Supreme Court justices are nominated by the president and then the house and Senate approve or deny the nomination. The current justices were nominated by Democrat majorities.

Kamala Harris is actively campaigning with Dick Cheney.

Electoral districts are drawn via bipartisan committee.

This is ultimately the problem with metaphors… What specifically are you looking for to confirm or deny?

Are Democrats holding a gun to your head?

Yes. They are called police, the gun isn’t figurative.

But if you want to change metaphors:

“if you leave him alone with your stuff he’s going to steal it, you better leave me alone with your stuff as I won’t steal it.”

They then invite the other guy over and help them steal it, but blame it on the other guy and say “we tried to stop it”. Who would you be more angry with?

Holding a gun to your head is “not doing anything”?

Yes, dictatorships and monarchies sometimes have a petition process, but they tend only to pay lip service. Not because they care, they will do as they please becaue they have the power-- hence a dictatorship.

You’re so close to getting it…

So if one person is holding you at gunpoint while another rummages through your pockets, you should definitely only be mad at the one going through your pockets right?

The promise is that Harris is essentially a continuation of Biden so with that in mind comparing to your list above:

Similarities ✓ the “Muslim Ban” on air travel, employing white nationalists as staffers, packing the supreme court with extreme conservative justices, giving permanent tax cuts to the rich, expanding the presence of immigrant concentration camps, cozying up to foreign dictators, directly pursuing strikes and assassination attempts against middle-Eastern military generals and diplomats, trying to start a trade war with China, discrediting his chief medical advisor on factual statements about Covid, saying Black Lives Matter protestors were “burning down cities”, wanting to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization, declaring “far left radical lunatics” part of his “enemy from within”, sexually assaulting over a dozen women and underage girls, being a generally abusive sleazebag, also funding a genocide (Israel has always been ethnically displacing Palestinians), also building the wall, also not implementing healthcare reform (and being against what we have), also not protecting abortion rights, and also denigrating anti-genocide protestors (but not as harshly since he wasn’t the one in charge when it happened)

Differences: X Popularizing the idea of the wall in the first place, calling illegal immigrants “murderers and rapists”, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, being an avowed friend of Epstein, stating he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler’s behind closed doors when his own generals refused to nuke North Korea and blame it on someone else, egging on a far-right insurrection attempt, calling climate change a Chinese hoax, calling Covid the “China virus”

They are faaaarrrr more similar than they are different as honestly some of the “differences” I’ve noted are just because the exact quotes aren’t the same, even if some similiarly spirit quotes have been said.

Okay, nobody I can vote for will change the process. Now what?

Also dictatorships, monarchies, etc. pretty universally have some form of petition process as well, so not actually a difference…

The history of that phrase and how it re-entered modern English is fascinating though!

LLMs would have no problem doing any of this. There’s a discernible pattern in any judge’s verdict. LLMs can easily pick this pattern up.

That’s worse! You do see how that’s worse right?!?

You are factually correct, but those are called biases. That doesn’t mean that LLMs would be good at that job. It means they can do the job with comparable results for all the reasons that people are terrible at it. You’re arguing to build a racism machine because judges are racist.

I think you’re conflating formal and informal logic. Programmers are excellent at defining a formal logic system which the computer follows, but the computer itself isn’t particularly “logical”.

What you describe as:

Action A is legal. Action B isn’t. Doing X + Y + Z constitutes action A and so on.

Is a particularly nasty form of logic called abstract reasoning. Biological brains are very good at that! Computers a lot less so…

(Using a test designed to measure that)[https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547] humans average ~80% accuracy. The current best algorithm (last I checked…) has a 31% accuracy. (LLMs can get up to ~17% accuracy.)[https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.11793] (With the addition of some prompt engineering and other fancy tricks). So they are technically capable… Just really bad at it…

Now law ismarketed as a very logical profession but, at least Western, modern law is more akin to combatative theater. The law as written serves as the base worldbuilding and case law serving as addition canon. The goal of law is to put on a performance with the goal of tricking the audience (typically judge, jury, opposing legal) that it is far more logical and internally consistent than it actually is.

