Is Ron DeSantis as big of a threat to democracy as Trump?

 So, we've already more or less established that Trump is a fundamental threat to democracy given his January 6th crap. But now Florida is considering a bill that would ban the democratic party from the state. I admit, this isn't Ron acting directly as he's the executive and some crazy in the legislature was the one who made this, but it is a concern. This is literal Nazi 1933 crap right here. I mean, I get that they framed it as banning a party associated with slavery, and the dems were the party of slavery...several party realignments ago in the 1860s, but as most educated people know, the parties have changed since then and the democrats are now the party of wokeness and identity politics, completely opposed to their original ideals. 

It's unclear if this would allow them to reregister under another name. Apparently the name has to be different, and I'm not sure if they'd seriously allow another party if they can just ban this one. We know that they banned ranked choice voting last year, so it doesnt seem they're friendly to third parties either. This is some crazy crap. These guys are just full on anti democratic and going on some insane power grab here. I might have issues with the democratic party not being democratic enough, and being anti third party, but a two party system is better than a one party system. 

This kind of makes me have to consider my third party stance. Keep in mind, when I made my original third party votes, I did so in an era where the democrats were fear mongering and drumming up a threat that didn't really exist yet. They literally were the boy who cried wolf on this. But now there is an actual wolf. Trump has literally incited an insurrection and now the state his main opponent is from is making crazy authoritarian power grabs. If this is the future of the GOP, then we should be afraid, very afraid.

Keep in mind my original idea, I would willingly deal with a horridly incompetent and even evil administration if it meant that afterwards we could get closer to our goals. But...it seems like the GOP has gotten so radical and authoritarian that we can no longer really sit back and just sit from the sidelines. So yes, I might feel like I have to "vote blue no matter who" in 2024. I wish it didn't come to this. I really think that 2016 was a "finish him" or "cast it into the fire" moment for the democrats to finish off the GOP for good (in their current form, the party would come back after about 10-20 years of systematically getting destroyed election after election and be forced to the center as the dems run to the left), but in rejecting bernie and embracing hillary, they put us on a very dangerous course. And yes, I blame the dems there, not the voters. They had a potential coalition they could have embraced and they failed to. And this is the result. 

Don't think I'm letting the democrats off the hook here. The democrats are very anti democratic themselves. We've discussed at length how they systematically control their primary and media presence to frame the entire election in their favor, putting the thumb on the scale to get their preferred outcome. And let's not forget how they've made it so difficult in blue states for third parties to get ballot access, or the fact that they worked to get the greens off the ballot in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2020.

So yeah, dems are scummy, let's never forget. And they're not owed votes. But...if the GOP is literally going to bring the end of whatever pretense of democracy we got left, we might have to play defensively to stop that. Better to make a tactical retreat and live to fight another day than to own the dems only for the GOP to be 10x worse than they are anyway. Again, I'd put a republican in charge if it meant it imploded so badly the GOP would get destroyed at the ballot box ever since, but I'm not going to play that game if the GOP is trying to power grab themselves and turn us into a fascist post democratic country. First we gotta send a message to the GOP that democracy is not on the table, and once that threat is passed, THEN we can bring the fight to the democrats again. My worst fear is that because of 2016 being a realigning year we're gonna be stuck in this cycle until the 2050s or 2060s. That would be scary to me. Hopefully we can reverse course by 2028 or the 2030s.

Discussing Vivek Ramaswamy's presidential campaign, and how he perfectly personifies the ideology of "the cave"

 So, I feel like this is something important to discuss. Kyle Kulinski today discussed this guy on his youtube channel, but I have a much deeper ideological teardown of this guy I wanna go over. Basically, the dude is another kind of guy who wants to "make america great again", while offering an alternative vision to Trump 2024. Why do I use the MAGA language? Because the dude seems to have the same energy. Go back to some idea of the past in which things were simple, black is black, white is white, right is right, and wrong is wrong. Conservatives live for the cave, they like things simple. And this dude's entire campaign seems to be about promoting a cultural alternative to "wokeism" and restoring America to its roots.

Now, as we discussed in the earlier article, if we look at this through say, Understanding the Times, we can see that conservatism and wokeism are two different ideologies and visions for the country, and the right loves to attack wokeism while promoting their own stuff. They see a vision of America in which things are run awry and all of these crazy progressives are trying to change things, and we need to go back to our roots. What are our roots, according to this guy? Well, in the video Kyle covers, it's stuff like religion, patriotism, and hard work. You know, the usual.

And that really got me thinking, that stuff basically is the essence of plato's cave, and the nonsense that I escaped, and why I named my blog what I did. Basically, conservatives like things simple. They like up to be up, down to be down, and they like life to be simplified to them where some dude just tells them what it is, and they obey. They are often christian, believing in that version of god and religion and whatever authoritarian trappings that has related to things like purpose, morality, etc. They believe in patriotism, basically treating their obsession with "America" as a religion in itself. And of course, they have a work fetish. Work is what defines their life, it is their purpose, it is their calling. They love people to tell them what to think, they live for the illusions, and a world without their religion, obnoxiously religious sense of patriotism, and work scares them. As they see it, without these things, society would fall apart. literally. They think all crime and social dysfunction in the world is due to sinfulness, and if people just kept their head down, obeyed god and the state, and worked hard, that they would live a good life. 

It's really sad when you think about it. Again, this guy sees himself as the head of a cultural movement, he's fighting his own culture war here in running his presidential campaign. And he seems to be calling for some sort of conservative revival and rediscovering our cultural roots or whatever.

Now, here's my issue with this. It's perfectly fine, if YOU want to delude yourself with this nonsense. if you wanna believe in an authoritarian concept of god who told you what the world is, and gave you a place in it in the form of your job, go for it, but I dont believe that nonsense. And we all know that these conservatives are ultimately authoritarian. Not only do they need to believe in this nonsense, they gotta force that stuff on you as well.

I admit, the left got off on the wrong foot with wokeism. As I've stated many times on this blog, while they sometimes have okay ideas, they dont speak for me, and my own ethos has a much different ideological bend to it.

I guess, you can say I'm a culture warrior too in this sense. I also fight for my own idea of America's soul, but my vision of the future is one of liberty, and also of increased well being. I combine libertarianism with progressivism. I support ideas like human centered capitalism, based on humanist principles. The idea that economy exists for people, not people for the economy. The idea that work is a means to an end, just a way to get the stuff we need, not an end in itself, or this massive calling that the right and their protestant work ethic nonsense makes it out to be. The idea that there is no purpose but that which we make for ourselves. And I believe every person's relationship with god is personal. They should be able to decide whatever they want, but they have no justification in governing others. The only purpose of government is to prevent harm to others, to improve well being, and to otherwise leave people alone and preserve their liberty. 

Yes, I guess that you can say, for all I rip on the culture wars, I'm a culture warrior myself, but my vision is both distinct from the left and the right. The right goes all in with the cave, but the left makes their own cave based on stuff like marxism, and postmodernism, and dont get me wrong, these ideas are nice and have some intellectual validity, but the left does try to make a religion out of this stuff too. And that's my issue both with leftists and with SJWs. At the end of the say, SJWs want to rope me into their little performative virtue signalling nonsense at the expense of my priorities. And the left, well, let's be honest, any time actual marxists get an iota of power it seems to end terribly. Yes they have some valid criticisms against capitalism, but looking at marxist governments, they just ended up creating their own state religion too.

What makes my brand of politics different? I both want to ensure your needs are taken care of, but also to leave you alone. I oppose all kinds of authoritarianism, both left and right, and I try to resolve a lot of common dichotomies that normally plague our society like left vs right, collectivism vs individualism. My ideology breaks these traditional scales. I hit both buttons at once, I want to eat my cake and have it too. I want a system collectivist and left wing enough to ensure everyone is taken care of, but capitalist and libertarian enough to ensure that people maintain their freedom. If anything, my idea actually expands freedom, since right libertarianism or propertarianism leads to wage slavery, and only my ideas give people true freedom and autonomy within the capitalist system. Often times leftists promote their own version of freedom from capitalism and authoritarianism, but at the same time, their ideas are just another cave sometimes. 

And yeah. I guess that's where I wanted to go with this. It's not left or right, but forward. Ugh, I wish Yang didn't ruin that quote with his forward party. But yeah, he didn't come up with it, so it's cool I guess (been a UBI slogan since 2014 or earlier). And I guess forward is kinda left given how authoritarian the right is, but not crazy left. 

And yeah. We need a whole new ethos for the 21st century. The traditional left-right dichotomy isn't working. We need to get out of whatever culture wars we're stuck in. And we need to move toward having a human centered economy, and human centered society. And yeah, that's where my head is at with 2024. Unfortunately the only candidate who might remotely deliver that is Marianne Willamson and lets face it, she has no chance.

Discussing DeSantis vs wokeness, Tennessee's new law, and how the right doesn't give a crap about freedom

 So, I don't talk about the right that much on here, mainly because I like to write about INTERESTING topics, and not "bad things are bad, good things are good". Whenever I feel like I'm writing about the right, I feel like my articles often come down to that unless there's a more important point to make about the right. 

This...kinda feels like the former. So, as we know, in Florida, Ron DeSantis is banning wokeness in schools and nonsense like that. I mean, the right wingers act like teaching wokeness is an existential threat to their existence, and I guess that a well rounded education is, as their ideas can't compete in a real market place of ideas assuming the people are intelligent enough to think about these things. So what have they done? Well, over the past half centuries, they've tried taking over schools. They point out the advantage the left has in higher education, so they've hammered home on K-12, trying to push their nonsense, especially in southern states. And now, wokeness is the big threat they're freaked out again.

Now, we've read Noebel on here, we know how the right approaches worldview, and how the "woke" or postmodern worldview is competition for the fundamentalist christian one. And while I dont really agree with either, the woke one is at least based on sound theory, even if I can't imagine making it my entire perspective. The right doesnt like it simply because it displaces their worldview. 

