“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

― Jean-Paul Sartre

Again, the question is what is the anything you want to fix. Where is your milestone? You want the morons with guns off the street, sure, assuming the Thiel machine catches some rocks in its cogs and there’s going to be elections, you ride it out for three more years, by some miracle Musk doesn’t steal the election again and bing bang boom, you have it fixed. And by fixed, we mean you gently escorted the problem back into the bottle and loosely popped in the cork. The root causes - oligarchic big tech, hostile SCOTUS, far-right thinktank, misinformation centrals - are still there. For all intents and purposes, it’s not like this anymore, but it’s actually still like this, it’s just quieter for a couple of years.

Interesting. Harris gets a nickname but Trump doesn’t. There’s almost an undertone suggesting you think one side is worse. Let’s face it - I understand it, you understand it, by not going out to vote, you are signalling that you are a-okay with the likelier candidate winning, that likelier candidate is Trump. You are complicit, and you’re even worse than the MAGA freaks because you’re desperate to create plausible deniability. “Oh I didn’t vote for him!”. That’s great. You didn’t vote against him. Donny is pro-Israel? Boy that makes it even better. You made a conscious decision that while the only issue you care about at all is equal between both candidates, one is a convicted felon rapist pedophile, and the other is not, and you said “well I’m not willing to choose between that too”. Mask on the floor, facade ends. Your humanity extends only from Egypt to Israel and stops exactly there, I guess Trump is lucky Epstein Island wasn’t on that stretch. But hey, okay, so we were talking about purity tests originally. This still is a purity test. Kamala didn’t check a single box and she was suddenly as deplorable of Trump. That is the very definition of purity testing.

I don’t understand this primitive obsession of tankies with Israel-Palestine. Is it because the anti-capitalist, progressive left has been hijacked by far left pundits like Hasan Piker?

But “supports Russia” is fine I suppose?

Lots of humanity in “child sex trafficker”, “pedophile”, “rapist”, right?

Delusional. Stop pretending you care about humanity. You care about this one specific issue.

No, see, you were given a choice.

a) Reasonably tepid president’s vice president. No great achievements, but no strongly notable transgressions against the people of the country. Policies not actively progressive but not actively hostile. Supports Ukraine. Supports Israel. Runs on the platform of moderate politics.

b) Multiple times convicted felon, strongly suspected of being a pedophile and child trafficker. Catastrophic first term. Weak foreign policy in first term, already schmoozing up to military enemies of the country. Supports nothing but his own pocket.

How is that not a purity test? Even if you’re a normal person that is sternly anti-Israel, you have singled out one issue in which one candidate performs (probably, we don’t even know) worse than the other one. And still outperforms the other one on all other issues unless you’re a ten toes down white supremacist with the sole life goal to make sure people with a darker skin color suffer and a deeper pocket prosper. That’s what we call, say it with me, a purity test. Your refusal to go out and vote is complicity in the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Don’t preach to me about humanity, you’re probably not even from the US.

There’s a world of difference between “was always like this” and “could only be like this”.

This is precisely what the fall of Nixon has been building up to, brick by brick. But the fact is that sitting presidents could do literally whatever they wanted since at least the Bush era. It’s almost a wonder it took this long for someone to take advantage of that possibility. In that regard, it has been like this for a long time, they’ve just been very careful about what they do. And the funniest thing is that they still are. I find the claims for example that Trump is doing this to provoke a violent reaction so that the army can be deployed almost comical. Why? If you need to provoke a reaction, provoke harder. If you don’t, well, why don’t you just deploy the army for no good reason. He can, after all. He could literally attempt to murder his political opponent by coughing at him knowingly while having COVID. Bush could gaslight the entire NATO into furthering US imperial goals in the Middle East. Bush was allowed to walk away with what was essentially a stolen election. For all we know, Clinton could’ve been raping children on Epstein Island while he was sitting president. It’s been like this for god knows how long, this is the first guy with the sheer audacity to do it out in the open.

The could be different is then another question, right? I think you see the problem about how far this reaches. Almost everyone with a significant amount of capital in the US is all in on this. Media is playing along the party status quo, the faces of tech can finally come out of the closet and fall in line as nazis, insurance companies have been death dealers for the longest time, and now, a slimy greasy businessman and not politician is in charge of the country. Could it be different - sure. But the house cleaning is effectively insurmountable. Every career politician on corporate bankroll, wall street, CEOs, boardrooms, corporate private militaries, and of course, the human waste who proudly exercise their 2nd amendment rights to serve their oligarch overlords. So yeah, it could be different, but it won’t be, not like this. The system is not set up in a way that you can democratically elect someone that isn’t beholden to the interests of the same people, and is willing to do anything about it. And even those who would be willing to do anything about it will find that all the other branches are long time gone. The same supreme court that gives Trump a complete blank check to bypass the legislative branch can take the same blank check away from any progressive president for reason. You can’t rely on party lines in the legislative to help you out either, if you’re a progressive president you were miraculously elected as an independent - dems are in just as deep as GOP.

So yeah. It’s paralyzing, it’s demoralizing, but it’s also just the reality. The knob only goes way up or slightly down. Up to you how to react to that. In the same situation, I decided to up and leave my home country. It was the best decision ever.

Sort of. Miller has been involved in developing and test running the concept on years, see Hungary (field test of the fearmongering populism + the “Mike Johnson” special - we had “don’t know, wasn’t there, didn’t hear about it, ask someone else” press conference memes like 12 years ago) and other examples. Definitely involved to some degree with Fico and Putin, and to a lesser extent, Babis, Meloni and Simion. They weren’t sure they could get away with it last time Trump was up there, although if my memory serves, national guard was deployed due to maybe BLM?

I mean really, it’s shocking how fast it ramped up but I cannot say that I’m truly surprised it did happen, and if I look back at the people involved in it, it seems more like a gentle increase of the knob than a sudden twist. It’s also just that the higher you are on the dial, the closer together are the red lines.

I don’t know why you think this is the secret that ends his career. Dems fail the purity tests of the type of people that actually care about that and voted Trump by not showing up. Or in even worse cases, went full horseshoe theory and actually voted Trump.