Okay sure, let’s have this discussion.

The first massive favor I’ll do is give you the benefit of the doubt and accept you’re saying this in good faith and not as a right-wing sock puppet.

The next massive favor I’ll do is accept your (ostensible) plan is wildly successful, far beyond what you could reasonably hope for. Everybody is so moved by your comment that you convince 80% of Democrat voters to vote independent and every single one votes for the same independent party. Hell, I’ll even throw in 10% of Republican voters.

The only thing we won’t give you is the ranked choice voting needed to stop your idea being dumb as fuck. We’ll stick to reality for that one.

So tell us how the next 4 years play out in your head. Polls close, votes are counted. Democrats 9.8%, Toothfairy Party 44.1%, Republicans 45.9%.

Then what?

Most people who aren’t conservative psychopaths actually like their families and want to help them when they can.

You inherently claimed to be a victim by claiming that people were attacking you. You’ve done an embarrassingly bad job of damage control today.

“Said” is past tense. Yesterday, when you were pretending to be an authority on historic rocks, you said it wouldn’t wash off. I didn’t see that thread and immediately understood what they meant.

They weren’t being even slightly dishonest, but it’s clear you are. Would you have admitted you were wrong if you weren’t called out by name? My gut feeling is “not a chance”.

Oh I understand those far-right “others” just fine. They’re all the abusive partners, parents and bullys we’ve all known. The ones who will torture their own family members for doing something, anything, without their unpredictable stamp of approval. The ones who eagerly twist and lie and manipulate people to get what they want, saying vapid shit about “empathy and understanding” that they have no intention of following themselves.

The Republican party is indefensible and by extension, so are those that support them, from Fox News all the way down to fuckstains at the local bar. They’ve made themselves a shining beacon for the worst people in America and I’m comfortable writing every single one of them off.

Because if they were actually capable of empathy, understanding or reasonable discourse, they wouldn’t be far-right in the first place.

Yep, you’ve outed yourself. Better luck next time.

The worst people you know vote and have social media.

The right: “I think we should deport anyone with brown skin, incarcerate the LGBT community until they learn to stay closeted, execute black people without trial and force raped children to give birth, all the while gutting environmental protections, welfare and anything else that might cost my rich friends money”

The left: “Then you’re a cunt”

You: Both sides so divisive!

Charismatic, intelligent people don’t need fascism nearly as much as dumbfucks do but even for the few who get sucked in anyway, there’s easier and more self-serving ways to express it than a grueling, always-on position in the Republican party.

But ultimately the answer to both “why don’t they run someone actually good” questions is “because it would be a threat to neoliberals and their record profits”.

Bad news sells

So do lies and propaganda. That’s why pro-gun groups rely on imaginary threats, bullshit statistics and unverifiable anecdotes to justify a multi-billion dollar industry.

Drop the bullshit. You’re using short people and lone women as human shields for your hobby.

Are we really supposed to believe your dogshit gun laws are an act of feminism? You’ve put 100% of American women in more danger by arming criminals, rapists and domestic abusers and you want to claim it’s all worth it because the less than 20% of women who want to carry guns are possibly safer.

Which of course they’re not anyway. The moment they know a man is a “brandish your gun” level threat is when that man grabs them or pulls a weapon on them.

And you know what happens next don’t you Mr Action Hero? If the man is already in grappling distance, she gets disarmed and then probably killed with her own weapon. If the man has already pulled his gun, she gets shot before she can aim and fire her gun.

The best thing women can do to keep themselves safe is to avoid men who are walking red flags, like gun-owners that throw women under the bus for their own self-interest and awkwardly brag about martial arts training and being immune to stun guns.

While “find the worst photo of them for the article” is definitely a thing that happens, are you sure it’s happening here? He just looks like a normal person in a normal pose. It’s what people look like without makeup and studio lighting.

The right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental civil right in the US

The pro-gun community has wasted the last 20 years demonstrating that they’re unwilling or incapable of addressing gun violence and they use the second amendment to prevent others from addressing it.

Eventually, the people you’ve sold out will have no other choice but to repeal it. Pro-gun groups will throw an almighty tantrum but so what? They have no room left to escalate because we already have to listen to them endlessly bleat about guns, we already have to constantly fight them politically and we already live under the threat of being murdered by a far-right extremist with a gun.

access to the means of self-protection is a human right

Sure, if you can prove you’re not what we need protection from because you’ve been sold a gun. Nobody is opposing legitimate self-defense – that’s why they’re not banning door locks, burglar alarms and MMA classes.

