NoneOfUrBusiness

Like the other person said. The social vs antisocial thing is just the modern manifestation; that’s why depending on issue the left will argue for personal autonomy while the right will be pro-tradition and “family values.”

I would strongly contest the idea that tankies are durther left than anarchists. This only make since if you’re a shitlib.

Relevant.

(This is a song about not taking drugs, but it’s framed as a drug bragging about being really bad).

There is no military long-term solution, nor does there need to be. “Don’t try to overthrow governments you don’t like” sounds like a pretty good long-term solution.

Uh… why? They don’t get anything substantial from closing it, and it’d earn them the enmity of half the world when they’re clearly trying to end their pariah state status.

A lot of it is going to be in places outside the rule of the modern UK since the British Empire never really did industrial slavery at home AFAIK.

“Bill Clinton is obviously a Democrat and also obviously a pedophile,”

This. Banjo’s reply implies that only the Republican side of the aisle would be discredited by the files rather than the whole American ruling class, so I decided to point out an obvious counterexample.

K.

Right, it’d discredit diehard and longtime Republicans such as Bill Clinton.

What? No? Why would they do that? I mean it’d discredit the American political class even more than it has been, but that’s not really their immediate goal right now.

Presumably it’s more for the American/European public at large? If they look like they’re winning, it’ll push Americans to push America to sue for peace. It probably won’t work, but better than nothing and AI slop is cheap to make.

The marketing serves to make stupid solutions acceptable, but it (for the most part, see: crime rates) can’t create new problems out of thin air. The reason conservative marketing has any takers is that people are hurting and looking for someone who will do something about it. The fact that a rising proportion of households are living paycheck to paycheck, for example, is not marketing.

You say that like MAGA was based on reasonable, logical reactions to real problems.

No, it’s based on unreasonable, illogical reactions to real problems. You don’t accept “the immigrants are taking our jobs” as justification for atrocities unless you need a (better) job.

but MAGA pre-Trump couldn’t have even IDENTIFIED a single one of them successfully.

Correction: MAGA pre and post-Trump can’t identify a single one of the causes correctly. They can very correctly identify that quality of life was getting worse and worse for the majority of people (including, most importantly, themselves and their communities). They can identify that they’ll never own a home, get a job that pays a livable wage or have enough money to survive an emergency. There’s a reason one of Trump’s main bases of support is white people in rural areas and/or without a college education. There’s a reason conservatives’ selling point has always been being good for the economy (which is of course total bollocks, but that’s a different story).

MAGA was and is successfully mobilized against imaginary problems for the purpose of creating imaginary outcomes based on magical thinking and delusion,

Correction: It successfully mobilized against scapegoats for the purpose of creating imaginary outcomes based on magical thinking and delusion. The “problems” addressed by MAGA are targeted with the understanding that getting rid of them will Make America Great Again, not for their own sake. We don’t even need to speculate about this; cost of living was a major part of Trump’s 2024 platform, and this was a big part of why he won. “Draining the swamp” is also notable here.

and if you think they would’ve been fended off by the real problems being addressed faster, you’re kidding yourself. MAGA’s rise was NEVER a reaction to real problems. It was a psychological attack that successfully captured and ruined an entire society.

Then why do progressives consistently get conservative votes? You seem like you’ve never listened critically to MAGAts speak, in which case you should do that before building an alternate reality where reactionary politics have nothing to do with declining material conditions.

So now we have all the same problems we had before, except now we can’t even THINK about addressing them because FIRST we have to stop a militant cult that’s willing to die - which comprises half the goddamn country - from tilting at windmills and fucking everything else up in the process.

Except the only attempts with any amount of promise to deal with this new problem have been based on making credible promises to improve material conditions. MAGA won’t and can’t be defeated without addressing the material bedrock of their delusions; attempting to do one without the other is folly.

It would’ve continued if we’d left competent people in charge instead of handing the keys over to the absolute WORST people in the world.

Except it’s the “competent” people who paved the way for this mess. You don’t get a Trump without generations of Bidens, Obamas and Reagans. The rot that led to MAGA isn’t something that could’ve just not happened; it needed to be actively avoided years if not decades in advance. Besides, things were getting worse even before Trump so what?

We’ve been passing NDAAs since The Korean War without hitting this level of mass slaughter.

Not contesting your overall point, but the Korean War was mass slaughter galore. The US almost completely flattened North Korea, and proportionally more North Koreans died in the war than Soviets did in WWII. If there’s a time when the US didn’t inflict mass slaughter on its enemies, it sure as hell wasn’t 1950-1953.

Breaking Amazon’s stuff automatically makes one at least somewhat based. Fuck Amazon.

They already are.

I never thought a reactionary repressive theocracy could be so based.

Gaza and West Bank two state solution.

I mean Chinese and Mexican people have been in America for almost two centuries. I’m usually the first one to shit on Americans, but at this point Chinese-American stuff and Tex-Mex are theirs.