Oh it was awful. I was about your age back then, and I had been raised religious which I rebelled against by trying to be completely rational, to the point of trying to suppress all my emotions like a robot, which made me miserable. I had no self confidence, crippling social anxiety, and all sorts of bad ideas steering me in completely wrong directions.

I don’t think I had met any openly queer people at that point and the first time I did I was like, “I don’t get it, I would never express myself that way, because what would people think?” while of course completely sidestepping the question of how I actually felt or wanted to identify because again, suppressing my emotions. Spoiler alert: probably should’ve examined that!

The best decision I ever made in my life came a few years later when I studied abroad in Japan. It exposed me to a lot of different perspectives in the international house and also gave me interesting experiences to talk about which helped with my social anxiety (actively identifying and working on it with therapy techniques later on probably did more).

Politically, I had no real awareness of leftism and was into Ron Paul and libertarianism, because he was the loudest antiwar voice at the time. It’s also a great ideology for if you’ve never had a boss or a landlord. I was mostly just glad to be rid of Bush, and I had some hope that Obama would end the war, prosecute people in the Bush administration for war crimes, and stop mass surveillance. I was very naive at that time.

I feel like this was a time before a bunch of movements or cultural tendencies became associated with the right. The problems were still there, but there were also some non-shitty people included in them:

• It was before Gamergate, but there was a lot of sexism in video game communities.

• I remember being into “transhumanist” ideas that would these days be associated with Elon Musk and his sycophantic techbro fanboys.

• Many prominent “New Atheists” either had or would break right and support the wars in the Middle East, with logic like, “We’ve already fixed sexism completely here in the West (and the feminists who don’t agree with that are just a bunch of dumb broads), the big problem is Islam,” ignoring the threat of Christofascism at home.

• Even stuff like 4chan, I had friends who were on /b/ back in the day who turned out normal and chill. There was an element of rebelling against the Pat Robertson, stick-in-the-mud, “D&D is witchcraft” types, and part of that was reveling in rule-breaking, and so they delighted in shock images and made fun of anyone who cared too much about things in response to that.

I guess the positives were that people were less divided and it was easier to have hope for the future. But like there were reasons why those things changed, either movements/groups showed their true colors, or valid criticisms of those groups became more widely accepted. I much prefer the division and conflict that we have now compared to the “post-9/11 world” where virtually everybody was in agreement about slaughtering Muslims. And yeah I had more hope for the future but it was because I though technology would fix everything for everybody and didn’t understand how it could hurt workers and benefit capitalists, it was based on ignorance.

Everyone believes their cause is just. Every conflict ever can be framed as defensive. The US has compared every major conflict since WWII to stopping Hitler, even cases like Vietnam. My mother once quoted, “All that’s necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing” in the context of supporting the invasion of Iraq.

If You investigate and deconstruct the concept of “defensive” wars (as You are so wont to deconstruct concepts) then You will find that they are entirely dependent on socially constructed ideas about “legitimacy.” If Switzerland does not have “legitimate ownership” of Zurich, then to station troops there or to fight against Zurich being occupied by foreign powers would make Switzerland the aggressor. It could be argued that, when the US invaded Vietnam, it was merely “coming to the aid” of the Republic of Vietnam, which had requested our aid (nevermind that they were our puppet). Likewise, in Ukraine everything about how you view the conflict is dependent on who you think is legitimate - the “consensus” interpretation in the West is that the central government is legitimate and the separatists are just Russian puppets, while the pro-Russia view says that the separatists are legitimate and the central government just Western puppets.

So V.I. Lenin observes:

…the bourgeoisie [of all the imperialist nations] are always ready to say—and do say to the people—that they are “only” fighting “against defeat”.

Funny enough, this observation was shared by Leo Tolstoy, the Christian Anarchist/Anarcho-Pacifist, who writes:

For ever since the beginning of the world, the use of violence of every kind, from the Inquisition to the Schlüsselburg fortress, has rested and still rests on the opposite principle of the necessity of resisting evil by force.

