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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 6th, 2024

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  • This is MAGA-type thinking you’re demonstrating. Democrats massively fucked up the 2024 election. It is important that those lessons be studied, learned from, and not repeated. Yes, Trump is worse, but that’s completely irrelevant to the conversation at hand. We have another Trump term precisely because of the mistakes the DNC made during the election. Failing to listen to those mistakes doesn’t help Democrats, and it doesn’t help the country. Failing to learn from the mistakes of 2016 and 2020 are how we ended up with 2024 after all.

    Do not for a second think Trump or some other MAGA candidate cannot win in 2028. Regardless of how bad Trump governs, even ignoring the potential for election shenanigans, it is entirely possible that Trump will win again in 2028. And every person that sticks their fingers in their ears and ignores all criticism of elected Democrats makes that event all the more likely.

    Democrats ran on “we’re not Trump” in 2016, 2020, and 2024. That strategy lost them both 2016 and 2024, and it would have lost them 2020 if not for covid.

    Yet here you are, still trying the same tired “we’re not Trump” strategy. You’re clearly insane, as you keep trying the same thing again and again, expecting a different result.


  • We need to abandon the Democratic Party at this point. Democrats are not capable of winning national elections. The Democratic Party is not run by serious people who actually intend on winning power and wielding it wisely. Those still telling folks to vote for Democrats are not politically serious people. The only future can be found in parties like the Working Families Party. Centrists will simply need to hold their nose, quit dividing the left, and vote for progressive candidates. Remember, a vote for a Democrat is a vote for a Republican. Democrats can’t win national elections. In a two party system, we can’t afford to throw our votes away on parties that are doomed to lose.




  • In February, he said the government could “monetize the US balance sheet for the American people.”

    One way to do this would be to revalue America’s gold reserves.

    The US still prices its gold reserves at $42.22 an ounce.

    If revalued to the market price of around $2,900, it could create nearly $900 billion in new equity overnight.

    This would give the government a new pool of capital without borrowing more money or printing dollars.

    Other assets, including federal land, real estate, infrastructure, and even confiscated cryptocurrency, could also be used.

    The logic is clear: the US owns trillions in untapped assets but still runs massive deficits.

    They want to put federal land up as collateral for loans. Instead of just issuing debt in the government’s name, they want to get lower interest rates by putting up US land as collateral. And when they manage the government right into default, the bankers will take possession of all national parks and federal land. That’s what ‘monetize’ means. It means put up as collateral.









  • The state of New York is about to get a firsthand lesson in the Streisand Effect. They should have just charged him the same charge any normal killer would get - Second Degree Murder, which is the normal charge for premeditated murder in NY. First degree requires rare special circumstances, and the prosecutor chose to use a dubious “terrorism” modifier to up the charge to Murder 1. They just couldn’t help themselves, and they shot themselves in the foot.

    The advantage to the prosecution to a simple Murder 2 charge is that motive really doesn’t matter much. They just have to prove that Luigi pulled the trigger. But with the terrorism modifier, the trial will no devolve into lengthy discussions about his motives and message. Not only have they now given him the world’s largest soapbox, but this will also give the defense an opportunity to make him much more sympathetic to the jury. With only a Murder 2 charge, the defense lawyer would have had to fight hard to sneak subtle hints into trial about Luigi’s motives. Now his motives will be a core part of the prosecution’s case.

    With a simple Murder 2 trial, even jurors who thought Thompson got what he deserved could vote to convict based simply on the letter of the law. Luigi killed an evil man, but he still has to face the consequences like any other criminal. Now the jury will clearly see that the system isn’t treating him like any other criminal. The prosecutors, through their own actions, are making Luigi’s case for him - the justice system is completely rigged in favor of the rich and powerful, and the only way they can ever be held accountable is through violence.

    All it takes is one juror of twelve to look around at the situation and say, “this is bullshit. I’m not going to convict.” Sure, they can try him again with a new jury if he’s not found unanimously not-guilty, but that jury will have an even greater risk of jury nullification. The longer this goes on, the more likely the prosecutor just has to offer him some sweetheart plea deal just to get him convicted of something. And each trial just elevates Mangione that much closer to literal Sainthood in the popular imagination.



  • I have a modest proposal. It is a way, at very little cost, to solve global warming and save countless human lives from violent deaths. It is the logical option, on purely utilitarian grounds.

    I propose that we gather up a list of every ethnic group on Earth. And I’m talking pretty specific here. I’m not talking “European,” or even “German.” No I mean like “Bavarian.” That level of specificity. We’ll have a list thousands of ethnicities long.

