Rail lives in that weird category like rural mail or power service (or, for that matter, highways) – you need to provide it if you want your country to be a civilized place, but it’s real real hard to make it available at a reasonable price and still turn a profit.

Turns out the answer was government, all along…

I’m just saying most left people I know who want to reign in the excesses of US hegemony care about US military adventures in the Middle East, or interventions in Central America, or immigration policy, or neoliberal trade restrictions against weaker economic powers… it’s highly unusual for the second thing on the list to be this particular European military alliance that is highly consensual and pretty productive for everyone who’s a part of it, and which is targeted almost entirely (now that it’s not the late 1990s anymore) at one particular big geopolitical power that they don’t have any particular love for any more than they do for the US. If we were talking about reigning them in back when they were bombing the fuck out of the former Yugoslavia, then yeah I wouldn’t bat an eye at it, but… I’m not saying it’s impossible that someone from the left managed to authentically arrive at the conclusion that out of all the possible awful things the US does on the world stage, NATO’s the urgent problem that needs to be torn down. But I think in comparison to the other obvious explanation, it seems a little implausible, quite honestly.

😀

I learned today that Cornel West thinks the world would be safer without NATO. I won’t say that’s the only geopolitical opinion he felt strongly enough about to issue a press release about, but I had to go six months back to find another one, which makes a total of two that I’m aware of.

“Let’s not support Israel while they kill Palestinians,” of course, is honestly a pretty sensible and congruous number one… “why NATO is bad” and Ukraine, on the other hand, is a very surprising and unusual one to be number 2.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what the right move here is. It’s a shitty situation. “How Democracies Die” talks about it in quite a bit of detail, but basically, in the unfolding collapse of a democracy, there’s a terrible temptation to start eroding democratic norms “in kind” in response to their eroding from the fascist side, but this is a mistake. You have to keep fighting on the tilted table without trying to tilt it back, because eroding the norms of behavior plays right into the fascists’ hands and those democratic standards are horrifyingly hard to get back once you’ve broken the seal.

But, that being said, keeping in mind that this is satire to make a point: I don’t think Biden should have Trump assassinated, or anybody. I do think that it would be a little more directly on the nose if he, as an official act, had Seal Team 6 ambush all the justices that voted for this (as an official act of course), take them with hoods over their heads and in ziptie cuffs to an undisclosed location, and then put up on YouTube the video of someone asking them a few questions in a bare concrete room in that undisclosed location, requesting that they clarify that this is really what they meant. Sort of bring some reality to what is the door they are trying to open, on a personal level, to them. Because I am 100% serious when I say that that is 100% very literally the door they have chosen to open. Sort of a “Let’s close this door back up tight, right brother? Unless you are sure you want to open it? Really, like really for real sure with no backsies?”

Saying that it’s okay if one group of people that someone tried to wipe out, does whatever they want, because of course they’re the victims after all, is exactly how we got to this situation where Israel is creating on Earth a for-real biblical apocalypse and people are trying to defend their right to do so.

Here is his more complete statement on it.

100% right. It is the temptation for easy solutions.

Turns out all that was needed to eliminate war and oppression was to pick out one semi-democratic country that’s doing it, and don’t vote in their elections, and bingo! Fascists take over, country collapses, no war and oppression anymore. I am amazed it was so easy the whole time and people were wasting their time with all these other more complicated structures and efforts to get it done.

Two things can both be concerning

When one side is being violent and racist against innocent people and then some other people start being violent and racist against innocent people on the “other side” to counterbalance, that’s not a calm or welcoming development for anyone concerned

Are you under the impression that Trump’s destruction of the US won’t involve him doing 10 times more terroristic things all over the world?

Or that the powers that will invade the power vacuum left by a US collapse wouldn’t instantly start resuming the exact same terrorism, and worse, that you are (with every righteous reason) opposing when the US is doing it?

Judging by the number of people who showed up at the Stormy Daniels trial the army is pretty understrength.

I won’t say they are not dangerous but I think there’s like a couple thousand of them that are actually ready to go to war at this stage, which if it doesn’t grow, is nowhere near enough

I think Godwin’s Law died out around the time the actual Nazis came back. It’s actually sort of difficult to talk about some elements of politics and media in the present day without referring to the historical parallels, and one particular parallel is absolutely significantly more parallel than the others.

But you don’t have to justify to me, man. You can abandon the conversation at any point you feel that that’s what you want to do. All the best.

