Thrashy
Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything-hobbyist in the thirty minutes a day I get to myself.
- Loud voices promoting hopelessness and advocating against voting in left-leaning spaces can have a measurable impact on voter turnout and is also a known tactic of global bad actors like Russia
- “useful idiot” is a term of art
- You’re working very hard not to engage with the meat of my responses, aren’t you?
My guy… I am trying to point out here that the mentality of “I feel hopeless about the current situation, so I’m going to agitate to throw it to a guy whose whole platform is ‘I’m gonna make everything so much worse!’ because that will somehow ultimately make things better” is pushing for an outcome that puts literal millions of vulnerable people in actual, immediate, mortal danger. In fact, tankies and others on the left making the argument that there’s no difference between Biden and Trump can only be making that argument from a place of privilege, because for anybody belonging to the many vulnerable minority groups (nevermind anybody that would be negatively impacted by the geopolitical effects of Trump abandoning NATO, among other things) that the far right intend to target if Trump wins again, the difference is fucking stark, and you’d have to be far removed from any of those groups to think otherwise.
An interesting question, with (I think) a range of viable answers, in the angels-on-pinheads sense of pure theory. I personally think the sweet spot would be a broadly social-democratic system where basic industries are socialized to varying degrees, a regulated free market exists for novel industries and goods we would think of as “discretionary spending” items, and the market regulator has the capacity to move industries gradually from the latter category towards the former as they mature and become foundational to the society and economy.
Funny how the self-proclaimed vanguard of the radical left are just incoherent anti-western reactionaries wearing Marxism like a fig leaf, isn’t it? Like, I’m all for breaking down the current neoliberal capitalist hegemony, but you’ve gotta have a hole in your head to want to replace it with a literal crime syndicate masquerading as a government or an oppressive hyper-capitalist dictatorship with imperialistic ambitions.
If I was to give this point of the benefit of the doubt (which, to be clear, I don’t) what you’re saying is that tankies are accelerationists. And I get it, to an extent – a comfortable middle class isn’t going to be concerned about the depredations of the right until they start to find themselves in the crosshairs – but the last time fascists got their way in the world, more than 73 million people died. Arguing, in effect, that the aftermath of another world war will be better for the survivors is a… challenging point to defend when it requires you to dismiss the deaths of a significant percentage of the world’s population, especially when those most in danger from a rising right wing are those that a supposed left-winger should most want to protect. Sacrificing religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities on the altar of a better future for religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities doesn’t sit well with me.
The reverse. OceanGate saw how planes were being built and said, “let’s do that for submersibles!” even though in airplanes, composites are subjected to <1 atmosphere of tension loading and <2g aerodynamic loading, whereas their submersible was going to be subjected to >400 atmospheres of compression loading, and a much more corrosive environment.
Composites in aircraft have a fairly long and uncontroversial history, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with them in that application. The biggest problem with composites is what happens with them at the end of their service life. Finding ways to recycle them without compromising safety is a good thing, and if it weren’t for Boeing having such a damaged reputation at the moment I think nobody would bat an eye.
I lived in co-op housing during college, which was (loosely) administered by the university and separated into different buildings by gender. One year my hall started a rapidly-escalating prank war with a women’s hall when some guys testing a water balloon launcher accidentally put a balloon through their back window from like 100 yards away. Things culminated in a massive water balloon fight on the campus quad that both sides referred to as the “Bitches and Bastards Brawl.”
The past truly is another country.
EU politics generally seem to be taking a sudden rightward lurch of late, with immigration being a major driver. All that history of African colonialism coming home to roost is making people with a fixed, racially-homogenous sense of their national identity into very unhappy campers. Of the countries not actively sliding into fascism, Putin seems to be ogling with hungry eyes in anticipation of NATO’s defanging. Things look pretty dire across the board, to be honest – between fascism, looming war, and climate change it’s all about least-bad options right now.
