I don’t know what policies Mark Zuckerberg is going to run on (well, I mean I kinda do) but I don’t really care, I am already very dedicated to not voting for him
I very much do not put it beyond the democratic party to nominate The Zuck for President. But I don’t think he’ll actually win if they do.
Remember when Republicans pretended they were fine with legal immigration
If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party.
But don’t worry. In about ten years I’m going to be asking “remember when the democrats made fun of marrying your cousin instead of calling all objections racist?”
Maybe Dems shouldn’t brag about Demographic Destiny™ next time.
“If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party”
We can hope!
I love when conservatives implicitly admit that too much of their ideology is racist or xenophobic to ever appeal to enough people of color to sustain them.
I’m not really a Conservative, or at least Conservatives would not consider me a Conservative, I voted for the Clintontron 3000 last election and I support the establishment of a national wage subsidy program for low-income workers.
Apparently it takes multiple generations for “desired level of government interference” (or whatever it was) to revert to the national mean, and apparently most incoming groups from most countries have a higher level of it than the current national mean.
So if you’re the “less government interference except for abortions and military spending” party, then, logically…
Remember when Republicans pretended they were fine with legal immigration
If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party.
But don’t worry. In about ten years I’m going to be asking “remember when the democrats made fun of marrying your cousin instead of calling all objections racist?”
Maybe Dems shouldn’t brag about Demographic Destiny™ next time.
“If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party”
We can hope!
#change their policies to attract different voters
Yes, yes, very funny.
The Republicans should clearly support expanded welfare, mass migration, and culture war against the country’s ethnic majority. That won’t upset their base at all and just make them a more sucky version of the Democrats.
Honestly, if they actually started changing policies to appeal outside their party in a way that wasn’t stupid… they’d be looking to pick up Asian voters by expanding the definition of white to include them. There are already risk factors for this in the current environment, it just remains to be seen if the visual difference is too much of a leap.
And if that happened, the democrats would quickly throw Asians under the bus. Socially, I mean. Apparently it isn’t mostly white people that are displaced by Affirmative Action, etc. There have been lawsuits about this.
Of course they won’t actually do this, because both the Republican and Democratic parties are never going to actually get smarter. Maybe if we didn’t have FPTP.
“Culture war against the country’s ethnic majority” is a fucking nuclear take. As if every poltical institution in this country doesn’t uphold white supremacy. what world are you living where the democrats pose a threat to whiteness?
Their goal seems to be:
“You can’t have oppression by an ethnic majority if you don’t have an ethnic majority.”
So not immediately, no. After all, Hillary Clinton was their presidential candidate. But it does seem like the plan is “let’s defeat white supremacy by making the whites a minority,” which might work, or might not work.
I live in a world where democrats periodically talk about how eventually all those darn old racist white redneck men will die off and America will be significantly more racially diverse, and the GOP needs to “get with the times, grampa”, so to speak. It’s also a world where the democrats describe opposition to immigration as fundamentally rooted in racism, and just last week I was arguing with someone I knew IRL that said America has an obligation to take in all peoples because it is on land stolen from Native Americans (and therefore not only can immigration not be decreased but we can’t even have limits on countries which lack functioning governments to vet newcomers).
This is, of course, ignoring all the various other progressive leftists grouped in with the democrats that are much less, hm, “gentle” and just looking at the mainstream of the party. (Again, Hillary “super predators” Clinton was their candidate, not their opinion columnists.)
Anyhow, “mass migration” is also a bit of an overstatement regarding current immigration policies, so “culture war against the country’s ethnic majority” is also a pull in the other direction for contrast with where they are right now, depending on just how you define culture war.
Though… once the demographics change, do you think they’ll actually stop trying to fight white supremacy? Or will they just change focus, like how women are the majority of undergraduate university students, but we mostly hear about how STEM needs more women (even though the fields of biology also flipped majority women recently, IIRC)?
And perhaps more importantly, do the Republican Party and their voters believe it will stop?
Anonymous asked:
theunitofcaring answered:
I think the sources on the effects of the last decade on Venezuela’s economic situation seem pretty reliable - that is, they are using statistics that existed long before the crisis, the statistics paint a consistent picture, that picture matches what I’ve seen written by people currently living there, and I haven’t seen them seriously contested. So, yeah, it looks like the last few socialist/communist governments of Venezuela have been steadily consolidating power by murder where necessary, have destroyed the country’s health system, access to food, and access to necessities, and are tightening their dictatorial death grip on the country they steered off a cliff.
