Here No Longer

Rule 34 @ 1:53

I do remember Veggie Tales, but when I think about it now, the religious orientation of the show is the first thing that comes to mind.

Hey TF2 is still more than alright and Paladins is good aside from the toxicity.

@Pastel Heart

I suppose that's something to call it. I personally have worries about anarchism becoming exactly what it despises in practice: an authoritarian philosophy. The questions that really seem to warrant asking are questions like the following:

• Who exactly determines whether an organization is legitimate or not? If it would always be ALL of society, and not just a "leader of the mob" if you will, then it's no issue.
• If the former would be determined by a leader of said mob, would he be able to abuse said power for the group? If not and the group would be beholden to abide by the principles of the ideology, then no issue.
• If this were abusable and the mob wouldn't immediately protest to somebody abusing the group's power to deem organizations illegitimate, then what's to stop the group from essentially ruling over everyone else like an authoritarian regime would?

There's been a very, very recent example of one such society that has had the wrong answers to every question, that society being the CHOP. Murder rates shot up, and in fact most of these murders were either committed or sanctioned by the leader of the mob behind it. However, especially if the first question is answered the right way, I have a lot of agreements on the philosophy and the core of it.

Lincoln? You mean the same guy that violated the Constitution to imprison people arbitrarily under accusations of being Confederate spies? https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0005.103/--lincoln-administration-and-arbitrary-arrests?rgn=main;view=fulltext Or the same one that was legitimately racist and wanted to free as few people as possible from slavery because he felt black people were inferior to whites? https://www.history.com/news/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-lincoln-slavery-and-emancipation I actually put Lincoln in the bottom half because the man actually had less respect for democracy and equality than most people seem to think.

I personally think of FDR as my favorite president. He did apparently try to overreach a little bit in terms of authoritarian power over the government, according to some sources. But in my mind he's the closest we've had a to a democratic president. The only real bad thing he did was something the people wanted, being internment camps for the Japanese Americans. He saved the country twice, once from the product of unrestricted capitalism (the Great Depression) and the second time from the effects of a Nazi victory of WWII on the European Front.

If we were sent back 60 years, it would be an improvement in terms of foreign and economic policy. I personally believe that every single president since Nixon has been a bad president, and even then LBJ I'm a bit ehh on considering although he made a lot of progress in very important ways, he also further focused on the Vietnam War first went into by Kennedy (who frankly is another president that's much worse than people realize, along with Lincoln). Really ever since the Korean War, every single conflict the US was involved in has been an offensive war the States actively wanted to start. As for social policy, that is one place we've improved significantly and I will more than readily acknowledge that fact. Socially speaking the US 60 years ago was absolutely intolerable by modern standards especially south of the Mason-Dixon line.

@Pastel Heart

I don't consider myself necessarily an anarchist, though that may be in part because I'm used to the definition of it being "no government." Which although I still do support a government, it would be highly limited in scope and would likely just have the power over executive decisions and plausibly the writing of laws and really that's about it. I don't personally see them as exactly the same thing, though I do see a lot of overlap between libertarian left ideas and anarchist left ideas.

I think an apt comparison would be Handsome Jack, to be honest. They're not dissimilar by any means. Both fascistic, corporatist assholes who justify their actions with hatred of common people. At least Handsome Jack is funny, though. Trump's not only unfunny, he angers me every other time he opens his mouth.

Yeah imagining the conversations they would have... They're both at the least partially at fault for economic depressions (honestly I see this becoming worse than the Great Depression in the 30's), both corporate hacks (in Trump's case, he himself IS part of the corporate elite), and both horrible people as well as horrible presidents (though I could only count on one hand the number of good presidents the US has had).

Oh, they don't follow the Constitution, they only pretend to. They really abandon it whenever politically expedient. The Patriot Act manages to violate at least three amendments in the Bill of Rights all by itself. Yet every single time it's brought up in Congress, it's voted back in by at least 2/3 of Congress. And also their checks don't only come from the state, they come from the corporations too. They pay the politicians to implement policies that benefit them. I'm quite sure all but a grand total of around 5 to 10 people in Congress do not take corporate money.

I don't however share the exact same degree of pessimism. I think it CAN be done in the electoral process if Biden becomes president now (he'll just be Obama 2.0), and somebody like Nina Turner wins in 2024 (granted she'd still have the whole of the party against her). We just have to band together and say that this current situation isn't acceptable. Though if it does come to revolution and there's no choice, so be it. May we then riot in the streets aggressively asking for change or else. I don't support offensive wars, but I WILL support fighting a necessary war.

