U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for "Armageddon,"
jonathanlarsen.substack.comCan someone please find a way to either confirm or debunk this. My working hypothesis was that people in power did actually take the time to read René Girard, and not just mention him to appear enlightened... Anyway, never too late, at least one Stamford documentary on YouTube... Please check him out.
The MRFF, which seems to be above board and its existence widely known by military personnel, is quoted directly in the article as having received the complaints as described. An article in The Guardian [1] tells the same story, but adds another MRFF quote: “Anytime Israel or the US is involved in the Middle East, we get this stuff about Christian nationalists who’ve taken over our government, and certainly our US military,” Mikey Weinstein, MRFF’s president, who is an air force veteran, told the Guardian.
“Military members are not really able to stand up for themselves, because your military superior is not your shift manager at Starbucks,”
This doesn't really confirm or debunk, but it's surely a solid nudge towards confirmation.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran...
-- Edited to add: Another commentator, who takes the story with a pinch of salt, casts aspersions at the MRFF. [2] The penultimate paragraph should really be far higher up.
[2] https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/before-you-share-that-stor...
> Anyway, never too late, at least one Stamford documentary on YouTube... Please check him out.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, surely you can share the link with us.
https://googlethatforyou.com?q=rene%20girard%20stanford%20do...
Sorry I thought the Girard Thiel Vance timeline courtesy of Yeats https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi... was common knowledge here. I will see myself out now.
You mean "Things Hidden: The Life and Legacy of René Girard | Full Length Documentary"?
Youtube is full of Girard stuff and it's not clear which of the many you were thinking of.
Yes Stanford documentary there is one.
Explain it to me like I'm 5, please?
Life doesn't have an obvious purpose so people tend to pick up on what others around them are into, so may be into social justice, or greed is good, or islam or christianity or whatever.
Then they tend to clash, fight and blame the other group for their problems.
Kids don't really do it but it's why dad has to go bomb the islamists or jihad the infidels or similar.
At 5 you should not be told about mimetic violence, you would not understand.
I'd never heard of René Girard and would be very surprised if Trump or Hegseth had read him, or probably even heard of him. His basic ideas from the top of his Wikipedia page seem interesting though:
>...that human desire is fundamentally imitative, leading to rivalry, violence and the scapegoat mechanism as foundations of religion and culture.
I guess applying that here Hegseth not having so many ideas of his own got the Armageddon and Jesus ideas from others and scapegoats the islam guys leading to violence etc.?
Girard is pretty famous and was well known at Stanford when he was there. He is a major thinker and deserving of individual attention rather than being pulled into partisan political debates. Even Peter Thiel, who attended a seminar taught by Girard at Stanford, has a fairly good understanding of Girard's views, one that is not amenable to cliches.
If you are interested in learning about Girard, start with "I See Satan Fall Like Lightning".
There used to be a page on arcade.stanford.edu that was a takedown of Girard. It seems to have disappeared, or I would point you to it.
Girard writes beautifully. The problem is with his evidence. He says things like Jesus being an instance of the scapegoat, which is true, but he also says that the disciples were in on it. Never mind that the gospels say that they didn't understand until after Jesus rose from the dead; Girard says that those who are scapegoating someone won't say that that's what they're doing. And viola, evidence against Girard's position magically becomes evidence for it.
Same with Oedipus, and literally dozens of other examples that the article gave that I don't remember what they are. It goes on and on and on, giving examples where Girard's "evidence" does not say what he says it says.
So if you actually read Girard, look carefully at his examples. Don't get carried away by the beautiful writing; think about what the example says and what Girard says it says.
[Edit: Found a link. https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/publications/rofl/issues/vol...
It's worth a read.]
I am not really interested in things like "evidence" that the gospels are consistent with Girard's examples, nor of "takedowns". That's not really how things work in comparative literature.
What you are doing in this field is re-interpreting works of literature to find common themes and shed insight on human nature by looking at these themes. The fundamental assumption here -- which is a radical assumption -- is that works of literature that are considered classic or great works of literature -- contain within them information about human nature, that is, hidden information, and this applies even to, or especially with respect to, fictional works such as Don Quixote.
As an example, you can claim children desire power. And as evidence of this, point to children's stories, reintepreting them as power fantasies. Which is basically correct. Now let's say that you are talking about Lord of the Rings, and arguing that here we have the lowly hobbit that ends up saving the whole world and Kings bow to him, you can use that as one piece of data. But now comes the "takedown", and the critic says "No! You have it wrong! The point of destroying the ring is to get rid of power! You have it all backwards". But the critic is missing the point. I hope everyone can see that. Tolkien might have been consciously warning readers about the dangers of power, but it would not have been a successful children's book if it did not involve the lead character starting out powerless, acquiring power, and being someone the child reader identified with. Or at least the odds of it being successful would be much lower. In most children's books, you are acquiring power -- because children fantasize about that, it is human nature. It does not matter what moral lesson the author is trying to get across, his human nature finds a way of expressing itself in the work.
Now, you can reject the core assumption that literature reveals aspects of human nature, it's fine, but there is no point in arguing that core assumption. If you reject it, then don't read Girard.
But if you don't reject it, then because you are re-interpreting works and looking for overlooked themes, the name of the game is to accumulate a large body of examples, not to debate a single example. And you judge the success of your examples primarily by their explanatory power, not because you think the original author intentionally made a certain theme that heretofore was overlooked.
But because you are providing novel interpretations of existing works, you can always find plenty of arguments that the original works were intended to be interpreted differently. It's trivial, but not a compelling critique. It is up to the reader to decide whether interpreting the work through this lense sheds more light on the work in the sense that applying the same interpretation to the large body of works cited results in something that "makes sense", as Girard is building a case that a certain theme in human nature occurs in works of literature over and over again, and having this theme available helps you to better understand the work.
This is very different from theology, or legalism, where people focus on debating a single verb tense in a specific verse. Because Girard is not doing theology or legalism, he is doing comparative literature, so he provides a hundred examples of common themes, and after you read him, the next time you read literature your mind is trained to look for these themes and you can identify them and interpret what you are reading in a different way.
