Prize for the worst post-election take on my social media goes to the following:

It's quite impressive to encapsulate so much of what's wrong with the common progressive framing of the political battleground for the last decade, and just how counterproductive it is, in such an elegant single sentence.

i don't think this is how we should be choosing candidates

this is why people were looking up who was even running btw

Regardless of the eventual outcome, political science got an unprecedented natural experiment here:

Highly disciplined campaign with comprehensive and competent field infrastructure and the most lopsided debate win in history vs. a shambolic and incompetent campaign headed by a man obviously suffering from either dementia or neurosyphilis, but with the billionaires who control Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, and the Washington Post (and multimillionaires who control other media) putting their thumbs hard on the scale for him.

money 👏doesn't👏 buy 👏elections!

yeah this is cope lmao

I don't see how you can read that as coping. It's rather depressing that the combination of people who think fascism is good and people who lack the judgment to recognize fascism when they see it is ~1/2 of the voting population.

arguing Trump is fascist now is the perfect illustration of everything wrong with every attempt to beat him

everyone who isn't already on your side immediately and correctly ignores your opinion when you call Trump a fascist, because we already had a term of him as president and he didn't do the things you said he was going to do. you were certain he was going to be openly white supremacist and usher in a new era of hate crime and racism, you were certain he was going to have journalists arrested, you were certain he was going to begin the purge, and then he didn't, and you don't realize everyone else can remember and notice that.

It's a bit unsettling how people outside the UK interpret the UK election as a political attitudes moving leftwards, far more than warranted. The SNP lost a lot of the popular vote. The Brexit party got more of the popular vote than the Lib Dems. The Tories lost many seats because the Brexit Party acted as a spoiler. The Lib Dems are geographically more concentrated, so the FPTP system worked in their favour. The Greens got a lot more votes than you'd think, and only a few seats.

You can easily interpret these results as:

For what it's worth, under their new leadership the Greens have done sterling work disaffiliating TERF sub-groups and members.

Also, it's awkward to say 'Reform got more votes under FPTP therefore would get more seats under PR' because the voting strategies and campaigning strategies would be different, but I suspect you know that.

Points 4 and 5 are totally true though.

Actual hell country

is that what the plan said or is that what someone else summarized the plan as saying

did the plan say "do not allow essential amenities to be within a 15 minute walk" or did it say other things that in the opinion of the summarizer add up to "this won't allow essential amenities to be within a 15 minute walk"

I fully believe that that is actually what was said, because our current political leaders couldn't find their arse with both hands, and the government is in its death throes before the next general election.

Boris is out!

Well, he's remaining until a leadership contest is run, at which point he definitely will immediately step down, yep, no risk here.

This post does actually put out one of those important “corrections” to my mental model that I needed - the stagnation of Europe’s economic growth relative to the US has been going on for so long that “falling behind” has become the reality that much of Europe is in a completely different income class. Italy is literally 50% as wealthy as the US, from a ~80% peak, and others don’t fair that much better.

The article mentions healthcare as a cause, which it brushes off too easily - the US does in fact get by many metrics worse healthcare results for spending ~7% more of our GDP than our peers, so that does dent the estimates. Demography is also playing a role - due to the US’s killer app of immigration we have a higher percent of our population actually working, so that diminishes the productivity gap if not the wealth gap. But facts like that only gets you so far - the majority of the gap is real, and its growing, and as places like Taiwan, South Korea, etc continue to eclipse Europe as well it really highlights a growing gap in the economic structures of the two blocs.

The distribution of this wealth is something I’d really like to see charted also; is high income inequality in the US tipping the results? If the top 10 or 5 or 1 percent in the US is much wealthier than their European counterparts, but average income in lower percentiles is the same, that doesn’t necessarily mean the “European model” is failing, from the perspective of the average voter.

Median disposable income looks like this:

The three highest are Luxembourg at 72k, US at 61k, and Norway at 57k. Then number four is Denmark at 47k and most of Europe clusters between 40 and 47, with Spain and Italy being downward outliers. (from Pew)

Most European countries have more lower-income families if you measure by what counts as “low income” in the US than they do if you measure internal to those countries.

