The universe is an anomaly. It’s a miracle life is even possible at all.

Nah I’ll buy the mobile home used off Craigslist. The car will be of similar quality. I’m committing to the bit!

Of course!

Well if money is no object, I’m guessing I’m a sociopathic billionaire in this scenario. With that in mind, I’m going to live in Manhattan. Specifically, in a home that flaunts wealth in the greatest act of poor taste imaginable. I will buy up and bulldoze an entire block of dense Manhattan real estate. Then, surrounded by skyscrapers on all sides, I’ll live in a mobile home with a block-wide chain link fence around the property. There will be at least three cars on blocks in the yard.

It is close to the form used by the Nazis, but that exact form was used by many people other than the Nazis. The Nazis were not the only ones to use this variant of a death’s head. That’s why it’s not a Nazi symbol or a Nazi tattoo. To be so, it would have to be a symbol almost exclusively used by the Nazis, or of a form associated always universally with the Nazis. A swastika would be a Nazi symbol, as everyone knows that it’s primarily a Nazi symbol, even though the swastika has roots preceding the Nazis. But the death’s head? Before this, if you asked the average person what the symbol meant, very few people say it’s an SS symbol. Some history buffs might. But in the eyes of the people, very few would call it a Nazi symbol.

He didn’t get a Nazi tattoo. He got a skull and crossbones tattoo. Does it look a bit like the Nazi version? Sure. But the Nazis just took a form for it that had been used for centuries.

It wasn’t a damn swastika. It was a military tattoo of the kind no way specific to Nazis. And you’re surprised a damn marine gets a tattoo that evokes centuries of military tradition?

Would you refuse to vote for someone that was a vegetarian? Because vegetarianism is a “Nazi diet” in the same way this is a “Nazi tattoo.” Hitler was vegetarian at the end of his life.

States rights were also a profound force against slavery.

If conservatives in Britain can elect a woman as the leader of their country in the 1980s, then the US can elect a woman in the 2020s. We have a problem with misogyny, but I refuse to believe that even though enough conservative Britains could overcome their prejudice to get a woman elected in the 1980s, progressives in the US can’t somehow manage it in the 2020s.

Reality check. A few points swing would have resulted in Hillary of Kamala winning. These were close elections. I’m sure sexism was a factor, but their unpopular policies and corporate fakery were what really killed them.

This wreaks of the centrism “common sense” that keeps losing us elections. It’s built on the assumption that moderates are innately more electable, while history has shown this is anything but the case. It’s a kind of magical thinking completely divorced from reality.

The flaw in this thinking is that it assumes that there is a large population of political moderates waiting to be appealed to. This is what’s cost Democrats the working class - abandoning workers rights and benefits in the hope of wooing suburban conservatives. And it’s failed election after election.

It fails because there aren’t actually very many true moderates. If you poll people who are politically unaligned, it’s not that they’re unaligned because they lie right between the parties. They’re unaligned because their politics simply don’t match to the existing partisan alignment. Think someone that is pro-gun rights but also supports Medicare for All.

Running performative centrists doesn’t do anything to appeal to these voters, it just makes your candidate come off as inauthentic. Some issues just don’t have reasonable compromises on them. If one party wants to greatly restrict the civil rights of some minority group, taking the centrist position of only restricting their rights a little bit still makes you look like a monster to anyone with a conscience.

This is why centrists fail. Almost no one actually had beliefs that are in the dead middle of the political spectrum. Appealing to these mythical voters is a strategy that fails again and again.

Historically, the first step in removing the dictator is letting the fake controlled opposition party burn to the ground. Voting in corporate Dems is no different than voting for the fake opposition parties the Soviet dictators used to let run so they could brag about getting 99% of the vote.

We already tried your strategy, and it failed. We got some short-term wins, but at the cost of long-term defeat. In 2020, we followed your approach. We picked the useless corporate centrist because we saw him as more ‘electable’ and because we needed to get Trump out of office. And of course, what everyone on the left predicted would happen, happened. The centrist did very little to actually change the conditions that lead to Trump in the first place, and predictably, Trump won again with an even larger margin.

You need to start looking beyond just the election in front of you. Short-term thinking is what has got us into this mess. We’re so unwilling to take a short-term loss that we make short-sighted decisions on “electability” that ultimately end up losing us elections in both the short and long term.

Your strategy results in Kamala winning in 2028 and Steven Miller becoming president in 2032.

Oh she could easily be the candidate. She could get the nomination the same way Biden got it: a coordinated manipulation campaign by the DNC. In 2020, they arranged for all the centrist candidates except Biden to drop out at once, while leaving the progressive vote split between Sanders and Warren. Kamala could easily end up with the nomination.

we really need a fresh pool of candidates

DNC: We’ve listened to your suggestions and taken them to heart. We have a new candidate, someone not cut from the old cloth. In fact, he’s even a socialist. Let me introduce you to our new 2028 candidate…Steven Miller. He’s not just a socialist, but a national socialist! Don’t forget to vote blue no matter who!

