That’s an unfair question. It’s just too easy to nitpick reasons why this candidate or that could never win. Just look at the list of very convincing reasons why Trump could never win. Most Democrats even believed most of them before Hillary flopped.

Nikki Haley would probably be their best choice, though I could see Marco Rubio or Lindsey Graham. Hell, Matt Gates could probably win. He’s no more horrific than Trump.

Against Biden or Harris? I think you’re overestimating how hard they were to beat. Another Republican might not win the popular vote but, unlike Democrats, Republicans don’t need a mandate to get things done.

The thing about Hillary’s loss against Trump was that it should have shocked the Democratic party into reform. The way they manipulated to get Biden and “anyone but Bernie” proved that they learned nothing.

If Trump were in prison it would be someone else. Trump didn’t start this fascist movement, he surfed it. Trump is a uniquely detestable person, but he’s not the worst President the Republican party could come up with.

That’s one.

The election that handed the country over to fascists was the Democratic primary in 2020. Democrats had a chance to change and doubled down on third-way neoliberal bullshit. Neoliberalism has never been an effective counter to a rising fascist movement.

Democrats made the mistake of thinking that Trump was the root of the problem and that defeating him in 2020 would somehow turn back the clock to the late 90s / early 2000s. All they did is put us right back into the cycle that spawned this fascist movement in the first place. In the process they lost the youth which is going to haunt this country and the world for many decades.

The biggest failure was the Democrats who nominated Biden in 2020. That primary was the last offramp that could have avoided a fascist takeover, either in 2024 or 2028, with Trump or a Trump clone.

The return of Trump might just have bought us another shot in 2028, but it’s not looking like the Democrats have learned much. Trump has a lot of similarities to Hoover and, as bad a President as he was, he was great for Democrats and progressivism. If the Democrats can get their heads out of their asses, the Trump Presidency might open a path to save the country - assuming we survive it.

Apparently not.

Let’s test it.

He got out in front of his PR operation on that one, but a lot of leftists had him pegged long before that incident. It was obvious that he was funding an astroturf campaign to deify himself, and he has always been rabidly aggressive to worker’s rights.

It will be a body of oil soon enough. Then the world will probably get on board with the new name.

That’s not a new war. It’s the war behind all the other wars.

If you are currently in the process of saving instead of withdrawing in retirement, then falling stock prices are just buying opportunities. If the grocery store puts eggs on sale, you wouldn’t fret that the eggs currently in your fridge aren’t worth as much.

When you think of it that way, it gets a lot easier to hang on after a crash, and you might start looking for ways to buy even more at bargain prices.

From the article you linked.

researchers report that the substantial antidepressant effects of psilocybin-assisted therapy, given with supportive psychotherapy, may last at least a year for some patients.

So, essentially what I said. There is a difference between an anti-anxiety or anti-depressive drug and a drug that’s useful in therapy to treat anxiety or depression.

Anti-depressive and anti-anxiety drugs function on their own, but only so long as the drug is active in your system. Psychedelics allow self reflection to enhance traditionally non-drug therapies. They can even lead to the exact opposite results when used in an improper mind set or setting.

Psilocybin is basically an antidepressant, and anti-anxiety drug.

Except that it’s totally not either of those things. In fact, it can sometimes cause panic attacks if taken ill advisedly.

Psilocybin and other psychedelics reveal to us a lot of the inner workings of our minds. That can help people to correct unhealthy thinking when they are willing to do the work. That can lead to long term reduction of anxiety and depression, but only through addressing root causes.

Yep. Biden and Harris come to mind, as does the rest of the Democratic establishment. If they didn’t prefer Trump to Bernie, this would be a much sweeter timeline.

Most of Trump’s cabinet ranges from morally indifferent to outright hostile to human beings. The only exception I think I see is RFK Jr. who is just batshit insane.

It’s an orwellian term for a package of anti-worker and anti-union laws. The centerpiece where the name comes from is making it illegal for a union shop to require workers to pay union dues.

The computers we have today help to do logistics to “feed, clothe and house the homeless”. They also help you to advocate to do more. How much of that would be comprehensible to someone living in 1900?

I’m not sure that homelessness is a problem quantum computing or AI are suitable for. However, AI has already contributed in helping to solve protein folding problems that are critical in modern medicine.

Solving homelessness and many other problems isn’t resource constrained as you think. It’s more about the will to solve them, and who profits from leaving them unsolved. We have known for decades that providing homes for the homeless in a large city actually saves the city money, but we’re still not doing it. Renewable energy has been cheaper than fossil fuels for almost as long. Medicare for all would cost significantly less than the US private healthcare system, and would lead to better results, but we aren’t doing that either.

