EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

You can have a doctor who’s willing to shoot you full of stimulants every time you have to go on TV, or you can have a doctor who will do routine medical examinations, but you’re not getting both.

I’m glad Mr. Rogers isn’t here to see all this shit, because he would be saying exactly the same things as Ms. Rachel and they’d be calling him an antisemite for it.

Another example of China’s oppressive authoritarianism. In the West, this wouldn’t even be considered a crime.

Yeah, the concept of a state should make sense to any leftist as a formal mechanism for organizing society towards equal and collective participation in said society. The difference, as you say, is whether or not you think it’s possible to execute on that, or if a state will always trend towards ensuring its own existence, and therefore inevitably run into the iron law of institutions and end up corrupted.

I think a state-like mechanism could and probably does need to exist, but it would have to be truly dedicated to facilitating its own dissolution from the start. Whether that would work is dependent on a lot of things, but a big problem with institutions in general is that they almost always come with the fundamental assumption that the institution should persist. If, however, the primary mission of the institution is to obviate the need for the institution to exist, then I think it could be stable. There may never be a moment where there is no state, but I could see society approaching the dissolution of the state asymptotically, which on a long enough timeline would be indistinguishable from complete dissolution.

The alternative, no matter how well-intentioned, is likely vulnerable to the nonsense you describe. I do think that the reason to be optimistic about that is that such a thing hasn’t really been tried, or at least not on a long enough timeline, while the status quo systems are clearly unstable long-term.

It’s also the best way to get things done. If you can get Trump’s ear, he’ll say yes to anything you suggest. There’s no reason not to lean into being a Trump ghoul, and I doubt that’ll change until they start ramping up for the next election, at the earliest.

The Onion’s “no one will stop me” loophole joke is just real real now. All the checks against presidential power are based on someone having to use discretion to enforce the law, and no one is willing to set the precedent that laws apply to the executive branch. It’s not worth hurting the power of the office just to deal with one oaf who still agrees with the status quo on a very fundamental level. Trump isn’t a revolutionary; this is pure infighting among the elites.

This whole thing is a gigantic display of that observation about how conservatism boils down to having an in-group protected but not bound by the law, and an out-group bound but not protected by the law. Laws are for poor people, and Trump is not an exception.