When you start denying genocide, it doesn’t matter how good your economic policy is.

Perfect example of propagandized individuals hating communists because of propaganda.

I deny lots of genocides. For example, when Elon Musk talks about the “white genocide” I deny that. But somehow libs have gotten it in their heads that claims of genocide get to bypass all standards of evidence and fact-checking, because if you don’t immediately accept it without evidence, it means you’re a genocide denier, a bad person, basically a fascist who shouldn’t even be engaged with (conveniently averting the need to provide evidence). The state is more than happy to exploit this nonsense by putting out claims of genocide with zero credible evidence, because they know you’ll do this.

Everybody in this thread going like, “It was so obvious he was going to do this, how could they be so stupid?”

I’ll tell you why: it’s because the Democrats ran as border hawks. Remember when they were saying, “We’re the ones who actually tried to pass a bill to crack down on immigration, but Trump blocked it.” The Democrats actively downplayed the threat that Trump posed by trying to claim that he was all talk. They completely abandoned any argument like, “Trump wants to build a wall because he’s racist,” in favor of “We’re the ones who actually want to build the wall.” If you’re saying that Latinos were “stupid” or whatever, what you’re saying is that the Democrats were lying and it should’ve been obvious to Latinos that they were lying, and because it was so obvious they were lying, they should’ve voted for them. Which is an absolutely insane thing to say.

When you have two candidates fighting over who’s going to be tougher on immigration, it’s really not that surprising that people who might be affected by that issue don’t vote based on that issue. And many Latinos have conservative cultural values. Absent a clear argument for vote against Trump, like that he’s racist, that his talk about cracking down on “illegals” won’t stop there, they voted based on other shit.

Of course, this reality is utterly unimaginable to the DNC, because it’s taken as unquestionable dogma that the way to win votes is by moving to the right and appealing to the mythical centrist swing voter. The reality is that if you can draw this hard moral line, and stand by it, then you can convince people that you’re actually going to protect their rights and that they should put aside other, less important concerns for the sake of defending this moral line. Even if that requires going out on a limb and adopting a more “extreme” position. Even now, there’s a lot of silence coming from the centrist Dems when they ought to be shouting from the rooftops about this shit, because oh no, what if we alienate the three people in the country who actually liked Dick Cheney.

I fucking hate anybody who tries to pull this “leopards ate their face” bit about vulnerable minorities who were abandoned by both parties. Go fuck yourself. Legitimately, go fuck yourself. You don’t get to stan a party that says, “Fuck you, vote for me,” and then act all smug when people don’t vote for them and get screwed over by the other side. Yeah, it was obvious they’d get screwed over by the other side, but your side was also promising to screw them over. Christ.

“Here’s my card. If you wouldn’t mind signing it and giving it back to me, we just need 30% to get a vote on forming a union.”

In 2020, she had all the time in the world, and she mismanaged things badly enough that she ended up dropping out before a single vote was cast. What happened in 2024 was purely advantageous to her, she got to skip the primary altogether and only had to keep it together for 15 weeks. Few people in history have ever received such a privileged ramp towards the presidency.

The primary process is an additional hoop that a candidate has to jump through, they have to appeal to a different segment of the people than in the general, which may leave them having to pivot or backtrack on their positions. They may have to endure bad blood, or harsher criticism from people who had been invested in another candidate. You could say that the lack of the primary cost the Democrats the election but only in the sense that Kamala probably wouldn’t have won a primary and we’d have gotten someone better.

15 weeks is also plenty of time to get a message out. Other countries do much shorter campaign lengths. And in the current situation where most people are driven by “negative partisanship,” voting against the people they hate more, being relatively unknown (not that a VP is that unknown) can be advantageous.

The main thing was policy but she was also just an unpopular politician with bad political instincts (campaigning with the Cheney 's lol), and she basically got to fail upwards and bypass any of the checks that would’ve recognized that unpopularity before it was too late.

Hindenburg, who ran as a left wing centrist.

There wasn’t anything “left-wing” about Hindenburg. He ran on maintaining the status quo - a status quo that was a rapidly deteriorating depression with very high unemployment. He represented business interests and was never going to do any of the major reforms that would’ve been necessary to save the republic (if anything could).

The social democrats decided to throw unconditional support to these centrist parties for the sake of stability. They didn’t seem to have any actual understanding of why conditions were deteriorating, why extremism was rising, or what needed to be done in order to address it - all they could ever think to do was support the bourgeoisie in order to buy time - in order to sleepwalk into fascism.

Naturally, as Hindenburg represented bourgeois interests, he was always going to side with the far-right against the left, if he had to choose. And, since conditions were declining with no plan to actually fix anything, he was always going to end up in the position of having to choose.

I would say that there are similarities, though, yes.

Spine? Conviction?

Whatever it is, the important takeaway is if future campaigns take the same approach, they’re liable to get the same results.

I swear, liberals will latch on to anything to avoid admitting their candidates’ actual faults and recognizing reality.

Objectively the worst electoral map since the Republicans took California.

Bit of a strained metaphor, seeing as Amidala was actually anti-war and not a fan of genocide. Libs in the Star Wars Universe would be calling Amidala a separatist droid.

