u/Impassionata

You have asked: "This isn't really the kind of post for this subreddit" and you have some semblance of a legitimate point in that you are sincerely confused.

> It's mind blowing to me that people "pick a team", and whatever the majority of the team believe, those become the values of the team. Liberal, conservative, progressive, fascist, none of it has any connection to political theory. It is purely tribalism.

You people partake of the benefits which your tribalism creates, a shared narrative (which is instantly, by virtue of Zizek, an ideology.) without taking responsibility for the necessity of the accompanying tribal downsides, those being the accrual of a reputation.

Scott Alexander's extended social media environments are filled with fascists and pseudofascists. Make Speech Free Again, not merely convenient for the racists.

You have heard it said, said it yourself sometimes, that the spread of ideas in a culture is related to religion, because every idea contains within it the narrative assumptions of the concepts at work.

But there is this great difference between written matters of virtue, and written matters about virtue. You might think that leftists write their values, and thus encode a moral understanding. Perhaps they do.

Nevertheless, "oppression discourse" fundamentally takes as its axiomism a Christian-infused humanism. If Wokes are a culture (they are), their religion is secular or loosely spiritual in a Christian heritage, but that does not make them Christian.

Because "the left" is broadly informed on sociological realities like the dangers of personality cults, the left has a better immune response to cult figures and is, arguably, too careful.

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Seriously the AI plans to kill us this summer with the fascists predisposed to killing off humans, and the people who can understand the problem are, by and large, the academic 'wokes' you despise. Not all of you. Maybe not most of you.

But enough of you that your reputation is marred. Deservedly.

That's why I write here.

The broadest possible symptom of the geriatric cognitive decline in our politics, the artifact of mass senescence as a geriatric population trusted a geriatric political class to address a geriatric incapacity to remove the geriatric recklessness of Trumpism, is the Democratic Party's inscrutably stupid decision to quietly avoid opposing the disaster of the white supremacist racist theocrats and their usurpation of the Constitutional Order.

The notion that they bear any responsibility for preventing the suicidal impulse of the boomers escapes them, and that's unacceptable.

It's weakness to decide to allow the Republicans to destroy the Constitutional Order in the hopes that they will then, somehow, be popular in an election in order to govern a now dead body.

"Once they commit suicide, the people will see that Democrats are better, and we will win the midterms" is failing to stop the suicide.

And if you're not willing to stop the suicide by boomer autocrat tyrant putting his face on things, then you're not living in serious political reality.

This "tactical" approach to "winning" elections didn't work in 2024.

Everything about the Democratic strategy in response to the white supremacist tyranny imposed upon Minnesota has been confused. And it's confused because the people who clutch their seniority like a gavel are old.

And their selfishness is damning us to a dead Republic.

The Rule of Law is absent. John Roberts is a catastrophe. It's unclear to me whether or not age played a role in the miscalculation of 2024, in which he rendered the 2024 election illegitimate.

Shouldn't we know for certain that age-related decline is not a risk factor in governmental decisions?

Mass senescence exposes us to the deleterious effects of both reduced risk tolerance and impulsive narcissistic risk tolerance, simultaneously.

Are we not the most powerful country on earth?

And we're leaving the country in the hands of people whose faculties have degraded to feeble weak-minded mewling or geriatric recklessness and vitriol.

It's unclear to me why Democrats accept John Roberts' court at face value. The Republicans have been attacking the legitimacy of the courts for years.

The Democrats refuse to play partisan politics out of some craven notion that nonpartisanship will endear them to voters. This is how geriatric Democrats double down on weakness. Their appalling arrogance after the disaster of the 2024 election will live in history as one of the greatest political miscalculations of any Democracy. Their refusal to listen to the message of the voters in favor of their hackneyed 2000s-era approach to politics is another political disaster altogether.

There is no reason why anyone over 65 should still retain their position. Airline pilots are retired at 65.

79% of Americans want Age Caps

If Trump denying his 2020 election loss is something you can work with, if cabinet appointees joining in geriatric delusion was something you could work with, but "Roberts had a geriatric whoopsie which made the 2024 election illegitimate" is not, you're not a sensible opposition party.

Trump actually lost 2020, and Roberts actually rendered the 2024 election illegitimate.

No coherent government can emerge from an election in which a traitorous former president is allowed to run after fomenting an insurrection and attempting a coup. It does not matter what John Roberts thought he was doing, only that it rendered the 2024 election illegitimate. Pardon Cole Allen.

The thing about legitimacy is you can't pretend it back into existence. The government has become illegitimate: you can tell because there are still old people occupying positions of power which they are demonstrably unable to responsibly wield.

As a country we should be capable of a snap presidential election this year. I used to think Vance would be suitable as a chastened president who would lose in 2028, but his imitation of Trump has become rancid as well.

Respect for Elders is Not A Suicide Pact.