What are you basing this on besides your feelings? It sounds nice but I don’t see any reason to believe that it’s anything more than wishful thinking.

The best part is that he’s not even particularly good at it. Nebraska has been shit for well more than a decade at this point.

Personally I found the crown on his head and the fighter jet labeled “King Trump” more objectionable. I’m pretty used to dealing with his shit by now.

It’s not an illogical position to take it’s just naive. In the same way that military service members are supposed to disregard illegal orders, Congress is supposed to impeach a President who breaks the law or established codes of conduct.

It sounds good in theory but both ultimately rely on the integrity of the people in those positions. If they don’t rise to the challenge then there isn’t anything stopping the bad actors from doing what they want with impunity. We can hope it will be enough but it hasn’t changed much so far. It seems like the people who could act know this and are colluding with the executive branch to test how far they can push things before we decide to go looking outside the system for solutions. I see no reason to believe that the military will respond any differently than Congress has.

What exactly would you describe as appealing about Trump?

I bet you would have said the same thing about Trump in 2016 and yet here we are. Attempting to understand the thought process of inherently irrational people is a losing battle.

Yeah 80 year old men only pretend to be senile because of all the pussy it gets them

If the worst people in society are making a list of enemies it should be considered a moral failure to not make the list.

If that bothers you then gun shops are still open. There’s nothing stopping you from doing what it seems like you want somebody else to do for you.

Who is out there saying that the Dems are great and we need to vote for them because they’re actively good?

Almost all mainstream media that isn’t intended for right wing audiences. Every person who has knocked on my door, sent me an email, or called my phone to talk to me about Democratic candidates for the last 25 years. 80% of the people I have had political conversations with in the real world who aren’t Republicans. Calling it millions of people would be a conservative estimate as best as I can tell. The only people I hear saying what you’re saying, which by the way isn’t too dissimilar to what I have been saying for the last decade, are people in niche online communities like Lemmy and the occasional outlier politician like Bernie Sanders.

The vast majority of people I see advocating Dems are very candid about it being a harm reduction strategy.

I’m all about harm reduction. I think it’s a great strategy that most people can get behind. However, when I say harm reduction I don’t just mean slowing the rate at which shitty things happen. I mean reducing the amount of harm in the world. So the question is, do Democrats reduce the amount of harm in the world or do they simply slow the progress of shitty people?

Now, I understand that a lot of people think slowing the progress of shitty people is it’s own reward, and in a vacuum I think that’s true. That being said, are we actually slowing it down indefinitely or are we simply delaying it while at the same time making it inevitable? There is a difference. Biden slowed MAGA down for sure. While he was President they could not actively pursue their goals to the same degree that they could with Trump in the White House. However, I think Bidens policies in general but especially his refusal to go after Trump in a serious manner have made our current situation more likely, not less. The only way to prevent what we have now was to clamp down hard on Trump’s lawlessness and executive overreach when we had the chance or to improve the lives of the average American significantly enough that they would not fall for Trump’s lies about the economy or immigrants or whatever else. Biden could have done at least the first pretty easily. Instead, he decided to mostly maintain the status quo and hope Americans made the right decision in the end. Well, given that Trump’s 2016 win was, in my opinion, largely a rebellion against the status quo, that seems like a bad move. Further, giving Trump four years to strategize and consolidate power within the Republican party led to worse outcomes in 2025 than would have been possible in 2021.

There’s a lot more to say here and I feel like I’ve been going on too long already so let me sum it all up like this; I believe that putting Biden in the White House in 2020 on the basis of harm reduction was worse than a Trump win would have been. Biden didn’t do anything significant to either disqualify Trump himself or materially change the conditions that led to his election, which made Trump’s eventual reelection both more likely and more dangerous because Trump and his cronies had four years to plot out their strategies. In the end, aiming for harm reduction actually increased harm.

For fucks sake. I literally just answered your dumbass question and yet you’re still pretending both that I haven’t done so and that you know what I’m going to say better than I do. Go talk to yourself in a mirror and save the rest of us some time. Blocked.

I haven’t answered you directly because:

1. Its a stupid question. I already said that Democrats are better than Republicans before you ever responded to me. Out of all the things you have incorrectly inferred from my responses, the answer to this dumb “gotcha” question is the one thing you could have successfully deduced with ease but for some reason you’re categorically unwilling to do so. Probably because you’re not actually processing what I’m saying. Which leads me to:

2. You aren’t having a discussion. You’re arguing with a caricature of what you think I’m saying. People that do this usually have such an inflated ego that conversation is pointless because they’re not interested in the exchange of ideas but rather word vomiting on someone in a childish attempt at self soothing. This is further evidenced by the fact that you’re downvoting everything I say despite the fact that I still have not downvoted your repeatedly and unnecessarily hostile demeanor.

Since you appear fond of the TLDR summary I’ll give one for this comment. You’re a shit conversational partner that I have no interest in speaking with further.

Maybe that’s what you mean but I don’t get the impression that’s what most people mean when they say that voting for Dems is the answer. They want some external force to do the work for them. They don’t want to be directly involved any more than checking a box every couple of years.

No the summary is that you’re clearly incapable of keeping your assumptions and biases from changing the meaning of what you read.

I never said it would be anyone else in power. I said Democrats are not going to fix this problem. Those two things are not equivalent in any way.

Still, if you want to take this conversation in a totally different direction I’ll play along. if you base future decisions on past outcomes you’re only guaranteeing that change cannot occur. People said exactly what you just did about the divine right of kings for centuries. It was true until it wasn’t just like what you’re saying now.

Merrick Garland didn’t need Congress to do his job. Biden didn’t need Congress to pressure Garland to do his job. Stop making excuses for their inaction.

getting everyone you know to vote in the mid-terms for the Democrats - even if the candidate is an absolute stinker - is what is needed to put the brakes onto this administration.

We did that for Biden already. The Dems had 4 years to do something, anything, of significance to protect democracy and what did we get? The most feeble attempt at legal charades that I’ve ever seen. They ran out the clock and let Trump cancel the only real investigations into his own behavior.

Yes, Democrats are clearly better than Republicans but those limp-dicked cowards are not going to save us. Many of them can barely muster the courage to condemn what’s happening now, much less convince anyone that they actually want to stop it.

I don’t get why you guys say stuff like this. I’ve seen dozens of articles that do more than hint at a possibility that Trump has dementia. So have you. I’d be willing to bet that your belief that he has dementia came from one of those articles. Why then are you saying no one has mentioned it?

I don’t know, our influence isn’t exactly a good thing at the moment but most of the rest of the world seems to be doing a pretty good job of destabilizing on its own. We’re just further down the path than they are.

Unless you mean you’ll be in prison reading about what he’s doing outside that doesn’t seem to be the direction we’re heading