Bruh you are the least qualified person on the planet to be commenting on what reality is.

Your “reality” cost the country its Democracy.

Supporting Joe Biden when there was -> 0 <- fucking chance he could win, and it was obvious to anyone with two braincells to rub together; if that was you, Trump is your fucking fault.

And not just supporting him, admonishing ANYONE AND EVERYONE who was pointing out that the strategic approach you were insisting on was a fucking disaster. That’s on you fam. At least your crime is on record.

And if you STILL walking around with this lessor evil mentality, a mentality that WILL lose the next election if imposed in support of a shitty candidate, who stands for nothing, who fights for nothing, who represents nothing but genocide and the defense of a corporate power structure: You WILL lose the next election if you can’t fix yourself.

This is the kind of mindset that resulted in running Biden long enough that we didn’t have a real primary, and Trump winning.

oops.

Heritage Foundation Project 2025 officials are the vanguard of the real fascist movement.

Names. We need names.

I’m at least 20% pizza.

It’s not just Biden s team. Its the entire media consent apparatus build around the DNC that was responsible for Biden being around as long as he was.

They’re all culpable.

I mean, Biden is quoted as calling it a campaign promise.

Which is is less binding than a pinky promise, but in 2024, he at least saw that he had made the commitment in 2020. Plenty of people in 2024 then were also incorrectly saying that Biden didn’t make that promise.

Maybe if they center a Cheney even harder next time!

They will have no one to blame but themselves.

Oh come on now. They’ve got you! And me! And the voters! And quite literally everybody but themselves!!

Its interesting right.

When it comes to any attempts to get things done that would make the party more progressive, or more to more aggressively fight, there is always some rule, some policy, the fucking “Parlementarian”, whatever, that blocks them. There are rules! We must follow them, even the ones that contradict the other ones!

But when it comes to stopping progressives, they change, bend, or break their own rules to favor a candidate or policy, its fine. Very legal very cool, the court said so. Justified as “they are private institution and can do whatever they want”. The DNC can rig their primary, its fine. The court said so. See. The rules don’t matter.

The term, I believe, is called illiberalism. Its the facade of democracy; the trapings, the method: but none of its substance. The Democratic party would have it both ways. Rules matter, when it comes to stopping you from having influence on the party, and yet, the rules don’t matter, again, if it results in stopping you from having influence in the party.

The Democratic party is an illiberal party, when it comes to their own governance.

Sure. I’ll just multiply my current efforts times 10% and…

smelania

Like you point out, my comments are all publicly available. I’m sure if what you are saying is the case then you can drum up some form of positive evidence of this. But I too am also fairly familiar with what I’ve put out, and I’ve been extremely critical of both Democrats and “the left” as a greater project in the lack of rigor they bring to their strategy.

I’m not suggesting the “left” is free from this whats-over. Search my comment history for my opinion on the “left” and the edging display Rachel Maddow engaged in (my self included) for literally years waiting for that second shoe.

The examples I put out I put out because they are good examples. I don’t think there are better examples of this phenomena in political circles than first and foremost 1) Trump and the MAGA movement, and 2) the collective self deception of Democrats, specifically the Blue MAGA/ Blue dog/ BAU/ “moderate” wing of the party in specifically the previous 4 years. The consequences for engagement in fantastical thinking and self deception on the part of MAGA is very obvious and very on display and so warrant less time. There are also many people covering this issue. The consequences for engagement in fantastical thinking and self deception on the part of Blue MAGA are less obvious, although perhaps, no less consequential. They warrant more time and coverage because of this.

If you have good examples of this happening on the left, but outside of the centrist/ Blue MAGA disaster which was the DNC in 2024, you are more than welcome to share it with the class. Otherwise, if its just you circle jerking because “I dont like how these words make me feel”, maybe have a seat.

I’m fucking confused.

Did I specify either: a part of the political spectrum that doesn’t fall victim to this; or a part of the political spectrum I identify with?

