Like… you can either ask for open discussion or you can say, “Everybody shut up and listen to what I have to say, and unless you’re opening your mouth to completely agree with me in every way

There’s a big middle area you’re ignoring.

Okay, but just hear me out.

There used to be a time when this kind of shit led to a swift execution.

Dude, that’s absolutely not true. After the Civil Fucking War numerous rebel generals went right back home and ran for high office. Others got jobs as professors or retired to lavish estates that were never broken up. Still others founded the KKK. The Feds let it happen then.

Also, let’s not forget Reagan feeding the Iranians intel during hostage negotiations. Or Bush evacuating Saudi officials after 9/11. Or any number of intelligence leaks from Congressman Nunes, Michael Flynn, Tom DeLay, the list goes on.

The only people we execute in this country are scapegoats, civil rights activists, and the poor. Actual traitors get to walk damned near every time.

Sometimes certain subsets of the planet have problems particular to their region, culture, or cohort.

Telling a person wandering through the desert “I also get thirsty” maybe deflects from the issue at hand.

Comic: “I’m here to talk about women.” Heckling ensues

First Comment: “This is exactly what happens to men.” Wall of Upvotes

Proof that you can pull the users out of the Reddit but you can’t pull the Reddit out of the users.

Given Tucker’s views on women, I don’t see a discrepancy

It’s an entirely captured medium. The best you’ll ever be is the Alan Colmes to CatTurd’s Sean Hannity.

Okay hear me out.

He was a White Hat Pedophile. Working the system from the inside.

The long and tortured history of bad American medicine and crooked elections is a reminder of the crimes of privatization, eugenics, and white nationalism.

The irony is how often these crimes are invokes as an excuse to deny health care provision via public institutions, to encourage further eugenics policies, and to facilitate white nationalist control of the country.

How many times am I going to see a MAGA Republican denounce Medicaid on the grounds that its too nice to black people or obstruct ballot access to college voters, on the grounds that these systems are corrupt?

How many times am I going to see liberals insist “This is just what people want” as they tear up another health care public option and let the GOP further stack the SCOTUS?

Trump’s been bought and sold more times than a vintage Pokemon trading card.

For some reason, people love to fixate on Putin while ignoring MBS, JP Morgan, and Elon Musk.

Convicted (civilly) on that, too.

Still hasn’t spent a hot minute in prison, though. Sentencing keeps getting delayed and prosecutions dropped by a bureaucracy that loathes punishing the wealthy and connected.

a cowardly weak rapist con man traitor loser

That’s simply the norm for social media personalities in the modern era. Donald Trump’s presidency is a product of half a century of misogyny in marketing, advertising, and influencing.

He won’t be the last rapist, con artist, or kleptocrat to run. He won’t be the last to win. Not so long as economic conditions for Americans continue to degrade, while fascist policy is championed as a panacea.

Billionaires don’t have taxable income because they’ve successfully lobbied for carve outs that exempt them from taxation.

That’s what makes a wealth tax impractical. How do you pass it through a Congress that’s been wholely co-opted by a billionaire friendly caucus?

Chuck Schumer, the senior senator from Wall Street, isn’t going to author a wealth tax. Kamala Harris, the former Senator from Silicon Valley isn’t going to sign it. And the SCOTUS majority that’s on the Harlan Crow payroll isn’t going to uphold it.

He realizes this every couple of years and then he forgets again during the next shareholders meeting

The infamous examples of $500 hammers, for example, were anti sparking hammers for working around flammables or munitions, hence requiring special materials, certification, and low production runs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Commission

I’m not one to praise Reagan, but the Packard Commission picked off some incredibly low hanging fruit. The $435 hammer ($1235 adjusted for inflation) was a boondoggle by any standard. That it was overcharged by a factor of 2-3x instead of the sloppy journalism implying a 100x markup doesn’t refute the fact that these contracts were corrupt on their face.

While a soap dispenser having an 80x markup seems absurd, it might be more reasonable than it seems at first glance.

Either the equipment could be purchased wholesale much cheaper (as was often the case even for industrial grade goods) or the production should have been insourced to the department that had a bespoke demand.

The fact that Boeing exists at all is absurd, given the degree to which government monopsony and security concerns force them to act as a department within the public sector. But the extortionary rates illustrate the fraud that is the reason these public-private relationships exist.

