So, this was totally predictable. Here's why.
0 of 17. The 2008 Election
In 2008, something unusual happened: The Republicans got absolutely destroyed, and rightfully so.
The Republicans won a lot of support after September 11, 2001, and they used that support to implement a lot of policies and push for a lot of things. They pushed for the USAPATRIOT act and the surveillance state. They brought hawkish neoconservatism to its peak invading two nations with the assumption that they would be greeted as liberators and would magically implement democracy in an unstable region without much democracy. They pushed economic policies which had some short-term growth but ultimately led to the 2008 financial crisis, which was the biggest financial crisis since the great recession, and given how much institutional power the Republicans had at that time, it very much appeared that they owned the recession.
The Democrats ended up winning big after that. They won the presidency. They had a supermajority in the senate for a short time. They had a healthy majority in congress, and as we know they had a majority on the supreme court. Among millennials, surveys at the time suggested that 70% of millennials leaned progressive, and even in businesses, many thought they'd spend more on brands that supported political causes.
This represented a tectonic shift in politics at the time, and the Democrats were at a huge advantage. The Republicans had no choice, they had to start working on new strategies. We saw the tea party strategy come out, snagged from Ron Paul imo, but it was shut down pretty quickly by namecalling ("Teabaggers"), they tried doubling down on neoconservatism, and that was a non-starter. The Democrats had a full 8 years of essentially steamrolling the competition. Since there was essentially no competition out of the Republican field, it looks like that was going to be the case indefinitely.
However, in 2015, something highly unusual happened: a new candidate emerged with new ideas. Donald Trump was described as a bull in a china shop. The Democrats didn't like him, not so much because they thought he could win but because he represented chaos that could mess up their plans, and so after initially supporting him thinking he was the weakest candidate, they went to work putting their full attack machine into action.
Someone once described Donald Trump as a 90s democrat, and I tend to agree with that summary. Mean tweets aside, there are a lot of policy positions where Donald Trump is to the left of Bill Clinton.. Bill Clinton implemented workfare, trying to get people off of federal welfare programs, where Trump didn't really touch those programs. Bill Clinton signed the defense of marriage act which defined marriage as between one man and one woman, and other than a couple times where he was blustering, Donald Trump is the first elected president to openly support gay marriage on the day of his inauguration. Many people forget that Elian Gonzalez was taken from his uncle under Bill Clinton and returned to Cuba by force. Bill Clinton worked with the Republicans to dramatically reduce spending and almost balanced budgeting by his final year.
It turns out that for a lot of Republicans, and a lot of Independents, the MAGA platform had a lot to like. Of course, it was tough to know what was true or not (Trump is a master of innane bluster, and so said a lot of things that were never going to be true such as getting Mexico to pay for his border wall, or paying down the federal debt by the end of his first term)
In an upset victory, Donald Trump won the 2016 election, changing all the assumptions held since 2008.
In 2008, something unusual happened: The Republicans got absolutely destroyed, and rightfully so.
The Republicans won a lot of support after September 11, 2001, and they used that support to implement a lot of policies and push for a lot of things. They pushed for the USAPATRIOT act and the surveillance state. They brought hawkish neoconservatism to its peak invading two nations with the assumption that they would be greeted as liberators and would magically implement democracy in an unstable region without much democracy. They pushed economic policies which had some short-term growth but ultimately led to the 2008 financial crisis, which was the biggest financial crisis since the great recession, and given how much institutional power the Republicans had at that time, it very much appeared that they owned the recession.
The Democrats ended up winning big after that. They won the presidency. They had a supermajority in the senate for a short time. They had a healthy majority in congress, and as we know they had a majority on the supreme court. Among millennials, surveys at the time suggested that 70% of millennials leaned progressive, and even in businesses, many thought they'd spend more on brands that supported political causes.
This represented a tectonic shift in politics at the time, and the Democrats were at a huge advantage. The Republicans had no choice, they had to start working on new strategies. We saw the tea party strategy come out, snagged from Ron Paul imo, but it was shut down pretty quickly by namecalling ("Teabaggers"), they tried doubling down on neoconservatism, and that was a non-starter. The Democrats had a full 8 years of essentially steamrolling the competition. Since there was essentially no competition out of the Republican field, it looks like that was going to be the case indefinitely.