That is essentially what LLMs are designed to do. Take some giant corpus of knowledge and return some permutation of it that maximizes the “believability” based on the input prompt. And it can do so with a shocking amount of internal logic and creativity. So it shouldn’t be shocking that they’re capable of passing bar exams, but that should not be conflated with them being rational, logical, fair, just, or accurate.

And neither should the law. Friendly reminder to fuck the police and the corrupt legal system they enforce.

It’s not a hierarchy per se so much as different categories/distinctions which I do think is useful. A serial killer is different than a hitman which is different than a soldier. I agree they are all functionally the same but they serve different purposes and have different characteristics which are important to keep in mind when talking about them.

That being said you’ve changed my mind on calling it a “soft” coup as it doesn’t really accurately describe the differences I was trying to convey. “Incompetent, halfhearted, and poorly planned autocoup” would be more accurate but it’s a mouthful and I don’t know if that’s the most useful distinction either.

Either case thanks for the pushback!

Several deaths:

six people died: one was shot by Capitol Police, another died of a drug overdose, three died of natural causes, and a police officer died after being assaulted by rioters.

I’ll admit it may technically be a mischaracterization, but I don’t think you understand the level of violence that is typical of “hard” coups.

LMAO at the amount of “her entire career has been about building and filling internment camps, but at least she doesn’t have the popular support for a soft coup!” in this thread.

Same, you have a said a lot of words while mostly refusing to seriously engage with anything I’ve said. If I may though; some parting thoughts:

please stop wasting people’s time with obviously false arguments like “trump and harris are the same”. not only is it wrong, it’s painfully simplistic and reductive. no nuance, just black and white thinking so that you never have to think critically.

They are not the same, they are 2 sides to the same coin. I fail to see how that heads/tails isn’t the “black and white, no nuance” mindset.

I have noticed that you threw my “parroting” and “idealism” criticisms back at me

Yeah, because I was hoping it would be a moment for you to stop and do some self-reflection because I actually listened to what you had to say warts and all.

trump will send my trans ass to a camp

No he will send our asses to a prison the same ones black, Hispanic, indigenous, poor, marganalized etc. people are currently in. The same ones Harris is repeatedly saying she wants to expand and build more of, the same ones Biden has been building out for the last 4 years.

Likely contentious but my experience has been “newb” has a slight vocal raising to indicate light-heartedness, ie:

Noob: no͞ob Newb: nyo͞ob

No. It was a shortcut I took to shortcircuit your argument that Biden is fascist. Not all dictators are fascists, but all fascists are dictators.

Then provide your definition of the term “fascist” because it clearly differs from the dictionary definition.

The U.S. government is set up in a way that makes it extremely resistant to change, both good and bad. This means that the Democrats, who at least make a token effort towards progress, face an uphill battle. Republicans, on the other hand, just want to stymie progress and roll back everything they can, and it’s always a lot easier to tear things down than build things up.

Many of the things that we see are not “stymied progress” or “roll back everything”. The modern US government today is in many ways very different than it was even 20 years ago. Republicans and Democrats have been building and modifying how the US government operates and they are making changes that directly change the form and function of government. The supreme Court and presidency did not have as much power as they do now. If you read the “Project 2025 agenda” it is not rolling things back, it is a plan for building a new thing.

If that is your argument then why don’t the Democrats simply roll back many of the extensions that have been made? If it’s easier to tear down, then the citizen’s united case should be easy to destroy? We could revert to 1960s federal tax rates? Repeal the homeland security act? That argument requires an extremely ahistorical understanding, but one you seem to share with the “make America great again” crowd.

Our system is inherently dysfunctional, with many of the advances in progress that we’ve made lately have been due to Supreme Court decisions, and, well, the Republicans seized control of it and are now using it to roll back those advances. In fact, now that they’re obviously in the bag for Trump, they’re making nonsensical and unconstitutional decisions that will hand Trump a lot of power that will make things a lot worse for all of us.

If only we could’ve elected a democratic president in between Trump’s first and second term…

your weak grasp on how the American government works

You have a good grasp on how the de jure government works, but seem to be rather ignorant (seemingly intentionally) of how the de facto government works. That ignorance is what I’m trying to highlight and why you keep ending up in disagreements. You can keep repeating what you read in your AP US history book but you should really be paying more attention to when it doesn’t match the present material conditions.