I think you get similar numbers looking at consumption but I’m too lazy to hunt that down right now. But the US really is noticeably richer than most of Europe.

Interesting! Would different cost of living measurements affect quality of life on the ground more, do you think? By lazy comparison: it seems to me (I could be wrong) that everybody in Germany pays less for things like healthcare, education, and childcare, while getting services of comparable or near-comparable quality, so somebody making 40k in Berlin might be doing a lot better than someone making 40k in much of the US–but that’s obviously going to be a crude metric bc cost of living varies widely across a continent, and there are parts of Europe and the US with both very low CoL and very high CoL–so maybe it washes out and doesn’t matter all that much in the end?

These numbers are purchasing-power parity, so they’ve attempted to correct for that sort of stuff. Those corrections are always imperfect in a lot of ways, of course. I could easily seem them being “wrong” about the health care market.

And if you have a society where material goods are super cheap, but housing, food, and health care are really expensive, then that society really is materially wealthy but also, in a lot of ways, sucks. (See discourse about “how can they really be poor, they have a big-screen TV”.)

But the more interesting response/critique comes from @tandagore elsethread here. These numbers are median income per year, but people in different countries work different amounts. In particular, and relevantly to us, while the US is about median for the OECD at 1770 hours/year, Germany is at the absolute bottom at 1390. (Using 2010 numbers because the Pew chart is from 2010.)

That gives the US a (roughly figured) median income per hour of 34.5, and Germany 32.3. Factor in the health care stuff and plausibly Germans are making as much real wealth per hour worked as Americans, and just have a different tradeoff between income and leisure time.

This measure also makes Luxembourg and Norway look even better. Luxembourg works like 1520 hours/year, for a wage of 47.2. Norway works 1420 hours/year for a wage of 40.1, pulling them ahead of the US. And it makes a lot of Western European countries look relatively better, though still poorer than the US: The UK works 1650 hours/week for a wage of 24.8, and France works 1500 hours/week for a wage of 29.0.

But some countries look worse! Ireland has a higher median income than the UK, but works 1800 hours/year, more than the US; that gives a “wage” of 24.0. And while Spain’s position improves a little bit, working 1710 hours for a “wage” of 21.2, Italy works 1780 hours, slightly more than the US, for a “wage” of 20.0.

(I kind of want to make a graph of this, and I might update if I do. Good practice at graph-making. I’m sure someone else has made one but I couldn’t find it in two minutes of Googling.)

My understanding of the general situation is that on average, richer countries work less per week. The US is unusual in having a really high work ethic for its level of wealth and productivity. (While also being near the top of the charts for wealth and productivity!)

And these numbers do comport with my general impressions. I lived in Britain for a year, and it really did feel obviously materially poorer than the US to me. Like, nowhere near impoverished, but houses were smaller and stuff was less nice and more expensive. Italy definitely feels much poorer than the US to me, and basically everyone agrees that it is. And on my brief (and heavily selection-biased ) trip there, Germany felt fairly comparable.

Brit here. Just on the last two points - US houses are definitely bigger; contrariwise I can walk to the town center, do my shopping and get the bus back. 

At a certain point, GDP measures inefficiency rather than value. If you need to drive anywhere to do anything, economic activity has to happen to maintain that (to maintain the car, purchase fuel, etc) that doesn’t need to happen if I walk. Americans talk about 2 hour driving commutes, which most people in the UK wouldn’t put up with (although maybe that’s a selection bias in both directions).

I know it’s been mentioned, but over here we tend to have socialised health services - which doesn’t generate GDP because there’s no insurance company in the middle increasing the cost. We also tend to have job security in a way that the US doesn’t. The concept of at-will employment (more or less) doesn’t exist. Sure that doesn’t generate GDP either way, but there’s immediately an economic security that’s held in Europe that isn’t in the US. People don’t tend to need to have two jobs. We have a social security net.

This isn’t to say that Americans don’t have more money, in aggregate, but 'money can’t buy you happiness’ seems more relevant here. Intangibles don’t have a price. I have a friend who lives in America who earns twice what I do, but I have unlimited PTO to his no PTO - who’s better off? Who can say?

Goods do tend to be more expensive, but we do live on an island.