However, in 2015, something highly unusual happened: a new candidate emerged with new ideas. Donald Trump was described as a bull in a china shop. The Democrats didn't like him, not so much because they thought he could win but because he represented chaos that could mess up their plans, and so after initially supporting him thinking he was the weakest candidate, they went to work putting their full attack machine into action.
Someone once described Donald Trump as a 90s democrat, and I tend to agree with that summary. Mean tweets aside, there are a lot of policy positions where Donald Trump is to the left of Bill Clinton.. Bill Clinton implemented workfare, trying to get people off of federal welfare programs, where Trump didn't really touch those programs. Bill Clinton signed the defense of marriage act which defined marriage as between one man and one woman, and other than a couple times where he was blustering, Donald Trump is the first elected president to openly support gay marriage on the day of his inauguration. Many people forget that Elian Gonzalez was taken from his uncle under Bill Clinton and returned to Cuba by force. Bill Clinton worked with the Republicans to dramatically reduce spending and almost balanced budgeting by his final year.
It turns out that for a lot of Republicans, and a lot of Independents, the MAGA platform had a lot to like. Of course, it was tough to know what was true or not (Trump is a master of innane bluster, and so said a lot of things that were never going to be true such as getting Mexico to pay for his border wall, or paying down the federal debt by the end of his first term)
In an upset victory, Donald Trump won the 2016 election, changing all the assumptions held since 2008.
So, this was totally predictable. Here's why.
-1 of 17. Trump isn't a very good candidate
Reality is, Donald Trump isn't a very good candidate.
Most Republicans will admit that. He's boorish, he's got a lot of personal moral failings. His ideology is all over the map, and self-contradictory. You can't achieve all the things he promises, many of the bullet points he's talking about are mutually exclusive, like balancing the budget but increasing spending and cutting taxes. We saw that in his first term, that obviously the real world doesn't match with flapping your jaw.
Fiscal conservatives hate the way Trump dealt with budgets and they're going to continue to be disappointed. He's proposed a lot of specific tax cuts he'll likely deliver on, but he's also talking about new ways of spending money.
Libertarians don't like him for not pardoning Assange and Snowden, seeing their charges as overreach by the state, as well as some of his decisions such as his bump stock ban following the Los Vegas shooting.
New right folks are upset about many of his appointments such as John Bolton who most Trump supporters consider a real swamp creature as his secretary of state.
Religious conservatives don't like his stance on abortion or IVF because it's far too moderate and he's said he won't ban either at a federal level. It turns out murdering innocents isn't really something you can negotiate, people who believe abortion is murder won't like it being legal in any capacity, certainly not in the wide range blue states will allow it.
A lot of conservatives don't like that he brought in a rapper to the RNC. She raps about being a prostitute, which is not in any way in line with traditional moral values, upsetting social conservatives.
And then there's all the reasons for people on the left to hate Trump, which I don't need to list because the media has listed all the reasons and many more they invented.
So if Trump wins, it's a harsh indictment on anyone who is running against him. You ran against someone with this many weakness, and you lost. Joe Biden ran a campaign from his basement and won. that's how weak you can be and still beat Trump.
Reality is, Donald Trump isn't a very good candidate.
Most Republicans will admit that. He's boorish, he's got a lot of personal moral failings. His ideology is all over the map, and self-contradictory. You can't achieve all the things he promises, many of the bullet points he's talking about are mutually exclusive, like balancing the budget but increasing spending and cutting taxes. We saw that in his first term, that obviously the real world doesn't match with flapping your jaw.
Fiscal conservatives hate the way Trump dealt with budgets and they're going to continue to be disappointed. He's proposed a lot of specific tax cuts he'll likely deliver on, but he's also talking about new ways of spending money.
Libertarians don't like him for not pardoning Assange and Snowden, seeing their charges as overreach by the state, as well as some of his decisions such as his bump stock ban following the Los Vegas shooting.
New right folks are upset about many of his appointments such as John Bolton who most Trump supporters consider a real swamp creature as his secretary of state.
