Fauci started walking back his claims that the lab leak theory was false.

Did he though?

Fauci walked back calling it a conspiracy theory, not his claims that it was false. I think you know that which explains the “started”, because you knew you were bullshitting.

Which is suspicious to say the least.

Is it though?

If this wasn’t a conspiracy theory before, conspiracy theorists sure turned it into one.

There are other countries?

Aa someone who’s spent their entire life inside the US, I think it’s fucking wild too. We could have fucking had Bernie, but we chose Biden. That’s when I lost my last strand of hope in American voters.

you prioritizing your own kids futures over that of kids more in need is shitty.

Aside from this just being normal human behavior, I never actually did this.

You think the policy debate matters anymore with our soon to be christened God Emperor trump?

I think policy is everything important about politics. But no, I don’t think it matters much under Trump, except as something to criticize him about. But Trump is your strategy, not mine. That’s where accelerationism got us.

Grow up.

…says the guy who’s “arguments” are almost entirely insults and hand waving.

I care about my kid’s future, so therefore I don’t care about kids in the global south? LOL Wut? I’d love to see you walk through the logic on that one.

Long term the American empire getting knocked down a peg so they’re not the only game in town is going to be a good thing for the world.

Well, that kind of depends on who takes America’s place. Right now it looks more likely to be China or India instead of local control. Local control is what I’d like to see, but I don’t see that as any more or less likely if SHTF in America. If anything, the people who just took control are going to go even harder at extracting every bit of wealth from the globe as they possibly can.

your kids are going to be fuckwits if stability and long term collapse is better to you than short term collapse and maybe picking up the pieces.

So much to parse here. On the topic of lead levels, it would have to be me (and you) who are the “fuckwits”, since atmospheric lead levels have fallen by over 97% since 1977. The choice between long term and short term collapse is a false one, and America has chosen reform in the past and can do so again.

You know how we get a party that’s not dem or repub? By shit hitting the fucking fan.

Is that the objective? Your goal is a change of branding? My goals are related to policy, and I don’t give a flying fuck about political parties. How exactly do you think you can prevent the replacement party from becoming just as corrupt as the Democrats and Republicans are? I don’t even think you can perfectly vet an alternative presidential candidate, never-mind the thousands of offices you would need to take at both the state and federal levels. We’ve moved on here from a SHTF strategy to a third party strategy, but that’s hardly a move towards sanity.

There is no shortcut for organizing and educating voters. If you can do that, then you can fix the existing parties. If you can’t do that, then even a replacement party will end up controlled by oligarchs. Both organizing and educating are significantly more difficult under autocratic regimes, which is why your “let it burn” type strategy has never worked anywhere.

And China DOES have the whole “lifting the most people out of poverty in the last 30 years by a huge margin” track record.

Well, they did shift from being a developing country to being a middle-income country. Falling poverty rates are what happens in every country when it becomes industrialized. China industrialized quickly, so their poverty rate fell quickly. Still, it was a big accomplishment, but I don’t think it says what you want it to say. Their poverty rate of 13% is still higher than the US rate of 11%. China ranks better than the US in overall wealth inequality, but isn’t nearly as good as it used to be when poverty rates were higher.

Jury nullification.

Removed by mod

You have no clue how bad this can get, or how uncertain the outcome is. Historically speaking, the change that comes from a societal breakdown is almost certain to be entirely bad. He’s just removing what little restraint there was on billionaires and corporations.

The pipes don’t burst. Look to modern Russia if you want to know where we are accelerating to. We’re already halfway there and moving fast.

The Soviets lost to fascists first. Now we’re falling to the Soviet fascists.

You think billionaires and their private armies and vast disinformation networks won’t come up with even more control from a constitutional convention or violent revolution? Fucking delusional.

Drop them in the Mariana Trench.

A government is only legitimate if enough people believe it is legitimate. Don’t underestimate how easily fake government can become real government, especially with the national press bowing and scraping before Trump.

Why ask for examples if your just going to reject them on principle?

On it’s face, the idea that every Republican politician is right of every one of their voters on every issue is ridiculous. Republican voters, like all voters, compromise.

Oh, piss off. You clearly are beyond help of reason. Too bad the rest of us have to live with the consequences of your stubborn stupidity.

I never said Democrats are “good on climate change.”, so why the fuck put it in quotes? They are better than Republicans, and that’s just reality. But no, we get worse so you can take the moral high ground to watch the world burn.

I shouldn’t have to explain that “you” refers to all proponents of the third party strategy, not you personally.

If you want people to do what you say then, yeah, it falls on you to convince them that it makes sense. It doesn’t fall on me to convince people to follow a deeply flawed strategy that I think will only lead to even worse outcomes when it fails yet again.

