I mean… I don’t really have to reply to literally anything else here. You’re actually insane.

How so? Perhaps you misread my comment (I think you missed the last “to”). Or you can just say that I’m mentally ill and therefore not worth the most basic level of conversation.

I think Trump’s pretty bad too, which is why I’m glad the Dems are prioritizing being strong opposition to him instead of capitulating (wait . . .) or getting distracted punching left at Mamdani over non-issues (shit . . .)

I think that Trump 2 is starkly different from Trump 1. I maintain my interpretation of Trump 1 and happily await someone explaining to me a basis for predicting Trump 2’s methodological shift. I personally really struggle to understand it unless it’s truly that his brain was broken by losing in 2020 and he became the Joker. Perhaps it’s just that the actual fascists finally were able to figure out how to more effectively control him/convince him to cooperate, since he was notoriously unruly and refused to defer to allies who knew what they were doing (and this is part of what made him so much less threatening from a long-term standpoint than he could have been, not that he didn’t present problems).

Looking at the context of this conversation (why are you even back here? why did you even remember it? did you think this was a great chance to gloat about how Momala would have made everything okay?) I think it’s more productive to try to understand how Republicans generally have taken this hard right shift, and it’s not because Trump is a wizard who can make everyone do what he wants, we have seen him come into conflict with the Republican establishment many times before, but they are backing him on a lot of the more fascist policies (with the exception of some of the courts). It’s also worth noting that the Democrats, infamously Schumer, are extremely capitulatory to him, and obviously some fascist policy was done under their lead, like with Gaza, but remembering discourse from when I was writing, I can infer that you were arguing that the extermination of just the Palestinians was the lesser evil, so I guess that doesn’t matter. Anyway, my original point is that the threat isn’t coming fundamentally from Trump, but from the Republican Party and neoliberalism generally, and I see no reason to think that is less true now.

In my personal life, I’ve actually been really pleasantly surprised to see former “lesser evil” types realize that the Democratic Party needs to be destroyed because they are ultimately collaborators with the Republicans who will never, ever actually solve the problems producing fascist threats (and also do really awful things in their own right). I think they learned the correct lesson from the last several years, but of course diehards remain and will act like this is a moral victory for them somehow, when Kamala was adopting Trump 1 policy and even worse and Dems keep saying “we lost, I guess we weren’t reactionary enough” and shifting ever-further right.

I truly hope that one day you realize that the Dems are more opposed to genuine leftism than to Republicans and have and will work to suppress it while protecting the Republican establishment. If you truly hate Republicans and not just Trump in particular, you need to look beyond the Dems and beyond the tip of your nose (a single election cycle).

Appropriately apocalyptic for the liberal view on these elections, but the problem, also appropriate for the liberal view on these elections, is that you are taking the Other to be a complete dipshit.

If you’re in a situation that isn’t the literal end of the world, bluffing has a serious danger associated with it because it informs all circumstances subsequent to the bluff if it gets called. From that point on, people know that your threats are not to be taken seriously, and you have robbed yourself of whatever power you had. You become a “boy who cried wolf” with respect to the actions you will take.

Furthermore, this time in all situations, it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to stake such a widespread plan of action on everyone at all times maintaining a lie. How do you agitate for such a thing? You can’t speak of it in the open. How do you vet candidates? Someone might be an asset (and liberals usually believe spaces both online and offline are crawling with assets for other states) or even just someone who thinks you plan is bullshit and will decide to talk about it afterwards. Basically, your plan works in the same realm of imagination where wars would stop if all of the soldiers on both sides just laid down their arms. That is to say, if you could just cast a spell and make people act that way, sure, but that’s not how politics works.

Lastly, it’s important to remember we are talking about threats, so “If we have nukes, we should just use them!” is a complete non sequitur. That’s not a threat, that’s just an attack. Incidentally, while there is a good argument to be made that if you get nuked, you should just take the L if you think your barrage might tip the scales into the world ending, such an idea definitionally does not work as the dominant ideology because at that point MAD does not protect your country anymore and there’s really no point in you having nukes when you’re just surrendering to death anyway. If you’re an individual operator of a nuclear silo or something and you refuse to participate in ending the world, good for you, but again that’s something that you can’t organize with because it’s a conspiracy of a similar style to what I outlined before, so you aren’t going to succeed in helping very much unless you’re on the vanguard and it might be a false positive that an enemy nuke was launched at all (this happened at least once with the USSR, during the Cuban Missile Crisis). In that extremely specific situation where mass action is impossible and only a tiny fraction of a fraction of the population ever gets close to being in the conditions where such an incident has even a slim possibility of occuring: Yes, there it works well.

A threat that you refuse to make good on is the same as doing nothing. I have no interest in telling someone who to vote for, but your proposed strategy is ridiculous.

Words can have different colloquial meanings. There is a really crass meaning of liberal that would identify Marx as a liberal, yes, and this is the most popular one in America, but there’s another colloquial meaning (more popular in other anglophone countries, but gaining traction in America) where liberals are basically centrists (in capitalist societies) who might pretend to be progressive but are ultimately moderates to their bones. This came from the proclivities of “Liberal” parties, along with centrists understandably claiming the name of whatever the ruling ideology is, and here it is of course liberalism.

Among leftist circles, “liberal” is sort of an unmarked term for the moderate definition and the Lockean definition both, like how “guys” can refer to both a group of males and a group of mixed gender, despite “gals” only referring specifically to a group of females (I’m using those terms because they apply to children also, not just men/women).