Religious conservatives don't like his stance on abortion or IVF because it's far too moderate and he's said he won't ban either at a federal level. It turns out murdering innocents isn't really something you can negotiate, people who believe abortion is murder won't like it being legal in any capacity, certainly not in the wide range blue states will allow it.
A lot of conservatives don't like that he brought in a rapper to the RNC. She raps about being a prostitute, which is not in any way in line with traditional moral values, upsetting social conservatives.
And then there's all the reasons for people on the left to hate Trump, which I don't need to list because the media has listed all the reasons and many more they invented.
So if Trump wins, it's a harsh indictment on anyone who is running against him. You ran against someone with this many weakness, and you lost. Joe Biden ran a campaign from his basement and won. that's how weak you can be and still beat Trump.
So, this was totally predictable. Here's why.
(Alternative title: Huh, I didn't expect that. Here's why.)
I started this article a couple months before the election because I figured a record of what probably happened would make sense, and I'm releasing it on the day we know who won. I personally think there's no way Harris wins, and a bunch of the electorate will be totally confused because they fail the important axiom of Sun Tzu: "Know your enemy and know yourself and you will win 1000 battles" -- they don't know their enemy and they don't know themselves, so they lose.
I already kind of expect a certain response to a post like this. The right won't really be that interested in what I have to say here because they already know, and the left will want to downvote and report it into oblivion because that's what they've become. As for the center? Well, I guess it depends how they lean. The real chads will see what I've got to say to see if it actually helps describe what happened just now at all. I mean, if I'm wrong, I'm just an idiot on the Internet, so who cares?
On the fediverse I've been cast down from the good graces of the wokerati for my wrongthink, but I wasn't so different from them not so long ago. In 2008 I hoped Obama would win like most people my age, but in 2015 I hoped Trudeau would win like most people my age. I'm not a US citizen, didn't vote in this or any US election (though I've joked about illegally immigrating to vote since a certain political party down there seems to think illegal immigrants voting is the best thing ever), so this is a view from someone who doesn't really have a direct horse in the race. I have my opinions about each option and I'll be clear with those, but keep in mind at the end of the day I'm not a Republican, it's not physically possible. (Oh, but if you're thinking of moving up here to get away from the maga chuds, don't bother. By this time next year there'll be a huge majority government headed by Pierre Poilievre, who is a J.D. Vance type character on the right. If you think he can't be that bad, Alex Jones specifically called him out as good people. If you want to go somewhere 'friendly', England just voted in a Labour majority, go hang out with them)
For those keeping track, in the 2024 election, Joe Biden won the Democratic primary, and the entire media claimed he was "sharp as a tack" (they all used the exact same phrase oddly enough), until the first debate which showed the world that wasn't really the case anymore. There was a palace coup, and Joe "stepped down", and Kamala Harris was coronated the new candidate. They didn't run a primary at all, she got the position through backroom deals (which we'll talk about in a bit).
Starting at -1 (because it isn't really a point as to why Kamala lost), moving onto 0 (because it's just our backdrop), and then from there on we'll discuss all the reasons Kamala just lost the presidential election.
I started this article a couple months before the election because I figured a record of what probably happened would make sense, and I'm releasing it on the day we know who won. I personally think there's no way Harris wins, and a bunch of the electorate will be totally confused because they fail the important axiom of Sun Tzu: "Know your enemy and know yourself and you will win 1000 battles" -- they don't know their enemy and they don't know themselves, so they lose.
I already kind of expect a certain response to a post like this. The right won't really be that interested in what I have to say here because they already know, and the left will want to downvote and report it into oblivion because that's what they've become. As for the center? Well, I guess it depends how they lean. The real chads will see what I've got to say to see if it actually helps describe what happened just now at all. I mean, if I'm wrong, I'm just an idiot on the Internet, so who cares?
