Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but this kind of sounds like a technofascist trial balloon to push for the privatization of the US military. The implication being

Why can’t our nation’s air industry not simply buy the right to fly through no-fly zones? This is deep state oppression curtailing YOUR freedoms to go where-ever you please. If we just privatize military research and production it will be more productive (SpaceX is better than NASA) and American (a big state is communist; those military officers that don’t want to invade Canada are traitors), and people can fly over SpaceX’s latest acquisition Area 51X if they buy the rights.

Project 2025 was not written by Trump even if he is the executor/scapegoat. Smart people exist and work for the politicians, shareholders and lobbyists that shape current US policy. And trial balloons don’t need to be cleverly worked out, in the era of Trump you can just throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks, and pay private media to not make a story out of the rest. There’s a good chance this will come to nothing, but why wouldn’t a petty technocrat try to ingratiate himself to the new technofascist regime by offering a win-win.

As long as that sophistication is geared towards reaching capitalist targets, all it does is enable them to ruin the land through “tragedies of the commons” faster.

Whether that’s desertification because you’re pumping up more groundwater than rain can replenish, nitrates continuing to exist after they leave your land, pesticides giving your customers cancer, insecticides causing a collapse of pollinator populations you rely on for crop yields, crop pandemics due to a lack of genetic diversity, or something else, modern capitalist farmers have a lot of fancy tools for destroying the planet and leaving society vulnerable to starvation.

They say that, but there are people out there deliberately breeding humans to keep the population up so human hunting remains justified, and these wild humans do terrible damage to the environment by over-foraging.

The fact that Republicans wouldn’t do that doesn’t change the fact that there are undecided voters that would do that. If you think non-whites aren’t capable of being as conservative as republicans, you’re going to be disappointed time and time again.

They’ve had decades to adapt to Republicans being blatantly disingenuous. At what point does it stop being “not equipped to deal with” and does it start being “chooses not to deal with”?

Private media are owned by shareholders that want as many unfair advantages as possible. They want to be slightly left of center to appeal to the “reasonable centrist” crowd, but they want the center to be as far to the right as possible so their taxes are low and their assets unregulated. Moreover, they want the presidential election to be as close to 50-50 as possible so both candidates are desperate for bribe money and and willing to pay further favors.

If the Democrats win by a landslide, what is next? What is the new political center, and what does that mean for the stock market? Even in the face of fascism, corporations and shareholders keep playing both sides, because if Volkswagen and BMW and Ford and Siemens and Kodak and IBM and Bayer and the Associated Press and Hugo Boss and Fanta/Coca-Cola and all the unnamed German millionaires that hid their cash and pillaged Jewish artifacts in Switzerland and politely surrendered to the western forces made it through being Nazis with a profit, why expect worse from Trump?

I guess the main thing is that if you’re going to argue for something very unpopular, rather than arguing for the sake of your opponent as they are today, argue for the sake of uncommitted onlookers and for the sake of the opponent a week from now after they’ve had time to calm down and reprocess. Respond to their arguments, of course, but do it in a way that illustrates to less polarized people that you’ve got a point, rather than trying to convince your opponent or finding specific errors in the opponent’s reasoning/self-justification.

When an issue is as polarized as this, people very rarely switch sides publicly (unless they’re shilling and they didn’t hold the original position to begin with), but people can cringe from the side making bad arguments, quietly distancing themselves, and a few months or years later show up on a different side.

If you want that side to be your side, it’s nice to present a pipeline that does that. People who cringe from bottom-of-the-barrel leftist discourse can fall into alt-right pipelines, which you presumably don’t want, so ideally you would want to have examples of (leftist) influencers whose takes you find reasonable, ideally on the case itself. For example, LegalEagle (“it is plausible that the jury was right that murder under Wisconsin law was not proven beyond reasonable doubt”).

The hate is not really avoidable except by forgoing this venue or not arguing your point, but like with the hate thrown towards peaceful climate activists, it is not a sign that you’re doing a bad job.

Your original comment is passive-aggressive. You decry that people aren’t doing their due dilligence but don’t actually provide your perspective on the story or give any indication that you’ve put in any effort of your own. Unless you believe that legal definitions and jury trials are simply right, in which case, wow, you’re such a leftist.

If you want to have a fact based conversation, it would be nice if you came with facts instead of just claiming they exist.

If you want to discuss about what kind of killing is worth calling murder, it would be nice if you explained your position.

Your original comment is incredibly passive-aggressive.

Your mistake is seeing them as Democrat voters. Maybe if the Republicans had a brown candidate they would vote for them instead.

ASML is basically a strategic asset. Breaking them up to have a more level playing field inherently threatens the West’s economic-political position. If ASML abused their position, it wouldn’t be the regulators so much as the CIA that showed up to tell them to reconsider.

Maybe they’re going for something similar to RDJ’s Sherlock Holmes. A veneer of propriety over a ruthless and savage intelligence.

it becomes the first nation on earth to avoid civil war by allowing its military to rape prisoners

If this is true, it is only because usually the rapists got their way before enough people heard about it for it to become a civil war. Soldiers threatening mutiny unless they were allowed to rape people is a pretty common phenomenon in war.

