Counterpoints: the US voter base re-elected Nixon

Nixon was able to capitalize on the sharp George Wallace split in the Democratic Party over the Civil Rights Act. The Nixonian attack on liberals boiled down to the claim that black people were naturally inferior, and any effort at repairing the damage inflicted by Jim Crow amounted to pro-black corrupt patronage.

then re-elected Reagan (despite him openly admitting to lying to the American public and exchanging guns for hostages)

Reagan wasn’t hit by Iran Contra until '87, and it nearly sank the Bush '88 campaign for President. Prior to that, he successfully campaigned as an anti-corruption tough-on-crime President, particularly in his prosecution of ABSCAM and other sting operations aimed at liberal politicians with big business ties.

So there’s your version of superman.

The idea of a single all-power Ubermensch Superman isn’t a socialist view. Time and again, large cooperative campaigns of mutual aid provide better outcomes than the public putting all our hopes on a handful of aristocratic elites.

Socialism or Barbarism. We either hang together or we hang separately.

I’m saying there are SOME bad actors here. SOME people are here in bad faith to propagandize the far left’s agenda

The far left’s… anti-genocide agenda?

Dude… this is an extremely old and very tired attempt to move the goalposts.

Its too hard to score goals when the goalpost marker is “Be against genocide”. Better move it to “Be against Republicans advocating genocide”.

This isn’t going to work anymore.

For once, you’re right. Fascism as bipartisan politics is going to destroy the country.

How is destructive behavior a form of anxiety relief?

Depressants reduce anxiety.

They could have fought the Russian influence

How much more money do we need to spend on the NSA and CIA to say we did that?

The democrats didn’t vote because it was laughable tRump would win

Democrats turned out in droves for Obama in 2008, despite the fact that McCain was one of the weakest candidates of my lifetime. The decline in 2012 was in direct response to a federal government that had thrown in the towel and a party that only knew how to compromise with the most greedy and cynical conservatives in their own party. But by 2016, they’d hit their functional floor. Hillary only lost 100,000 votes relative to Obama, four years earlier.

Do you think more democrats would have turned out against a John Kasich or Macro Rubio because they were less laughable? Do you think democrats would have turned out against a Low Energy Jeb campaign?

No. The problem democrats had in 2016 was an enormous surge in Republican turnout. 2M more Republicans climbed aboard the Trump train than Mitt Romney had. Four years later, Trump had accumulated an extra 12M votes. He crested Obama’s 2008 total by 9M votes. Trump won by tapping into the American fascist Id.

You respond like a bot/troll.

So I’m either a formulaic mechanical pre-generated response or a slick, sarcastic human being trying to get your goat?

Real “my enemy is both weak and strong” hours. No wonder they call it Blue MAGA.

why squabble with people pointing out that the US is more corrupt than other countries?

I started out illustrating instances in which politicians could end-run a simple bribery ban and it got dismissed as a uniquely American problem.

And it’s more corrupt because not only are we more accepting of corruption

I don’t think the US voter base is any more accepting of corruption than any other constituency. The courts are more accepting of corruption, but that’s largely because they are insulated from any kind of oversight or accountability.

I gotta tell ya at this point we’re much more likely to get full, mask-off fascism complete with gas chambers than we are to get any kind of communist revolution in the US.

We’ve had periods of mask-off fascism in the US going back centuries. From Indian Reservations to Jim Crow to Japanese Internment to Gitmo detention to kids stuffed into concentration camps on the US/Mexico border. But there are plenty of Americans who have lived through these periods and never really acknowledged it. That’s what allows fascism in the US to infest the body politic and to endure from generation to generation.

Meanwhile, we’ve inoculated ourselves against any kind of mass labor movement with the most hysterical media and legal response to organized workers. Every AES state is a deplorable hell-hole, because some industry unionized or popular local leader took the reins from a failing foreign corporate interest. Every domestic labor movement is simultaneously described as a bunch of entitled greedy idiot teenagers, a gaggle of uppity minorities with drug problems, and a fifth column of foreign infiltrators trying to bring down the American economy.

