The fact that this whole norion of a lack of lefty unity is complete bullshit was neatly demonstrated by leftist voters coming together to overwhelmingly support Zohran Mamdani.
And who didn't support him? The fucking establishment neolib hacks - the exact same people who keep fucking us over by putting up shitty candidates then trying to guilt trip leftists into voting for them. We finally got a candidate we wanted and they couldn't even be arsed to endorse him.
I'm old. My first awareness of the world of politics was the Watergate hearings, so I actually lived through most of the run-up to this.
It's certainly the case that the US has been moving more or less steadily toward plutocratic oligarchy since at least Nixon, and progress has definitely accelerated (though it really started accelerating with the Wall Street bailouts in the wake of the 2008 real estate bubble collapse and hasn't really let up since), but that's not really what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the literal insanity of Trump and his sycophants. They aren't merely corrupt tools of the plutocrats like so many past politicians - they're deranged lunatics. That's not hyperbole - it's simple fact, plainly obvious to anyone who takes a step back and honestly looks at what they do and say.
It's not that the US has accelerated toward autocracy in less than a year (though it has), because yes - that's the direction it's been headed for decades. The astonishing thing to me is that the US has effectively gone insane in less than a year.
If the US was a person, it'd be on a psych hold. And that's something I wasn't prepared for, even as cynical as I've always been.
Oh look - it's the DNC Defense Force, here to get an early start on guilt-tripping leftists who won't vote for whichever shitty center right neolib hack the DNC will likely end up trying to foist on the voters at the behest of their corporate donors.
Fuck that. It's not the voters' responsibility to vote for a piece of shit just because they stink a little bit less than the other piece of shit - it's the DNC's responsibility to run candidates people actually want to vote for. And when they can't (or more accurately won't) even do that, then they and nobody else are responsible for the consequences.
Reality has gone completely off the rails. Virtually every day, I read another account of blithering insanity, and painfully obviously dangerous and destructive insanity, from this administration, and then I watch as all of the official entities that are meant to check that sort of insanity just treat it as another day and another press release from another President's office.
It's like The Emperor's New Clothes, only far far worse.
Unfortunately, the mass media is complicit in the insanity - they've abandoned principles, integrity, honesty and accuracy in pursuit of profit and/or the owners' agenda, whichever might be deemed more important in a given organization.
That's not to say that that story is necessarily false. It's simply that if it's a spin that serves someone's agenda, as this obviously is, then it will be published somewhere, entirely regardless of whether it's true or not, so the fact that it has been published means nothing at all.
I know things were pretty fucked - I haven't been a lifelong cynic for no reason - but still, it's amazing how quickly snd completely the US has descended into screeching insanity.
And all at the hands of this demented lunatic, his psychopathic enablers and his legions of angry and stupid followers.
Of course they're not releasing the autopsy - they're already planning to continue using the same failed strategies.
The single most important thing to understand about the DNC is that their first priority is collecting enormous piles of soft money from corporations and billionaires. That's more important to them than any other consideration, including winning elections.
Their primary purpose is not trying to ensure that Democrats win, but trying to ensure that leftists do not, because that's the exact service their corporate and billionaire donors are buying from them.
And if that means running corrupt neolib hacks who can't gain enough voter support to win, then that's just the way it goes. They'll just fold the fact of their loss into their future donation pitches - they'll point to the harm the Republican winner has inevitably done, and say that that's exactly why "we need your support now more than ever."
So what the autopsy certainly points to as their failures are not, from the DNC's self-serving viewpoint, failures at all. They're strategies that they not only very deliberately pursued, but that they have every intention of continuing to pursue. Even if that means they're going to keep losing elections. Just so long as the soft money keeps flowing.
Remember when the term "Orwellian" was often treated as somewhat ridiculous, because western governments, censorious and propagandistic as they might be, still didn't rise to anything close to that extreme a level?
A "physical property", in this context, may be a metaphysical or logical combination of properties which are not physical in the ordinary sense.
lol
I've been watching as ontology has gone sideways since the new generation of blinkered STEMites decided they were qualified to weigh in on it, but this goes even beyond what I cynically expected.
Libre is a third party that was formed in 2011. They're a coalition of leftist groups, and are democratic socialists.
In 2012 and 2013, at least 18 of their pre-candidates, candidates and staff were murdered.
In 2013, they lost the almost certainly fraudulent presidential election to the right-wing National Party candidate - Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado, the narcotics trafficker who was just pardoned by Trump.
He's an unqualified, paychopathic piece of shit and a fucking war criminal and the best the US media can do is speculate that maybe the deranged toddler-in-chief might maybe not support him quite as much as he used to because maybe a few of the brazenly traitorous Republican scumbags in Congress might actually take issue with him.
2025 is going to go down in history as the year that the US dropped all pretense of being rational or legitimate and went full bug-eyed insane.
None of this is or ever has been about crime, or even really about immigrants, undocumented or otherwise.
It is and always has been about establishing precedents by which to expand governmental authority.
What they're building is a system in which anonymous federal agents will be seen to have the right to black-bag anyone, regardless of whether they can be charged with a crime or not, and disappear them.
They started with undocumented immigrants justifiably accused of other crimes because that was the easiest case to be made both legally and popularly, but they never had any intention of stopping there. They're going to keep expanding until they reach the point that they can do it to anyone, any time, for any reason.
I don't think Trump is even capable of considering a coherent ideology - his mind is just too scattershot and too self-absorbed for that.
Rather, I think that what happened is that after his first term. actual fascists like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought and Elon Musk saw Trump as a tool through which they could get what they wanted. They feed his ego-driven tantrums and he demands things because he's a giant overgrown toddler, and not coincidentally his demands and tantrums align with the fascist agenda that Miller, Vought et al are pursuing.
The sinplest explanation is simply that he's oblivious to hypocrisy because he's so narcissistic and so sociopathic that he can't conceive of any conflicts between his desires since they are all his desires and thus inherently perfect and beautiful, and he conceive of any interpretation of events other than his own.
But there are times, and this is one of them, in which his hypocrisy os so obvious and so brazen that it does feelbaomost deliberately.
And I can actually see it from a warped paychological perspective - basically, he's demonstrating that niceties like integrity and principles are for the small folk, but as an inherently superior member of the legitimate ruling class, he's above such things, and entirely free to be just as capricious and self-serving as he pleases. It's basically an ego flex.
Oh and....
The fact that this whole norion of a lack of lefty unity is complete bullshit was neatly demonstrated by leftist voters coming together to overwhelmingly support Zohran Mamdani.
And who didn't support him? The fucking establishment neolib hacks - the exact same people who keep fucking us over by putting up shitty candidates then trying to guilt trip leftists into voting for them. We finally got a candidate we wanted and they couldn't even be arsed to endorse him.