Objection

War profiteers. If you work for a company like Raytheon or Lockheed Martin then you are doing an incredible amount of harm to the world and I have even less respect than I have for people in the military. These companies are constantly looking to fuel conflicts, destabilize, and pump all sorts of weapons into every corner of the globe. These people are the true scum of the earth, they are among the worst people who have ever lived.

But it isn’t wrong. I’d like it to be wrong, and I can appreciate wanting to shift the Overton window, but that’s not where we are and it won’t change before November.

Cool, so which other groups are acceptable sacrifices for the sake of political convenience?

The rights of any minority are always precarious because the majority has the ability to fuck them over. The only way to protect ourselves is by banding together in solidarity with other vulnerable groups and drawing red lines and treating an attack on one as an attack on all. A group I belong to could very easily be the next in the crosshairs. "We will hang together, or we will hang separately."

You want to convince me to support a third-party candidate, first we need to put Trump in prison, then we need to roll out Star Voting, and then we need some third-party alternatives that aren’t obvious Russian assets.

Oh, is Star Voting part of Kamala's platform? Is that listed on her campaign website? Has she talked about it in speeches, rallies, or debates? Has she ever even mentioned it once?

Your plan is, "unconditional support of the Democratic party whether or not they provide any sort of voting reform, until they voluntarily choose to give us voting reform, in direct contradiction of their interests, and if they never do then just unconditional support to the democrats forever." In other words, talking about voting reform is just a red herring to obfuscate that your actual stance is just unconditional support to the democrats forever.

You know who does support voting reform to make third party candidates more viable? Third party candidates. So if you wanna talk about voting reform, in order for that to happen, we would need to get a third party candidate to win first. Or, alternatively, we could say that our support for Democrats should be conditional on them supporting voting reform, so that when they do their calculations they realize that they need to incorporate that into their platform to have a better chance of winning. Because why on earth would they ever support it otherwise?

Right now, the Dems have decided that supporting Israel gains them more votes than it loses, and they can live with that.

I don't see how you can say this and still not get it. We're trying to make sure that this calculation is wrong. Because it's only if that calculation is wrong that they would have any reason to change their stance. Voting for them regardless would mean that their calculation was easily correct and they should keep making the same calculation in the future. If you aknowledge that such a calculation is being made, then surely you can understand the rationale for making the decision more costly.

This thread has made me realize that while I was watching the hearings on it purely for comedy aspect, there were actually people out there being like, "Yeah that makes sense."

Love it when the government takes away our stuff. Please, take away more of our stuff. Love me that security theater.

If you don't like the app, just don't use it. Nationalism is a hell of a drug.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with data security and everything to do with other social media companies lobbying to eliminate a competitor, using anti-China sentiment and fear-mongering as a justification. It's all about the money.

I only brought up Jim Crow in response to the claim that the the state will protect people and that there are ways to appeal the state of it doesn't. The point being that having legal protections on paper is not always enough to keep people safe.

The "fascist enablers" don't have consciences you can appeal to, because what drives them is money, and they are specifically selected for their willingness to serve capital and cause harm to innocent people. The system selects for sociopaths.

You analysis takes absolutely zero account of the systems or material conditions that exist which compel people to act in certain ways. Germany had an unemployment rate of 30% in 1932, but in your mind, it seems like the communists were only fighting because they wanted to and the capitalists were just reacting to that.

Had everyone on the left coordinated on mass nonviolent actions, like mass strikes for example, the capitalists would still have turned to the fascists in order to preserve their money and power. Violence or nonviolence doesn't matter, what matters is whether their positions are threatened. You either never do anything to gain power in hopes of being able to beg your enemies for mercy, or you do whatever it takes to win so you don't have to rely on that. The in between stuff where you pull your punches and try to disrupt things without defending yourself is the surest way to get yourself killed.

Yeah, and those same mechanisms existed in the Jim Crow South but that didn't stop the Klan from lynching people and getting away with it.