Honestly, the right is in such a moral panic about this nonsense that they didn't even know how to define it. They just knew it was bad and had to get back to the person asking the definition. Then they came back and talked about systemic injustices. 

Now, Im going to be honest. Im not a fan of "wokeism", although my definition varies a bit. I'm mostly concerned about those who make it their entire worldview, are extremely evangelical on forcing it on others, and insist on punishing anyone who doesnt go along with them. I see those guys as a threat to freedom as they take it to religious zealotry levels of insanity. But what Ron DeSantis is doing is just as bad if not worse.

I mean, belief in systemic injustices, by that definition I'M woke. I mean, I accept systemic injustices. Not just racial and gender based ones, but ones of all kind. And that's an important part of education. Like, being able to understand systemic issues, conflict theory and all, that's BASIC SOCIOLOGY. Ron is being full on anti intellectual here and banning literal sociology in effect here. That's messed up. This is a fundamental violation of freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and it anti intellectual in nature.

This isn't uncommon among the right. Remember when back in the 2012 election cycle the Texas GOP talked about banning critical thinking? Yeah, these guys are anti intellectual nutcases. Screw these guys. 

And then we gotta talk about Tennessee. They just banned drag shows. Like, wtf. They're literally so afraid of men in dresses that they banned the concept. I mean, just...wow. Again, massive violation of peoples' freedom. If guys wanna wear dresses, go for it, let your freak flag fly. I don't care. But for some reason, the right does.

This kinda stuff is why i can never be a rightoid on social issues. I mean, some of the literal woke crazies will think I'm a right winger just for not being as extreme as them on their crap, but uh, to actually get to a point where the right wing worldview makes sense, you need to have this extremely conservative authoritarian view of society. And I just don't. Like, I left that crap, I'm never going back. I'm actually pretty libertarian on social issues. I keep saying it whenever i criticize the woke people too. I'm LIBERTARIAN on social issues. As in, laid back, do what you want, just dont hurt other people. I dont like the woke people trying to force their crap on everyone else, sure. But I also dont like the right trying to regulate behavior according to their weird authoritarian religious worldviews. It's a shame that in the 21st century we have to actually discuss these issues openly and say "hey maybe banning this crap" is bad. For me, this crap has been won 10 years ago now, and it's like, jesus, why won't the right just go away already? 

I mean, it's nuts. Party of small government, people. Small enough to fit in your vaginas and regulate abortion. Small enough to tell you what you should and shouldnt wear. Small enough to ban valid social science from educational facilities. Seriously, screw the right.

I want to make it clear, to all my anti woke lefties and fence sitters out there. I know there's this alt right pipeline out there, don't go down it. Those guys are indoctrinating you into their own craziness. I know it's attractive to want to own the woke libs who get so self righteous and grating that you just wanna take them down a peg, but seriously, don't join the right. Because at the end of the day, the REAL religious crazies are on the right. Yes, woke people are crazy, sometimes they get high on the smell of their own BS, yada yada, but trust me, you dont wanna join the right. Because they do crap like this.

if you want to be libertarian, then be libertarian. Be a third force against both sides of the crazy. That's what I am. I'm a bona fide enlightened centrist and i cant stand both sides. But at the end of the day, im still closer to the left. I recognize woke people sometimes have points, they just need to tone down the crazy themselves.

Expanding on human centered capitalism as a concept

 So, I'm currently taking a break from politics stuff mostly as I managed to burn myself out on it yet again, but I did have a strike of inspiration that is causing me to want to write a quick article.

So, as I've stated before, I'm a supporter of human centered capitalism. Andrew Yang coined the term and I largely do agree with his framing of it, but I have believed something similar for a while, and take it in a slightly different direction. 

As I said before, my own framing is this: is the economy made for humans, or are humans made for the economy? I notice a lot of people on the economic right tend to believe in the concept of markets with almost a religious faith. Basically, whatever the market decrees and wherever the pieces fall is just, and we should defer to the laissez faire results of the economy with the force of objective morality. Clearly whatever the market decides by its natural mechanisms is okay, and if that means that people are excluded from markets due to lack of resources, or need to work long hours being productive enough to justify their own existence (aka "earn a living") or starve to death, then that is a okay as far as markets go.

But....again, that's not human centered capitalism. In such a scenario, the economy isn't existing for people, people are coerced to fit in with the economy somehow, and the economy is a cruel mistress that basically enslaves most people to ensure maximal productivity for its own sake, rather than looking around and seeing whether this system makes sense.

I am a supporter of capitalism, ie, "markets", as opposed to socialism, ie, state or collective ownership of the means or production, which normally amounts to a command economy, but markets need to be applied to human ends, and I am perfectly fine with distorting them in order to achieve results that better serve human ends.

The theory behind markets is that while many buyers and sellers come together and exchange goods and services with each other for money, that somehow, the public good is being achieved here. That's the point of it all. To achieve that public good. We should not force people to be slaves for the accumulation of some rich person's private capital, the system needs to work to achieve human ends. And the government has an active role in regulating the economy, or introducing distortions in order to achieve the "proper" result.

Markets don't exist in vacuums. We like to act like they do, and that the econ 101 model of markets is always correct, but it's not. Government actions ensure the safe environment for markets to exist to begin with, and the rules underlying those markets are often enforced with rule of law. Governments protect the private property of the rich. Governments protect IP laws that are sometimes anti competitive. Governments actively manage the labor market to ensure a balance between inflation and unemployment. Most people dont question such actions. But the second you ask the government to say, break up a monopoly, or regulate things to ensure things like environmental protection and fair treatment of workers, people lose their crap. But such things are also variables that influence markets, and there's no reason why we shouldn't do such things if it leads to preferable results. I even support things like UBI, giving workers the freedom as the power to say no. The government establishes a property rights system that protects the rich and ensures the poor have to work to get their needs met, well, everyone acts like that's natural, but giving everyone a UBI to ensure people aren't coerced and can enter markets as free people as econ 101 theory indicates is suddenly bad? I mean, really. I even support, in the case of extreme market failures, that government runs an industry itself, either directly or indirectly, such as with healthcare or education. Ultimately, we should be focused on whether the end result makes sense for the people. The system should be designed around human needs, we shouldn't have this system in which we act like it exacts perfect justice in its natural form, people need to conform to it, or be punished.

That I feel is the difference between the right and the left worldview wise to some extent. The right often insists on creating their little perfect systems, and then imposing them on people to horrifying results, insisting with all of these oughts how humans should act, and then when the results don't work, blaming them for their moral failures. This is the same crap they accuse the far left communists of doing. You know all that stuff about great in theory, good on paper, discounts human nature, blah blah blah? Yeah, that's the right, actually. The left, at least the more liberal left, wants to make those institutions serve people. It looks at where humans are, and tries to make systems around human needs and human nature. Ie, institutions under liberalism and other related ideologies like social democracy and my favored social libertarianism, are supposed to serve the people. Hence, human centered capitalism. There's nothing just about free markets and unjust about government intervention. Nor should we assume the opposite, as the socialists do, that we should abolish markets and have nothing BUT government intervention (yes yes, i know im boiling socialism down to "when the government does things" here, but again, socialism is, in the context of this article, a centrally planned economy, market socialism is actually a version of capitalism as far as I'm concerned as it's a market based system). 

And yeah, I just wanted to write all of this stuff down while it was fresh in my mind. I don't understand why having a system designed around human needs is so controversial. Then again, that's the power of propaganda for ya. People develop these fancy ideological systems based on models in their head, and they believe them as if they are objective models of morality, when nah, it's just another subjective morality. The only morality that to me is objective is that which makes peoples' lives better while respecting individuals' freedom and autonomy to the greatest extent possible. Even then some would simply simplify that to "makes it better", but I added that caveat as some people would use that logic to design a "perfect life" no one could reasonably object to when the result is quite tyrannical and leaves people with little or no liberty.

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It was ironically a debate over the GPU market that caused this. A lot of hardware subs have an obnoxious right wing bend due to PC gaming being more and more a hobby of the affluent, as more and more mainstream gamers are getting priced out of the market. I pointed out how the market was broken and got a "well ackshully" comment going on about how because people are buying GPUs the prices are justified and blah blah blah. And I...fundamentally disagree.

Here's the thing. The ideal free market has many buyers and many sellers, to a point that no one seller dominates the market and dictates its course of action.

But the GPU market has traditionally been a duopoly for the last 20 years or so, with a third player only recently joining into the fray. One company (nvidia) dominates 88% of the market share and effectively sets the prices. The other main company (AMD) makes CPUs and only half heartedly competes in the GPU space. While AMD has aggressively undercut Nvidia in the past, they seem to be less incentivized to do so this time around, wanting to allocate more silicon to their booming CPU industry. So they're just satisfied to do the bare minimum to halfheartedly compete. And while in my experience, they lowered prices enough to sway me to buy their products, they still havent done a whole lot to make inroads with GPUs in the same way they have with CPUs. Ironically, I keep saying we need them to do with GPUs what they did with CPUs with ryzen, but to be fair, once they got the upper hand they started overcharging to the point intel's pricing structure looked attractive.

Intel is that third player in the GPU market. They've previously made IGPs but this is their first real attempt to capture GPU market share, and need to sell products cheaply to get anywhere. Their products aren't the best, even for the price they're questionable as they're quite immature and lack a lot of the "it just works" aspects you'd expect from the other two companies, but they're trying.

The fact is, it's hard to make a GPU company. You cant just open one. it requires billions in R&D, so you need to be a big company to get your foot in the door, and due to IP laws you cant just copy your competitor, but make your entirely new product by yourself. And a reason nvidia is so far ahead is they have all of these exclusive features other companies can't just copy, so they need to spend billions making their own derivative versions of these features (so AMD ends up with inferior features overall, and intel is just...all over the place right now). This allowed nvidia, the one company with their crap completely together, to push their advantage and charge high prices to protect their profits, with the other companies not being in a significant position to undercut them. Even though AMD is cheaper, buying them often requires some sacrifices a lot of gamers aren't willing to make, but I personally am, in order to get a cheaper product. 

