Yeah. I don’t really know politics well enough to know how realistic it is. I do know that most of them exist in a weird white-collar corruption ecosystem which really doesn’t give a shit about parties D or R, working people, America’s standing in the world and success or failure, any of that stuff. They just work for who pays them, and for the most part, who pays them is the rich sociopaths who are completely fine with putting all the poors in camps.

I feel like a certain amount of it is also deliberate partisan sabotage by people who care specifically about R instead of D, but I think mostly it’s just the bipartisan Washington consensus that Bernie Sanders is a loony old guy and Hilary Clinton / George W / Mitt Romney / Hakeem Jeffries / all those indistinguishable dickheads are the future of this country, because they’re going to continue to enable all of “us” to get filthy rich without really having to work for it.

Honestly, the National Guard is a lot better trained at this kind of “dealing with large groups of angry but mostly unarmed and harmless people” situation. The cops are trained and experienced at dealing with individuals, for the most part, but when they’re faced with a big protest or a riot they are often making it up as they go along.

One thing that multiple National Guard people said after they got involved in BLM in 2020 was that they often felt like their role in practice was to protect the people against the police. Since their job is, more or less, to maintain order, and the people were (most of the time) pretty orderly and the police often were not.

And when he’s floating in a barge off Gitmo, he’ll be very mad that it was someone else’s fault. This isn’t supposed to happen to people like him, he was doing everything professional and right.

Seriously. You’d think that after 2016 when the signal stabilized and people who ignored this messaging were consistently wildly popular in elections, and people who listened to it got beat like a rented mule year after year, they’d see the pattern. There aren’t a lot of fields of big league human endeavor where you can be this stupidly unsuccessful for this long and people still take you seriously and keep paying you vast sums of money to learn your wisdom.

I suspect there’s a certain amount of deliberate sabotage involved. How much of it is that, and how much is pure homegrown white-collar stupidity, it’s impossible to say, although I would speculate they’re both heavily involved.

That’s all it’s ever been. These nations rise and fall like villages in the Ice Age. We just have media and systems to make it look like everything is all organized and “professional” now, and it kind of is sometimes, but at the end of the day we’re still living on the same uncaring planet by the same rules.

Nothing, as far as I can tell.

I have only the vaguest of vague impressions, but my vague impression is that he’s been quite a good actor in other things, but then with Doctor Who they kept giving him terrible scripts.

She did do acting before she did comedy, probably nothing anyone’s ever seen.

It looks like I’m not alone in having the impression that the most recent seasons were badly received: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436992/ratings/

I don’t think it was that gender “was an issue” or anything. Like I say I thought it was just kind of generally understood that the recent seasons just weren’t very good, but it looks from the comments like that’s not the Lemmy consensus, so be it.

Maybe you don’t like the actress

No idea about her or anything upcoming. I thought it was universally accepted that the recent seasons of the Doctor were horrible, but it looks like I’m alone in that. Oh well. Anyway, my main point about this was that Fern Brady would do great.

My phrasing was bad. Both the gender-swapped and the current “dancing in the crosswalk” Doctor Who attempts were dogshit. Fern Brady would actually fit the emotional timbre of the classic Doctors while also happening to be modern and female, was my point.

This is one of the last levels of safeguard: At the end of the day, public opinion matters for whether or not you can put people in prison (or even put them through the life-changingly traumatic and expensive experience of a major criminal trial.)

They are trying to change that, of course. George W. introducing whole new systems that were outside the normal constitutional safeguards was deeply horrifying to a lot of people, because it laid the groundwork which Trump is now so many years later building his camps on.

None of the neoliberals wanted to “use overt fascism” as a threat of anything. They just want to sit back and get paid, and don’t really care, most of their campaign materials (according to the super-experts in this comments section at least) are trying to imitate the fascists. None of their campaign materials or public statements even seemed to recognize that fascism was something at all dangerous in any way.

The thing of “oh isn’t it convenient that I have to vote for the non fascist if I don’t want fascism, well fuck you I think you’re trying to trick me” is a super popular and very effective propaganda thing designed to trick people into letting the fascists come to power, though. The overall pitch is to make it sound like “it is urgent not to let fascists come to power” is some kind of clever ruse, and can be discounted.

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

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

So I disagreed with this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m not going to vote for my own demise

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

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