Maybe if we just don't fight the Nazis, they won't be able to justify violence against us 🤡

Yeah let's just allow roving gangs of brownshirts to run around attacking and terrorizing minorities because if we don't they might stage an attack and the "atmosphere of violence" we've created by trying to keep people safe will allow them to blame it on us and seize power. The solution is to just allow them to seize power directly through force, without resistance.

This is nonsense. Nazis don't need a justification to use force against you, they can literally just lie and make shit up, like they did with the Reichstag Fire. It doesn't matter if it's true because it's directed at the weakest and most vulnerable and stigmatized populations, who have the least capacity to fight back and the fewest platforms to counter their narratives, and once they're done with them they work their way up. They will create terror on the streets and then use the fact that the streets are full of terror to seize power. People are going to try to defend themselves when attacked whether you think they should or not, so the only question is whether that resistance is strong enough to actually work.

I've seen too many examples throughout history of people trying to use nonviolence and do things the right way and just getting slaughtered because the other side simply does not care to be a pacifist. The world is clearly a better place because people employed violence in WWII to stop the Nazis. And street fighting in the 30's was one of the ways that the Nazis secured their power in the first place.

Nonviolent methods are tools that are useful to have in your toolbox, and in many situations, they are more practical in achieving your ends. But there are cases were violence is more practical, even necessary, and one shouldn't shy away from it when it's needed. You gotta have your head in the game, the stakes are too high. A diversity of tactics is best.

The logic that violence is oppressive so it should be renounced in all cases in order to reduce oppression is idealist. You have to look at the actual evidence and material situation to evaluate what effects violence will have in a given situation.

Punching Nazis is cool and good. Just try not to get arrested for it because it'll take you out of the action longer than it will them.

When I was a teenager, I encountered a bunch of different perspectives that contradicted the beliefs and ideas that I was raised with, and I realized that if you had wrong ideas about reality and tried to be a good person based on those ideas, you could easily wind up doing more harm than good. So I made a vow to myself to always pursue the truth - to learn about the world, to examine myself and my biases, to seek out and understand different perspectives, to ground my beliefs on evidence, and to reject peer pressure and comforting lies and to face reality even when it disturbed me.

My brother got fucked up psychologically from murdering Iraqis and Afghans and then came home and started "self-medicating" with meth while spending all day sitting in his house alone while listening to far-right propaganda like OAN. He tried to check himself in for treatment at the VA but they committed malpractice which nearly killed him, and he responded violently, which put a flag on his record making it difficult for him to get help in the future, while at the same time giving him a deep distrust of doctors. He was incredibly paranoid and accused everyone of being part of some sort of conspiracy against him and would make violent threats, veiled just enough to not be actionable. Eventually, he went over to someone's house with a gun, but the cops had been watching his house and they showed up, he pulled a gun on them and got shot in the arm, which he lost the use of, but he eventually recovered somewhat on account of getting off the meth while in jail. He's still a fascist and still listens to all the same shit, but he's at regular fascist levels of paranoid-schizophrenia now.

I don't give a shit about him but the pain he put my family through, a memory is burned into my mind of tears in my mother's eyes as she gets another text and it's another crisis and she can't enjoy even a single night out at dinner because she has to act like a 911 operator 24/7 - and whenever I think about any of the people responsible for the stupid, pointless wars that caused all this, Bush, Obama, Biden, Trump, and all the rest, I remember that we got off incredibly easy, that our suffering was absolutely nothing compared to the actual victims of our country's wanton slaughter and pointless wars of aggression, and I multiply the pain I felt in that moment and the trauma throughout the whole experience by a thousand, a hundred thousand, by as much as my mind is even capable of comprehending which is still only a tiny fraction of the reality, and I focus it into pure hatred directed towards all the people responsible for the wars.

One time when I was 10 my teacher rolled in a TV and made us watch some building fall over on the news. I thought it was boring and wanted to go back to learning stuff. But then afterwards all the grown-ups, and I mean like, all the grown-ups got really really angry and weird, like I would say things like that I don't want to knock over other people's buildings and they said that meant I was a terrorist.

This isn't the most quintessential 90's movie, or even a good movie, but the fever dream of Romeo+Juliet (1996) is the most 90's thing I've ever seen in my life.