So, you have an industry, that requires billions in money to start your own company, with uncertain returns, and IP laws protecting the market leaders, stopping the market from being more of an actual free market, and as a result, prices are high, competition is weak, and in response to lower demand, they simply reduced supply rather than reduce their prices. This is full on anti consumer behavior. I'm sorry, but the whole "well if people are priced out of the market then that's fine because markets are always right" approach, is freaking ignorant and ignores how we got here. I know a lot of people will claim that well, its harder to turn a profit these days, but that's because of nvidia in part too. They went all in with these super expensive proprietary technologies it has significantly increased the costs of GPUs, and people are just following where nvidia took the market. 

It isnt just the lack of features that turned people off from AMD, mind you, it's also that they're a damaged brand. Every generation they overhype their products and act like they're problem free, and then they can't even get their drivers right half the time. So people expect a smooth experience, AMD drops the ball again, in part because they're in that inferior market position of not being able to make enough money to make a better driver team, and yeah. it's just a mass. AMD marketing is obnoxiously bad as it overpromises and underdelivers, AMD's fanboys are insufferable on the internet, and most people just associate AMD with making inferior products. Even in the CPU market where they're solid and rapidly increasing market share, they still got only 30% to intel's 70%. Because people just trust intel as a name brand more. AMD has serious problems and needs to rehabilitate their image. I dont think their products are AS bad as people say, but yeah, let's just say I've had experiences where I understand why they're the inferior brand. 

But yeah. That's the state of the market. You got one company who just dominates everything, has their crap together, and makes very good, but very expensive products and holds a de facto monopoly, and two weaker companies who also specialize in CPUs, treat the GPU market as secondary, dont invest a ton in it, and make worse products that are cheaper. 

How do we fix this? Well, I think breaking AMD up COULD be a solution. AMD bought out ATI back in the 2000s, and their lack of interest in consumer GPUs is reflected with the poor state of AMD's GPUs. We could do anti trust stuff against nvidia for being TOO strong, and them having TOO much market share. We could deregulate the IP end of things to make more space in the markets. Really, having one company with so many proprietary technologies that it just destroys the competition is BAD for the market. We could look into price gouging. 

We could even look at the issue up stream. Like, a lot of the cheerleaders of these companies point out that companies like TSMC and samsung who control the larger microchip markets, and who these companies get their stock from, also dominate the market in their own way, making it very difficult for companies to supply silicon to make chips.

And another thing, I know trump had a tariff on GPUs that's supposed to go into effect at some point. They should scrap that. It's just more "lets make crap in America" BS which is well meaning, but again, if work is a means to an end, we shouldnt circlejerk so hard about JERBS, and we should focus on ensuring people get cheaper products. Give people who are unemployed a UBI. Most of them won't be able to afford GPUs on it (maybe at the family level), but hey it's a step in the right direction. 

The fact is, this economy needs to be structured around human needs. The market has to work for the people. While yes, profit motive is essential in motivating these companies to work and make stuff in the first place, we shouldnt let markets get to positions where they descend into uncompetitive oligopolies with consumer unfriendly practices. We shouldnt be okay with pricing people out of the market and then circlejerking about how it's okay because "the free market decreed it so" or whatever. Economies work for people. And if they arent working for people, well, at some point something has to give where the underlying conditions of the market need to change to make it for the people. Are you okay with people being priced out of markets while de facto monopolies make money hand over fist? I sure as heck ain't. We need to go all Teddy Roosevelt on these people sometimes.

Anyway, I know this is a massive digression from my original point, but I felt like including the original topic of discussion that inspired this here.

The insanity of propertarianism: taxes are slavery but forced labor is "natural"?

 This is just a blurb, but something that irritates me about debating with the right. A lot of the time when my anti work views come up, and I start talking about how capitalism imposes forced labor on people, they seem to deny this, but then claim that redistribution is slavery because we're forcing people to work to provide for another. Recently, one debate I got in got to a point where the dude was going on about how we had the "freedom to starve to death", but that taxes are slavery. While I understand the mindset that leads to such an approach to ethics, it seems very distorted in my worldview.

To summarize the right wing worldview, they see poverty as natural, that work is needed to make things to get out of poverty, and that property is a "natural right" and that forced redistribution is evil. This ultimately leads to a society where we all circlejerk over work ethic and talk about endlessly creating jobs rather than simply redistributing wealth as needed to make life easier for everyone involved. 

With my worldview, I believe we should have some redistribution to stop people from being forced to labor to survive, while still maintaining enough work incentive for people to want to work. Kind of a "eat your cake and have it to" mindset. For me, the purpose of linking greater wealth to work...is to incentivize work, as long as people continue to work enough to meet society's needs, it does not matter to me if we deviate from that mindset. I understand that we need some work to be done, but that a rigid approach to property and work just subjects people to servitude, leads to extreme inequalities, and the problems with society as it exists.

For me, redistribution is not slavery, and here's why. Forcing one group to work while another group is free not to is immoral to me. But that's kind of the leftist criticism to capitalism, and how it grants, by virtue of ownership, all of the profits and surplus labor of the system, while others are robbed of the product of their labor and subjected to an inhumane work process in order to force them to work and then not give them what they're "owed." 

I'm not saying rigidly adopting to that is good either, mind you. Again, the purpose of linking property to work is to incentivize people to work. But if we made a system where one group is forced to work to provide for another, sure, that's immoral. but what if we made a system where we redistribute wealth to everyone, thus giving everyone, including workers, the same right to not work? That's all I want. A system where a UBI guaranteed at liberating people from actual forced labor as a right to citizenship exists, and that work becomes as voluntary as humanly possible. In such a system, taxation is not forced labor. Because the choice to work is, in itself, voluntary. 

It's weird, the idea that redistribution is forced labor acts as if there's something compulsory about labor in the first place. Like I "HAVE TO" work, and cant choose not to, and now my wealth is being given to someone else. But then this guy talked about how people were free not to work, and to starve.

The idea of being forced to work for oneself is not evil for them, but the idea of being forced to work for others is evil to them. Although most in practice have to work for others. I see the very idea of having to work as what's evil under capitalism. If we accomplished a system in which work was voluntary, we simply paid back our UBi as we got more money, and eventually paid into the fund, and the very act of choosing to work is as voluntary as humanly possible, then what is the harm? Who is truly being forced to work? Taxes are just part of the deal of choosing to work. And if that choice is a free choice, then why is that more immoral than a system in which everyone is forced to work to provide for themselves or starve?

Honestly, again, propertarians have what I consider to be a distorted moral compass. I kind of understand it, but it's like these guys are indoctrinated into the current system and simply do not know that there are other ways of approaching these issues. To me, taxation is a far lesser evil than being forced to work in the first place. For them, being forced to work is natural, but having to share is evil. It's insanity to me. 

Have I changed my mind on how we should have handled COVID?

 So, I saw this question on the internet, and thought it was worth discussing. Our COVID response, should we have handled it differently? More specifically, should we have shut down the economy. 

And uh...yeah. my response is that my strategy wouldn't have been terribly different than what we did, if anything, we should have been MORE strict. The key to stopping a pandemic like this is to stop it EARLY, before it spreads. Trump downplayed it and didnt take the threat seriously and was too concerned about what the virus would do to the economy to properly control its spread. We should have been like Madagascar in Pandemic 2. Shut down everything. The stronger, more decisive action we took at first, the better the response would have been. We could have had a global shut down for like a couple weeks, the virus wouldnt have spread at all, and we would go back to normal. But because we waited until it was out there spreading to take action against it, we were too late.

I don't think shutting down the economy for a year, like we did, was unreasonable. Again, maybe I spent too much time in college playing Pandemic 2, but given how it was basically like super flu and was like 100x more deadly or something, and given how many people died from it, yeah, we weren't unreasonable for trying to control it. I think shutting down was a good decision. At the very least, we flattened the curve where we didn't overstretch our healthcare resources. Remember how we were concerned about exponential spread so fast that it would overwhelm the hospitals? That said, yes, absolutely, we made the right decision.

I'm going to be honest, the economy is not my top priority. I'm a human centered capitalist. Markets exist to serve us, we don't exist to serve them. And while we could make a case for modern capitalism being designed as "slavery with extra steps", I do believe that that's something a little reform can't fix. The republicans want the whole world to revolve around the economy. The economy is the most important thing. Everyone working constantly is the most important thing. Screw grandma, she can die, heck she would be glad to die to save the economy. Yeah, that's literally how the far right thinks. 

Heck, i'll double down on this, and this is where I really disagree with the right, and you see a difference in our philosophies. The right saw shutting down the economy as their way of life under attack by the far left. While some of this was delusions of tyranny and transitioning the economy to communism that got them concerned about ANY sort of shut down. But, there was also something else they feared: the loss of work ethic.

For the right, work ethic is the life blood of all societies. They believe if we are not disciplined and work constantly at all times, that capitalism will stop functioning and the country will decay and become weak. They think that if we don't all waste our lives working, that we will all starve come winter.

Now, see where the problem is from me. I actually AM anti work. Most liberals and leftists actually aren't, but I am. And something I personally hoped would happen with COVID is that much like I did when I was shut out of the economy post college/great recession, that people would kind of wake up, and realize that work isn't everything to life, and that it would cause a bit of a revolt against work as an idea.

Now, in some forms this did happen, but the right fought back ferociously, recognizing that this could happen. Their ideology kind of relies on everyone being nice little worker bees who are so brainwashed around work, that they can't see a life without it. If people start getting a bit too comfortable with that pandemic money, they might want a basic income. They might want to have more "work life balance", and we can't let that happen. Work should BE your life, according to them. Now get back to work, you little worker bee.

Of course, as right wingers do, they dressed this up as the guise of "freedom". People should be free TO work. They shouldnt be allowed to not work and be given money for not working. That ruins a person according to them. It ruins their work ethic, which ruins their character and given their entire ethical system isn't based around some sort of utilitarianism or consequentialism but some weirdo form of virtue ethics based on christianity, yeah they can't accept this from happening.