Given the prevalence of iconoclasm at the moment, there’s a lot of discussion in my neck of the woods about Churchill, and how there’s a lot of evidence that he was a racist, and therefore shouldn’t be celebrated.

I feel like there’s some bad news that needs breaking about anyone who was famous before, oh I dunno, 1950. If you think that systemic racism is bad now, you should see what it was like when it didn’t have to hide behind being systemic. Even the purest cinnamon roll from before, probably, the reconstruction after WWII was a racist, even if just from the bigotry of low expectations.

If we want to be iconoclasts about Churchill, we probably need to be an iconoclast about literally every statue more than about 50 years old.

Oh also, since the left has decided that iconoclasm is an acceptable method, the right will now pick up on this and …iconoclast(?) statues the left would prefer not to take down.

This is why it is better to go through some proper process, even if Bristol council does ignore a petition of 10 thousand people, because now you’ve torn a statue you don’t like down, someone attacking one you do like with bleach is fair game. You might not like it, but that’s your revealed preference.

Iconoclasm update: the statue of Colston in Bristol was guerrilla replaced by a statue of a BLM protestor, and got taken down by the council within hours. The latest hot take is, of course, ‘oh so the council does know how to take down statues quickly’.

Well of course they do: if you put on your evil thinking cap for a minute, you’ll understand why. Who put it there? What’s their motivation? Is it safely anchored to the plinth? Is it stable? Is the material safe? Is there a coating that’s dangerous? Is there straight up a bomb in it or something?

Imagine making a BLM protestor-shaped pipe bomb and putting it where you guarantee BLM adjacent people will go take selfies with it. Of course the council’s going to take down something that they don’t know what it is. Maybe it’ll go back. I doubt it, because the whole problem here is people not wanting to go through the proper channels. The proper channels didn’t get Colston taken down in the first place because where does your iconoclasm end?

Hello and welcome to the latest instalment of UK Iconoclasm:

Iconclasm is now (more?) illegal, and carries up to a 10 year prison sentence. This is self-evidently ridiculous, and a breach of free speech, according to, uh, hmm, the leftists amongst us who typically decry free speech as it allows for hate speech.

That’s slightly unusual.

Of course, the whole arc of this thing has been fascinating. The first reading was (apparently) 9th March. I heard nothing about it, until last week when a woman went missing and then turned up dead, and there was a protestvigil on Saturday that was dispersed with force because the police said ‘if you do this protest we will disperse you’ and the people there were complaining about the police’s use of force. People were shocked, I tell you, shocked.

On Monday the second and third readings of the bill happened, and it’s now the top piece of news. Weirdly the focus has shifted away from the fact that a protest that causes annoyance is also punishable by 10 years in prison, and towards the fact that, off the back of a woman going missing and turning up dead, there are going to be more plain clothes police officers to try and protect more women, which people have immediately said puts women more at risk.

That and the statues thing.

To be honest, none of this is a surprise, as the Conservatives have a stonking majority, and can do whatever they want. Of course they want fewer protests, because the left won’t get into power as they don’t have a coherent point of view, and because the left are far more likely to protest. The only surprising thing is that it’s taken this long, and they didn’t force it through while proper lockdowns were still in force, so there could be no protests. Apparently this was originally set up to combat Extinction Rebellion protests, designed to disrupt as much as possible with no way for anyone affect to actually do anything. I had friends at work who are generally sympathetic complaining. This is sort of the natural conclusion to multiple excessively disruptive protests. While there’s definitely something to be of disruptive protests, when that’s all you’ve got, and you don’t even pretend to play the normal rules, what else is anyone going to do.

I fully expect that if my friends who are complaining the loudest were in power, they would totally ban right wing protests though.

So what the qanon crowd have been saying for the past week to keep faith is “Why are the democrats so eager to remove trump now unless he’s about to win?“ which is an interesting perspective

technically true given that winning in this context is instituting martial law.

The baffling thing to me is why we edge Democrats so eager to remove Trump, when he gets removed in 7 days and they could just wait. By not waiting, they've thrown fuel on the fire and its more likely to go sour in exactly the way they're saying it'll go if they don't preemptively remove him.