The “pied piper” strategy, where Democrats fund far-right candidates in Republican primaries in order to create a situation where they’re the only alternative to someone abhorrent, rather than actually offering the voters what they want.

Aka the reason we got Trump.

I’m just responding in kind, what I said is no more “lashing out” than what you said.

I’m more than happy to have a conversation, but that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize and call out impossible standards. You want a state that never persecuted anyone, show me a society where people didn’t knock out all their teeth that didn’t persecute anyone. Every society has murderers, and every society makes mistakes, and someone who is unjustly punished for a murder they didn’t commit could certainly be said to have been persecuted, no? So I don’t accept this standard.

And I was hoping you’d ground your views in reality.

Non-states or weak states very quickly run into collective action problems which are made significantly worse at large scales. Generally, they work when the material conditions allow for it, for example, the Zapatistas are in rural mountains that nobody really cares that much about. If they happened to be sitting on top of a bunch of oil, then the situation would be quite different.

States are the most effective means of solving collective action problems that currently exist. Even the fundamental goal of keeping people safe from other states cannot be achieved in most cases without some degree of centralization. “I can’t go up and defend the pass, I have to stay here and protect my farm.” That’s what decentralization gets you, and the result is that the enemy, who is solving such collective action problems through the mechanism of a state, is (generally) able to subdue each individual with overwhelming force. But it extends beyond defense, “I can’t help build that bridge so we can all trade with our neighbors, I have to tend to my crops or I’ll starve.” While these problems can be solved on a very small scale, on a local level where people know and trust each other, it generally cannot be scaled up to similar situations beyond that.

That’s an impossible standard, and doesn’t really have anything to do with anything. I’m not interested in impractical moral perfectionism.

Yeah and white people have also done that while having teeth so clearly that means we need to knock out all our teeth.

The state has been used to persecute and exploit people because it is an effective means of wielding power, so virtually everyone everywhere uses it, if they can. There’s just this silly martyr complex where people would rather lose and get themselves killed in practice, so that they can remain pure in their ideals. I suppose it’s useful for winning arguments. Not so much at actually achieving anything.

Only white people have states, yes.

Really, just about anybody that looks to historical examples to inform their perspective.

Nobody sidestepped special effects like film noir did. They made a whole genre out of, “If we dim the lights enough, nobody will notice we stole this set from a different movie.”

The history of film noir is something really special that came together due to a unique set of circumstances (saddle up for an infodump). The Great Depression had given popularity to pulp fiction novels, generally focusing on working class protagonists struggling to keep a roof over their heads, and often viewing power and social structures through cynical terms. Meanwhile, in Germany, Hitler destroyed the German film industry, which had previously been the best in the world. A bunch of people who were generally some combination of gay/Jewish/communist/film makers came to America and brought their expertise, expressionist style, and antifascist perspectives to Hollywood, where it blended with existing American culture to create something entirely new.

Every iconic aspect of film noir was that way for a reason - even if the reason was often, “saving money,” like I mentioned before. The older, grizzled detective and the young femme fatale were cast out of necessity, especially during wartime when young men who would have otherwise dominated those roles were out fighting (or expected to be). While of course they are product of their time and can contain sexist themes, they provided roles for women that were more complex and had more agency than before. And they were also subject to censorship, but some movies, such as Crossfire (1947), snuck hidden meanings under the radar. The book Crossfire was based on was centered around a homophobic murder, but the Hays Code prohibited any mention of homosexuality, so the plot was changed to a racist/antisemitic murder (which also capitalized on the anti-Nazi sentiment of the time) - but with subtext alluding to the original plot. The effect is that the two forms of bigotry are linked together (tagline: “Hate Is Like A Loaded Gun!”), and the director later said that the Code, “had a very good effect because it made us think. If we wanted to get something across that was censorable… we had to do it deviously. We had to be clever. And it usually turned out to be much better than if we had done it straight.”

Film noir’s fans cut across demographics, popular with women and men alike. Back in those days, going to the movie theater was an all-day affair with multiple films shown, and film noir movies generally occupied the role of “B movies” (necessitating their cheap production values), but the point is that they were just targeted towards… moviegoers. And I don’t want to paint it as just, “foreign socialists promoting their agenda through hidden messages” or that sort of thing, it genuinely was a blending of perspectives and cultures that (much as I hate to say it as a certified America hater) really represents America at it’s best, the dream that we ought to aspire to. There really was something magical happening in the cultural dialogue that these movies are the product of.

But of course, we’re not allowed to have nice things. Due to McCarthyism, the alliances and blending of cultures and ideas that had allowed the genre to exist were ripped apart. People were pressured to name names and sell out their colleagues, which spawned distrust and animosity, betrayal and grudges that would disrupt the industry even after the direct threat had passed. And eventually replacing film noir and it’s proletarian focus and cynical view of society, came the spy movies, glorifying government agents infiltrating other countries as part of this global ideological conflict against communism. Propagandizing trash. Dead art taking no risks and presenting nothing to challenge the audience.

Anyway, film noir is cool and fun and artsy and had a progressive (for its time, at least) current insofar as it was allowed to.

I mixed up the threads, which wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t followed me around dragging it out into another thread in a desperate attempt to weasel out of providing the evidence that you don’t have because it doesn’t exist.

Evidence or GTFO.