On the fediverse I've been cast down from the good graces of the wokerati for my wrongthink, but I wasn't so different from them not so long ago. In 2008 I hoped Obama would win like most people my age, but in 2015 I hoped Trudeau would win like most people my age. I'm not a US citizen, didn't vote in this or any US election (though I've joked about illegally immigrating to vote since a certain political party down there seems to think illegal immigrants voting is the best thing ever), so this is a view from someone who doesn't really have a direct horse in the race. I have my opinions about each option and I'll be clear with those, but keep in mind at the end of the day I'm not a Republican, it's not physically possible. (Oh, but if you're thinking of moving up here to get away from the maga chuds, don't bother. By this time next year there'll be a huge majority government headed by Pierre Poilievre, who is a J.D. Vance type character on the right. If you think he can't be that bad, Alex Jones specifically called him out as good people. If you want to go somewhere 'friendly', England just voted in a Labour majority, go hang out with them)
For those keeping track, in the 2024 election, Joe Biden won the Democratic primary, and the entire media claimed he was "sharp as a tack" (they all used the exact same phrase oddly enough), until the first debate which showed the world that wasn't really the case anymore. There was a palace coup, and Joe "stepped down", and Kamala Harris was coronated the new candidate. They didn't run a primary at all, she got the position through backroom deals (which we'll talk about in a bit).
Starting at -1 (because it isn't really a point as to why Kamala lost), moving onto 0 (because it's just our backdrop), and then from there on we'll discuss all the reasons Kamala just lost the presidential election.
The drama is exciting, but no matter which way you wish it would go or which way it appears to be going, it isn't over until it's over, and getting too worked up until that moment we know isn't that helpful for anyone's mental health.
I'm on record as a PPC guy last election, but I'll take a Poilievre this time, especially if it's a thrashing so hard the BQ becomes the official opposition.
I cannot stress this enough: If you think you're moving to Canada if Trump wins tonight, Pierre Poilievre is getting a massive majority in the next election, and Alex Fucking Jones says he's the shit. Go to England, they have a Labour government for like 3 and a half more years. You can go there and listen to English people say "Kier Starmer" because I still think that's a troll name in England, nobody would actually do that to their kid
subs >> dubs.
There might be 2-3 dubs that are acceptable in the entire catalog. That's thousands of hours of shitty dubs, just for 2-3 acceptable ones.
There might be 2-3 dubs that are acceptable in the entire catalog. That's thousands of hours of shitty dubs, just for 2-3 acceptable ones.
It's context specific, and realistically somewhat arbitrary because politics are fickle things.
One big example is that in Europe, right wing for the longest time related to maintaining the monarchy, and left wing referred to creating new power structures such as republics. In America, the monarchy has never been right wing because monarchy isn't part of the American tradition.
One of the most important groups of the left in the modern period was during the French Revolution starting around 1789, particularly the radical Jacobin faction. Many of the current left's ideas come directly from this region and this period of history. The first Republic experimented with many ideas such as income taxes, abolishing religion and replacing it with a "cult of reason", they changed marriage from a largely religious institution to a civil bureaucratic institution, and legalized divorce which was previously not allowed. The period was a period where radical feminists were emboldened to make demands in a society that was trying to totally rewire itself, though as the revolution became more radical women found themselves marginalized over time.
Later, in the 1830s, Karl Marx added economic frameworks to the left as well as tools such as class analysis. His works are a cornerstone of far left ideology that remains today.
The Russian Revolution started in the early 1910s, and after a civil war the Soviet Union was created. Over time, and in particular with the publishing of the works of Solzhenitsyn thoroughly debunked the moral superiority of Marxism as implemented in the Soviet Union while America was providing the working classes with the highest material quality of life on earth and throughout all of history, leading thinkers (who were previously enamored with Marxism) to find new ways of looking at Marxism to sort of "salvage" it, which led to neomarxist frameworks such as critical theory which looks at things through the lens of race, sex, and so on, or intersectionalism, which looks at something through multiple lenses at once to get to the most individualized view of a person's privilege and encumbrances.
