@inthehands oh holy fuck is there really NO POINT in engaging them. Our headmate Peter thinks he can land a few useful punches at least with well-chosen words (short and...very much not sweet) but the general impression I get from that crowd is that if you hit them in some way, they just...pump up the old #meme machine again and disgorge some words (possibly all LLM generated now) that have served them for many decades of chewing on their memories of Reagan and Thatcher and Ayn Fucking Rand

@inthehands
The Democrats support genocide and brought us Donald Trump, as well as the surveillance state. Both parties work for the same billionaire donors. Amazing that so many people still buy the whole "good cop bad cop" routine even now! I don't know how they manage to completely overlook the genocide in Gaza, among other things.

What we need is to end the system altogether and replace it with something that answers to the needs of the people. And we the people are the only ones who are going to do THAT.

#GeneralStrike

@Quasit

While you are "ending the system", or "seizing the means of production", Black and Brown people will be working in the trenches actually making lives better. But please, do go on.

@Okanogen

And while you are being "practical" and "respecting POC", tens and hundreds of thousands of brown children will continue to be murdered by the DNC, which receives bountiful funding from APAC and J Street. But I guess those kids don't really matter to you. We just need to keep voting Blue no matter who, right? What's a little genocide between friends?

@Quasit
A hundred thousand dead Iraqi children stare up from their graves to thank Ralph Nader for making sure Florida voters knew GWB and Al Gore were exactly the same. Not to mention the decades of climate action lost, because as we all KNOW they were exactly the same on that issue.

@Okanogen @Quasit Ranked Choice Voting (among other, better voting systems) removes that spoiler effect, BTW. No surprise the SAVE Act wants to ban it at the federal level. Maybe with less primitive methods of voting we could stop tearing each other apart? Maybe?

@inthehands Wyo actually used to be a donor state. At onetime, we had so much in the coffers, they were considering on giving checks to everyone. And then honestly, Biden killed our gas industry, and we never recovered which let MAGA usurp the state. "That square state..they're doing things right. Let's not let them do that" is kinda what happened. We're a little a little bitter about it.

@praetor

I'm not sure I completely buy this argument: (1) Wyoming only just baaarely crept over the net donor / net recipient line recently; it was a very small shift. (2) The gas industry •needs• to die, and I’m all for using fed money to soften the blow of killing it for individuals. (3) Most skeptical: “let MAGA usurp the state?!?” Wyoming has been one of the most deep-red states in the country since I was a kid next door to it in the 80s, so….

@inthehands maga wasn’t a problem until the freedom caucus came in. Red yes. But republicanism in Wyoming works more like Libertarianism does.

@praetor

I don’t know, I was in high school maybe an hour or two from where homophobes murdered Matthew Shepard and left his body by the side of the road, which hardly seems a Libertarian thing to do.

Again, I'm from that part of the world. I know the Libertarian veneer, and I also know how much it resembled MAGA beneath that veneer even in the 80s and 90s.