They’re rigged because, uh, um

Party Control of Party Primaries: Party Influence in Nominations for the US Senate

Using a simple and easily understood measure of party support, I show that candidates who are less connected to the party are less likely to win and also less likely to remain a candidate in the primary. I find that parties not only are effective in helping candidates win but also are influential in excluding certain electoral options from being presented to primary voters.

This is how black people in the south managed the Democratic party; by voting for the least racist Democrats in the primaries

The black voter enjoyed a heavy Republican bias for nearly a century, and suffered much of the same treatment (GOP treated them as a captured constituency, Dixiecrats suppressed their turnout with fraud, incarceration, and terrorism).

By Kennedy, the northern Dems were embracing civil rights not as an electoral strategy but a labor organizing strategy. The vote was largely split, with black voters biasing by party in individual regions rather than as a national block.

It wasn’t into Clinton - when Southern Strategy Repubs had fully purged their party of black voters - that the trend was fully reversed. That wasn’t a decision by the NAACP or the median black voter. It was a Nixonian gambit. Black voters were viewed as a handicap. Appealing to fascism was how you obtained a majority in American politics.

Reagan, the Bushs, and then Trump seemed to further this theory. You’ll get two white voters for every black voter you lose, by being the most racist candidate in the ticket.

the entire clone war era was a government that had become largely pacifist and demilitarized

The Jedi were plenty militant as needed. And the drone armies of the Trade Republic were clearly in regular production and use. Then you had the Mandalorian Wars, which had left the Galaxy with a sizeable contingent of heavily armed and armored vagrant mercenaries. And the Outer Rim continued to be a shit-show all through the Republic Era. Hell, the Gungans had (relatively) advanced planetside military.

I don’t see anything in the Star Wars cannon to suggest the Republic was pacifist. What fueled the Clone War was simply the outward facing private militaries and commandos and space wizard super-soldiers coming back to the imperial core to duke it out on home turf.

leaving them scrambling and reliant on Palatine’s indoctrinated space cops

Which were pitted against Dooku’s army of literal killer robots (which Palpatine also helped commission and field).

“Ah, but if there had just been a third standing army!” doesn’t solve the problem. Because the problem was, at its heart, the endless ratcheting of tensions and the failure of the Jedi (specifically Obi Wan and Anakin) to achieve a ceasefire, acceptable terms for surrender, and a new peace.

Jedi wouldn’t have been embedded in crowds of space cops to begin with if they hadn’t been trapped in a spiraling expansive endless war that collapsed democratic rule and created the Imperial Galactic State.

You see I do have rights, and that’s something Americans are about to lose.

I’ve seen this dogged insistence that Americans have rights but an election can take them away and all I can think of is the Iraq War Protesters, the OWS protesters, the Climate Change protesters, the Pro-Choice activists, LGBT activists, and the anti-Genocide protesters who have all seen police action against them.

You’re not about to lose your rights. You’re simply going to be subjected to a level of enforcement traditionally reserved for ethnic, religious, social minorities, labor organizers, and other broadly defined “Leftists”.

And chosing between two evils is a bad position to be in, but they can still chose.

The choice is an illusion in a system as degraded as the American democracy. Even at the most superficial level, you’re telling people they have a choice of who to support when the Electoral College clearly denies them this privilege. If you live in Texas, you’ll be counted as a Trump supporter whether you are or not. If you live in California, you’re counted to Harris. The swing states are exactly that - all or nothing. Individual voices don’t matter.

And that’s before you get into the decades of legalized disenfranchisement, vote caging, and voter intimidation that have shaped the results in states like Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina. Florida has the single largest number of disenfranchised voters - 1.1M people, roughly 1 in 14 eligible voters. They are legally disqualified from casting a ballot in the state, overwhelmingly biased against ethnicity. Then you’ve got places like DC and Puerto Rico, which are fully disenfranchised at the Congressional level and only tangentially represented in the EC, via ex-pat voters and the 23rd amendment.

This isn’t lesser of two evils, its a ratchet. Dems backstop progress with legalistic delays and poor leadership. GOPs ram ahead in direct violation of law and precedent, then face no consequences other than a brief sabbatical from high office during wave years. The end result is a consistent march towards fascism.