Incidents like this almost certainly took place during the US American occupation of Okinawa, there just weren’t smartphones to relay the information to the general public, other soldiers, and the government so they could take positions. Maybe the prisoners will be tried at a later date, like the US did with some rapists in the US armed forces.

Trump shows that FPTP doesn’t have to result in a closest-to-center career politician. The DNC likes to pretend that it does in order to prop up their most centrist candidates, but as long as there is a large group of radicals and non-voters, a candidate who appeals to those voters can defeat a candidate who appeals to the center.

There were people who switched from Bernie to Trump. There were people who didn’t want to vote Biden because he supported Palestinian genocide too much. Those people are idiots, but they still vote. Lower class workers tend to vote left-wing if they trust that fair competent government is possible and right-wing if they don’t, with most of them in the US voting right-wing, especially in rural areas.

Foelly

It’s annoying that she put this on Instagram where there’s no scrobble function, and she then spends so much time leading up to it.

For those not willing to sit around listening to off-the-cuff meandering, AOC’s points:

• Ohio requires political parties to submit their candidates’ names before the Democratic convention. If the convention is contested, Democrats likely won’t be able to vote there effectively.
• AOC says that swing states might have enough legal ambiguity in the electoral code that Republicans can challenge any voting results, and then let it escalate to the Supreme Court who can throw out the Democratic result.
• Democrats are divided on who would be the replacement candidate, with many of the people calling for Biden to step down opposing Harris as well.
• The Biden/Harris campaign has $100M of campaign funding that will not be able to be transferred to another ticket. (Maybe it can be transferred to Harris? She mumbles a bit there).
• Anecdotally, when AOC sat “in rooms with those people” that call for Biden to step down, they didn’t seem to have a proposed game plan for any sort of replacement. This includes lawyers who ought to know whether this creates legal trouble and people in the legislature.
• There is a risk that if the Democratic convention is contested, it won’t be concluded before the deadline to submit the ticket in more states, which is two days after the scheduled end.
• There are no candidates that poll way better than Biden.
• Many mail-in votes can already be made in September or October. A new candidate would have to have a succesful campaign by that time.
• Biden is systematically underestimated (by Democrats and fianciers?) in his ability to rally ‘demographics typically not cared for’.
• Biden does great with elderly people, which may not transfer to other Democrats.
• Democrats opposing Biden seem to be mostly concerned about big donors, not popular support.
• Democratic party members speaking anonymously to the press is both strategically stupid and undemocratic. They should have either spoken out publicly or kept it behind closed doors. The fact that they did may be why Biden is polling so bad.
• Biden gets energized from having people around him, which was not the case for the debate with Trump.

My personal opinions:

• With regards to Ohio, betting websites put the Republicans at 95% chance of winning the state, and Biden appears to have been trailing by 10 percentage points even before the debate. Losing Ohio only matters if you would have won Ohio with Biden, and that’s questionable.
• With regards to the Supreme court handing the election to Trump based on a bullshit legal ruling, it seems like AOC is making the dangerous and questionable assumption that the Supreme Court cares about the law, and that the outcome of these legal challenges will depend on technicalities rather than on whether they think they can practically succeed at the coup.
• With regards to the $100M war chest, this seems to be cancelled out by her argument that Democrats opposing Trump are mostly concerned about donors. In 2020, Biden’s election got $1 billion in funding while on May 9th, Biden had raked in $170M according to this website. So with upwards of $700M of donations left to collect, a 14% decrease in donations would mean Biden has less money to work with than other candidates.
• With regards to other candidates not doing much better, it seems impressive that they are polling better than Biden even with Biden running a massive election campaign and having spent a hundred million dollars in ads already. I would expect the gap to widen if those other candidates actually start trying to win the election as much as Biden is.
• With regards to the votes in September and October, with regards to the elderly and demographics typically not cared for and popular support, these all seem to be cancelled out by the polls.
• With regards to the Democrat backchannels, the damage is done. It’s fair that she’s mad about it, but it doesn’t affect future decisions.
• With regards to Biden’s energy, either this doesn’t explain the Zelensky-Putin gaffe, or it’s kind of irrelevant. Biden won’t be sitting in the oval office with an audience to work off of.

So from everything AOC says, all that seems reasonable to me is (1) the observation that there is no good Democratic alternative plan, (2) the worry that the convention might run long so the alternative candidate can’t appear on the ticket, (3) the possibility that a succesful Republican coup is significantly more likely with a candidate that might provide loopholes for the Supreme Court to work off of than with Biden, and (4) the possibility of losing Ohio if Biden would otherwise have won it.

However, even here, the parts of the alternative plan she is most worried about seems to be the legal trouble, which she seems most worried about only if the Democrats aren’t on time with selecting a candidate. It seems to me that if only the Democrats are able to rally behind a new candidate before the Ohio deadline two days before the convention, none of her concerns apply more to the new candidate than to Biden. If it happens after the Ohio deadline, it only matters if there is a technicality that disqualifies the new candidate and Biden would otherwise have won Ohio and that technicality determines whether a coup succesfully occurs.

That’s the neat thing about workers’ rights. Workers have more interest in making good products than investors, especially in artistic fields. Investors will gladly sabotage a product’s quality for the sake of personal gain and move on to the next company with goodwill to exploit, but for workers a job well done is inherently rewarding.

Unionization directly leads to better games with more artistic merit.