But just because a weapon could be used in self-defense, doesn’t mean it should be sold in corner stores to anyone who wants one. Landmines could be used in self-defense but we all know they’d be used 1000 times for terrorism, arming cartels and killing the family members of reactionary idiots for every 1 “noble” use.

I think that correcting the underlying issues that lead to gang activity would have more benefits overall than trying to ban a constitutional right

Let’s take you at your extremely dishonest word and say that gun violence is 95% social problems and 5% access to firearms.

Well the overwhelming majority of the actual people you’ve grouped as “enemies” support both gun-control and social policies designed to combat inequality, which addresses 100% of the problem. It’s literally the progressive platform.

For you to actual have an argument, they would need to support gun-control but oppose progressive social policies – and those people simply don’t exist in significant numbers outside your imagination.

But what about your “allies”? Well the majority of them support neither gun-control nor progressive social policies, for a grand total of 0% of the problem fixed. This tracks with the last 20+ years of them not solving any of these problems. It’s literally the Republican platform.

However you’re happy to be dishonest so you pretend they all belong to a group that only opposes gun-control while still supporting social reforms. Sure, people like that do exist, but not only are they a clear minority of the pro-gun community, they’re still only fixing 95% of the problem

While gang activity exists in all countries, countries with fewer social problems and lower economic inequality have far less of a problem with gang activity.

All of them also have restrictive gun laws, making them far more closely aligned with gun-control advocates than pro-gun groups. They didn’t have to endlessly argue over exactly how much gun access, culture, poverty, mental health services and the media contributed to violence.

They just did it all and by your own admission, it worked.

You take your magic wand and make all guns disappear, people who want to harm others will turn to knives.

Which would instantly be a massive improvement. Americas crime rates are functionally identical to other wealthy countries, only with a massively inflated homicide rate thanks to sick, stupid and desperate people being able to buy all the guns they want.

When people try to raise money for cancer research, do you spit in their face and tell them “you’ll never cure all cancer and even if you do people will still have heart attacks and if you cure those too they’ll just die in car crashes”?

You don’t think it will ever be your life it saves, so you don’t give a shit.

Doctors treat symptoms while they treat the problem, they don’t just offer you thoughts and prayers. Even if the problem isn’t treatable, they still do everything in their power to control your symptoms.

Imagine you turned up to a doctor with every bone in your hand broken, only to have them claim “Sorry, we refuse to give you painkillers because the pain is just a symptom. If someone just spends 12 months reconstructing your hand, the symptoms should be mostly gone. I won’t do it (and I’ll staunchly oppose anyone that tries), but that’s the real solution”.

They wouldn’t just be considered a dogshit doctor, they’d be considered a genuinely evil person.

So stop with the apologist bullshit. No gun control advocates are stopping you from building your violence-free utopia that you insist will solve everything. The society we have today is fucked up and you need to stop selling them guns.

They wouldn’t wear a paper mask to save their own family. They’re not going to drop 100 pounds and die for their asshole king.

Would we even notice if they followed through? From the people who brought you domestic terrorism its… more domestic terrorism.

Did anybody say admins aren’t entitled to block stuff

His “defederation bad (except pedos)” isn’t exactly wet with support for blocking instances for spam and extremism.

User just wanted a system to see everything and block what they didn’t want.

That system exists. It’s the “run your own server” that I explicitly mentioned. But let’s be honest, he doesn’t want that system (which again, he already has) for himself, he wants it for everyone else.

It’s the same bullshit that “free speech absolutists” push in every single thread about defederation – admins should be hands off and users should dig through through slurs, racism, homophobia looking for content worth engaging with.

It benefits exactly one group of people but apparently doesn’t set off your “bad-faith” radar.

Or they’re just not interested in wading through far-right extremists for 3 shitty memes.

After all, if your theory about “open spaces turn into Nazis and pedos because most people are secretly Nazis and pedos” were actually true, those sites would be the biggest sites in the world, not tiny little bubbles that last 6 months.

If you want to see far-right content and spam, join a far-right server or run your own, rather than trying to shame server owners into doing what you want.

Admins are entitled to decide what they platform and what they don’t. On top of that, the user experience of “just block 100 servers of Nazis and incels to get to the content you want to see” is complete dogshit.

This “it should all be user level” is just apologist bullshit.