Now going back to the original sharp assumption, this means that you do not only know something new about literature, but something new about human nature.
But the problem is that a large number of Girard's examples don't support his position. He's not comparing literature; he's looking for things that might be anywhere in the neighborhood of his thesis, and then torturing them until they fit. That's closer to topiary than botany (to torture an example of my own). Sure, once he ignores parts and says other parts are wrong, then what's left supports his position, but that is not comparative literature.
And, yes, in comparative literature you can take a minor theme from a particular piece of literature (or even several pieces). But it should never be untrue to the piece it's pulling from. And Girard is, repeatedly and egregiously.
The irony is that it’s happening in Iran, the home of Zoroastarianism, which is the religion that Judaism and Christianity ripped off about the messiah, heaven, hell and the apocalyptic battle at the end of time (amongst other things)
One of my favorites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xwedodah
>Xwedodah (Persian: خویدوده xidude; Avestan: xᵛaētuuadaθa) is a type of consanguine marriage historically practiced in Zoroastrianism before the Muslim conquest of Persia.[1] Such marriages are recorded as having been inspired by Zoroastrian cosmogony and considered pious. It was a high act of worship in Zoroastrianism, and there were punishments for not performing it.[2][3]
>This form of direct familial incest marriage allowed Zoroastrians to marry their sisters, daughters, granddaughters, and their own mothers to take as wives.[4] Xwedodah was widely practiced by royalty and nobility, and possibly clergy, but it is not known if it was commonly practiced by families in other classes.[5] In modern Zoroastrianism it is near non-existent, having been noted to have disappeared as an extant practice by the 11th century.[5]
It seems Judaism also took from Aten, weirdly, because the cult died under Tutankhamun, at least in lower Egypt.
“Armageddon” sounds plausible in the sense that if this war ends too soon, the goons in charge will find ways to start another one within days. The war(s) will not end until von Clownstick is out of office, one way or the other.
> Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth
I lived in Texas for 5 years and I have heard people saying this kind of things first and second hand during his first term and also after his defeat.
They said it under George W. Bush, too.
I always have to remind my mom that she legitimately thought Obama might be the Antichrist… I honestly think the entire premise of the “End of the World” religious beliefs is just pattern recognition instincts being pointed at something entirely random.
It looks very, very silly in hindsight, but natural selection actually selects for a nontrivial predisposition to make type 1 errors, so we should expect them to be very common.
That only works as long as the powers that be don't start quoting this stuff themselves.
>I honestly think the entire premise of the “End of the World” religious beliefs is just pattern recognition instincts being pointed at something entirely random.
It isn't ever entirely random. They thought Obama was the Antichrist because they thought he was a Muslim, and a common interpretation of the Book of Revelations is that the final war of Armageddon will be a nuclear war between Christianity and Islam, after a New World Order/One World Government established by the Antichrist.
I've never heard of that interpretation before. My parents did not think he was a Muslim.
I have heard it, and people thinking he was a Muslim was definitely common, so I don't know what to tell you.
This interpretation is a conspiracy theory driven by 9/11. If it was not, Saudis would be America's biggest enemy, not the most trusted ally after Israel.
makes a lot of sense now why Thiel is talking a lot about the anti-christ
Whether I believe this or not, it sure seems like a good way to present a patsy when the war (or is it a special operation) goes sideways.
the power of Christ compels you … to bomb schools, apparently
I think that one was a screw up - it was next to an IRGC barracks.
Ah, that’s alright then.
Also there was intel of IRGC members in the school.
Either way it's a mess. Iran had performed similar strikes (though not in schools) in residential buildings in Golf states that included a mix of military y personnel and civilians.
War is terrible and innocent people always take causalities.
But what if I don't want Armageddon. I like sleeping in my warm comfy bed at night and not fighting in the endtimes.
Context: This refers to a particular Evangelical quasi-cult called the "New Apostolic Reformation".
Obsession with the end times stems from a particular Biblical interpretation called "dispensationalism" that was introduced into America in the 1800s. If you're wondering why certain Christian sects became more obsessed from retreating from society than improving it, these are the head waters. It's a successful theme that took off on radio, then with televangelists, and now on social media.
The New Apostolic Reformation is kind of the ultimate culmination of these beliefs. It's one of the key components of what is being called Christian Nationalism.
It's not even clear what parts of the movement are earnestly held and which are purely opportunists trading on the fears of the naive. Many Christians may cross-pollinate in these circles without knowing it - but it takes a very specifically indoctrinated person to think Trump is divinely anointed
Having grown up in churches that began to embrace NAR tenets in the 90s-00s, this particular eschatology gained a foothold across a wide swath of denominations from non-denom/charismatic/baptist all the way to methodist/CoC. In my experience it’s less a retreat from society, and more of a particular strain of religious fundamentalism that seeks to draw a line in the sand against “secular” culture. Most NAR organizations are lead by a “prophet” or leader who followers believe directly hears from God (aka a new apostle). A predominant theme among NAR churches is increasing christian influence in government (i.e. “7 Mountain Mandate” for example). I also recently learned about catholic integralism, which shares similar dominionist goals with NAR, and has gained momentum in the US.
> It's not even clear what parts of the movement are earnestly held and which are purely opportunists trading on the fears of the naive.
None of them and all of them.
The people running the country are fucking insane.
The strange part from my point of view is that it's so obviously heretical from inside the system.
They have Amos, which reasons out the problems of wishing for the Day of the Lord, and I don't understand how they can ignore it. Internalizing this idea should rather lead to a profound dislike for destabilizing the world, push the Day of the Lord as far into the future as it can be, to save all the people who can be born. I can understand how one can be a madman for a while, when one is full of grief. That's fine, but when one returns to normality one should realise that not destabilizing things is a moral duty.
The way they ignore everything else that doesn't validate their own sinning?
The bigger challenge is the people who vote for them are also fucking insane and there are tens of millions more of them.
