I mean I do think banning them is a good idea, and in general I think nazis should be taken on helicopter rides, most especially the enablers of nazis, their financial leash handlers which basically bootstrap them into these positions in order to push the dialogue further rightward in service of corporate interests, and probably also in this case in service of “geopolitical security” since we’re going to be seeing oncoming climate refugees in the coming years, and combatting that in any way but increasing the security apparatus is off the table.

More than that, though, I worry that realistically just banning them, though a great temporary measure, won’t do much, say, five years or a decade down the road, because it’s not gonna solve the core hypocrisies and discrepancies that neoliberalism is not so keen to solve. If you want to actually solve this problem long term then you need to combat those core problems. Instead, though, I think that probably the party being banned will just see them either form a new party, or else tone down their rhetoric to an acceptable degree, or just join the next furthest right party and then decide to push them further right, and so on and so on, until we’ve all collectively just shifted rightward to an incredible degree.

Ad nauseam, et cetera, regardless of the political apparatuses at work, until collectively the western world plummets towards fascism.

Because I’m sure that LA, in california, is under threat of swinging right if people protest vote too much. I’m sure of it, it just makes sense.

I mean I dunno, even if you switch to some sort of li-on AAs (something which I think would also be good for other reasons, like making recycling potentially easier, being able to swap batteries between devices, making batteries slightly cheaper), I dunno how many people are gonna want to slice open their own batteries and run tests on what comprises them. Since the half-life on any given set of batteries is probably in the range of multiple years, or at least several months, you’d probably be able to set up an attack before any government agency or private battery replacement or analysis would start getting off the ground to sus out what you’re doing.

I think the only reason this might be harder with replaceable batteries, would be that the potential for batteries to get swapped out of devices means that you’re less certain to see any kind of explosion from a given device that you’ve modified, and you’re less certain to hit the particular targets that you want, but it doesn’t seem like either of those would really be a big problem for whoever would want to do this sort of terrorism in the first place, so I’m not sure that’s a major deterrent.

I am also mocking the idea that the choice has been made easier by Harris.

It’s also like, not a choice, just straight up, right? Like the offer between, shit sandwich and shit sandwich with, I dunno, ham, or some other ostensibly good thing, that’s not really a choice, both because on the surface it sucks or whatever, and also because I’m gonna choose the one with ham. If I’m, by default, guaranteed to choose the one with ham every time, then that’s not really a choice, I was predestined to choose that. It’s no wonder that with this constant framing, the focus is always put on these nonexistent undecided voters, because they’re the only ones which can actually be presumed to be making a real choice here, they’re the only ones who “need” any convincing.

I mean, a core component in fascism is massive overlap between control of the government and the control of private interest, in return for politically backing fascists. Lobbying accompanied by mass privatization, basically. I think Mussolini is most infamous for this, but it also happened with Hitler. So, I dunno if that’s really a limiting factor.

It’s fucking so obvious that it boggles my mind that people are still gunning for him and buttigieg and shapiro. They are all power-hungry neoliberal freaks, I don’t understand how this is really in contention at this point. Basically the only thing she can do on the campaign trail is talk, and appoint a rather meaningless VP slot to show her allegiance to some kind of politics that actually gets people out and voting. If she chooses some moderate scumbag because they’re in a swing state, that’s like the fastest way for her to piss away all the good will she’s built up so far. It’s crazy, I don’t understand it.

this is THE first time I’ve seen a link to a mastodon page anywhere on my lemmy feed. insane

That’s kind of assuming they can’t just find any other freak to take command while doing everything the foundations and conservative PACs and corporate donors want. I don’t actually think trump really has all that much charisma beyond his slightly flamboyant mannerisms and his weird accent that I’ve never heard anywhere else. They could pretty easily replace him with some other brainworm candidate, probably get someone way younger and slightly more well-spoken, lose maybe like, 10% of the diehard trump supporters, and then gain back those numbers and more after running their candidate for like five months and trying to ride with slightly more centrist appeal.

Trump isn’t like, the end of this, he’s just a kind of canary in the coal mine for what’s to come, because the conditions which created him still exist and are actively worsening pretty much all the time. It’s not gonna end with him.

He’s also one of the only democrats that’s refused to sign the PRO act iirc, so I don’t think he’s, uhhh, pro labor either, which is a somewhat large issue I would say

Yeah, unfortunately people don’t understand that, of the IT guys and linux users and sysadmins that are gonna be most likely to want to migrate over here as a result of reddit going to shit, a lot of those are going to be furries and trans people, sure. But the other half of that demographic is gonna be the most incredible middle class financial anxiety liberal grifter white dudes you’ve ever seen, no question.

I mean I’m generally skeptical of like “this one weird 19th century ideology can solve all our problems” schtick, right, and I’m also skeptical of the mythical single tax systems, as a kind of simplified and idealistic compromise between your libertarians, your anarchists, and your more standard socialists and communists.

If you were to ask me in more detail, I would basically say that I think it’s a compromise solution for an extremely narrow set of problems that too often gets extrapolated into encompassing the entirety of a political system. I think that it functions well enough as an ideology within a specific set of constraints and goals, but if you seek to extrapolate it solve like, every political problem, as georgists generally tend to do, then it kind of falls apart, and doesn’t tend to be broad enough.

