He was not executed by the US federal government. He was executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia.

You would certainly lose a lot of money masturbating in a bus. You’ll be kicked off the bus, arrested for indecent exposure, and have to pay a fine and court costs plus community service.

What do you mean by “keep fighting”? How are you fighting?

I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing these past months. I signed the petition to bring forth a ballot measure to institute instant-runoff voting in Oregon. When it was placed on the ballot, I was actively talking to everyone I knew to convince them to vote yes (the ballot measure did not pass). I donated $50 to the campaign of Janelle Bynum, who unseated Republican Lorie Chavez-Deremer in the extremely competitive Oregon 5 constituency where I live. I helped my grandparents read through the voter’s guide and mail in their ballots.

This isn’t intended to be a competition, I just want to know what your idea of “fighting” is.

Okay, so what are you going to do about it?

When you make up your own religion you can set the rules to be whatever you want, including refusing to eat pumpkin pie

Well, it’s not like they had anywhere to be. They were just wandering around in the desert for a while.

But Asia Minor ain’t gonna conquer itself!

“The Democrats” are a lot less cohesive than you’re giving them credit for. Yes, there’s a national committee and several important figures within the party, but there is no single “leader of the Democratic Party” who dictates policy down to their underlings. Plenty of times we’ve seen prominent Democrats in power defy the party leaders and suffer no immediate consequences.

The traditional American political system is very decentralised. Parties are more like labels that politicians adopt rather than actual vehicles for political control. Anyone is free to join any party and nobody needs the party’s permission to stand for election.

Meanwhile, if you take a look at how political parties work in other countries, there’s usually a person holding the title of “party leader”, that usually being the president, leader of the opposition, prime minister, or holder of some other important state office. The party leader is in control of the entire party and all of the party’s elected officials are expected to follow the party’s official ideology as dictated by the leader. If they refuse, then they will be kicked out of the party. The party leadership has complete control over who is allowed in the party and who it nominates to stand for election.

The Democratic Party has several important leaders. Biden, of course, is the president and thus the most influential. But he’s not the dictator of the party. He still has to negotiate and work with the likes of Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakim Jefferies in the House for his agenda. And, of course, Biden doesn’t have the power to dictate policy to the various state chapters of the party, which have their own local leaders setting agendas independent of what Biden wants.

Contrast this with the Republican Party, which in recent years has become a lot more hierarchical, with Trump as the undisputed party leader. Trump’s power over the party is all informal, but informal power is still power and the reality is that Trump, as the de facto leader of the Republican Party, can almost unilaterally dictate who the party nominates and what the party’s policy platforms will be on a national scale. That sort of centralisation just isn’t present in the Democratic Party.

I didn’t say the national presidential primaries were clean and fair. I said that local primaries are. And that is true.

Regardless, nothing you said changes the fact that when it came down to actual votes in the primary, those who voted in the Democratic primary seemed to prefer moderate neoliberals over social democrats and progressives in 2016 and 2020.

All this complaining about the primary process amounts to useless hand-writhing because no amount of calling for reform or argumentation is going to change the system. Calling for people to be “up in arms” is a useless activity because being angry by itself means nothing. If you want change, you need power. If you want power, you need to get it by playing within the rules of the current system.

So vote in the damn primaries to get the party to nominate progressives and tell your mates to do the same. Start or sign ballot initiatives to move to nonpartisan blanket primaries and ranked-choice voting.

Student loans are collected by contracted third-party loan servicing organisations, not the Government.

If you don’t pay, the servicer can initiate legal proceedings against you on their own regardless of what’s happening within the Education Department.

I know it’s just a meme and the accuracy of ancient history/religious folklore is always going to be questionable anyway, but don’t you think it’s reasonable that an army of orderly and disciplined soldiers would move just a bit faster and more efficiently than a band of refugees?

Slightly related, but apparently people also do this to the testicles of the Charging Bull statue in New York City.

