Hey hey hey!

Don’t be dragging granola into this fuckwit-ocracy. It’s a perfectly reasonable low effort breakfast for those of us that are unable to cook for ourselves because we can’t find our arses with both hands for the first hour of semi-consciousness in the morning.

List of Distributist parties in the UK:

• National Distributist Party
• British National Party
• National Front

Hmmm, maybe the Catholic part isn’t the only part worth reviewing.

Also worth noting that the Conservative Party’s ‘Big Society’ schtick in 2010 was wrapped in the trappings of distributism.

Not that all this diminishes it entirely but it does seem to be an entry drug for exploitation by the right.

I gotta hold my hand up and state that I am not read up on it at all, so happy to be corrected. But my impression is that Pope Leo XIII’s conception was to reduce secular power so as to leave a void for the church to fill. And it’s the potential exploitation of that void that attracts the far right too.

Subjectivity?

And I appreciate your civil attempts at clarifying your stance too. To the degree that I think we’re both talking past each other.

On my part, even as an outsider to US politics, I have been getting more and more frustrated with a lot of the bullying rhetoric I see on this platform directed towards potential voters that are very concerned about the US’s current complicity in the ongoing genocide. I see them getting talked down to with utter contempt. Being berated by people who insouciantly weigh a potential loss of comforts at home against the real and current killing of tens of thousands of innocent civilians and the forced famine of hundreds of thousands.

Now is the only time that they can apply pressure on Biden. Now that he actually needs something from them. But (like MLK’s white moderates) people here are telling them that “now is not the time” and a whole spectrum of worse accusations too. But if the civil rights movement hadn’t agitated and pressed for change decades would have passed before the moderates would have opened their eyes and acted beyond the pale.

Personally, I agree ostensibly with your calculus (though not with your particular framing of it but it is still a very, very tight call) but if I was a US voter I would be vocally holding my vote hostage until the last moment to make sure that my discontent was given the greatest chance of not being ignored.

More importantly (and central to this whole discussion) i still believe that people have a right to respectful discourse if they can’t morally make it over the sizable hurdles.

Which brings me round back to you. You’ve been very patient and civil throughout this discourse even though we have different perspectives. So my ‘beef’ ain’t wit you my friend. Though I do wonder what is your line in the ground that if both of the two main candidates were guilty of something that you’d drop the lesser of two evils calculus and vote for a third party. For me both are terrible choices but the potential for long term democratic, human rights, and environmental protection regression under Trump cannot be underestimated

It is ‘rational’ attitudes such as this that MLK bemoaned in his Birmingham jail letters. Order above justice. An order in which the boot is not on your neck. So you minimize its dehumanizing brutality in relation to the maintenance of the day-to-day comforts you enjoy.

Hypothetically: if Biden was sending weapons and financial support to Russia in support of their war efforts but mildly denouncing Putin when pressed; and Trump was pledging full throated support of Putin and offering to nuke Kyiv; would you still feel so enthusiastic about voting for Biden or for your moral calculus? Might you lament the electoral system that has put this decision before you. Might you protest this mockery of democratic choice. Even if you internally still cede to moral calculus, might you continue to make your displeasure known and apply whatever pressure was within your purview as a voter to make. Might you be offended by people demanding you not only vote for Biden regardless your rightful concerns about Putin and the sovereignity of Ukrainians but also try to insinuate that you are part of some foreign operation to undermine the election for voicing your concerns?

Voting for big genocide or voting for small genocide is irreconcilably voting for genocide for some people. It’s a morally cognizant choice for some to not want to put the endorsement of their vote on either.

Let me crystal clear. I do not think that your position or attitude are moderate either. Haranguing people to vote against their conscience is a bad look. Big genocide, small genocide, both are genocide. If that overloads some people’s ‘election calculus’ it’s a reasonable and engaged reaction. If anything talking down to them is more likely to turn them off voting at all.

Some of these are clearly wedge-driving divisive (sic) trolls posing as moderates. Especially those hectoring voters that vote with their conscience now that attitudes toward a current genocide is making it impossible to vote for either of the frontrunners.

Potty mouth.

It looks like the intent is to deter any of the neighbouring countries from interfering with Isreal’s ongoing genocide.

When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I’m rich and I complain about inequality they say I’m a hypocrite. I’m beginning to think they just don’t want to talk about inequality.

Would that it were.

Is that you Howard Moon?

If you haven’t seen any clear bias then you probably have a close enough outlook to them to not notice. And that’s fine, I don’t require everyone to have the same opinion as me for their comments to have value.

My impression of bias is probably born out of the leading polls that rightwing media and thinktanks in the UK commission them to do. You can fairly argue that these polls are externally commissioned so their tenor is a product of their issuer not yougov. But the overall impression I got was that they could be readily depended on to produce misleading propaganda against labour when it wasn’t being run by corporate technocrats.

It’s a serious issue when there’s a clear political bias in the founders. They put more effort into steering the narrative than objectively reporting it.

Fivethirtyeight only grades them on their ability to predict american election results. I don’t think that’s the same as advocating for their efficacy in producing leading public opinion polls.

Just the five minutes. Thank you. Anyway, I did.

Oh I’m sorry, is this a five minute argument, or the full half hour?

A stitch in time saves nine.

-Pliny the elder