By contrast, the right starts much earlier, and in Europe it would start with the greek philosophers, who would become the intellectual foundation upon which much of what would follow would be based. The Athenian civilization led to the Macedonian greek empire created by Alexander (Who I didn't know was a student of Aristotle until quite recently, which is amazing -- connecting the Macedonian empire to the socratic philosophers is really cool) which quickly fragmented and changed after his death, and soon Rome rose as the most prominent power in the region. It would end up being very important in forming the bureaucratic framework in the region, but eventually would become decadent and fall so would have less of a direct impact on conservatism than you might expect besides a few outliers such as Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. After the fall of the Roman empire, the core of European religion would become the royalty and nobility, and the core of roman religion and philosophy would be the church. Many notable philosophers of the period after the dust started to settle were Christians such as St. Augustine, a bishop from North Africa shortly before the fall of the Roman Empire, and immediately after Boethius created many works which bridged the gap between Christian scholasticism and ancient Aristotelian ideas. St. Gregory the Great led the church immediately after the fall, and guided the church to become something that would ultimately be one of the most powerful ideological forces on the continent.
By the 9th century, Islamic scholars were in the midst of a golden age of their own where they developed ideas, but quite importantly worked to maintain and extend works from the ancients for centuries. It would be these maintained works that ultimately would be recovered in the west, leading to the Renaissance, and ultimately to the enlightenment which would help create the modern age for good and for ill.
English right-wing ideas really seem to start with the Romans taking over England way back in 43BC and establishing the city of Londinium which today is the city of London, which introduced the English to greco-roman ideas from the continent which combined with the established rich cultures, as well as introducing Christianity to the island. By 410 the Roman empire was in decline, and suddenly the English were left to fend for themselves without the protection of the Empire, leaving them open to attacks from different Pagan groups such as the Angles and Saxons, which ultimately led to those groups settling on the island. This led to various groups inhabiting the island, such as the Celts who were already there, the angles, and the saxons. For several centuries after that there was a period of kingdoms building up, then political power started to coalesce. A series of wars and attacks from the danes and norwegians ultimately culminated in the normans taking control of the country, and implementing a nobility and many reforms that fundamentally changed England, putting it on the path to where it is today. The next 950 years or so had a huge history including the creation of the common law system, parliamentary democracy and a balance of power between the king, the courts, the house of lords, the house of commons, the church, the merchants, and so on, and this is the fertile soil from which the english right-wing came about. I don't want to go on much longer, but the struggles between all these different groups helped build a society that ultimately had an Empire upon which the sun ever set.
When the colonies that would become the United States began, ultimately they borrowed a lot of ideas from Rome, including the idea of the Republic. Many of their other ideas came wholesale from the English (being English colonies), such as snagging a lot of English common law. At the moment the nation was created, it's safe to say that fundamentally the country could be considered a left wing creation, in the same vein as the nearly contemporaneous French Revolution, but the difference ideological background led the revolution down a much different path. The French Revolution was focused on rebuilding society from the ground up in reaction to the bureaucracy and nobility in France, whereas the American revolution in my view was focused on a revolution that brought about a largely evolutionary step from the English parliamentary democracy it came from. England at that time was one of the freest societies on earth, and so the new nation America was deeply rooted in liberty, and even today this idea is a core part of the American right wing, though tempered with the other core part which is religion -- prior to the 14th amendment being ratified in the mid to late 1860s, the states were not held to the bill of rights, so many states had official religions for example. America was a colony from an island nation with a strong merchant class, so it was focused strongly on capitalism and trade, so those things ended up a big part of the country's underlying framework as well. All this combined to make a right wing in America focused on liberty, piety, capitalism, and often some of the values that individual diaspora brought to the melting pot as well.
In some ways, I'm sort of cutting the descriptions of both the left and right short, because both interacted with the modern age and particularly the industrial age, in different ways. Both the left and the right ended up finding different forms of nationalism compelling, where the left's focus on social justice and economic ends appeared to be more relevant in the industrial age and the combination of industrialism and the left wing resulted in the ideologies of socialism and communism. The right, on the other hand, ended up really affected by the martial philosophy of industrialized total war which changed how it would look, especially during the cold war period.