World War I is a prime example of how things can go wrong. There had been a major socialist movement at the time across every major country in Europe, and there had been a significant fear that, should the imperialist powers start a major war like that, it would lead to a coordinated revolution across all of Europe. But instead, when war broke out, the social democrats all found reasons to rally around the flags of their respective countries. They were committed to keeping their positions within the realm of acceptability, and the war narrowed that realm of acceptibility to the point that coordination with ordinary people of other countries (or genuine opposition to the war) was considered treasonous. So, all the social democrats of Europe rallied around their flags and drafted proles to go out and kill each other for no good reason.

If Your “anarcho-antirealist” stuff is supposed to have any merit at all, then it ought to allow You to recognize that the concept of “defense” is largely arbitrary - or are You seriously of the belief that national borders have some inherent natural truth when even the law of gravity does not?

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On.

I had a part time job at a UPS warehouse in Tennessee when covid hit. We got a new manager, and so they gathered everyone in the warehouse together into a small break area, everyone was right next to each other and nobody was wearing a mask, and the manager gave us all a speech about how much he cared about our safety. There were TV screens in the break areas that had been set to display information about covid safety guidelines that were being blatantly violated.

The same day, my supervisor informed me of a new policy: they’d had too many people “faking” being sick and calling out, so from now on you have to come into work even if you’re sick, and they’ll decide if you’re sick enough to go home. I with I had gotten it in writing because what she told me was definitely illegal, I actually called OSHA afterwards but it was my word against theirs. This was the only time I’ve quit a job with no notice, I remember it clear as day, I told her, “People are dying” and she replied, “I have a business to run,” and I said, “I don’t care.”

I wanted to set the damn building on fire. I was fortunate to have saved enough to take time off work because I lost all confidence that there was anywhere around me that would be a safe place to work.

When it breaks. I don’t remember how long I’ve had this one but it was made in 2019.

Technically correct. It’s a valid comparison to Catholicism and Catholicism is, indeed, a bad faith.

This shouldn’t be misconstrued as women being less than a man it’s just that their roles are different.

Oh, I get it, they’re separate but equal!

What a load of horseshit.

Catholic and Orthodox have way less loonies comparatively than either evangelicals or the fedora wearing atheist crowd which is basically another form of protestantism.

I’ve never been religious by my little sister was. She loved helping out at Mass every Sunday, and volunteered to be an alter server. She was one of the most faithful and good-hearted Christians I’ve ever met. As long as you didn’t bring up abortion, anyway.

Then one day the priest said she wasn’t allowed to anymore, because she was a girl. He said that only boys should be allowed up in the front of church. His justification was that being an alter server was practice for being a priest, and only men were allowed to be priests.

Do you happen to know what the Catholic Church’s justification for only allowing male priests is, by the way? Well you see, God is male, obviously, and the Church is symbolically married to God, so that means that the Church must be symbolically female, and priests are symbolically married to the Church (the Church is poly?) meaning, of course, that priests have to be male.

If you get a Protestant or a fedora atheist, you’re basically rolling the dice, but if you get a Catholic, you know for a fact that they’re at minimum fine with being part of a deeply sexist, homophobic, and authoritarian institution.

Fucking Amazon would be a better moral authority than the Catholic Church because at least Amazon doesn’t explicitly descriminate based on sex. Always the last to be dragged into the future, kicking and screaming the whole time, since Galileo if not before.

WKUK - Pope Rap

In my experience, and maybe some churches are different, you’re just supposed to pretend to take it seriously, if you actually take it seriously you’ll find yourself very unwelcome.

If I went around saying, “I’m a Christian, so obviously that means I oppose the Iraq War,” or, “Christian teachings clearly call for opposing the war and anyone supporting it is living in sin,” I would get a lot of strange looks. Swap out the war for abortion or gay marriage and it would be perfectly normal. Between those subjects, Jesus was constantly talking about nonviolence and said nothing at all about abortion or homosexuality.