A possible good point of Trump is he seems pretty non religious. The Armageddon bit seems to be Hegseth and his preacher.
You don't have to be religious to figure out that theological indoctrination is a great way to de-legitimize courts, laws and norms of civil society in your favor.
The intersectionality of the American military industrial complex, the Republican Party and fundamentalist Christianity go back much further than Hegseth. When Bush talked about a "new crusade" after 9/11, who do you think he was signaling to? That wasn't just awkward phrasing.
The only real difference between then and now is that the current administration is run by groypers and trolls who don't care about kayfabe and aren't capable of subtlety.
Not exactly the "Armageddon" part. It's a little more complicated than that.
Hegseth's preacher is part of a partial preterist and postmillennialist group. They believe apocalyptic prophecies like the Great Tribulation and Armageddon were largely fulfilled in 70 CE when the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem.
They are a reflection of the electorate. If you don’t want crazy and incompetent, don’t vote for it. If you get what you voted for, don’t be sad about it, it’s what you voted for. Regime change will come with time, but it’s going to suck for a while because of this governance failure mode.
> If you don’t want crazy and incompetent, don’t vote for it
We have less of a problem with crazies voting for crazies than non-crazies not voting. Because if the crazies can find compromise with someone approximately as crazy as them while the non-crazies are either too lazy to turn out or unable to get out of stitches because the less-crazy candidate disagrees with them on two issues, the crazies win.
Was arming genocide in Gaza sane?
Even if you have no moral red line whatsoever, that decision was still certain to lose millions of votes in swing states... Because millions of voters do have morality, even in America.
America's problems are far bigger than whether people vote or not. The insanity is thoroughly bipartisan. Look at the Democrats giving Trump standing ovations while he talked about military action in Iran last week!
It's just a matter of degree: Genocide, or genocide+. ICE, or ICE+. Do you want your fossil fuel subsidies massive or ginormous. Techno-feudalism, or turbo techno-feudalism.
Those aren't sane options. It's not sane to accept them.
The idea that we could elect Democrats and "push them left" "once the fire was out" was thoroughly disproved shortly after October 7th - if not before then, when Trump's insurrection prosecution for was slow-rolled; or when we decided that the correct legal procedure was to let Garland sit on the Epstein files for 4 years.
So... Maybe diminishing one half of the problem as 'insane', but not the other half because it's slightly better, is doomed to failure. Either way the crazies win.
"I refuse to wear glasses, they don't give me perfect vision and they don't fix my underlying eyesight problem"
A fair position if the electoral system weren't a complete shambles. When gerrymandering is openly used as a weapon by the only two parties, it's pretty clearly not working.
Of course, change is impossible without a complete dissolution of governance in the US.
~89 million eligible voters did not vote in the last presidential election. “Fuck around find out”, and we are at the “find out” stage. This was a collective choice.
So if you didn’t vote, or you voted for this, you voted for this. Enjoy the ride.
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-11-1...
I can understand why someone would choose not to participate in an unrepresentative electoral process.
Here in the authoritarian hellhole that is the Commonwealth of Australia, showing up to the voting booth is mandatory. We also have preferential voting, and in a few jurisdictions we even have proportional representation.
"authoritarian hellhole" as in Jon Kudelka's "Tasmania is awful don't come here" hellhole.
In these times, I think humour does not work well in written communications without a flag.
It's not a hellhole, and it's no more authoritarian now, than it was when I came here in 1988.
Sorry you got downvoted for explaining my sarcasm :| No idea why, you’re exactly right
The downvoters thought you were dog-whistlin' for them.
What percentage of those eligible voters do you think would've mattered? For example I lived in WA and voted, how much do you think my vote mattered over an entire red county of 100 people voting for Trump?
Our electoral system is designed to disenfranchise the most populated areas.
More voters 55+ will have died in a year (~2M/year) since he was elected to office than was the margin of victory. High single digit percentage points of eligible voters who did not vote. Ahh, well, it is what it is. We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
Trump got less than 50% of the vote, and less than a third of eligible voters voted for him. The real issue is that the two parties have created a situation where you cannot vote for a viable candidate. Case in point: approximately a dozen democratic senators have come out in support of the war. Like, if you don’t want to intentionally bring about the apocalypse/nuclear holocaust, and you live in those states, the only way to avoid voting for those things is to not vote.
You can try getting your incumbent kicked out in the primaries, but that’s a dangerous game in swing states. In your case (WA) you absolutely should vote in the primary for the farthest left democrat possible.
We probably should switch to multi-party proportional representation at some point.
This is the right idea. Under-appreciated is that voting in the federal general elections is the point at which you have the least effect on anything. Earlier (primaries) and more local (all those elections way fewer people go to because there are no nationally-covered races on it) is far more effective at actually affecting the world. Someone who votes in all of those and skips the federal general bubbles is a more-effective voter than someone who does the opposite and only votes for the big federal offices (and those are the only ones people will commonly shame you for skipping, which is really backwards)
Yea...forgive me for doubting that Genocide Joe's MK-Ultra'd lieutenant would not have us similarly murderous.
But only around a quarter of Americans support the war?
*special Judeo-Christian operation
I wouldn't say it's a reflection of the electorate. There's a lot of states that have been gerrymandered for years and Christians in extremely red areas have outsized voting power compared to everywhere else. Combined with the complete media capture by billionaires, the dumbest rule by fiat.
Unfortunately Christian nationalists happen to be extremely wealthy and extremely stupid.
Calling people stupid who are voting for what they want feels counter-productive.
I don't know them, and I don't see a reason to call anyone stupid. Turkeys voting for thanksgiving is not "stupid" it's normal. Turkeys do what turkeys do.
I would have said "Unfortunately Christian Nationalists want what is being offered them by this administration, are extremely wealthy and fund PAC accordingly." but even "unfortunately" is argumentative. Of course to ME it's unfortunate, but thats me.
It’s not just gerrymandering (though that is indeed pervasive and pernicious. It’s structural. The apportionment between states gives small right-leaning states outsized representation in both the house and senate relative to their proportion of the national population.
