A nation can enrich it’s elites in the short term at the expense of its people, or it can invest in its people (education, commons, etc) at the expense of its elites.

The west, and especially my cesspool the US has made its choice.

China has been heavily building up its commons and infrastructure in the same 40 year span the US has let its commons and education fall into utter ruin in order to sell economically segregated education and gated communities for private profit.

The US is culturally indoctrinated to be hostile towards the very concept of society. Imagine resenting paying into universal healthcare because you don’t want to accidentally pay for your countrymen’s “bad decisions” like… Eating food.

I go on Rednote quite a bit. The US attitude towards China, just like non pure crony capitalism is “they are evil and from hell” for being a society. Their people, not their politicians, their people, are sweet, intelligent, and mostly treat Americans with an “are you guys OK? We’ve heard (true) horror stories.”

Thats humanity. Why would I want my schaudenfreude and greed ruled cesspool to “win?” It’s not about winning, it’s about the wellbeing of ALL your people. If the US dominates the world culturally, all that would mean is that humanity stands for “fuck you I got mine” at which point I have no comradery with my species whatsoever.

Actual human worth/value is measured in empathy for one another, which makes the US destitude in what matters.

Welcome to the party, pals!

This is why I’m a dog person.

Cats bitch and moan when you disturb their routine.

Dogs are just happy to be interacted with.

I’ve seen cat owners waste half a dozen cans of food finding out what their cat is in the mood for that night. Cats just seem like another source of highly conditional affection. Might as well just go be social at that point.

In Republican’s fever dream scenario, they’d consider splitting the nation up to be marooning 200 million people at gunpoint stranded to die standing room only on a military embargoed Puerto Rico. They’d call that perfectly fair and not mass murder.

Get your logic out of here as to why that isn’t possible.

Why would non Israeli Jews have to denounce the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians?

The conductor was Israeli.

Republican Fascists are the Neoliberals “esteemed opposition.”

The few leftists with power are spoiler candidates, because both parties only promote candidates on the basis of their ability to get bribe checks, and are the Neoliberals enemies.

If you want to see the Democrat party treat a President as a threat to the nation that must be resisted at every turn, just elect President AOC. They’re in a power sharing agreement with the Republicans.

Not like we have a left with any power to stop them.

Im sure the fascist light(D) party will have very furrowed brows though.

Oh so furrowed.

The first wave was right. (equal legal rights)

The second wave had a good point. (reproductive rights and workplace discrimination)

The rest were just further attempted power grabs that don’t even make the people they claim to represent happy. They tried to do what well meaning but ultimately misguided anti racism waves did by claiming gender shouldn’t even be acknowledged aka “I don’t even see the color.” Which is it’s own kind of bigotry.

Everyone should be allowed to fill the same role, but while a minority might be ecstatic in the corpo grinder, it made society worse for men and women more generally, and I don’t see many women who enjoy being forced into the hunter gatherer role by the capitalists and the convenient femininists whose message they coopted to boost productivity by mandating ALL the poors make widgets for them if they want to subsist.

It hasn’t been productive to raise women to believe it is essential that they defy gender norms as if it is their mission in life to do so. More than anyone else, modern feminists have culturally demeaned the role of being a wife and mother in society, which is ironic, since they seem dead set on making women fit the mold of the men they see as their oppressor.

Men and women are different, with different strengths and weaknesses and intrinsic desires. With overlap, there are things that make men happier and things that make women happier generally. We should have equality, but we’ve been trying to shoehorn both genders to be interchangable in any societal role en masse, and it’s taken a massive toll on men and women in different ways.

Edit: Nevermind, everything is awesome, we did it!

I mean, his voters will believe it.

They’d jump off the empire state building if the Administration told them it would pwn the libs.

Nah.

We think we’re that powerful, but there’s an entire domain of creatures we can barely reach that utilize geothermal energy that will just keep plugging away out of our sphere of influence.

Surface and shallow water life is and will suffer greatly until we burn ourselves out and are no longer a threat on the scale we currently are, but humans are even egotistical in this topic. We couldn’t come close to sterilizing this world, even if it magically became as important to us as fucking one another over for paper simulacra of supposed value.

We are a nuisance, but we aren’t the first evolutionary nuisance the earth has dealt with. We have no mastery over this world as much as many like to believe so. A nuclear detonation possesses a tiny fraction of the power of a volcanic eruption.

There’s a small class of people who civilization has put in absolute power based on how effectively greedy and sociopathic they are. Did you expect such people to be ethical and moral and decent with their exploited hoards as they sit above those that would regulate, judge, and police them? Then greed, sociopathy, and willingness to exploit their brothers and sisters to death for an extra nickel shouldn’t have been made the metrics for societal power that they have. It’s wealthy people who think rules and laws are for their little peasant capital batteries.

The wealthy elite have always been largely pedophilic. Didn’t start and certainly didn’t stop with Epstein as just one of their facilitators.

Don’t like it? At least be against and vote against capitalism and rampant economic inequity. Otherwise 78 choices of cereal are more important to you than children not being raped by rich people just because they can.

They’re bored, have infinite resources, and by the nature of their insatiable greed and sociopathic treatment of those they exploit feel the need to test their limits and taste that which most consider forbidden. That makes it more desirable to them, not less.

Society should check, temper, and commit such people for everyone’s safety, instead they own the government, and freely fuck kids and teens when they aren’t being literally infused with their young blood to try to live longer. Enjoy their “free market.” Hey, at least we aren’t socialists amirite?

Of course we would we’d just have more!

And buy really expensive ketchups for it… Like Dijon ketchup!

