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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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AOC is definitely a voice in politics I've come to respect. I can assume pretty confidently that her opinion is well founded and with the right intentions... if she thinks Biden is best option at this point, that tells me pretty conclusively that Biden is genuinely the best option at this point.
The debate shenanigans, the age, whatever: all of that is a fraction of a drop in the ocean compared to the shitstorm that would be Trump presidency. It doesn't matter if any of us like Biden. Do you want a literal fascist running the country? If no, vote Biden. If yes, abstain / vote for literally anyone else.
I wish it was possible to convince trump supporters that he's literally not on their side
I've been making pitches for the libertarian party to my trumpanzee coworkers. It's a similar flavor of bullshit as the turds the GOP is already feeding them, so they're somewhat susceptible to it.
No chance in hell I'll be able to convince them to vote Biden, so burning a would-be Trump vote on the spoiler effect is the next best thing.
One of his better nuggets for this crowd is his suggestion that they "take the guns away first and do [sic] process later".
I'm sure you're an excellent spokesperson for ideas you think are similar to maga bullshit.
ideas that are objectively similar to maga bullshit.
When your knowledge of them is bullshit, sure.
You are cute. How far into the shit-filled rabbithole do I have to go into libertarianism before I find your specific flavour of bullshit? Somewhere between rand paul and ayn rand? Or do we go deeper?
Libertarians man. What a fucking joke.
I'm ethically closer to a leftist, but your choices highlight your ignorance but I guess that makes it easier to be smarmy.
A leftist who can't see how the tea party emboldened and created the proto-maga movement just in time for Trump to take it over.
I will once again call bullshit.
A leftist who watched the tea party get taken over by republicans. It was an unmitigated disaster, and the libertarians that allowed that shit are mostly gone.
It is an amusing conundrum, though. Any popular libertarian movement is destined to be co-opted by larger groups if it's not closely guarded, and libertarians suck at being exclusive to ideas.
Ya dont say.gif
Who would've thought that "rugged individualism" doesn't scale well, and that collectivism of any sort in politics (a fucking popularity contest with real world stakes) will obviously trounce individualism politically? /s
"If not closely guarded"? What does that even look like? A tiny political party destined to get 0.25% of the vote? Politics is a numbers game, it's not your favorite indie band, or a recipe handed down from your grandma.
If you keep repeating standard anti-libertarian talking points instead of actually attempting to understand then, well, I had enough of that on reddit. There's a difference between political individualism and peeps living in shacks and shitting with bears. After the state convention in 2020 some of the local peeps went downtown to hand out stuff to homeless peeps with Spike Cohen and his wife (who wandered around finding homeless peeps to drag them to the tent to get stuff).
I was referring to closely guarding shit online mostly. In real life it's just kind of absurd. When I saw pro-life shit at a tea party rally I almost vomited. Not much to be done about it. Back in the day we just helped out causes we cared about. Shared our state fair booth with NORML sort of things.
We have a system that's built to crush third parties. Libertarians and greens have to sue states every election for ballot access and their 4-5%.
Regardless, it's a mistake to write off motivated people that will back you up on individual policies. I may disagree with them on a lot of things now, but when we're doing activist shit it's fantastic.
Ah yes, online, where you can keep everything closely guarded...
What are you even talking about? Keeping something "closely guarded" online is perhaps more absurd than trying to do so in real life, where at least the people had to show up physically.
Oh, yeah, bad wording. Heavily moderated is what I should have said. Libertarians don't have much to keep quiet about.
I mean, you're being sarcastic, but being able to give an elevator pitch for something you're personally against is a great skill. I was a speech & debate nerd in high school, and that was definitely one of the more valuable lessons.
If nothing else, it helps to understand what 'other side' is thinking. We (self included) have a tendency to demonize others who don't align with our values.
Abortion is one of the best examples of this. If you look at the other side exclusively through the lens of the other's echo chamber, you have 1) misogynistic bigots who want to control women down to their organ function and punish them for failing to adhere to a religious standard that they don't subscribe to, vs 2) women who recreationally murder babies and redirect responsibility for their promiscuous lifestyle onto the healthcare system.
I think this is why we never make any meaningful progress on that controversy: all of the mainstream arguments are shit arguments in terms of their ability to actually resonate with the people they're directed at. You can probably guess where I stand on abortion based on my first post here, but I can 100% make a pitch for either.
Other topics are no exception. I fucking loathe the MAGA crowd, but calling them a Nazi isn't going to change any minds. I don't love the LP, but they're significantly more benign than the GOP. The two have overlap, so fuck yeah I can work with that. I'd love for the LP to continue to grow and refine itself - best case scenario is the GOP shrinks to an obscure extremist group, while any shreds of sanity flock to the LP to make a much more productive rival to big blue. I don't have to actually support the LP to want them to do well in that regard; if I can boost them at the expense of the GOP, win-win!