The leftists I’ve seen defending this seem to fall back to ‘well, it’s this or allowing U.S. imperialism and U.S. imperialism is even worse’, but I find this amazingly callous and horrible - if the best alternative your ideology can offer to U.S. imperialism is ‘wait in line for ten hours for inadequate amounts of basic necessities, sham elections where even though people are shot for not voting turnout is basically nothing, massive human rights catastrophe and desperate poverty for everyone’, then your ideology is terrible and should die. And the thing is, I do not actually think that that is the best alternative the left can offer - so for the love of g-d offer a better one, instead of doubling down on the insistence that this is all you’ve got!
Unfortunately, Leftists that are less terminally stupid/corrupt about economic management than the Venezuelan government (a bar quite a few leftists pass! just not many Bad Tumblr Commies) have no feasible method to seize power from the Venezuelan government.
Remember when Republicans pretended they were fine with legal immigration
If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party.
But don’t worry. In about ten years I’m going to be asking “remember when the democrats made fun of marrying your cousin instead of calling all objections racist?”
Maybe Dems shouldn’t brag about Demographic Destiny™ next time.
“If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party”
We can hope!
#change their policies to attract different voters
Yes, yes, very funny.
The Republicans should clearly support expanded welfare, mass migration, and culture war against the country’s ethnic majority. That won’t upset their base at all and just make them a more sucky version of the Democrats.
Honestly, if they actually started changing policies to appeal outside their party in a way that wasn’t stupid… they’d be looking to pick up Asian voters by expanding the definition of white to include them. There are already risk factors for this in the current environment, it just remains to be seen if the visual difference is too much of a leap.
And if that happened, the democrats would quickly throw Asians under the bus. Socially, I mean. Apparently it isn’t mostly white people that are displaced by Affirmative Action, etc. There have been lawsuits about this.
Of course they won’t actually do this, because both the Republican and Democratic parties are never going to actually get smarter. Maybe if we didn’t have FPTP.
Remember when Republicans pretended they were fine with legal immigration
If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party.
But don’t worry. In about ten years I’m going to be asking “remember when the democrats made fun of marrying your cousin instead of calling all objections racist?”
Maybe Dems shouldn’t brag about Demographic Destiny™ next time.
What if we turned facile pop culture comparisons back onto shallow centrist ideology, much like Harry killing Voldemort by deflecting his own Killing Curse?
To rely on elections alone is to use a powerful magical spell to seal away the ancient evil; it will inevitably break loose and terrorize the people again. Only a sustained campaign against the roots of evil ideology will allow us to “gather and level up our party” so we can use Omnislash on - hgk - [swallows the bile rising in my throat] ugh - on the Dark Lord Chee'toragas.
*reblogs disapprovingly*
Have you even looked at popular media?
Villains are the only ones with the ambition, the will, and the plans to drive the world forward.
Villains act, heroes react. It is only by the actions of villains that the plot is driven forward. Heroes are nothing more than abominable tools of the status quo and every hierarchy that exists within it.
What has fighting for democracy gotten us in the past fifty years? Nothing but more pointless wars. The vain idealism of this country is nothing more than hollow self-gratification. It must be eliminated or transformed into something far greater.
We must immediately instate mandatory National Military Service for the nation’s youth. An assault rifle and a kukri for every able-bodied-and-minded American citizen. War production levels. Total national mobilization.
It’s time for America to go heel for real.
We will abolish the legislature and replace it with personnel from the RAND Corporation betting on outcomes of their new legislation, with a twenty billion dollar machine learning project at their fingertips intercepting information from all over the world. The cruelest and most frighteningly competent tech CEO will be chosen as the new Central Director for the North American Union, real identity concealed, and tasked with world dominion. The vast majority of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border. It will not be difficult to sweep them into the new project.
A reformed DARPA will be issued megaproject funding levels for geoengineering, exoskeletal powered armor, and cybernetic enhancement projects. The North American fleet will be outfitted with new hypervelocity railguns that cannot be stopped by mere Chinese missile intercept systems. The government will fund mass selective IVF to screen out genetic defects, and then full-on genetic engineering. “Naturals” will be made a special, separate insurance category so as not to drag on the state’s new unified military service based insurance program.
