PhilipTheBucket

Many issues at play:

1. In the same way that a lot of people with powerful friends in the city depend on new highway projects, new community centers, new programs being set up, so that their friends can get paid, people in the US government with powerful friends depend on new wars so that everyone can sell weapons and continue to have good quarters.
2. The US military benefits enormously from getting a ton of practice. We're trying to run an empire, and very often big militaries get lazy because their countries do so well that they don't really have to be scrappy, and people get complacent. War is so shocking and challenging that the only way to really stay good at it is to be doing it. And so, that's exactly what the US does.
3. The US has its fingers in so many pies so to speak that all kinds of shit that happens globally we determine to be our business. Civil war in Syria? Holy shit, better make sure the right people win. Let's go fuck up some irregular forces that don't have helicopters or satellite support.

The time to do that was 2020-2024, honestly. They had power. Now they're having to fight the whole fucking thing uphill, and of course Trump is going to make himself president for life.

They should try to recover us to a democracy, IDK what the fuck the alternative would be. But the time to put Trump in custody was January 2021. Now we've got the exact same fight on our hands that that would have caused, but they get to be inside the castle shooting out.

So I disagreed with this:

Because the opinion pieces were all winging about how Harris lost because ... she hadn’t been mean enough to trans people.

Now that we've solidly established that I was 100% in the right to disagree with this, you've done a few rhetorical backflips around to where you're accusing me of a bunch of things I never said. You've also actually managed to backflip your way around to where because I posted a negative story about Gavin Newsom, I must not care about negative things about Gavin Newsom and I must think he's our next president.

I changed my mind: You might be the galaxy brain propaganda. It's honestly pretty impressive. Well done! If you want to engage with anything I actually said, you're welcome to.

Okay, so it wasn't "all" opinion pieces, it was no opinion pieces. Glad we got that squared away. There is an NBC News article, and a couple of clueless reps apparently. Hooray. To me this piece sounds like a pretty good instance of the galaxy-brain type of propaganda that can successfully turn everyone against the Democrats, whether you are pro-trans or anti-trans, which is generally a pretty good accomplishment when you can swing it.

Do they? When did this happen? I know they arrest people for "Plasticine Action" T-shirts.

Germany's been doing fucked up stuff for a while. People have literally had the police visit and gotten citations for what they said online (for example calling a politician a "penis" on social media.) It's fucked.

Haha, I was actually going to make fun of the "milk toast" but I thought there were some more substantive issues.

People are applying for refugee status in Canada already, especially LGBTQ people. Which makes it fucking hilarious that there are people in another adjacent comments section yelling at me "AS AN LGBTQ PERSON I CAN'T SUPPORT GAVIN NEWSOM HOW DARE" and expecting me to take them seriously or something.

No, he made it into the news because he's doing all this attention grabbing shit. And then some geniuses sprung the gotcha of "Aha! He is a high-profile Democrat, therefore nothing he does counts, because he's just doing it because he wants to be president!" And then they sat back with a satisfied smile.

The article isn't talking him up as a candidate. I'm not talking him up as a candidate. He's not in the news because he's a candidate for the election that's going to happen in three and a half years. Are you now shifting your stance from "now that he's being talked up as a candidate" to something different? Or still claiming he's being talked up as a candidate for the election and that's why we have to "respond" with this sort of disclaimer? I mean, it's fine, I actually was as you noted the person who posted this article which is slapping a disclaimer on what he is doing. But IDK where you got the idea that all of a sudden now he's being talked up as a candidate.

I'm not going to vote for my own demise

If you didn't vote against Trump in the last election, you literally voted for your own demise. Maybe literally. I hope it turns out okay for you.

Fighting for better than the Democrats is in no way whatsoever incompatible with fighting to survive in the meantime.

now that he's being talked up as a presidential candidate

I haven't heard anyone talking him up as a candidate. I mean, people have talked about it periodically and I'm sure they still are, but the reason he's in the news right now is because he's trying to fuck up Trump's planning. The election isn't for years and years (maybe longer than that, the way things are going) right now.

If you look back on my profile you can see me commenting on a couple of them (including return2ozma reposting something from 2023 because it was a good opportunity to shit on Newsom and then a bunch of people coming in the comments lecturing me on how important it was to shit on Newsom).