So to save the people and their work ethic, and what makes america "great" according to these people (which is a massive circlejerk about work ethic), they had to force Americans back to work. And the democrats, not wanting to look like evil socialists and basically giving in to these ideas, they ended up rolling over and opening up ASAP. 

Honestly, I'm going to be honest, I do have biases here given my attitudes toward work, but work shouldnt be central to peoples' lives. Work is what we do, to do the things we need, to survive or live a good life. But the right seeks work as a good in itself. And they believe in forcing people to work "for their own good", a direct callback to the protestant work ethic. 

And honestly, my view on the economy is this: as long as enough people are working to do the essential roles for society, i dont care about work ethic, and whether people work or not. I dont see work as an inherent good. I see work as a necessary evil. Never, at any point during the pandemic, did we push things to a point that peoples' basic needs weren't being met from a work perspective. From a distributional perspective, yeah, but from a work perspective, no. We kept the essential workers working. We laid off 1/3 of the work force, and kept the other 2/3 working doing the jobs Americans NEEDED to be done. And in a lot of ways, this laid bare what I said all along about work. That a lot of work out there doesnt NEED to be done. Don't get me wrong, who doesn't like going to the movies, or amusement parks, or getting a new GPU at a non insane price? But should people be FORCED under the threat of poverty to provide those things? No.

Honestly, 2020 taught me that my ideals actually were right, that the way our society is set up is artificial, it can be changed at any time, and that maybe it should change. I actually preferred the way we lived in 2020 to some extent over the way it is now. It was simpler, and while it was boring for all of the extraverts, let's face it, the nromal ways of life are hell on earth for someone like me, who feels forced to participate in a system that i really dont like. 

Really, for all of the talk of freedom, I felt like I had more freedom during covid than i do now in some ways. Sure, I couldnt do some things that could spread the disease, but I didnt really care much anyway. I missed out on only a handful of things. And in return, a got the freedom to not be forced to work as a slave in the economy to some extent. 

Really, what's NOT to like about that? 

Now, ideally, my actual ideal world is one in which we can all do what we want, extraverts can work and go to amusement parks, I can screw off and do my own thing, and everyone is happy. Again, it's Van Parijs' "lazies vs crazies" debate. The second the crazies lifestyle came under assault even a little, out of necessity, they screamed tyranny and blah blah blah. But as a "lazy", I actually kinda liked 2020, minus the disease part. I mean, I always seem to like it when the normal way of life is suspended. I loved snow days as a kid for example. Normal living in our society isn't living at all in my opinion, and I hate this system. Nothing makes me feel less burdened more than being told "nah, stay home today, go back to bed, don't get up early". COVID was actually an interesting time where we could practice how to move toward a less work centric society. We figured out new ways to teach kids, and new ways to do work remotely, and new ways to automate stuff away. And these were good things. And I think that to some extent, many of those changes were actually positive.

But, conservatives wanna conserve the traditional way of life in all of its glory. They screamed tyranny, they called for giving people the "freedom" to work, and they refused any and all ways to mitigate the virus. Which really pisses me off. Even though I have these idealistic anti work views, I'm not even the tyrant the right thinks I am, I wouldnt shut down the economy to force my ways on people, rather it was shut down because HEY THERE IS THIS DANGEROUS DISEASE GOING AROUND, and the right was so rigid they wouldn't even try to mask up, or get the vaccine. And that's freaking sickening. I mean, even if you are a pro work traditionalist, why wouldnt you get the vaccine? Why wouldnt you wear a mask? Again, they just have this irrational, ignorant anti authority bias where they dont like to be told what to do at all, even if it's to save lives, and see any attempts to change their behavior, even if it's to live life as they want to, as tyranny. It's dumb. So dumb. Do they not realize they made things worse?

THis is one of the reason lock downs were so ineffective. Because despite the federal lockdowns, the states were trying to open up everything all throughout the pandemic, causing the virus to spread like wildfire. Then they point to the virus spreading like wildfire and are like "see, those shut downs did nothing". YES BECAUSE YOU UNDERMINED THEM AND THEIR EFFECTIVENESS YOU IGNORANT PERSON. 

So no, I dont regret what we did, if anything I resent the far right for undermining everything we did. 

And as for the economy reopening. I admit, yes, shutting down an entire global economy and then reopening overnight was a bad idea. Everything with our economy is profits profits profits and productivity, productivity, productivity. And I do think we opened too fast. It's like the second the vaccine became available, we just reopened everything overnight. And that caused such a shock to the economy it created an inflationary spiral, because there was suddenly too much demand and too many jobs, and not enough raw resources for the economy to sustain itself, where the end result was an inflationary spiral. What happens when you have tons of people suddenly want to spend money on limited resources that arent there due to cut down pandemic supply chains, excessive demand,a nd everyone reopening the economy at once and not being able to fill the jobs for a variety of reasons. Quite frankly, we should have opened the economy slowly over 2021, rather than just removing all of the restrictions in april and letting things all where they may. If we opened it in stages, yes, people would have groaned and complained, but we wouldn't have had the crapshow that followed. And yeah, I know im pointing to supply chain issues and worker shortages (aka jobs surplus as I call it), rather than corporate greed, but that came later. The fact was, as soon as the economy turned into a free for all where inflation was rising, a lot of corporations just used the moment to be like...uh...we need to raise prices...because we can't find workers...and supply chain stuff...yeah. Oh wait, where did all of these profits come from? Yeah, corporations abused the crisis, the crisis had legit causes from reopening the economy, but then companies used it as an excuse just to make inflation significantly worse by using it as cover for raising prices as much as they can get away with. I think at this point we're FINALLY starting to see pushback as demand falls and suddenly, it turns out those prices are too high and no one can afford anything, but yeah. All of the crap that happened was because we reopened TOO FAST. Again, a slower, more planned out reopening that happened in gradual phases as people got the vaccine would have been better. But, again, the right screamed like a little word I don't wanna say on here, and then the left just...gave in to them.

Again, I strongly believe the core problem with our pandemic response was the right kept sabotaging it at every turn over their concerns about "tyranny" and the economy, and the left just giving in on the matter. Seriously, the right just sabotages everything the left does, then screams that government doesnt work, and everyone votes for the right. And then the left rolls over, and the right wins the moral argument, and the overton window keeps moving to the right. And now people are like gee, do you think we should have done things differently? Heck no, we should've doubled down instead of letting the right sabotage everything we wanted to do. 

And I do wanna discuss some of the culture wars that came after the economy reopened. Work from home. A lot of workers liked it. A lot of businesses didnt. They are forcing people to stop it and come in any way, all while rubbing it in their faces they can no longer work in sweat pants and have to dress up and blah blah blah. It's like the right loves to pride itself on hating good things and being for bad things. Again, it's because their entire moral compass is distorted. Again, to them, morality is about virtue and being a "good person" and "good people" are disciplined and have work ethic. WHile there is some "functionalist" basis to this, it's vastly overstated, and their crocodile tears about how every change ever is bad because it might mess with the normal functioning of society is vastly overstated. And to some extent, we live a lesser existence because of this. These guys dont actually understand how the world works, how the world can get by just fine without their ideas (to some extent, I'm not an EXTREMIST, mind you), and fight every minor change as if it will cause the downfall of society. Because in their minds it is.

And as we went back to "normal", we gaslight people for not following their model of society. Instead of calling the jobs surplus for what it is (because that IS what it is, normally the economy is structured to ensure there are more workers than jobs, and when we create a shock to the economy suddenly there are more jobs than workers), we claim it's a worker shortage and go on about how "no one wants to work any more", trying to bully and gaslight people. Like for as much as they were screaming about how not being able to work is tyranny during covid, they sure love shaming people for not being forced to take whatever job they can get regardless of working conditons and pay, and completely disregarding their alleged freedom in the economy. Funny how that works. Seriously, while I can be somewhat sympathetic, in more normal times, that forcing people to not work is a bad thing, so is forcing people to work. We're not respecting peoples' freedom post covid to say no. Instead, people are trying to force others to work to provide luxuries that they dont really NEED, while simultaneously removing worker protections like self isolating during covid. So now workers have no choice but to go to work sick and spread covid to their coworkers. Lovely. But that's the world the right wants. The economy doesnt work for you, you work for it, and you better get back to working even if you're exposed to this potentially deadly virus that still exists and we like to just forget about.

And now they're trying to stop the free covid vaccines and go to a normal paid model, which I think Bernie stopped to some extent but yeah, that was a thing, and that is sickening too. We had one taste of single payer healthcare in this country with these covid vaccines, and now they're taking it away. 

Seriously, the right fought this as a cultural revolution, and they're winning, and the left is just rolling over left and right. This crisis could have been a time for us to come together, realize that we don't need to keep living this way, and change our economy to be more centric to our actual needs. Instead, the right recognized the threat of this, and wanting to force their stupid little ideas of virtue on people and wanting to stop people from making those realizations, forced the country to reopen everything prematurely, none of our policies were anywhere near as effective as they should have been, and the left just rolled over and let them score the big cultural win. 

I really hate this country sometimes. Again, the big problem is we have a crazed right that will fight like hell to get their way, and a left that just...rolls over and gives it to them. And as a result, left wing ideas look very unattractive to the populace, while everyone argues that the right had it right all along. Idiots. 

But no, as you can tell, I haven't really changed my views at all. The left just got outplayed and we caved to the petulant children and let them get their way, as usual.

So is JK Rowling an actual bigot?