> The apportionment between states gives small right-leaning states outsized representation in both the house and senate relative to their proportion of the national population.
That's not a bad thing. The bad thing happened when the Democrats decided to alienate those areas and lost them. You may forget, but a lot of those "small right-leaning states" were solid blue until relatively recently. For instance 100% of North Dakota's congressional delegation was Democratic until ~2010, Iowa was the quintessential purple state, the Senate majority leader was from South Dakota (but unlike today he was a Democrat), and I could go on.
I mean, when I was younger, Utah had a Democratic senator and several Democratic governors.
Among the small states, we have New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Vermont. They also have outsized influence.
I will grant you that more of the small states lean right than lean left, but it's not completely one-sided.
If Americans didn't like their system then they would change it. Isn’t that their whole founding mythos?
I don’t think hundreds of millions of Americans are continually being duped. I think they actually like the system they’ve built, and the outcomes that system produces.
So much easier said than done. We have to get our elected representatives to make the change, but it is against their self interest. If this was the only thing people considered when voting _maybe_ it would stand a chance. And honestly, I suspect less than 20% understand how other voting systems could lead to better out comes. Heck, we can’t even use the metric system!
"If the prisoners did not like their prison, they would change it"
I don’t think that the richest and most powerful people on the planet are prisoners. That seems like a ridiculous take.
>There's a lot of states that have been gerrymandered for years and Christians in extremely red areas have outsized voting power compared to everywhere else. Combined with the complete media capture by billionaires, the dumbest rule by fiat.
It's happening on both sides. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/14/nx-s1-5647442/midterm-electio...
We the public should be rejecting it, but we're idiots and keep falling for 'but they're doing it!' and then undermine our own political power to 'own' the other side. We're being played for fools.
That's a ridiculous comparison. The California special redistricting was done via a voter initiative that was approved by a majority of California voters, and imposes a temporary change on the rules for drawing districts that reverts to the neutral rules when after the next census.
It was specifically proposed to counter the Texas special redistricting which was done by the Texas legislature and government with no concern over whether or not Texas voters approved (and polls show that more Texas voters disapprove than approve).
It's happening on both sides now because the Supreme Court has signed off on it for years and given all the power to gerrymandering efforts from the right. The public can't reject what is unaccountable to said public.
is this real life
is this just fanta sea
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality
Armageddon is the old name for what is now called Megiddo. It's a Kibbutz in northern Israel.
But hey, if the goal is to bring war to the doorstep of the occupiers,there are probably worse goals to have.
I think you are mistaken: that lush green slow-sloped hill and beautiful valley was there before anyone built a Kibbutz on it, and was already called that in the bronze age when a Canaanite town stood there. In my memory of it from 20 years ago, it was surprisingly nice and green, a bit like a Windows background. As far as I understand, as it's got even neolithic settlement strata, this is as good as any other place name for signifying "the center of the world" as any Koine-writer was going to get.
And the sad truth is that democrats will continue to nominate candidates that are so appalling they'll still be rejected in favor of this lunatic or someone like him. Pathetic options on both sides. The two party system is failing the country. If there was literally anything in the middle, I feel like we'd be better off than lurching from one extreme to the other.
What kinds of middle policies would you like to see?
Genuine question. This is a surprising opinion to me because I see the democrats as a center left largely moderate party. Agreed that the democrat candidates are appalling and generally show no conviction.
The Democratic Party may be center left and largely moderate. Democratic politicians are further left than that, especially the ones that seem to attract microphones.
Now, the mainstream media plays the most outrageous statements because they attract the most eyeballs. And the Republicans play up the most outrageous Democratic statements (a process sometimes called "nut harvesting"). But the point is, what the average person hears is the most extreme statements made by Democrats, and that frames their view of the Democratic Party. You want to change that? Stop the more extreme ones from talking into microphones. If you can't do that (and you can't), then the next best is to have someone authoritative (say, the senior member of the House, or the chair of the DNC) officially and publicly repudiate the more extreme statements.
Do you have an example of one of these extreme left positions??
The furthest left member of Congress, AOC, voted to give Israel more military aid and never pushed for a floor vote on Medicare for all. None of them are center left. They're all right wing.
Talking about the "middle" is the wrong way of framing it. The problem is that the Democratic party sandbags any meaningful reforms, as they're still beholden to that same Epstein class when it comes time to campaign. For example the Democrats' grand attempt at healthcare reform included making it mandatory to patronize the "insurance" cartel! Is it possible for regulatory capture to be any more brazen?
So people get frustrated with the hamfisted top-down plans tailored for those deeply wed to the system, tire of the hypocrisy, and then either stay home or vote for the alternative that doesn't even bother promising to try and constructively fix anything. It's a game of bad cop worse cop. We desperately need ranked pairs voting.
Several countries with universal healthcare use the "you have to buy private insurance" model, such as the Netherlands and Switzerland. There doesn't seem to be anything inherently wrong with that system.
ACA has survived 12 years and enabled a lot of people to obtain health insurance that would not have been able to otherwise, with Republicans wanting to kill it that entire time but failing to do so. Do you think there was any other system Democrats could have passed instead that would have lasted that long?
> Do you think there was any other system Democrats could have passed instead that would have lasted that long?
You're buying into the paradigm wherein sandbagging it was necessary for pragmatic reasons, and justifying within that. While this is true to an extent, it doesn't really change my overall point.
I do get that the ACA was a significant piece of legislation that has helped many people. And if you want to talk system design, such a mandate might make sense in a system with much much more regulatory bandwidth than ours, where it's not just forcing people into a corrupt system. But as it stands, they didn't even address the antitrust issues of bundling healthcare plans with employment or price fixing between insurers and providers. So I stand by my characterization of the dynamic as brazen regulatory capture.
Switzerland has a “public option”, price controls, and IIRC private insurers have to be non-profits (and possibly that designation means more in their system than the US, I dunno about that).
