[smallmancontrov]

People underestimate how radical JD Vance is. He wrote an endorsement for the skull book, and not a "my buddy wrote a book that I totally read and you should too" endorsement, but one that restated the core argument: Democrats are secretly communists who want to communist genocide you and we should invoke the Iron Law of Reciprocity to preemptively ... them.

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

During the election I thought this was mostly rhetoric, but now that the administration has turned ICE fully paramilitary and tried to get its base excited about murdering their political opposition, I'm not so sure.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Democrats are secretly communists who want to communist genocide you

Isn't this just how politics looks now? The Republicans say that, the Democrats say the Republicans are secretly nazis who want to nazi genocide you, both parties contain millions of people so both can point to some extremists on the other side saying something shocking and then they both go back to trying to get 51% of the votes so they can be the ones picking your pocket this year.

edit: It's beautiful how the two immediate replies to this post are, respectively, "it's not both sides because only the Democrats are actually Marxists" and "it's not both sides because only the Republicans are actually Fascists".

[smallmancontrov]

When things are this lopsided, both-sidesing is indistinguishable from sweeping for the bad one.

Want to prove me wrong? Show me the last time Kamala Harris engaged in guillotine rhetoric (which is the left-coded equivalent). Point me to what you think the Democratic equivalent of the ICE killings are. Show me dead protestors and stifling of legal proceedings to hold them accountable. Show me Democratic fraud on the scale of the $40B swap line to Argentina, pumping and dumping the American economy by announcing on-again-off-again war, creating a board of peace / putting yourself in charge / giving it $10B, and shitcoin rugpulls.

[AnthonyMouse]

> both-sidesing is indistinguishable from sweeping for the bad one.

That implies there is a good one. The lesser of two evils is still evil, and even how to measure lesser is extremely subjective.

> Show me the last time Kamala Harris engaged in guillotine rhetoric

Harris campaigned on saying as little as possible. Several Democrats have called for Trump's assassination. Some (like Stacey Plaskett) quite directly, others (including Harris) have implied or joked about it. Someone worked the nutters into a sufficient frenzy to attempt it with Trump and to murder Charlie Kirk.

> Point me to what you think the Democratic equivalent of the ICE killings are.

Around 3 million people die in the US per year, on the order of 6000 of those are in prisons, ICE was on the order of 30.

The media focuses on that because Trump campaigns on immigration, not because it's a significant proportion of the people the government kills. Significantly more people die when Democrats get paid off by the AMA to limit the number of medical residency slots, or impede housing construction even in states their party fully controls resulting in homelessness and poverty-inducing high rents.

> Show me dead protestors

Are you referring to the unarmed woman killed by the capitol police in 2021?

> stifling of legal proceedings to hold them accountable

Biden pardoned a lot of people in his own party.

The government failing to hold itself accountable is the default. Most of the time they don't even initiate proceedings against themselves when they're committing a crime, and hide behind qualified immunity etc. if someone wants to sue them.

> Show me Democratic fraud on the scale of the $40B swap line to Argentina, pumping and dumping the American economy by announcing on-again-off-again war, creating a board of peace / putting yourself in charge / giving it $10B, and shitcoin rugpulls.

The Inflation Reduction Act was a trillion dollars. The federal budget is multiple trillions every year and a double digit percentage of it is corruption every year, regardless of which party is in office.

In general it seems like you want to point to specific things that represent a fractional percentage of the overall problem and ignore the systemic bipartisan corruption and government unaccountability that has been the status quo for generations.

[smallmancontrov]

Oh, so you can't find equivalents from Harris and Walz! That's what I thought. You aren't an enlightened centrist, you're a partisan hack posing as one.

> residency slots, NIMBY

Who put forward the last bill addressing the residency slot issue? Which party has the bigger YIMBY faction?

> Ashli Babbitt

She was storming the capitol! The officer who shot her was investigated and cleared because the courts agree: cops are allowed to shoot if you are trying to breach the inner defensive perimeter of the US capitol. Where are the investigations for Rene Good and Alex Pretti?

> state investigators were denied access to the shooting scene by the federal government

Oh. This isn't even "we've investigated ourselves," it's just "we kill you, you die." That's new in US politics.

> IRA was a trillion dollars

Spending that you do not like is not fraud. That's not what the word means. I'd love to call the trillions spent on Iraq and Afghanistan and (soon) Iran fraud, but I can't, because that's not what the word means.

