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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Without calling into question the broader possibility that malfeasance did occur, I don’t feel like this argument is particularly credible.

    Suppose you were to engage in some form of straight up ballot stuffing? Why then would you make them bullet ballots? Why not vote straight ticket Republican? Straight ticket ballots are not unusual - even less so then bullet ballots, apparently - so you’d draw less suspicion, and you’d get the benefit of lots of extra down ticket votes.

    If someone was going to cheat, what benefit would they gain from cheating this way?


  • To be fair, it’s been a longstanding rule with Republicans that whatever they accuse others of is merely a projection of what they’ll do the moment they can get away with it. Whether or not they would try to steal an election isn’t even a question. They’ve as much as admitted it. The only question is whether or not they did. I’ve not seen any evidence to that effect, and I’m not presuming there is any, but it would be idiotic not to at least contemplate the possibility.








  • Also I really think the key thing to pay attention to here is “multiyear period”. As in, it takes years for companies to reconstruct their entire production and supply chain. Imposing harsh tariffs on goods made outside the US could theoretically boost domestic production, but only if there’s actually the skills and infrastructure available domestically to make that cost-effective… And even then, the gains would take years to decades to realise. And Trump sure as shit isn’t making the kinds of education and infrastructure investments needed to actually make any of that worthwhile.





  • The war on drugs only failed if you truly believe its goal was getting rid of drugs.

    To quote John Erlichman, one of its architects:

    “The Nixon Campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

    By the strandards of what it was created to do, the war on drugs was fantastically successful.

    The war on porn will be successful in exactly the same way, because Republicans have already spent decades redefining all LGBTQ content as “pornographic”. This is will be a tool for disrupting queer and trans communities, for erasing queer and trans resources and tearing down queer and trans rights activists. Stopping porn isn’t the point, and it never was.



  • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlDeception
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    10 days ago

    The Dem establishment will obviously blame anyone but themselves. That’s what establishments do. That’s why, assuming there are still free and fair elections in America in two years time, left wing voters in the US need to start planning now how they’re going to primary out every last establishment Dem who thought that leaning right was the answer, and replace them with people who do believe in real progressive politics.

    It won’t work everywhere. It can’t. And some of those people will inevitably get caught up in the machine, or turn out not to be what they claimed. Reality is messy. But get enough of them in and you can make a real difference. The mid-terms are the American left’s opportunity to do what the right did in 2010.

    But at the end of the day none of this matters, because we’re just two outsiders pontificating over another country’s politics. Despite how deeply those politics affect the whole world, there’s nothing we can actually do about it, other than focusing on what we can do in our own back yards.



  • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlDeception
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    10 days ago

    So, it was worth Trump getting a second term in order for you to maintain your moral purity?

    Listen, fuck Harris and every other Dem who failed to condemn the war in Gaza, they all deserve to burn in hell for that.

    But did you really get what you wanted out of this?


  • I actually completely agree. This is exactly the point Bernie was making when he said that the Dems brought their loss on themselves by abandoning the working class.

    Canadian leftists need to really focus in on issues of cost of living, access to housing and education, the things that working class people are worried about.

    I’m queer, and I’m married to a trans woman. I’m not saying the left should give up on talking about issues of inequality and social justice. But I am saying that we need a message that resonates with working class voters, not just people on the margins.

    We need to make unions cool again. We need to get the rugged individualists excited about solar power (what’s more rugged and self sufficient than powering your home with nothing but the light of the sun?). We need to start talking about cutting those millionaire and billionaire elites down to size.

    This isn’t easy. We’ll need to find careful ways to shape these messages, because there are a lot of thought terminating cliches that you’ll trip up on if you’re too direct. But I think the possibility is there. Even when you can’t talk about “socialism” and collectivism, you can still say things like “community” and “people having each other’s backs.” Appeal to the ideals that they want to think they believe in.