Calibration Time: Am I suffering from a severe case of normalcy bias?

It is currently 22:50 local time. I’m going to bed. I expect, when I wake up tomorrow, that this entire situation either (1) has been resolved or (2) is being resolved or (3) is a stalemate that will be resolved in favor of the status quo eventually.

My gut feeling assigns epsilon odds that this will actually result in any real political change. This is not the Revolution 2.0

YET AT THE SAME TIME

The actual facts on the ground is that capitol hill has been stormed, the succession process has been severely tampered with, congress has been evacuated.

…

It feels very certain that this won’t make any real change happen.

It looks a lot like a Reichstagsbrand.

I notice that I am confused.

The difference is that the protestors clearly have no idea what they’re doing. They’ve stormed the Capitol building, and then were like ‘what do we do now’ and took selfies in the legislative chambers.

If this were a revolution where there revolutionaries knew what they were doing, it’d feel even more like the Reichstagsbrand, because the building would be on fire, and there’d be more shooting. This is just larping, which is funny because the average rpg group would be way more prepared than this.

Tumblr user W1l Wh3aton really did just say that "Democrat" is a slur huh

Well, he’s right. It’s not just the word “Democrat” by itself, but “Democrat Party,” which Republicans have been using as a term of disparagement for decades. I can remember Newt Gingrich saying it in the 90s.

And they are doing it for transparently partisan reasons. It’s every bit as affected as “Republic Party” or “Social Party” would be if anyone ever used those terms. 

That is not the context in which the person he's responding to used it, though. They said "Democrat politician", which is analogous to "Republican politician".

Are we talking about the same thing? There’s no reference to “Democrat politicians” here: https://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/629077537157496832/can-you-please-not-bash-on-third-party-voters

Of course, some people habitually use modifying nouns where others would use adjectives, so if someone says “woman politician” rather than “female politician” I find that rather old-fashioned, but I don’t automatically suspect an agenda. So I would pass over “Democrat nominees” without comment, and even “Democrat campaigns.” But “Democrat party,” given that the name of the party is well-known, looks deliberate to me.

While “Democrat” in lieu of “Democratic” definitely started out as a conservative verbal tic, I’m not sure it still is for all speakers; I’ve started seeing it crop up in contexts where it’s obviously not being used that way, and while that surprised me at first (bc as the original post @funereal-disease​ is riffing on mentions, it definitely started out as a tribal pejorative), it doesn’t seem weird that the usage is expanding, based both on the existence of modifying nouns in English and on the need to distinguish small-d and large-d uses of the term “Democrat[ic]” (small-r “republican” as a label just comes up a lot less in the political discourse these days, so the same tension isn’t there; and in any case the noun and adjective forms are the same).

You should see the linguistic shenanigans we have to put up with conservative vs Conservative. The Conservatives really aren’t very conservative!

Of course, part of the resolution of this is that they’re typically referred to as the Tory party, and the fact that there actually was a Tory party that pre-dated the Whigs, and originally the Conservatives were called Tories because they were as bad as those upper-class fuckers who had to disband has been lost to the mists of time. This is not much of an improvement.

You know, you’re probably a single-issue voter on way more issues than you’d think, if they were on the ballot.

Like, before 2020, I never thought I’d say something like, “I’m not fond of his running mate, but I really like how I can count on him to support the peaceful transfer of power following an election.” That’s my one issue now. That’s how I’ll be voting.

Yuuup. I have exactly one priority for this election, and that is that it is an election, is considered legitimate, and the next transfer of power be a peaceful one. A Second American Civil War would be a horrifyingly disastrous calamity to the United States, the world, and a very large number of people. Avoiding that fate is my priority on a personal and political level.

You don’t… You think that Trump will not peacably transfer power to his opponent if he is defeated in an election, so you think the solution to that is to… have his opponent defeat him in an election, so Trump would have to peacably transfer power to him.

I think that if there’s enough ambiguity that a naked power grab might be effective, through strategic application of force to a one or two states, then it would be an option on the table. And I think that he’s already talking about eschewing term limits.

