the same thing with Trump supporters. Trump’s base supports him because Trump wants to maintain the racial hierarchy that benefits white people. And Trump’s base supports that because a lot of them are poor, white people. Because even though they don’t have a lot going for them, “at least I’m not black.” There’s little in their lives to be proud of, so they take pride in their race to feel better about themselves.

It’s like the evil version of gay pride.

Gay people take pride in their homosexuality because it’s a form of psychic preservation. They are denigrated for this one aspect of themselves, so they emphasize pride in that aspect to counter the stigma. It’s a way of preserving their sense of self-worth.

People like Floch take pride in their race because they have no self-worth to preserve. They’re empty and sad. Their race is one of the only things they have going for them. So they fight for Eldian greatness because a restored Empire will make them feel all big and strong.

It is utterly pathetic.

That’s one thing Floch and Eren have in common. They’re both sad. From Eren’s sad enslavement to the vague notion of freedom, to Floch’s sad belief that if Eldia is made “great” he’ll be made great in turn. It’s sadness all the way down.

The exemplar of that in this chapter is when Floch confronts Shadis.

It’s hilarious how Shadis calls Floch out on being a sad pissant and Floch tries to prove him wrong, only to prove him right in the process.

Not only does Floch miss, he’s stupid enough to say so out loud. He even explains what he was trying for.

Duuuude!

Just play it off as a warning shot! You’re trying to put up a tough guy front. Don’t admit to having failed spectacularly.

He would have been better off doing that anyway. Hitting Shadis in the foot just for mouthing off also would have proven him right. If you feel the need to shoot someone for mouthing off to you, then yeah, you are, in fact, a sad pissant.

But if it was just a warning shot to the ground around him, then that still would have been excessive, but it wouldn’t make you look insecure as hell.

To quote Game of Thrones:

“We’ve had vicious kings, and we’ve had idiot kings, but I don’t think we’ve ever been cursed with a vicious, idiot king!”

He’s not just vicious. He’s not just an idiot. He’s not even just a vicious idiot. He’s a vicious idiot with power. God help them.

But this idea of insecurity being the root cause of nationalist behavior raises an important question: why are the denizens of Paradis also on board with this nationalist program?

Well, nationalism runs on tribalism, so the people need to care about their Eldianism. Their being Eldians.

And going by that…it might actually be the Survey Corps’ fault.

At the start of the series, the Walldians were apathetic about the outside world. But thanks to the (not unjustified) efforts of the Survey Corps, the Walldians started to care.

Rod’s titan was over twice as big as the Colossal Titan; it loomed over Orvud like a kid looms over a toy cityscape playset. A lot of parallels were made in that sequence to the original Colossal Titan attack. In hindsight, Isayama, in his typically blunt style, was probably motivated by more than a need for a stylistic flourish. He probably did it to impress on the reader what he intended the Walldians to take away from the same event: From their perspective, this was another Shighanshina.

But the ending was different this time.

This was bigger than the first attack. Much bigger. Thousands upon thousands of people died in the first attack and its aftermath. Literally no one died the second time. Rod’s titan was subdued without incident. Awesome, but it also had the effect of inspiring nationalistic pride in the people.

Historia’s plan, very explicitly, was to exploit these nationalist feelings to the Survey Corps’ advantage. Stopping a second Shighanshina created a sense of communal unity among the Walldians. The plan was to encourage and then use those feelings to “stabilize the situation” as Historia herself put it.

And it worked, only it worked too well. Now those nationalist feelings have carried over to the Marley conflict to deleterious effect.

And then there’s the Wall Maria operation. That was described by the narrator like this:

“The area within Wall Maria represented one third of the land humanity had left. When the territory was lost five years ago, the loss of human life and property was massive. And, as those who remained inside the two walls quickly realized, those losses were only the beginning. It seemed wrong for us to continue living. Whether humanity could survive another day was out of human hands. Everything was now up to the titans. Because humanity had no way of defeating them. But, that day, one boy gripped the dagger in his heart and used it to kill a titan, stomping its massive head into the ground. How did the humans who saw that sight feel? Some were filled with pride. Some were filled with hope. Some were filled with rage. But all of them screamed. Now, if Wall Maria is taken back, what scream will fill humanity’s hearts?”

