It’s legitimately a gem. On par with 6, 7, and 10 without a doubt

A primary just means that other people think they could do a better job of it than the incumbent

Vanity campaigns are consistently the worst

Friendly reminder that Boris Yeltsin shelled Parliament back in 1993

Ffs, the response to the LA Riots in '91 happened two years after Tienamen.

Nevermind the police response to Occupy Wall Street and BLM.

Imagine a scenario where an American government deployed armed soldiers into the center of a city to suppress a civilian revolt against the government.

A thing that has never happened before.

Peter Thiel is an AnCap, though.

We’ve formed a committee to look into it

What we have now requires the same tactics the Panthers used, visible intimidation.

And then Huey Newton, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton lived happily ever after?

mental health

I see this floated over and over again, with the expectation that people with chronic psychological conditions just “get better” one day and go off to land cushy office jobs making six figures in an upper-middle class part of town.

If you just provide free housing, there will be a significant proportion of people who would not be able to fully benefit from it

So, this is where things get really sticky. Because we do have examples of governments with these very rigorously managed programs that host large workforces dedicated to identifying, rounding up, and rehabilitating people who get flagged as “having mental health issues”.

The problem is that “mental health” often gets mixed in with “gender non-conformity”, “neuro-atypical behavior”, and “religious/ideological heresy”. Whether you’re looking at British Gender Clinics or Iranian Religious Police or Chinese Cultural apparatchiks or the American War on Woke, you have bureaucratic institutions mix the politics of the moment with the industrial scale machinery of the state.

You also run into the problem of mental health sciences being relatively new, medications carrying a host of dubious side effects, and public policymakers having very different ideas as to what a “successful” program looks like.

A lot of times, the “just give people free housing” faction sees these services as an extension of the police state that’s undesirable.

What if we commoditized the homeless as a profit center for government contractors?

But then we complained about how much this was costing the public sector, so we privatized the entire state bureaucracy and billed it out of the public coffers as “National Security”?

And then if you complained about the horrifying abuse of civil liberties, we labeled you an enemy of the state and threw you in jail as well?

I can’t think of anything more AnCap than this.

More Charlie Kirks have gotten got in the last year than ICE Agents.

Lemmy just BLEW AWAY the LinkedIn Writing Style.

A few simple witty posts have utterly upended how we communicate on the internet.

Normal Users:

• Post replies

• Up and Downvote

• Embarassingly minimizing the display when your boss approaches the desk.

And maybe that works for normal online interactions.

Sure, it’s fine if you’re an entry level Lemmy user

But you’ll never change the culture of the internet.

So we came up with

Something that’s

Even better than

What we used

To post like

Before

We first started using

This online

digital service

For posting our

Thoughts to

Other

Pe

ople

It’s called memes.

Keeping a glock in your glove box does not change your relationship with the police.

what is so mystical and magical about guns to you?

Small tubes full of explosive shrapnel aren’t magic. They’re just hazardous when improperly owned and operated.

Multi-ton gas powered rolling steel boxes are also hazardous when improperly owned and operated. That’s why we have all these standards for licensure, ownership, and use.

I can also murder people with kitchen knives, btw.

Sure. People are fragile. You can crush someone’s windpipe with your bare hands.

I don’t think your ability to do this manually should encourage anyone to stock up on machines that do it rapidly at long range.

If you suggested everyone should show up at an ICE detention center wearing hockey masks and waving meat clevers, I would tell you this is a bad idea. If you suggested everyone should sleep with a kitchen knife under their pillows, because it would keep them safe from a SWAT raid, I would strongly disagree.

You’re pitching individualist solutions to a broad social problem. There is nothing you can purchase retail that will remove ICE from your neighborhood. And there are hazards that come with gun ownership that you seem deeply invested in ignoring.

some people who don’t have dogs freak out around my dog because they are afraid of dogs.

If your response your sense of insecurity is to go out and buy a Bully XL on impulse, you are making a mistake.

you seem to think the only point of owning a gun is to commit violence

You talk about a gun like you plan to open your beer with it.

Is driving a car stupid and pointless then?

If you can’t tell the difference between driving a car and firing a gun, you should be allowed to own neither.

I am convinced that the #1 problem in this country right now is the notion that having a primary challenger is somehow a sign of weakness.

I mean, it’s absolutely a sign of weakness - which is to say, it’s a sign that the incumbent isn’t popular. The institutional response to an incumbent’s unpopularity is to mask it by forcing rivals out of the primary process (as with Biden going uncontested in '24).

The House, in particular, is meant to be the body that is most responsive to the people, because they are theoretically accountable to them every two years.

In 1803, a single House Rep had a district of about 34,000 people. In 1903, a district held 193,167 people. In 1953, 334,587 people. In 2023, 761,169 people. These seats weren’t great at representing large-ish constituencies 220 years ago. They’re absolutely dogshit at it now. Members exist to represent the party on behalf of local party members not the people of the district. In many cases, a Rep is explicitly antagonistic towards minority members of their district in an attempt to curry favor with the majority.

The two year window is not about direct accountability to the district nearly so much as it is direct accountability towards the donor class that sponsors their campaigns. And the near-continuous need to fundraise in order to cover the cost of advertising and self-promotion within the district has turned House Reps into patronage positions of the most servile sort.

The problem with primaries, in the modern political equation, is that they drive up the cost for donors to hold any single seat. And for parties to control a House majority (as non-incumbents are more vulnerable to a seat flip).

So suppressing primaries, suppressing voter turnout, and suppressing opposition parties through gerrymandering are - at the end of the day - cost control measures for national parties and corporate interests.

I don’t particularly mind if there folks keep their jobs into their 70’s, as long as they really are the best person for that district.

They’re the best because at that age they’ve proven themselves to be unfailingly loyal. This is, again, an issue of cost control and risk mitigation. Nobody who has been in the Senate for 50 years is going to pitch any curveballs. Nobody who has climbed to the top of the ladder in their House Committee is going to deviate far from their proven ideology.

Unlike with freshmen who can waffle erratically from their original campaign pledges (see: Fetterman and Sinema, for instance) the 70 year old multi-election incumbent - a la Chuck Schumer or Diane Feinstein - is very predictable.

“I’ve got four years college experience and another six years of part-time work experience.”

“Do you know how to use the Flibbidty Widget?”

“No. Where would I have learned how to use that?”

“Only our company. We have a proprietary system that revolves entirely around this custom piece of hardware.”

“So…”

“We are only hiring people with five years experience. Sorry.”

Wind farms are wildly lucrative and Donald Trump is living in a country that puts profit above everything else.