Allonzee
As an atheist raised roman catholic, I disagree.
There are rules and tenets and ideals of the religion. It's not about meeting them, but it is about wanting to and more strictly attempting to.
It's not even a no true Scotsman fallacy, because there's a book no flavor of Christianity I know of openly rejects while claiming to be Christian, even if they have adendums like the book of Mormon. The rules are defined.
They aren't only not trying to live up to those rules and ideals, they aren't only just paying them lip service, they are actively, jubilantly, and studiously undermining and working against the most belabored edicts of their belief system without end and calling that Christianity.
Cheering for the torture of the meek, demanding cruelty upon people from foreign lands and calling oneself Christian, ie Jesus of Nazareth as written in the New Testament, is like claiming to be an academic because you burn a book every morning and brag about how illiterate you are.
"What you have to know how to read and... read books instead of burning them to be an academic?" Actually yes.
Harris had Liz Cheney on stage with her. Liz Cheney is a monster, and we courted her. It only drove actual potential voters on the left away.
There aren't any sane Republicans to court. Stop with the Overton window bullshit. Stop trying to meet the sociopath by choice movement in the middle. It's been racing us to the doom we're sitting in for as long as I've been alive. We need to elect an enemy of the capital markets on no uncertain terms. Someone that would enslave our economy to exist in service to the needs of the citizenry as it always should have been, because corporations aren't people, and should not exist if they are serving few or one at the expense of the rest of the citizenry. It should be the corporate burden to prove why it should exist at all by showing how society is better off because of it. Given the power theyve shown they will always accumulate and abuse, I'm for a perpetual corporate death penalty on a hair trigger for the slightest of antisocial activity.
If we don't make an extreme move left from this fascist hellscape, it's all just rearranging deck chairs.
If by some miracle we have another free election, managing to elect another neoliberal to move the Democrats closer to the Fascists as they have for 50 years will just keep the table set for the fascists to march again in another 4. Fascism is the union of the state and big business, the only thing the Neoliberals don't add to that stew is the cruelty and scapegoating as the people are robbed blind, they save that special sauce for their esteemed opposition, but they are both all about mass homelessness, and entire economic sectors murdering Americans when it's profitable in state sanctioned confidence schemes like our deathcare system. Thats neoliberal and fascist bipartisan supported and defended from we the people.
The capital markets must be dismantled with extreme prejudice, any value redistributed in order of the worst off aka the capitalists greatest victims who they haven't yet murdered, with currency retied to labor or active stake (working at) in a company/cooperative. If we refuse to do that, highly likely, nothing can improve and get comfortable in misery and cruelty.
Hopefully we get to tell them to get in line or they're a Trump lover at some point.
After all the right-wing Neoliberals I've voted for over the years out of harm reduction to attempt to stop literal murderous fascists, it would be nice to see them eat some of that shit and vote for someone with ideals they loathe, win or lose.
We should be so lucky to have a party she represents in this country. The only reason she has that seat is by defying the DNC as a spoiler. They only elevate politicians to the Federal level on the basis of how good they've proven they are at collecting that sweet, sweet corpo bribe money.
The DNC and democratic leadership would rather dissappear her Than Trump by a mile.
The pendulum is the point. Both parties are well bribed to maintain the capitalist's murderous control. Good cop and bad cop are both just fine with mass homelessness and entire murder for profit confidence scheme market sectors. One laughs at you when the capitalists cause you harm, the other just shrugs and says "golly gee market forces nothing we can do! But I affirm your right to die horribly as who you are here in this cardboard box under a freeway! Pronouns are free so whatever I still get bribed 😁" (edit to be clear, respecting others identity is the right thing to do and basic decency, but there's a hierarchy of needs, self-actualization only matters if you have your basic needs met. You cannot live in an affirmation ribbon, you cannot eat a preferred pronoun, priorities.)
If the Democrats were led by someone talking about redistribution, that bribe gravy train would stop. If by some miracle AOC manages to steal the party out from under them as Trump did the RNC, the DNC would be fighting her every move and comment the way we wish they were countering Trump right now. In fact, here's how Democrat leadership spent the months leading to Trump's inauguration:
https://www.axios.com/2024/12/12/aoc-pelosi-oversight-committee-connolly-raskin
Defending the country from one of the only slightly left Reps in the entire federal government.