The term for the “scream” the narrator is describing here is “nationalistic fervor.” The Wall Maria operation inspired further feelings of nationalism in the people. And again, those feelings have carried over.

This is a case study in unintended consequences. They wanted humanity to fight, now humanity is fighting and it’s backfiring spectacularly. The people are out for blood. Only this time the blood doesn’t evaporate without a trace.

It’s very revealing how Floch acts towards Shadis compared to Hange.

Hange didn’t have a very high opinion of Shadis the last time we saw them in a room together, but they still stood up for him. Even when they’re pissed at someone, they still don’t lose sight of the humanity of that someone.

Floch also has a low opinion of Shadis. He ordered him beaten for no reason. Because Floch is a sad, maladjusted, man-child. He sees the world in black and white terms. If you support him, you’re golden. If you don’t, you’re not even human.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Floch actually gets off on abusing whatever power he has over people. Being powerful is a high he doesn’t get to experience often, so don’t be surprised of he savors the exercising of it.

So I’ve noticed that the Survey Corps is still training recruits to fight titans. Who don’t exist anymore.

Ooookay.

Where is Isayama going with this?

Floch cites the stagnation in Survey Corps tactics as a reason why Eldia isn’t great. Isayama isn’t trying to both-sides this debate is he?

Floch is an asshole and his movement is repugnant. He’s a right-wing fucking nationalist. But it seems Isayama is trying to send the message that he’s not wrong.

What is it with this series and this schizophrenic approach to right-wing nationalism? The story has condemned it in certain moments, but when it comes to condemning the actual leaders of this movement, Isayama equivocates.

Floch is an asshole, BUT he’s actually right because the Survey Corps really is backwards thinking and in need of new leadership.

Eren is an asshole, BUT he’s actually right because the rumbling *is* necessary to protect Paradis and everyone else was just slow to accept this.

This isn’t just a case of the villains having a point. The key in situations like that is to show they have a point, but that their methods are obscene. Important to that is showing an actual alternative to those methods. Putting forth an alternative is important because it doesn’t matter how horrific Eren or Floch’s actions are, if it’s the only way to proceed then the argument can be made they are doing the right thing.

When the villain has a point, they have correctly identified a problem, but have incorrectly identified the solution.

With Eren and co. the story doesn’t just depict them as having correctly identified the problem. Their proposed solution is depicted as being at least somewhat correct too.

That’s a problem because it means Isayama is granting undue legitimacy to a repugnant, real world ideology.

Them being assholes should be a feature, not a bug. The bug being that they have a point. But the way Isayama has set things up, it’s that them having a point is the feature and their jackassery is the bug.

It all amounts to the story criticizing the nonessential aspects of this movement while leaving the substantive aspects intact.

At this point we’ll all need gas masks real soon because the smoke just keeps piling up.

The last thing of note is Zeke. Apparently he doesn’t get off on pain and suffering. Who knew.

We are apparently going to finally get a peak (you know it’s only going to be a peak) at his backstory and mindset next chapter.

Zeke worrying about his glasses, which belonged to what seems to have been a childhood friend of his, is obviously supposed to signal that Zeke can in fact empathize with people.

I am…warily looking forward to this. The ending blurb teases that he does in fact have a reason for what he’s doing. What I hope Isayama will do, because I think it would be a cool twist, is reveal that Zeke’s motives and plan is merely internally logical, but from an outside perspective, his plan is still totally batshit insane and maybe even nonsensical.

Because that’s how it is with people. People are rational actors, but all that means is that they respond to incentives and harms as they themselves weigh them in accordance with their own internal value system.

In other words, people act in a way that is always internally logical but not always truly logical. The prisoner’s dilemma is a classic example of this. Everyone acts rationally and because of that everyone loses.

How interesting would it be if Zeke’s motives only make sense to him, but are still, in a way, understandable?

The next chapter will end the second volume of this arc. Based on past chapters in a similar position, it will probably end on some event that rapidly escalates the conflict. My guess is that it’ll end on Marley launching its attack on Paradis.

SNK 114 awaits.

#shingeki no kyojin #attack on titan #floch forster #snk 113 #spoilers

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