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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • The headline is disingenuously framed. He isn’t saying he’s gearing up for a presidential bid. He’s saying he’ll throw his weight in to build up support for the party. Idk that that’ll do any good, but it isn’t a bad thing for him to do necessarily.

    He’s an established guy who a lot of moderates and libs have historically liked. Plus, I guarantee he knows a lot of big money donors who he might be able to convince to put their money toward a more progressive candidate - that could be useful if he was willing to support a more progressive direction & agenda. Now will he do that or just insist on more of the same bullshit that ran the party into the ground…? Seems like he might not exactly have his finger on the dying pulse of american democracy, so to speak


  • One thing the lawyer on Opening Arguments (US conlaw/current events podcast, progressive-liberal perspective) says often that rings really true to me is that “Fascism requires lawyers”, and lots of lawyers, to become established. We saw it in Germany and Italy as well - and in other fascist-lite regimes. You need people who know the law and know how to challenge and change those laws in order to take power. Usually, that means selling out & perverting the rule of law in destructive ways.




  • There’s a video somewhere of a documentarian undergoing oxygen deprivation under medical supervision by pumping nitrogen gas into a sealed room while he attempted to solve a simple geometric puzzle (like one for kids, putting the circle in the circular hole, etc). He felt totally fine the entire time but became euphoric and rapidly declined in cognitive ability - to the point where he could no longer solve the puzzle but was very confident that he was doing very well. When he was supplied with oxygen he reflected on the experience and said he had no idea anything was wrong.

    Now I’m not saying there isn’t something I’m missing or don’t understand regarding suicide/execution by nitrogen, but as far as I understand it, any discomfort occurs after you’ve lost consciousness.

    I have a feeling the backlash when states started considering this as an execution method was intended to paint it as less humane than the 3-drug cocktail to propagandize against the death penalty - knowing that if a more humane method were used, the movement against the death penalty would probably lose some supporters. So, they poisoned the well a couple years ago when this conversation first hit the news.

    Now, the real argument against the death penalty is that the state shouldn’t have the ability to kill convicts because what is a capital offence can change for arbitrary reasons and the judicial system will always wrongly convict people. But a more visceral argument is that execution is painful and cruel - so take away the pain and you lose the folks you’ve persuaded using that argument.



  • He did a huge amount of harm to our government. Not quite like this time, where most of what he is doing is outright illegal and is essentially a soft coup, but really bad nonetheless - just mostly aimed at making him money and getting/keeping political power instead of destryoying the country. Much of that was outright illegal, but a lot of it was just breaches of “norms” and “decorum”.

    I literally can’t fit it all into one comment, its so much and such a convoluted web of schemes and lies and crimes and support from other politicians/lawyers/the media. And every day was something new. I followed all the legal cases relating to his admin back in the first term - it was hard to keep up with even while it was all happening. Much of the reason he was never charged or indicted for so much of what he did is that you can’t criminally indict a sitting president.

    The Mueller investigation into the Trump administration’s conduct with Russian political operatives found that he more than likely illegally colluded with Russia to the detriment of the US and to defraud and disenfranchise voters, but literally couldn’t charge Trump since he was a sitting president - hoping instead that someone would pick up the investigation when he could be charged. It is notable that that investigation produced 37 indictments and 7 convictions/guilty pleas, referred 14 more cases to DoJ for prosecution, and recovered like $48M in misappropriated government funds (the investigation cost $32M, so it was actually profitable). So, this investigation couldn’t prosecute Trump, but 34 people in his administration were indicted and the findings of the report suggested they would have prosecuted Trump if they were legally allowed to. That says all you need to know, IMO.




  • This is how everyone should handle trump and his ilk at every opportunity. Talk over him, call him out on obvious lies, chuckle at him when he says idiotic things. Just generally treat him with disdain and derision. He has this hero status with his followers that could be chipped away at if he’s the subject of serious, casual ridicule. Not the stupid, desperate, “mango mussolini” “lord cheeto” junk, but the stuff that makes him feel self-conscious and lash out like a stupid, bumbling old man. This has been the most successful rhetorical/propaganda strategy whenever people have employed it.



  • Not mutually exclusive. People need to see messages like that to understand the link between their actions and those actions indirectly helping to cause the thing they wanted to stop in the first place.

    As a socialist, it is frustrating seeing people take a correct stance: the genocide in Gaza is bad and we should put pressure on the political establishment and turn it into “so we’ll become politically disengaged, serving the interests of fascism to teach the liberals a lesson while making no meaningful progress toward stopping genocide”.