Comments by "TJ Marx" (@tjmarx) on "The New York Times" channel.

  1. lol imagine believing that people virtue signalling actually believe in the things they're saying. Listen, if wealthy democrats believed in the virtue signalling they throw around, they'd be taking their own wealth and investing it directly into helping the disadvantaged. It's all just double speak to get people to vote a certain way. Look, when you have a political system designed around a two party majority then these kinds of problems are inevitable. Think about it practically. You have two parties campaigning for the same voters as each other because the winner has the majority. The fringe die hard party faithful aren't the people they're campaigning for, it's the majority swing voters. But when you only have 2 parties and they're both going after the same swing voters then you end up with parties that are the same as each other by necessity but just say their stuff in different ways. That's where this virtue signalling and double speak comes in. If you're a wealthy political candidate and you win you can give yourself, friends, family neighbours and donours tax breaks and shield your position on the top. If your competitor in the only other party win, they can do the same with their friends, family, neighbours and donours, you and yours miss out. That's really what it's all about. Vote for which group of wealthy people will benefit for the term.democrat and republican are really just two sides of the same coin, each putting on a little song and dance to give the illusion of choice. But you don't really have one. It isn't new, it's been built into the system since independence. You think a poor white kid could grow up to be president if he hadn't made a fortune in the intervening years first? "The american dream" has always been that same kind of virtue signal double speak crap they're doing now. It isn't real and never has been. Wealthy people don't want equality, they wouldn't be wealthy if they did. They want to be exceptional, separate from everyone else, better than other people. They might virtue signal otherwise, but that's why anyone chases wealth or riches over mere financial security. You want to fix it you need political reforms to make it a multiparty, proportal voting system where there are no major parties, and all parties run campaigns on a level playing field without private donours. Where the vote is spread between more parties, and thus the percentage necessary for a majority is lower so you don't need to compete on all the same swing voters, and political churn can be far more frequent as a result. But that kind of reform would require mass political engagement and coordination from the public to not vote for incombents or major parties in the next electoon. Instead of voting democrat or republican in November, for example, everyone could vote for independents and in so doing knock the major parties out of existence, and create the very real means for reform. Incredibly unrealistic to happen however. Unless a newspaper like the NYT got behind it and started pushing the idea for example.
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  2. It's because, if you take away the autonomous zone they lose power over the area. So they'll say and do whatever it takes to hold on to that power. That's the whole story.
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