This year it's nothing. I say that I'm with the people of Palestine and it's like I said the secret word. Immediately it's "Ok, thank you." and they hang up. What is up with this?

They're trying to hit a call-quota. The people on the other end of the line don't actually care if you vote or who you vote for. They just want to make their 1000th call and go home. You'll notice you still keep getting called so its not like anyone is registering what you're saying.

When I dabbled in electoralism I used to see this on the other end. There would just be a line of phone numbers getting dialed. 90% of them wouldn't pick up. Anyone who answered the phone promoted you with a "R / D / Undecided / Other" option menu. If someone on the other end of the line is saying "I won't vote for genocide!" what do I select? Undecided/Other. But that doesn't take you off the phone list, it just spits you into the "Try again later" queue.

The best way to get these calls to stop is to identify who is making them and say you're staunchly supporting the other one. That still doesn't work too well, because you're getting called independently from Presidential, Senatorial, and House phone bankers who don't bother to coordinate because that would mean functioning as a party rather than a random assortment of self-centered egomaniacs. But it does at least get the network you said "I'm voting for the other guy" on to flag you as "Opposition, do not call again".

Rocket League will be banned because it contains the ability to explode cars

Killing children is one thing. But they attacked cars. Cars. They didn't know who they were messing with.

Stop trying to get me to vote for Trump by threatening gamers.

Almost forced to wonder if they're all racists. Like, it doesn't have anything to do with Trump at all. They're merely looking for an excuse to say The Word.

Why can't these dumbfuck gamers just stop playing the game they hate

Because they don't hate the game. Its all performative. They love the attention that lashing out at Popular New Thing provokes. And they love riding the algorithm, wherein anyone talking about Popular New Thing frequently enough gets promoted to the top of the automated attention queue.

This is all about generating influence through attention seeking behaviors. The game itself doesn't matter, save that someone is spending a fortune to promote mentions of it and that offers these shits an elevated platform to say provocative shit.

What consumers? It's one guy with a Twitch stream whose audience mostly just laugh at how weird and gross he is.

Go the Exo-Squad route. Colonize Mars and genetically engineer a race of superhumans to survive the harsh conditions. Then become terrified of your Mars-Engineered Children, reclassify them as a hostile alien species, and spend the next five years doing interstellar pogroms in cool mechs.

William Shattner went to space and it just made him sad.

What a waste. You could be using it to build a guillotine instead.

Spending millions on a PR stunt with the surplus income you siphoned out of your victims? Literally vampirism.

how dare I like the easy thing that just worked for normies.

In fairness, Win8 was just about the last version that did do easy things and work for normies. Even that was bloat and spyware ridden. But it's become exhausting to fumble for the hidden setting that turns off the wall of ads in my start menu every time my company pushes a patch that resets my startup settings. Nevermind Microsoft's decade long crusade to fully obscure the file directory.

The correct answer was "Anything big enough to pull a boat"

"Wow you make a lot of interesting points, I'll have to think about that" is my go-to escape hatch.

Repeatedly demurring to respond, because anything else they say is just too confusing, is another approach.

My mom loves to swerve the conversation in a completely different direction, to try and deflect the conversation to another subject. I just remember her opening on "Why aren't you voting for Biden?", getting a response she didn't like, probing a bit further, balking, and then producing a book of baby pictures I swear to God from thin air to talk about how cute I was when I was younger. I think the transition was "The 1980s? I remember when you were just a little boy back then!" and then insisting we talk about a road trip from when I was 4.

Why hide your hand when you're sitting on a royal flush?

When you're in the most propagandized country on Earth, leftists are few and far between

Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

All of this functionally exists in the context of currency. Rents are traditionally paid in currency. Taxes are collected as currency. Inheritance involves transfer of currency as an asset.

These three reforms drastically reduce the access bourgeois capitalists have to currency as a consequence of implementation. And they would be deflationary as a policy, reducing the cost of goods and services by eliminating the costs associated with the middlemen that gatekeep their transfer.

The problem with the Internet is, thirty years ago I'd assume this was a human who simply had a childish understanding of the root philosophy. And maybe this would be a troll. Maybe this would be a real person. But I wouldn't feel annoyed at the prospect of engaging.

Now, I look at a post like this, and my brain just screams "It's Steven Crowder or a bot."

He matters in that he reveals the ideological hollowness and fecklessness of the Green Party.

They do that with their absolute inability to organize anything locally. They can't function as a party. They only exist as a brand.

But that's exactly why a guy like this doesn't matter.

They have to at least be good in theory!

Greens cultivate an image of "naturalist" types. And that attracts people who believe everything from plastics to nuclear energy to vaccines to hormone replacement is sinful.

That's a problem of the ideology. And it's a tough nut to crack, because there's a natural contradiction between ecological purity and industrial technology that I've yet to see a good simple way to navigate.

It's not the only natural schism I see form in left-liberal circles.

The DSA chapter I flirt with from time to time inevitably has a nasty struggle session over AES states and whether or not they're just another flavor of bourgeois imperialism. You get under the hood of these heated arguments, and a lot just ends with "Who do you believe?"

I don't think you can get a "Good in Theory" candidate unless you can find a set of facts everyone can agree on. And as America is the most propagandized country on Earth, that's a big ask.

He sucks, sure. But anyone you pick will inevitably disgust some number of Leftists for some take on a divisive issue.

I seriously cannot imagine a vegan Trump voter.

There's a faction of anti-COVID folks who bought the Vegan As Panacea line from the 70s/80s and are now so old that Trumpism appeals to them. They crop up on QAnonAnonymous and other Freak Show podcasts from time to time. But they aren't his primary audience by any means.

Why do you believe a party currently committing genocide?

Because, 23 years after 9/11, they have fully internalized the War Of Civilizations and are absolutely on board with a Holocaust of Arabs, Persians, and any other excessively brown person.

This is the Just War America was asking for back when we invaded Iraq. Israel is just an extension of the American Id. So is Ukraine, as they get to re-fight the Eastern Front and Americans relitigate who the good guys really were during WW2.