So the comment is saying, in translation: “Democrat aligned people will still blame socialists (etc.) like their Democrat ideological cult wants them to.” Does that make sense?

That’s true, they are (and I guess I am, by extension) using it in a narrower sense than is represented in Locke, who encompasses both the red and blue team, but the Lockean sense would still distinguish between liberals and modern leftism.

This has to be bait. You can’t possibly think people think that way, right? .ml people disagree with NATO-sphere liberals about a lot of things to do with Russia, but that’s not the same as being mindless Russian chauvinists.

Like, do you really think whatever meetings she had with Putin or whatever it is you blue rags gossip about would be a bigger factor than her opposing the genocide in Gaza, to say nothing of having better climate policies, better immigration policies, and so on?

“But she won’t win”

Obviously, but her shaking Putin’s hand won’t change that. His apparent trick of buying a miniscule number of highly-targeted Facebook ads isn’t gonna do much for her, so we need to accept that assumption either way.

I’m voting for PSL, not Greens, btw.

I think it’s funny that someone with “Locke” in their name would seemingly not distinguish between liberals and leftists.

When I said:

and that there is only this one, totalizing crossroad of literal, immediate survival.

This was me saying “It frames things as though losing the election means that all is lost and there won’t be future elections.”

As I’m pretty sure I explained to you an hour ago in another thread, I think it’s an acceptable loss for the Democrats to lose an election to put pressure on them to change or else to establish that they are more loyal to the US project of Israel than they are to trying to win elections or do what voters want or anything like that.

I don’t proactively want Trump to win, but I find it totally acceptable since what sets him apart from other Republicans is not that he is especially fascist in the substance of what he is likely to do. It might actually be possible to browbeat me if we had a Tom “throne of Chinese skulls” Cotton or someone as the nominee, he actually represents something that could be totalizing to me, but Trump is just kind of a deranged grifter and Vance is a more even-keel grifter.

So to save us both time, no, I don’t think we agree on any points. I wasn’t commenting toward that end, I merely wanted to say that the comic is unhelpful.

This is question-begging a number of critical elements, e.g. that the “rafts” cannot be influenced by “passenger” input, and that there is only this one, totalizing crossroad of literal, immediate survival.

We can do it too:

You’re in a runaway train accelerating toward a cliff and the break only really stops acceleration, it doesn’t decelerate. You can sit in the engine room and hold down the break, and you’ll live longer, but you aren’t changing the fundamental dynamic of the situation, which ends in your eventual death. Conversely, you can jump off the train, surely injuring yourself, possibly crippling yourself, maybe even killing yourself, but it’s the only potential way to change the dynamic of being doomed to fall off the cliff.

Does this prove anything? No, it’s just a model of how some people think of the problem, not an argument. It would be really obnoxious and disingenuous to present it as an argument.

OP asked how to explain socialism, not how to do anticommunist apologia for social democracy.

As far as Israel’s founding, yeah fine I’m not that old afaic the world fucked up by letting Israel happen but once they’re all there what now?

Well, there is (or was) continuous immigration to Israel from various other (almost exclusively white) countries as part of the project of continuous growth to settle new territory. A lot of them can just go back to their home country and a number already have on at least a temporary basis because of the war.

For the sake of argument we can say there are recent settlers who really cannot go back, and for them the answer is to rehouse them, since obviously no one here wants genocide, that’s just a Zionist myth.

But it should be the duty of the founders and masters of Israel, those being the US and UK, to rehouse Israelis in their borders. The same should go for other major sponsors of the Zionist project, like Canada, Australia, and of course Germany. All of these countries (especially America) can afford to do so.

That wouldn’t eliminate the Jewish population, but the goal has never been to eliminate the Jewish population.

I mean, I think religion is stupid but

They’re much more of an ethnostate than a theocracy, though they have features of both

neither side is ever going to stop fighting because religion.

You are severely misunderstanding the lines of the conflict, but you’re misunderstanding them in exactly the way you were told to by the neoliberal media trying to both sides a conflict that was always, always a settler-colonial state trying to exterminate and replace the indigenous Palestinian population. The Palestinians are not fighting to exterminate Jews, they are fighting to destroy the settler-colony that ousted them from most of their land. There’s no shortage of evidence of Palestinian society being basically pluralist, allowing Christian churches to stand for centuries (until Israel bombed them) and taking care of Jewish graveyards and so on.

It is not a religious war, it’s a colonialist war.

What do you think a relationship between Trump 2.0 and Netanyahu looks like? You care about Palestinians and you want to risk a second Trump term?

I think Biden was already fully supporting Bibi. Trump can’t “fully support him but even more now”.

Here’s the thing, taking your paraphrased quotes as accurate (and I believe they are) she is not appending any condition on arming Israel. She did not say “If Congress apportions funds, I will arm Israel,” [let alone “If and only if,”] she said “I will continue to arm Israel,” without any conditional, which Biden has demonstrated the President can do at least to some extent through unilateral executive authority in addition to Congress being able to do it. Therefore, the statements are equivalent. I therefore maintain that “lol/lmao” is a valid response to claiming they are different.

I’m no fucken liberal

Voteblues are liberals, sorry

We should have cut Israel loose 30 years ago

Assuming it had to be founded, it should have been destroyed 70-something years ago

She has not promised to “keep sending Israel bombs”. She has said that she would continue to arm Israel

lol