I think that an unequivocal loss would limit and likely eliminate his ability to hold on to power, and minimize the people who would help him to do so. My hope is that he loses unambiguously, overwhelmingly, so that he’s no longer a horse worth backing for self-interested political operatives and politicians.

Let me put it this way: if Biden wins, he won’t be the president in 2035. If Trump wins, I think he will. And if Trump doesn’t just lose in November, but gets his ass handed to him and laughed out of court, the republic endures.

Of course, I think you’d have to try pretty hard to miss what I was saying in the first post, so I’m not sure we’re engaging in good faith here, but I’m laying this out in case I’m misreading your intent.

>  Let me put it this way: if Biden wins, he won’t be the president in 2035. If Trump wins, I think he will.

See, this is a bit where I think you aren’t engaging in good faith.

On purely biological grounds, Trump is 74. Average US life expectancy at age 74 is 85. Add that to the stress of the presidency and Trump probably dies before 2035.

On inductive grounds, I’ve heard similar “what if he doesn’t give up power!?” for all the presidential elections I can recall, and I’ve heard meta-similar “but this election is EXTRA IMPORTANT” for at least the last three. You may wish to review The Flight 93 Election for an example.

And on transfer of power grounds, if we’re going to start worrying about unlikely doom scenarios, if Biden wins 2020, the major concern isn’t Biden being president until 2035, it’s Copmala Harris being president circa 2022-2035, backed by a party that’s talking itself into ever more fervent racial conspiracy theories. Harris has more institutional support than Trump and is more dangerous for that reason.

The important thing is not to keep any given president from getting one extra term but preserving the norm against the sitting president refusing to accept the result of an election; if there were a lot of single-issue voters who would switch to supporting the other guy as soon as any candidate said he might do it then US democracy would be a lot stronger. Personally I can’t claim to be one of those people since I was already planning to vote against Trump before he said that, but if a Democrat ever says the same thing I plan to vote against them.

I’m also a potential single-issue voter for “anyone not a reality TV show star”, I already committed to voting for the Republican if the Democrats ever nominate one, but I guess “respects election results” takes priority over that.

I’d split the difference, personally;

Trump has been pretty explicitly laying the groundwork to contest the results of the next election.

I don’t think he’s likely to actually overturn Presidential term limits; I do think that he’s likely to kick up a major stink if the election is at all disputable, and I think it’s bad for him to continue to erode the norms of our democracy.

“Donald Trump siezes power in a coup” is pretty unlikely; “Donald Trump sets a precedent of the sitting President challenging the legitimacy of every election in a bad faith power grab” is a little more likely.

I don’t know, ever since the refusal to consider Merrick Garland I see the failure point over the next few decades being, “The Republicans simply refuse to interact with or acknowledge any procedure which would tend to reduce their power.”

I like how this all slides what happens if Trump does win again.while Biden might graciously concede, I suspect the riots so far this year will just be a faster of what's to come.

Hey. Hello.

I am monumentally tired of fighting. But I’m going to continue to do so for as long as I can.

Right now I am seeing long-time followers attack Kamala Harris and Joe Biden for picking her as a running mate. I know a lot of people look at this duo and see “more of the same.” I’ve seen so many intelligent people saying they are not going to vote.

It is absolutely critical that you vote the Biden/Harris ticket. I want you to remember that while you are pointing out the flaws, and here is why.

The current president is literally a fascist. He’s slow-burning, meaning he’s slowly moving the goalpost farther right. The only reason he’s slow-moving is because the Republican party still has the barest semblance of a conscience. Think of what would have happened if #45 said “we should delay the election!” and McConnell said “yeah okay that sounds cool.”

Do you know how terrifying that is? Because if he got congress to delay the election somehow, there would be no reason to ever have a federal election again. He could just keep delaying it forever.

“But CK,” you say. “The constitution says we can’t delay a presidential election!”

Checks and balances say a lot of things. Checks and balances say that bills are supposed to be voted on and go to the president for signing or veto. Currently McConnell has found a loophole and just has 400 bills sitting on his desk, ignored.

I want you to keep this in mind: Under fascism, the constitution does not matter. They will find a way around it. They’re trying to find ways around amendments, too, poking and prodding at free speech until they can find a way to shut it down.

