What makes you think I care who you're voting for?
Rottcodd
joined 2 years ago
The rest of that sentence, which you unsurprisingly ignored:
but that still beats the hell out of allowing the election of a would-be tyrant who fully intends to dismantle every part of the federal government that provides any benefit at all to the people or that in any way inpedes the ability of the wealthy few to rape and pillage to their hearts’ content and to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military domestically to put down any protests that might result.
Entirely unsurprisingly, this article never actually answers that argument.
It notes, essentially just in passing, that:
There is no doubt that the civil rights that were won over generations of struggle are under attack. The Voting Rights Act is being dismantled. An unelected Supreme Court is slashing people’s rights. The electoral system is being modified to allow the right wing to win with a minority of votes. And the rise of Trump’s ultra-right movement with its hateful and violent tendencies is of course a dangerous expression of this anti-democratic tendency – Trump himself is now openly promising a form of semi-dictatorial rule if elected.
But then it just shifts back to making the point that Biden (the article was obviously written before Harris became the candidate, but presumably the point remains) isn't left enough. It never directly addresses the existential threat that Trump poses, or the near certain fact that if Trump wins, the country will be moved so far to the right, and so many civil liberties will be stripped, that those who support the far left not only will almost certainly never get another chance to vote for a candidate of their choice, but quite possibly won't even remain free, and might not even remain alive.
Yes - it sucks to have to support yet another Overton Window shifting Democrat who almost certainly won't actually do anything to actually accomplish any truly leftist goals, but that still beats the hell out of allowing the election of a would-be tyrant who fully intends to dismantle every part of the federal government that provides any benefit at all to the people or that in any way inpedes the ability of the wealthy few to rape and pillage to their hearts' content and to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military domestically to put down any protests that might result. The first option is disappointing, but the second is the literal death of US democracy and liberty.
Reminder that Trump doesn't live in reality.
He lives in a fantasy world in which he's the rightful center of the universe, and his entire conception of truth and falsehood and right and wrong is based on how well or how poorly things or ideas or people fit into that worldview.
Well... yeah. There is that.
Like the US and slavery and institutional racism and Manifest Destiny and such, I don't understand what the problem is with admitting to it and facing up to it.
It's not even so much from a moral standpoint (though that is of course a factor) as from a practical one - the people who avoid facing up to it are apparently driven by a desire to not be haunted by it - to effectively put it behind them and clear the slate. But not admitting to it guarantees that that won't and in fact can't happen, so it's actually directly contrary to their apparent goals.
The people who want it to not matter going foward should be the ones most eager to drag it out into the open and fully expose all of the ugliness. It's like lancing a boil - yeah, it'll be painful and messy, but then it's over and done with and you can get on with healing rather than just dragging it on and on and on and on ..
Damn I love Turkey.
Sitting there as it does at the crossroads between Europe, Asia and the Middle East, it's cultivated an international presence that might be summed up as conditional cooperation with or opposition to anybody, and absolute loyalty or submission to nobody. It's the national embodiment of playing both (all) sides against the middle, and it just regularly amuses the hell out of me.
How perfectly on-brand for the NYT to try to argue that center right is too far left...
Nailed it.
This is the basic DNC fraud loop - ensure that the plutocrats get what they want so the corporate soft money keeps rolling in, blame the Republicans for all of the pro-plutocrat policies that passed last time around, run on promises to stop them this time, get elected, completely fail to accomplish anything, thereby ensuring that the plutocrats get what they want so the corporate soft money keeps rolling in, blame the Republicans for all of the pro-plutocrat policies that passed last time around, run on promises to stop them this time, get elected, completely fail to accomplish anything, thereby ensuring that the plutocrats get what they want so the corporate soft money keeps rolling in...
Interesting strategy there...
The exact and only point of overturning Chevronis to make it so that corporations (and apparently branches of the government?) will be free to destroy the environment in order to generate more wealth for the c-suite and the investor class, but it isn't going to happen all by itself. It's necessary for someone to make this specific challenge, so that then the wholly corrupt and compromised supreme court can rule in their favor, then the corporations will be free to pollute to their hearts' content.
That isn't a slam dunk though. The plutocrats have to be careful about who files the challenge, since a particularly egregious or unpopular corporation will likely draw too much attention to the scheme and generate opposition, which in turn will spotlight the brazen corruption of the supreme court.
So it's an interesting strategy to not even use a corporation at all, but a branch of the government itself. On the one hand, it not only sidesteps the risk of the opposition it could face if it was a corporation with a poor reputation - by having it not be a corporation at all, it will potentially distract from the underlying fact that the whole thing is being done primarily to benefit corporations at the cost of the health and well-being of people, and of society as a whole. But on the other hand, as a branch of government, it could all be irrelevant, since it's not necessary for the EPA to have enforcement authority - there are other mechanisms by which the Air Force can be held liable for the pollution for which they are self-evidently liable.
And maybe that's the point. The Air Force can serve as the test case that will establish the desired precedent that the EPA doesn't have the authority to enforce environmental law or to hold polluters accountsble for the harm they've done, but can then potentially avoid the demonization a corporation would rightly face for being the point organization in this blatantly destructive and self-serving and short-sighted scheme by going ahead and at least carrying out some token effort to rectify the situation, under some other authority. It'll potentially serve as a way to minimize the clear threat - of making it seem to casual observers that eliminating EPA authority won't make it so that polluters will be entirely free to destroy the environment, in spite of the fact that, in cases other than a branch of government that's subject to other lines of authority, that's exactly what it will do, and in fact exactly what it was intended to do.
Dastardly...
Of course it does.
The broad point of Project 2025 is to eliminate anything and everything that provides any measurable benefit to the common people and/or in any way impedes the wealthy and the corporations doing absolutely whatever they want to do, no matter how much harm it might cause to people. That's the exact reason that so much of it focuses on eliminating or at least neutering government agencies - the goal is to make it so that corporations and the wealthy few face no constraints and no consequences - so that they have free rein to rob and pillage and rape and destroy.
And it's not only the playbook Trimp will follow, but the reason that billionaires like Musk and Thiel are backing Trump. They aren't really backing Trump per se - they're backing Project 2025.
He doesn't need to do it this time - he has a veritable army of fascists, a brazenly corrupt and compromised supreme court and a squad of billionaire plutocrats to do it all on his behalf, and not coincidentally they have a detailed blueprint in Project 2025 that tells them exactly what to do, step by step, to transform the US into a christofascist/plutocratic autocracy.
All Trump has to do this time around is just carry on being Trump, while all those other people do all the dirty work.
Wow - that was quite possibly the dumbest thing he's done yet.