Yes - this is not Reddit.

Which is exactly why I’m not going to stand for a poster trying to saddle me with some asinine strawman version of my actual points.

The other poster self-evidently believed that I was either so stupid that I actually believed that “this is all the fault of the Democrats” or that I was so stupid that I’d let that ridiculous strawman slide. And in either case fully deserved a verbal smack upside the head, and that specifically because this isn’t Reddit. Leave that sort of cheap, intellectually dishonest bullshit there.

I hesitate to post this, but…

I actually have experience with that.

And unfortunately, nothing I did worked, and ultimately I had to get away to save my own sanity

The problem was that she had effectively perfect defenses. In most cases, she could twist whatever I said to further “prove” that she was right and I was wrong, and in the rare cases in which I managed to say something that finally backed her into a corner from which she couldn’t spin it back against me, that, to her, just “proved” that I (or, often, “everybody”) hated her / wanted to hurt her / didn’t care about her / wanted to see her suffer / etc.

I never once, as far as I could tell, actually got through to her.

The media was making the democrats out to be the ones shutting down the nations airports.

So?

Exactly as I already said:

no matter how much they tried to dodge the responsibility, the majority of people blamed Republican intransigence for the shutdown

That’s what the polls consistently showed, and notably that was in spite of the fact that so much of the media tried to pin the blame on the Democrats.

So your claim here isn’t just irrelevant - it’s actually part of the support for my position. Yes - the captive media tried to blame the Democrats. But the people weren’t buying it.

But Schumer and the Democrats folded anyway.

and further empower the republicans

Nobody is empowering the Republicans more than Schumer and Jeffries and the rest of the establishment Democrats, who can’t even be arsed to do their jobs

You might be a russian troll…

lol

Of course not. Don’t be a simpleton.

The Republicans rather obviously bear the lion’s share of the blame.

However, that was the Republicans’ designated role from the start. Their job was to represent the interests of their plutocratic cronies and patrons by killing a program that spent money to benefit poor people, so they were just doing what they were meant to do and what they were expected to do.

On the other hand, the Democrats’ job was to protect a program that benefitted poor people, and they miserably failed at that job. In fact, they didn’t even simply fail - they forfeited. They gave up even trying.

And they very much deserve condemnation for that.

Remember when the government was shut down specifically because the Democrats refused to go along with a bill that ended the health insurance subsidies, and they had the Republicans up against the ropes because no matter how much they tried to dodge the responsibility, the majority of people blamed Republican intransigence for the shutdown?

Then remember how the Schumer-led Democrats just completely folded, passed the bill, then stood idly by as the chance to extend the subsidies vanished?

Every single one of those stinking traitorous shitbags needs to be primaried.

I’ll go one better - if the DNC hadn’t interfered and fucked us over, the people would have elected Sanders in 2016 and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.

Actually, we got fascism by constantly moving towards it over a span of at least 60 years, with the only difference being that we sometimes moved more quickly towards it and sometimes more slowly.

We moved towards it under Biden too, and would’ve continued moving towards it under either him or Harris.

The only thing that’s notable about Trump as far as that goes is how much he moved us and how quickly. But this was always the destination.

The only way we could’ve moved away from fascism rather than towards it would’ve been to elect federal politicians who were actually good instead of just less bad. But we not only haven’t been given that choice, but have been indoctrinated into treating less bad as a virtue

And what you just described is the exact process by which governments descend into tyranny.

The much better way to deal with the issue, if you actually do care about your fellow humans, is to refuse to support a toxic candidate even if they are somewhat less toxic than the alternative, and make sure at every single turn that the blame is placed squarely where it should be - on the foul, loathsome, corrupt and compromised scumbags who arranged for the nomination of a toxic piece of shit candidate in the first place.

Less bad is still bad. If you settle for less bad, the best you’ll ever get is that things woll potentially get worse somewhat more slowly than they would otherwise. They’ll still inevitably get worse.

If you want things to actually get better, then you have to hold the scumbags’ feet to the fire. You have to make sure that it’s widely understood that they and they alone are the reason that the best we can hope for is somewhat less bad and things getting worse somewhat more slowly. And you can’t do that by meekly going along with them.

Oh and…

The fact that this whole norion of a lack of lefty unity is complete bullshit was neatly demonstrated by leftist voters coming together to overwhelmingly support Zohran Mamdani.

And who didn’t support him? The fucking establishment neolib hacks - the exact same people who keep fucking us over by putting up shitty candidates then trying to guilt trip leftists into voting for them. We finally got a candidate we wanted and they couldn’t even be arsed to endorse him.

Supporting genocide is not fucking “minutia.”

I’m old. My first awareness of the world of politics was the Watergate hearings, so I actually lived through most of the run-up to this.

It’s certainly the case that the US has been moving more or less steadily toward plutocratic oligarchy since at least Nixon, and progress has definitely accelerated (though it really started accelerating with the Wall Street bailouts in the wake of the 2008 real estate bubble collapse and hasn’t really let up since), but that’s not really what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the literal insanity of Trump and his sycophants. They aren’t merely corrupt tools of the plutocrats like so many past politicians - they’re deranged lunatics. That’s not hyperbole - it’s simple fact, plainly obvious to anyone who takes a step back and honestly looks at what they do and say.