Can someone explain this one to me?

How it works on paper and how it works in reality are two different concepts.

Yes, the Party can nominate whoever it wants by fiat, but… do their own self-established rules (which they do follow) allow them to do that? Do you really think that’s how it works in reality?

This is like saying “the NFL is a private organisation and can declare any team they want to be the winner of the Super Bowl without paying attention to the result of the games”. Yes, that’s technically legally true but that’s not how it actually works in reality.

I honestly believe that the situation in Palestine has gotten to a point that if an election is held, Palestinians will vote an extremist government into power with an agenda of revenge whose policies are to wipe Israel and the people off the face of the Earth. Regardless of whether you think Israel deserved that, what will actually happen if they try is that the US will help Israel annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip and exterminate the Palestinian nation. And they will succeed.

Good does not always triumph over evil.

Of course that’s true, but the rules surrounding superdelegates and other tomfoolery wasn’t enough to make a difference in any recent presidential primary. 2024 was an anomaly but it seemed pretty likely Kamala would have won the nomination regardless (this is not an excuse to not hold a primary).

The rules for primaries to legislative or local offices are actually completely clean and fair, at least as far as I can tell.

I think it’s important to highlight the importance of primary elections here. Unlike most other countries, the process of choosing who a party nominates to stand for election is entirely controlled by voters in the USA through primary elections.

The Democratic Party loses because the Republican Party nominates populists that people are excited to vote for. If the Democrats want to win, they need to do the same—nominate people that voters are actually enthusiastic about.

Primary elections have historically rubbish turnout. If progressives, social democrats, and socialists want their candidates to be nominated, they should be starting information campaigns to get their fellow left-wing Democrats to vote in primary elections.

Okay, you win

The goalpost remains where it was at the beginning of this conversation. I claimed, and maintain, that requisitioning vacant housing units is not a good solution to the housing shortage.

What you’re describing is not the goalposts moving; it’s that you are attacking very specific peripheral claims without realising that if any of them are true then the overall conclusion is true. So when you attack one and I point out that another exists, you accuse me of moving the goalpost.

In order to be useful towards alleviating a housing shortage, housing units must be habitable, located where housing is needed, legally available, and in significant quantity, among other things that I can’t think of immediately. If any one of these is false, the solution doesn’t work. it is absolutely not useful in the slightest to suggest that pointing out holes in a solution one at a time is “moving the goalposts” and use that as a pretext to dismiss criticism of that solution.

It should not require explanation that for a chain of reasoning to be sound, you do not need to link to someone else saying it. I can adequately use your own sources to attack your conclusion.

Vacant housing that is for let or for sale is already on the market and will eventually be let or sold. Nobody wants to have an empty house earning no money but still have to pay tax and utility bills for it. If it really is priced too high, then nobody will rent or buy it and they will decrease the price until someone does. If you want units to become cheaper, you can’t do it by mandate with rent control ordinances or by requisition (at least not the US without paying compensation out the ass). This would be like trying to swim upstream. The only viable solution to bring down the price in this market is to create more supply (by building more units) or to depress demand (by driving people out of the city).

Just looking at the numbers for Los Angeles, at the top of my list, shows that I’m substantially right.

16,889 units out of a total housing stock of 3,591,981 units amounts to less than half of one per cent. That’s quite literally a rounding error. That number also utterly decimated by the homeless population in Los Angeles County, which is 75,518.

I’m talking about vacant homes in the city. Where the housing supply is most desperately needed. There are no such things as habitable off-market ready-to-move-in vacant homes in the city.

Holiday homes at the beach or hunting cabins in the woods aren’t useful to consider and the way your article presents it as a solution to homelessness is irresponsible clickbait. All of the jobs and economic opportunity is in the city. A house in the forest or in a beach side community of 5,000 people does nothing to alleviate the housing crisis. You would do better requisitioning hotel rooms than trying to use these buildings for housing.