ACA mandates that ~80% of insurance co. revenue must go back towards medical service. So not "non-profit" per se but there is some kind of restriction there.
1) Not for "self-funded"—many plans are managed by big insurance companies, but funded by employers. No restrictions there.
2) Not for plans that are (IIRC) two years old or newer. I'd be shocked if there aren't a bunch of shenanigans going on with this loophole.
also 3) many "insurance" companies are in the provider game, meaning they can preferentially shuffle surplus to their other arm
(2) and (3) were part of what I meant by a lack of regulatory bandwidth in another comment. There are rules that could be enforced to promptly impose steep penalties for a company that tries to skirt them. But they just aren't, so after one company starts doing it the rest inevitably follow suit.
which will never fly in the US in a million years.
take a look at the Fortune 500 list and notice how many health and pharma companies are in the top 50 (and/or top 10)
Add to it that all our retirement accounts are invested in these companies, and it kinda looks indistinguishable from a really roundabout way to have a very-regressive redistributive retirement scheme that also has crazy-high fees (whatever part of the overpayment to healthcare companies that doesn't make it to shareholders is basically part of the account management fees)
Yes, I'm suggesting that like 10% of our nominal GDP is actually a deeply fucked up regressive wealth redistribution scheme that doesn't buy tangible productivity, but is essentially a tax-like drag on the economy, but way less efficient than most government-run redistribution schemes. Because it is.
I don't think squinting and framing things that way is particularly productive on its own, and you didn't go anywhere with the idea. One could also characterize it as big jobs program. But these framings belie that the structural "inefficiency" is the crux of the problem - both resource-consumption wise, and also in terms of (not) providing good healthcare. For example, how many full time skilled doctor equivalents are flat-out wasted by being spent jumping through "insurance" company bureaucracy? Or how many nurses is the "insurance" industry wasting directly?
I agree that the core problem is that we’re simply spending far more than necessary for the level of care we receive, but the side effects like being a white-collar makework jobs program (the upscale counterpart to the military, sort of) and redistributing (a little of the) money toward retirement accounts are what make the problem “sticky”. There’s a lot of temporary collateral damage if you fix it.
But does that framing have predictive utility? Which would you say resonates more with voters, especially the middle/upper-middle class voters with skin in both games - "Healthcare reform is going to make your retirement account shrink" or "Healthcare reform is going to take away your employer plan and replace it with the same option the poors get" ?
Also my additional point is that nobody really thinks we need to create additional jobs for doctors, as we've currently got a dire shortage of healthcare. I just inquired about rescheduling a primary care visit for my aunt and the office told me they're scheduling out an entire year from now. That's obviously not the same as how soon they could see her for something urgent, but the sheer magnitude of that delay does highlight a problem. I've also seen many 4+ month waits for specialist appointments.
>ACA has survived 12 years and enabled a lot of people to obtain health insurance that would not have been able to otherwise, with Republicans wanting to kill it that entire time but failing to do so.
My insurance is more expensive than ever and quality of care lower quality than ever.
>Do you think there was any other system Democrats could have passed instead that would have lasted that long?
Medicare for all. Or lower the age gradually (cover kids and elderly first). They should have voted on it during the pandemic but Pelosi blocked it and AOC wouldn't do anything. They're all fakes.
You'd probably have the rising cost issue no matter what had happened, because that problem affects pretty much all first world health care systems. The US is way more expensive than others, but the ratio of US costs to the costs of others has stayed roughly constant over at least the last 40-50 years.
Exactly this. They went the entire pandemic without even bringing a vote on Medicare for All. The democrats are not left wing at all. They are complete corporate sell outs. They don't actually do what their voters want, they represent only their donors.
Agreed, but at least the Democrats (or their specific donors) were smart enough to not kill the geese that lay golden eggs. Republican policy is now like "it's free meat! and killing is a natural process!"
It's hard to tell if it's more accurate to still label the Republican party as also "complete corporate sell outs", or if the real dynamic is its controlling corpos got bought by foreign interests aiming to take down the whole United States (rather than merely being content extracting wealth from the masses).
I swallowed my pride and started voting conservative (aka Democrat) in 2020, but that doesn't mean I'll stop criticizing them.
I do have to wonder if say pushing the Democratic party itself to adopt something like ranked pairs voting for primaries would be more effective than hoping for it in the finals. The idea being that as time goes on that becomes the "real" election where more people feel enfranchised from being able to express themselves, and generally happier with the results if they still have to end up supporting a compromise in the finals.
(This is assuming what's left of the Republican party doesn't dramatically reinvent itself after it's finished crashing and burning)
I'll get downvoted by both sides but this is what a winning political party policies look like for most of Americans not in NYC or in SF Bay Area, LA, SD, Seattle, Portland:
-Medicare for all
-Lower income taxes (federal and state) cut all the useless bloat like the $20B in homeless spending we can't even account for in California
-Free state college tuition for local residents (we need to significantly decrease cost of college)
-Universal background checks on guns
-Ban abortion after 20 weeks
-America first and only (stop being Israel's bitch)
-Strong on crime laws (none of this bullshit we deal with in blue states where we catch and release violent offenders constantly and let people run over and kill entire families with ZERO consequences)
-Having no stance on DEI, LGBTQ, or other cultural issues that serve only to divide and distract
This comes off as a grab bag of non-issues and non-national issues mixed in with a couple of attractive seeming ideas. For example: Crime is down why bang on that issue instead of the 2000 Americans killed every year by cops? The young voters who will dominate in coming elections see, on their video feeds, how cops behave. The time for Clintonesque pandering on law and order has passed. It's not that Trump is different this time, it's that a lot of of his voters have died, and RFK Jr. is Charon at the Styx for more of them.
> I'll get downvoted by both sides but this is what a winning political party policies look like for most of Americans not in NYC or in SF Bay Area, LA, SD, Seattle, Portland:
I don't agree on all the specifics, but I think that's the absolute right way to be thinking about this. If you actually want to make things better, you need to have empathy for people who aren't like you. Despite their self-image, I don't think liberals are actually any better at empathy than anyone else.
