EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2020

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  • You can’t change the system if your goal is to work within it, and if Joe Biden is the best the system has to offer then that’s what you have to support. The lesson should be that working within the system is, at most, a means to an end. Bernie is either a true believer, or he’s lost the plot, but either way he’s decided that he’d rather validate the system than properly criticize it.

    I’m glad he never made it to the White House, he’d have been more disappointing than Obama. Say what you will about Biden, but he told everyone from the beginning that nothing was going to change, and boy did he ever deliver.



  • Are there any flat-moon conspiracy theorists? I feel like there’s way more evidence that the moon is flat. We see the same side all the time. If it were round, wouldn’t we see different parts of it? We’re supposed to believe that it’s a spheroid orbiting us at the exact rotational speed required so that the same side is facing us all the time? Be serious.



  • Something I’ve noticed studying systems theory is that liberalism is basically antithetical to systems thinking. The moment you apply a genuine systemic lens to individual choices at-scale, the whole thing falls apart fairly quickly. You pretty much have to assume that there’s some kind of plan orchestrated by groups of individual actors, or else you have to accept that things don’t happen because of the choices that people make, and if the choices people make aren’t that relevant, then changing people’s minds through education, debate, media, etc. doesn’t actually matter that much. The status quo doesn’t persist because of people’s choices, the status quo is driven by those choices. Individual agency is already priced-in, so to speak, at both the low and high level. Even individuals in places of power are basically train conductors. They don’t actually make any decisions about the direction they’re going, they just run the train.

    It’s hard to get your head around at first, but once you start seeing that powerful people’s decisions are a result of systemic forces, rather than the cause, a lot of stuff starts to make sense.



  • I think they have no idea what they’re doing and that there’s no one in charge of the Democratic Party in any meaningful sense. Whatever happens isn’t going to be the result of some grand plan cooked up by a group of key stakeholders deftly pulling levers, but rather the net result of a bunch of semi-independent actors flailing around trying to serve their own interests.

    Having said all of that, I don’t think that anyone wants Harris to be the nominee. She’s probably the only candidate who could do worse than Joe Biden in the general. Maybe there are some people who want to glass-cliff her into losing the general, but there’s no plan to win. Trump is good for individual fundraising efforts, and probably good for downballot campaigns overall. This is the American political system working as designed, which is why it’s irredeemable garbage and should be destroyed at the earliest opportunity.