If you are rich you can rape and do whatever you want.
This is why I hate capitalism so much. Extreme power disparity is the heart of tyranny and the extreme disparities in wealth that capitalism creates only leads to extreme disparities in political power.
I fear that the US went past a breaking point and that the US will fully be an oligarchy after Trump is done
How so? My dad voted for Trump’s fascism, but my mom did not. I am not going to avoid my mom just to punish my dad.
Next you’ll tell us Putin’s Russia is as strong as ever
China didn’t have to steal anything, the west handed them all of our trade and engineering secrets on a silver platter just to boost their profit margins.
You’re not completely wrong. There are many aspects of our system that are deeplh undemocratic: the way that the donor class gatekeeps who is able to run, the way politicians serve lobbyists and donors over the public will, and the way that oligarchs own 95% of our news media all create an environment where the interests of the people are not represented by our government
The supreme court and congress has put the executive branch in its place before.
The SC betrayed democracy with Citizens United and again when they gave Trump immunity for his countless crimes while in office. Don’t forget that the SC openly take bribes from billionaires.
I mean, Russia has been a fascist country for 30 years now and they haven’t collapsed
80% of Nazi casualties happened on the eastern front by the Communists. But yeah, the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia has fallen to fascism, and now the US has too. The world is fucked.
Old appliances broke, but they were made to be easy to fix so our grandparents could just swap out the broken parts. I helped my dad replace the compressor on an older fridge as a kid and the heating elements on my grandma’s toaster. I remember my dad taking me to some locally owned mom and pop hardware store where we could buy replacement parts for old appliances off the shelf. My parents still have the toaster, but that store closed down and new stuff isn’t made to be fixable anymore (most likely due to planned obsolescence thanks to late-stage-capitalism).
On a tangent, when you think about it, throwing an entire toaster away because one heating coil burned out or throwing awag an entire fridge just because the compressor gave out is not rational. But if you tell people we should have the freedom to buy repairable appliances then they look at you like you are crazy. To me, it is the other way around. Sustainability isn’t political or a luxury, it is an inevitabe, unstoppable force of equilibrium.
Real leftists would advocate for socialism.
True, but there are there differing approaches to socialism: MLs want authoritarian socialism (government runs everything), while Democratic Socialists usually want a hybrid of market socialism (co-ops) and government run socialism for needs that free market co-ops cannot address. And then there are libertarian socialists who want only worker owned co-ops and syndicates. Finally, we have SocDems that want indirect socialism where strong regulations and labor protections try to achieve socialist goals through capitalism.
Sort of like how it is illegal for companies to fire or mistreat workers for trying to unionize?
The uncomfortable truth is that our laws protect the rich (including their companies), but rarely bind them and bind workers, but rarely protect us.
The mentality that the future is always someone else’s problem is proving to be the biggest weakness of capitalism and our species.
just like FDR’s Social Democracy eroded over time.
Unlike Lenin’s communism which was immune to capitalist propaganda and still exists today.
The Left beat Donald Trump.
Well, everyone to the left of fascism beat Trump. Biden, like all liberals / capitalists, are on the right as they always end up prioritizing profits before people.
Instead of suggesting a book, why don’t you try naming an actual candidate that people can vote for?
$16 billion was spent on the political campaigns of the 2020 election. $16 billion! Roughly $8 billion per party. The deeply uncomfortable truth is that the oligarch class has nearly full control over which candidates have the funds necessary to have any chance at winning an election. There are rare exceptions, sure, but most candidates are either oligarchs themselves like Trump or Bloomberg, or they have sold out completely to other oligarchs (like JD Vance belonging to Peter Thiel)
I hate breathing in pollution so I keep a car’s length between me and the next car at traffic lights. Cars themselves are a huge storming waste of space and I hate being in or around cars with all my heart and soul so if I make traffic worse then I will consider it a passive form of protesting against car dependency
Maybe they just really love the smell of exhaust and are trying to get high off of your emissions
Yeah, I follow the 3 second rule and try to keep 3 seconds of travel distance between me and the car in front of me
Trump and his fascists deserve most of the blame, but I fear that liberals won’t learn from this. Realpolitik is bullshit. When you promise to help people but then sell us out to lobbyists and the donor class decade after decade after decade, then people lose all faith in institutions. Facts don’t matter because those facts were used to gaslight time and time again.