How’s that short term thinking working out for you?

And yet, utilitarianism was the moral philosophy of the Nazis. After all, think of all the suffering that will be prevented long-term once we kill all the racial minorities! Sure, millions die today. But in the future, far more people will be spared racial conflict if we just kill all the non-Aryans right now. Eternal world racial peace for the cost of a bit of genocide today.

The greatest good for the greatest number requires we kill everyone that isn’t white.

This is why utilitarianisn is a philosophy of the damned. It’s the philosophy behind almost all of history’s greatest atrocities. If you can convince yourself that some crime is a net positive, well the ends justify the means.

There’s more than one kind of moral philosophy. Why do utilitarians always forget this?

But when it comes to the general, the most milquetoast corporatist democrat is better than right-wing outright fascism.

Only if you only care about the short term. And then short term thinking is what has got us to this point.

First, you can cut that shit right out with your leading question of “was she worse than Trump.” That isn’t how a large portion of the electorate acts, thinks, and believes. Some vote on utilitarian ethics. Some vote on respect for persons. You can’t just whine, stamp your feet, and pretend that utilitarianism is the only way to vote. You’re trying to hand waive away an branch of moral philosophy that has centuries of scholarly work behind it. If you view voting as simply an either/or choice, sure, Kamala was the only choice. If you view voting as an endorsement of candidate, then it’s perfectly valid to not vote for a candidate simply because you consider their actions to be morally abominable. The other guy being worse doesn’t change that.

She abandoned Palestinian Americans. The strongest defense of trans people she could offer “she would follow the law.” She cozied up with the Cheneys and offered no real policies that would move the needle on wealth inequality. And she couldn’t even offer a robust plan on how to protect abortion rights. And she gaslit everyone on the economy, telling people to believe the inflation figures and not their own lying eyes.

And before you claim that utilitarianism is the only valid voting philosophy, realize that is not how our own government behaves. We’ve literally vaporized millions of innocent civilians over the decades. The justification has always been, “well, they supported the evil regime and their evil actions.” Yet every dictator has come to power on the backs of people who thought they were the lesser evil. Hell, almost every Republican thinks Trump is a monster, but they vote for him because they consider him the lesser evil. I’m sure we incinerated thousands of Iraqis who voted for Saddam because he was the lesser evil on the ballot.

Vote how you want. If you view voting as a utilitarian exercise, so be it. But part of living in a democracy is recognizing that other people can have different belief systems and ways of life. Your way is not the only way. You believe that the ends always justify the means. Others recognize that as a road to Hell.

Being willing to throw an election is one of the only tools voters actually have to fight fascism. It’s the only way to prevent a bait-and-switch candidate. If you’re not willing to potentially lose an election when your candidate betrays you, future candidates will betray you every time. You’ve told them that you’re perfectly fine with being betrayed. You’ve proven yourself a spineless cuck that will let people walk all over you.

Actions have consequences. Voting has consequences. And Trump isn’t the worst possible leader out there. He’s a monster, but there are many gradations of monster. There are far worse monsters out there waiting to be elected. If you’re not ever willing to walk away from a traitor candidate in the general election, you guarantee that the Democrats will just keep sliding to the right forever. Nominating a corporate Dem in 2028 will almost certainly see another Republican win. But even on the thin chance they do win, electing a corporate Dem in 2028 guarantees someone even worse than Trump winning in 2032.

We’ve degenerated so far precisely because Democrats don’t take responsibility for their votes and will just blindly vote for whatever corporate tool is placed in front of them. It’s the political version of the “next quarter” thinking that plagues corporate America. All that matters is the election today. Don’t think about the long term consequences. Focus only on today, even if it hurts you in the long term. Trump is the result of decades of Dems kicking the can down the road, holding their nose, and voting for the lesser evil.

Notice, we’re only starting to see some progressives gain traction in the party after Democrats have suffered badly at the polls. There has been real change at the DNC. That and candidates like Mamdani would have been completely impossible if Trump hadn’t been elected. It’s only when the old guard loses horribly and has to run away in shame that the opportunity arises for new voices to take the reins of the party.