> -Having no stance on DEI, LGBTQ, or other cultural issues that serve only to divide and distract
This is a key point. The focus on those issues is probably the only reason the plutocrat/big business Republicans even have a chance.
"This is a key point. The focus on those issues is probably the only reason the plutocrat/big business Republicans even have a chance."
The right spends *far* more money and airtime on these issues than democrats actually do: https://abcnews.com/US/trump-spends-millions-anti-trans-ads-...
In other words, it is largely a moral panic manufactured by the right. If democrats give in, the right will concoct a new one, ad infinitum, until democrats and republicans are indistinguishable.
> In other words, it is largely a propaganda push by the right.
Who cares? It works, and why does it work?
I tell you why: it works because the Democrats give them the ammunition.
Edit: I see you edited the line I quoted to:
> In other words, it is largely a moral panic manufactured by the right. If democrats give in, the right will concoct a new one, ad infinitum, until democrats and republicans are indistinguishable.
I don't think that's true, it's just a story to discourage effective change to keep some faction happy.
Democrats used to be able to win in so-called red states, because they used to be able to adapt to local conditions. Following your line of thinking just means they'll keep losing.
Abortion used to be a Catholic issue until a Republican strategist saw an opportunity.
The point is to get citizens fighting each other on things that are personally important so we're too busy to fight for things that are nationally important, like corruption or the decay of democracy.
Both parties suck because the system is broken, and both parties benefit from perpetuating it -- along with those who fund them.
When North Carolina passed the first bathroom bill in 2016, what should have happened in your mind?
Well, I'll just say this: I was a "vote blue no matter who" voter following Trump 1, but after seeing the complete limpness of democratic leadership in Trump's proto-fascist America, I'm not sure I could actually stomach voting for a politician like Newsom, who basically quacks like a republican circa 10 years ago. What would be the point? When ICE is pulling my neighbors from their homes, will he step in to protect them? When the executive order gets signed to federalize polling stations, will he bother to do anything about it? I am far from the only person who feels this way.
If democrats acquiesce to republicans, they will likely lose even more people than they already have while gaining absolutely no one from the maga camp. I think the real strat is to go full Mamdani across the board. Unapologetic, compassionate leftism focused on the economy and quality of life; no one thrown under the bus as a cynical ploy to scrap together a few undecided votes.
> Well, I'll just say this: I was a "vote blue no matter who" voter following Trump 1, but after seeing the complete limpness of democratic leadership in Trump's proto-fascist America, I'm not sure I could actually stomach voting for a someone like Newsom, who is basically a republican circa 10 years ago. I am far from the only person who feels this way.
It's not about who you would vote for.
> If the democrats acquiesce to the republicans, they will likely lose even more people than they already have, while gaining absolutely no one from the maga camp. I think the real strat is to go full Mamdani across the board. Unapologetic, compassionate leftism.
To be perfectly honest: I don't think you have the strategic sense to productively participate on a topic this. I kinda get the impression you're going for wish fulfillment.
You're not going to get it all. If you try to get it all, you'll lose. Your wish fulfillment candidate could win parts of California and New York, but those aren't the places you need to think about. Think about not crashing and burning in a Nebraska Senate race.
Why do you think you have the strategic sense to productively participate on a topic like this? Who even are you? What are your sources?
As for me, I look at polling results almost every day. My sense is that nothing I said is extraordinarily controversial among the voters who actually matter. People care about the economy, period. Outside of hardcore MAGA enclaves -- which will never change their vote -- the culture war bullshit is massively unpopular.
> Why do you think you have the strategic sense to productively participate on a topic like this?
In short: I'm talking about compromises, not fantasies of partisan purity.
> Who even are you? What are your sources?
Someone who has lived in places where Democrats used to win, but no longer do.
'Compromise' is strictly just code for becoming Republican, and I'm not going to vote for a Republican.
A great example of this is abortion, where for years Democrats did have 'moderate' positions on abortion. The end result has been taking away people's rights and stomping on any notion of any abortion.
Compromise is how we got to here in the first place, with feckless politicians unable to have any sort of spine and gradually shrinking the amount of constituents they'll fight for.
> 'Compromise' is strictly just code for becoming Republican, and I'm not going to vote for a Republican.
No it doesn't, and thinking that was shows the lack of "strategic sense to productively participate on a topic this." You're position basically seems like: give me everything I want, even if it's a losing platform.
> A great example of this is abortion, where for years Democrats did have 'moderate' positions on abortion. The end result has been taking away people's rights and stomping on any notion of any abortion.
They didn't moderate enough, where they needed to moderate. I know for a fact Democrats have lost Senate races in "red" states, at least in part, because the candidate couldn't take a clear pro-life position.
They were never going to get a pro-choice person there, but what else did they lose by insisting that's the only kind of person they'd accept?
> Compromise is how we got to here in the first place, with feckless politicians unable to have any sort of spine and gradually shrinking the amount of constituents they'll fight for.
Lack of compromise is precisely what leads to "gradually shrinking the amount of constituents they'll fight for." You're saying: if you're not 100% for everything we stand for, we won't represent you.
> They didn't moderate enough, where they needed to moderate. I know for a fact Democrats have lost Senate races in "red" states, at least in part, because the candidate couldn't take a clear pro-life position.
I know for a fact that Democrats have lost senate races in red states because the candidate took a clear pro-life position. Your arguments are not going to work on me, considering I've lived in Texas and have seen what happens when Democrats compromise their position into oblivion. Or hell, you can look at the DINOs and see how every goddamn time they torpedo'd policy over the past decade.
Any Democrat that chooses to compromise over issues like abortion or trans rights or anything like that should be chased out of the running. We should adopt the exact same strategy that Tea Party republicans used to gain control over the Republican party.
> I know for a fact that Democrats have lost senate races in red states because the candidate took a clear pro-life position. Your arguments are not going to work on me, considering I've lived in Texas and have seen what happens when Democrats compromise their position into oblivion. Or hell, you can look at the DINOs and see how every goddamn time they torpedo'd policy over the past decade.
