“Again.”

For leaks there is rarely going to be a way to know for sure. So you have to evaluate whether or not you think it’s reasonable given what you do know. We do know that they’ve done this kind of thing in other races. We do know that the party is funded by capitalist interests. We do know that the campaign didn’t really put forward a positive agenda and therefore had to look for other ways to gain advantages. As far as the character of the people/party involved, I’m not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt knowing all the awful things they’ve been complicit in. Lastly it doesn’t seem like it’s some crazy infeasible or irrational thing to do. We’re not talking about demonic sex cults or mind control or some nonsense. We’re talking about political maneuvering through media strategy during a campaign. The objective was rational even if it was unconscionable.

As you said, they thought it was a good strategy to optimize their chances at winning. Not only did they turn out to be wrong, but the act of trying to instigate one of the only two political parties we’re stuck with to take further right positions and possibly nominate a very right wing candidate is not an acceptable byproduct of the strategy.

Do I think we were headed in that direction anyway? Probably. As long as the parties aren’t willing to address the fundamental problems with capitalism, the door will always be open to a right wing demagogue who knows the right things to say. But spending your effort to speed that along instead of, idk, working on actually popular social programs, certainly didn’t help.

Did you not read about the part where their plan was to boost the more extreme candidates in the primary to try to get the rest of them to move further right in hopes that it would make an easier opponent for them?

That they realized they screwed up after the fact doesn’t change that.

Yeah you’re right, it’s nothing compared to helping Trump get elected.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/missteps-doomed-clinton-campaign/story?id=43422676

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-2016-donald-trump-214428/

https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/

Yeah look how well it’s worked. Far right nutjobs have totally not been normalized. Nope.

Ah yes. Give money to the “progressive party” so it can do progressive things like funding ads for far right republicans in primaries:

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/27/1106859552/primary-illinois-colorado-republican-candidate-democrats-ads

Or backing “centrist” primary candidates against progressive candidates.

Very progressive. This amalgamation of rich people’s money and consultants is a great political ally.

Yeah I’ve yet to get this with Ublock. It warms my heart to know that the professional coders at a multi-billion dollar company can’t outfox some open source devs who are just really determined to not have to look at ads. lol

The point isn’t to cede ground and compromise with them. The point is to try to show them that they’ve been duped about who their enemies are. It might still take some time to deprogram them, but if we could at least get them to put that all on hold and focus on the class issue, maybe we can actually get somewhere instead of spinning in circles.

I have less hope for two reasons:

1. These are still capitalist countries and thus the incentive for fascism still remains even if it gets delayed a bit.

2. The US is the largest, most dangerous military superpower the world has ever seen and it has shown time and time again that it’s willing to use that might to bully other nations into economic submission. No country is really safe if it decides to start going after them. The US hasn’t always won these wars, but even when it fails like in Vietnam or Korea, it does enough damage on the way out to cause massive destruction and suffering which has long lasting consequences. I seriously doubt the rest of the world is just gonna get to sit this one out and watch America self destruct.

Maybe we don’t want to do that again… people have some really short memories.

Trump, may I remind you, installed a number of those judges.

Right, after a lot of opportunities by Democrats to do things to stop him. The Republicans were willing to fight dirty and the Democrats kind of just rolled over and let it happen. That’s not even considering the world where they didn’t choose to run 2 deeply unpopular presidents on nothing platforms in multiple critical elections.

Those things have nothing to do with the subject at hand however. Let’s keep it in between the lines.

Is the subject at hand not “Why have we gotten into this situation?” The comic certainly seems to be about that in the most reductive way possible. All of this is relevant in trying to explain how we both have the president we have and why he’s able to do the bad things that are hurting people.

So you believe they should be allowed to install a sock puppet? I believe that was what we were talking about about, was it not?

