Blue MAGA

This is one of those phrases that tells everyone exactly what they need to know about you. Have a great day!

K well as long as you’re unwilling to vote strategically, you’ll continue to allow evil fascists to take over the US. The rest of us will try to elect progressives in primaries and support the most left-leaning viable candidate in the general election because that’s how you defeat fascists if your society isn’t ready for a revolution yet, and ours isn’t. Too many full bellies and entertained morons.

Understood, thanks! We have reason to be hopeful: Americans are no longer spooked by the word “socialist” and they treat threats of socialists being secret commies with skepticism. (That said, they also don’t actually know what “socialism” is.) The backlash to MAGA, if it isn’t defeated by fascists entrenched in our institutions, will be a leftward swing of the pendulum across the center ready to embrace new ideas. (Or old ideas as the case may be.) Obviously our current system is rigged and everyone feels it. We tried one extreme and I think most people realized it A) sucked and B) didn’t work at all as promised.

For my part, I likely want what you want, but I don’t know if I agree on how to get there. There are many accelerationists who don’t understand what a revolution would look like for normal people. I want the Senate abolished, but I don’t want to try a famine.

This comment is funny because it further reinforces the point: Obama didn’t start that war, and he was unable to cleanly exit it without leaving Afghanistan for the Taliban, which as we’ve seen has been disastrous for that country’s girls and women.

There are exactly three choices in every general election:

1. The viable party.

2. The other viable party.

3. Not participating in the election at all.

You might think there are other options like write-ins, protest votes, or third parties. Unfortunately, those are all permutations of #3: nonparticipation.

Nobody here is saying they love Democrats. The party is about as popular as boiled cabbage at a chili competition. But when served with those three choices, participating in the election is important, which narrows it down to #1 or #2, and it’s really not hard to choose between the GOP and the Democrats. The Democrats sent your brother to war. The Republicans started that war, sent way more people to it, killed more civilians, and made withdrawing impossible. The Democrats are also more likely to offer mental healthcare to your brother.

That wasn’t all of it. Carter got blamed for both Stagflation and the high interest rates his Fed used to get it under control. And of course the Iran Hostage Crisis and oil shortages. Then Reagan got all the credit for the economy the high interest rates helped save.

You never really explained why neoliberalism is problematic. Neoliberalism is not incompatible with unions, as you seemed to imply, nor is it incompatible with a government that utilizes tax and spend to provide essential services for the public. It can be regulated markets and free trade, and most of the stuff we associate with Reagan’s brand of neoliberalism are consequences of horrible tax and social spending policies, not necessarily a consequence of a lighter hand at protectionism. What’s the real problem here, that we became more open to importing stuff or that the government abdicated its duty to do anything at all? (Aside from bombing brown people, of course.)

Game of Thrones sucks and I thought we were well over “bothsides” in 2026.

Like what? By my math, €2.5B affords 14.5B km of travel. I guess they could buy a bunch of EVs for people? €2.5B could purchase around 47,000, but the cash infusion would raise prices so that’s not terribly accurate. The one thing they could do the German government will not do is allow Chinese BEV brands in without tariffs.

You’re gonna have to be more specific.

In the US, most people have one option, a legal monopoly whose rates are set by the municipal government, and customers treat the energy company as one entity even if there is a grid operator and many electricity producers. There are exceptions (as with anything in the US) but that’s the general rule.

In other news, I’m really tempted to pull the trigger on a pallet of PV panels and DIY that install, but then I remember the inverter doubles the cost.

It’s not. There’s no bad faith. Your argument is simply humorously bad. Have a nice day.

This is closer to a bumper sticker

That might actually be more appropriate considering Americans’ obsession with both cars and bumper stickers.

A strawman is where you invent a different argument, then defeat it. Rephrasing the exact argument you made in funnier language isn’t a strawman. It’s just what you said, but more plainly. “Voting doesn’t work because I don’t always get what I want.” That’s what you said in literal English.

I suppose remembering what you said and knowing what words mean is different. Fascinating.

you got the same result as people who voted for Jill Stein and the people who voted for Trump.

that’s not effective.

Some memory you have.

Nah. You said voting doesn’t work because I got the same outcome as everyone else. That’s stupid. Voting works fine when enough people do it and do it intelligently. Americans simply didn’t in 2024. “Eggs expensive! Let’s try fascism!”

“voting doesn’t work because I don’t always win”

Wew that’s some take.

This is made only in jest:

Well I’ll have a Coke, then.

I want to know where they think this will go, because there is an obvious and looming problem: the content–the library–wasn’t made or at least hosted for free.

Somebody set up a website to host the interactions between people who knew things and people who wanted to learn things. The people exchanging information often got as much as they gave, and the person hosting the forum typically sold ads or information about the people participating in the discussions. The result was a virtuous cycle where content gets made and everyone is happy.

Now all those sites are scraped, and their information is regurgitated by slop bots into a “zero click search” where the creators of the information have no role, the seekers of information never encountered the source, and the hosts never get their slice of the pie. OK, well that works for now, but what about when something new is made and there’s no forum to talk about it because all forums get scraped into the slop machine? How will the slop center learn? Are we supposed to expect the AI companies will spend time meticulously testing how best to DIY a mass spectrometer or whatever?

Voting strategically doesn’t make me feel good. It sucks. However, it does effect change, so I do it. You should try it. On election day you might not appreciate it, but come inauguration day, or perhaps a few months later, you’ll recognize the value in meaningfully participating in your democracy instead of complaining online about an outcome you didn’t bother to influence.

Millions of people are going to die because DOGE gutted USAID. That could easily have been prevented, and that’s just the start.