Another neoliberal.

I agree, but I don’t think there’ll be another real election here for a long time if ever, and I’d rather vote for her than another hypercapitalist enslaver with pride ribbons(D) to stop hypercapitalist enslaver with scapegoats® yet again as I’ve done my entire life in our descent to oblivion. There’s not really rational hope either way. The capitalists won and have us by the balls in every way, including tens of millions of deluded minds that have learned to love and defend the Massas and their “free market” directly against their own interests.

Climate change is going to end planetary scale civilization in 50 years max, probably 20-30. It’s blowing past all projections because we were conservative and both couldn’t and didn’t want to consider the runaway effects. I honestly think Kamala was my last pragmatic funeral dirge vote. Give me something to vote for and I’ll show up. I haven’t had a federal level candidate to vote for in a general in my entire life though. I doubt AOC will become the first after the DNC uses every lever to end any primary run.

Also because both of our major party machines would cooperate in attacking her.

Neoliberals would rather lose power than signal to their bribers that their party isn’t bought and paid for. President Ocasio-Cortez would be such a signal.

The DNC promotes on the basis of potential federal level reps getting bribe money. AOC was a spoiler and is not welcome in the party because of her views. That’s why the Neoliberals in congress don’t care Trump is in office and even help him with appointments.

Neoliberals like Pelosi would lock arms with the Fascists and treat a President AOC like the threat we wished they’d treat their fascist opposition like, but they have too much in common on the same Economic policy they’re both well bribed to enact and protect from us.

Which is why, all the more, AOC is a good choice. The hatred of our true oppressors on Wall Street is welcome. At worst, it will further demonstrate that the American people aren’t permitted by big corpo to have a real choice in governance, only hypercapitalist robber baron enablers paid to divide us on social wedges as they legislate new ways for the owners to monetize sucking us dry.

Neoliberals are still openly hostile towards her.

Queen Neoliberal Pelosi spent more time in the lameduck period undermining AOC’s committee appointment than Trump’s Presidency.

That’s good enough for me as a leftist knowing the context that she really is about as left wing as our pathetic, deluded, propagandized, under or miseducated populace could ever elect as we are.

I don’t have any hope anymore, this nation died under Reagan and it’s just a slow falling corpse as far as I’m concerned, but for anyone looking to cling to at least borderline rational hope, someone in her position is your best bet, because she’s a known name, that matters in our shitty celebrity obsessed culture, she proves every day that a leftist can be professional and govern, that matters because leftists are painted as anarchist boogiemen without a plan in most American news media, and she’s photogenic and naturally charasmatic, which shouldn’t matter but sadly does.

There isn’t an individual to the left of her that I can think of that could conceivably get elected President in this cesspool of willful ignorance and systemically stoked division of the poors, can you? Even her becoming President would be a moonshot. That isn’t a knock on her, she’s one of about 4 members of congress (or executives in the fortune 1000) I’d give a glass of water to if they were dying of thirst, that’s a knock on our gold plated shithole and people, not her. She’s a diamond in the rough.

Bullshit, billionaires are too greedy and morally bankrupt to leave exploited money on the table.

They won’t close the highest producing stores and effectively kill a revenue stream out of conviction in something that isn’t money, because if they had any beliefs or values above “gimme gimme gimme moar moar moar” they wouldn’t be billionaires.

It’s not a matter of not needing it, no shit, they have a socially encouraged mental illness.

It would be better for the new socialist stores if they did vacate the market, but they won’t. They’ll even pull a Walmart and try to do some loss leaders to convince idiots that der free merket menes lower prices for as long as they can stomach it until they find a vector to make the state stores illegal and Jack those prices back up forever.

I wish the office came with a mandate that they’d personally have to field constituent calls 4 hours a week.

But like so much else, they aren’t going to legislate accountability for themselves.

Apologies.

Harris had Liz Cheney on stage with her. Liz Cheney is a monster, and we courted her. It only drove actual potential voters on the left away.

There aren’t any sane Republicans to court. Stop with the Overton window bullshit. Stop trying to meet the sociopath by choice movement in the middle. It’s been racing us to the doom we’re sitting in for as long as I’ve been alive. We need to elect an enemy of the capital markets on no uncertain terms. Someone that would enslave our economy to exist in service to the needs of the citizenry as it always should have been, because corporations aren’t people, and should not exist if they are serving few or one at the expense of the rest of the citizenry. It should be the corporate burden to prove why it should exist at all by showing how society is better off because of it. Given the power theyve shown they will always accumulate and abuse, I’m for a perpetual corporate death penalty on a hair trigger for the slightest of antisocial activity.

If we don’t make an extreme move left from this fascist hellscape, it’s all just rearranging deck chairs.

If by some miracle we have another free election, managing to elect another neoliberal to move the Democrats closer to the Fascists as they have for 50 years will just keep the table set for the fascists to march again in another 4. Fascism is the union of the state and big business, the only thing the Neoliberals don’t add to that stew is the cruelty and scapegoating as the people are robbed blind, they save that special sauce for their esteemed opposition, but they are both all about mass homelessness, and entire economic sectors murdering Americans when it’s profitable in state sanctioned confidence schemes like our deathcare system. Thats neoliberal and fascist bipartisan supported and defended from we the people.

The capital markets must be dismantled with extreme prejudice, any value redistributed in order of the worst off aka the capitalists greatest victims who they haven’t yet murdered, with currency retied to labor or active stake (working at) in a company/cooperative. If we refuse to do that, highly likely, nothing can improve and get comfortable in misery and cruelty.