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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: February 21st, 2025

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  • They care to a point. Most people want a populist anti-elite approach to politics and messaging but that’s off limits. In reality, what you see is the following dynamic:

    • Republicans get their cues by testing various talking points on their base to see what sticks. They respond to the response of their base and double and triple down on the most popular. So in a sense get their policy cues from their base, but I left out one crucial thing: they’re extremely disingenuous about it because the talking points are mostly just culture war tabloid style outrage bait — moral panics filled with lies and half-truths. Still, to the common Republican voter, this seems like a dialogue.
    • Democrats could do the same thing but with real stuff. Even appeals to emotion are fine as long as you’re being truthful, because a lot of the time you need to meet people where they are. But Democrats do not talk to their voters at all, they despise them and feel entitled to their vote because hey, look how bad the Republicans are. But then where do they get the policy if they don’t talk to voters? Oh, why, the Republicans of course! They triangulate a “common sense” position between their ivory tower ideas (mostly just “civility”), the Republicans and the (pre-programmed) Republican base. Except for the populism, you see, because that’s “going low” and they’re going to be the adults in the room who “go high”.

    I hate this worthless octogenarian club of a party, sometimes more than the Republicans.

    (I apologize that this turned into a rant. I do want Dems to win, I just want them to stop being, you know, them.)


  • I’m with you. Too much baggage with these terms. I’d rather extract the actual policies from them and run with those directly. Call it “supercapitalism” for all I care (although realistically I think “demsoc” would sound like an intuitive next step after “socdem”).

    I also agree with the previous person that it’s a time for revolutionary change. It’s clear the current system needs to fundamentally transform to be stable, either by doubling down on capitalism at the expense of democracy, or by doubling down on democracy at the expense of capitalism. It’s clear now that the two cannot coexist.





  • I want to add that the people in charge of these policies have repeatedly made statements showing that their true feelings/intent aren’t about legal/illegal status:

    • Stephen Miller said in public that the 9-0 Supreme Court ruling to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia (whose deportation to a modern day concentration camp was, by their own admission, an “administrative error”) actually said the opposite of what it did. He’s made a lot of off-hand statements about migrants, usually to avoid mentioning their legal status, to the tune of “they don’t look like you” or “you wouldn’t want him as your neighbor” which is literally just racism.
    • Tom Homan “border czar” said in an interview that to prevent family separation, they can just deport the whole family.
    • Kristi Noem has made few appearances but each time it seems like she’s “cruelty is the point” personified. For instance, she recently did a photo op at CECOT with prisoners behind her with the classic “this is what you get if you come here illegally” speech. But to me the worst part is when, totally unforced, she wrote in her book about how she killed her puppy with a bullet to the head because it wasn’t keen on killing animals on its first hunting trip and wanted to play instead. When asked about it, she said that “that’s just what you do on the farm” and started listing other animals she’d killed for mild annoyances.

    These people are psychopaths. They saw it’s easy to suck up to Trump and convince him to support their ideas in exchange for treating him like dear leader. I maintain that Trump is the only one in that admin who isn’t a soulless demon, but he’s so easy to flatter.






  • These people don’t realize (or well, maybe they do and are lying, I can’t read their minds) that asking people to not meaningfully participate in voting is like asking people to not participate in capitalism.

    The argument that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism — something all leftists agree on and understand they still need to buy food, clothes, electronics etc. despite them being unethically sourced — is the same as the argument that there’s no ethical voting in FPTP (and capitalism). It’s literally the same argument, just centered on voting.

    So these people end up doing a kind of unironic “you say you’re a leftist yet you own an iPhone” but for voting — while probably typing all that from an iPhone.