If you base you beliefs around a good faith attempt to understand Jesus’ teachings, you won’t be accepted in those circles. Heck, even if I based my beliefs around the Catholic Church’s teachings, for example, going around insisting that being “pro-life” requires you to oppose the death penalty, I would be out of place in most Catholic circles, considered annoying at best.

I still don’t really understand what I would’ve had to have done to fit in there. Somehow, a lot of people seem to see morality as something that is almost exclusively related to sex, and the idea of applying morality to things like war or executions is a completely foreign concept. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to arrive at that point but it clearly wasn’t from a good faith reading of the gospels.

I think you have to have the same emotional impulses somehow, like, to really fit in you need to have a drive to tear down people with more exciting sex lives than your own, and that was something I had no interest in. So it was either keep calling myself a Christian and try to reclaim that label, which would just confuse everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, or find a better label. So, now I just tell people I’m a communist.

My dumb ass thought people actually believed Jesus’ teachings.

9/11 happened and 10 year old me was running around going, “Well, now obviously is the perfect time to turn the other cheek, be good to those who hurt us, and forgive not just seven times, but seven times seven times.”

Strangely, all the people who had taught me those things didn’t hear the words I spoke but apparently heard something along the lines of, “Allahu akbar, America deserved 9/11, death to America, Bin Laden did nothing wrong, and I’m happy about dead firefighters.” They extremely did not like me trying to apply what they had taught me in that context.

I think I must be autistic or something because it seems like everybody else picked up on some sort of subtle understanding that none of that stuff was meant to be taken seriously or applied to real life, and I’m just over here like an absolute dupe who didn’t pick up on the joke.

I don’t think you can compare trump to either Bush or any president in recent history.

Hard disagree. Bush was absolutely terrible, and the only reason he gets whitewashed like this is because he’s no longer the current thing. If anything, Bush was much more capable of enacting his fascist agenda because he was able to get bipartisan support for it. It Trump is worse, it’s only because he’s standing on the shoulders of demons. Bush introduced the surveillance state, extrajudicial detention, and started multiple wars of aggression.

you might not get free elections that far into the future by allowing trump back in.

We don’t have free elections now. We will always have some form of elections though, virtually every country does. Elections are very useful to any aspiring dictator. Give the people a way to feel like they can work within the system and they’ll be much less troublesome, and less prone to engaging in other mechanisms of influencing things that could actually be disruptive.

On top of that, American elections are extraordinary for controlling the people, you get two groups of people who are both adamantly defending different ruling class candidates, hating each other’s guts, and trying to push anyone with a different perspective into that paradigm. It’s one of the most ingenious mechanisms of population control ever designed. Imagine, if we didn’t have elections, you’d not longer have any sort of beef with me at all, and we could be discussing the most effective ways of disrupting the state.

Also, Trump’s nearly 80. Octogenarians are not known for overthrowing governments and establishing dictatorships, on account of how they’ll die soon anyway, even if they had the energy and mental acuity for it. It’s much more likely that someone after Trump will.

Just as the far-right did not originate with Trump, it won’t end with him either. As soon as he’s out of the picture, then you’ll be talking about how uniquely terrifying the next person is, and how you can’t compare him to Trump who wasn’t really that bad and just had a different vision for how to improve the country, or whatever bullshit you say about Bush. Or if you personally don’t, then people will, perhaps young people who weren’t really aware of how awful Trump/Bush was. And you will be right, about the threat being awful and terrifying. But as long as you insist on just treading water, the threat is only going to get worse and worse forever. That path is 100% certain to lead to fascism.

How would anybody know who to rally around because they aren’t allowed to participate in debates or even really participate as a first class candidate?

It looks a lot more possible if one election like 20% of people vote third party, but it hasn’t ever happened.

