I don’t think he needed to rig the election. The DNC rigs elections. They subvert the Democratic process by not holding primaries and selecting the worst challenge or possible. If you doubt me, please take a look at the Maine Senate race this year.

Buying TV commercials and Facebook comments isn’t really bribing anyone. They actually own the media apparatus. They own the two party system. They bought it fair and square. They don’t need to bribe anyone because they completely control every aspect of society. People willingly vote for them. There’s no bribes being handed out on election day.

photo credit Hubble telescope

Glad to see another user of this phrase 🤣 I have no idea of the origin it just lives in my head and pops out sometimes

Not really. I’m from a state that’s had an independent senator for the last 20 years and I’m focused on trying to send another one. I’m over the two party system. I’ve always been a fan of voting platforms over party.

Ya to be honest, there’s a damn genocide in Sudan and my country cut food aid for not fucking reason and started kicking out refugees instead of accepting them. It makes the suffering in my own community seem inconsequential. It’s probably hard to conceive if you’re incapable of nuance.

Somewhere on the Main page right now someone’s stills screaming about Genocide Joe! Like you are brainwashed heathens. Lend me those down votes they can’t amount to the death you’ve caused by your “activism”. If you gave a fuck about an African genocide you’d be allowing refugees to come in. You people don’t give a fuck about anything but internet up-doots and virtue signaling. America always took in African refugees during these times. I got large populations down the road. Great people. Now they are doomed to die and suffer because Genocide Joe am I rite gang?

Like I don’t recall the nazi’s having a group of people that ran around trying to defend the Jews while also making their lives infinitely worse. You guys made yourself a special place in genocide history. I’m not letting that shit go. Like I’ve never seen a group of people come together to support a cause and fuck it up so bad. It’s truly worth a chapter in the old history books… if they have those in 10 years.

Na look how mad y’all are. I gotta troll you ever chance I get because you fucked my american empire to death with your virtue signaling and now Palestine is smoldering and when its done burning it will be a nice TRUMP resort.

Morons.

I’d argue calling them demons is employing rhetoric that is ineffective. It kinda shuts off the rational part of the listeners brain. I prefer to gentle steer towards acknowledging the straying away from normals. Which conservatism is still about preserving normals. I know what you’re saying is not hyperbole and I agree with you but probably not the best way to reach hearts and minds? I like to kinda sneak in unnoticed and then start manipulating peoples emotions subtly, but the whole yelling about demons thing is appealing to. It’s okay to have different approaches, we all want to see congress hung for their crimes <3

TLDR tariffs have always existed to protect people like Elon Musk from having to compete with the hard working people of china. They are not beneficial to the working class unless you’re only focused on your countries working class, and not the global working class. Since it is a consumption tax the burden is unevenly spread upon the poor and working class who are living on fixed budgets that don’t have room for price changes. It’s easily paid by the rich and disproportionately hurts the poor.

VAT tax is basically a consumption tax with more steps. At the end of the day the cost gets transferred to the consumer who pays more for what they consume. I generally don’t have a problem with a consumption tax, but with all the other taxes targeting the poor and relieving the rich, the tariffs are a step too far. They are not making that much money from the tariffs. common economic theory is when you tax spending, it slows spending and thus generates less revenues. if businesses go to cut costs to absorb production, that usually hits labor and thus consumers.

Now let’s just say we did tariffs in a bubble which we used to do, yes tariffs are a valid way to balance competition and generate revenue. Consumption taxes are good because we probably should consume less. In this case they are being used to hoist up industrialists, and the revenues are not significant enough to deal with the current deficit.

So from a leftist perspective and the Neo-liberal perspective, absolutely not there’s way better ways to raise money that hurst the poor less. Taxing land, or capital gains, or inheritance, or any of the numbers of ways large amounts of money changes hands, is a stronger leftist position. You would have to use tariffs precisely to help the working class. The nature of a tariff is to restrict international trade, so you’d also have to forsake your brother over seas who’s also in the middle class. You’re putting national interests in front of human interests which is not a very commie thing to do.

so as far as holocaust goes, before there was infrastructure in place, the public had been riled up by the government and was happily handing people over and attacking the out groups. We can’t just examine the holocaust as its end product (which was still operated partially by civilians and captives under SS leadership). There were was plenty of indiscriminate violence leading up to the systematic destruction. The germans just added layers of bureaucracy to their genocide, but it start with a good old fashioned witch hunt and evolved into something similar.

Idk but my understanding of Bosnia/Armina was it was almost exactly that, civilians attacking civilians with the aid of the military. To me those people come from the same damn mountain but to them they were inferior ethnic groups. Any time you start ethnic cleansing someone who looks just like you I’d say we’re happily at genocide. Cambodia was more of a civil war id say because there was an internal power that conquered. Pol Pot was a weird dude, he kinda stands out in his own league with hitler.

idk id debate semantics all day, its all unnecessary death and hopefully we can all agree on that.

highly improbable but still a good idea.

Wars involve more discriminate killing and usually combatants doing killing. there’s usually military leadership and objectives. There’s a special word for when an unorganized group of people starts killing another unorganized group of people for using a different dialect. I think for me it’s a genocide when it’s the civilian population doing most of the killing. Versus a civil war where civilians are fighting a military apparatus with leadership. fine line between a civil war and a genocide, much more defined line between a real war and genocide.

I cannot defend the population that cannot understand that a tariff is consumption tax. But like maybe 20% of us still do. And that’s like 70 million people.

No if I were the majority we would not be here. They don’t really teach finance and economics in public school. Balanced budgets haven’t been a popular platform since 2001. They stopped talking about it in 2012.

The average American can barely fucking read, so you better believe they can’t do math well. They certainly don’t deal in complex problems or multiple orders of effects.

Our education system failed so hard so fast that the majority of the population is blissfully ignorant on monetary and fiscal policy. I mean, these people don’t even understand the progressive tax code they’re under. They will pay taxes for 40 years of their life without fully understanding how a tax bracket works.

I’m waiting for everyone to understand we’re in a global information war, and nowhere can really have free and fair elections with the current state of information.

The USA needed the Russia skrong narrative to fund defense, and Russia needs US based political power to secure their assets here. Allies of convenience but not friends. Orban advances these goals in Europe along the same lines for both countries.

Putins playing Trump and Orban, their interest don’t align all the time but often enough to make it hard to argue he’s not got a couple hands up is ass making him dance. Sorry for calling you Ivan.