    I will then cut the list apart. Each ethnicity will be on a paper slip. I will put these slips in a hat, give a few good shakes, and select one ethnicity at random. And I mean truly random. It will be a fair drawing. We select an ethnicity from the hat. Individuals of that ethnicity are left alone.

    Everyone else goes to the camps.

    In this process, we will, depending on the size of the ethnicity randomly selected, wipe out between 90-99.9% of the entire human population. So, on the downside, we will have to lose…approximately 8 billion lives. That is the downside cost.

    But think of the upside! We have randomly selected a single ethnic group and wiped everyone else out. That single ethnic group, while still having numbers large enough for viability, now inhabit an empty world. Global warming is now solved. They’ll have no problem with CO2 emissions, as there’s a planet’s worth of solar panels and batteries waiting for them. Over time, their numbers will doubtlessly grow, and they will eventually repopulate the planet.

    But think of what will now happen. At the, admittedly steep cost of 8 billion lives, we’ve now eliminated racism forever! In the long run, they might need to engage in some minor genetic engineering to prevent genetic drift, but that should be quite doable. There will now be only a single ethnicity that all humans will share. Think of how many racial pogroms, expulsions, moral panics, race riots, and outright genocides and race wars have happened through history. We’ve been doing that since the dawn of time. Does anyone today think that we’ll ever be immune from that kind of hatred and violence?

    So yes, we lose 8 billion lives today, but in turn, we avoid racial prejudice and violence from now UNTIL THE END OF TIME. And we have no idea the scale of conflicts in the future. In a far space faring future, human population might be in the quintillions. In that kind of society, trillions of deaths by racial violence a year would be the equivalent of the hate crime rate experienced in the US today. And we can prevent all of that by simply ethnically downsizing the human population today!

    We pay the cost of 8 billion lives now. But in return, we are going to save trillions, perhaps quadrillions. Project forward billions of years, maybe even quintillions.

    From a purely utilitarian point of view, the choice is obvious. We must take the path that will save the most lives. We must commence the omnicide.

    /Obviously this is not a serious policy proposal, but an illustration of the flaws of utilitarian ethics. Yes, Kamala getting elected would have been objectively better for the Palestinians. It would have likely net saved lives. But the omnicide would also, on net, save lives. And utilitarian value cannot be the only way we make decisions. Justice and the respect for human life are not some trivial thing to be ignored. Let’s not mince words. Biden abetted a genocide; there can be no excuse for this. If there is a Hell beyond this place, then he has assuredly secured himself a fine residence there. What he did was, in fact, a profoundly wicked act. Evil in any meaning of the word. And Kamala promised to continue that evil. Trump would have objectively done even more evil. But again, utilitarian ethics is not the totality of things.

    For millions of voters, their moral compasses simply wouldn’t let them have any part of it. The reason we don’t do the omnicide is that we do not have the right to sacrifice countless innocent people based on our best guesses of how the future will turn out. And it’s completely incompatible with any moral system that places innate value on human life. The moral calculus of the pro-Palestine voters that stayed home works on similar logic.

    Yes, per our best estimate on election day, Trump would likely be worse for the Palestinians than Kamala would have been. But that is still in the unknown future. We don’t know what tomorrow will hold. But we do know that Kamala was the VP of a president that abetted a genocide. And we know that Kamala herself says she will continue these policies. She was part of that administration. She has culpability in this. Should she not be held accountable? Does she not objectively deserve punishment? Denying her a victory would be an act of justice for those she helped kill. But in turn, it would cause the election of someone likely to be much worse. But there are people who have already died. There are people today in unbearable suffering because of this. By electing her, you are denying them justice. In exchange for what may come to be in the future.

    Or think of it another way. Imagine you had a terrorist leader on trial, someone on the order of Osama Bin Laden. He’s convicted and sentenced to hang. As he’s taken to the gallows, he says, “I have a dozen sleeper cells planted through the US. If I die, expect dozens of suicide bombings across the country within the next few days.” Do you stay his sentence, or put it on hold? Or do you just carry forward, and let these future terrorists be responsible for their own actions?

    This is the core problem the Palestine abstainers faced. Are elections more about future policy, or are they about accountability? In truth, they’re both. And different people have different ratios of accountability to future policy that they vote on. I personally voted for Kamala, but I can absolutely get the ethical case for not participating at all in this race. If you care far more for future policy than accountability, you vote for Kamala. If you care far more for accountability than future policy, you stay home. A lot of people picked accountability, and as a consequence, Kamala lost.

    But perhaps I, and others who did vote for Kamala, have the worst outcome of any voter. I sold my soul and voted for Kamala. I gave up my one chance to apply the only bit of power I have as a voter to hold her accountable. I did it all because I hoped for a better future. But in the end, it didn’t matter. I lost my chance to hold her accountable, and the greater evil still won.