Kamala lost because she abandoned her voters. She told her own base to pound sand while fruitlessly trying to appease Republicans. The voters didn’t “not show up.” She simply made herself not their candidate anymore. It’s a fools’ errand to blame voters, as they’re not an individual you can actually hold accountable. Blaming voters for not voting for your terrible candidate is like blaming consumers for not buying shitty overpriced items at a store. You can whine, “well you have to buy something somewhere anyway!” But that’s just unproductive whining.

All that matters is that your portfolio grows faster than the interest rate.

Your parents just suck at personal finance. They used their home as a piggy bank and raided the equity every time they moved. Either that or they kept buying more expensive properties.

I’m sorry, but your story is just not credible. If they owned a house in the city, and then the value soared, they should have been able to take their windfall, move out to the country, and buy a cheap property in cash. The only way this isn’t true is if they either did a lot of cash-out refinancing, or if when they moved to the countryside, they bought a much larger property.

To actually legally impose anything based on total net worth, you need to actually audit net worth and get a real figure.

So, what’s wrong with that? You have a wealth tax on all wealth over $100 million. If you have wealth anywhere over say, $50 million, you hire an accountant to assess your business’s value. Everyone with that level of wealth already hires accountants. It’s a trivial additional burden. If your wealth is no where near the tax threshold, you don’t need to bother hiring an accountant to get a precise figure.

There is a reason that every time such a policy targeting only the wealthiest is put into place (it’s been tried numerous times over the years in a bunch of European countries)

I’m calling bullshit on this. There are all sorts of taxes that fall heavily or solely on the wealthy. The reason the wealthy don’t all leave is that they don’t actually want to live in places that have low taxes. You can get low taxes in a war-torn hellhole, but most don’t actually want to live like that.

The yacht, sure. The mansion…Are you seriously trying to argue that real estate, literal land, isn’t a long-term valuable asset? There is literally no asset in existence with a better long-term value proposition than land.

What do you call a low-level Nazi without any leadership responsibilities?

A Nazi.

And meanwhile, Israel has instituted a policy of the deliberate mass execution of journalists on an industrial scale.

On what criteria are they worse than Israel? Neither are good. They’re both authoritarian theocratic hellholes. One is a rogue state with a nuclear arsenal, the other is a rogue state seeking a nuclear arsenal. But Iran hasn’t invaded any nation in its modern history, while Israel invades people on the regular.

You need to open your eyes. You don’t even know why Iran is bad. You’ve just had a lifetime of propaganda calling them evil while our own allies over there, Israel and Saudi, are just as bad if not worse.

Terrorism (n): violence committed by low income people with dark skin complexion.

You need to get past the idea that everything on social media is a formal debate.

Oh, it’s so much worse than that. They are rational actors. Terrifyingly rational actors.

Once you get past a certain amount of wealth, the only purpose of money is status, prestige, and power. Imagine you gave Elon Musk two choices, two different worlds he could live in:

1. A world where he had 200 billion and everyone else had 10 million.

2. A world where had 100 billion and everyone else had 100,000.

He would choose the first option. Why? Because status. In a world where everyone was independently wealthy, he wouldn’t have people fawning over him all the time. Few people would willingly work for him, as they already had all of their their needs met. In order to really enjoy his billions, he needs millions of poor desperate people he can exploit for labor and adoration.

Milton figured this out in Paradise Lost way back in the 17th century.

“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

I don’t really see why Iran is any worse than Israel, other than Iran has brown people living in it. Once you cut past all the crap and bad faith, ultimately we judge Iran worse than Israel because of skin color.

Both are nominal but deeply flawed democracies. Both hold large numbers of political dissidents on bogus charges as a matter of course. Both are theocracies that make their religion a core component of their governmental structure. Both engage in large scale acts of mass state-sponsored terrorism. Both have or seek to have a nuclear arsenal.

The only real difference I can see is that Iran hasn’t invaded anyone in the whole modern history of the country. The Iranian government is a bunch of peace-and-love hippies compared to the Israelis.

Democrats lost in 2016 and 2024. They would have lost in 2020 if it weren’t for covid.

Sure. History has proven that civil rights laws that are very specific and explicit are much more resilient to legal challenge than broad ones. They probably should have been a hell of a lot more specific in the Reconstruction amendments.