I think both ideologies are struggling somewhat in the postmodern period because both contemporary right wing and left wing ideas are contingent on the idea of perpetual progress. For the right, the idea of progress comes from Christianity where we're trying to find the utopian heaven on earth. For the left, the idea of progress comes from Marxism where we're trying to find the utopian real communism. Both could appear to be driving continuous progress as economic, scientific, and engineering improvements continued to be exponential, but the reality of the moment is that just like most easy oil has been extracted and most easy minerals have been mined, most easy economic, scientific, engineering, and technological progress has been achieved, and it's becoming more difficult to keep seeing progress, which I think will mean both the left and the right need to rethink exactly what progress looks like without the past 300 years exponential growth. I think with the looming threat of population collapse and civilizational collapse, we'll have to work to stop trying to find our answers in the lab and start finding answers in our souls.
To show things in a different light though, in China, to be conservative might be trying to be more like the Zhou dynasty of 500 BC, which obviously has nothing to do with anything I've said, which really helps show how you have to be careful and understand the context of where and when you are to define left or right wing.
One big example is that in Europe, right wing for the longest time related to maintaining the monarchy, and left wing referred to creating new power structures such as republics. In America, the monarchy has never been right wing because monarchy isn't part of the American tradition.
One of the most important groups of the left in the modern period was during the French Revolution starting around 1789, particularly the radical Jacobin faction. Many of the current left's ideas come directly from this region and this period of history. The first Republic experimented with many ideas such as income taxes, abolishing religion and replacing it with a "cult of reason", they changed marriage from a largely religious institution to a civil bureaucratic institution, and legalized divorce which was previously not allowed. The period was a period where radical feminists were emboldened to make demands in a society that was trying to totally rewire itself, though as the revolution became more radical women found themselves marginalized over time.
Later, in the 1830s, Karl Marx added economic frameworks to the left as well as tools such as class analysis. His works are a cornerstone of far left ideology that remains today.
The Russian Revolution started in the early 1910s, and after a civil war the Soviet Union was created. Over time, and in particular with the publishing of the works of Solzhenitsyn thoroughly debunked the moral superiority of Marxism as implemented in the Soviet Union while America was providing the working classes with the highest material quality of life on earth and throughout all of history, leading thinkers (who were previously enamored with Marxism) to find new ways of looking at Marxism to sort of "salvage" it, which led to neomarxist frameworks such as critical theory which looks at things through the lens of race, sex, and so on, or intersectionalism, which looks at something through multiple lenses at once to get to the most individualized view of a person's privilege and encumbrances.
By contrast, the right starts much earlier, and in Europe it would start with the greek philosophers, who would become the intellectual foundation upon which much of what would follow would be based. The Athenian civilization led to the Macedonian greek empire created by Alexander (Who I didn't know was a student of Aristotle until quite recently, which is amazing -- connecting the Macedonian empire to the socratic philosophers is really cool) which quickly fragmented and changed after his death, and soon Rome rose as the most prominent power in the region. It would end up being very important in forming the bureaucratic framework in the region, but eventually would become decadent and fall so would have less of a direct impact on conservatism than you might expect besides a few outliers such as Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. After the fall of the Roman empire, the core of European religion would become the royalty and nobility, and the core of roman religion and philosophy would be the church. Many notable philosophers of the period after the dust started to settle were Christians such as St. Augustine, a bishop from North Africa shortly before the fall of the Roman Empire, and immediately after Boethius created many works which bridged the gap between Christian scholasticism and ancient Aristotelian ideas. St. Gregory the Great led the church immediately after the fall, and guided the church to become something that would ultimately be one of the most powerful ideological forces on the continent.
By the 9th century, Islamic scholars were in the midst of a golden age of their own where they developed ideas, but quite importantly worked to maintain and extend works from the ancients for centuries. It would be these maintained works that ultimately would be recovered in the west, leading to the Renaissance, and ultimately to the enlightenment which would help create the modern age for good and for ill.
