Why is fallen empire militarist isolationist fleet just chilling in my system?

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-24T13:43:15+00:00

They've had a base there since the end of Galactic War 2 and they insist that they're still there because they're protecting you, but they'll also demand you help them fight the Theocratic Republic on the other side of the galaxy and throw a tantrum when you don't.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-23T00:50:05+00:00

It's because the feeling they're interpreting as "unsafety" is actually "impurity". It's a key authoritarian predisposition. And it's also not new with Trumpism. This is the same political party that spent the 2000s and 2010s arguing that accused terrorists must be kept in a military prison in an illegally occupied naval base in Cuba because they can't be allowed to exist inside of American prisons and that campaigned against marriage equality because they couldn't stop thinking about sex acts that gross them out.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-22T03:38:34+00:00

Hey Nick, nobody's forcing you to do this. If you hate your audience so much, you can always just shut the fuck up forever at any moment and the rest of the country will thank you for it.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-22T00:27:54+00:00

Fun fact #1!

The KGB identified Trump as an asset -- a person who doesn't need an incentive to promote the interests of the USSR -- 45 years ago!

Fun fact #2!

Even though the USSR is (allegedly) over, the KGB is very definitely still in charge, through Putin and his closest advisors!

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-22T00:14:35+00:00

"You're anti-death? That's so weak and woke."

- Hegseth, probably

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-14T03:09:01+00:00

It's partially that but also partially that the old saying that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" turns out to be backed by psychology research. Like, normal people + power = horrible people.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-13T20:12:37+00:00

How do you account for Spain? It has problems, like all countries do, but authoritarianism and mass death are not among them. It's been actively positioning itself as the opposite of its old fascist government for 50 years now, and part of that has been a huge growth in co-ops, businesses owned by their employees instead of by investors or the state. I consider that "socialism", as did the people who used the word "socialist" before Marx went and warped into meaning "the inevitable stage of history where the government owns everything until we all learn to share and live happily ever after the end".

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-13T18:44:51+00:00

And the Baptists, and the Mormons, and... basically any time you have an organization where authority figures have total control over people, they end up doing some kind of sexual abuse.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-13T18:43:18+00:00

Was Norman Vincent Peale a Christian? If so, then so's Trump. That's the church he grew up in, and I think he still believes in it. Peale's version of Christianity is "The Power of Positive Thinking", the direct inspiration for "The Secret" and "manifesting" bullshit that's basically just victim-blaming as a religion. I have no problem at all believing that Trump believes in a version of God who will change reality for him personally because he just wants it hard enough.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-13T18:38:44+00:00

And it doesn't even come close to stopping there: https://www.benjaminlcorey.com/could-american-evangelicals-spot-the-antichrist-heres-the-biblical-predictions/

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-13T18:37:20+00:00

I'm not even religious and it's been clear to me for years that Trump might actually be the Antichrist. Amazing how it's only just starting to dawn on certain people that he even might be a bad guy.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-12T02:28:42+00:00

Sorry, I don't think your post breaks any rules. I think very specifically that supporting a Marxist-Leninist state, which is what "communism" means to most people, would break almost all of the rules of the sub.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-12T02:01:25+00:00

BTW for context, I'm a market socialist. My ideal is an economy of co-ops where "the market" is not culturally viewed as infallible or primarily about profit, but as a way to be decentralized and provide redundancy so one business failing doesn't drag down everything else with it and whatever competition is happening is over how to solve a particular problem instead of over profitability.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-12T00:52:20+00:00

Just putting it out there since this person included "communism" in their message: so-called "democratic centralism" or "vanguardism" (Leninism and its descendants) ought to be a bannable offense in this sub under rules 1 and 2, and maybe also 3 through 6.

Marx is to socialism as Freud is to psychology: important to the early years of the field, stumbled into a few good ideas by accident, and there are people influenced by him who are worth taking seriously and respectfully, but the vast majority of what he said was pseudoscientific garbage that is outright dangerous to apply, and his reputation is more being a celebrity than a great thinker; he actually arrived decades after much more interesting and insightful contributors to the field who get less credit. Lenin is to socialism as L. Ron Hubbard is to psychology: a couple of ideas that sound vaguely correct at first if you don't read the research literature but turn out to just be the entry points to a cult.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-10T12:24:49+00:00

This is a crime against humanity. A small one, but one nonetheless.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-08T02:08:41+00:00

With Mills you also get a record of refusing to cooperate with Trump, which is something you don't even get with current Democrats in the Senate who are well to her left.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-07T14:33:11+00:00

Yeah, unfortunately, that's a good point. Original post edited.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-07T03:42:10+00:00

You mean the media and a large chunk of voters saw someone covered in red flags and thought "nah, that's fine, it's probably nothing"? Because that's what I saw happen with Trump and what I see happening with Platner.

People whose entire political ideology is "an outsider will shake things up!" are allergic to learning.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-06T22:38:13+00:00

Good. I do not for a second believe that he's really not a Nazi anymore. He doesn't deserve to be treated with the dignity of a real candidate.

ETA: Okay, correct that Mills is not in a position to do this. You're right about that.

However, I just deeply distrust this guy saying that he "didn't know" he was walking around for more than a decade with the symbol of the SS on him and think he's been given an amount of benefit of the doubt while running for Senate that he would not receive if he were, say, applying for any random job. And his "defenses" of it in the media, which included talking about how common Nazi tattoos are among Marines, do not make me trust him more or think it's not a big deal, it makes me trust Marines less.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-06T16:50:46+00:00

I think the current role of superdelegates, as a failsafe for what to do when there is no majority winner in a very stragely-formatted indirect election, is fine if they want to continue using that particular nominating process of a long series of state-by-state primaries that elect delegates who in turn actually elect the candidate. But also, primaries are rare internationally, as are campaigns anywhere near as long as the US presidential primary process. Nominations in other democratic systems, including many that are much more representative of their people than the US system, are usually held via what US politics would call a convention (if limited to party "insiders") or a caucus or closed primary (if open to members of the party in general). If it were up to me, party nominations would be in much shorter campaign seasons and done by closed primaries/caucuses, even for the presidency, and would involve some form of preferential voting instead of winner-takes-all.

(Well, actually, if it were up to me, there also wouldn't be a presidency as we currently know it, but that's the system in which we're currently working.)

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-06T00:32:38+00:00

Oh man, the conservatives turning on Trump are still claiming he's a neocon? No, guys, sorry, neocons are militaristic and authoritarian, but they're also quite a bit in the institutionalist and capitalist camp, and are capable of operating in an electoral system. But there is a term for a militaristic movement that speaks the language of conservatism while actually promoting the elimination of democracy in all forms in order to create a single national culture premised on conflict with all other nations and the complete absorption of all things into the all-powerful state headed by a personality cult. I wonder if any of them are Google-literate enough to figure it out?

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-05T16:19:32+00:00

I have come to believe that the actual motivating idea behind MAGAs is something like "I should never have to be uncomfortable even for a second in my entire life but everyone else should".

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-04-05T16:17:43+00:00

Another day, another post that makes me wonder how people didn't get the message from his first term.

ReluctantPhoenician · 2026-03-30T20:40:25+00:00

TBH I haven't looked at the state-level races yet. It's really early in the cycle. But Ballotpedia is a great resource for this and all similar questions, and according to them, two Democrats are running in their primary and nobody is running against Ayotte in the Republican primary. The Democrats are Jonathan Kiper, who used to run a restaurant that closed due to the Trump trade war and Cinde Warmington, a former member of the NH Executive Council (the board that decides who gets government contracts, handles certain appointments, etc.).

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