> you want to point to specific things that represent a fractional percentage

The reason why you can't come up with equivalents for the Trump fraud is because they don't exist, so you have to pretend that congressional appropriations that you don't like are somehow equivalent. But they aren't. They made Jimmy Carter sell his peanut farm, but Trump can just pocket billions and Republicans say "both sides." No, it's not both sides, it's not normal outside of shithole countries, and despite Trump's best efforts to turn the US into a shithole country we can still decide to enforce our laws and turn back the clock on that.

[micromacrofoot]

what was the unarmed woman doing at the time?

[AnthonyMouse]

Is killing unarmed protesters okay if we don't like what they're protesting?

You can arrest someone for trespassing without shooting them.

[micromacrofoot]

I can't help but feel you're leaving out some key details here...

was she perhaps trespassing after walking through broken barriers, past security guards that told people to leave, and through broken windows? was she also warned to stop multiple times while climbing through a broken window to circumvent a barricaded door at the time of being shot?

If those things happened to be true, it would seem that you're attempting to deceive us as readers to make a point in poor faith. Probably no need to do that, right?

[cramsession]

The Democrats have a very similar platform to the Republicans (especially around ICE and Israel, both of which Harris vowed to continue supporting). Trump is uniquely incompetent though, which if you believe in accelerationism may or may not be a good thing. For instance Democrats have long yearned to go to war with Iran, now Trump did it, but he did it in such an incompetent and rushed manner that it's led to US bases throughout the Middle East being destroyed and abandoned. That's a good thing that came out of a bad situation.

[smallmancontrov]

Lots of yapping, no showing. Show me the equivalents I asked for.

> Democrats have long yearned to go to war with Iran

Really?

[cramsession]

I'm not trying to be combative, just honest. Here is Harris saying Iran is our greatest adversary (sorry for the Zionist source). Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton have also been very vocal about wanting to attack Iran. Clinton actually recently praised Trump!

https://x.com/EYakoby/status/2045697406612762951

[smallmancontrov]

Oh, Harris called Iran an adversary! Wow! I'm glad we didn't elect her or the party that negotiated the last deal with Iran! The party that tore up the Iran deal and kept joking about bombing them into the stone age and started 2 out of 2 of the last middle eastern forever wars is the much better bet.

What? They bombed Iran and started forever war 3 of 3? Who could have seen this coming?!

[micromacrofoot]

a republican mob stormed the capitol in an attempt to overthrow the election

the republicans have actually started arresting people they don't like and building camps to imprison them in via ICE

earlier they deported people, without trial, to foreign prisons to be kept indefinitely

how long are we going to hand wave this away as "both sides are extreme"? this is a little more than the typical insider cronyism isn't it?

edit: your edit is also wrong, and kind of validates that you're only seeing what you want to be seeing

[Zigurd]

All five actual Marxist-Leninists in the US appreciate your attention. Now let's list the actual fascists. Symmetry is beautiful but sometimes it's just not there.

[smallmancontrov]

Exactly: the tear-down-the-system left barely exists outside twitch and college campuses, while the far right has the presidency and majority control of the Republican party. These are not the same.

[magicalist]

> edit: It's beautiful how the two immediate replies to this post are, respectively, "it's not both sides because only the Democrats are actually Marxists" and "it's not both sides because only the Republicans are actually Fascists".

I don't think we should pat ourselves on the back too hard for milquetoast takes devoid of any specifics.

(also I think you misread the responses to your post)

[smallmancontrov]

You're too kind, he hallucinated harder than an LLM on that one.

[AnthonyMouse]

> All five actual Marxist-Leninists in the US appreciate your attention. Now let's list the actual fascists. Symmetry is beautiful but sometimes it's just not there.

"There are five actual Marxist-Leninists you need to be paying attention to in the US but we can't even name one relevant actual fascist, so the symmetry isn't there."

That was my initial reading, and it's because I've encountered numerous people who sincerely believe that. Using sarcasm in posts subject to Poe's Law is a good way to be ambiguous.

[Zigurd]

Lets start: you. Followed by Stephen Miller. Trump, per the assessment of his own former chief of staff. Josh Hawley. Leonard Leo. All the "Dark Enlightenment." Your initial reading is tendentious and of little value. Are you seriously going to challenge the notion that American politics has a spectrum from center right to fascists-would-blush ideological crackpots like the dark enlightenment?