I do know that we need to do something actionable, and not throw our hands up and go “we’ve tried everything and we’re all out of ideas”. Your idealism clouds your mind to the point where you’re actively working against what you’re professing to believe

Funny, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Your idealism surrounding what the Democratic party is, and it’s purpose, has you actively working and arguing against your beliefs.

compare and contrast Harris’s proposed policy agenda and Trump’s Agenda 47/Project 2025 and tell me that they’re the same.

I don’t care what they say, I care what they do and they will both do the same thing.

if you somehow view even Trump and Romney as the same

They are not, but the messaging surrounding them at the time was. Similiarly going from the first black president to Jim Crow Joe is quite the difference on the Democratic side as well.

I don’t think that leftist organizing will face quite that amount of pushback.

Then you live under a rock.

the man sent goons in unmarked vans to harass, detain, and intimidate BLM protesters in Portland.

Using presidential powers created under Bush and expanded under Obama. It was a more brazen use of those powers than usual, but not too out of the ordinary if you’ve paid attention to events in Ferguson, standing rock, etc.

you can’t discern the painfully obvious difference between the mediocre status quo Harris and the absolutely fascist Donald Trump

The “mediocre status quo” is absolutely fascist.

You are engaging with a different comment thread, if you would like to engage with that thread and not be dismissive and condescending then go over there. (Lol, seriously why did you feel it necessary to post a screenshot of the og ‘Charlie Brown had hoes’ tweet?! 🤣)

Would you like to take a pass at answering the above rhetorical questions?

Then who has the power to fix anything?

To be clear your dividing line between “fascism” and not is “dictatorship”? You have no problem calling the USSR and PRC dictatorships (assuming due to the functionally 1 party systems).

A 2 party system where one gets to dictate what the other can/cannot do is a dictatorship is it not? Or else what do you mean by the Democrats can’t do anything because the “system is kinda rigged against them”? My argument is actually that “corporatism” is the 1 party dictatorship in the US which I believe is a stronger argument but also requires a deeper dive…

The word choice of “fascist” is deliberate so that you take the current state of things seriously because your belief that others disagree with you because they ‘just don’t understand how government works’ is a very unserious one.

I would be curious to know what the “effective difference” between, historically, Trump and Biden is because the functional difference has been negligible. I’m also old enough to recall the Obama vs Romney and old enough to recall they were also marketed as polar opposites. The only major difference between then and now is the faces and increased normalization.

We’ll still be able to organize under Harris, and that won’t be the case with a Trump regime.

Have you not been paying attention to the attempts at organizing under the current Biden administration?

We’re fighting against a century of antisocialist propaganda, and that’s going to take a long time to undo

As well as nationalistic propaganda which I am desperately trying to help you see past. The actual workings of the us government are significantly different than what was taught in your AP high school history class and I need you to have more intellectual curiosity and less parroting.

if you actually think Harris will purge trans people

Yes, the only difference is that Trump will actively encourage vigilantism while being largely ineffective whereas Harris will do the ‘I promise we are doing everything in our power to prevent these gross mischarges of justice!!! But we need to build more prisons in order to effectively combat attacks against our democracy.’ song and dance. See the “kids in cages”, Roe v Wade, war on the homeless, Iran escalation etc. comparing Trump Vs. Biden.

if you think that voting third party accomplishes anything at all

It’s at least not a vote for dictatorship. I agree it’s functionally useless but I’m hoping to help you understand how it’s not any less useless than a vote for Harris. My goal isn’t to convince you to vote third party, my goal is to help you understand other viewpoints instead of actively belittling those with different perspectives.

So the only ones who have the power to fix the system are Republicans? If that’s the case why isn’t the strategy then to vote Republican and change their hearts and minds instead?

Or if you legitimately believe the only way to accrue enough political power is to become indistinguishable from that which you’re trying to replace, does it matter if it gets replaced at all?

(Mostly rhetorical questions, I just strongly believe that you have an incorrect analysis of this situation and what must be done to change it and am hoping to provide other perspectives because you are not getting it…)