The lost because of that? If so, it sounds like it was the red-state liberals being immature and choosing a no-win situation: either lose because you run a candidate that makes liberals happy but can't win the state or liberals doom a candidate who can win the state because he only offered the liberals 90% instead of 100%.
> Any Democrat that chooses to compromise over issues like abortion or trans rights or anything like that should be chased out of the running. We should adopt the exact same strategy that Tea Party republicans used to gain control over the Republican party.
Such black and white thinking. You'd rather have 0% alignment on issues than 90% or 75%? Because that's what you get when a Republican wins.
Purity is a dumb strategy when the Tea Party republicans do it, and it'd a dumb strategy when liberals do it. Tell me: how many competitive races have "Tea Party republicans" lost because they ran a nut? The answer: lots. Uncompromising purity like yours is actually an exploitable vulnerability.
> The lost because of that? If so, it sounds like it was the red-state liberals being immature and choosing a no-win situation: either lose because you run a candidate that makes liberals happy but can't win the state or liberals doom a candidate who can win the state because he only offered the liberals 90% instead of 100%.
This is an incredibly nonsensical rationale. For some people, including myself, abortion is going to be a hard line. I don't care if you think compromise is a better option, if that line is crossed they are losing my vote. If abortion can be a single-issue policy for Republicans then I can damn well make it into one for myself.
> Such black and white thinking. You'd rather have 0% alignment on issues than 90% or 75%? Because that's what you get when a Republican wins.
Correct. I'm done voting for the lesser evil. If it works for Republicans it can work for the left. As much as you say it's a 'dumb strategy' we're in this situation today because it works. It's what got the current set of Republicans into power.
> Tell me: how many competitive races have "Tea Party republicans" lost because they ran a nut?
Most Republican elected officials in Texas? Ken Paxton is insane, incredibly corrupt and someone that should've been ran out of the state years ago. Same with Greg Abott. The idea that democrats should compromise a bit with insane assholes who are causing direct harm to women is a mistake. Even if you consider it 'tactically' correct, morally it is a mistake and is a losing proposition for their own voters.
> This is an incredibly nonsensical rationale. For some people, including myself, abortion is going to be a hard line. I don't care if you think compromise is a better option, if that line is crossed they are losing my vote. If abortion can be a single-issue policy for Republicans then I can damn well make it into one for myself.
Donald Trump and the MAGA right thank you for your service to their cause.
>> Such black and white thinking. You'd rather have 0% alignment on issues than 90% or 75%? Because that's what you get when a Republican wins.
> Correct. I'm done voting for the lesser evil. If it works for Republicans it can work for the left. As much as you say it's a 'dumb strategy' we're in this situation today because it works. It's what got the current set of Republicans into power.
I think you misunderstand how and why Republicans win in a lot of places, and how and why Democrats lose. Maybe you're also thinking too much about Texas. Everywhere is not Texas.
Also, even admitting for a moment that "it works for Republicans" (which I disagree with), you're assuming a false symmetry between the left and the right. To make a Starcraft analogy: the left could be Protoss and the right could be Zerg, and strategies that work for Zerg won't work for Protoss, because they're actually different. Getting mad at a Zerg for winning with a Zerg strategy doesn't change that.
> The idea that democrats should compromise a bit with insane assholes who are causing direct harm to women is a mistake. Even if you consider it 'tactically' correct, morally it is a mistake and is a losing proposition for their own voters.
There's a name for that: letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. You'll never get perfect, and if you demand it, at best you'll get less than you could have accomplished otherwise, and at worse, you're inviting total defeat.
And if your kind of thinking becomes dominant on the left, we're fucked (in more ways than one).
Funny how this logic doesn't seem to apply to Republicans. They run the absolute worst candidate I've seen in my entire life -- in any democratic country -- and they get everything they want. At no point did they feel the need to compromise in any way or adjust their positions any closer to the left. Apparently pounding the table until you win is a viable political strategy in America. Or maybe timing the political pendulum with economic swings simply lets you run any candidate you want.
No offense, but I'm not sure you have much strategic sense here either. Your take on how politics works in the US strikes me as utterly naive.
> Funny how this logic doesn't seem to apply to Republicans. They run the absolute worst candidate I've seen in my entire life -- in any democratic country -- and they get everything they want.
Complaints about the other side will get you nowhere.
And the lesson I got from Trump's win the real cause is Democrats are were so out of touch that they allowed someone as bad as Trump to win. The turn towards fantasy politics, where liberals just need to be more liberal and maybe bigger assholes and suddenly we get everything we want is completely unrealistic. All it will do really do is just ratify the Trumpian dysfunction.
> At no point did they feel the need to compromise in any way or adjust their positions any closer to the left. Apparently pounding the table until you win is a viable political strategy in America.
Are even you paying attention? Trump totally did adjust their positions closer to the left. When was the last time you heard about Social Security privatization, for instance? Trump also threw generations of right-wing free-trade economic policy out the window to pursue tariffs.
> No offense, but I'm not sure you have much strategic sense here either. Your take on how politics works in the US strikes me as utterly naive.
It's a lot more realistic than what you're offering. If you're not thinking about the valuable things you really want that you're willing to sacrifice, you're not being strategic.
A lot of people are angry, and looking for catharsis in fantasy. "What if we try just doing all the things that feel good to me, and none of the things I don't want to do? If everyone's like me, we'll win!" That's really dumb and won't end well.
> The end result has been taking away people's rights and stomping on any notion of any abortion.
Abortion is allowed just like in the EU, some member states in both do ban it but USA and EU doesn't.
The Epstein files are full of emails of them explicitly manufacturing it as you say.
What focus on these issues? Harris did everything she could to run from trans rights issues and the most we got from Biden was reinterpreting Title IX based on the finding in Bostock.
>Despite their self-image, I don't think liberals are actually any better at empathy than anyone else.
