Internalizing the “your vote only matters in purple states” will turn it into a self fulfilling prophecy.

Previously blue states have turned purple, previously purple states have turned red. Nothing is set in stone, although resting on your laurels (if your state is blue) or giving up (if your state is red) will all but guarantee that the changes will only happen in one direction: the bad one.

In 2020, Texas would have gone blue were it not for Ken Paxton purging mail-in votes, by Paxton’s own admission.

Nothing is set in stone, so you need fight for every inch.

Truuuue

Hey now, don’t you know that the biggest sin is agreeing with liberals? There’s practically no difference between liberals and fascists because I read somewhere that “if you scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds” and my takeaway from that was that liberals and fascists are literally identical and both sides are the same. I am very smart. (/s)

Yep. It’s my go-to video explainer for “freedom cities” aka network states.

First off, this video is obligatory watching on the topic. Go watch it now if you haven’t.

Ok, back to Próspera. From the Wikipedia article:

The company is financed by several investors and venture capital firms, including Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, through the venture capital company Pronomos Capital.

It’s literally the same guys, and they’re trying it in the US too btw.

That Balaji guy in particular is the one who came up with the idea of “freedom cities”, which he calls network states. He’s also a follower of Curtis Yarvin, obviously, and just like him he’s a two bit fascist crank who thinks he’s of superior IQ.

Nobody’s saying otherwise.

Look. You need a lot of people to actually fight this thing, millions actually, and it’s preferable this fight happens while there’s still a pretense of democracy left.

Yes, it’s helpful to frame the fight around Musk to get the point across, and you can be as mean and threatening towards him as you want — but don’t forget you’re up against a whole system here, not just Musk! If someone actually did something to him, you’d get martial law the next day and everyone vaguely leftist would get shot in the head. You don’t want that!

Get people on your side, organize, and attack the system, and do it as legally as possible. Make them (by which I mean the party, starting with local officials) afraid of how many of you there are. Use Musk as the symbol of evil around which to get people angry, don’t advocate for someone to make him a martyr…

(removed — sorry this thread is too fedposty for my liking)

(removed — sorry this thread is too fedposty for my liking)

You say “destroy” but you mean murder. That’s not okay. I know the Paradox of Tolerance, and it doesn’t say to jump to straight-up murder. That should never be the first thought, it should be the worst case scenario.

(removed — sorry this thread is too fedposty for my liking)

I think it was this one which also got banned from Reddit:

No no, we still value free speech, just that yours isn’t really speech, it’s the woke mind virus. And that needs to be eradicated. So, you see, we’re still free speech absolutists!

This is how they trick people.

Yeah, especially after he attacked the ADL for so long. Huge disappointment.

Yesterday for me too.

Also, seeing the post just now, I knew I recognized the picture but I couldn’t remember why :)

Yep, pretty much — thanks for that! Much clearer than my morning-brained pre-coffee rants, haha.

There’s two kinds of people in this regard:

• The “I escaped the alt-right pipeline” types, i.e. people realizing there’s a cult and leaving it, and getting to understand more about where they’ve been and how they’ve been manipulated by an entire media ecosystem. They stop hating trans people, abortion, etc., practically changing their whole worldview as if leaving a religion. These I believe are legit because they make an effort to comprehend wtf happened so that it doesn’t happen again, and they likely attempt to pull others out as well.

• The casual types you described who will dodge a bullet here and there because a candidate rubs them the wrong way but they’re still fundamentally the same: concerned only with incoherent grievance politics, and therefore deeply susceptible to the same manipulation tactics.

Stages of grief

Exactly. It doesn’t only apply to grief — any major change of beliefs will need to go through this process… unfortunately.

There’s a saying in my country: don’t get drunk on cold water. Meaning don’t gaslight yourself into wishful thinking, because hope can be a hell of a drug.

A third party win won’t happen overnight. The only way you can realistically get it is with ranked choice voting. Otherwise you’re stuck replacing Democrats (and why not, Republicans — in smaller races you can absolutely run a Bernie style progressive who keeps the focus on economics!) one by one because the institutions are already in place, and they’re really powerful! Also, remember they’re just institutions: parties don’t have ideologies, people do.

And before you think to vote for people like Jill Stein or whoever else while hoping that maybe this year the miracle will happen (i.e. getting drunk on cold water), remember that there’s a lot of groundwork that needs to be done by that candidate for them to be viable, and it essentially boils down to this: the whole country needs to know about that person and recognize them on the street come election year — if that’s not the case, then they’re either delusional, underfunded, or most likely an opportunist (possibly even an intentional spoiler paid by the opposition, like RFK was in the Dem primary).

Source: me. I’ve been on the third party hope train back in 2020, emboldened by “leftists” such as Jimmy Dore, BJG, Richard Medhurst, etc.

That’s kind of true: you can’t get them to see reason, only spite.