And if #45 decides he doesn’t want to play anymore, he’s got a whole fucking army, and he’s just proven that the secret police he has in his employ will do whatever the fuck he says. I need you to recognized that this throwing people in Portland into vans thing wasn’t the ultimate violation of freedom. It was only one step in a massive authoritarian takeover. You cannot trust the secret police to do the right thing and say no. #45 has just proven they’ll listen to him like trained dogs.

He has already started talking about more terms. If he discards the constitution, there will be nothing stopping him from taking them. He’s currently, blatantly trying to rig a free and fair election. This has happened in other countries across the globe, and the same people who are posting “NEVER VOTE FOR BIDEN” are the same ones who post things like “JUSTICE FOR _______” when a despot steals an election.

If the incumbent president wins another term, this will be the last election we have. This will be it. This is how fascism works. This isn’t slippery-slope talk. This isn’t “potential worst case scenario.” We are in the middle of the worst case scenario now.

Please. For the sake of the millions of people who will die under #45. For the sake of people who cannot survive another 4+ years. Think of Biden/Harris as a road block. A barricade. Right in the middle of the road. It stops traffic and doesn’t do anything to get people where they’re going, but at least it stops them from careening off a bridge.

If you never want to have to make this choice again, you have to fight to abolish the US’s First-Past-The-Post voting system, but it is TOO LATE to do that now. No third party candidate can win. Study the election results from the last 40 years and you’ll see.

Please. Wise up. This is our last chance.

As someone who is in local leftist circles, I’m seeing a lot of people mocking “vote blue no matter who”. Lately, even comparing those people with the Back The Blue movement which sides with the police against protesters. They’re saying that if you insist people vote Democrat, you’re basically a boot licker. I’ve been hearing, “time to burn it all down”.

Mmkay. When?

When is your glorious revolution going to start? Please explain your plan to me. Explain how it will topple the current government. Explain how you will install something better in its place. Explain how the new government will legitimize itself and stay in power. Now, Explain how you will do this without killing millions of poor, disabled, and marginalized people.

Oh. You don’t have one of those plans? Then you have to deal with the government we actually have, not a fantasy version of it. You have to look at what you can realistically accomplish within the two party system that we have, not the fantasy multi-party system you want. You have to look at the REAL, ACTUAL candidates and say, “which one starts closer to my eventual goal, and which one can be moved by a sustained concerted effort?” And you have to say, “which one will kill the fewest people while we’re trying to fix the problems that gave us this system we hate in the first place?”

Because you cannot campaign for a ranked voting system in the eleventh hour. It’s too fucking late. That choice isn’t on the table for you anymore. Don’t whine and kick your feet and refuse to take the first step towards fixing things because that step isn’t big enough for you. There are hundreds of notches on the needle between Biden/Harris and all the things we want: racial Justice, indigenous land reparations, universal basic income, socialized medicine. Hundreds of notches. But if we cannot even agree to pull the needle ONE NOTCH FURTHER LEFT in unison, how the fuck are we supposed to get there? How do we ever reach a destination when half of us turn our noses up at a first step?

The Right got us here because they pull in unison. They’ve been doing it for decades and every election, the whole country slides. There are more of us but we refuse to work together. We refuse to just decide on a first step and take it. We refuse so hard we’d rather say “burn it down” than comprise our political purity. But I am here to tell you that no amount of philosophy is worth an ounce of praxis and your purity will not absolve you from the moral laziness of deciding your neighbors are acceptable sacrifices in the name of a brave new world.

Change requires realistic goals and sustained effort. It requires responsibility and involvement. It is measured in increments. It isn’t glorious.

“Burn it all down” only requires you to stand back and watch. So. I see y'all.

This.

As a historian, this “don’t do anything and expect a morally pure system to spring from the ashes” argument is especially insane and maddening. Right. Okay. Don’t do anything, stand by and permit the world to be destroyed in the name of proving a Leftist Point, and then expect the shattered remnants of humanity to magically and collectively realize their error and build Utopia. It has never once worked like that in the history of the world. You know what we got instead? More suffering. And standing by to enable fascism because you’re just so morally good and can’t lower yourself to make a Flawed Choice looks a lot like… I dunno, fascism.