It’s basically just a less generalized version of marxism, to me, where land is equivalent in the system to capital, and rent-seeking behavior is only really banned from interference with whatever resources are seen as natural, which is primarily land. I dunno. I think as I slowly go more insane and become more cranky, I find myself increasingly wanting a horrible authoritarian state that just does exactly what I want, because everything I like is awesome, and everything everyone else thinks is bad and evil or whatever.

yeah georgism is crap though

but the government has to be pretty authoritarian in order to pull it off

I dunno if that’s a super necessary element, really. I think they could probably get off better, actually, if they had a more lenient prison system, and, say, didn’t execute people for minor weed possession or like, being gay. But then I also think their economy relies on a large portion of oppressed migrant labor, if I remember right? I dunno, somebody fact check me on that

MLK did advocate for pacifism for all but the last few months of his life

I mean this is sort of reframed with the context that he was assassinated for making that turn away from pacifism. I’m not saying that it was the wrong decision even given the hindsight we have now, but it does recontextualize it.

I mean I would just get rid of the GOP if that were a viable option. and probably also the political system in which we live, as a whole.

I do think more realistically though the only point I’m making is that it’s a kind of insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome, without understanding why they’re able to poison pill anything and everything and roll back any advancements as soon as they feel that the public pressure has let up enough. There’s a deeper issue there beyond just the lack of public housing, an issue that causes that lack of public housing in the first place, and simply building massive amounts of public housing, even if we were able to do that, which would be quite a feat, and something I would be happy about, even that would be a temporary solution, as we’ve seen.

I mean yeah, but I’m not sure we won’t just poison pill them again as soon as the metronome swings back around and keeps us from having anything nice.

The problem is the rentier class has the most resources to throw against this and they still can find other ways to rescarcify housing unless forced building programs are big enough to over power them.

Yeah, we probably just need to get rid of the rentier class. I don’t like them very much, I think they might be bad.

So if we can elect like, any old fuck now, can’t we just go even older and elect the corpse of mao or something? cause that’s kinda the only way I see rent, and rent specifically, becoming a non-issue in the near future. This is like one of the main issues which is directly symptomatic of capitalism, and which keeps capitalism as a system directly propped up. I don’t really see any long term solution to it that doesn’t involve a lot of no longer having capitalism. Other capitalist countries still have this problem. It’s only like, china and the former soviet union and apparently barcelona with superblocks which are still gonna be subject to market demands and rates, it’s only those countries which are going to be constructing such an excess of housing that a good amount of it can remain empty, which is also the case here as well but with the caveat that we still have massive amounts of homelessness and the empty housing is basically just to increase demand on top of straight up not having enough housing even were we to construct mass housing projects.

I dunno, this is a pretty good encapsulation of why we are specifically incredibly fucked and how this incrementalism isn’t going to work at all to address our current issues. We’re cooked, lads. Get the titanic band to start playing the song or whatever.

So, people can make the whole like, oh, this is a different context, kyle is joking, whatever whatever, right, and that’s both true and a fine argument to make. But I also think when we make this like, freedom as a principle argument, right, free speech as a principle, argument, it isn’t necessarily hypocritical.

We’re just not prioritizing freedom, prioritizing free speech, as the highest possible value that trumps all other values. I think kind of by necessity, it can’t be. The idea of free speech is logically incoherent if you take it to the extreme, because you could just define speech as being anything. Harmful acts, smearing poop on the bathroom walls, whatever. So you have to put a limit on it, and then those external values are going to be what places the limit on it.

Those external values of “I agree with kyle gass” vs “I agree with dave chapelle”. Agreeing with either argument, beyond that, thinking either argument, had in the public sphere, is worthwhile, that’s what has to define the limits of speech and freedom and what has to drive the outlook on it. I might oppose the poop swastika in the rec center bathroom, but I might think the ACAB poop smear in the nazi bar bathroom is maybe okay, even if it’s a little misguided or kind of just stupid or whatever.

There has to be a core value there. It’s not necessarily hypocritical to believe that political violence can be called for, or justified against your foes necessarily, and then think that the same thing shouldn’t be done to you on the nature of your ideology strictly being better. If my foes are basically just evil, straight up, yeah, probably at the very least stop them from like, having undue economic influence, which depending on who you ask, is gonna be some form of economic violence by nature of stripping away their agency or property or whatever. That doesn’t necessarily strike me as hypocritical, or not believing in equal rights or anything, it just strikes me as pragmatic.

I do think people are becoming overly worried about this sort of thing having a negative effect, or a large amount of sway. I haven’t seen really anyone who doesn’t have a schizo political affiliation actually commit these sorts of things. The guy who killed shinzo abe killed him for affiliation with a cult, the guy who tried to kill reagan shot him because he was undiagnosed and thought a celebrity wanted him to do it.

I don’t think the right wing has enough support broadly, and the hardcore groyper trump types definitely don’t have enough support, in order to actually have some sort of large scale mass riot or protest like with BLM. Charlottesville is about the best they’re gonna be able to do. But despite their relatively lower numbers, and we’re talking like, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction here, we’ve seen that they are overwhelmingly ready to commit political violence over other political groups, as one might predict and as we saw during BLM. I agree with lots of people that are saying we might get retaliatory attacks from this, but I’m also agreeing that those might’ve happened anyways just as well, or might’ve happened for any other reason, it’s really hard to tell.

Your average trump supporter, though, I’d be incredibly surprised if they did anything, and I don’t think this is going to result in civil war despite how much people seem to want to manifest that as a reality. I’m more concerned with how this has probably just ensured that he’s gonna get back in the white house.