United States | News & Politics

I will get to your other comment before too long, hopefully, but I wanted to take this opportunity to say that this is exactly what I meant when I said that your perspective was distorted by Sorkin-ism. In the ways that really matter, the political class are nothing like "petulant children" and nothing in DC would be solved by people just "hashing their problems out." They are, as you say, corrupt, and they are both largely getting their money from the same sources, resulting in their goals being mostly the same, whatever their professed positions are.

Paraphrasing from a source you rightly don't care about, people talk about "diverse interests", but generally what do those "diverse interests" look like? Typically it's not something indifferent like "I like spaghetti" vs "I like hamburgers", typically it's something more like "I own this copper refinery and want to dump industrial waste into this river" vs "we live downstream of that refinery and don't want to be poisoned" and typically, assuming that action isn't already illegal (and sometimes even when it is), the Republican position is siding with the factory owner and the Democrat position is pretending to side with the people but really doing nothing. If you think that's an exaggeration, remember they promised that they fixed the pipes in Flint but plainly did not.

You're getting hung up on kabuki theater, a good cop/bad cop routine, rather than looking at how the system demands the oppression of working people and the ruling class is united on that front.

Anyway, if you want to have conversations with communists, Hexbear is good for that (see the askchapo comm), you just need to signal that you're being sincere and unassuming. Most of them are better at being nice than I am, though in all respects there is a variance in quality.

Man, I really thought things were going okay.

I feel like you're misunderstanding my view here. What I'm trying to say is that I believe if Trump gets the position then we'll be so busy fighting things at home that we won't have time to think about foreign affairs. If anybody else gets into the white house then we at least have a chance that further protests could make an impact on Washington. This isn't a both-sides thing, I really feel there could be a real difference to what happens in Palestine depending on who gets elected

This is ridiculous. You have a Democrat in charge right now! You see the nothing that protests are doing! Kamala is the current President's VP and has come out swinging declaring such protests antisemitic and supportive of terrorism! You've let people talk you into a position that would only make sense speculatively, but we have the concrete reality right now and for the past nine months and it tells us that things don't work like that!

Plus we already know that Trump has pledged support to Russia and vowed to immediately stop all aid to Ukraine, so supporting him just means double the genocide

It's arguably a mistake on my part to respond to this at all, but I still will: Russia is not committing genocide and has no intention to do so. Ukrainian nationalists love to cry genocide, but it's nonsense. It's part of a cottage industry of hysterical headlines made to drum up support for the militarization of Europe and, in some cases, the direct arming of neo-nazis.

This is something that really disgusts me because of all of the brutality the US inflicts on the world, and the disproportionate reaction from white audiences to a white country getting invaded for the first time in a couple of decades.

Somebody is losing no matter how we vote, I'm just hoping we can make it so fewer people lose. Hoping for anything more at this point just feels unrealistic?

Some people might conclude that if you've talked yourself into supporting an open genocider on the basis that anyone else is "unrealistic", the more appropriate action instead of hemming and hawing about who to vote for is to work to do whatever is necessary to smash the system, something that is not a question of voting. Just worth thinking about.

However other issues, like the way we vote, can be changed incrementally. Yes they're going to notice that they are starting to lose power, but once that ball starts rolling it's hard to stop it (although they could do something drastic like inciting a civil war and declaring martial law). It might happen, it might not, but the ball has at least started rolling in the right direction.

This is just you imagining a path to victory in which the opponent is functionally helpless to stop you, like playing chess against yourself, despite that power historically and currently being in a position of monstrous dominance. You sidestepped my counter here while trying to use it as evidence. This is the whole game, this isn't just some concession that those old farts are unhappy about giving, this is turning over and surrendering their belly for the people to tear into. Are you not familiar with what the US has done abroad to depose democratically elected leaders? Do you think that if a movement gained traction here that they somehow couldn't ratfuck like Bernie, that they would so much as hesitate to pull the trigger?

They wouldn't.