All the more reason to support them, then. You even spell out the logic yourself, even if they can’t win, if they reached a certain threshold then they’d have to be taken seriously.

Elections are about more than who wins and loses, they’re also about setting precedent. If a third party gets enough votes, if a faction within a party demonstrates a credible threat of defection, then a major party has to start making concessions if they want to bring them into the fold. The Democrats, however, did nothing but spit in our faces, because they made the incorrect calculation that the left’s opposition was just blowing hot air and that we’d come around to the lesser evil (which is generally what has happened in the past and how we got here in the first place).

I see three possibilities, one where the democrats remain stubborn, and a third party eventually emerges and supplants them (as has happened before in history), a second where the democrats start taking the left seriously and start responding to our demands, and a third, by far the worst, where the left gets cold feet and gives up, desperately rallying around the “lesser evil,” thereby ensuring that nothing ever gets fixed, that conditions will continue to decline, and that fascism becomes inevitable.

It’s an objectively raw deal. For the presidential race there are functionally only two choices.

That being the case, everything you said falls apart. Voters are not “the only ones we can criticize,” we can instead focus our criticism on the people deciding what our two choices are.

I could just as easily say that it’s the fault of Democratic voters for splitting the vote instead of rallying around PSL or the Green party. The only real counterargument to that is that there are a lot more of them than there are of us. But there are also a lot more of us compared to the singular individual of Kamala Harris. So why does it make sense to say we should be the ones to change instead of her? It’s nonsense. The only reason I can see is that we’re regular people and she’s ruling class.

If you want to make the argument that I’m the long run trump is a cold shower that we deserve to shock the whole system

I don’t want to make that argument, no. My position has never been that it would be better for Trump to get elected than Harris, and I have never argued for voting for Trump.

“Not getting a Nazi isn’t an option. But what we can control is whether we get a Strasserist Nazi or a Hitlerite Nazi. Clearly, you have a moral responsibility to support the Strasserist.”

(It’s getting harder and harder to do parodies because a lot of people would unironically agree with that.)

fundamentally the voters pick the politicians

No they don’t. The DNC is a private entity that can nominate on whatever basis it feels like. That’s especially true considering the nonsense of the 2024 primary. When there was something more of a semblance of a legitimate primary, in 2016, the voters soundly rejected Harris. That is, of course, before we get into Citizens United, dark money, the electoral college, etc. Bourgeois elections are not a legitimate representation of the people’s will. There’s even been studies that show no correlation between how popular a policy is and how likely it is to be enacted. Opinion polls likewise show strong, consistent disapproval of Congress.

Suppose the public is pro-Palestine - when did we ever get a chance to express that and have it represented in the political system? If we never got the chance, then how can you claim that Kamala’s Zionism is an expression of popular will? The only opportunity I ever saw was to vote third party, which I did, but apparently that’s not a legitimate method of making my voice heard on account of you’re currently criticizing me for it. So then there was no method at all.

Candice Owens/Milo Yiannopoulos

The literal definition is someone who unquestionably supports anyone who waves a red flag. In practice, it means anyone who ever acknowledges a good thing done by a socialist state, or even refutes misinformation about them. If you say, “Cuba had a successful literacy program,” there are people who will call you a tankie, even though it’s just objectively true.

See, the difference between our perspectives is that you’re punching down at voters rather than punching up at politicians. Maybe if every single person who stood by their valid moral principles was convinced to abandon them, it would’ve changed the outcome. I don’t know how that’s supposed to be achieved, exactly, aside from trying to shame people for having morals, which I don’t expect to be particularly effective.

Alternatively, instead of changing the public in order to be in line with what politicians want, we could change politicians to be in line with what voters want. I think the word for that is “democracy.”

If the status quo was enough to address Trumpism, then why is Trump president?

I don’t say that the two parties are exactly the same, but 1) they will both lead to the same result and 2) they are both fundamentally unacceptable.