In every general election, there are exactly three options:

1. Viable party #1.

2. Viable party #2.

3. Nonparticipation.

Many Americans think there are more options. There aren’t. Third parties, write-ins, etc. are all permutations of #3. I love seeing establishment Dems losing their primaries to DSA candidates, but if they don’t I’d rather vote strategically than sit out the election and watch fascist kid fuckers take over my country.

I didn’t plunge anybody’s homeland into fascism.

Sorry, but you helped. You decided that your morality was more important than your efficacy. One day you will grow up and regret your decisions like I did. Sorry.

Well if you live in a swing state, you deserve it for plunging my homeland into fascism. Have a mediocre day!

Blue MAGA

This is one of those phrases that tells everyone exactly what they need to know about you. Have a great day!

K well as long as you’re unwilling to vote strategically, you’ll continue to allow evil fascists to take over the US. The rest of us will try to elect progressives in primaries and support the most left-leaning viable candidate in the general election because that’s how you defeat fascists if your society isn’t ready for a revolution yet, and ours isn’t. Too many full bellies and entertained morons.

Understood, thanks! We have reason to be hopeful: Americans are no longer spooked by the word “socialist” and they treat threats of socialists being secret commies with skepticism. (That said, they also don’t actually know what “socialism” is.) The backlash to MAGA, if it isn’t defeated by fascists entrenched in our institutions, will be a leftward swing of the pendulum across the center ready to embrace new ideas. (Or old ideas as the case may be.) Obviously our current system is rigged and everyone feels it. We tried one extreme and I think most people realized it A) sucked and B) didn’t work at all as promised.

For my part, I likely want what you want, but I don’t know if I agree on how to get there. There are many accelerationists who don’t understand what a revolution would look like for normal people. I want the Senate abolished, but I don’t want to try a famine.

This comment is funny because it further reinforces the point: Obama didn’t start that war, and he was unable to cleanly exit it without leaving Afghan for the Taliban.

There are exactly three choices in every general election:

1. The viable party.

2. The other viable party.

3. Not participating in the election at all.

You might think there are other options like write-ins, protest votes, or third parties. Unfortunately, those are all permutations of #3: nonparticipation.

Nobody here is saying they love Democrats. The party is about as popular as boiled cabbage at a chili competition. But when served with those three choices, participating in the election is important, which narrows it down to #1 or #2, and it’s really not hard to choose between the GOP and the Democrats. The Democrats sent your brother to war. The Republicans started that war, sent way more people to it, killed more civilians, and made withdrawing impossible. The Democrats are also more likely to offer mental healthcare to your brother.

That wasn’t all of it. Carter got blamed for both Stagflation and the high interest rates his Fed used to get it under control. And of course the Iran Hostage Crisis and oil shortages. Then Reagan got all the credit for the economy the high interest rates helped save.

You never really explained why neoliberalism is problematic. Neoliberalism is not incompatible with unions, as you seemed to imply, nor is it incompatible with a government that utilizes tax and spend to provide essential services for the public. It can be regulated markets and free trade, and most of the stuff we associate with Reagan’s brand of neoliberalism are consequences of horrible tax and social spending policies, not necessarily a consequence of a lighter hand at protectionism. What’s the real problem here, that we became more open to importing stuff or that the government abdicated its duty to do anything at all? (Aside from bombing brown people, of course.)

Game of Thrones sucks and I thought we were well over “bothsides” in 2026.

I’m hoping the brownshirts aren’t smart enough for that, but you may be right.

You’re gonna have to be more specific.

No.

It should be from -3 to 10. (Probably more than 10 actually.)

We did.

Then we decided not to use them.

Cheap, fast to build, doesn’t appear obvious from the air, hard to destroy with conventional weapons. The drawback of damaging the container when you use it wasn’t considered as big an issue back when we knew what the words “strategic” and “emergency” meant. When the administration creates a new crisis every week to distract from the Epstein Files, it suddenly seems insufficient.

Thanks, friend!

Also: https://archivegenocide.com/

(warning: graphic.)

They’re really simple electronics, but there are likely a lot of little trade secrets that made them better. At the end of the day, it’s a cathode ray tube with a couple of electromagnets to divert a pulsing electron beam to hit different parts of the phosphor-coated end of the tube. The signal fed to the magnets is analog, and the beam sweeps the screen line-by-line every frame. (Or every other line for interpolated signals.)

It’s really not that dangerous. There’s a big capacitor called the flyback capacitor which can store a deadly amount of energy. You disconnect the power (obviously) and then discharge that cap and everything else is relatively safe. To discharge a capacitor, bridge the leads with an electricians screwdriver. If you don’t like sparks, hold a resistor with pliers between the two leads. (It will go slower but also get hot AF.)

Retro games look better on them and there’s no emulator that has ever pulled off a sufficiently convincing simulation for me. They also render dark colors better than most high end TVs. If you play a lot of old games, it would be neat to have a small one. The big ones, however, weigh a metric ton and are at least as deep as they are wide, and they’re extremely front-heavy. Those aren’t worth it unless you plan to build an entire arcade cabinet around it.