English right-wing ideas really seem to start with the Romans taking over England way back in 43BC and establishing the city of Londinium which today is the city of London, which introduced the English to greco-roman ideas from the continent which combined with the established rich cultures, as well as introducing Christianity to the island. By 410 the Roman empire was in decline, and suddenly the English were left to fend for themselves without the protection of the Empire, leaving them open to attacks from different Pagan groups such as the Angles and Saxons, which ultimately led to those groups settling on the island. This led to various groups inhabiting the island, such as the Celts who were already there, the angles, and the saxons. For several centuries after that there was a period of kingdoms building up, then political power started to coalesce. A series of wars and attacks from the danes and norwegians ultimately culminated in the normans taking control of the country, and implementing a nobility and many reforms that fundamentally changed England, putting it on the path to where it is today. The next 950 years or so had a huge history including the creation of the common law system, parliamentary democracy and a balance of power between the king, the courts, the house of lords, the house of commons, the church, the merchants, and so on, and this is the fertile soil from which the english right-wing came about. I don't want to go on much longer, but the struggles between all these different groups helped build a society that ultimately had an Empire upon which the sun ever set.
When the colonies that would become the United States began, ultimately they borrowed a lot of ideas from Rome, including the idea of the Republic. Many of their other ideas came wholesale from the English (being English colonies), such as snagging a lot of English common law. At the moment the nation was created, it's safe to say that fundamentally the country could be considered a left wing creation, in the same vein as the nearly contemporaneous French Revolution, but the difference ideological background led the revolution down a much different path. The French Revolution was focused on rebuilding society from the ground up in reaction to the bureaucracy and nobility in France, whereas the American revolution in my view was focused on a revolution that brought about a largely evolutionary step from the English parliamentary democracy it came from. England at that time was one of the freest societies on earth, and so the new nation America was deeply rooted in liberty, and even today this idea is a core part of the American right wing, though tempered with the other core part which is religion -- prior to the 14th amendment being ratified in the mid to late 1860s, the states were not held to the bill of rights, so many states had official religions for example. America was a colony from an island nation with a strong merchant class, so it was focused strongly on capitalism and trade, so those things ended up a big part of the country's underlying framework as well. All this combined to make a right wing in America focused on liberty, piety, capitalism, and often some of the values that individual diaspora brought to the melting pot as well.
In some ways, I'm sort of cutting the descriptions of both the left and right short, because both interacted with the modern age and particularly the industrial age, in different ways. Both the left and the right ended up finding different forms of nationalism compelling, where the left's focus on social justice and economic ends appeared to be more relevant in the industrial age and the combination of industrialism and the left wing resulted in the ideologies of socialism and communism. The right, on the other hand, ended up really affected by the martial philosophy of industrialized total war which changed how it would look, especially during the cold war period.
I think both ideologies are struggling somewhat in the postmodern period because both contemporary right wing and left wing ideas are contingent on the idea of perpetual progress. For the right, the idea of progress comes from Christianity where we're trying to find the utopian heaven on earth. For the left, the idea of progress comes from Marxism where we're trying to find the utopian real communism. Both could appear to be driving continuous progress as economic, scientific, and engineering improvements continued to be exponential, but the reality of the moment is that just like most easy oil has been extracted and most easy minerals have been mined, most easy economic, scientific, engineering, and technological progress has been achieved, and it's becoming more difficult to keep seeing progress, which I think will mean both the left and the right need to rethink exactly what progress looks like without the past 300 years exponential growth. I think with the looming threat of population collapse and civilizational collapse, we'll have to work to stop trying to find our answers in the lab and start finding answers in our souls.
To show things in a different light though, in China, to be conservative might be trying to be more like the Zhou dynasty of 500 BC, which obviously has nothing to do with anything I've said, which really helps show how you have to be careful and understand the context of where and when you are to define left or right wing.
More importantly, why give your date bot a hanging neck like a frog on a lilly pad? I felt like it was going to balloon up as a show of dominance.
At Newcorp, the company running Fox News, employee donations skew wildly towards Kamala Harris, with the #1 recipient of funds by a wide margin being Kamala Harris in 2024. Donald Trump got less than 1/10th of the donations from Newcorp employees.
It's all performative. You're watching Democrats pretend to be Republicans, largely for the benefit of other Democrats.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/news-corp/summary?id=D000067048
It's all performative. You're watching Democrats pretend to be Republicans, largely for the benefit of other Democrats.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/news-corp/summary?id=D000067048
Honestly, it would have to be something both parties work on together as a compromise. I'm sure both parties have their own visions of what might keep them up at night regarding unchecked executive power.
