The time to do that was 2020-2024, honestly. They had power. Now they’re having to fight the whole fucking thing uphill, and of course Trump is going to make himself president for life.

They should try to recover us to a democracy, IDK what the fuck the alternative would be. But the time to put Trump in custody was January 2021. Now we’ve got the exact same fight on our hands that that would have caused, but they get to be inside the castle shooting out.

So I disagreed with this:

Because the opinion pieces were all winging about how Harris lost because … she hadn’t been mean enough to trans people.

Now that we’ve solidly established that I was 100% in the right to disagree with this, you’ve done a few rhetorical backflips around to where you’re accusing me of a bunch of things I never said. You’ve also actually managed to backflip your way around to where because I posted a negative story about Gavin Newsom, I must not care about negative things about Gavin Newsom and I must think he’s our next president.

I changed my mind: You might be the galaxy brain propaganda. It’s honestly pretty impressive. Well done! If you want to engage with anything I actually said, you’re welcome to.

Okay, so it wasn’t “all” opinion pieces, it was no opinion pieces. Glad we got that squared away. There is an NBC News article, and a couple of clueless reps apparently. Hooray. To me this piece sounds like a pretty good instance of the galaxy-brain type of propaganda that can successfully turn everyone against the Democrats, whether you are pro-trans or anti-trans, which is generally a pretty good accomplishment when you can swing it.

Do they? When did this happen? I know they arrest people for “Plasticine Action” T-shirts.

Germany’s been doing fucked up stuff for a while. People have literally had the police visit and gotten citations for what they said online (for example calling a politician a “penis” on social media.) It’s fucked.

Haha, I was actually going to make fun of the “milk toast” but I thought there were some more substantive issues.

People are applying for refugee status in Canada already, especially LGBTQ people. Which makes it fucking hilarious that there are people in another adjacent comments section yelling at me “AS AN LGBTQ PERSON I CAN’T SUPPORT GAVIN NEWSOM HOW DARE” and expecting me to take them seriously or something.

No, he made it into the news because he’s doing all this attention grabbing shit. And then some geniuses sprung the gotcha of “Aha! He is a high-profile Democrat, therefore nothing he does counts, because he’s just doing it because he wants to be president!” And then they sat back with a satisfied smile.

The article isn’t talking him up as a candidate. I’m not talking him up as a candidate. He’s not in the news because he’s a candidate for the election that’s going to happen in three and a half years. Are you now shifting your stance from “now that he’s being talked up as a candidate” to something different? Or still claiming he’s being talked up as a candidate for the election and that’s why we have to “respond” with this sort of disclaimer? I mean, it’s fine, I actually was as you noted the person who posted this article which is slapping a disclaimer on what he is doing. But IDK where you got the idea that all of a sudden now he’s being talked up as a candidate.

I’m not going to vote for my own demise

If you didn’t vote against Trump in the last election, you literally voted for your own demise. Maybe literally. I hope it turns out okay for you.

Fighting for better than the Democrats is in no way whatsoever incompatible with fighting to survive in the meantime.

now that he’s being talked up as a presidential candidate

I haven’t heard anyone talking him up as a candidate. I mean, people have talked about it periodically and I’m sure they still are, but the reason he’s in the news right now is because he’s trying to fuck up Trump’s planning. The election isn’t for years and years (maybe longer than that, the way things are going) right now.

If you look back on my profile you can see me commenting on a couple of them (including return2ozma reposting something from 2023 because it was a good opportunity to shit on Newsom and then a bunch of people coming in the comments lecturing me on how important it was to shit on Newsom).

Because the opinion pieces were all winging about how Harris lost because she didn’t go on enough podcasts

I mean that part is definitely true. The Democratic campaign machine is a big collection of boomer shit, of which this was one example. I thought that was generally agreed upon on Lemmy?

, and/or because she hadn’t been mean enough to trans people.

Fuckin’ what? Who said that? What are some of these opinion pieces?

at best his milk toast careerism will knee cap the congressional battles that happen at the same time

Sounds like it’s doing literally 100% the exact opposite, because he unlike almost all of the Democratic party is actually trying to fight for proper representation in congress. Right? Or did we read different articles or something?

Yeah. I’m especially suspicious of the big influx of posts that are all of a sudden super-concerned about his progressive credentials, as if the most important thing right now that we’re trying not to go to Trump-prison for making a Democratic campaign contribution, is what Gavin Newsom’s homeless policy was like. But this one I posted because I do feel like it’s pretty accurate to what I don’t like about Gavin Newsom on a general personal level. But yeah, he’s doing fine, it’s good that he’s trying to mess up Trump, I wish more people would.