Democrats like Schumer and Pelosi are far closer to Trump than AOC.
https://apnews.com/article/business-nancy-pelosi-congress-8685e82eb6d6e5b42413417f3d5d6775
HR is the office cop.
NEVER talk to American cops.
My HR and I have a wordless dirty look relationship.
Which makes them suckers.
Birth lottery is most of it. They let a few exceptional tokens through, enough to keep the fantasy alive.
I consider being a grind culture warrior true believer to be considerably dumber than a lottery ticket addict
I'm against a free market.
I think the market should be chained to benefit society from the bottom up if they want to profit at all.
Donnie is also against a free market, he wants it to serve himself exclusively, which is kind of hilarious since the most selfish class of all is under attack from his greed.
If it isn't recognition of the glorification of something that shouldn't even be tolerated and should be legislated out of being practiced with punishments that compete with hate crimes, then no we don't recognize the problem. And most people who are even against Trump don't. It is his signature brand and why he represents our people as they are perfectly. (I voted against him every time for the record, but he is a monument to our culture's sins. He's like the zeitgeist of the United States of America anthropomorphized into human form.)
That something being avarice.
There was a time when there was mass recognition of the problem, but the Mr. Potters of the world got control when they convinced the masses herp derp you could be rich and shit on your neighbors too! The George Baileys arguing for taking what you need and no more, for community, and most importantly for telling the greed class "No, and by the way fuck you for offering your faustian bargain" lost and died.
The types most laughed at for occupying Wall Street. We clearly don't recognize the problem, because I hear almost nothing about razing the capital markets to cinder. Those rigged casinos that commoditize our very humanity to be bought, sold, and betrayed when profitable, those market's utter conquest of their regulators and government need to be destroyed, their arbitrary tabulations of "value" erased, and currency retied to either honest labor, or benefitting directly those who labored for the value of products/services.
Without that, today is the best day of the rest of our lives, and sadly, few recognize that fact. On the bright side, if we don't, and we know we won't because our population has been made too ignorant to, capital market made climate change will do our job for us and wipe those markets clean, along with every other aspect of civilization in just a few decades. We have no reason not to stop them save our subsistence opiates like social media and fast food, and that, pathetically myself included, appears to be enough.
You are giving our species too much credit. For almost all of our history, we merely lacked the technologies capable of terraforming our planet against us for short term profit.
If the kings and feudal lords of yore had the capability to burn the long term future to goose their short term greed disease hoards, they would have.
We're a gaggle of monkeys just barely capable, with great effort, of devising tools with complexities and consequences we're still far too primitive to wield responsibly, nothing more.
I'm of the opinion this is one of those theoretical Great Filters that explains the lack of a loud universe filled with the signals of other civilizations.
Evolution is slow. If complex life is common and eventually leads to intelligence, maybe there's just a common chasm between when when a species becomes... clever enough, because we've proven as a species we aren't intelligent... To split atoms or otherwise alter the habitat of their world technologically, but still sit biologically in the tribal, zero sum, rival monkeys have to lose so we big win! mentality that is necessary in nature but harmful to a civilization, that inevitably leads to self-destruction.
What was the FIRST thing we sought to do with the awesome power of the atom again? Wasn't even a hundred years ago. That's who we are. We could have made a warm light for all mankind, instead we made big boomie boom rival monkey tribe, wheeeeee!
They aren't the primary villains, but they're sure as shit the bumbling secondary antagonists.
I phone banked on two Sanders campaigns. This didn't start with Trump or even in most of our lifetimes. Both parties, and yes most voters of both of them, would rather set the country on fire than have anything resembling economic equity or someone having their basic needs met without a subjective judgement of "deserving" it. We could have ended homelessness inexpensively at any time under any administration, we could have made prison rehabilitative, it would have literally saved the country money to invest in both, yet I've heard more Democrats and Republicans speak of such desperate populations as the problem instead of the society that put them there.
This collapse was a choice we made over and over again.
...To better reflect how much my country values education and commerce.
Money can't buy happiness, but Elon sure did buy a lot of hair plugs.
You mean the communist and socialist regimes the capitalists used military force to destabilize for wanting to be societies instead of a bunch of rugged individuals at each other's throats for scraps in order to keep their resource markets open to our capitalist's exploitation?