Best I could do without a definition for the stupid use of “leftist extremists” with no definition. My point is, there is zero evidence to blame this election on leftists of any stripe.

You have data to back that up I assume?

Biden had polling in his hands that said Trump would get 400 electoral votes against him on the day he decided to run for a second term. Then he held on just long enough to make certain we would have no primary and be stuck with a candidate who couldn’t shake the stink of his presidency.

Harris lost the popular vote by over 4-million votes. There aren’t that many “leftist extremists” in the whole damn country, and only a small subset of those wouldn’t have voted for Harris.

The vast bulk of those who stayed home were left leaning apolitical normies. Most of the country fits in that group.

Maybe they both die and we get Mike Johnson!

The sad part is that that also describes what the Democrats did to get us into this mess.

Jumping the gun a bit on that post mortum analysis? Put up the data or shut the fuck up you wanker. This is 100% an establishment fuck up, and you are as cognitively twisted as any MAGA freak.

What was the cool part again?

I’m not being smart or funny, but apparently I’m getting under your skin.

Say what you will about socialist beliefs, they are absolutely more nuanced, historically rooted, and varied than what you call libertarian. You also don’t see super wealthy corporate oligarchs as thought leaders on the left. Your Ayn Rand inspired cult was entirely assembled by oligarch sponsored anarcho-capitalist think tanks.

I haven’t argued for socialism of any kind here, and I won’t. You have probably heard most of the reasons why your opinions on socialism are nonsense, and you have probably not really heard any of them. I’m not wasting my time on that.

You guys all spout the same platitudes constantly and ignore every reality based argument. It’s not exactly opaque (or interesting).

Arrogance is the only language that ever penetrates with people who think in platitudes. It’s not my general attitude, it’s a tool that sometimes wakes up zombies. American libertarians are always surprised to find someone more arrogant then themselves.

What you believe to be a political philosophy is nothing but empty rhetoric assembled by powerful elitists for the express purpose of consolidating and extending their power. It’s intended from the outset to neuter actual libertarian movements. Wake the fuck up zombie.

Excerpts from the Wikipedia entry on libertarianism:

In the mid-19th century,[10] libertarianism originated as a form of left-wing politics such as anti-authoritarian and anti-state socialists like anarchists.

And

In the mid-20th century, American right-libertarian[35] proponents of anarcho-capitalism and minarchism co-opted[13] the term libertarian to advocate laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights such as in land, infrastructure and natural resources.[36] The latter is the dominant form of libertarianism in the United States.

Don’t feel too bad. Having no fucking idea what you are talking about just makes you a typical American style libertarian.

As for centralizing power, corporate personhood and broad deregulation are about the most radical systems for centralizing power that have ever existed. You are still ignoring the entire history of conflict between unions and corporations. Unions had their day using the “libertarian” model and all that came from it was disaster. It wasn’t until the labor movement gained political power and had pro-union regulations put in place that unions had any real ability to negotiate with corporate power. But that’s all reality so it’s irrelevant I guess.

Libertarianism is properly a socialist philosophy, but it’s been coopted by the far right in America who then started exporting their bullshit to the rest of the world. It’s entirely possible for two people to call themselves “libertarian” and have next to nothing in common in their understanding of what that means.

Most libertarian support of unions in America is a bad joke. It’s meaningless feel-good rhetoric that completely ignores the entire history of unions in America. Corporations have a million ways to crush unions and union organizers. Without government regulations requiring corporations to engage with unions, unions are next to impossible in reality. But that’s just fine with the kind of people attracted to the Libertarian party, because they don’t live in reality.

I was in IT back in 2001 when the Code Red virus hit. It was a very similar situation where entire enterprises in totally unrelated fields were brought down. So many infected machines were still trying to replicate that corporate networks and Internet backbone routers were getting absolutely crushed.

Prior to that, trying to get real funding for securing networks was almost impossible. Suddenly security was the hottest topic in IT and corporations were throwing money at all the snake oil Silicon Valley could produce.

That lasted for a couple years, then things started going back to business as usual. Microsoft in particular was making all sorts of promises and boasts about how they made security their top priority, but that never really happened. Security remained something slapped on at the end of product development and was never allowed to interfere with producing products demanded by marketing with inherently insecure designs.

There is a surprising variety among even those who call themselves Marxists or anarchists. Some are way more practical than others. Marx was first and foremost a critic of capitalism, and his criticisms were way ahead of their time and right on the money. Anarchism covers a whole lot of ground that I wouldn’t consider anarchism myself. The umbrella basis for anarchism is anti-authoritarianism. To me, that makes them less extreme than authoritarian socialists like in the Soviet Union or China. I’d consider myself an anarchist, but only in the margins that realize that government does play a critical role in establishing and defending freedoms.

I find that foolishness is spread pretty evenly across the political spectrum. I think most people believe what they want to believe and figure the “details” will work themselves out. Anyways, here in the US, the “far left” means things like universal healthcare, which seems a lot saner to me than the alternatives.

Neither of us live or are from the USA. So I don’t think this is relevant here.

A lot of foolishness is born in the US but doesn’t stay here. It might still be relevant.

If your friend calls themselves a libertarian, then my starting assumption would be they are wrong about everything.

It’s true that Trump made some kind of declaration as President, but that was pretty much a meaningless gesture. The US actually has no official list of domestic terror organizations, only foreign. In any case, calling antifa a terrorist organization is absurd.

A quick note on libertarianism: I consider myself a libertarian, but what passes for libertarianism in the US is anything but. Libertarianism is a left wing political philosophy, while the US Libertarian party is far right. It would be more accurate to label them as anarcho-capitalist.

That’s right wing gaslighting.

The failure was in the primaries, not in voting for the only remotely sane party in a two party system.

There would have to be some kind of currently unforseen breakthroughs before something like that would be even remotely possible. In all likelihood, quantum computing would stay in specialized data centers. For the problems quantum would solve, there is really no advantage to having it local anyways.

I remember them saying all the same exact things in the early 2000s after a slew of widespread disasters. Security will never be a higher priority than whatever cool new thing they want to sell.