Inb4 they pretty much don’t do a fucking thing, and we start seeing commercials and public perception about how bad and fake this whole “government internet” thing is

I feel like you’re ascribing a kind of logic to Stalin’s purges that didn’t exist. It definitely wasn’t as straightforward or honest as determining what your ideology was, and then killing you if it wasn’t the right one. You know the joke about “10 years hard labor for nothing? That can’t be right…”?

From the English WP:

According to historian Eric D. Weitz, 60% of German exiles in the Soviet Union had been liquidated during the Stalinist terror and a higher proportion of the KPD Politburo membership had died in the Soviet Union than in Nazi Germany.

It wasn’t a small proportion that died in Nazi Germany.

Weitz also noted that hundreds of German citizens, the majority of whom were communists, had been handed over to the Gestapo from Stalin’s administration.[28]

The German version, which I read in machine translation, is fuckin’ fascinating. Here’s our boy Ernst Thälmann saying he couldn’t really see how anything could be more fascist than the social democrats, but said that at least the Hitler era government was going to be a lot more dangerous. Just not any more fascist, because how could such a thing be?

The Hitler-Hugenberg-Papen cabinet is the open fascist dictatorship. As far as the composition of the government is concerned, there can hardly be any further escalation in the direction of open fascism in Germany. However, there are still a whole series of possibilities for escalation in the methods of this government of open fascist dictatorship. Any doubt that this government would shrink from any Balkan methods of extreme terror would be very dangerous.

Here’s the German communists thrilled about the non-aggression pact between the USSR and Germany, because hooray! Peace!

The non-aggression pact exposes the Nazi regime’s propaganda about the alleged ‘encirclement’ of Germany. […] The German people welcome the non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany because they want peace […] because unlike Hitler’s alliance with Mussolini and the Japanese militarists, it is not an instrument of war and imperialist violation of other peoples, but a pact to preserve peace between Germany and the Soviet Union.

The war of the great imperialist powers in Europe has become a fact. Again millions of people are being driven to the battlefields, chased to their deaths. All illusions about permanent peace systems, disarmament and understanding in the world of capitalism have been shattered. […] The true cause lies in the imperialists’ struggle for supremacy in Europe and for the redistribution of the earth. For 20 years, imperialists have been striving to satisfy their predatory desires at the expense of the Soviet Union.

… which is why we joined up with the people doing it all! Which is a good thing!

Fuckin’ morons. It’s easy to pick holes in hindsight of course.

Also, it says “at least” 242 (Mindestens 242 KPD-Spitzenfunktionäre) 242 of the top functionaries were killed, and similar for “over” (über) 4000 regular members. I shouldn’t have said “had them all killed,” I guess, my impression was that it was so universal as makes no difference but maybe I’m wrong about that. He killed a whole fuck of a lot of them.

The tragicomedy continues in the next section, too, where the KPD was allowed to operate in West Germany but consistently failed to win any nontrivial number of people to their side (wonder why), and then tried to hold power by declaring that anyone in a union had to agree to loyalty to their party first, and the union second. The members of pretty much every single union told them to go get fucked. Then, ejected from both governmental and labor power structures, they devolved into bitter infighting over whether they should “tolerate” the existence of the German government or not, as if it was up to them. They expelled anyone who was in favor of toleration. Then, in 1956, with their support among the people at 2.2%, they tried to curry a little favor with the government by dropping their goal of “revolutionary overthrow of the Adenauer regime” which would otherwise clearly have been just around the corner. The government, unfooled, banned their party.

Just a fuckin’ rollercoaster. Honestly, it is exactly as if Hexbear grew up and got into politics. Surprisingly identical.

Türkiye coming in with the spike

There is also the tragicomedy of the German communists following instructions from Moscow about how to engage in rebellion against the social democrats of the day, which was a big part of setting the backdrop of political chaos that enabled Hitler to seize power, while Stalin occasionally ratted them out to Hitler’s secret police. And then, when it all went tits-up and the ones left alive fled Germany for the USSR where they could finally live with their communist allies, Stalin had them all killed.

The more things change amirite

Welcome to the United States, where the rich people get socialism and the poors get prison

Is it opposite day or something? I could swear I literally gave a counterexample in the message you’re replying to lol