We both want to put better people in power and remove the people running the Democratic party from power. There is an inside strategy to do that, and an outside strategy to do that. The inside strategy has more of a chance to win, and less of a downside if it fails.

People didn’t vote Democrats this time around, and the world is about to get a whole lot worse. Gaza isn’t the only thing that matters. It isn’t even the worst ongoing genocide. Assuming you didn’t vote for Harris, did you even consider what a Trump win means for those other genocides? What it means for the people of Ukraine? Does it somehow help Gaza that we are about to do ethnic cleansing right here at home? Trump turning back the clock on fighting climate change alone will make Gaza look quaint.

I know who’s implementing the plan for totalitarian disaster. It’s morons who don’t understand politics.

EXACTLY! You do get it! Yes, that is EXACTLY the problem. How do you convince me that if I vote third party that they will too? How do you convince them that I will vote third party?

Here is the brilliant argument you are making put just a bit differently. “If enough people would just vote the way I want them to vote, we could elect who I want to elect!”. Congratulations, on that brilliant observation!

Here is the thing. If you had the power to do that, inside or outside strategy would no longer even matter. You could pick the winning candidates for the Democratic primary then pick them to win the general, or you could pick your third party candidate to win, and it would work fine either way.

But you can’t do that. You actually have to convince people to go your way. I’m still not hearing how you plan to do that for an outside strategy when every attempt to do so has failed miserably. I’ll ask again. How do you plan to run a third party strategy differently in 2028 than in 2024 or prior elections. How do you convince me or anyone else that you have enough people on board? I’m not even convinced that most Democrats even want a third party - nevermind being willing to risk splitting the vote to get there.

What percentage did they get in 1996? 2000? Perot split the conservative vote with Bush and allowed Clinton to win the election with only 43% of the vote. That’s not an outcome I want to replicate on the left.

Compare Perot with Trump who ran a very similar nationalist/populist strategy as a party outsider. Trump ripped the party out of the establishment’s hands and won the Presidency. Perot would have been well advised to run as a Republican.

I didn’t ignore 1996, I just don’t see it as a counter example to what I said. Perot lost by a wide margin, split the vote with his next closest candidate, then dropped to half as many votes in the next election. And that was when third parties could get into the debates.

The last time we got a shake up in the two party system was with the civil war. Even then, we didn’t get three parties, we just replaced one party with another. 1912 was a notable but unrepeatable exception, but not an “upset”. We still elected one of the two major parties, and four years later it was back to Republicans and Democrats. It’s also notable that Taft and Roosevelt were both Republicans, so Roosevelt running as a Progressive meant that they split the vote and Democrats won with only 41.8% of the vote. Republicans were the left party at the time, so the left split the vote and got a conservative. Your exception shows exactly why third party runs are boneheaded.

Any third party that had the means to run a viable third party candidate would easily be capable of running an inside strategy to replace the Democratic establishment. Unlike the fantasy of a third party approach, that strategy has worked in the past. If there aren’t enough Democratic voters who are pissed enough at the Democratic establishment to do a takeover of the party, then there definitely aren’t enough to win a third party strategy.

The independent party got 18.9% of the vote for one office in 1992, and then dropped to 8.4% in 1996, and then didn’t even get a candidate on the ballot in 2000. That’s hardly a record that’s dispositive of anything I have said, and it’s still focusing on just one office that can’t do much of anything without legislative support. A progressive Democrat might get congressional Democrats to cooperate, but a third party president would face solid opposition from both Democrats and Republicans. If your plan doesn’t include taking congress, then it will fail even if you do get a president.

This isn’t a predictive theory,

I’m not asking for a prediction, I’m asking for a strategy. What do you propose to do differently in the 2028 election from what has failed repeatedly? People aren’t going to risk a third party vote en masse unless they think everyone else is going to do it. Also, up to this point we have been largely acting like most Democratic voters would rather be voting third party, but that’s just not true. Democratic party favorability is at a low right now, but is still at 40% of the electorate. How are you going to convince voters who don’t even desire a third party option to risk electing a Republican?

If the left had enough influence over voters to elect a third party candidate, then they could have nominated Bernie in 2020. The media called Bernie a fringe candidate, and voters became fearful that Bernie would lose. If voters wouldn’t take that risk (imaginary as I personally think it was) they are never going to take the much bigger and more real risk of voting 3rd party in the general - not in the numbers you need.

That’s why I’m out here, saying it, over and over again.

Repeating bullshit over and over doesn’t make it not-bullshit. If we had the influence required to pull off a 3rd party victory then we could just as easily take over the Democratic party with a hell of a lot less risk.

Certain Republicans, yes. The Republican party just won the working class for the first time since Reagan.