The post you linked was primarily about the direct fallout of COVID. They very directly said what they were talking about was a basically overnight charge.

My point is about societal change. The kids aren’t “wusses”, they’re reacting rationally to a changing world. You grew up with much lesser consequences for the risks you took. Those are no longer justifiable risks. Even flipping a lightswitch can trigger a devastating chain of consequence if you have a crazy power tripping teacher, so why bother? Phone screens are backlit anyway.

I take opposition to the way you’re framing this. Are you a wuss because you didn’t work 16 hours a day in a coalmine as a kid? Every generation thinks the next is too soft. The world changes, and the skills and techniques to successfully navigate it change.

This seems like a really dated take, overall.

You grew up in a time when you could make mistakes because your mistakes would be forgotten. That is no longer the case. Everything they do and say is recorded and distributed for later scrutinization.

It’s not 2004, being criticized on social media can be career ending. They constantly watch beloved celebrities get raked over the coals overnight because they said or did something 20 years ago that society has since decided is wrong. Who knows what society will retroactively demonize in 20 years?

The job market is competitive, good luck getting a corporate data entry job without a Bachelor’s, and college is competitive. The wrong mistake can snowball into life changing inconvenience. Or life ending, police absolutely do get called for minor things, and if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time that can be the end for you.

They’re living in 21st century reality, not an 80s comedy. There are more consequences than a curmudgeonly principal shaking his fist. Everything is being watched, recorded, and scrutinized, by everyone, all the time. A few laughs are not worth the possible consequences. Why stand out? The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

Krishna isn’t even really part of the Trimurti, he’s an avatar of Vishnu. You could draw parallels to Christ, “personal” is a crucial qualifier there.

It was my understanding that even then, Vishnu and Shiva are aspects of Brahman. It’s just that Brahman is so abstract and transcendent that you don’t really “worship”. If you view worship as a form of evocation, Brahman doesn’t really give you any attributes to focus on.

It’s like playing music to evoke a mood. Holding down every key of an organ can only really convey the idea of “EVERYTHING, undifferentiated”. It’s certainly a compelling idea, but it lacks nuance and texture. If you want to convey something more “useful”, you have to be more selective.

Trump is not the end all be all of political aspiration. His flavor was not the dominant streak at the time of this interview. Before, and beside, his relatively recent claim to political power were, and are, claims predicated on theocratic moral justification.

Theocracy is always about lip service. The ones who are actually about service to God aren’t concerned with power. Religion, as an institution, just provides a convenient “moral” claim to power to be exploited by power-hungry individuals.

There are 2 or 3 candidates for that

I’ve never heard that. I’ve always heard that Brahman = God, the Trimurti (Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma) are the three main “aspects”, and every other “god” is a further “subdivision” thereof.

Clearly they mean the Mercator projection. Since they’re not in 8th grade anymore ,they’ve realized the shortcomings.

Rotate the nozzle 180° so the angle is steeper, then wiggle

With a little modification

I’m consistently in the middle of many, many books. I use dollar bills so I get a reward for actually finishing.

Yet you claim they are the easier party to move

I very much did not claim that. I said they are the easier enemy to fight. That is a very, very different thing.

Provide my wife the infrastructure she needs to garden effectively. I am excellent at developing systems and awful at gardening, and she is awful at developing systems but excellent at gardening.

Same. The redneck stuff would be more concerning if I didn’t know how to fix redneck stuff.

But if you only just now seize them, the rich still have all the money and personal property they already accumulated.

If every person that said this just voted their beliefs instead of spreading this ideology like a cancer

So if every person just spontaneously decided to ignore history, human nature, and the mechanics of a first past the post election system, and each of their beliefs aligned perfectly to rally behind the same candidate? That stresses even the wildest suspension of disbelief.

if the Democrats even have a party left after that, you would be able to use your bloc to pressure them into being everything you say they are.

What exactly do I say they are?

And when has that ever happened? You can’t get a roomful of Leftists to agree on what the Left is, much less a national population of Leftists to agree on a specific course of action.

Not all Republicans are fully behind Trump, but they’ll be damned if they vote for a democrat.

And that’s why your course of action can’t work. The right wing is authoritarian, they unify behind a figurehead. Every Leftist voting their beliefs leads to dozens of uncoordinated splinter groups, too busy in-fighting to unify behind anyone who could defeat the lockstep of right wing voters. They don’t spend time fantasizing about impossible hypotheticals, they learn the mechanics of the game and play to win. They make concessions, choose a horse that can win, and unify.

Leftists are a minority. They don’t have to be, if they could focus on winning rhetoric to pull voters instead of hoping everyone just spontaneously agrees with them, but they’re too busy criticizing the ones who try to develop winning strategies because they fail all the Leftist purity tests. Republicans win because they vote for candidates they disagree with, because splitting the vote loses FPTP elections.

When the Left votes their beliefs, the right sweeps them every time. The Democrats don’t cave to pressure to move their platform to the fractured left, they go hunting for “moderates”. This is how we get Democrats catering to Cheney. Leftist appeal to ideological purity.

Parties win when enough people vote for them. You can’t beat propaganda with purity. You beat propaganda with propaganda.

It was $60 when I looked

Easier than the other. And not quite so hostile to human rights.

with the exact same policy, but it’s a woman or a POC doing the policy

That’s just objectively false. No, their policy isn’t good enough, but to pretend that it’s exactly the same is disingenuous.

The Democrats are always going to be controlled opposition, I just care about them beating MAGA long enough to develop an alternative that can actually replace them. I don’t vote for representation, the ones who represent me don’t have enough support to win yet. I’m voting for the easier-to-defeat enemy.

My alternative is mass unionization and more Luigi. Gotta hit the capitalists where it hurts.

Agreed. How long do you think that will take though, and are we supposed to just keep letting fascists entrench themselves in the meantime? That’s the point of voting lesser evil, to slow down fascism so it’s easier to defeat when proper praxis is mature enough to actually defeat it. We’re not voting for representation, we’re voting for weaker enemies.

Your plan is “democrats are all we got guess we’ll have to work with them.” The democrats are no longer worth working with.

False. My plan is “Democrats are the lesser evil, let’s make sure they keep winning until we have something to replace them with. I’d rather flight a neo-lib than a full-bore fascist”