The civil rights act of 1871 that established 1983 civil rights claims came from the Republicans primarily with strong opposition from southern Democrats but had some support from northern Democrats.
The federal tort claims act was passed by a Democrat led Congress but had bipartisan support because it addressed an injustice that both parties agreed needed to be solved.
The civil rights act of 1871 that established 1983 civil rights claims came from the Republicans primarily with strong opposition from southern Democrats but had some support from northern Democrats.
The federal tort claims act was passed by a Democrat led Congress but had bipartisan support because it addressed an injustice that both parties agreed needed to be solved.
Well it's been the law of the land in the US through every US president, but it's only started coming up now because disagreements with how the president acted in office was typically accepted to be a political question to be solved at the ballot box and not by the courts.
If you look at us history, lots of presidents did some really grotesquely evil and illegal things. Andrew Jackson explicitly ignored the supreme Court and caused the trail of tears by annexing native lands illegally. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeus corpus unilaterally so his government could lock up anyone he wanted indefinitely. FDR locked up 100,000 Japanese-Americans and seized their properties. That's just a few examples but they're all world class atrocities, and there were no legal repercussions for any of these presidents personally. It's only 248 years in and the establishment wants to punish someone for winning an election they weren't supposed to win that suddenly the question is raised about whether we can charge presidents. In a common law system, this isn't what rule of law looks like. The idea for hundreds of years has been that you try to be consistent in application of law which is why stare decisis exists.
Now, does that all mean I necessarily agree with 100% sovereign immunity? Not necessarily. But the way to fix that is by the congress passing legislation to limit immunity, similar to how it did in civil rights legislation such as section 1983 which allows people to sue the government for violating civil rights, or the federal tort claims act, which allows the federal government to be sued for certain tort laws. It shouldn't be legislated into existence from whole cloth by the courts because that isn't their role in the process. To have the courts do otherwise would be a violation of the rule of law.
If you look at us history, lots of presidents did some really grotesquely evil and illegal things. Andrew Jackson explicitly ignored the supreme Court and caused the trail of tears by annexing native lands illegally. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeus corpus unilaterally so his government could lock up anyone he wanted indefinitely. FDR locked up 100,000 Japanese-Americans and seized their properties. That's just a few examples but they're all world class atrocities, and there were no legal repercussions for any of these presidents personally. It's only 248 years in and the establishment wants to punish someone for winning an election they weren't supposed to win that suddenly the question is raised about whether we can charge presidents. In a common law system, this isn't what rule of law looks like. The idea for hundreds of years has been that you try to be consistent in application of law which is why stare decisis exists.
Now, does that all mean I necessarily agree with 100% sovereign immunity? Not necessarily. But the way to fix that is by the congress passing legislation to limit immunity, similar to how it did in civil rights legislation such as section 1983 which allows people to sue the government for violating civil rights, or the federal tort claims act, which allows the federal government to be sued for certain tort laws. It shouldn't be legislated into existence from whole cloth by the courts because that isn't their role in the process. To have the courts do otherwise would be a violation of the rule of law.
To be fair, it doesn't look ai fake, it looks like shitty photoshop fake. If I made this in 1999 in paint shop pro it'd look like this and it'd look fake.
Imagine if you told 2004 Goldberg that she was going to be recommending a Cheney for all this shit, and that her politics were exactly the same as her dad's.
As a PhD in fake diplomas from the university of enter school name here I'm shocked and appalled that people would lie about credentials to get jobs in healthcare!
A pasta or "copypasta" is an old thing that's often copied and pasted to new comments because it is funny or controversial.
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The navy seal copypasta is at this point 15 years old, but people often reuse it or modify it. Its like an inside joke for people who recognize it, but some people react to it as if it's fresh.
An example is the famous navy seal copypasta which goes: "What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo."
The navy seal copypasta is at this point 15 years old, but people often reuse it or modify it. Its like an inside joke for people who recognize it, but some people react to it as if it's fresh.
"you can either snort this giant pile of cocaine or you can go free no strings attached"
Rip old nick
Rip old nick