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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I think I agree, but I’d phrase it a bit differently. The problem in our country isn’t division, it’s that there’s an energetic fascist movement that needs to be stopped. The problem with assassinating Trump is that it gives that movement a martyr and would very much energize them (disorganize them too, since they wouldn’t know for sure who to follow anymore, but they’ve never needed to be too organized to do damage and they could do plenty before succession fueled infighting really started to take a toll).

    Killing Trump won’t kill his ideas, the only way to do that is to embarrass Trump and Trumpism badly, so I think the best series of events would be a) Trump loses the election, b) prosecutors explain Trump’s many crimes in meticulous detail to a series of juries who sentence Trump to years and years behind bars, c) Trump dies of a heart attack while taking a shit in prison.

    The fact that the voters already did a) once in 2020 and the system’s let us down on b) is deeply frustrating and worth acknowledging for the sake of identifying the country’s underlying problems (it’s the politicians and lawyers more than it is the voters), but it doesn’t change the fact that assassinating Trump is the last thing we want to do at this point.






  • So, this is a very complex topic I don’t have the time to give the treatment it deserves, but to try to give a very summarized historical viewpoint on it -

    Liberalism was a set of ideas that cohered around the 18th century as a reaction to monarchism that emphasized universal civil rights and free markets (there were a ton of weird things going on with noble privileges and state monopolies issued by royal administrations and mercantile economics this was a response to)

    Socialism was a set of ideas that cohered around the 19th century as a reaction to liberalism (and the whole industrial revolution) that said universal civil rights didn’t go far enough and we needed to establish universal economic rights. Some socialists think the only way to achieve these things is by overthrowing or limiting the power of governments and ripping up contracts between private parties, which liberals tend not to like.

    Progressivism was (sort of, I’m being very reductive here) an attempted synthesis of these traditions that cohered around the early 20th century, and (essentially) argued “ok, free markets but restricted by regulations (e.g. you can’t sell snake oil, you can’t condition the sale of property on the purchaser being a specific race), and open elections for whoever the voters want but with restrictions on the kinda of laws that can be passed” (e.g. no poll taxes).

    Like I said, I’m simplifying a lot here and I’d encourage reading Wikipedia pages and other sources on all of these things (like, I’m eliding a whole very dark history progressives have where their attempts to perfect society had them advocating for eugenics and segregation early on because there was academic support for those ideas at the time, and there’s a lot more to be said on how a lot of the first anti-racist voices were socialist ones and why it took progressives and liberals time to get on the right side of that issue, and how fights for colonial independence tended to be led by socialists and against liberals), but the fact that liberals progressives and socialists are all ostensibly “on the left” is a big cause of the infighting we see.