I just don’t think that a country that hasn’t be relevant in 30 years can have more influence over our politics than the richest people in the world regularly pouring their money into the system. Trying to pin our problems on some external enemy is just missing the point. The Republicans don’t need foreign encouragement to strip the country for parts and sell it to the rich.

Sorry I figured someone familiar with our system could interpret that as checks and balances. Something trump is currently trying to break. In what language should I provide your native translation?

You wrote a sentence that didn’t have the information you were talking about in a comment that didn’t talk about what you say the “it” was referring to in a thread with several points of discussion. No reasonable person could just divine what you meant there. It’s just not worth having this conversation if you’re going to be this aggressive about pointless stuff.

It’s not about this being the same. It’s about what has contributed to allow this moment. Regular failures of institutions and vast wealth inequality that has been left undressed by the political system has made for a lot of angry people. Concentration of ownership in media has guided that frustration away from its true causes for the benefit of the rich and powerful. The electoral system is set up to favor conservative results and to squarely shut out left leaning candidates. The various expansions of presidential power and the tools needed to exercise that power has made it easier for someone like Trump to get away with things he theoretically shouldn’t. The courts being slowly corrupted. Etc.

What Russia is doing is besides the point. The US has plenty of it’s own oligarchs to mess with our elections already and we’re definitely messing around in other countries. If they weren’t touching anything, do you think we’d suddenly get some great elections that represent the people?

however; it is a feature of our system that has allowed us to retain some semblance of humanity and good will - despite the rot.

What is a feature of our system? You didn’t specify. As to us maintaining our humanity: We do terrible things regularly, but most people are so disconnected from those actions that they can’t really conceptualize the horror of it enough to care and do something about it. There’s always some excuse that helps them rationalize it. I don’t think most people WANT all the bad stuff. But in the absence of better education and media, it’s really easy to trick people into thinking all of this is actually good or at least not bad enough to do something about it.

Legally the president doesn’t have the power to unilaterally go to war, but that hasn’t stopped them from doing it for the last 70+ years.

Basically ever modern president has grabbed more power for the executive branch without being properly checked by congress or the courts. Combine that with an ever expanding military and surveillance apparatus and it turns out you can do some pretty bad stuff, regardless of the legality.

As for the rest of it, idk man. Clearly you have your rosy view of history where the US was a super great place before the scary Russians came in to corrupt democracy. All I can say is you have more reading to do.

idk. If western governments had any ability to learn or care, WWII surely would have been that moment. But after beating the endpoint of imperialism, they without irony or self awareness, just kept doing imperialism. I’m not holding my breath.

Oh I must have been confused. I forgot that history doesn’t exist. Everything started with whatever was last on TV. Donald Trump is just randomly the president for no reason. There must not be any reason he has the power to do the things he’s doing. Nope. It’s a mystery. Carry on.

I mean, over half a century of neolibs gutting the small semblance of social democracy we had did this. And Biden was certainly one of those people. It’d just be more accurate to say Trump, Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush again, Regan…

Even if it would, how would it ever get passed when the people who would need to pass it are the ones who are only in office because the system works the way it currently does?

This is just a recurring theme I’ve found when talking with liberals. They like to think about and suggest all sorts of policy ideas as though all we’re missing are some smart ideas nobody has thought of. It’s one thing to say we should have this, but it’s another to have any idea of how it’d be possible to do. Since they have no actual analysis of the system, they’ll just turn around and tell you to vote or call your representative. “We should get money out of politics!” “Yeah, well we checked with the people giving us money and they said no. So…”

Page 3:

“Oh no. It’s coming for me literally as I’m writing thi… aaahhhggggggg!!!”

We’ve had the same microwave in my house my entire life. That might have something to do with it.

idk, for me Apple has been kind of hit or miss. There’s some good stuff on there, but I’ve run into plenty of boring generic shows/movies too.

Also I’ve noticed that the shows all kind of look… similar in a way that’s hard to pin down. I think it has something to do with lighting or saturation or whatever, but they all kind of have this grayish feeling to them.