Yeah this is a somewhat bad guide at least as far as some of these entries

I would also add:

• ad hoc = sort of made up for this one situation; “ad hoc attendance system” means they’re not following the structure; carries an implication that it’s more or less working but maybe not the best way
• de facto = it doesn’t have the designation but regardless of that, the meaning of the designation is what’s happening; “de facto manager” means they don’t have the manager title but that’s the job they are doing
• per se = I’m being nitpicky about details so please be careful not to read anything into my statements other than what’s specifically said; “he didn’t drive off the road per se, but he skidded on the turn and he was way out of his lane”

I didn’t even know about this

I watched one of his speeches at random just to see what the guy was about and TL;DR I wasn’t impressed and I would not be at all surprised to learn that the Republicans are trying to trick leftists into getting behind him. But I hadn’t heard that he also dislikes NATO. That seems like a weirdly specific and incongruous stance for him to take, given how extraordinarily nonspecific was a lot of the stuff he was saying when I watched him.

Yeah. Those guys I’m fine with. I was around in the 90s, man; you don’t have to tell me that the Democrats don’t have my back.

My point is that that subset doesn’t spend all their time on political forums picking on the DNC. Their time on the internet in my experience is spent in anarchist / activist forums or just on other, non political things; their not caring about electoral politics is a lot more universal and they don’t get all amped up talking about it or want to spend all their time on it (and specifically spend all their time on criticisms of only one of the parties, a lot of which are sort of made up and weird if you look at them closely.)

Throw some Costco Ghirardelli brownie mix in a mug

Add a little milk and stir

Microwave for roughly 45 seconds, until it starts bubbling, then quickly stop

Throw some vanilla ice cream on top

Eat it up with a glass of milk on the side

Fuckin delightful man

Stop climate change, stop killing Palestinians, economic justice for working people

There are various strategies you could use for any of the three, with various levels of timeframe involved and chance of success and all, but “let Trump come to power” is not a real good solution to any of them, to me. “Stop supporting the Democrats until they suddenly decide to start supporting them” also seems weird to me and unlikely to succeed. People have been not caring about politics (with every righteous reason) for quite a while now, and it doesn’t seem to have made the politics or the level of leftism progress in the equation any higher, to me.

What, you mean those guys that looked at Bernie Sanders and Gavin Newsom and Cory Booker, and said naw we want the guy with the crazy hair who is absolutely guaranteed to be unacceptable to the American electorate, to be the spokesman of the Left and specifically in this presidential election and we want people to take the world’s most bizarre strategy on his behalf which will NOT cause him to win or advance any leftist cause but MIGHT get Trump elected and destroy any large number of leftist causes

And, also, are totally uninterested in any leftist causes more strategic or logical than this weird and counterproductive single quixotic stand in this general election

You mean those guys WEREN’T trying to win the election for leftist causes, like they said they were?

That’s nuts man

It’s just part of an engineered drumbeat of various reasons not to vote for Biden. He’s the worst president for leftists in a whole generation. Okay actually he’s the opposite of that, but he can’t beat Trump. Okay he could have beat Trump but now he’s too old and can’t beat him anymore, and now we need someone else. I’m just pointing out all these problems because I want to help the Democrats. Now here are 10 different bad things that Biden did (of which it turns out, on examination, that he only did 2 of them and those 2 have asterisks). See, I’m helping the left!

None of it makes any acknowledgement that Trump will be actively destructive to the goals they say they care about, in a way that’s a hundred times worse than even the most outlandish of the false things they said about Biden. And, if the DNC did decide to replace Biden with Andrew Yang or Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders, or fucking Che Guevara for that matter, they would instantly pivot to saying it is SUPER PROBLEMATIC that Bernie said this thing about trans people in 1988, and anyway he’s too old to appeal to most Americans, and he screwed up this other thing last week, and anyway bottom line I’m staying home, I could never vote for a fake leftist millionaire who lives up in some rich person’s community up in New England and I’m voting for Cornel West and you should too.

It’s all just a bunch of shit. I mean, in this case they actually have something genuine to load into the cannon (Biden really did do a pretty incredibly poor job at the debate and it’s a real problem). But that’s not why they are firing the cannon this week. They are firing it because it’s Sunday and every day that ends in a Y from now until November is a good day to fire off the cannon.

I don’t even think they stand to benefit. I think when he blows up the US their assets will lose value, and depending on how bad it gets they may start having to hang out in some other safer country like a Russian oligarch spending all his time in Western Europe.

I think it is just pure force of habit at this point, like “Biden’s gonna tax the rich fuck him let’s get behind this disaster instead.” I mean, it worked for other disasters like Reagan or W, but I think they haven’t really absorbed how big a disaster Trump 2 would be.