@WashedOutGundamPilot@NotImportant I think the logic, here, would've been that Trump goes with the crowd, the crowd camps out around Congress, and then the options are either give in and acknowledge the election was fraudulent (I don't think they even expected to get away with it, I think they expected to use "He overturned the election!!!" as the Russiagate of the next four years) or actively attack an encampment of people with the sitting president right there alongside them (which is an order most of them wouldn't have followed - I've seen videos of the leadup, most of the cops in the area were more or less sympathetic, they deal with one of the most bn crime-ridden places in the country on a daily basis).
There were certainly glowies around, but I don't think they had any real control over the situation, and they were clearly terrified over the next few days. The military standdown and pullout from Afghanistan were brought about by fear; we all saw those pics of Nat. Guard guys snubbing Biden/Harris in the aftermath. If Trump had played it a little bit smarter, and had politically reliable guards around him, things could've been a lot different.
@WashedOutGundamPilot@NotImportant That implies that the regime is stronger than it is, in multiple senses of the word. If they had the balls to do that in the face of serious opposition, they'd have done it in 2016. Further, they've still got hundreds of thousands of Trump guys in DC, and the trigger-pullers might go with Trump (at which point it's positively, definitely over for whoever ordered them to break it up, whereas if they just laugh it off and memory hole the whole thing, they get another chance in 2024, and can probably get Trump to pick some DeSantis/Kemp style person as a successor, or at least think they can).
The only real way they pull through is if Trump is out of the picture, and the crowd just sort of disperses on its own. The regime can't use hard power at any meaningful scale - it's outgunned.
I am serious about all of these things, by the way. Huge dividends to be gained from:
> Browser extension that seamlessly merges a fedi server into twitter, such that you can get banned and keep posting with no interruption of service
> Browser extension that uses modern ML models to better filter spam and shill posts on 4chan
> Underground realty service with all the good shit that realters aren't allowed to talk about
All of these things are tractable for either a small team or one guy with a lot of free time, and I'm willing to help out anyone who takes a shot at any of them pro bono.
@BigTLarrity I maintain that if one of /ourguys/ wants to make some serious XMR, setting up ArcGIS, gathering some racial data, merging in scraped data from Redfin, and creating "Weihan Zhang's No. 1 Housing Realty Application" would work wonders.
People would pay a decent sum of money for a service that lets them run a house search with things like crime and ethnicity that realters aren't legally allowed to tell you about.
> "Ahkshully, all of these people truly believe in the retarded ideology they made up to hurt you!"
Clearly not. The Jews who advocate mass immigration turn on a dime to protect Israel. They believe none of what they say. The non-Jews in the left aren't any more faithful - they're craven rather than self-interested. "Lefties as true believers" is a terrible predictive model, and anyone who internalizes it becomes less effective.
Not a fan of what ZHP has become - especially in that all of these fucking people now obsess over writing "thinkpieces" in "magazines" whose view counts barely crack three digits rather than doing anything worthwhile. One of the regime's most effective PR coups in recent years was convincing a generation of decent-if-socially-awkward writers that they were above writing to an audience of 4chan anons, and should sit around circlejerking each other impotently instead.
Still, it's a decent steelman of the RW twitter sphere's opinions. Thread:
The battlecry of the Conservative Intellectual. Categorically false, of course.
The core facet of all these peoples' narratives is that the left is organic and independent. It's a blatant lie, but they can't go without it because admitting that it's a lie is catastrophic to their self image, and to their elevator pitch. If the left isn't a group of organic, self-organized true believers, then they can't be countered by having some dork attempt to debate them - it'd be like debating the aliens from Blindsight, who can speak in order to negotiate but are not conscious nor ideological. We don't need to build a bench (by giving sinecures to this guy and all his useless friends) - we absolutely would solve everything by purging our enemies' leadership.
Rather, the Left is a top-down organization - wipe out the Lawyer's Guild in its time, pick off maybe a four digit number of people, and ban new entries, and the left never exists again. The Right, on the other hand, is truly organic - everything from Trump to GG to the trucker protest have been bottom-up.
If the Right 'wins' - if it takes power in America - all it needs to do is expunge the people at the top of the lefties' chain of command. There's no fallback system; there's no organic support. Without internet censorship, their pretense of winning the culture war is as dead and gone as it was in '16. Without their activist judges, CA would still be a vibrant red. Righties can organize in small groups, organically, and fight off any problems in their towns, so long as they aren't blocked from above. Any power vaccuum would be filled by people we'd like - the only task at hand is creating one.
This is something that, to his credit, doesn't get brought up enough. J6 could very well have been something if things had gone a little differently. If you have a million true believers in the capitol, one fat security guard with a gun is not an obstacle.
If the crowd hadn't been leaderless - if he hadn't been taken away (a palace coup? a limo driver preventing him from grabbing the wheel? we will probably never find out the real explanation.), it could very easily have been used to apply pressure. The regime was clearly scared out of its mind - enough to shut down the military, pull out of Afghanistan, and redouble its political purge at the expense of competence, even in the leadup to a major proxy war.
@akariposter@gnu2@Humpleupagus It's an interesting dynamic. The Dems used to be ostensibly anti-Israel, but with the buckbreaking of Bernie, their base has gotten the message that they're the regime's bitch unless they'd rather be *our* bitch. With the GOP, the base is sort of apathetic on Israel nowadays. There's a substantial faction that just wants AIPAC gone - the politicians of that stripe are very quiet about it, they know AIPAC tends to retaliate disproportionately. The voters of that stripe trend young - as the boomers steadily die on one end and become ever-so-slightly redpilled on the other, you'll start to see a bit more public dissent on the Right.
Nothing retard-tier or edgy, of course, more Trump from the 2016 primary, or Ann Coulter from the same period.
@shedinja@GoblinKingNoticer@rher It's like those tiktoks of those kiddie mobile games side by side with something else. I'm somewhat between generations - two videos side by side just feels wrong, but I definitely can't just sit and watch a video. Generally I'm either reading something, babysitting a ML model as it trains, or playing some sort of webgame (usually a simple puzzle game or something).
@shedinja@GoblinKingNoticer@rher I feel like there's a divide here. Half of us feel some kind of superstimulus reaction to this, and the other half of us just see it as another weird niche internet thing that we don't get.
I wonder if it's generation-based, or something else.
@Senator_Armstrong@Humpleupagus@NirtyDigger@Twoinchdestroya Any term that is used to refer to White people will eventually develop positive connotations, just as any term that is used to refer to black people will eventually become a synonym for "nigger".
@TrevorGoodchild The conspiracy theory that Zelenskyyy is using the war to kill off the poor bastards that he drafts into it is looking more plausible by the second.