So we're moving goalposts and just straight-up refusing to answer a simple question about why it seems like the thing you posted was not just misleadingingly framed, but actually false. Sounds good.

I do understand that I haven't been real polite to you and it creates a certain pressure to "get a win" by making some kind of counterpoint. Mission accomplished, I guess. Biden did actually give the speech he was invited to give, even though he's also campaigning and that makes things more complicated in some ways. It's true. You caught him.

You wanna address the thing with the second part of the headline, though?

I can't open X links; I'm on Firefox and it's fucked on Firefox now and I don't really feel like hopping around on browsers just to keep Elon Musk happy. I'm happy to look at it if you can find it somewhere else. I did search for the quote and I didn't find anything.

You wanna address the thing with the second part of the headline, though? Because I'm not real sure I trust "freedomrideblog" on Twitter and I would want to know more details about how Biden's campaign is using the speech, and all that, but it definitely looks like part of the headline you posted was objectively a lie. No?

"Well as long as they're working full time while inside, at least they can use that to pay for incarceration. It actually does seem fair that they need to be working instead of literally just sitting around, and then that can pay for their right to continue to exist."

"Okay, so we could do that, but also, hear me out for a second"

Chin up boyo! You said you were gonna keep doing this all the way until the election. That's like 6 more months, you can't get all downhearted about it already just about some messages explaining why this one was bullshit too.

He constructed it a little cleverly: Said that if it was a Republican, they'd be in the electric chair. I don't think it was criminal.

Of course, he also openly tried to have his own vice president killed, and collects non-murder-related felonies like bottles for recycling, and at least so far all of that has been mostly okay of him to do, so I'm not sure how much it matters. 😕

I notice that this conversation has a very particular type of flow -- Innuendo Studios talked about this in Never Play Defense.

Actually, I went back and looked at it's significantly worse than the example the video constructs. The video's example was dishonest, but the exchange was actually pretty coherent. I think this message is a particularly strong example of the flow you've been doing -- where I say the protestors are right and I'm glad that Biden is letting them speak and hope he will take their message on board because what he's doing right now is wrong, and then you get all hostile while lecturing me that not everyone who disagrees with Biden is a Republican. The Republicans in the video are never bad-faith to that comical a level, although the overall flow of "wild new assertion / coherent response / repeat" is pretty similar.

Quick question, who's "we"? Pretty much everyone I see use the term "blue MAGA" seems to mean by it, all the Democrats.

Or are you saying the Democrats as a whole are cult-like just as much as Trump's MAGA?

Yeah. It's a big shame. I read Lawrence O'Donnell's book about 1968. It's so fucking sad. I couldn't finish.

And then, even with all the justification all the progressives had for quitting from the political system -- basically on par with if the US was directly sending 19-year-old US citizens over to Gaza and having them blow up hospitals and get their balls shot off, or if Biden himself were approving of the brutalizing of protestors, like sending them to the hospital with nightstick fractures and covered in blood, not "just" pepper spraying them and putting cuffs on them -- I feel like you can draw this absolutely direct line from 1968 and the disillusionment that stemmed from it into the grim nightmare politics that took over in America, because only the assholes were still voting, from Nixon to Reagan to Clinton until now we have just a wreckage of a system that someone from the 60s wouldn't even recognize.

Basically I feel like 2016 was a repetition of that same betrayal, and I'm really hoping that 2024 isn't a repetition of the same fascist takeover that's enabled by it, because now we're much much closer to the edge. Daniel Ellsberg said that all the things Nixon did to him that formed one piece of his collapse and fall when they came to light, they're all legal now.

Back in the Clinton/Bush era 20 years ago when he said that, I actually think it made quite a bit of sense. The Democrats were a lot more corporate-friendly (dropping corporate tax instead of raising it like Biden did, boosting the WTO instead of telling them to go fuck themselves like Biden did), and the Republicans weren't trying to kill their political opponents or put minority groups into literal concentration camps.

I'm not even gonna comment on "'they' keep scrubbing it from YouTube."

I sorta had a feeling you wouldn't make even the slightest effort to defend that bullshit you had said.

politicians are not your friends

No, politicians are not at all your friends. What you mean when you say "support" for Biden or that Biden betrayed us, or that thing shills sometimes say about "falling in line behind" the Democrats and how they don't want to do it, is very weird to me.

Nobody in politics is your friend. The government is just a big, corrupt, very dangerous machine. It runs on money and propaganda and defense contractors, and sometimes good things come out of it and sometimes bad things, and Biden is one little cog in that machine. That's why I'm comfortable saying good things that Biden did, or that he's doing a very bad thing by enabling a genocide -- I'm not viewing either of those as a statement of my "allegiance." It's just, like, hey I am a free person and here is how I am viewing the world and what the truth is.

Ralph Nader did an excellent interview talking about productive ways to push the Democrats to the left, and how upset he was at Democratic voters who were throwing away an opportunity to get some concessions from the Biden administration in exchange for their vote. His viewpoint makes a ton of sense to me.

Your viewpoint -- sort of based on emotion, this sort of teenager mentality like "YOU'RE DEAD TO ME NOW I'LL CALL UNCLE TRUMP TO COME OVER AND BURN THE HOUSE DOWN BECAUSE WHO CARES YOU BROKE MY HEART" coupled with a lot of the sins you're accusing him of actually being things he didn't do, is just weird. Like, if you want to push Biden left, fuckin go for it man. Sounds great. But if you've decided that if Trump comes to power and nukes Iran and makes being gay illegal and puts all the Hispanics in camps and cancels the next election, that's just the price the country will pay because Biden said this wrong thing about racism and it was so hurtful to you and he's definitely a bad person and that good person / bad person is even relevant to how to vote, then okay sure. I won't tell you not to. But I don't think you should pretend that I'm the one treating my politicians in a strange parasocial non sensible way.

I know that if I was a Palestine protestor, and President Biden was going to speak, and the college said that they would immediately just end the ceremony if things got too out of hand, I would immediately think "Well that definitely wouldn't be a good outcome. I better quiet down; I was going to have this big protest, but if it'll end the commencement ceremony entirely, then I won't, because that would attract some attention to the cause I'm trying to promote. It might make the news or something. I'm scared of that outcome and wouldn't want it to happen; that threat is effective."

Your conclusion makes perfect sense that the crowd was mostly filled with people who were seething with contempt for Joe Biden, but cowed into obedient sitting-facing-towards-him by the threat that if they made too much ruckus, it would successfully disrupt the event.