Like… yes, it is a state level election. But you don’t come out of absolutely nowhere and become the one true hope for the Democrats. Okay… Obama actually DID but he had actually had a political career until then, we just weren’t paying attention.

Platner has also had a political career prior to this. He didn’t come out of nowhere. You think the unions that recruited him to run did so based on 20 year old reddit comments?

Contrast that with “I talked about how much I like socialism on twitter”.

That is a comical and disgraceful summary of Platner’s career. Hell, running for office wasn’t even his idea. He was recruited by local labor unions, directly as a result of his activism work, not his online posts.

What kind of Nazis do you know make comments like “all cops are bastards?”

That’s antithetical to the entire idea of being a Nazi.

Reading through the actual comments, they’re not great, but they’re hardly monstrous. Note, in this smear campaign, you mostly see headlines that just vaguely describe the comments. They keep it vague because the comments themselves really aren’t that bad, judged by the scale of contemporary discourse.

Frankly we really shouldn’t crucify people or some comments they made on an pseudonymous reddit account years ago. Unless someone is actively advocating Nazi policies, has actually committed sexual assault or rape, etc. There are perfectly valid reasons to cancel someone; some off-the-cuff remarks on a message board aren’t worthy of that. If you post something under a pseudonym, it shouldn’t be taken seriously unless it’s an actual threat of violence. These are the type of comments people have been making since the dawn of time, but past generations have had the privilege of not risking their old off-the-cuff remarks being preserved forever.

It’s really time we mature our expectations and stop pretending like it’s still 1970. This smear campaign would make sense if these were speeches given in public, or formal writings published under someone’s name. In other words, if they were words carefully chosen and meant to really represent someone’s view. Random reddit comments today should be treated like anonymous drunken bar room talk of 50 years ago. Maybe if some drunk guy in a bar threatens to lynch the governor you should take them seriously, but otherwise we really should just get in the habit of ignoring smear attacks based on pseudonymous social media posts. It’s the modern equivalent of drunken bar room talk. Unless someone drunkenly threatens or confesses to actual serious crimes, such talk should be ignored.

Because the problem with your approach is that you are inadvertently selecting for absolute psychopaths. Everyone has said some things in their lives that may disqualify them from office decades down the road. What if the AI rights weirdos actually take off into a movement, and 20 years from now “clanker” is seen as a disqualifying slur? Or what if saying anything good about trans people is considered disqualifying 20 years from now, or saying anything bad about them? You can’t predict how political norms will evolve.

You have to let people move on. There has to be a place for crude but low-stakes communication. Otherwise you are creating a political system that aggressively selects for absolute psychopaths as leaders. The only people who will ever be able to run for office are those that deliberately craft their entire public image from a very young age. Unless your parents started grooming you for political office before puberty even hit and carefully controlled your social media use, then you yourself likely have something in your past that would disqualify you from office if it came to light. If every word you had ever said was aired out publicly, something you said at some point will serve to crucify you.

The approach you are advocating for selects for absolute psychopaths who fundamentally do not live real human lives. The only people who will be able to run for office are people who are, from a very young age, able to completely control their public image. Every comment. Every gesture. Every look. All carefully choreographed to never produce a comment or sound bite that someone might later object to. Someone who arranges their entire life around the goal of achieving power.

Is that really the type of person you want to lead you? Or do you want actual, real, flawed human beings, who sometimes make mistakes but are willing to acknowledge and own up to them?

“It’s all in your head.”

Shouting doesn’t make a statement true.

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

1. Elect Mamdani. The requirement here only applies to the office of the president. Despite your shouting, you simply made up the idea that this applies to the VP.

2. Elect someone else president.

3. Have them resign or, even better, go on permanent vacation. VP Mamdani then takes on the duties of Acting President, for which the Constitution places no citizenship requirement.

Again, any loophole Trump can use Mamdani can as well.

they could just hire Paul Rudd or Jason Mamoa, put them in a suit and tie and shove them on stage at the convention.

When they have a proven track record of running for office, sure. Until then, no.

And what would stop Mamdani from running for VP? That’s the entire fucking point. Any loophole that Trump could use to bypass the term limit requirement could be used by Mamdani to bypass the natural born citizen requirement. He could use the figurehead method. He could run for VP. He could get the house to appoint him. Etc. Why is this hard to understand? If you can bypass one constitutional requirement for the presidency, you can bypass all of them. 2028 could easily be Trump v. Mamdani.