 So, a few months ago I covered the Hogwarts Legacy thing when r/gamingcirlejerk decided to go full IF YOU BUY THIS GAME YOURE A TRANSPHOBE AND BLAH BLAH BLAH. And I ended up having, what I thought at the time, was a fairly even handed take on the situation. An initial look at her statements seemed to convince me that she wasn't anti trans rights, as much as she just didn't think trans women were real women and didn't belong in her little feminist club. Which many SJWs take offense to, as they refuse to have their little doctrines challenged, but didn't seem an entirely unreasonable or "transphobic" take to me. I mean i think there's a valid philosophical debate over whether trans women should be considered "real" women, and while I don't necessarily agree with Rowlings' position as it comes from one of those weird "feminist" places and I think all identity politics is basically cancer, including both sides of this specific debate. So I was happy just to try to contextualize her comments and leave it at that.

But today, the Humanist Report dug a bit deeper into some of the stuff she said, and I'd like to analyze this stuff a bit more. A lot of her stuff just happens to be "OMG SHE LIKES AND RETWEETS THE WRONG PEOPLE", but then it looks like she's also advocating against trans rights and stuff at times, and seems obsessed with it? Like, I know I post about SJWs a lot. It's hard not to in 2023, when that ideology has gained such an ascendancy in the United States, and how its grip on social media threatens to force out any ideology that's not it. But I'm not really obsessed with it. As I stated, my actual position is "trans people should be free to live as they want", and while I don't always do the proper virtue signalling related to the subject, and my views are also a bit more nuanced on this topic, I'm ultimately affirmative of their rights, even if I'm not an obsessive circlejerker. But Rowling does seem to be a little more hateful here, and seems to be going down an alt right rabbit hole here. 

So yeah, screw her. It's one thing to have a philosophical opinion on the subject that goes against the circlejerk, it's another thing to actually advocate AGAINST trans rights. I do think there are some debates on the subject in nuance where you can debate whether trans people should, for example, be allowed to play in sports of their preferred gender, as there may be some inherent biases granted by being born the other gender that are not mitigated by transitioning, but generally speaking, where their behaviors do not negatively impact others, they should be allowed to live their own lives as they want, without interference. 

Sadly, I feel like this transformation on her part could have been largely avoided if SJWs weren't so freaking toxic to her. Like, I don't think they realize that they literally streisand effect the alt right and their views. By being so obnoxiously toxic, they drive people into rabbit holes where they become the very thing these guys are trying to prevent. When you try your best to remove normies with somewhat controversials from common spaces, and you try to actively punish them for having views that go against your dogma, what happens? Well, those people find new spaces to occupy, and they're full of the same people the SJW left hates in the first place. What do you think happens to those people over time? They become alt right themselves.

Rowling did initially, at least, seem to have views which were a bit more "TERFy". As in, not against trans people, but simply didn't believe that trans people were part of her little club. But when you go after her and make her the center of controversy and try to make her life possibly simply for expressing an opinion, what happens? people double down in their existing views, and become more extreme. No one, in response to the SJW left, who isnt already a member of said left, says "gee im sorry i guess i never thought of it that way, I guess I'll change my mind." Instead they go "F these guys for censoring me" and become louder, more shrill, and double down on their views, even if it causes them to become more toxic and extreme in the process.

If we want to deradicalize America, and since Rowling is British, the internet, we need to back off of this crap. The SJWs need to take a chill pill and come back down to earth, and they need to stop giving the alt right the ammo that allows them to recruit for their cause. The left needs to fight culture wars defensively, with their most "offensive" stance being that "people should be allowed to live as they want, F the haters." Instead they become their own weirdo brand of authoritarian, and go about dealing with these issues in the worst way possible.

Been saying it for years. it's trevor's axiom. This is how trump was elected, and this is how this crap has gotten so toxic. Don't say i didn't warn you. I've been calling this crap out since 2016.

Explaining why Pete Buttigieg is still "electable" (also, how the democrats "rig" the process)

 So, with the Ohio train disaster being REALLY BAD and a lot of progressives jumping on Pete Buttigieg for his slow response, I feel like the left is being way too quick to just decide "yeah he's done, he's never going to become president." 

Before I get into my main argument, where I'm going to explain why this won't matter in the grand scheme of presidential elections, I'm just going to say, "first time"? How many times have a previous democratic corporatist, like Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden, done something questionable and it didn't really matter come election time? A LOT. And you know what it matters? Not at all. Because years later, people will forget all about this, and this incident will be drowned out in the noise that is your typical presidential campaign cycle. All of these candidates have their skeletons in the closet, from the crime bill, to Benghazi, to being abusive toward staff and eating a salad with a comb, and at the end of the day, unless it's something truly major, this is going to be a nothingburger. Especially if it turns out he's actually doing his job behind the scenes and simply isn't tweeting about it publicly. But let's assume the worst case scenario, and Buttigieg is actually bad at his job. So what? Because if the democrats want this guy to be president, they will try to strongarm it.

That said, let's actually go through the process of how democrats choose their presidential candidates.

 1) Selection process

 Honestly, it should be quite clear by now that the democratic party is run by machine politics and a system of political patronage. Political candidates for president are insiders who work their way up from the inside, and who spend years, if not decades, playing the long game and dedicating their lives and political career to the advancement of the party. The democrats are "team players", whatever the group decides, the rest of the group has to go along with it, and anyone who openly challenges them gets the axe. As long as Buttigieg remains in the party's good graces, he will be in the running in future presidential election cycles. And so far, he's been a nice little team player. He backed out to clear the way for Biden, and he chose to work within the administration. Do you think Pete Buttigieg was actually QUALIFIED to be transportation secretary? Probably nowhere near the best guy. But he got the job because the democrats reward positions according to a spoils system. 

It's unclear whether democrats go into presidential elections with specific candidates in mind, or a short list. In 2016, it seemed obvious Hillary was always "the person", with most other centrist democrats refusing to run in the primaries. Only people no one ever heard of and outsiders like Bernie Sanders dared challenge her. I'll get more into how the machine reacted to this in the next section, but yeah, it's possible that due to previous back room deals, like a potential one brokered between Hillary and Obama in 2008 where Hillary conceded and backed Obama, that they do promise the position in the next open election, but it's also possible that they operate with a short list.

2020 seemed like a "short list" year. I don't think the democrats were sold on any individual candidate, which was why everyone and their mother jumped in, and we had like 20-25 candidates, with around 15 of them being the same brand of neoliberal and fauxgressive. Generally speaking, in years like this, they might not have anyone in mind, but they do have a profile that they want to fit. First of all, the candidate HAS to be a team player. They have to be moderate and espouse the ideology of the leadership of the party. They likely are experienced, and operate as political insiders, working their way up through the party. From there, it's just a matter of who stands out and who polls best. They might send up trial balloons with various candidates seeing if the electorate bites. For example, it seemed pretty obvious they were grooming Kamala Harris for the role, and trying really hard to push her in the media, given she was this hip black female who was slightly more progressive than the others (but not TOO progressive), and she could probably "excite" voters who wanted someone other than a white male and were nostalgic over Obama. But the public didn't bite, and I really don't think that they really had "their guy" until Biden won south Carolina. Given Bernie was an early juggernaut, I figured that the democrats all got together the weekend before super tuesday and Obama played kingmaker and made Biden "the guy", encouraging everyone else to get out, potentially in exchange for cabinet positions (looking at you, Pete). And then everyone got behind Biden just before super tuesday, and they crushed Bernie. 

But yeah, even if they don't have a specific candidate in mind, it seems obvious that there are a few that are in the party's good graces and anyone else is shut out. They'll fawn over Kamala Harris but then downplay and ignore Bernie and Andrew Yang. heck, I think Yang outright said the media wasn't allowed to talk to him or take him seriously. Gee, I wonder why...

2) Setting the stage/manufacturing consent

Okay, so the party has their guy, or short list of guys. What now? Well, ultimately we live in a democracy, and they need to at least have the pretense of voter support, so the party sets out very early to set the stage. They clearly work with the media in setting the narrative around the race. For example, in the 2016 election cycle, I noted that the democratic friendly media like MSNBC and CNN would fawn over Hillary and paint her as the next nominee, while any time someone suggested she might be challenged from the left, by, say, Sanders or Warren, the host would suddenly cut to a commercial and when they come back, that person they were talking to was gone. Do you really think that is a coincidence, that they do that? Of course it isn't. Because ultimately, their job is to sell Hillary to the public. 

In 2016, Hillary was considered to be "inevitable". She was "the guy" or, given she isn't a guy, "the person." She was the presumptive nominee. And the media and social media handlers were given the job of selling a turd. Hillary didn't have much going for her. She wasn't exciting. She didn't offer any interesting policies that anyone actually wanted. She was boring, no one really liked her, outside of the weirdos who are obsessed with the democrats and their brand of politics, and yeah, she kind of sucked. So rather than leaning into policy, she leaned into her experience, her electability. It really was set up like the whole thing was "her turn", "her time to shine" (sorry, couldn't resist a sabaton reference here). She acted with almost an air of entitlement that after 2008 and giving years to the party this was her election cycle. And honestly, that's probably how the outsiders saw it. This was what the party owed her after she backed Obama in 2008, she gave up her aspirations in 2008 for the party and now the party owed her big. 

But yeah, for us little guys, the party basically got on selling Hillary, the turd. The candidate of nothing will fundamentally change, we can't have nice things. They spun it from a perspective of weaponized incompetence. Oh, we CAN'T do that. You have to be "pragmatic", you have to be "incremental", you have to "compromise". It was all a bunch of nonsense buzzwords to save face on the idea that they DIDN'T WANT TO DO SOMETHING. They didn't want to give us universal healthcare, they didn't want to give us UBI (even though she secretly believed in it, seriously, still pissed over that one). They just wanted us to give up our aspirations and back Hillary.

They even started in early against the Bernie supporters, as if they knew to expect trouble. They would start saying that "we had to support whoever the nominee was", while at the same time going "it's going to be Hillary", and pushing her as "inevitable." They started saying that we had to vote blue no matter who, and blah blah blah. Ironically, for me, they basically Streisand effected themselves here. I didn't go into 2016 with any intention of voting third party. But after I saw the democrats doing this kind of BS on me, and not taking too kindly to it, because I believe that the politicians are responsible to the voters, not the other way around, and that I don't owe them crap, and that if they were going to try to strongarm me into voting for Hillary, I was explicitly not going to do it because screw them. And I didn't, by the way. Still don't regret it, despite the damage Trump caused.