@Pastel Heart

What the US calls "radical left" isn't even on the left in my honest view, they are actually who I call the "centrists", usually call them "fake left" because in my experience that's more accurate. I am what I would consider a leftist, of course not really far left to the point of being a Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist (there are places I agree with Marx, but substantially more places where I would agree with the likes of Noam Chomsky). Philosophically, I would identify more as a Libertarian Socialist or a Syndicalist if I were to label it as something. I believe in ideas like worker's possession of the means of production (not necessarily in the sense like Marxists or Communists would, but more in the sense that if somebody owns a means of production, they should also be a worker that contributes to said production), UBI, Public Banking, Public Ownership of Utilities, Medicare for All... I could probably make a whole blog post about what kinds of things I believe in, but this is just the idea in terms of economics.

It should never be considered okay to have power concentrated to a powerful and wealthy elite. In fact, the problem I have the most with Trump isn't his economic policy, even with how terrible it is in most aspects. It's his seeming desire to see this country become an authoritarian corporate state. Granted, it was already halfway there to begin with. The corporations have had an irrationally large concentration of power, especially in the last 52 years (yes, exactly 52 years). But now Trump seems to aim not only to strengthen that power, but to turn neoconservative ideas even more authoritarian to the point of becoming more like corporate fascism.

What I am hoping for is that we can have the country "for and by the people" promised by the Constitution, and it can be somehow done by peaceful means. If it can't be, well, we may have to resort to revolution at some point in the future for the sake of not only the working class of this nation, but everyone on the planet as this state we have now seems determined to ruin the world for everyone with massive amounts of pollution, offensive wars, and foreign policy that is, in general, aimed to make half of the world our enemy and plausibly there may be the eventuality with war on China, that could turn into the end of the Human race. All I insist on is a nation that doesn't rush head-first into catastrophe where the common people have significantly more leverage individually than they do today.

@Pastel Heart

I used to be in that situation, but now I thankfully live a 15 minute drive or so from Houston.

Yeah it almost seems like there's a lot of people, especially around this part of the country, who have no idea what actually is the status quo... They have this idea that the "far radical left" has "taken over" (pure nonsense) when in all actuality it's the center and the right defining the mainstream right now. But they get all angry about the liberals instead of actually paying attention to what's really going on. Which is why we have a president who's only goal seems to be, in the words of many a far right lunatic, "to trigger the libtards."

This is true, but Trump has not only made the problem significantly worse, he's gotten to the point of embracing actual authoritarianism. The mainstream hasn't quite gotten there yet. Sure we've had unconstitutional and downright authoritarian laws signed in to office, and there's the off-chance that a US president may be the real perpetrator of one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in not only US history but world history... But Trump has taken it to the level where if he doesn't win, it seems like he will at least try to manipulate the result so he actually is considered the winner, or possibly even try to overthrow the f***ing government if that doesn't work.. And if he wins, well, we'll have another four years of utter chaos, completely backwards policy, and likely authoritarianism and that is a guarantee.

@Pastel Heart

Oh yeah and frankly I'd probably consider joining in the protests (not like I wouldn't as is, considering all the issues there are living a lower middle class life in our day and age). Not only would a coup by Trump be a threat to the remnants of democracy there are, it would be the destruction of them. Granted I probably would try to be more peaceful instead of rioting, I'd definitely see the justification for rioting. Granted the rioting could be used politically to say "these protestors are violent and a threat to the union" (which by and large as of now they're not even remotely either, especially to even nearly the same extent Trump is), I think it's more than justified with all the damage Trump has done to the country as is.

@Kyoshi That would be nice.

Had the sig there until recently... @Kyoshi sent me a new sig from Addict but it was too wide.

@Fasu This account was named for him a few months ago and he used to be in my sig, so I suppose so.

Why does this status make me think of the "The Science of" videos that used to be on Shoddycast?

Also because UwU take this Furret:

I mean you may not have chosen the greatest time to come back, but:

@Emerald Heart I definitely get not being into the show anymore. Pony Life looks pretty bad, and plus I just don't have any real interest in watching FiM anymore. Good show, but moving on.

Hopefully, the problems I've had with this forum don't get worse. Wish doesn't exactly seem to be coming true with the bigoted stuff I still see around, even from people who should definitely know better.