I can see how you think this, since othering and dehumanizing responses rise to the top when people ask how Republicans can support this administration.
Who benefits from amplifying those voices?
Medicare for all doesn't seem to be a winning strategy, judging by the way it gets turned into euthanasia for all by our neighbors to the north.
Lowering the cost of necessary education is important, though in many cases the methods attempted just serve to make matters worse (much like how corporate average fleet economy regulations, in attempting to improve fuel efficiency, just made vehicles bigger). The structure of college itself (and schooling up until that point) is something I think we could stand to seriously reconsider, given how much of it really formed amid the industrial revolution and was modeled off of the ubiquitous factory models. I don't have some ready made model to address this, but do think there's room for an open conversation.
I don't care THAT much about abortion so much as the system that incentivizes it -- that is, the one that makes it particularly unaffordable to have children, and drives debaucherous, nihilistic behavior. In other words, the monetary system. Fix that, and see if a lot of this other stuff even needs to be fixed or resolves on its own.
Background checks, not licensing, I don't see a strong reason to oppose. I don't have a strong reason to back it, but not a total non-starter.
America first doesn't just mean cutting Israel's influence -- more importantly, it means cutting the influence of international bankers who bought our nation out from under us by printing OUR currency through the Eurodollar system. We've started to address this by leaving LIBOR for SOFR, but it's not a done deal, and there are decades of damage to undo.
Strong on crime needs to come with it sanity of enforcement. Another area I suspect fixing money can help, because I'm not convinced there isn't a fair bit of funded agitation to disrupt the social fabric that has law enforcement at its wit's end. That said, police killing people in the street is not a good look.
As for DEI, no argument.
The problem isn’t that the candidates are appalling. They’re not. It’s that the left is shit at messaging.
How do you "message" to people who abandoned Fox News for NewsMax when Fox admitted that "The election was stolen" was always a bald faced lie?
Almost all of America makes zero attempt to hear anything a democrat says, opts into being force fed literal republican propaganda on all News channels and now X and Facebook, and then complains that the democrats didn't "message" well.
> The problem isn’t that the candidates are appalling. They’re not. It’s that the left is shit at messaging.
The "the left is shit at messaging" is an excuse to distract from having a bad message (or at least a message with bad parts), so that message doesn't get revised into something better. Basically: "we don't want to change so we can win, so lets hope all we have to do is say stuff better."
Here's something to think about:
> And the stakes of politics are almost always incredibly high. I think they happen to be higher now. And I do think a lot of what is happening in terms of the structure of the system itself is dangerous. I think that the hour is late in many ways. My view is that a lot of people who embrace alarm don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win.
> Taking political positions that’ll make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri. Trying to open your coalition to people you didn’t want it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats.
> And one of my biggest frustrations with many people whose politics I otherwise share is the unwillingness to match the seriousness of your politics to the seriousness of your alarm. I see a Democratic Party that often just wants to do nothing differently, even though it is failing — failing in the most obvious and consequential ways it can possibly fail. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/opinion/interesting-times...)
I don't think it really matters what Democratic messaging is when Republicans effectively control all broadcast media. It didn't matter how much Kamala didn't talk about trans issues. It was how much Republicans said she did. No basis in reality like most things they push. But they can push it effectively because the billionaire owners of large media corporations support it. Stephen Colbert can't even interview James Talerico on CBS. Part of the so-called "Liberal Media" owned and controlled by right wing billionaires.
I cannot even imagine how someone can be more appalling than Trump.
Is being black and a woman that bad?
She was drunk and incompetent and had literally no platform or politics other than 'not being Trump' and being a black woman.
Ah, right, she should have been Secretary of Defense then.
Remember https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/non-binary-ex-biden-nucle... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Levine That is why democrats are losing. This isn't normal and 80% of the country outright rejects this. Democrats refuse to make even the smallest compromises to just go back to what was 'normal' only a few years ago. How willing to win are they really? Doesn't seem like they care to win if they won't give up the policies that are holding them back. Voter registrations tell you the story--democrats down 5M since 2020 and republicans up by about the same. Democrats have to change course and quit digging the hole deeper.
So it's not just black women that bothers you, it's trans people too.
Yet you prefer pedophiles and rapists.
Why the personal attacks on someone who's trying to explain to you why the Democrats lost, and why they will continue to lose, now when it's more important than ever? Since when did he say he prefers the lunatics in power now? The election showed the result of attitudes like yours, where you say "vote for us or you're a despicable person" to undecided voters just makes you lose. Ordinary people hear that and they think: fuck you, if you're going to try to tell me what to do, then I'm voting against YOU.
The left in the United States is a group of extreme orthodoxy and excommunication of everyone who doesn't toe the line on absolutely everything, and what you just said is a great example of this. He doesn't agree with you on everything, so he supports pedophiles! Right now, the right is fracturing and millions of people who voted for Trump realize that he's a madman. Right now is the time for the left to move to the center and accept these people into the fold, and accept that they won't agree on every single thing, because there's something far more important at stake.
No, it's incompetent mentally ill weirdos being put in charge of things that they should because of DEI and woke virtue signaling that I disagree with. And again, if that's the hill that democrats want to die on when they think the entire country is under siege... then it shows just how unserious they really are. Those are elitist and luxury beliefs.
Clearly fake news, but leftists are eating it up like the MAGAs of yesteryear. The amount of fake news and outrage AI slop posted on reddit, BlueSky, HN in the recently is maddening.
I mean people voted for Trump so I'd bet there are people falling for this too
Is there any effing source or is everybody inventing shit just for the fun of it?
The source is complaints to the MRFF. Having served for a little while, this kind of rhetoric does not surprise me. Especially after the speeches Hegseth has given previously. This my wife and I anecdotal experiences but military leadership will sometimes surprise you with a bunch of deeply religious statements out of nowhere.
yeah like AFAIK there is 0 proof... but having been military they love to throw this shit around.
there are a lot of dumb fuckin rubes in the military but not as many as you'd think. I think it's more posturing for the people at home