Don’t blame the Trump voters if (and God forbid) the Democrats lose this election. They showed up and voted for their guy, abhorrent as he and they may be. They took part. If we lose swing states that Biden/Harris would have won without pointless fucking third party votes, I swear to Jesus, the blood is on our hands. We don’t and won’t get the luxury of blaming it on Trump and his calamitous administration any more. Right now, we still have a chance. It’s a narrow one, it’s not the one we may have wanted, and it’s going to be hard as hell even if this election was fair (and thanks to the Russians, Facebook, etc, it’s not, but still). It’s there.

The problem is that America has become a society so deeply catering to selfishness and self-interest that we just can’t bestir ourselves to do something that Isn’t Good For Us Personally. If you’re deriding people who won’t wear masks in a pandemic and then refusing to vote for Biden/Harris: congratulations, you are part of the problem. You are giving into the exact “me first/won’t do it if it doesn’t help me” sociopathic selfishness that late-stage capitalism has deliberately bred into us. You might think you are taking a principled stand and you’re rejecting the system, but that does… absolutely nothing. It’s not a protest. It’s not a moral choice. It is a surrender. And I’m so goddamn tired of a bunch of whiny Twitter pissbabies acting like our current Democratic choice (which has plenty of good things, even as everyone is neurotically fixated on the flaws!) is worse than another four years of the Trumpian corporate death cult. Because. Nah bro.

The accelerationist theory of social change (currently beloved by both the extreme right and extreme left), I.e. things will get bad enough to start a war and said magical new system will emerge from the ashes, is a HORRIFYINGLY white supremacist, racist, classist, homophobic, xenophobic, etc theory. It predicates that you, the genius suggesting this, are white, middle class, and in a comfortable enough position to survive the horrors going on to those other people, and whose deaths are an acceptable collateral of your Ideology. A core of progressive belief used to be that no single ideology was more valuable than actual living people. But that has been totally sacrificed on the altar of Purist Woke Points. The ideology trumps all, literally. Because in this case, if some of you don’t get your fucking acts together, Trump’s ideology will trump all, and then we are fucked.

I study this kind of thing professionally. I have written many posts about the lack of historical memory and the crisis it is causing. I’m saying that again right now. I’ve said it in polite ways and academic ways and even funny ways. I am saying it in a deadly serious goddamn way now. I’m tired. I know we are all tired. But refusing the single biggest choice we can make to change the way things are currently going in this country is tantamount to lunacy. No other way to put it.

Don’t be a whining pissbaby who makes the rest of us die. Wear a mask. Grow up. Learn some history. Do whatever nose-holding you have to and vote Biden/Harris 2020.

The end.

SOMEBODY finally put it in words. Thank you. Revolution should be the absolute LAST option. Hell, given the bastards we’re dealing with there’s no guarantee it won’t come to a bloody fight to preserve democracy… 😕

@qqueenofhades and @sonneillonv are on it.

Also, let me take a moment to point out, if your side can’t manage to win the election, or at least make it contested, I don’t think you can win a civil war, especially not since the Left-libs are the anti gun ownership, anti military service side.

Vote, because don’t kid yourselves, you can’t win a civil war without making compromises that will make the Biden/Harris platform look like an idealistic dream. Vote if you actually give a shit about The Disadvantaged dying, because there’s going to be a lot of that in the US AND around the world if the US has a civil war.

Why would an American civil war cause death in other countries? Because the US exports a lot of food including as relief, so there’s that problem, and the US base system and military is essentially… Look, “Team America: World Police” was a joke, but the US military really does serve as the world police and a sudden abandonment of that position is going to create international instability and lead to a lot of deaths.

Fallacy of the excluded middle: the only options are not “vote blue no matter who” and “burn it all down and count on Glorious Revolution”.

The middle option is “To earn my vote you have to put forth a candidate that does not make me want to put a gun in my mouth. If you do not meet this standard then you will not get my vote.” I’m going with that.