So I don’t doubt the next step will be towards another round of brutal, blood-drenched fascism. But the end result will be the further deterioration of the American project and the ultimate crack up of our unified economy. The only thing that can save America from itself is a new socialist turn. Without that, we’re headed for balkanization, further deindustrialization, and ultimate colonization from abroad.

Here Lies ICQ, a better alternative to AOL Instant Messanger

1996 to 2024

A lot of the people who come out of these schools are physical and emotional trainwrecks who immediately double-down on destructive behaviors as a form of anxiety relief.

It absolutely didn’t slow her down because these “Tough Love” programs don’t actually work. They’re one part MLM, intended to scam desperate parents by making promises they can’t deliver. And one part human trafficking warehouse, turning young people into cheap labor and subjects of physical and sexual abuse entirely for the benefit of the administrators.

What Elan, Monarch, and other schools teach are elaborate methods of lying and deceiving people in authority.

The podcaster host Brace Belden of TrueAnon was forced into The Monarch School as a teenager, which had a similar curriculum to Elan. His podcast takes some deep dives into the treatment of students as part of “The Game” miniseries. Episode 4, in particular, focuses on how the Synanon organization transforms itself from a cultish and violent drug rehab operation into an even more predatory troubled teen outreach organization.

Frustrating that the article doesn’t specify and simply links to a different Github page which doesn’t clearly specify the problem either.

I have to assume the site’s article was dynamically generated, without any actual tech journalist doing the reporting. The byline is “Sansec Forensics Team” which doesn’t even link out to the group. Also, the “Chinese Company” isn’t named either it the article or the references, which is incredibly shoddy reporting. The archive link is dead.

This whole page is indicative of the failed state of tech journalism. A genuinely explosive story but its so threadbare and vague that it becomes meaningless.

Based and Hygiene Pilled

Just because I’m not seeing these comments and posts doesn’t mean other people aren’t. And if they’re seeing it, then they’ll get seduced by the evil tankie mind-control rays. That means I’ve got to start blocking them, too.

Pretty soon, I’ll be in this shrinking walled garden of fewer and fewer people who say things I approve of. And then what?! I might begin to question my own self-righteousness or engage in some degree of critical reflection of views. That’ll be it. They’ll have gotten to me, too!

The whole Lemmy.world community needs to be severed from any instance of heresy. Otherwise, my personal views might be put at risk.

By a con­tin­u­ous shift­ing of rhetor­i­cal focus, the ene­mies are at the same time too strong and too weak.

Somewhere in Moscow, there’s a big red phone that connects to its counterpart in Beijing, where Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping discuss the latest attempts to influence an indie reddit spin-off with an elaborate network of Markov Chain LLMs producing comments like “I wish y’all wouldn’t be so nakedly racist towards people from other countries.”

This isn’t people being influenced by AI. This is Microsoft’s Godzilla battling the RIAA/MPAA’s King Kong.

The trend, to date, has been consolidation of media properties under fewer and more hegemonic distributors. And now we’re seeing a couple of economic Titans battle over the position of “Last Legitimate Music Vendor”.

She got too much of what she wanted as Sec. State. That’s what did her in.

Setting up my Trump/Biden bingo card with “Hunter Biden’s Cock” as the free space.

Riiiight… the old, ‘if you don’t entertain my endless barrage of bad-faith questions, I get to play Uno reverse on you!’ rule.

“I’m not hoisted on my own petard! You are!”

I never said it wasn’t genocide.

So its genocide, but talking about it in a way that makes the current President look bad means you’re not human?

And if you honestly believe this isn’t happening….

The problem with Americans is that they literally cannot break out of the Two-Party mentality. Since Joe Biden is endorsing genocide in Israel, anyone that suggests Biden might be bad for doing so is implicitly supporting Trump. And since Trump is also endorsing genocide, you can twist yourself into a knot suggesting that anyone espousing anti-genocidal views is somehow pro-genocide by the transitive property of “You must be a MAGA Russian bot”.

The great thing about a debate is that you don’t even have to watch the damned things to know who won.

Your team did! Because your team is the best and always was!

I’m sure there were a few more pressing matters to deal with

That’s always the excuse. And then you lose by 40,000 votes because your candidate reeks of sleeze and entitlement. What could Obama, Biden, and Hilary have done differently back in 2016?

How about doing the right thing?