Rayvin

I absolutely detest Elon Musk. Forget Trump, Musk is rapidly becoming the danger. Apparently buying Twitter has paid off for him in all this as its made him the most powerful unelected bureaucrat in the world.

Do we reckon Barnes has been better for us than Maddison would have been in the end then? Not really followed Maddison since, did he turn out to be any good?

There will be free elections in 2028, the world hasn't gone that insane yet. And I'm not trying to draw any sort of equivalence, I'm simply saying that if Harris is being called a communist now, what more can they say about someone on the left of her? Like that "insult" can't go further than it already has, so I don't see what we'd lose that we aren't already losing.

Harris being called a communist actually opens the door to further left policies coming in. What are they gonna do, start branding people super communists? Same as the UK, if we're all Marxists no matter what, we have absolutely nothing to lose. We threw the word 'fascist' around until it lost all meaning and they embraced themselves anyway. Why would it be any different for us? Also I think that if we pushed the social left wing concepts less, and the economic ones more, we'd be doing better. I often feel like the moderate left placates us with social progress to avoid giving us economic progress, but the longer we go without it, the worse the situation gets.

All we know at this point is the centrists can't win without the left, and vice versa. The question I suppose is whether the 10m or so people who walked away because she wasn't offering anything productive (left wing enough) outnumber the people who would walk away from her if she did. In the end I've just had enough of cringing before the right like this, we should just die on our feet. We're dying either way.

I'd support this wholeheartedly, though the US already has that minimum limit of 35 or something.

Harrison Ford movies! I knew you were talking weirdly but honestly I just assumed you'd had a stroke or something...

Fair. On the subject of Putin, I feel like we should collectively acknowledge that we are literally at war with Russia now. This constant fucking on with our countries and democracies is a war. We should see it for what it is.

I think we're kinda through the looking glass now tbh, this is Trump's world to mould as he sees fit. We shall see if he's competent enough to use that.

The thing I would put to you I guess is this - if you're right, it feels like there's nothing we can do about it. If I'm right, there is something we can do about it. So we may as well assume I'm right because it's the only assumption that we can do anything about 😉

I feel like we're just discussing something tbf, but I do think Renton and I are two people with nearly identical views, separated by perspective alone

I do take your point, it's just that having plunged into the murkier parts of the right wing discourse online at least, I've never seen anyone other than the absolute fringe mentalists (which depressingly, we cannot now consider Trump to be) say that women are not fit to lead. The young men I've been observing, none of them have said that. Ever. They're all about sticking it to the left because they view us as preachy, self righteous bellends who refuse to listen. So sure, maybe it's swung hugely back the other way - but you'd think someone somewhere would have picked up on that. And why in an interconnected and online era, would it only be a US specific thing? We lack the evidence to know based on just that article, I'm open to a revised opinion if further relevant data comes to light.

I mean I'm not the one making that claim particularly, I'm citing experts who have made it. You are of course free to disagree with their conclusion but I think the Tory party shows that women being in charge really isn't the factor we all want to believe it is...

Think I'd be tempted to say that this is trolling the losing side more than any sincerely held belief. I'm seeing it online too and at least there it seems to be designed entirely with the aim of winding up the more ardent feminists. Our side is giving plenty back though, don't worry. Plans for mass castrations are well under way

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/08/young-men-donald-trump-kamala-harris This is a superb article on why the Democrats fucked it with men, informed by Richard Reeves who is the President of the American Institute for Boys and Men. I think his comments are bang on personally, and I say this as someone farther to the left than most people on here. EDIT - One more key excerpt that I feel compelled to add: What men heard from the right was: you’ve got problems, we don’t have solutions. What they heard from the left is: you don’t have problems, you are the problem. I could take excerpts from it all over the place that I agree with but I'm going to pick this one on its own: I presume the conclusion they’re also going to reach is that they can’t run a female candidate for a really long time? I really, I really, I really hope they don’t draw that conclusion. There’s a reason the General Social Survey stopped asking the question about a female candidate in 2010: because it hit 96% support, and it’s even higher among young men. I suppose it’s possible that those men are secretly sexist or racist and won’t tell pollsters that, but that’s an unfalsifiable hypothesis, we can’t know. If Democrats draw the conclusion that it was because it was a female candidate, that will be the wrong conclusion. Empirically. It will insult the male voters they need and it will hobble the careers of female politicians, potentially for a long time.