You might as well refer to the Kardashian as a crime family. Donald Trump represents the fusion of reality television and spectator politics – of course sycophants show up, how else are they supposed to get air time?

Isn’t “the state” just cultural mechanisms extended beyond familial or interpersonal ties? There’s a threshold where the group becomes too numerous for a member to form social ties with all other members. At that stage, culture becomes a force unto itself, propagating further than the members that comprise it. That point, more than money, seems to be where exploitative behavior becomes more likely to take hold.

Like, feudal aristocracies were plenty exploitative, plenty domineering. But they didn’t necessarily need money for it; a lot of them operated on barter economies. They just needed a knife-point and a cultural belief to justify the domination. Money is just an innovation on a much older process.

You’re getting surveillance regardless of walkablity. Amazon is happy enough to hand Ring camera footage over to authorities no questions asked.

You worship the stock market and private property like a golden calf.

Hamas agreed to a ceasefire that would have released the remaining hostages. Israel turned it down.

Ah, I see, you just meant that other species don’t share our capacity for learning and adapting. Although, why do you continue to describe exploitative behavior as an instinct if you agree that it is a learned trait?

neuroplasticity is limited to what our genetics will allow

sorry, what do you mean by this? Surely the benefit of a learning and growing brain is that it can respond and adapt to situations faster than germ-line genetics ever could. Why would there be a genetic limiter, what purpose would that serve?

It’s kinda annoying how quickly he’s been forgotten. If we’re just looking at policy, Trump was a bog standard Republican. Dubba redefined national and international policy for every administration to follow.

All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they’re eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I’d rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough…

From further up the thread

A liberal is someone who:

• Upholds the modern nation state and is thus against monarchy (against whom the first liberals rebelled against)
• Upholds capitalism and market economies, and with it property rights
• Upholds electoral parliamentary systems of governance
• Usually believes in some version of the social contract or similar theory from which the legitimacy of the nation state and capitalism is derived.

This describes the bulk of the Democrat and Republican parties. US politics doesn’t have a left-wing as it is understood in the rest of the world, our center is between two right-wing ideologies.

I never said I wasn’t voting, or that others shouldn’t.

Or maybe because they obstruct fucking everything. JFC. And then they can stack the courts.

Or maybe because the Dems still try to reach across the aisle. While the GOP doesn’t.

This is what I’m saying! Democrats keep trying to meet Republicans in the middle, and Republicans just push further and further to the right. That is, regardless of intention, enabling! I feel like you are asking the world of voters, when the party itself won’t even play hardball with the fascist nutjobs they’re supposed to be opposing

Biden isn’t running against an incumbent, he is the incumbent. You want him to run from the center against an incumbent, OK. But then what? Run from the center again? That doesn’t make sense.

Again, “consistent, overwhelming” victory is a fantasy. Control of the executive and legislative branch exchanges hands every few terms. That’s just how this rule-set and this electorate play out.

The meme oversimplifies what is happening. Our politics has been drifting further to the right with each election and the people in power are fine with that, regardless of whatever party they’re a part of.

there you go

Why is it that you claim Democrats need “consistent and overwhelming” victory, when Republicans have managed to shift the Overton window without that?

If this were a parliamentary system, sure. But our constitutional framework does not produce overwhelming, consistent victory. Like, ever, in its history.

May I remind you after the Bush administration, Obama won both the primaries and the overall election by campaigning from the left, not the center. And he won by a very wide margin.

Which part is the baseless claim?

I’m not saying election wins don’t affect it, I’m saying how our elected officials behave while in office affect it even more, both intentionally and unintentionally.

If your opponents are talking about and implementing far-right nonsense, you push against the opposite edge of the window – staying in the cetre just lets them push more to the right. Democrats always running to the center is primarily how we got here in the first place. You are inadvertently arguing that we follow Republicans further to the right as they continue to push against the edge of the window.

The Overton window is a cultural measurement, not a tally of recent political victories. It is a range determined by our media and our history, the sum of what people talk and think about, what they experience in the political economic and artistic worlds. It is a crude way of describing what is collectively believed to be possible. The spectrum doesn’t just shift to the right because “conservatives won”, it shifted to the right before Trump won – that’s how he was able to win. And the preceding administration played a big role in that shift.

After the recession, people felt like they had been left behind. The banks and the auto manufactures got a huge bailout, but there was very little help for the individuals and families caught in the downturn. Nearly all the economic growth through the recovery was happening for top earners, not median households. People’s lived experiences didn’t match the story of recovery that was described in the news and by politicians…

…which is why Trump’s victory caught so many established Democrats off guard. They didn’t notice the window shift, they thought it was still the same place it was four years ago when Obama won his second term.

…with everything that has happened recently, I have this dreadful sense of the familiar. Young people see lives being taken in Palestine and are angry. Old people see us lurching toward another conflict in the Middle East and are weary. Everyone is grumbling about the price of groceries. Democratic leadership keeps insisting that things are fine and actually getting better. Does that seem like a recipe for consistent, overwhelming victory?

Are you certain of that? In a country where half of the population consistently, chronically, for decades, doesn’t vote?

Every election brings with it the chance of loosing. Seems to me that something radical is what tips the scales. What gets that checked out population to sit up and take notice. Play too conservatively (with a lowercase ‘c’), and they stay checked out.

There was some stuff for rehabilitating our rail corridors. Not enough, of course, but it was there.