I feel you, but honestly, with this administration, who fucking knows what will happen. The Secretary of Defense is an alcoholic, the President is sundowning, and JD Vance appears to already be in hiding. This might end with our unconditional surrender to the next Ayatollah after we lose a ground invasion.
I don’t even think you can say, “America,” at this point; I think this 5 to 10 people at the top of the administration that thought they could repeat what they did in Venezuela. There are plenty of ghouls in both parties that have been dreaming of regime change in Iran, but even they wouldn’t be stupid enough to think they could just bomb the country for a weekend, kill the Ayatollah, and move on. Intelligence officials at the Pentagon directly contradicted the administration’s claim that Iran was planning an attack, and even John Fucking Bolton wrote an op-ed saying this was a bad idea. America is gonna get a kick in the nuts, but only a handful of people are actually responsible for this cluster-fuck, and they probably won’t learn anything or face any consequences for their actions.
Man, if I ever become an employer, this is how I’m gonna do job interviews.
People keep saying this is going to be America’s next forever war, but there’s a good chance we might just lose.
No, just for Biden to appoint someone who wasn’t too cowardly to prosecute Trump for his many, many crimes.
Not really, for several reasons I just laid out, but if it gets you to stop doubling down on this, sure.
Please, just stop, you don’t know what you’re talking about. 80 years ago we were still riding high on programs like the New Deal and the GI Bill. 50 to 70 years ago we were building the administrative state with the HEW, USAID, FEMA NOAA, and the EPA. It wasn’t until 40 years ago that Regean and his cronies began slashing taxes and trying to disempower federal agencies, and even then, those freaks would never eliminate NOAA or USAID because of the massive benefits they gave to defense.
What’s currently happening isn’t the same as the neocons trying to eliminate social spending, It is a group of fascists stripping the government for parts, even when that directly works against their plans of an authoritarian state. That’s sure as shit not, “taking the system further,” and you sure as shit don’t know anything about the last century of American politics.
Yeah man, dismantling the administrative state the federal government built up over the last 80 years is, “taking the system even further.” You’re super smart.
OMFG dude, Project 2025 is burning the system down. What do you think dismantling the federal bureaucracy, illegally shuttering federal agencies, and removing the independence of the FBI and DOJ is? He promised to take a wrecking ball to the entire system, and low information voters said, “fuck it, my life has only grown worse under this system, might as well.”
I could further explain how the Democratic primary system has been suppressing progressives for the last quarter century, but since you didn’t engage with any of the points I’ve already made on that topic, it would be a waste of my time. I can’t tell if you’re an American who knows shockingly little about their own government or a foreigner who’s arrogant enough to explain another countries political systems to their own citizens, but either way, you’re embarrassing yourself.
I saw the Porno Freaks open for the So Called Christians when I was in college. Great show.
Oh, OK, so then this is also something you’re wrong about, because that’s not how the process has worked for 240 years. The Democratic party itself has existed for less than 200 years, it’s modern form as a (ostensibly) left-leaninf, pro-labor party has existed for less than 100 years, and the modern primary process, where the voters actually select a candidate, has only existed since 1972. Before that, party delegates would just pick a candidate in a backroom meeting and voters would be stuck with it. People were incredibly unhappy with that system, which is why it was reformed in 1072 with binding primaries. The Democrats tried to limit voter influence in the 80s by adding Superdelegates, but after the outsized roll they played the disastrous 2016 election, they were reformed in 2018. Some of those reforms were rolled back in 2024 so they could anoint Harris.
Also, a large majority of Democratic voters did not want Joe Biden to run again in 2024, but the Democrats refused to hold debates and kept challengers off the ballot in many states. That did not end well, and no, Americans as a group are not fucking happy with this system. Generally speaking, people who are happy their current systems of government don’t elect fascist conmen who promise to burn the system down.
No one knows what fhe fuck you’re trying to say, dude. I made, like, six different points about the Democrats and the 2024 election and you replied with, “what about the entirety of American history?” What about it? WTF is your point?
What about them? That question is so vague asking it without further context is meaningless.
I’m saying that democrats already have the position that a wide majority of their constituents hold (as shown by the primary victories of corporate democrats time and again on a national level).
OK, well, what you’re saying is demonstrably wrong. Recent polling shows that 65% of Democrats are sympathetic towards Palestinians, while 17% of Democrats’ sympathies lie with the Israelis. By the way, those numbers are at 41% to 30% with independents, so that means Democrats’ current position on Gaza is still 11 points underwater with those, “swing voters,” they’re always chasing.
However, if you’re using elections as your barometer, well, the Democrats own internal report (which the DNC tried to bury), shows that, “Kamala Harris lost significant support because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza.” Also, if you think that, “primary victories of corporate democrats,” prove that being pro-Israel is a net positive for Democrats, “on a national level,” I’d like to point out that Biden didn’t face a real primary in 2024, and Harris didn’t face a primary at all, so Democratic voters haven’t weighed in nationally on Israel/Gaza since 2020. But if the local victories of folks like Mamdani and Majia are any indicator, then I’d say being pro-Israel is a pretty bad position to take.
Anyway, I’ll admit that I was so overwhelmed by how spectacularly wrong you were in that first sentence that I didn’t even read the rest of your comment, but skimming it now, I can see it the same, “lesser evil,” arguments I’ve been hearing since 2016, to which I’ll say, “no one gives a shit.” Would we be better off with Harris than Trump? Of course. That’s why I voted for her. But it doesn’t fucking matter. The, “lesser evil,” argument may be correct, but time and again it has failed with voters. You can bitch all you want about people not voting how you think they should, but at the end of the day, it won’t make a difference. Give them something they want to vote for in 2028 or lose.
So, you realize that what you’re saying here is, “The Democrats are so incompetent that getting them to adopt a position that a wide majority of their own constituents hold over the course of two years is an impossible and ludicrous.” You get that, right?
Good. He’s an authoritarian who had his paramilitary goons invade an American city. All you achieve by going to the State of the Union and listening politely is the normalization of fascism. Only deeply unserious people who are incapable of meeting this moment would consider attending without disrupting him.
I hate TikTok too, but it’s not going away without comprehensive legislation regulating social media. Until then, a fediverse alternative that’s not ruled by corporate algorithms would at least be a form of harm reduction. Think of it like a Safe Injection Site program; it’s not great that they’re still using, but at least they’re getting clean needles.
Someone on Bluesky pointed out that, even if you ignore the morality of this argument, AI is trained on human content, so if we’re going to start examining the human energy cost, we’ll have to factor in the cost of every single human whose work was used by ChatGPT on top of the data center costs.
Oh, the Occupation apologist? He was still justifying the concentration camps into season 5.
LOL, I’m very tired right now and read, “book checkpoint,” and thought, “…do they mean a fucking bookmark?”