Is there one if someone calls you a liar?
Only the money and the schedule and the debate rules and the rumour mill…
Stawman. Not my argument.
…which of course everyone already knew/was as widely advertised/was as publicly endorsed by the party machine…
The Democratic Party absolutely puts its thumb on the scale in the primaries. Obama getting the nom instead of Hillary Clinton was not supposed to happen, and they went HARD to make sure she got her turn in 2016.
I’m hoping the proposed switch to ranked-choice voting in the primaries gets enacted for 2028, because it’ll make those kind of shenanigans a lot more difficult to pull off.
Sigh. I don’t like the conspiracy crap, either. Are the main people in the Democratic Party largely liberal and not even progressive, let alone leftist? Of course.
But they still want to win elections. They would have gotten behind Sanders if he was pulling in the numbers. When he didn’t against Clinton, and when they were able to overwhelm him with Biden in 2020, it appeared like he couldn’t. They coalesced behind the one they thought could win.
I hate that they aren’t progressive, but the only way to fix that in a two party system is to start from the ground up running progressives. We’ve gotten some elected.
No amount of pessimistic “well, they wouldn’t be allowed to win anyways” can possibly fix the problem. Yes, deal with reality. But then don’t shut down the paths that do exist, just because they are unfairly harder than they should be. If the party is the problem, you have to put in the work to change the party.
At the end of the day, if it actually is hopeless, then at least we tried. You miss all the shots you don’t take. The only way to guarantee failure is not to play.
I’m not the OP. I don’t disparage people for talking about how bad shit is. I don’t begrudge those who are so worn down they can’t fight. I know what is needed is empowerment, not chastisement.
But I am seeing actual fatalism here, rather than simple realism. And I am seeing a lot of y’all going after Nemo when he’s not doing the actual bad shit, and even actually engaging in discussion.
I still blame the thread, ofc. I think this thread should be nuked and things reset. But, if you’re gonna engage with him here, I do think you should be fair. Attack him when he attacks us.
Don’t fucking dehumanize him. Fuck that bullshit. Everything about him in this thread has been very human.
Who said anything about a conspiracy? Conspiracies are organized. This is just the machine running.
Oh, and can’t say I missed the old BigT finger wagging, but there it is, like it never left.
Excellent post.
Maybe not all that relevant to this particular thread, but … still …
I think our “first past the post” voting system is part of the problem. It would be easier to get really popular candidates with a form of preference voting. But i don’t see any chance we’ll fix that in enough places to matter.
Well, he may not be actively planning it… But he’s certainly making it more likely to happen.
The problem is that those who have the power to change this are using that power to stop it.
Trump isn’t planning a nuclear war because he doesn’t really plan anything; he operates on impulse and appetite. That doesn’t mean he won’t start one in a tantrum. Or nuke somebody who can’t fire nuclear weapons back, like Iran. I think the odds are fairly good at this point he’ll nuke Iran for failing to roll over for him.
I think he’ll make noises about it, but saner heads will actually prevail, and it won’t actually happen.
I hope you are right, but sanity seems to be in short supply in the Administration.
Please name the “saner heads” that are in a position to stop him.
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Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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I say the odds of the US setting off a nuclear warhead in Iran before Jan 2029 are lower than 50%. I’ll bid 10 quatloos against @Der_Trihs’ and @Czarcasm’s explicit and implicit prediction (which I don’t believe are actual beliefs).
Agreed. I’m not too fond of the thread title, but I agree broadly with some of the arguments listed by Nemo here. For example, while I wouldn’t put it past Trump to commit genocidal acts as defined by authorities in the Hague, that’s not the battle we’re facing. I perceive it as a distraction. Sure, we’re fighting a fascist regime now (think Mussolini not Hitler) but throwing around such a term can be counterproductive when interacting with US normies.
See you on the streets next Saturday, March 28th, at the No Kings rally.
The Joint Chiefs can’t stop him from using a nuclear weapon; there is by design no legal way to stop a President from using them. Also, Trump has been firing members of the JCoS to replace them with toadies, anyway.
As for my beliefs, it’s known since his first term in office that he wants to nuke somebody. I’d be surprised if he doesn’t nuke someone at some point just so he can bask in having done so. Combine that with his growing frustration and the use of nuclear weapons agaisnt Iran seems likely to me.
Also, I’ll point out that even the “less than 50%” odds you give are much, much higher than they should be.
I give it lower than 0.5%.
Trump does have megalomaniac impulses and a functional democracy would keep men like him as far from the nuclear codes as possible. At the very least his temperament makes him prone to fight pointless wars, which is bad for taxpayers, billionaire and otherwise. His supporters have terrible judgment.
What I don’t see is any of his advisors or people he takes seriously urging him to drop a couple of nukes. This matters, since Trump is approval seeking. There’s no corollary to Stephen Miller (mass deportation) or Navarro (tariffs). Nor are there any corrupt monetary rewards for Trump and his family. So Trump, 79, probably won’t toss a nuke before turning senile. In office.
Joint Chiefs can’t stop Trump. But they can dissuade a President with a notoriously short attention span.
Big picture: talk like this is a distraction from the real and immediate harms Trump does, the ones that Little Nemo and I believe should be emphasized and focused on. I admit though that nuclear talk is normie-friendly: basically everyone has visceral feelings about it.
I’m hopeful that SOMEone in the chain of command will be sane enough to prevent the destruction of the entire human race based on the “gut feeling” of a madman.
Maybe someone like Stanislav Petrov, who was a mere lieutenant colonel
And I say that anything remotely near 50% is way too damn high and ought to be unthinkable.
But than, I used to think it was unthinkable that we’d elect somebody President, for a second time, who in his first term had asked why we have nukes if we’re not going to use them.
That reminds me of before the election when someone posted a link to an opinion piece that said “look, polls show that he only has around a 50% chance of being elected - no reason to panic!” And I posted even back then that actually, that is a reason to panic. 'cause look what we got now.
I don’t think the chances of him using nukes are 50/50. But it’s still firmly higher than had anyone, almost literally anyone, else been elected.