Which, gets us to what they did next. They basically decided to run a campaign about how much worse their opponent was. They would start going on about how old the SCOTUS justices were and how we needed to vote for the court (they were technically right, yes, but that still doesn't justify them trying to use that fact to strongarm voters as it basically amounts to holding the system hostage to manufacture consent for their candidate). They actually ran a pied piper strategy of elevating the most crazy GOP candidates, including trump, so that they could convince people to vote for them instead. 

They would astroturf message boards, including reddit, with paid trolls in order to bully people into supporting their candidate. There was nothing they would not do if it meant getting Hillary elected. They would manipulate the perception of the candidates to the public, elevating Clinton, and the most extreme GOP candidates, while simultaneously suppressing those dangerous to Clinton's campaign. They tried their darndest to nip Bernie's campaign in the bud, only to effectively Streisand effect the guy, where his supporters got more hostile and obnoxious. For as purity testy and obnoxious as Bernie supporters are these days, let's not forget that it was these tactics against Bernie supporters in 2016 that drove them to those extremes to begin with. And let's not forget that I was one of those guys until they got too crazy for me and then I noped out and I'm now just doing my own thing.So yeah.

Beyond that, they would start all of these nonsense social justice fights, using social justice ideology to divide the party. As I said in a recent article, the social justice virtue signalling is a speech check to test one's dedication to the cause, and it was weaponized by Clinton and the democratic party in order to divide and conquer. They would portray Bernie voters as sexist and racist for not supporting clinton, and going on about how we hated hillary because she was a woman, and OMG T3H BLACK VOTE T3H BLACK VOTE! you see, you white progressives, you dont get black people.

Given that African Americans vote democrat by a margin of like 97%, and given how, like just about everyone else, most of them were not super politically engaged and just followed politics on the news (note, not only black people are guilty of this, this is most of america, where everyone is encouraged to have an opinion, and almost no one actually knows wtf they're talking about), and they just went along with it. And given the demographics of the party, most people ended up just trending hillary. 

And then we get to the actual race. While Iowa and New Hampshire were customary "firsts", and they had to abide by that until this election where they quickly broke tradition (I'll get to that a bit later, but I've written two articles on this, we know they changed the schedule to favor Biden), after that, what did they do? Well, they front loaded all of these southern states full of rural African Americans who would vote for whatever establishment candidate they ran. The goal is to set up the narrative where Clinton wins the early states and that it's over and he needs to drop out and we need to unify behind Clinton. Once the immediate threat of their favored candidate(s) losing is passed, they will focus more explicitly on trying to encourage any challengers to drop out and to unify the party. The reason they wanna do that is they want all the voters behind the candidate in time for the general election.

Again, this ends up Streisand effecting the insurgents who won't give in though. If you're smart enough to see through this, it makes you LESS likely to support the upcoming candidate ebcause you realize they're doing this to push your favored candidates out and get their way. And me, being committed to my own ideals, wasn't willing to do that. Hence why I encouraged people up to election day to vote their conscience and I myself voted green.

Now, 2020 they did a different variation of this. They didn't have a specific candidate, so they trial ballooned several, and then once Biden won south Carolina, the first southern state full of African Americans, they threw their support behind him, encouraged all of the other team player centrists to back out, and the party got behind Biden. While Bernie is a trooper and would normally stay in it to the bitter end, COVID forced him to drop out because then there was the risk of voters getting sick because of the primary still going on. Yeah, democrats would never NOT weaponize that. 

But yeah, the result is the same. The candidates they want taken seriously are taken seriously. The candidates they want suppressed they'll try to suppress. They set up the political battlefield on their terms, and design it to manufacture the result they want. It's all about picking their candidate, and then pushing them down peoples' throats whether they want them or not. Most voters aren't that smart, they follow politics relatively casually, as they're too busy just...surviving in this capitalist hellscape (or they actively benefit from the status quo), so they'll be too distracted to actually think about these issues. And they'll win. They'll get early wins for the candidates they want, claim that they're inevitable, push everyone else to drop out, and then focus on the general with an emphasis on further suppressing the competition and manufacturing consent. 

If they want this system to work with Pete Buttigieg, there's no reason to believe it wouldn't work. No progressive will stand a chance in the democratic party, because they'll get the Bernie or Yang treatment, and they'll just tilt the playing field to get the result they want. Thinking about this dude's role in some random train disaster 5 years later in say 2028 is gonna be a nothingburger. No one's gonna care. Given this guy is like 40, they could just run him again in like 20-30 years and he'll STILL be "young" enough to reasonably get the nomination. I mean, Biden's first run was in 1988. And many of the issues surrounding that first run like plagiarism weren't even brought up in 2020. Because no one cared. And Biden was electable. And he was the guy we were stuck with.

That said, to discuss the general election.

3) Strategies for the general election

After the primaries are over, the convention is held, and the issue is "settled", the hammer comes down in full force on the dissenters. You WILL give your support to the democratic party OR ELSE. Not doing so is not an option. Or so they'll have you believe.

As I noted in 2016, after the democratic primary, the internet suddenly changed. Everywhere, all day, every day, the internet was FLOODED with people trying to pressure the remaining dissenters to vote for Hillary. CTR's astroturfing was in full effect, and I was clearly arguing with paid trolls. Of course, you can't exactly call them out or the mods will ban you, but it's obvious what is going on. It's sickening the amount of institutional influence these guys got on reddit in 2016. It's like some subs just got flat out taken over by democratic operatives, and they just quashed any dissent. Which was how the Bernie or Busters ended up on their own subs, and since 2016, radicalized into the crazed monsters they are now. Originally, back in 2016, these guys started out with good intentions, but yeah, by 2020 they started getting cray cray and now I can't even deal with these guys. The toxicity, obsession with insane levels of ideological purity, and unhinged craziness and conspiracy nonsense is too much for me. But again, kinda what happens when the dems push all of these people into the same corners of the internet. Same thing I mentioned with incels recently. They just end up radicalizing if they aren't participating in the mainstream. 

But yeah. By this point, the goal of the party is to unify everyone behind it. Which means bullying everyone into voting for the candidate. Hillary, Biden, whomever. They will pull out every trick in the book. They'll go on about how the two party systems means you only got two options and if you dont actively support one you're implicitly supporting the other (never mind that no support means no support and no one is morally obligated to support a cause they disagree with). They will go on with the privilege politics, call you racist, blah blah blah. They will do everything they can to get you to support the candidates...instead of the things that SHOULD get you to support the candidates. They wont offer change or REAL policy concessions. Sure, Hillary and Biden shifted a little left to win over the Bernie supporters, but the concessions were the bare minimum window dressings, and the democrats will basically tell you that that's good enough and you better support them. They'll also say if you dont support them they'll ignore you next time because it's clear that we vote against them to get attention. Cool, continue digging yourselves in a hole I guess, I can do this all day.

In 2020, they even went so far to get Howie Hawkins removed from the ballot in a few states by technicality. Yeah, removing the competition. How "democratic" of the democratic party. 

I know I'm kind of using this topic as an excuse to discuss how the dems rig the primaries, but I also do wanna talk about Buttigieg here. Do you really think, in this general election stage, that anyone would reasonably dissent from the democrats over Buttigieg's potential mishandling of the East Palestine crisis? If it's say, November 2028, and Buttigieg is the nominee, do you think anyone would reasonably dissent from voting for Buttigieg here? Maybe a few rural people in Eastern Ohio or Western Pennsylvania, but given the immediate area around the crisis is rural as fudge, will it impact the results much at all? Probably not. Especially since Buttigieg could point to Trump's deregulation as his excuse for it happening. The point is, given the immense pressure to vote blue, even if the candidate is a turd, even if no one actually wants the candidate, most will do so. Because they aren't voting third party, they arent staying home, and they aint voting for Trump.

Sadly, dissenters like me are rare. Only like 1% of people vote green party, or something disgustingly small like that. Most people will vote for Buttigieg in 2028, just like they voted for Hillary in 2016, just like they did for Biden in 2020 and presumably 2024. And if Buttigieg loses, there are likely MUCH larger issues at stake than the East Palestine thing, which will be five years old and forgotten in memory by then.

This is the crisis of the month, and if it happened on Buttigieg's watch in October, 2028, sure, an October surprise like that would have an impact. But five years from now? No. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now? East Palestine? What was that? No one will care. Maybe a couple progressives will bring it up like they always do with their insane purity tests and coming up with excuses to hate on people, but most people will have long forgotten, and it likely won't have a statistically significant result on the election.

Conclusion

As such, it should seem clear that the democratic party is run by machine politics and a patronage system just like in the Boss Tweed days, the primaries are largely just for show, and the real decisions are made behind the scenes. If the democrats decide Buttigieg is "the guy" in 2028, then he will be the nominee in 2028. And we will be given the same crap sandwich of being told to vote for him or we get either 80 something year old Trump, Ron Desantis, or god help us all, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Because in the two party system, they got us by the balls, and they choose the real candidate behind the scenes, and everything else is just about justifying them to the public by giving it the pretense of being free and democratic, despite the "invisible hand" of the democratic party machinery being at work guaranteeing exactly that result. It's why we keep getting the same crap candidates every 4 years, and then we end up having to hold our nose and vote for them anyway. Buttigieg could very well be a successor to Biden. And if the party decides he's the guy, then he's the guy, and we all have to put up with it or kick rocks. 

That's how politics works in America, and I'm sure you know it too. If you've been around the block long enough and paid attention, you know what is gonna happen.

Briefly discussing the Ohio train disaster

 So, for those who havent noticed, last week there was a train crash in Ohio that spewed toxic chemicals everywhere and turned the area into a literal hellscape. It happened near the Ohio Pennsylvania border, just short of Pittsburgh, and if it happened any later than it did, it could have gone off in downtown Pittsburgh, where it could have harmed orders of magnitude more people.