I’ve been talking about this for a while, but it goes well beyond those who simply have “lower cognitive ability”. Plenty of intelligent people fall victim to traps in their thinking.

A few observations I’ve made on the matter.

• People, in my observations, are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty. In general, people will prefer a wrong belief on a matter or issue, rather than holding back from having any belief at all. As well, most people do not seem to understand uncertainty as a principal, and specifically, the relationship between how they use the word and think about the concept of “truth”, versus, “truth” in the context of the scientific method and data. I’ve witnessed, first hand, well placed, highly intelligent professionals choosing to believe things they know to be wrong, on issues that have consequences for millions of people and billions of dollars in resources. My assertion is that people would rather be confidently wrong than not have an answer, or have to hold onto uncertainty.

• People take great pleasure in being “holders of the secret knowledge”. Its my observation, that because we live in a grossly dis-empowering society, which in a social manner is authoritarian to its core, people will embrace any kind of thinking or believe that gives them a sense of power over others. This includes racism, sexism, nationalism, and all forms of authoritarianism. But it goes well beyond this, especially in regards to things like conspiracy theory. The sensation, the idea that you have the “secret knowledge”, that you know something that no one else knows. The dopamine release that comes from the sensation of knowing something other people don’t, even if its false knowledge and maybe somewhere deep in your core you know its false, its a real thing. It also creates an identity structure based on in-group/ out-group mentality; you get to be a part of the selected few. Its my belief that this structure was fundamental to the rise of the MAGA movement, although one might argue that in some senses their secret knowledge ‘became’ real knowledge. For example, the phrase “stand back and stand by” went from pseudo-conspiratorial “secret knowledge” to real “secret knowledge” by evidence of the act on behalf of Trump. This structure has been exponentially expanded with the elevation of extreme conspiracy high priests like RFK Jr, MTG, and even Trump themselves.

• And perhaps most importantly, the high priests of this new religion of psuedo-consipiratorial, baseless but pleasurable belief, are both victim to, and creator of these structures. Trump is not immune to the same thinking his base falls victim to in this regard, and I belief that in a sense, there has been a propaganda campaign built for one, targeting Trump directly, going on for decades. But the broader point is that the purveyors of this snake oil are they themselves also victim to their own poison. It becomes a recursive “amplification of idiocy” process where a high priest puts out some bullshit, the followers make up bullshit to support the claims of the high priest, and the high priest cites that bullshit to confirm their belief. The result is a runaway amplification of “wrong think” feedback, like feedback into a PA system, or how when you feed output from an ML process back in on itself,it goes completely off the rails.

I used right wing examples here to make the point, but I want to be very clear, that there are those on the left and most specifically, those who identify as “centrists” or “moderates”; those we might classify as “blue dog” or “blue maga” who also are extremely vulnerable to the kind of “pleasurable in-group self sucking” to end up in intellectual and ideological positions that are utterly untenable. This issue goes well beyond particular ideologies, and may find its basis in human evolution, where it might be a positive selective trait to “believe something extreme”, even if that belief is utterly wrong or incoherent.

import tax

You should watch this from the “don’t be evil days” days of google.: https://youtu.be/mhBpI13dxkI

Copyright isn’t, and never has been, about “protecting the artist”.

It was, and is, and has always been, about controlling the means of distribution.

Interestingly, if you look into the lecturerer of that video, they are very active on mastadon.

yeah. it’s mind blowing to me how the Internet was convinced to give up its a culture of piracy and privateering and become sycophants for corporate protection of IP under they imaginary impression that they are “protecting artists”.

There were industry executives and think tanks litterally quoted (in the 2000s) for saying that their job was to effectively convince people that piracy “hurt the artist”, that this was the way to stop piracy: convince people they were hurting artists by piracy.

Turns out, almost no artists except the most extraordinarily successful make any money off copyright or IP. They mostly make their money the way they’ve always made their money: ticket sales, merch sales, performances, etc.

What do they say? The best time to start working out was 10 years ago.

The second best time to start is now.