If you say “but you’re just letting Trump win and he will destroy everything!”, for one, I am not letting Trump win anything. The Democratic party is not entitled to my vote, they have to earn it. All they have to do to earn my vote is have a candidate that doesn’t make me want to put a gun in my mouth. They didn’t do that. My job is to vote for the candidate that doesn’t instantly inspire powerless suicidal ideation, I did my job. Their job is to put forth a candidate that people want to vote for, and they didn’t do their job. The reason they keep failing to do their job is that they think they are entitled to everyone’s votes so it’s okay to keep betraying everyone who counts on them.

For two, I don’t think you get how much of the things you decry about Trump and being uniquely evil to Trump were happening before Trump and will continue to happen in a Biden administration. I cannot stress enough that Trump is not the one who “put children in cages”. Obama did that. Trump just didn’t stop it. Biden won’t stop it either. 

The Democratic Party keeps betraying us, again and again and again and again, and then saying “oh but you have to reward us for our betrayal otherwise the bad guys will win, you have to vote for this guy who is 3% better than the other evil Republican candidate.” If someone keeps betraying you, and you keep rewarding them for betraying you, they are never going to stop until you stop rewarding them. I do not plan on rewarding the Democratic Party for betraying me any more. 

Of all the things America does for which there is a broad cross-partisan consensus that it’s a bad idea, but that we do anyway because one interest group just cares about it more... is the continued existence of the penny.

Wait what.

I thought "Abolish the Penny" was kinda a crank position on par with calendar reform and crank-ier than Americans who want government mandated switch to the metric system.

Like, we're talking about something that would impact every single person in the country and almost every single cash transaction, and would have major implications for sales tax on every single level of government that has a sales tax.

Like, "$9.99" is the advertised price to make it sound cheaper than "$10" and either way, sales tax almost always results in the actual charged price not being divisible by 5, because sales tax rates are basically never a round 5%.

Because everything is always a mess, I would expect some kind of stupidly complex system where cash sales would be rounded up and the retailer and the government would split the spare money, and credit/debit customers wouldn't be fucked because extra bonus enhanced government/corporate tracking, and there'd be ridiculous lobbying drama about exactly which industries and products get which percentages in a way that enriches Walmart and sets up small businesses to either fuck up and be destroyed for tax theft or have to pay for expensive payment system upgrades to not fuck up, because it's never going to take off unless it fucks over the poor AND small business AND increases surveillance.

Price-after-tax already isn’t evenly divisible to 1 cent and has to be rounded to hit the nearest cent. Rounding it to hit the nearest 5 cents is the same operation.

Put sales tax in the ticket price like civilised countries do.

Status Game

Bob: We should say “Black Lives Matter“ on the homepage

Alice: We should also say “光復香港，時代革命“ on our homepage

Bob: You know we can’t do that, and I think you don’t care about Hong Kong, you’re just trying to make a point here!

Alice: Well, aren’t you trying to make a point, too?

Bob: Yes, but I also care about police violence.

Alice: Do you care about the people of Hong Kong?

Bob: Of course.

Alice: …

Bob: Dammit!

I mean, the ‘honest’ final line from Bob is just “That’s a matter between them and their national government, while black lives not mattering in America is a matter of people who should be my fellow citizens’ defense of white supremacy.” after being asked if he cares about the people of Hong Kong. The fact that nobody disagrees with the first slogan and the world’s rising superpower disagrees with the second slogan matters a lot.

But Bob is not even an American, and neither is Alice!

So he’d say it in Dutch? What’s that change?

You must be American.

My least favourite thing about these protests is how they’ve exported the American race dynamic of masters and slaves to the UK, and protesters have willingly lapped it up. Sure, we had a hand in the slave trade and some cities got very rich off it, but we have our own huge racism problem we with the police that’s completely uninspected because it’s not to do with slaves. Instead it’s to do with 400 years of empire and later commonwealth meant that people what don’t look like us end up living here.

“Tell me, Wu Guang, what is the penalty for rioting?”

“The police will shoot us with tear gas and rubber bullets and arrest us, Chen Sheng”

“And for peacefully protesting?”

“The police will shoot us with tear gas and rubber bullets and arrest us”

“I see. And if we stay at home?”

“Ah, then they’ll just shoot rubber bullets and cs pellets at us through our doorways and windows.”

“Well then…”