As it is, they appear to have evacuated everyone within like a mile of the site, and even a weak later people are talking about how the area is still hazardous to be in. It's pretty messed up.

Originally, I was gonna talk about the tradeoffs between gas pipelines, and trains, and how reducing the amount of pipelines in use causes more use of transporting harmful chemicals like oil and natural gas on trains and how you get more ecological disasters that way, but Vaush ended up doing a good video on the subject today I'd like to talk about instead.

He ended up talking about rail safety in general and how these businesses are making all of this money but then they're cutting corners with safety to maximize profits. Sounds about right. Anyway, what happens under capitalism when a company fixates on maximizing profits at the expense of safety? You guessed it, you get crap like this, as more accidents happen and it leads to ecological disasters. Rail companies have been deregulated in recent years/decades too, and this is leading to putting people at risk as well.

I won't agree with Vaush's idea of like 30 conductors on a train as that seems like a prime example of BS jobs under socialism to me, but it seems clear that we need to regulate these companies more. Companies WILL put their profits above public safety if not regulated. Also, reconsider breaking up the rail strikes. Vaush also pointed out this comes just weeks after Biden broke up that rail strike and uh...maybe we shouldnt have done that, guys. Between the horrid working conditions and the safety issues, yeah, maybe a right to say no here would've done these companies some good, as it would've forced them to address safety issues better. 

And yeah. Sadly, these things are going to happen, but honestly, given we're dealing with LITERALLY HAZARDOUS MATERIALS, yeah, maybe we should regulate this stuff to MINIMIZE it happening, rather than just letting corporations make record profits while the environment goes to hell in a handbasket, literally.

Seriously, I saw pictures when this first happened, it looks like A LITERAL HELLSCAPE like out of an action movie or video game. It's ridiculous. Seriously, how do we screw up so bad as a species here? We develop these crappy coercive systems based around maximum profit, and then crap like this happens. I may not be a "socialist" or anything like that, but i DEFINITELY believe in regulating the everloving crap out of companies that do this. It seems to happen every few years. We had the BP oil spill, the Exxon Valdez back in the 90s, not to mention various ecological disasters from fracking, oil pipeline leaks, train crashes, truck crashes.

I mean, I know that we need to move stuff around, and as they say, "time is money", but yeah, safety is kind of an important priority in these situations. not everything should be about squeezing every cent out of the economy. This is inhumane as fudge, that we live like this. Wtf, people. 

Anyway, that's all I'm gonna say on this. I'd like to say this is a literal dumpster fire, but sadly, in this case, that is a LITERAL understatement as a LITERAL dumpster fire would be preferable to this. Heck, most kinds of fire would be. You'd literally need to be actively setting the elephant's foot in Chernobyl on fire to create an ecological disaster worse than this (*gives the Russians in Ukraine the stinkeye so they don't get any ideas*). And yeah, this never should have happened.
 

Reacting to counterpunch's "Marxist response" to the state of the union

 Well, I covered the rest of the spectrum and gave my own take, now to look at what the "leftists" have to say. This is gonna be one of those "quote paragraphs and respond" articles.

I have been told by liberals and progressives that the nation’s leading strikebreaker Joe Biden “knocked it out of the park” with his State of the Union Address last night. It was “Joe’s FDR moment,” marked by populist attacks on the under-taxed super-rich, a defense of Social Security and Medicare, a call-out of the Republicans for their abjectly partisan debt-ceiling hypocrisy, a call for police reform,  and more to pull at the heart strings of decent people who still believe in democracy and the common good.

I assume that the Republi-fascists are calling the speech socialist and “radical Left,” “Marxist” and the like.  Of course they are. That’s one of the many terrible things fascists do: tar liberals and centrists with the supposed evil of socialism so as better to eliminate them.  (Never mind that human beings here in the US and across the world desperately require the radical replacement of eco-exterminist capitalism-imperialism by, well, umm …socialism).

Well, I, an actual radical socialist  — unlike Joe (see point 3 below) — read the speech and watched a video of it this morning.

Here below is a response from a real-life Marxist after going through the oration.

Five things stood out to me.

 Yeah. It baffled me to see liberals hooting and hollering over what was an extremely milquetoast SOTU. And of course the far right screamed Biden was a communist while basically being radicals themselves. Already covered all of this.

1. Some High Points. There were some decent moments for sure.  “The defense of Social Security was a high point, without question,” a perceptive correspondent from Brooklyn writes, “getting nearly the entire Republican delegation to stand up, as was the presence of Tyre Nichols’s parents, and getting broad standing ovation support for police reform.” I concur.

 Yeah, as I said, Biden's social security response WAS the high point I recall. But again, I kinda felt like that should be the bare minimum.

2.  Silence on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There was a deafening void on what the nation’s leading left intellectual Noam Chomsky recently called the “four horsemen of the apocalypse” in the nation and world today: the heightened risk of thermonuclear war, ecocide, pandemicide, and fascism. Biden never frontally confronted any of these four existential threats to a decent and livable future.  Maybe that’s because he’s actively advancing each one of them by: waging an ever more menacing proxy war with imperialist Russian in Ukraine (a war that has lead the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to move its Doomsday Clock to the most perilous point in its history); signing off on more oil and gas release and drilling than his openly eco-cidal and tangerine-tinted redecessor; shutting down public health protections for a still globally rampant and mutating pandemic; failing to seriously confront and counter the not-so “semi”-fascism of the Republicans, who he repeatedly called “my friends.”

Consistent with the last silence (on fascism), Biden naturally said nothing about the elementary need to indict, convict, and imprison Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump for…you know, …um… trying to overthrow previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law (with some help from the openly fascist Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters).

I’ll mention some other silences under points 4 and 5

 Im gonna be honest, this sounds stupid to me. Like leftists just get so obsessed with certain talking points and purity test them when most people just don't think that way. I'm not saying these aren't important, but only the far left emphasize them. 

I will agree that I would have liked to have seen biden talk more about climate change or taking down trump but let's face it, dude got beaten down on climate change to the point he was just celebrating the passage of the inflation reduction act and on trump, he wouldn't do something so incendiary as call for his arrest. I have no doubt they'll be dealing with that one behind the scenes. I mean, january 6thers are going to jail. A lot of them have been convicted recently, and I'm loving every minute of that.

3. Loving Capitalism/Competition.  Biden sadly proclaimed yet again his love for he soulless, anarchic, authoritarian, and eco-exterminist class rule system of capitalism, which just happens to be the domestic and world systemic taproot of each of Chomsky’s apocalyptic horsemen.  “Look, I’m a capitalist. I’m a capitalist,” Biden said, adding this: “Look, capitalism without competition is not capitalism. It’s extortion. It’s exploitation.”

 This is where I diverge from the left but I agree with biden. I've also been distancing myself from leftism and trying to push for my ideas within the confines of capitalism. Hell, I'd like to say my form of capitalism is what capitalism should really be. I don't want socialism and any of that crap (well at least not beyond market socialism, which is still "capitalism" to me). 

Like my whole ideology kind of expands on this idea. Capitalism as it exists is exploitation, but capitalism with people being free to say no actually works. That's my pitch. I know "leftists" would never agree, but that's where I start saying "screw lefties". I dont want these weirdo communist dystopias with a centrally planned economy and giving in kind aid to people rather than a UBI and healthcare. These guys' models for the world sound a little to soviet for my tastes.

Come on, man! Capitalism is exploitation driven in no small part by competition between capitals. It is ecologically exterminist and breeds pandemics and is the taproot of inter-imperialist wars with great potential to end life on Earth.

 Where did the covid pandemic come from? China. Who covered it up and let it spread? China. What system is china? Not capitalist mostly. 

Also, other economic systems dont engage in wars? These guys really do blame capitalism for all ills in the world and then scream WE NEED SOCIALISM as a response to everything. it's why I stopped dealing with these people in a serious way. They're radical nutjobs with bad opinions not worth taking seriously.

Let me say it like Biden: Listen, folks. Look, it’s like my dad always used to say.  He’d lay in bed and stare at the ceiling and say “Pauly, this capitalist system will be the death of us all.” Look it up. Check it out. It’s like Che used to say: it’s not my fault that reality is Marxist!

 Except reality isn't marxist. Their ideas are literally worse than capitalists, which is saying a lot given i ain't a fan of capitalism as it exists either.

What does Joe think undermined the stable blue-collar communities he’s always mourning like Bruce Springsteen in his constant references to his working-class origins in Scranton, PA? Global capitalist competition and the endless capitalist pursuit of cheap labor and materials in the quest for a greater share of the total surplus value ripped from proletarianized human labor power and the rest of the Earth, for crying out loud. It’s like Marx and Engels said in 1848 for f*#k’s sake:

“The bourgeoisie…has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation….[capitalism] cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the [capitalist] epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Amazing how relevant that passage is 175 years after it was written.

With good reasons discussed across ten books and hundreds of essays and commentaries, I have long felt fully justified in saying this to people who repeatedl declatre their love for capitalism: “nothing personal, but f*#k you very much.”

 Well, technically capitalism DID destabilize those economies, but as someone who lives in PA and has the same working class roots as Joe Biden, let me just say that communists dont offer real solutions. What would they do? Force me to work some crappy make work job of theirs? Screw that. We have enough "jobs" here at this point. Unemployment is low. it's just that the work sucks and the pay isn't good. And while that is arguably capitalism's fault, I fail to see how *spongebob rainbow* communism will solve my problems. 

Just give me a UBI and universal healthcare FFS and be done with it. Not to mention student debt forgiveness. 

Seriously, Marx did have good criticisms of capitalism, but his supporters are absolute crap on offering any solutions worth a darn. 