The power of eminent domain will be expanded dramatically. Old slums will be torn down and replaced with defensible, militarized housing complexes with dense public transportation and on-site commercial and light industrial complexes. Cities will be designed for high survivability in the event of nuclear war, and civil defense stations will be positioned throughout the country with multiple months of freeze-dried reserve foods in addition to water filtration systems and heavier weaponry required foreign land-based counter-invasion.
All convicted of murder, sex trafficking of minors, or unlawful sale of hard drugs will be summarily executed. Corporal punishment will be reintroduced and prison sentences will be halved or reduced to a third. The punishments for repeated offenses will square.
No longer will America engage in the half-hearted “regime change” of knocking over some pathetic middle eastern country with an illiteracy rate approaching 60% and then imagining that Liberal Democracy will instantly take root. Now, we play for keeps. Any country invaded will be subjected to a 20 year military governorship overwriting whatever aspects of the culture must be overwritten for the territory to be permanently held in the American sphere. No international apologies will ever be made. For anything.
New full-body armor with face-concealing helmets will be designed for our new heavy infantry units, including built-in augmented reality battlespace software. It is important that we provide a unique look to the faceless wall of power.
Then, and only then, having become a true sci-fi empire, can the 21st Century Protagonist emerge to instill real Freedomocracy™.
We can start tomorrow.
“I would like you to consider very seriously today whether a big part of the solution to all of our worldwide ‘crises’ does not lie simply in more and better technology, but in the recovery of the soul to the mainstream of our thinking. Our science and technology cannot do this. Only sacred traditions have the capacity to help this happen.”
— HRH Prince Charles of Wales
make me king already you fuckers or I’ll strangle me mum meself
Okay, okay, so,
What if, simultaneously, Netflix for iPad is utterly incapable of fixing broken families, which can result in non-trivial social problems later on down the line, and,
and,
if we don’t keep teching up we’ll run out of energy and minerals and civilization will collapse?
WASHINGTON—After persistent efforts by Republicans to wipe out the healthcare law over the past seven years, experts warned Wednesday that the repeated attempts at eradicating Obamacare may have created an ultra-resistant super law. “Given the frequency with which lawmakers have unsuccessfully tried to exterminate the Affordable Care Act, the growing resiliency of this legislation could soon be insurmountable,” said Institute for Healthcare Improvement senior fellow Curt Greenwood, adding that the landmark healthcare overhaul could grow impervious to any repeal measures or even major amendments within just a few short congressional sessions. “What we once thought would be eliminated by now will instead require considerably more time and resources. And at a certain point, no interventions on the part of any branch of government will be sufficient to overcome the ACA’s built-in resistance.” According to Greenwood, however, hope remained that sufficiently high doses of single-payer healthcare legislation could potentially offer a cure.
I actually specified what the GOP must do to actually kill Obamacare and avoid a single-payer healthcare system.
The good news for Obamacare supporters is that they will never actually do this.
Things that can simultaneously be true:
(this post aimed mostly but not exclusively at @slartibartfastibast)
* Including, FWIW, factors that if ignored can lead to even worse sins than Rotherham itself.
There are a few different matters that I’m frequently accused of bringing up more often than is necessary. I don’t see it that way. People didn’t want to bring this up back when it mattered. I see my one-trackedness as making up lost ground. And there’s a lot of ground to make up.
Well you see, IME liberal multiculturalists tend to think that anyone to the right of them worrying about this sort of thing is a paranoid bigot that is hallucinating things because they are huffing racism, and that the only possible reasons anyone would worry are unjustified xenophobia and anti-brown-people racism. (Rationalists are kind enough to give a much greater benefit of the doubt than twitter liberals, because they are Rationalists. Which is good.)
So unfortunately, from time to time, it must be shoved into their faces that no, these concerns are not paranoid bigot hallucinations, because if it happened in one place and was covered up, then there are good odds it’s still happening in other places and being covered up.
I think once you properly incorporate that information into your worldview, what you have doesn’t count as Liberalism anymore. It could be reasonably close, but it’s a certain… cultural consciousness that was deemed morally reprehensible at the end of the last century, because it was considered dangerous and oppressive.
