You’re welcome 🫡

The “guy” would be Shein.

Another neat way to frame the debate, to reach for the obvious example, is over swastikas. Of course, having a picture of a swastika tattooed on your arm isn’t harming anyone, so why should we as a society have any distaste for it?

To answer “we shouldn’t” is to cede ground to nazis. We do not, actually, have to tolerate their symbols.

The 4chan-nazi pipeline—yes, I’m still talking about pedophiles—if you’re not aware, is a strategy by which people are drenched in ironic, nazi iconography, which results in them being more permissive of that kind of thing, and thus makes them much, much easier to be groomed by king-master klansman, or whatever they call themselves.

Being too permissive of something is socially harmful.

I agree, pedophiles are often villainized way too much. I would like them not to be so afraid of being found out that they never get therapy. If they’re good people, I assume they want to be better as much as I want them to, even if it’s difficult. None of this means we need to sell dolls to them.

Think about it this way: I watch pornography all the time. I am not any less likely to fuck a woman. How is the doll supposed to satiate them?

I realize that I sound very condescending right now, but I’m sincerely asking: this idea that a legal outlet is actually more helpful to them, where does this come from? Does it even make sense?

Whether you mean to or not, I think that you are ceding ground to people who want pedophilia to be more popular. They do exist: middle America loves child marriage. This is why I’m not engaging with the personal freedom angle; it’s not really relevant.

Also, requiring child dolls to have some dimension by which they are clearly identifiable as adults is an effective ban on child dolls—it’s the same thing.

I think there may be some social issues with a for-profit company being financially incentivized to promote and sell pedophilia to people.

How would you rather deal with this? A boycott? Do you have money in child sex doll manufacturing that you can withhold?

So he can think of it as a child in his head.

That’s not really what this is about. You’re trying to assess this on a personal freedom level when what we’re talking about is a guy with a megaphone.

Okay, well, I’m waiting for those steps to be carried out then. We can’t really talk about her extreme viability until they have.

I’m going to skip over the Kamala stuff because you say this later:

An extended campaign would only reveal Kamala as just another weak-ass establishment Dem.

Which I agree with. This is the reason she was not a strong candidate.

Was she the best we could have done under the circumstances? Well, we didn’t get a primary, so who knows. The past is the past, I suppose.

I am worried that you are drinking the koolaid a little bit. Kamala did lose. Nobody cares about policy. AOC’s proposals should be violent retribution against the leeches sucking the life out of the USA. Trump is successful, in part, because he pretends to be anti-establishment. The DNC’s official position is to never criticize any prominent figure they’ve ever had.

I agree that AOC can energize people. What I’m asking is if she has the dominant aura necessary to crack the whip.

I ask, partly because having the will to mobilize our system into actually doing something is a prerequisite now to being successful, and partly because this ping-ponging between the Dems and the Republicans will burn the country down. We need like a new cultural revolution. It should be as offensive to be a Republican now as it was to be a Nazi in the 1940s. American individualism and apathy must be crushed under heel. Anything less than this is basically a slow death. A pyrrhic victory as we lose global significance.

Didn’t she back down from Nancy Pelosi over the Isreal dome stuff?

The fire I’m talking about needs to burn away the establishment rot in the Democrat party. It cannot be afraid to criticize Merrick Garland for failing to prosecute Trump because it might make the party look bad.

The party has a reputation for doing nothing. This fire cannot promise nothing; people will see through it right away.

I don’t remember the content of the speech, but I do remember that during the last national convention, AOC did rouse the crowd better than pretty much anyone else there. I’m not saying she can’t be the one. I am saying there’s got to be a hell of a lot more than a Fighting Oligarchy tour that fails to really accomplish anything.

We’ve still got a lot of time, too. Nobody knew Mamdani 5 months ago. But yeah, I agree.

I’m not saying that Americans won’t think “oh, a third? really?” but you have to remember that Kamala fucking sucked. She was a pacifier the Biden administration threw at us to shut us up about him stepping down, and she knew she was, and if she cared at all, she lacked the strength to step out of line or say anything about it. Nobody believed she would meaningfully change their lives—that’s ultimately why she lost.

She lost to the fascist head of the new project 2025, and in her closing speech said something about the stars in the night sky and went on vacation. Pointing out that she’s a woman before pointing out that she and the rest of her democrat cohorts do not have any beliefs is absurd.

Candidates can still signal their intentions in other ways. It doesn’t have to be out loud per se.

The main concern I have—and if she’s going to give it a shot, give it a shot, I say—is that she won’t have the fire or aura necessary in her rhetoric to capture the anger the of the American left. I would love to be proven wrong, though. I’d certainly trust her more than that fuckin snake Gavin Newsom.

I’ll take your word for it, man. I just don’t want to see people clinging to the driftwood around them because it’s the only thing they have imagination for.

If Jon Stewart runs and wins, I need him, I need him, to be unfair to the right wing. We are past bipartisanship. We can no longer take 4 entire years to arrest the architects of Jan 6.

The cliff I’m referring to, by the way, is not just Trump’s government. There are a lot of reasons we are in the place we’re in right now.

This is true. Jon Stewart held that extremely cringe march to restore sanity some time ago. And if I recall, he later said that calling the Republicans fascists was a step too far.

Look, I’d vote for him if he was the only option, but he does not represent the anger burning at the heart of the American left-of-center. I believe, much like Biden, Harris, Clinton, Obama, the other Clinton, who are all flavors of the same exact person, he would naively want to make peace with Republicans, to heal the divide, when what we need is to punt them out of congress entirely.

I mean, has he signaled anything different? Does he recognize the cliff the US is being steered over?