Steelmanning is hard. I have gotten better at it, but it's kinda through empathy rather than analysis.
Abortion rhetoric is a shitshow of fallacies. Almost nobody is willing to slow down. And, yeah, the best part is that while failing to understand the other side's motivations they'll accuse the other side of lacking empathy.
I can handle the "trump funny" people, but anyone that genuinely likes Trump drive me batty. I don't think Trump has any ideals to hold onto to begin with, so it's all cult of personality shit.
With some exceptions, a lot of the anti-tax racist rednecks have been sidelined - the dinosaurs are dying. I went to the 2020 LP state convention because I was asked to, and I was really happy seeing the dudes that made me leave 16 years ago sitting at a table alone.
I didn't know there was an actual word for it!
The abortion shitshow was actually the topic of that lesson because of how tribal each side has gotten. That was... idk, 15 years ago? Not much has changed lol. Initially we were just told to prepare a debate on it, so we ofc pulled heavily from whichever echo chamber we adhered to, and we had all our (very flawed) talking points ready to go. Then the prof dropped the ol' switcheroo. Thoroughly broke highschool me's brain - in hindsight it was pretty funny to be in the middle of a room full of people who thought we knew our shit, all suddenly realizing we don't know squat.
That was a fucking good prof!
The LP... they sound alright on paper. The non-agression principle is solid. All the emphasis on a 'free market' sounds nice if you assume corporations elect for ethical practices when they're not mandated (lol). I can talk em up in the scope of a lunch break; it'd be hard to keep the ball rolling much passed that though.
No, nothing has changed. And that was a good professor. I'm kind of in the place where we've picked metrics to decide when it's fine to let a life go so why can't we look at the other side and aim for a non-magical start.
The LP has pretty good social ideas. First electoral vote for a woman. First to include sex workers in the party platform. The NAP is interesting because both the left and right are down, we just define aggression differently.
With sane liability laws and a financial system that isn't built for large corps, a free market could work. Where business has responsibility for its actions and is rated based on customer liability vs assets. Libertarians don't want no regulation, they just prefer private regulation. Ancaps are kind of the same. So long as we keep trying to patch up our bullshit system instead of addressing root causes, we'll continue getting fucked.
I'm still kind of a libertarian. My anti-corp and non-propertarian leanings make me somewhat left politically, but I have strong ethics about helping each other and those that can't really help themselves. I just don't like using violence to make people do what I want.
The LP definitely has potential for growth. I'd love to see them eventually take the GOP's seat as one of the big two. All the social stuff would pass pretty much overnight cuz that's a win for everyone; we'd just bash heads over where to (not) spend money and what (not) to regulate, but that wouldn't be a bad thing - at least the two parties would each have a clear objective for voters to weigh, vs the GOP's nonstop contrarian bullshit for the sole sake of contrarian bullshit. It'd also force the blue team to get their shit together and run some actual progressives instead of this race for second-worst we keep dragging our feet in. I can't stand this loop of voting for someone because they're not a Nazi. It's necessary, cuz I don't want the fucking Nazi, but is that really the highest we can set the damn bar?
My political wet dream is to look at a ballot and actually hesitate for a minute because all of the options on it are good options and trying to pick out the best one becomes a difficult task. That will never happen as long as it's red vs blue. Yellow vs blue though... there's potential.
That party itself in USA is definitely bullshit though
I mean, the local people put up a huge fight in our state fight to change the constitution to allow banning abortion. Printed stickers, organized marches, protected speakers and organizers.
Have you looked at who won the presidential nomination this time? Kinda neat.
It's a shitshow, and not at all monolithic. I've drifted toward left anarchy in the last couple decades, but they're not nearly as bad as progressives want to paint them.
I'd really prefer another candidate, but under our current system and circumstances, Biden is our best option.
That's how democracy works. You rarely get to pick a candidate who is perfectly aligned with you. You pick the least bad option.
The DNC is going to run this playbook again in four years. Stuff some establishment democrat down our throats "for the fate of democracy". I agree that another Trump presidency would be terrible, but can the American people please get a real choice of which Democrat to vote for? Please DNC?
Probably. And when that time comes, I'll make the same pitch for whichever not-a-Nazi is running against the actual Nazi. Should it be better? Fuck yeah! But if we don't play along, we get actual Nazi. I suspect we'll rinse-and-repeat until we're extinct; but I'd prefer to spend that time with as few Nazis in power as possible.