It’s not that the US has accelerated toward autocracy in less than a year (though it has), because yes - that’s the direction it’s been headed for decades. The astonishing thing to me is that the US has effectively gone insane in less than a year.

If the US was a person, it’d be on a psych hold. And that’s something I wasn’t prepared for, even as cynical as I’ve always been.

Oh look - it’s the DNC Defense Force, here to get an early start on guilt-tripping leftists who won’t vote for whichever shitty center right neolib hack the DNC will likely end up trying to foist on the voters at the behest of their corporate donors.

Fuck that. It’s not the voters’ responsibility to vote for a piece of shit just because they stink a little bit less than the other piece of shit - it’s the DNC’s responsibility to run candidates people actually want to vote for. And when they can’t (or more accurately won’t) even do that, then they and nobody else are responsible for the consequences.

That’s the most astonishing part of it to me.

Reality has gone completely off the rails. Virtually every day, I read another account of blithering insanity, and painfully obviously dangerous and destructive insanity, from this administration, and then I watch as all of the official entities that are meant to check that sort of insanity just treat it as another day and another press release from another President’s office.

It’s like The Emperor’s New Clothes, only far far worse.

And all in less than a year…

At this point though, that’s just noise.

Unfortunately, the mass media is complicit in the insanity - they’ve abandoned principles, integrity, honesty and accuracy in pursuit of profit and/or the owners’ agenda, whichever might be deemed more important in a given organization.

That’s not to say that that story is necessarily false. It’s simply that if it’s a spin that serves someone’s agenda, as this obviously is, then it will be published somewhere, entirely regardless of whether it’s true or not, so the fact that it has been published means nothing at all.

I know things were pretty fucked - I haven’t been a lifelong cynic for no reason - but still, it’s amazing how quickly snd completely the US has descended into screeching insanity.

And all at the hands of this demented lunatic, his psychopathic enablers and his legions of angry and stupid followers.

What a world…

That’s the current version of a power fantasy he’s had ever since he was the nerdy kid getting picked on by the mean kids on the playground.

For context:

Libre is a third party that was formed in 2011. They’re a coalition of leftist groups, and are democratic socialists.

In 2012 and 2013, at least 18 of their pre-candidates, candidates and staff were murdered.

In 2013, they lost the almost certainly fraudulent presidential election to the right-wing National Party candidate - Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado, the narcotics trafficker who was just pardoned by Trump.

Of course.

None of this is or ever has been about crime, or even really about immigrants, undocumented or otherwise.

It is and always has been about establishing precedents by which to expand governmental authority.

What they’re building is a system in which anonymous federal agents will be seen to have the right to black-bag anyone, regardless of whether they can be charged with a crime or not, and disappear them.

They started with undocumented immigrants justifiably accused of other crimes because that was the easiest case to be made both legally and popularly, but they never had any intention of stopping there. They’re going to keep expanding until they reach the point that they can do it to anyone, any time, for any reason.

Never seen it.

Off to see why I apparently should…

…Ah. I see.

That’s a specific approach I’ve never seen before, though the broad strategy is tediously familiar.

I’m amazed and pleased. I almost never encounter anyone who shares my views, even among self-described 'anarchists."

Most of them carry around lists (figuratively at least) of all of the things that will be required and all of the things that will be prohibited in their “anarchism,” antagonistically immune to the fact that by doing so, they’ve already stipulated institutionalized, hierarchical authority and thus proactively eliminated anarchism.

I don’t think of it as a political philosophy but more just as a description of how I believe the world actually is when stripped of the systems we’ve laid on top of everything.

Very much yes.

My anarchism is rooted in my view that authority is a contrivance, and an ultimately unjustifiable one.

Tom lives alone on a desert island. That means that Tom, within the constraints necessarily imposed by simple reality (he can’t, for instance, flap his arms and fly) enjoys complete freedom of choice.

The only way that that freedom can be constrained is if another person is introduced and that other person acts to constrain Tom’s freedom.

So as you note, the state of affairs in which Tom’s freedom is constrained beyond anything determined by simple reality is some additional element that’s laid on top of the base state.

And as such, it’s the thing that must be justified. Tom doesn’t have to justify being free from constraint imposed by another - he already was so free, and would have remained so were it not for the fact that the other has chosen to try to introduce constraint.

Therefore, the introduction of constraint is the thing that must be justified

And there’s no possible justification for it that doesn’t ultimately establish a hierarchy by which the other person is seen to effectively be a superior being, such that their determination of what Tom may, may not, must or must not do is superior even to Tom’s

If the tacit presumption of innate superiority isn’t made, then any and all noninal justifications for authority over Tom’s decisions fail, since any argument by which any other party might justify imposing their will on Tom is also an argument by which Tom might justify imposing his will on them, and any argument by which they might claim to be rightly free of the imposition of Tom’s will is also an argument by which Tom might claim to be rightfully free of the imposition of their will upon him.

This is where and why institutionalized authority inevitably goes wrong, which in turn is why I’m an anarchist.