4. Easy to Sound Progressive When Constitutionally Checkmated. I am struck by the fact that Biden gave the most populist, rabble-rousing, and angry, progressive-sounding speech of his presidency not in a time when his party held majorities in both chambers of Congress (as in 2021 and 2022) but after his dismal, dollar-drenched party lost the US House to the insurrectionist neo-fascist Christian white nationalist Republikaners.  It’s great to sound like “FDR” when you know that none of what you claim to passionately support – the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act (already shot down by the Senate when the Dems held the House),  labor law reform (the Protect the Right to Organize Act, also shot down by the upper chamber when the Dems ran the House), an assault weapons ban (someone can check if that also got shot-down in the Senate after coming out of the Pelosi House), the codification of women’s right to an abortion as a national law, and more – has a snowballs’ chance in Hell of getting past the absurdly powerful, malapportioned, filibusted, and right-tilted Senate, where sixty of a hundred votes are required, or even now out of the newly Republi-fascist-controlled House in the first place. And then there’s the absurdly powerful lifetime-appointed Christian fascist Supreme Court crafted by Trump and the former Senate Majority Leader, Malevolent Mitch McConnell. The Handmaid Court is in place to find liberal and progressive measures “unconstitutional” without the slightest concern for the fact that they are backed by the majority of the populace.

 That's kind of the sad thing about the overton window being pushed right. We're so right at this point that even Biden's original milquetoast agenda sounds surprisingly progressive right now. And we've already discussed it on here, it's not. So I will kinda sorta agree with that. 

Speaking of silences, it is unthinkable that Biden would have brought up the deeply embedded institutional cancellations of popular sovereignty that lay at the heart of the archaic US constitutional order and party and elections system: the authoritarian veto power of judicial review; the openly undemocratic and right-tilted Electoral College; the extreme power states possess to gerrymander House and state legislative district and to make key policies ( e.g. horrific sexist abortion bans and the white- nationalist outlawing of accurate US history and social studies instruction) that violate majority national public opinion; plutocratic campaign finance rules;  the noxious and reactionary granting of two US Senators to all 50 states regardless of their wildly divergent population sizes;  the winner-take-all first past-the-post (anti-proportional) elections regime that preempts power for progressive parties outside ruling class control and capture.

 To be fair, democrats benefit from the two party system and are wholly interested in allowing a more multiparty system to come along. because it would cost them their existing coalition. Seriously is there anyone but that weirdo 20% of the population that for some reason thinks Biden is the greatest thing ever who actually likes the guy? Most people TOLERATE the dude, and most are just thinking of one election to the next, without thinking of patterns. Which is why most of them are blue no matter whoers despite not liking the dude. Of course Biden isn't gonna offer anything progressive there. He's as milquetoast as milquetoast comes.

Should he? I'd like it. You dont even need to be a leftist to point that crap out. I mean, the dude in politics I typically agree with most started his own party to address these problems. Unfortunately, he also abandoned UBI in the process which disappoints me greatly. 

All of that is taboo – beyond the parameters of acceptable Democratic presidential oratory. So is the need for mass and militant social movements in the streets and public squares and for large scale direct popular action beneath and beyond the killing confines of US electoral politics and “parliamentary cretinism” (Lenin’s excellent phrase) if the US populace wants to ever see any more seriously progressive change. Keeping the masses off the streets is one of the top parts of the Democrats’ ruling class job description.

 I'm not necessarily going to disagree. Im not gonna call for revolution, but I do wish people on the left would be more willing to use scorched earth electoral tactics to punish the democrats for being a lesser evil that foists themselves on us.

What was all the chest-pounding and progressive-sounding yapp’n about when Biden can’t actually get basic liberal and progressive measures passed (and probably doesn’t even want to since the essence of his political career has always been neoliberal corporate-imperial centrism in the name of bipartisanship)? It was a campaign speech. Biden’s 2023 SOTUA was above all an I think effective and somewhat surprisingly well-performed campaign speech -—  a de facto announcement of his candidacy for a second term.  Biden, who sincerely promised Wall Street campaign donors in 2019 that “nothing would fundamentally change” when he became president,  was showing some fire for the base.  He was trying to demonstrate that he’s not too old for another go – that he’s fit and feisty for what a still leftish narcissist rightly called in 1999 “the essence of American politics….the manipulation of populism by elitism.”

 Yeah I would agree with this too. Dude is as establishment as he comes and isn't gonna offer any kind of real change, hence why I don't like the guy.

However, I have grown in the past couple years where I'm no longer particularly swayed by "left wing populism". Seriously these leftists love to talk a big game about change, but their ideas for change kinda suck. Freaking socialism? It's not 1848 any more. Marx had some good criticisms of capitalism, but as far as solutions, I prefer a more 21st century model that works. Heck, that's what I seek to advocate for. 

The enemy of my enemy isn't necessarily my friend. I tried working with leftists in the past, but push comes to shove, they stab me in the back and start being obsessed with their "socialism" bullcrap.

I'm just done both with liberals AND socialists. I might end up voting for one or the other come 2024, but let's be honest, I don't really LIKE leftists at this point either. Maybe if they stopped trying to push dystopian solutions like abolishing markets, "universal basic services", and jobs guarantees (combined with a presumed compulsion to work), but yeah, I'm just so not on the same page as leftists any more I really am starting to wonder if I'm literally better with the neolibs than them.

It's hard to say, both suck tbqh.

5. Imperial Understatement. Did I just say “imperial”? The fifth thing that stood out to me was how relatively silent Biden was on what in polite circles is called “United States foreign policy” and even “American diplomacy” – euphemisms for the mass-murderous imperialism of the world’s leading aggressor state, which possesses more than 800 military bases located in more than 100 countries and accounts for more than a third of global military spending even though it is home to 4 percent of the world’s population. Listening just to Biden last night you’d naturally never know that his administration helped provoke Vladimir Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine and has subsequently used that invasion to undertake a reckless proxy war that has so far killed as many as 200,000 human beings while exacerbating the deepening climate catastrophe and raising the specter of thermonuclear war.  Or that Biden’s military is positioning itself for a major war with the nuclear power China. Joe’s “foreign policy” comments were quite sparse, limited to almost passing reference to “Putin’s unfair and brutal war in Ukraine” and to how our “competition” China supposedly violated US sovereignty with a wayward weather balloon.

I was oddly reminded by Biden’s speech of the moment when  Dorothy peers behind the curtain to reveal the real Wizard of Oz: an old blustering man pretending to be a great, powerful, and benevolent leader with the help of sound, stage, and spectacle.

The Good Witch that can save us? There’s no magical wizardly involved. It’s us, we the people, shedding dreamy delusions about US electoral politics and bourgeois parliaments saving us, dropping the hopey-changey belief that the common good can be protected and preserved under the imperialist profits system, and taking to the streets and public squares for more than reform — for revolution.

 Oh god, give me a freaking break. Seriously, I am so over leftists its ridiculous.

The US is no angel on foreign policy, but let's not forget that Putin is a bloodthirsty dictator who is literally behaving the same way in Ukraine that Stalin did against the Nazis in WWII. He's full on targetting civilians, he's doing a brazen land grab, and the US is just giving ukraine the weapons to defend themselves. I admit, we're doing it on part to weaken russia, but who wouldn't want a weaker russia? Russia is BAD. And I'm not just saying that as a brainwashed american. They are literally an authoritarian autocracy wanting to expand their sphere of influence into eastern Europe. That is bad. I mean, I know leftists probably have such a distorted moral compass that they dont give a crap. Hell, half these people probably think the USSR collapsing was bad too. They're COMMUNISTS after all. I'm gonna be honest, I'm far more aligned with the west than the autocratic powers of the east. Screw Russia, screw China. America all the way. Well, the west. I don't even think the US is the best country in the world, but the countries I would cite as being "better" than us are reformist capitalist democracies in like Europe. Even then they're not PERFECT, but BETTER? Sure. 

----

That said, how do I feel about this? I mean, leftists do have good points. There's a reason why I previously tried to forge an alignment with these guys in 2016 and 2020. Back then they seemed significantly less crazy, and it seemed to be obvious that "hey we dont want literal communism here, we just want bernie's 2016 agenda", but since then, they've radicalized into calling for LITERAL socialism and coming off like unhinged whackcases the whole time. Some of their talking points are just so out there that it seems like they themselves only bring them up for political points. And honestly, they just aren't effective on me any more. I kinda got sucked into working with left wing populists in previous cycles, but I'm not really sure I'll be doing that this time. I'm ultimately a policy guy, ideas matter, ideology matters, values matter, and worldviews matter. And these guys are just not on the same page. So yeah, sorry, not sorry, I don't think I'll be working with these guys this time.

I think that's one place where I've matured in the past couple years. I've kind of decided to cut ties with the progressives and leftists because I've realized that they're batcrap crazy, and we're not on the same page. Do I want more than Biden and the democrats will offer? Of course. I've made my own own case clear, and will continue to do so. But leftists just dont offer the right solutions to what ails us. Their ideas are a sidegrade at best, in some ways an upgrade and in others a downgrade. And given how crazy literally socialist and communist nations can get, that's a downgrade.

I just ain't feeling it. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it and we have more than enough examples of trying to implement socialism going wrong. We need ideas compatible with what we have. Sure, we need people to be bolder and more populist and fight for things more, but yeah, these guys want literal revolutions and crap which just ain't good. 

Again, is it so unreasonable to want more than the democrats offer while also being turned off by the crazy marx worshippers? I feel like there's a middle ground between those two things, and that's where I'm at. Most socdems are that, and I'd still be willing to form coalitions with them despite being jobists. I mean we might disagree on UBI but on other stuff, we agree. Heck that's why i initially wanted to work with the bernie camp in the first place. That's literally what he seemed to want and then his supporters started being radicalized into crazy marx worshippers. ugh, i really wish bernie never called his ideas "socialism." That rhetorical tactic seemed to draw the crazies like moths to a flame. 

And again, I would've just worked with forward if they didn't go full stupid and merge with anti trump conservatives. I like their core political reform message, but giving up on UBI and human centered capitalism is a step back I can't forgive.

Ugh, I really ain't feeling 2024.