A guy on there told me that I should thank liberals for the Civil Rights Act, and when I pointed to the letter from A Birmingham Jail, his response was, "and yet they passed the Civil Rights Act a year later. Curious, no?" Like...yeah dumbass, because actual progressives kept pressuring them publicly, like King did in the Birmingham letter.

Uh...Political Memes on .world is not socialist. Much more of a, "vote blue, no matter who," and, "but her emails," vibe over there.

Watchmen is a perfect example of how Zach Snyder doesn't understand what he's adapting. The original story is a deconstruction of the superhero, showing how sad and broken these characters would be in real life: right-wing murders, rapists, schluby middle-age guys with ED...Snyder takes those characters and films them like they're cool and bad-ass. Aesthetically, it's a beautiful, shot-for-shot adaptation, but at no point did it occur to him that the guy in a trench coat muttering to himself about filth and removed wasn't supposed to be cool. It didn't occur to him that a group of people who completely fail to stop the villian weren't supposed to have action sequences straight out of The Matrix. It didn't occur to him that a story about what superheroes would look like in the real world should be realistic.

The part that truly enraged me was a small moment at the very end. In the comic books, after everyone leaves, Dr. Manhattan goes to see Ozymandias one last time before leaving Earth forever. Ozymandias asks him if he was right in the end, and Manhattan tells him, "Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends." Ozymandias asks what he means by this, but Manhattan leaves without answering. In the movie, Snyder replaces Dr. Manhattan with Owlman in this interaction. Ozymandias' story ends with a character who is essentially God telling him that his entire plan was pointless, and Snyder swaps out God for the story's everyman character. It's a perfect distillation Snyder's inability to understand even the simplest subtext.

Well, take that, established rules of comedy!

...The previous sentence was a reference to common idiom, "If you have to explain the joke, then it's not funny," while the current sentence is an example of irony. Here, I am not using irony as it's colloquially used, which could best be described as a funny coincidence, but rather by its literally definition of, "the use of words expressing something other than their literal intention." While the literal intention of my words is an explanation of my first and second sentences, the non-literal intention is a continuation of the premise that I am over-explaining my own jokes, thereby using irony to create what some would call a, "meta," joke.

The point of the comment wasn't to blame the drag queens. It was to reverse the implicit shame of being, "caught," that's in the title, giving the connotation that it's shameful or embarrassing to associate with the GOP candidate, not the other way around. It was just a little quip that I'm sure I've made much funnier with this explanation.

I think you mean, "Drag queens caught partying with GOP candidate who called them pedophiles."

Yeah, considering how bad their campaign did with abortion, cat ladies, and misogynistic bullshit, my gut says this moment did some damage.

I thought Vance won the debate (mostly through Gish galloping), but I'm not sure it's going to matter. The big moment of the evening was him being muted for aggressively talking over two women, and it wasn't a great look. I'm sure it played well to Trump's base of incels who hate journalists, but I doubt anyone else found it very appealing.

They're somewhat different. Our news media doesn't properly question our security agencies (they basically stopped doing this after 9/11), and Israel is our strongest Middle East alley, so they tend to present the Israeli narrative of the war with little or no scrutiny. That being said, given the sheer amount of destruction and death caused by the Israeli bombings, our media really can't ignore the suffering of the Palestinians this time. They're still far too deferential to Israel's justification for the suffering, but they're not ignoring.

Uh-huh. I'll be honest, it doesn't sound like you have any more influence or sway over your representatives than I do. I also get replies for telling them that they will lose my support over an issue, and Ed Markey's office was never more responsive than when he was being primaried by Joe Kennedy. So if it's all the same to you, I'm gonna keep voting third-party and making sure my representatives know they are replaceable, since it seems to be working at least as well as your strategy of unconditional support.

It didn't actually have any effect on 2016. Even if every single Jill Stien voter had gone to Clinton, she still would have needed to win over 50% of Gary Johnson's voters to win.. Since it's pretty unlikely that half of the Libertarian party's votes were from disaffected leftists, no, the protest vote did not cost Hillary the election.

Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren, and Ayanna Pressley. What representatives do you have at your beck and call with your amazing volunteering skills?

I call my Senators and my rep all the time. I tell them I'm a voter in my district and I care about X. They've never once asked me if I voted for them or how much money I gave them.

LOL, what? Are you high? No, they're not going to listen to you if they have your vote already; why would they work for it if they already have it? And if they only tried to appeal to people who already voted for them, then they wouldn't spend all this time and energy trying to appeal to moderate conservatives, would they? Why aren't they ignoring them, and instead only ignoring the left?

And you think they're going to listen to me if I give them money? How much money do you think I'm giving them? Do you think I have a super pac? What do you think the conversations are in DCCC headquarters are like? "Hey guys, I know that the financial-services sector gave us $462 million in 2020, but @pjwestin just donated $50, and he'd like us to reinstate Glass-Steagall, maybe we should listen to him?" Like, Christ, maybe in deluded for thinking enough third-party votes will scare them, but at least I'm not naive enough to think I can negotiate with someone by giving them everything they want upfront.

You can only know that with accurate polling, and accurate polling doesn't exist.

C'mon dude. You really think California is gonna go red this year? Grow up.

lol, and I cannot stress this enough, lmao.

I mean, I'm represented by Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren, and Ayanna Pressley, so...it's not not working. It's certainly better than voting for Democrats unconditionally while I whine about the electoral college and first-past-the-post polling.

If you live in a state that has even a slight chance to go red, yes, you should vote for Kamala. But if you live in a comfortably Blue or Red state, you should vote for the party that best reflects your ideology. I always vote for the farthest left candidate because I think that if my representatives see a strong third-party showing for a left-wing ideology, it will make them think twice before they pivot to the center.

You:

Wikipedia agrees with me

Wikipedia:

Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy as a whole or certain social hierarchies...Ideologies considered to be left-wing vary greatly depending on the placement along the political spectrum in a given time and place...In addition, the term left-wing has also been applied to a broad range of culturally liberal social movements, including the civil rights movement, feminist movement, LGBT rights movement, abortion-rights movements, multiculturalism, anti-war movement and environmental movement as well as a wide range of political parties.

Anyway, we're done here.

You are welcome to disagree with it, but your definition is not shared by Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, or Wikipedia. The Encyclopedia Britannica comes closest to agreeing with you by saying that, "Socialism is the standard leftist ideology in most countries of the world," but it does not limit its definition of the political left to socialist and communist ideologies, and it certainly doesn't say, "Left wing means ending Capitalism, not just 'reigning it in." So maybe next time, before you jump into someone's comments to tell them they're using a word wrong, check if they're actually using it wrong or simply using it in a way that doesn't align with your personal beliefs.

I've run out of ways to say this, so I'll just reiterate it one more time and be done with it; the meaning of left-wing is not that rigid and will vary based on context. It does not specifically mean revolutionary or anti-capitalist. It generally means a set of social or economic principles aimed at creating a more egalitarian society, but what that means in terms of policy will depend greatly based on the culture and system of government in place. Do I think it sucks ass that the American liberals are considered left-wing in the U.S.? Yeah. Do they meet my definition of left-wing? Fuck no. But I don't get to define that broad term based on my personal standards.

Right. So, you want to take the term, "left-wing," which has held different meanings in different contexts over more than two centuries and redefine as exclusively anti-capitalist, so you can tell liberals that they're not actually left-wing. Now that's an attempt to shift the Overton Window.