You are interpreting the word “collaborationist” so broadly as to make it entirely useless. Apparently you would think that every prisoner in a work camp is a collaborationist if they don’t immediately cut their own throats. The system we live in is way too all encompassing to somehow fight from the outside. Some level of interaction with the system is a requirement just to survive, and fighting back against the system can require even more participation in that system. You are trying to defend yourself against being called a collaborationist by muddying the waters and making the word functionally useless. When I used the word, it was in reference to the actual rhetoric you are using that is directly related to the conflict between American workers and Oligarchs. The Oligarchs have setup a system where they can kill us en masse with total impunity, but fighting back is out of bounds. You are taking a stance that is entirely unnecessary to take for any other reason but to defend the rules that keep us trapped in a broken system.

This entire argument stems from my refusal to reduce a man to his occupation.

When state catches the killer and puts them in jail, is it reducing them to nothing but being a killer? When we take certain actions in life, that is going to have consequences in how society interacts with us in the future. This creep wasn’t just a health insurance CEO, he was by many measures the worst health insurance CEO. He traded other people’s lives for cash, and that should have consequences. That’s not a failure to recognize the breadth of his humanity, it’s saying that actions have consequences.

Was Thomas Jefferson an oppressor, a rebel, or a collaborationist?

Who said that everyone can only fit in a single box? That sure wasn’t me, I will point out though that doing away with slavery (to the extent that we did anyways) involved killing a whole lot of slave owners.

I don’t believe in free will, so this argument is kind of moot for me.

I personally think that free will as a concept is inherently nonsensical, and therefore I don’t have a position on it at all. I’ll call that agreement to that point. However, I’m not convinced that the concept of morality is entirely dependent on the concept of free will. A machine with a faulty mechanism still just does what physics say it must do, but we still call it a malfunction (bad function) and expect it to be modified to work properly. Anyways, I don’t really want to delve into a nuanced discussion of moral systems.

I beg to differ, just look at the New Deal. When the Great Depression happened,…They elected a progressive candidate in FDR…

Same war, different battle. That was a strategy that worked, to an extent. However, what works once in war doesn’t always keep working. The oligarchs learned from FDR and, when we tried this again in 2020, it failed. American oligarchs have a stranglehold on the media and decades more knowledge in how to manipulate voters. Eventually we will need progressive representation, but a lot is going to have to happen to make that possible again. We might get lucky if Trump’s presidency fails in the right ways. If nothing else, Trump is great as an agent of chaos. Maybe he shuffles the deck and suddenly we have a credible electoral strategy, but I’m not counting on it.

American society did not descend into lawlessness and anarchy.

I disagree. The rise of organized crime in the US didn’t start with prohibition. It started because oligarch strategies to divide the public on ethnic lines effectively created a bunch of isolated resistance forces. It evolved into something else, but the justification these groups used was always that their group had been unfairly shut out of prosperity. If they weren’t going to be given their due, then they would take it. It’s more self serving than a targeted assassination, but it was definitely lawlessness and anarchy.

It’s also worth noting that FDR is exactly the kind of person that the current mob would be putting on the list of assassination targets.

So far, exactly one particularly bad oligarch has been assassinated. You are making some pretty wild assumptions based on a single data point. In an oblique way, this reminds me of your point on utilitarianism. We don’t know with certainty what any action we take might lead to. Maybe this CEO was going to be the next FDR, or maybe the next Hitler. Maybe Trump will have a change of heart (or grow one) and be the next FDR himself. Anything is possible but, call me a skeptic. This is not a valid way to argue anything.

This is where you lose me. You can’t know these things. You can’t know the future 50 years in advance.

No, but I can know history, and I can see what’s going on in the world around me. Wealth and power in this country are both almost entirely in the hands of psychopaths. The psychopaths have a global disinformation machine with effectively infinite funding. The harder we have pushed for change, the more effort they have put into dividing the people into subgroups and convincing them to fight each-other. It’s a strategy that works extremely well. It’s human nature that the only way to heal those divisions is to give people a common enemy, and that has to be the oligarchs. Moving society is like advancing the plot in a book. You can’t convince the masses to do something because it is the smart thing to do. They need a narrative, and assassinations make for an interesting story. I guarantee you that the oligarchs are more concerned about that aspect of this event than anything else. Suddenly all these people across all of their carefully created subgroups are unified in expressing hatred for their actual enemies.