crosswind

Every day he doesn't drop out strengthens the argument of "it's too late, it would cause too much chaos" so he would be stupid not to string everyone along as long as he can

Overhearing someone at a loud party describing what a pride flag is, and then designing my homophobe pride shirt

And it turns out you’re not Show more

I thought I was Show more

Biden, and the democratic party more broadly have two roles to play (outside of maintaining capitalism).

1. Oppose Trump and the republican party
2. Crush, discredit, or co-opt any other organizations that could threaten their monopoly on opposition to the republican party.

When it's time to fulfill role 1. the party always hedges, because they fear that taking any strong actions will alienate centrist voters, or more importantly donors. This means that on many issues, any progress made is not enough to undo the damage done under a republican government. On other issues the situation declines under either party. There are very few significant issues where the democrats are actually able to overcome the republicans long term.

All of this is very disappointing, but on its own it would still be preferable to republicans ruling completely unopposed.

The problem is when you factor in role 2. The republicans are not an unstoppable force of highly competent and well liked people. A party that was dedicated to taking serious actions to improve the lives of the average voter could easily beat the republicans electorally, if they wouldn't also have to take on the democratic party and all of their media influence. When the democrats pursue role 2. they have no reason to hold back. Their continued existence relies on giving it their full effort. They will try to prevent any organization from accumulating enough power to push them left, while actively pushing the republicans to the far right to strengthen their own position.

Having to choose between two terrible candidates isn't something that's happened on accident. It's the result of the ongoing actions of the democratic party.

At this point, with the ticking clocks of climate change and rising fascism, a democrat in the white house is not remotely adequate to make a difference. We're headed to multiple simultaneous catastrophes either way. The only thing voting for Biden accomplishes is supporting the party that brought us here in clinging to power until their last breath.

Right now there is no 'realistic' alternative outside of the two party electoral system. I don't know if there will be one in the future, but there's certainly no hope in helping to reinforce it.

China has achieved remarkable progress in controlling nuclear fusion by fusioning their nuclears better than ever before!

Never!

That's optimistic. I think one of the more employable/profitable skills is going to be learning how ai works so you can get it to be full of shit in a way that's useful to your boss.

You’re talking about opposing racist pieces of shit. For that, absolutely, use bullying, punches, bullets, whatever works. But there you’re not trying to make them better people, the goal is to stop them from saying and doing racist shit.

My issue is when this gets applied to trying to get an okay to change their beliefs. It’s not going to work, and you can talk yourself into doing some fucked up stuff that way.

Not bullying someone doesn’t mean being nice and holding their hand, it means not trying to make their life hell. You can still be harsh, blunt, and forceful when calling things out. That’s different from bullying.

I think we should be aware of when it’s an appropriate tool to use, and not treat any criticism of bullying like it’s a call to give a klansman a hug.

I think this is where the problem is. You can't bully someone into having better beliefs. You can bully them into shutting up and being scared to say their shitty opinions out loud. There's a lot of people where achieving that would be great, and for them "bullying works". But believing that "bullying works" to actually change people for the better leads to some awful behavior, and it's an issue that a lot of people on this site accept it.

Remember when people called mike bloomberg an oligarch, and others were defending him by citing webster’s dictionary or whatever to say that an oligarch can only be from russia by definition.

An american billionaire has to be a sparkling entrepreneur.

Either keep your compound words to a reasonable length, or get rid of spaces entirely and have one word per paragraph.

People criticized Obama for performatively pretending to drink water, and now here's Biden actually drinking water. Sometimes we just need to maturely accept incremental progress and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.